Ina (A Short Story)

Ina wore three strings of imitation pearls ascending in size and a stab of raspberry lipstick scribbled over her sardine lips. A white powder mask cloaked her face like a fog. She was tiny in every direction. She had old teeth and several black molars surfaced as she spoke. Still, hers was a sweet smile. Up close she smelled like those small bars of soap old ladies take from hotels and save in drawers. She was perched behind the shopping cart I first saw her sailing over the empty parking lot at dawn. Far off she was a dark blob over the glowing ground. She looked like a poem or a strange kind of song, one without lyrics or music. I had turned off the main road, headed for the grocery store. I pulled in between the yellow lines and her details came into focus. She inched along toward the entrance, her shadow wedded to the metal cage.

I spotted her inside, beside a wall of dry goods. Her legs looked like the skinny bars of crutches and she had clear jelly boots snapped over her flats. I tried not to embarrass Ina by staring in case they were special shoes. She must have caught me, because she said that she had bad feet like her grandfather. I thought she would tell me a story about how terrible her grandfather’s feet were. Her voice sounded excited, and she chirped like a kazoo. She said that as a child she lived in the Pennsylvania countryside. One afternoon her grandfather had gone out for a walk. When he hadn’t returned the family started to worry, so they went out looking. Ina said it was fine summer weather. He had sat down beside a stream that she said is much deeper now, more like a river. And resting there, under the tree beside the stream, he had gone away. And that’s how they found him. She said he was like her. Ready to move, hardly slept, and always up to something.

I hadn’t expected to meet her inside the store. I released the greasy cart handle and straightened my posture as I examined the contents of her cart. There were several boxes of chocolate Ensure, a family size package of Kit Kats, and a big bottle of blue Windex. Ina was admiring the flowered pattern of my sundress. She stopped and smiled at me in a searching way, like she was forgetting something. I was tempted to ask her why she’d brought her own cart. I glanced at Ina’s bare knuckles. She must have caught me, because she revealed that she had never married. Then she said that her mother had always asked if she would ever settle down. Ina’s answer was still the same: She didn’t have the time. Ina said that when her family moved to Pittsburgh she found her own apartment. When she finished at her clerking job in the train station she returned home to do some mending, sewing, or other kind of work. Her frail hunched body was no longer capable of precise, hurried movements. Dreaming up a younger version of Ina proved no less difficult than trying to imagine myself as being so much older.

Ina giggled like a woman in the presence of an admirer. I gave her a quizzical look, and Ina announced that she was a big fan of Kit Kats. She stored them in a Tupperware container in her refrigerator for a rainy day. She looked past me down the isle, like she was watching rain fall on the next town over. Ina said she had wanted to sell candy bars in the shop near her apartment. She told her brother and he said that he knew the owner there. He offered to take her down and introduce her, but Ina wanted to go alone. The manager liked her immediately. He offered Ina a cashier position at thirty cents an hour and she took it. Ina said she could leave the train station at five o’clock and arrive at the shop well before the shift at six. Sometimes, between her shifts, she liked to stop at Isaly’s. She would sit in a booth by the window, watch the commuters outside, and enjoy a cup of coffee or a scoop of butter pecan ice cream.

I pulled my cart back on purpose and let the wheel slowly crush my big toe. Ina kept talking. She said she stayed busy at the shop keeping everything in order, insisting that she was a hard worker. Once, the manager had asked Ina how she would respond if a thief came in demanding all the money from the register. Ina said she would not let him take it. The manager couldn’t believe it—he laughed. He told Ina that she could lose her life, but she didn’t care. The robber wouldn’t get that money—not from her. The manager said not to do that. If a person came in demanding the money, she was to give it to him.

A muffled voice announced something over the P.A. system. Ina and I shared a look of confusion. I told her that I had never ridden on a train. Then I asked about the station, expecting her to describe scenes from old Bing Crosby pictures, with women wearing fur muffs and singing gay show tunes all crammed inside a cozy club car. Her voice was proud and hollow like chords perfectly exhausted from an ancient organ. Ina said that all the other workers were afraid of the manager. She had taken her clerking job seriously, but she wasn’t scared of the boss. She treated him like he was anybody else. After all, they were the same age. Once, he called Ina into his office and asked her if she had a boyfriend or if she was hoping to get married. She told him the same thing she told anyone else; she worked two jobs and maintained her home and there was no time left after that.

