The Interior of a Heart: Stories

By Abigail Cummins

In Flesh and Blood, a young boy questions the essence of humanity while at a farm with his grandfather. In How It Happens, a boy falls in love with his best friends girlfriend. A Safe Distance details the poverty gap between the rich and the poor in stark terms. In Static, a young boy fi nally feels the pressures of society and explodes in more than one way. In Alone: A Love Story, a girl contemplates the frightening fact that she may be a murderer. Playground Patience describes a young childs observations about the confusing adult world. In the title story, a man discovers his shortcomings and his dissatisfaction with his wife while entertaining a fantasy about a much younger woman.

The lives of the people in this collection become magnifi ed as their experiences unfold. Within these stories and many more, the natures of compassion, love, and human failings are explored in depth. What does it mean to be human? Abigail Cummins debut collection of stories is poignant and touching in unexpected ways. These concise and rich stories lay bare the intricate workings of a heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456730925

Abigail Cummins

Abigail Cummins is a young writer with an avid passion. She has been published in Jerry Jazz Musician, an online review of music and art, has been part of the Northern Virginia Writers' Project since a very young age, and has received a grant to pursue her writing career. She loves music almost as much as she loves writing and reading literature. She lives in Northern Virginia with her wonderful family, amazing boyfriend, and three crazy dogs.

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© 2011 Abigail Cummins. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 3/28/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3093-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3092-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011901295

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

For:

My Grandma Eve and Grandma Dawn

because you were never able to see any of these stories

and you were my first creative inspirations,

My mother and father

for all your wonderful support

and for teaching me to love literature,

And

Mike Sheppard

for being the best part of my life

and for making me do this.

I love you all.

Contents

1. A SAFE DISTANCE

2. EVIE

3. ON SECOND THOUGHT

4. SUBURBAN LONELINESS

5. HOTEL DOORS

6. FAULTS

7. THE WAY IT HAPPENS

8. BOY TALK

9. FLESH AND BLOOD

10. STRANGE ATTRACTION

11. STATIC

12. PLAYGROUND PATIENCE

13. HITCHERS

14. MY NEIGHBOR THE MURDERER

15. IN PIECES

16. ALONE: A LOVE STORY

17. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART

1. A SAFE DISTANCE

There were two sides of the tracks, and if you lived on one side you were rich and if you lived on the other side you were trash. This was just ultimately the law. Middle class was a concept to be discussed, but not necessarily to be lived.

They were railroad tracks, operative, mostly a freight route and almost never commuters. Once in a blue moon, though, there’d be a train full of people whizzing by at top speed and looking out their windows like our town was some kind of novelty to be gaped at. The freight trains, full of things like coal and plywood, would come through at all times of the day and night. They’d be loud as hell, rattling and weaving back and forth and sounding like they were going to break right there on our doorsteps.

It was what the rich people complained about. They hated the noise, hated the disturbances to their perfect little lives. They were all sculpted and constructed over there, perfect and pristine. Their hairdos, their cars, their families.

We were not perfect. Nor were we sculpted. We liked the noise of the trains; it covered the noise of the people who lived in the trailers. Their loudness spilled out into the streets and polluted them. It was easier to listen to the clacking of the wheels than to listen to your next-door neighbors yell about their childcare issues. Sometimes it was a house that they conducted their arguments out of, but more often than not it wasn’t. There were a lot of trailers on the wrong side of the tracks, mostly taken off their wheels and propped lopsidedly up on bricks or cinderblocks.

This was the difference between the two sides of the tracks: the quality of life. On the wrong side, you had burned-out trailers, houses with abandoned tires and trash in front of them, women with caked-on blue eye shadow and men who walked around shirtless all day long. On the right side of the track was the lake all of its benefits: the waterfront properties, the boats and their docks, the overly tanned, pearl-strung women and the smug men outfitted in constant J. Crew.

We all went to school together, rich or poor. There was no private school close enough to send anyone to, or believe me, the rich townies would have sent their children away. They could afford it; we all knew that. Instead, though, they delineated us in other ways. Mostly it was through intelligence. The rich kids got the honors classes, the new textbooks, the first floor classrooms that had been renovated and decorated. The rest of us were delegated to the second floor, the books that had been dragged through the gutter, the teachers who had clearly learned long ago not to care. It was because of this: the rich kids were going to get out and go to school and have jobs, while we were destined to live here forever. We ran the Burger Kings and the gas stations. We were the bottom of the barrel.

Tell me the story! I’d beg my mother almost every night.

