BENSONHYPHENTAFT
By William Young
Copyright 2011 by William Young
The hyphen had been handed down to her by her parents and had become, by the time she had turned fourteen and the witticisms of her classmates had grown cleverer, a spoken part of her name. By the time she graduated from high school she was no longer Rachel Benson-Taft, but, rather, “Bensonhyphentaft,” the pronunciation of which she often found herself correcting when people addressed her as Ms. Benson-Taft. Her parents -- Bradley Benson and Liselle Taft -- had originally been amused, then annoyed, before settling into displeased acceptance of their daughter’s suigeneris pronunciation of her name.
Her boyfriend, who was currently on his knee proffering a 0.78 carat marquis-cut diamond, had taken notice of her two years earlier because she had, asked the professor of their graduate night course if he meant “Bensonhyphentaft” when calling out her name. She had even made the teacher say it twice, ensuring the class noticed the way her name looked on paper - Benson-Taft - and the way it was pronounced. The class had tittered inaudibly, each person smiling slightly but unwilling to break the adult social code of not laughing at another person, and he, one Danny Mechlinburg, had turned to look at her and plot his introduction.
Mechlinburg was on his right knee now, holding a velvet-lined box in his left hand and staring up at her with his large brown eyes opened their widest, giving her the momentary impression that he were balancing two chocolate-drop cookies on either side of his nose.
She had known he was going to ask for her hand for a year now, presuming as much after the one-year anniversary of their first date -- which had been combined into a 31st birthday dinner for her since her birth date was only four days shy -- when he had asked her to stop referring to him as “Mechlinburg.” He didn’t, he explained, want to go through life as a large, clumsy last name that people would feel compelled to locate on maps of central Europe. She had smiled the same smile then that she now wore: a small arc of contentment which allowed the barest glimpse of her reflector-white teeth. She had all along intended to say yes when asked, having already let it be known through mutual friends so that he wouldn’t waste too much time getting around to it. This moment, and his genuflection, were merely for historical purposes.
But now, as she sat on the cement park bench, fully ensconced in the glow of the overhead lamp and contemplating the river, Rachel was uncertain. She had even licked her lips in preparation of saying yes while Danny had fumbled the box out of his pocket, and she was preparing to throw her arms around him and laugh happily when the thought of the moment and the actuality of seeing Danny there, smiling widely as he asked, crashed head-long into each other. The two were so similar she was shocked in the same way she imagined she would be when encountering a doppelganger of herself standing at the dairy case searching for raspberry yogurt. It couldn’t be real and, yet, with the exception that her other self was left-handed, the moments were exactly the same.
“Danny,” she said quietly as she turned away from the river to look back at him.
He was still smiling, only the corners of his mouth were uncertain and forced - propped up for show and face-saving measures only - because he was certainly shocked that, though he hadn’t timed it, she had been silent for thirty-seven seconds and the word which had cracked the stillness was not the one he had anticipated.
“What, Rach?”
His eyes had returned to their normal size and small beads of sweat had formed on his upper lip. She wanted to bend over and kiss him, to remove the small lump that she knew grew in the pit of his stomach whenever he was nervous about something he wouldn’t admit to until later, but she couldn’t, and just blinked.
“What is it, Rach? Is something wrong?” Danny asked, suddenly realizing that he had been on his knee far too long and changing over to a coal miner’s squat.
“No, nothing’s wrong.”
Danny closed the lid of the box and put it on the grass between his feet and reached out for her hands. His hands were calloused and rough, and she was always comforted that, even though he spent most of his time number crunching on a computer at work, his hands weren’t smooth like a priest’s. Danny seemed relieved, she thought, as she watched him stroke the backs of her hands and stare at her forearms, drawing the same quiet, shallow breaths he had before first telling her that he loved her.
“What is it?” he asked softly.
“Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything has turned out just like I always imagined it would,” she said, looking down at the top of his head and the raffish curly brown hair that rappelled down the sides of his head and over the tops of his ears.
“Isn’t that good?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not? I mean, why shouldn’t it be?”
“It just doesn’t seem like we, me...,” she started, stalled, and looked away momentarily. “It’s just all too-right; like it shouldn’t be so easy to get here and say yes and live happily-ever-after. I’m afraid if I say yes, it won’t go on happily-ever-after, that it’ll become something different and wrong and scary.”
“Like how? Everything seems right: tonight, us, the world.”
She stood up from the bench, letting his hands drop away from hers, and took several steps from the bench down the paved sidewalk. On the river, a navigational buoy’s warning light glowed red and she stopped to stare at it and wait for Danny to follow. He came up beside her and laced the fingers of his left hand through those on her right, squeezing once lightly but saying nothing. She pulled him down the path, catching him turning his head toward her with her peripheral vision, knowing he wanted her to say something.
She couldn’t, though she wanted desperately to, because she was uncertain what had come over her at the exact moment she had intended to say “yes.”
It was nine o’clock and the park was empty. The small town off to their left had long since closed and the shopkeepers and businessmen were well into their evenings of television viewing or fly-tying or the other sundry, mundane tasks at which the husbands and wives and children kept themselves busy. Half the lights were still on in the rooms of the senior citizen’s high-rise, and the four traffic lights on Market Street blinked yellow or red: caution or stop. Those same two words, or, more correctly, feelings which she could only loosely associate with those two words, flashed intermittently through her head. As with the streets of the town, there was no traffic in her life to look out for, no police spying from behind a parked car for a driver to “rolling stop” through an intersection.
