She’s begun leaving 3M Post-it notes around the apartment. For example:
“Valerie, please scrub sink.”
“Valerie, please squeeze water out of sponge after using.”
“Valerie, please sign this petition to change the name of Lake Calhoun.”
I make up excuses when I see her in person this evening. “My mom never told me that you have to squeeze the sponge,” I say. Then I go for the sympathy timing. “Quentin broke up with me today. On the phone!”
She completely ignores this important new information.
Melinda and I became friends at Wayzata Junior High School. We’d met earlier, in fifth grade when she’d moved here from Philadelphia, but we weren’t friends. Once you know how we became friends, well—I’ll have to explain that later. It’s not exactly a heartwarming story.
But once we really were friends, we talked about boys, and fashion. We pored over The Official Preppy Handbook together—Wayzata got a mention in it as one of the preppiest places in the country. So at age fourteen we tried hard to live up to that, even though we lived in the part of Wayzata with the small houses, a good mile from Lake Minnetonka and all of its cake eaters. We didn’t say cake eaters in a derogatory way; we aspired to the name. Sometimes we met kids from nearby suburbs and when we said we were from Wayzata, they called us cake eaters, and we stood a little taller for being associated with the Wayzata bluebloods.
You have to understand that Wayzata thinks it’s special because it kind of is. Lake Minnetonka is a sprawling body of water with many bays and peninsulas. Its name means big water, and it’s been called Minnetonka since before white men came. But while a town like, say, Excelsior, has its main street heading up from Lake Minnetonka, Wayzata rests majestically upon it.
Wayzata’s Lake Street travels the distance through town along the shoreline, so restaurants, shops, and financial firms—even Meyers Bros. Dairy and the historic train depot built by James J. Hill—all regard the lake’s splendor. Then the town climbs a gentle hill, like a wave cresting, so another parallel layer of homes and the library and post office have their sense of the lake and perhaps a democratic sliver of a view. Even our childhood school, Widsten Elementary, looked out upon the water from the tower above the auditorium, where many sixth-graders had their first kiss.
“The refrigerator kind of stinks,” Melinda says now. “Can you throw away that Styrofoam container of eggplant dip yet?”
I take out my Dinky Kebab leftover appetizer and sniff it. “Did you even hear me?” I say. “Quentin dumped me. Now I have no plans tonight.”
Melinda pets me on the arm. “I’m sorry, I’ll hang out with you tomorrow night and cheer you up. I’m going out with Roger tonight.”
I dump the eggplant dip in the garbage can under the sink. “Not a big deal, really. Have fun.”
Now that Quentin has exchanged me for his old girlfriend, I imagine she will be sitting in my seat at the Guthrie tonight. Or was it I who had sat in her seat these past several months? I wonder if she’s looking forward to the Tennessee Williams play. I wonder if she even knows anything about Tennessee Williams.
As Melinda puts on her beaded earrings then leaves for the evening, I lay out my black pants, white shirt, and burgundy apron for work tomorrow. I should clean the apartment, or call and check in with my mom, who is having knee surgery in two days. But instead, I write until I’m half asleep. The guilt of unclean teeth forces me out of bed to go brush.
As I walk down the short hallway from the bathroom back to my room, I realize that tonight Dori will probably be walking past the authentic Andy Warhol silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe on the way to Quentin’s bedroom overlooking Lake Minnetonka. Not me. And while my heart is going to take some time to heal from Quentin, it might take even longer to get over that Marilyn Monroe.
Clan of Mama Bear
Running is just in some people’s blood. My mother, Eugenia, had surgery on her left knee for the second time, due to a running injury. Her boyfriend isn’t there to take care of her after the surgery because he’s running a marathon in Tennessee. Six more states to go and Bruce will have run a marathon in all fifty.
So my sisters and I take shifts. Laura—also a runner—took her to the hospital for the surgery and drove her home, and Courtney is going to help out after I get her through the first twenty-four hours when she isn’t supposed to be alone.
