Trolley Park
by Edythe Wise
We soared before we crashed. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. We were just going for a walk, but before I knew it, his soft, full lips were pressing mine, and I was restraining his long, lean hands, then relaxing my grip and letting them migrate to my anticipating breasts, feeling his sculpted face move lower and lower till he was on his knees, pulling me to the ground while along with a noisy airplane taking off nearby, I was slowly releasing the brakes, accelerating more and more till bam, wow-ee, that plane and I were flying.
He had a wild side, my lover, my flame. The park was next to a small airfield. Everybody called it the trolley park. He called me Babe. Never knew how much I loved that. Pulverized his car, his beautiful, muscular, sensual body, and my dreams on the Schuylkill Expressway before I could tell him.
As I emerge, many years later, into a musty, early spring night from a little Beechcraft Barron, grateful to have gotten a flight on such short notice and more grateful that the rubber band didn’t break. I see that the trolley park is gone.
In an instant, I am a five-year-old girl again in a pink sundress boarding the open trolley with her grandmother. It was hard for Grandma to climb the trolley steps. I had to push as she hauled her enormous weight aboard. Her flesh spilled out through her violet, flowered dress over my hands, obliterating, enfolding them. Leaning against her as we waited for the trolley to start was like lying against an enormous down pillow or floating on a cloud.
The old trolley rattled along the narrow street up and down cobblestone hills. An azure and white day. Sky brilliant with one or two white clouds. This was the open trolley’s last run.
“I want her to remember the last day the open trolley ran,” Grandma had said. “She can tell her grandchildren.”
Mother had snorted. “At her age? She won’t remember anything.”
Grandma had insisted, so here we were, big and little, mature and innocent. One would become the other, hold the other in her mind as she grew. I look back at what has disappeared, a life full of last days unrecognized, but this one, recognized, experienced, with memories of the open car, the red leather seats, the bumpiness making our teeth hit against each other, a thin man with red hair running to catch up.
“I’ve been running for this trolley every weekday for twenty-eight years going to work,” he said, climbing on. “This is goodbye.”
We got to the end of the line and sat on a bench in the park, watching the squirrels run up and down the trees and waited for the return trip. Grandma unpacked the snack she had brought, grape juice in a thermos and Swiss cheese sandwiches on pumpernickel bread. I never drink grape juice or eat pumpernickel without thinking of Grandma.
Those who knew her long before I was born said that Grandma changed after little Harry died. Grandpa rushed the baby to the hospital when the small, flushed face turned blue in a feverish struggle for breath. Grandma had to stay home with the other little ones, but she knew. When Grandpa got back, he found Grandma had disassembled the crib and put it away. From my earliest memory of her, she had a vague air of sorrow and anxiety.
On Monday, October 1, 1995, Grandma died. A friend arranged a private flight from my vacation spot. After touching down and leaving the airfield, I go past where the trolley park was. It’s become a strip mall. I tell the taxi driver to stop a minute while I get out and look for something I won’t find. Greasy smells emanate from Arby’s. Teenagers in grunge outfits hang around it under the “No Loitering” sign. As I check out the back of the stores, I see two teenagers on a loading platform embracing, bringing it all back.
The park was black with flashes of green when ascending or descending planes illuminated it. We held hands and ran up the bank. I pulled him, his heavier body offering no resistance, both of us tumbling over the tree roots as we entered the dark woods. The night air was getting chilly, and I shivered in my skimpy yellow shorts and halter. What drew me into the park next to the airfield with my exotic lover? Some distant memory perhaps and, all right, I longed to feel his untamed heart beating against my chest. To me he was a huge wild bird that I wanted to ride to the sky. I wanted to feel his pulse reverberate between my thighs and sense the wild flapping of his invisible wings, experience lightness, allow the gusts to buffet me, be overcome by a greater force, like riding on the open trolley, wind in my hair, bumping along the tracks.
“Wasn’t this the old trolley park?” he asked when we lay exhausted on the grass.
I took his flashlight, inspected what had looked like a placard shining in the reflected light from the airfield and read it aloud: “Fairview (Trolley) Park. Departure point of the cross-city open trolley. Dedicated on May 2, 1910. Discontinued July 2, 1952.” I’m glad I saw it that night long ago because even it has disappeared now.
Edythe Wise has a Master of Arts degree in writing, with a concentration in fiction, from Johns Hopkins University and is an associate editor of Potomac Review. Her work has appeared in Johns Hopkins’ Mass Ave Review (now Penn Union) and Orchard Press Mysteries. A lawyer, she lives in Falls Church, VA, a suburb of DC, where she has just completed a novel and a screenplay.