And almost every night, excepting those when she’d been at work for a very long time or was in a bad mood, she’d tell me: Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there lived a little girl who was the very prettiest little girl in the world. She was good at everything, sweet, kind, too, whether or not you believe that. But then, one day, her mother died and her father remarried, and the little girl had to go and live in the attic because her mean stepmother said so. The little girl’s life got very miserable and she had to do all the work around the house, waiting on her new stepfamily like they were royalty. Then one day, there was an announcement that there was going to be a singing contest, like karaoke, you see, and whoever won it would get to run off with the handsomest and nicest boy around. Now, this concert was held at night, and the little girl had grown up by then into a bigger girl who had t work at the gas station for the seven to midnight shift every night. And so she couldn’t go. So do you know what that girl did? She knew she was the best singer around, so she got pretty brave that night and did an unheard-of thing. She closed the gas station! Just found the switch that turned off the big old neon ‘open’ sign in the window, flipped it, and locked the door. She waltzed on down to the karaoke contest without even caring. Now, she’d signed up late, so she had to go last, after everyone else. And she knew she had to be back at home at midnight so it wouldn’t seem like she’d skipped work. She avoided her evil stepmother – who sang like a duck with laryngitis, just by the way – and sang her karaoke song after everyone else had gone home. The handsomest boy in town, who just so happened to be the best male singer also, heard her and knew she’d won. But at the end, the girl ran off quick, because she knew she had to get home. The next day, the girls’ stepmother made fun of her all day long because she’d had to work and not go. What she didn’t know was that the handsome boy was going around the town, listening to everybody sing so he could find the angelic voice from the night before. When he came to the girl’s house, the evil stepmother tried to pretend that the girl had already gone to the gas station for work, but it was no use. The handsome boy heard the girl singing in the yard. So he swept the girl up and took her away. The two of them became a famous singing duo and fell in love. They made an album that was number one on all the top forty charts. And the girl never had to work at a gas station again. That girl’s name was Elle. And that’s who you are named after! And then my mother would clap her hands, lean down to kiss my forehead, and turn off the light.

Most kids got Cinderella, but this was the tracks’ version of the story. If you had a talent big enough to carry you, you just might be able to get away. This was what my mother was telling me. My name, Elle, was a constant reminder. The last part of the lesson – and maybe the most important? – was that you had to learn how to do things for yourself, like closing down that gas station.

You could smell the deepness of summer, the sticky humidity of it, the lazy days and long nights. Especially in our town, this was true. Summer was a time for barbecuing and mowing lawns, shedding chlorine scent like it was perfume. The heaviness of the air was something you could feel deep in your heart.

Summer was our time. It was an us and them type of thing. Everything was for us, even simple things like seasons. There had to be sides, groups (the trailers and townies). It was my opinion that summer belonged to us, the people from the trailers.

Summer held promise. It was full of sun and free time, usually yard work for those of us who needed cash, and the lake. (The lake was the place where we all gathered, all the children and teenagers who had nowhere else to go.) It was our time because it focused so much on the outdoors. You couldn’t stick a price tag on the sky or own the thunderstorms. The town kids, as we called them, tried to make sure we were run off if there were adults there (for technically, the lake was private property), but there was absolutely nothing they could do about the Strand.

The Strand was a piece of land, just barely jutting out into the lake, that connected to Tommy Jergens’ backyard. It was the place we knew to be ours, not a part of the town people’s extensive property. The Jergens refused to sell even though real estate agents kept dropping by with new offers. It was on the Strand that we lived during the summer, eating sandwiches and skipping stones. Some of the boys would go fishing sometimes. I could easily waste a whole day up there, just watching the clouds float past. If it was in the dead middle of summer and hot, the kind of hot that you nearly couldn’t abide, Tommy Jergens’ mother would slice up watermelon for us and leave it in a bowl outside her back door to take as we pleased on our way.

To meet the Jergens family was to meet all trailer families. Mr. Jergens had run off with some lady from the next city over. Mrs. Jergens worked at the Burger King, switching off shifts with my mother and half of the other trailer park mothers, too. Tommy was the oldest of three and his little brothers were just as wild as he was. They lived the way all of us did – underprivileged, underfed, and overworked.

I started making all of my observations from the Strand that summer night, with Tommy Jergens sitting next to me. Neither of us knew it, but it was the beginning of a whole lot of big ideas.

Her name was Marie and she had a bikini with a little gold clasp that shone in the sunlight. Her hair was brown, a chestnut color. I couldn’t make out her eyes from where I sat, but judging from her hair and complexion, I believed they’d be dark as well. She was skinny, and it was the kind of skinny every girl wanted to be: not malnourished, not overly done, no extra fat on the sides, no love handles. She had a charming way of flirting with the boys that always surrounded her, as if she was entertaining a very silly notion just for fun. She looked too brown in the sun to be freckly, the way her sister was. She spent almost every day of that summer on the lake. Her family had a dock in full sun, and they had a sailboat tied up at the end of it.

