CNF: Assumption On Woman With A Wagon
by Wendy BooydeGraaff
[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]
We saw her from afar often that summer and fall, wearing a tightly belted trench coat, no matter the temperature, and pulling a red Radio Flyer wagon overflowing with what?—I couldn’t quite tell—along the wide suburban sidewalk. Her neck craned forward, urgently, as if that wagon didn’t follow fast enough. She marched onward in her lace-up boots, the fluttering hem of her flower-dotted dress also impatient, her hair pulled back, the long pony end trailing behind. A professor, I guessed, walking a seminar’s worth of visual aids to the neighborhood school.
We’d see her almost daily, from across the street or while driving by. She pulled that wagon with intention, shoulders forward, clipped steps toward a classified location. She was a government investigator and her current case required her to keep all evidence close. Or perhaps she researched environmental behavior, the documentation piling up until she was ready to publish the final findings.
At the library, her wagon was parked in the vestibule, pyramids of creased plastic bags, handles tightly knotted, crammed in. Inside, there she was, at a table, intent on her pen and notebook, stiff collar turned up. Mathematics, I presumed. On the frontier of equations to change the world.
We left the library at the same time, me with an armload of children’s and board books, she with her notebook that she stuffed into a bag filled with fabrics—clothes maybe—and I got a close look at her weathered face, wind-worn smooth and tight across her cheekbones. When she turned her face toward my hello, her eyes didn’t meet mine; her voice muttered too low and quick for me to catch what she said when I held the door open for her and her wagon. I assumed it was a thank you.
I pushed my double stroller home: my baby, my preschooler, and my books.
She pulled her wagon: her notebook and her bags.
That last weekend we went to the park, the same one we always went to;
the cold surprised us: too cold to play long, too cold for the baby. Our ears and knuckles turned bright red, raw, and the wind got under our collars. The woman was there, under the pavilion, un-mittened hands writing, sitting at the green painted picnic table, her wagon parked close.
On the path home, we finally figured it out—or so we thought. We wrapped up warm cabbage rolls in sauce and tinfoil. We ran the silver package back to her, heating our hands.
She looked up from her ciphers, her eyes focused on the horizon.
If she saw us at all, it was only in the periphery. “Ah, yes,” she said to the grassy knoll. She touched the handle of her wagon delicately and bowed over her notebooks again, words and calculations covering the white space. We left the crinkled package by her elbow and after that the park and the sidewalks and the vestibule were empty. Always empty.
Maybe it was my fault. After all, I hadn’t introduced myself, or asked how she was, what she did for a living, or even if she wanted my food in the first place.
Wendy BooydeGraaff holds a Master of Education degree from Grand Valley State University and a graduate certificate in children’s literature from Penn State. She is the author of Salad Pie, a children’s picture book published by Ripple Grove Press. Her stories and essays have been included in Taproot Magazine, The Ilanot Review, Great Lakes Review, matchbook, Meniscus, and elsewhere. She lives in Michigan. Find her online at wendybooydegraaff.com and @BooyTweets.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Assumption On Woman With A Wagon”? “Assumption On Woman With A Wagon” began as a poem, but like most of my poems, it was too prose-like. Still, I played with line breaks and worked the meter for years. Finally, finally, after being too stubborn for too long, I tried it as a prose piece, and it settled right into place. It benefited from being born as a poem, though, which helped me hone the words to the essentials. I like to think of the woman with the wagon coming to a similar moment of understanding in her own diligent work.
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