Courtney also bought her some magazines and the newest Clan of the Cave Bear book imposter. Mom’s been waiting for the next book in Jean Auel’s series since the last one came out in 1990. It’s been four years, so now she’s sating herself with all the Jean-Auel-wannabees.
My main job is just to make sure she stays put on the couch with ice on the knee and the leg elevated. As a bonus, I give her a nice foot massage with lotion to try to get her to relax. She already wants to get up. She’s only supposed to get up to go to the bathroom, and I’m supposed to help her. But when I run out to my car for something, that’s when she decides she can go to the bathroom on her own.
When I come back in, she’s on the floor with her leg twisted under her, her thick white hair fanned out on the floor, blending in with her white carpet.
“What happened?” I yell.
“I had to go to the bathroom,” she says. I crouch down to the floor to help her get into a sitting position and to see if she’s wet herself. She looks indignant. “I fell on the way back,” she says. “I think I tore it.” The discharge papers with the doctor’s phone number are on her kitchen counter. The nurse I talk to says if I don’t want to call an ambulance I’m going to need to get her into the wheelchair and back to the hospital for an x-ray.
Kurt, who’s a weightlifter, answers my call for help and comes to carry her straight to his car and take us to the hospital. Mom is still drugged enough from the surgery to get away with gazing up at him and saying, “I don’t know why you two don’t get back together. You would have made beautiful children.”
Kurt and I give each other wry smiles. “Off we go,” he says.
While Kurt watches T.V. in the hospital lobby, I’m taken to a tiny office and Mom is wheeled away for an x-ray. When my mom and the nurse come back to the room, I face an inquisition.
“Were you there when she fell?” the nurse asks. I explain that I had stepped out to my car for just a second.
“What position was her leg in when you came back inside and saw her on the floor?” she asks. I explain that she was already trying to get back up, so I’m not sure. My mom tells the nurse that she’s a nurse too, and she can answer the questions herself.
By the time we get home and Kurt carries her to her bed, I’m pushing my mom to take pain pills. Getting her to sleep might be the only way to keep her from moving around. I threaten her that if she doesn’t take her prescriptions, her knee might not get better and she might never run again. But Mom is a recovering alcoholic—maybe seven years sober—and she doesn’t want to take the narcotics. She says that she had Laura hide the bottle anyway. Laura had only left one pill out, in case our mom absolutely needed it, and I don’t know where she put the bottle. Mom says the ice is good enough. And maybe some more foot massage.
“Hey, if you don’t want the drugs, I’ll have them,” I joke.
“No, you will not.”
Mom acts like she’s oblivious to my bad habits, even though she’s found my paraphernalia before, and even though it was in the newspaper when Kurt was busted once back when we were together. She still adores Kurt too, and believes that it was all a mistake about the bust. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, I’d told my parents, and my mother had accepted that.
I can’t stand to see her wincing as I try to help her with her nightgown and robe and get her leg in a good position in her bed. We’ve done the ice, the Advil, and more massage, but she’s still in too much pain to fall asleep.
“I guess I could take one pill,” she says. But then she looks so beaten. “I didn’t want to.”
“
Sometimes you gotta,” I say. I give her the pill, which she holds out in front of her like a piece of rotten fruit, while I go to get her a glass of water.
When I get back a minute later, Mom is sound asleep, still wearing her cerulean blue velour bathrobe over her nightie. I kiss her on the forehead, trying to remember how long she’s had this robe. I know she had it when I was in elementary school, because I remember her in it sending me off to the bus stop.
The pill sits atop her cave-people novel, like a big orange rock from the future that has landed at the feet of the Cro-Magnon woman and Neanderthal child.
