Trance

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HERE’S A RED AND white VW van, parked and baking in the sun on this clear and warm May day, and the young woman seated in the front passenger seat, the van’s sole occupant, stirs uncomfortably, her clothes sticking to her, her scalp roasting under the towering Afro wig she wears. She is, she hopes, inconspicuous. She lifts her buttocks from the seat, rearranges herself, sits. She moves again, leaning across and over the stick shift to roll down the driver’s side window, letting in a warm draft redolent of exhaust and cut grass and what she thinks may be roasting frankfurters. Her nonprescription eyeglasses begin to slip down her nose, and she removes them to blot the perspiration from her face with a Kleenex. When she again looks up, a small boy meets her eyes. He walks beside a woman, his mother she guesses, toward a Chevrolet sedan, struggling with an oversize paper bag that appears to contain some cheap and colorful reward for enduring, with a minimum of fuss and fidget, Mom’s afternoon of shopping. They stare at each other, the boy’s head following his gaze as he hurries to keep up with the woman — definitely his mother, the young woman sees now; the boy is her diminutive masculine echo in nearly every way — and then his arm is tugging the woman’s, Mama … Mom … look … The young woman quickly replaces the eyeglasses and moves to the rear of the van, where she sits cross-legged on the metal floor and reaches for the paper: the funnies, “Dear Abby,” the movie listings, and her stars for today, May 16, 1974.

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