The woman known hid behind the woman unknown, not the other way around. Where she was currently, sitting on a bench in a park in a small town in Pennsylvania, a stranger to the place and the people driving and walking past, the unknown parts of her in ascendance. She’d chosen this by choice, drove half an hour from the grubby small town where she actually lived, parked on a side street near what appeared to be the town’s one busier street, then left the car behind. Turn a few corners and no one would know it even belonged to her. Then she’d get to play at being free. Anonymous, nondescript, just another woman walking at a relaxed pace, then, when she reached the park, just another woman who’d taken a seat on one of its benches, to watch the day pass without a worry. That’s what she’d look like, she thought, without a worry. If no one who laid eyes on her knew her, she could be free of the life she’d brought there.
No, this isn’t the place to list off her traumas or bad habits. Those have been rendered invisible, embedded in that other more troubled version of her, the woman known. If she reached into her left jeans pocket, her hand might find a couple of Dilaudid wrapped in a napkin, sealed in a ziplock bag. Who’d have put them there, she’d wonder. The very woman she’d tried to get away from, driving all those miles in a random direction, hoping for a town.
A pretty Thursday afternoon. A baseball diamond, tall chain link fence behind the home plate and concrete dugouts either side of it. One meager dead-looking tennis court, also surrounded by chain link fencing. A portable toilet nearby. Furthest from where she sat, the coup de grace of small town nowheresville parks, a little playground. These were school hours so it was bereft of children. Like her, sitting here, childless; though the known half of her was a mother of two, both grown, a boy and a girl. She opened her eyes then closed them then opened them again to erase the motherhood parts of her. Hadn’t she come here to leave those kids behind also, even though they lived elsewhere and wouldn’t know it?
A normal example of a human. A woman not seen before in the park or about town. It should be relieving, cleansing. Should help her fit into the collective day without any effort, no reminders of her many past lies or desperate bids at manipulation. Her husband and children knew her and that activated so much shame within her it made it difficult to behave normally, whatever that was like. Two paths lead from the shame of being known: death by one’s own hand or running away. Many times in the past she contemplated the former but always chose the latter, as she had now. While she’d been zoned out looking at the grass before and the far street beyond, a flock of birds had eased down onto the grounds, outfield the baseball diamond. Pecking and twitchy as they shuffled through the grass in search of fuel for further flying.
Well she’d been loved, she couldn’t say that. It was more a matter of what she did with it, how she begged for it, all for her, none to give back. Bam, there it went, another hit: a heavy swell in her chest and head, shame. The woman unknown divorced herself from such determinations, opening her eyes again to track the birds before her, unaware they were being watched, since she was too far from them to register as a threat. Now if she stood and tramped over toward them, waving her arms and hooting, they’d scatter. They’d flee skywards where she couldn’t follow. Envy. There it is. A bristly energy behind the eyes. As if it were perfectly understandable to resent birds for exercising a skill she didn’t have, nor would ever. But they were similar in a way, weren’t they? Leaving one town to drift to another, or settle in unmarked fields between. She was half bird, at least in her itch to arrive places so she could leave them.
She checked her phone. No text messages yet. The clock told her the time and, soon as it was told, it didn’t matter. Two, three hours yet until the nearby school let out and the parade of yellow buses began rolling past and the park began filling with parents and grandparents and children. No one asked anymore where she went, because she would never tell them truthfully. So to spare themselves the pain of being lied to by their own wife or mother, had stopped asking. And here was the bewildering thing, which of course hit her with more heavy swells in her chest and head, when she noticed they’d stopped, she'd resented that. As if they weren’t even willing anymore to uphold their end of the lying, receiving the lie and not challenging her, but also not giving her any indication they believed her. For the longest time lying had served a double purpose, her chosen form of self-punishment but also the flimsiest means of evading accountability. It had been her way of telling them: no, there’s part of me you aren’t allowed to know, I get to keep it, protect it, you can’t ever have it.
Already she was a few months into a new year but here was evidence she was nothing if not the same woman, a shabby-looking woman who shied away from smiling, all too conscious of the sorry state of her teeth. The children, they hadn’t arrived yet. When they did, if they did, the known parts of herself would surely assert themselves, and she’d project a child version of herself among them, watch her trounce around and chase the other children and play. Prime opportunity to luxuriate in self-pity. Yes, she’d remind herself, a terrible childhood had brought her here. Never mind that was over fifty years ago. It was a feeling-place where self-criticism could never reach her, daydreaming her victimhood. She was a survivor, the dream would tell her, she had endured so much, it was understandable she was caught up in the kinds of pills she carried in pockets. She was damaged and that forgave everything.
Almost as a comment on all this, the park remained empty. Even the birds had left. Given her state, she wasn’t surprised she hadn’t noticed. Without intending to, actually despite her attempts to do otherwise, she’d been pulled back into her own life. Free to not think of it, no reminders around her, it’d happened anyway. The known parts of her were in her head, no escaping them. That’s where the pills usually came in handy. Can’t do it here, she knew, not in a park out in the open, wait until she got back to the car. She’d need the pleasurable full-body bloom of numbness to help her drive back to the town where she came from, the house which owned her. To integrate the woman known into the woman unknown, she needed Fentanyl or hydrocodone or heroin or Dilaudid. It was painful to watch the two blend and become one person, nodding off on a couch, feigning sleepiness, claiming insomnia the night before.
She was standing now. How’d that happened? She’d been daydreaming the return to her life and as if taking its cue, her body had righted itself, taken to the feet she’d given it. On the back of the bench was a little bronze plaque, commemorating a dedication. Name of someone who’d lived and died. Other people who’d survived had paid for a bench to be placed in that very spot, overlooking the park from a shy hill. To her maudlin surprise, the name on the plaque was not her own. It should’ve been! That name was as good as any. She could assume it, walk the town an hour or two, introduce herself as the dead woman, would they know any different? Maybe that’d be her way of breaking free of the bind she’d been living, to make herself known in a counterfeit way, so the unknown and known woman she was would both become more hidden. Or better yet, could be discarded, useless to the smile on her face as she talked to these hypothetical townie strangers she’d meet in coffee shops or at gas stations, or outside the school where she’d stand waiting for children she didn’t have, to walk them home. Emma Strickland. Emma Strickland. It didn’t feel right yet. It’d need repeating. Emma Strickland the walk back to the car, Emma fishing pills from her pocket to swallow. Emma Strickland the long drive home where she would die again. Emma Strickland shameless in the room she no longer shared with her husband, door locked, drinking in secret. Emma in the basement scrolling through social media on her phone for hours alone, posting on strangers’ feeds as if she knew them. Emma Strickland the woman no one really knew and so was never really needed.
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