For a minute, I think about taking the pill. I could just zone out through my heartbreak over Quentin. But I need to be lucid next time Mom has to go to the bathroom, and Mom needs to know that she didn’t take the pill, so I leave it there. However, Kurt left me a little bud of Hawaiian, and I go out to my car to smoke it quickly, hoping Mom doesn’t wake up and take another fall. Then I go back inside and eat chips and nap in my mom’s bed next to her until the next day, when Courtney comes for her shift.
Needle Arts
There’s one Dinky Kebab family that visits every Sunday. Today, the daughter is wearing another crocheted dress. The multiple colors of yarn spin a rainbow as she twirls around to show it off to me.
“Another beautiful dress! What talent your grandma has,” I say to the little girl. The grandmother gives me a routine lift of the chin, as if to say, I made it with one hand while canning marmalade with the other.
“My grandma knitted my baba a sweater-vest too,” the girl says. I look and see the father has a brown cabled vest, not nearly as delightful as the rainbow dress with its crocheted shell patterns and popcorn stitches.
Only the mother is wearing store-bought clothes, fine garments that could be from Dayton’s Oval Room, or perhaps purchased while traveling to New York or Los Angeles. A cream-colored silk suit and high-heeled brown-butter leather shoes with the narrowest stacked heel I’ve ever seen—just dots of wood piled one upon the other four inches high.
When I applied to waitress at this Middle Eastern cafe, I imagined women in chadors as customers. Those are rare though—and never the Iranian—otherwise known as “Persian”—women, although sometimes the Arabs wear chadors or scarves. Students are rare too in this college-town restaurant—the Dinky Kebab is more expensive than the student hangouts, and they don’t have a beer license.
As I serve the father tea, the girl’s mother asks for water only with her meal. After the meal, she’ll drink her tea and also order tea for her mother-in-law, who had motioned to me that she would not take any. The wife knows best—which is that her husband’s mother always drinks tea after her meal, even though she always refuses to ask for it.
This family has never come in here without the grandma, who speaks no English. They are bound to her, as if by crochet needle and the skeins of yarn that cover the girl and her baba, tied to her with all of these decorative stitches.
Zoom
Melinda is making a necklace for her mom’s birthday and watching a drama show that I never watch. She offers me some corn chowder she made. It’s spicy and rich and I eat a big bowl of it.
“Do you want to hear a few lines from my story?” I ask her. It’s for the last class I’m taking at the university, even though I’ve already graduated. I’d always wanted to take a fiction class, and my dad didn’t refuse my request for a few more credits worth of tuition. He often tells me, as his mother told him: Education is always worth it.
“Sure,” she says as she slips another bead onto the wire.
I offer her a hit off of a joint that I got from Kurt. I read a few pages of Shoedog to her.
Melinda takes a few little tokes of the joint and gives me some thoughts. She still doesn’t get the title, even when I explain that the characters, shoe salespeople, are called shoedogs because they go fetch the shoes from the backroom and bring them to the customers. I know—I’ve done that job. She still doesn’t get it, and I finally give up on reading it to her.
Then she turns down the T.V. and tells me the latest on Roger, who is moving back to New Mexico for a new job.
“Did Quentin call tonight?” I interrupt.
“No, and I’m glad he didn’t,” she says. “Face it, you guys are over.”
“I’m not sure. I think Dori guilted him into taking her back. She probably threatened to kill herself or something.”
Melinda gives me the wan look for which her perfectly smooth forehead may be credited. “I’m glad you two broke up.”
“You’re glad that my boyfriend broke up with me?” I say.
“You were starting to dress like a Harvard grad on a weekend to the Cod. I thought we both left that preppy look behind after ninth grade.”
I smirk. “You mean…on a weekend to the Cape?” I ask.
She darts her eyes, a brief loss of confidence. But then I’m laughing so hard at how she just called Cape Cod “the Cod” that she can’t help laughing too even though she hates to be wrong.
“The Cod!” I scream. Stoned, we both laugh so long and hard that she has to put down the necklace she’s making because beads are rolling everywhere. Finally, Melinda composes herself, touching her face as if to iron out any laugh lines waiting to set in.