I wanted to see her laugh, so I told Ina that my Gram was Bob Barker’s biggest fan and asked if she liked The Price is Right. Ina said she hardly ever watched Television, and she never turned it on in the morning. She kept busy walking around her apartment. Ina had an old pair of scissors she used to do clippings. She said you’d be surprised how much more you could fit in a garbage bag if you cut the newspaper into smaller pieces. Then she said that when people came back from the war they were given their old jobs at the train station. It wasn’t uncommon for the replacements to be laid off, but Ina was never dismissed. She thought her boss had kept her around because he felt sorry for her. Ina chuckled and looked up at the fluorescent lights as if heaven waited just on the other side.

My mother sent me to the store for a box of baking powder that morning. I’d searched my purse twice to be sure that I’d forgotten my phone. I knew she’d be calling to ask what was taking so long. She had undoubtedly begun entertaining abduction scenarios or imagining me in a horrific car accident. Ina couldn’t know how this agitated me towards action. She simply recognized my fading attention as I broke eye contact to consider the array of decaffeinated teas stacked beside us. She started to let me go—saying a young girl like me surely had things to do. And I did want to go—I had plenty of things to do. As well, the conversation had gone on for so long that what was really happening was no longer deniable, even for her. A young woman was humoring an older woman for a small window of her day.

Ina took a step, but I grabbed the green wallet from my cart and held it up for her to see. I told her that I had three hundred dollars inside. She sunk back into her stance. Then I offered Ina the only reason a friendly young woman goes around carrying so much cash (and so many ones). I made my living as a waitress. I told her that the night before I’d almost lost it. I was driving home when I realized I’d left the wallet behind at the coffee shop where I’d been reading. I went back and searched my booth and the ladies room, but it was gone. I hurried over to the barista. He asked a couple of questions and checked behind the counter. Then he handed me the wallet; I opened the flap and every last bill was there. Ina looked energized by my story, like a spring. I searched for a way to keep it going. Something relative to ask an old woman—I knew what the Windex and Ensure were for, and then it hit me like a box of wigs. I asked Ina if she had a cat.
Ina squeezed her little nose. Sadly, she’d been blessed with allergies. But she said that her favorite Uncle had lived out in the country with his pet cat. He had bad feet like his father—her grandfather. He was older and liked to sit in a chair by the window. She said that when this particular cat was a baby it was the very biggest in the litter. But as the cats grew older this one stayed the same size. I stopped listening for a minute while she talked about the cat. I assumed I’d be standing there for another ten minutes, and I should at least decide on the tea I was planning to purchase along with the baking powder for my mother.

Ina dropped her chin and drew a furled fist into her chest. Gently, she began to pet one hand with the other. She said that her Uncle enjoyed looking out at the country, watching for the occasional car, and this particular cat had made a habit of perching itself on his shoulder. She chuckled, she said people used to come by and say what a funny thing it was. Then, one day, when the fur all over his face finally got to bothering him—not to mention the weight of this old cat—her Uncle shoed it off and moved his chair outside. The cat got the message, sort of. After that, while her Uncle watched the scenery from the porch, the little cat crouched under his chair. Ina said she heard what people said, but she knew that animals weren’t just animals. There was something going on in there. I noticed that her boots’ clear soles created the illusion of space between the floor and her feet. Ina looked like the incarnation of a sprite or a perennial. It wasn’t hard to believe she was someone who could understand animals.

Ina cupped her hip and said it was a falsie. She said after the operation her brother’s wife insisted that she move into a bigger apartment. Ina’s home was an efficiency in an assisted living community for the elderly. Ina heard that the couple living in the two bedroom across the hall were moving out. She phoned the building manager and he confirmed. Ina’s brother and his wife were pleased and offered to help her move. They told her she needed to start spending her money on herself, instead of on everyone else. Then I noticed her purse. A turquoise rectangle of leather hung from her shoulder by a long chord thick as a telephone wire.

Ina said she enjoyed talking to her nieces and nephews on the phone; they were all college graduates. She said they worked all kinds of jobs at different hours, so she didn’t like to bother them by calling. Ina had worked out her own method. She would wait for someone to call. If she answered then they would both hang up and Ina would call back so that she could pay the charges. I imagined her pacing around her apartment, glancing at the phone, then looking out the window or sitting at the kitchen table to cut up the morning paper. I thought Ina would give me her phone number and ask me to call her. But she just stood there, gripping the cart and looking into my eyes, and, for Ina, I tried not to look away.