“When?”
“When what?” Danny asked, turning to face her and walking sideways.
“When would we get married? When would we have children? When would we get away from it all?”
“I don’t know, as soon as possible or not too soon, whatever worked out the best for the two of us. Why?”
“I don’t know. I’m thirty-two, now; everything seems like it would have to be rushed. It’s like there would be no time to live.”
“Shh,” he said quietly as her words jumbled all together in the starched fall night air. “We’ve got plenty of time; stop thinking about numbers.”
She continued down the path and turned into the gazebo, the night dew abandoning the grass for her shoes and quickly soaking through the thin leather. She ran her free hand over the top of one of the picnic tables to sweep away the dust before turning, loosing her hand from Danny’s, and sitting down on the table. Danny backed up opposite her and leaned against the railing, altering his balance as the wood creaked and bowed, ever so slightly, outward. She smiled as she imagined him pratfalling backward onto the grass, his arms pinwheeling, as the railing gave way.
“What?”
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“Nothing?” she said, looking into his eyes and wishing she weren’t making him feel awkward.
He looked down at the floor and she wrapped her arms around her knees, pushing in the folds of her skirt between her legs to keep warm as the night air slowly chilled. She heard him rubbing his palm against the stubble on his cheeks, a sound she had grown used to hearing on Sunday mornings as he read the editorial section of the paper, his lips pursing out whenever he disagreed with something, and she smiled again.
“All of the sudden, I feel really stupid, Rach. Sort of like the way I feel embarrassed for people who get engaged on the big TV monitor at the baseball stadium, all of them thinking they’re the first ones to do such a thing in professing their love to everyone, but really not doing much of anything that wasn’t hackneyed just before the second person did it,” Danny said. “I wish you’d tell me what’s going on, why you won’t say anything.”
“I want to, I want to say it--“
“Then say it. This isn’t supposed to be a big deal; I thought it was all but agreed on and --“
“--but ...” she said, stopping again.
“What?”
As she sat on the bench suffering through the longest awkward pause of her life, staring out past his silhouette at the moon’s shifting reflection on the river, she wondered at the events in her life that had brought her here to this particular moment. Not merely the walk down the path but, more ephemerally, the decisions she had made, or neglected to make, and the people who had nudged her bumper-car life this way or that. They were fleeting thoughts that never matured into an idea, as if she were hurriedly flipping through a friend’s vacation snapshots out of politeness and not really interested in the images. Been there, done it, saw it. And then it came out, popping out of her mouth as unexpectedly as if Danny had performed the Heimlich maneuver on her and there, on the table, was the obstruction.
“Hyphen.”
Danny leaned in toward her, slightly, and asked, “Huh?”
“I won’t be able to have the hyphen anymore.”
“The hyphen?”
“Bensonhyphentaft. I won’t be Bensonhyphentaft, anymore, and I certainly couldn’t be Mechlinburghypehnbensonhyphentaft. Too long,” she said. “Even if the hyphens weren’t said, it would be too long.”
“So?”
“And I couldn’t be Benson-Taft because everyone would think your last name’s Benson, or Taft. I don’t know...,” she looked up at him and pursed her lips slowly. “I don’t know who I’ll be.”
She could tell by Danny’s look, his forehead crumpled down over his eyebrows as if his hairline had avalanched, that he had not thought through this possibility and was busily searching for something mediating to say. He had been ready, she was sure, to counter any realistic possibility, cold feet or sudden incompatibility or any of a hundred other clichés, but not this, she thought. He pressed his palms together and stood up, turning half-way to look over his shoulder at the river and she released the grip on her knees and leaned back on the table, staring at the graffiti on the ceiling.
“Am I supposed to say ‘what’s in a name’ or something like that?” he asked, not turning to look at her but addressing the near-leafless maple near the base of the gazebo’s steps.
She watched him as he put his hands into the pockets of his wool blazer and let his shoulders sag.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if what I said means anything.”
“It must mean something. A name doesn’t mean nothing,” Danny said.
“I don’t know, I never thought about it.”
“It’s obvious you don’t like ‘Mechlinburg.” God, I don’t even like ‘Mechlinburg,’ but it’s what I was born with, so I’m stuck with it just like the color of my hair,” Danny said, turning toward her and pulling the ring box out of his pocket and rolling it in his palms as if it were a die he was about to cast. “Hyphens are connectors, not separators.”
She sat up straight on the bench and stared down at the box in his hands, wanting to touch the velvet exterior and feel the chill of the metal band within, but only sighed imperceptibly instead. She wanted Danny’s argument to be more convincing, more passionate: a more certain profession of his love. She shouldn’t test him, she thought, closing her eyes tightly and looking within, knowing it was too late for that: she should know, shouldn’t she, by now?
A car accelerated down the street behind her, running through its gears and crashing through the silence, returning her to the gazebo. She opened her eyes. Between them was the space of the night, filled with darkness and cold air and fallen leaves. She stared past Danny’s silhouette at the black water of the river and knew, even if it only lasted a moment longer, a moment which would return whenever fallen leaves scraped over cement sidewalks when Autumn gusts blew, that she had been someone no one would forget.
About the Author
William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.
Also by William Young
The Signal (Paperback only)
Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse
Gold Guns Girls - Day 209 (Smashwords.)
The Undeath of Rob Zombie - Day 199 (Smashwords.)
The Third Time is the Harm - Day 654 (Smashwords)