It’s ironic she would insinuate that I was dressing for Quentin the stockbroker, when Melinda is the one who dressed and did her hair like Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie when she was dating her last Arab boyfriend.
Roger is her first boyfriend who is both white and American-born ever. Even though she’s so pretty, no boys in Wayzata liked her. She’s tall and big boned—maybe a little plump too. All the popular boys in Wayzata liked only skinny girls, like me, and Melinda wouldn’t have dated a guy who wasn’t popular back then.
Each objet d’art Melinda has lying around this apartment is an artifact of the homeland of the guy she was dating at the time she acquired it. There are, for example:
Turkish hamam antiques
Spanish Lladro figurines
Italian mouth-blown glass
hand-painted Kashmiri papier-mâché boxes
Algerian tapestries
a Jamaican kitchen witch
Liberian beads
French paintings
I love the Jamaican kitchen witch—I was camping on the island with her when she got that one. I still have the photo of her with that lover, Jesse. The Rastafarian stands next to the big, blonde, white girl in front of a wooden door that reads: JAH. Black man know yourself. I had the tent all to myself many nights on that trip.
But that was then. “You should meet one of Roger’s friends,” she says now, “since nobody else has been asking you out lately.”
I wasn’t going to bother telling her about my customer at the Dinky Kebab, but this goading forces me. I can’t resist—her antagonism brings out my news like the golden truth rope of Wonder Woman.
“You didn’t tell me you got in a car accident,” she says, genuinely surprised because it’s not like me to keep anything from Melinda.
“I spun into him, but no damage to my car,” I say. “Anyway, I’m not going to go out with him. I’m just saying, it’s not true that nobody has asked me out.”
She’s not impressed. “Oh good,” she says. “I can’t tell you how real it feels to be with someone from the same culture. We hum the same tunes, literally!”
I zone out while she babbles about how they both started humming the theme song from Zoom at the same time one day, and how that never happened with Omar or Giles or Jesse or whomever.
“And I’m worried those connections wouldn’t happen with this guy for you,” she concludes. “Plus, a Middle Eastern man won’t marry a non-virgin.”
“Who said anything about getting married anyway,” I say.
“And maybe I will go out with him,” I add, just to be contrary. “I have friends, like Savi, who didn’t grow up humming ‘Zoom-a-zoom-a-zooma-zoom.’ We still have things in common.” Savi is from t
he Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Her great-great grandfather arrived there in 1849 on a ship from India, one of thousands of Indian laborers to work the sugar cane as an indentured servant after African slavery was abolished there.
“That’s just an example,” she says. “Plus, Savi…” I interrupt before she can diss Savi.
“I probably would go out with him,” I say, “except I threw away his business card and I don’t know if he’ll ask me again.” I ladle some more corn chowder into my bowl and start walking back to my room to work on my story.
“Well I hope not, for your sake,” Melinda, expert of all things in love, bellows at me as I disappear down the hall. “I’m just afraid it would end badly.”
The Sunglasses Spa
One of the first signs of spring in Minnesota is that people with disposable income buy new sunglasses. They buy them in winter too, especially if they ski. But the first week in April is when they start lining up—even if there’s still snow on the ground. When the sun comes out and it’s not below zero, it’s time for shorts and sunglasses. April and May are the only months of the year when I earn more money in commission at my Sunglasses Spa job at Southdale Mall than I earn in tips at the Dinky Kebab.
When I come back from getting a twice-baked cheddar-jalapeno potato at One Potato Two for my late lunch, customers are waiting, so I have to set the potato aside. The first one I help spends fifteen minutes trying on every pair in her price range and not letting me help anyone else at the same time. She leaves without buying anything. But then I hit it big with one of the teenaged heirs to the Cargill Inc. fortune, who tries on and buys the $280 Revos and two pairs of Oakleys.
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