The way Marie maneuvered that little boat around the water, you would have thought she was born on it. I had no idea what all of the ropes and pulleys meant (and there were ropes and pulleys in excess on that contraption) but it looked very complicated and very impressive. As I watched Marie swerve her boat all over the lake, I noticed all of the differences between her and myself. It was clear that she had privilege. Money pouring from her pockets. Those kinds of girls, they were nothing like me at all. They could buy whatever they needed, drop dollar bills like they were useless pieces of candy that could be easily discarded. They’d go to the big super-mall that was on the other side of the rich people’s houses. Sometimes I’d go to this mall, too, and I’d stare through the glossy storefront windows at the beautiful satiny dresses and the cashmere sweaters. The mannequins that wore these clothes looked just like Marie, wide hips but a narrow waist, perfect little breasts that filled out every shirt, shapely legs. Marie would eat at fancy restaurants with her family; a nice night for mine was walking down to the McDonald’s together for as many dollar-menu items as we wanted. Marie’s family would have belonged to a country club if we’d had one. Instead, we had the lake families, who all congregated together, nice nights, for barbecues. As for the trailer families, we did nothing together besides the occasional parent visiting a friend to watch TV together. We kids hung out as much as possible, but it wasn’t classy like the townies, it was the kind of interaction that a townie would call derelict. The older kids drank together on corners while the younger ones got into mischief back behind the trailers, in the wilderness by the lake. Marie and I were as different as was possible.

But there was one quiet similarity. We were in the same English class at school. Which meant that I’d been afforded the opportunity to observe Marie Langston all year long. She sat right in front of me, strangely and for some unknown reason in the second floor classroom by the water fountain, English 12 Regular.

We read Animal Farm and talked about communism. We read excerpts of the Odyssey. We read different chapters in our tattered readers (handed down from years and years of previous classes). Half the time, the children slept while the teacher read romance novels. The other half, the children slept while the teacher talked uselessly at the blackboard. There were notes that we were supposed to have taken – on Communism, on the Odyssey, on grammar. No one took them, not even Marie. She slept just as much as we did. She never did her homework, either. We were all equals intellectually when it came down to our reading assignments. Marie and I both flipped the same pages, heard the same boring lectures, walked down the same set of stairs to get to the same courtyard at the end of every class.

We were the same. And then, out of nowhere, we were different again. Marie went straight from the courtyard, turning only to reach the parking lot where the townies kept their BMW’s and Lexus’s and Mustangs. I turned left to go down the back path that would lead me back down behind the lake to get home. As soon as we left that classroom, Marie turned into the little goddess that all the townie girls became. And I, as always, was nothing in comparison.

Tommy Jergens was sitting on a log that had fallen partway into the water. His legs were right next to mine, touching, sticking the way skin does in dead heat. I don’t think I’m going to get out anymore, he said. I thought I was, but now I don’t think I am.

Why? I asked. What’s different now?

My ma. She’s been let go. He looked down. We were dangling our feet over the water, bare toes just barely touching the muddy brown of it.

From Burger King? This was surprising news. It was hard to be fired from a fast food establishment in a town as small as ours; it wasn’t as though there were a ton of people chomping at the bit to work there. The townies would only frequent the establishment if they felt like slumming it. (I’d heard them discussing this, the emulation of our lives turned into a game for boring weekends. It was fun, they said, to see what it was like living as if you were poor. When I heard things like this, my blood boiled – as if we’d chosen to live this way! – as if it was entertaining!)

Yeah. Drinking, they said. She’s getting worse. Tommy turned away from me. He practiced the method of self-defense that so many boys are so adept at: avoidance. I’d never seen Mrs. Jergens with alcohol before, but I’d heard rumors. Rumors weren’t to be believed in public, but were probably true.

I’m sorry, I said.

I thought I’d be able to go to college, Tommy said. But now I think I’ll just stay here for a while. Ma said she’s heard there’s an opening down at the general store. Clerk, or some such position. I could do that.

Sure you could. I put my hand on Tommy’s arm. He leaned on me, hot and heavy in the heat.

He was the best example of a trailer kid I’d ever seen. You thought you were going to get out – you thought so with all your heart – and then you ended up right back where your parents had been all of their lives.

I didn’t talk to Marie in class ever; the gap between us was too great. We might have been the same intellectually, but the breaks between classes still found us held by the internal rules of social interaction. She was better than me and she knew it. I could tap her shoulder and ask her for a pencil, but not engage her in a conversation about her weekend.

But then, over the summer, she initiated the conversation.

Tommy and I were on the Strand, skipping stones. It was an art. To fit the smooth, flat edges of shale into your palm just so, so that you could flick your wrist enough to put adequate spin on the shale itself. To watch the delicate ripples that spread out from the rock itself, concentric circles like abstract art. I could get four skips, five on a good day. Tommy though, was exceptional; he could get it to seven or even nine occasionally.

Marie was on the lake, sailing. The boat had been left to drift maybe thirty feet from us. It was far enough to distance the boat from us, but close enough to easily swim over from. On