Lady in Red

Lady in Red

On a rainy Tuesday afternoon at 4:45 PM, Macbeth Alban Fraser III had begun to wonder, as he often did on such days, if he had succeeded in living up to his name. It was an important name, his grandfather had gruffly told him, one passed down from many generations of noble Scottish ancestry. Around here, no one really seemed to take to it. The boys at the downtown office of Cawdor & Thane Law called him Mac while his wife, Lydia, affectionately called him Mickey. He had saved for her the booklet of coupons from today’s paper, using them as an umbrella while he made his way to the furthest parking spot from the office’s front entrance. Grunting himself into the front seat of his pre-owned sedan—“a beautiful green, just like the highlands!” the dealer had told him—he hoped he could drive home in silence without considering how overdue he must be for an oil change. It wasn’t more than ten minutes into this silence that the radio began to whur and sputter out static. “Damn interference,” Macbeth muttered, fingering dials and buttons, looking to the sky for answers, “Powerlines? Some such thing.” But then, a young woman’s voice, clear and vital.
“I have a message for you,” She said, “You may not know it now, but YOU have the power. Yes, YOU. Don’t just trudge through the rest of your days, take control! Life, my friend, isn’t a walk through the park, it’s a battlefield.” In his periphery Macbeth saw the red of the brakelights belonging to the car in front of him and scrambled to come to a stop. His chest heaving, he glanced back at the radio, but the voice was gone. He let out a grim chuckle, “Ha! This damn car. Green like the highlands and tired as an old horse. Not a thing what works right.” He allowed a few more moments of stop-and-go traffic to pass, half-reveling in his own clever critique, but his normal homeward commute lacked the tedium it bore every other late afternoon of the past decade. Somewhere in his soul sparked the flame of agency. He fished his phone out of his pocket.
“Mickey, really, don’t tell me you’re staying late tonight. It’s only Tuesday and it’s already past five and I need those coupons to go shopping. I don’t have the energy, you know? It just gets so dark out so early this time of year.” Lydia liked to assume that she could tell the near future, and liked to explain her tragedic role in it.
“Honey, relax. I’m already on my way and I got your coupons. Look, I wanted to tell you something kinda funny what just happened. This woman, she—she just came on the radio—but the radio wasn’t even on—and I thought it was just this goddamn car, but she told me I need to change my life and I’ve been thinking you know she’s probably right. I don’t know. I just feel different. I’ve been feeling different.”
There was a long pause before Lydia began speaking slowly, “A woman ‘on the radio’ told you you need to change your life and now you’re feeling differently? Mickey, is there something you need to tell me? Who is this woman?”
“Oh God, Lydia! It’s not like that! I’m just sick of feeling like a loser at my age, you know? I could do more.”
“You’re not a loser, Mickey. Besides, the previous owner could have left some crap self-help CD in the player for all you know. Does this have to do with Duncan? I still can’t believe they passed you over for him at that awful firm of yours. Ten years of dedication! For what? That’s not you, Mickey, that’s them.”
“You’re right, it’s not me. I’m gonna need you to be more positive, too. I need you with me on this.”
Lydia shuffled the phone on to her shoulder as she stooped over the kitchen sink to wash the dishes, sighing, “I heard that Roald Macduff’s wife is pregnant again. At our age! You should have married her. Twelve years we’ve been married—and I couldn’t even give you one child. I’d rather be a man than deal with being this failure of a woman.”
“Alright, alright, that’s enough. We’ll talk about all that when I get home. Remember that song we danced to that summer we first met? You’re still my lady, my lady in red.”
A chunk of a wine glass gave under the pressure of the sponge, slicing into Lydia’s palm. As she recoiled, the phone fell into the warm soapy water.
“Hello? Lydia? Are you okay? Hello?”
Running the faucet over her bleeding palm, Lydia couldn’t stop the red blood flowing. She pressed down on it with her opposite fingers to encourage coagulation. It pooled readily into her nailbeds. Staring out the kitchen window into the grey dusk’s rain, she thought of Duncan, and another man’s pregnant wife, abundant with power and legacy. She wondered what she might be capable of.