On the other side of the parking lot, Kendra had somehow climbed up on the dais and was desperately clinging to the breast of the enormous Amish woman.
Roadside America seemed like the loneliest place on the planet at that moment, with the cold empty parking lot, the long dark Christmas night, and each of us lost in our own imploding head.
9
A few days after Christmas—Christmas 2008, this would be—I found myself trudging back to Acme, which I had taken to calling Nadir, after another lunchtime visit to St. Michael’s. I was walking very slowly, drawing out the moments before I had to go upstairs and close the coffin lid on myself.
In the building lobby I greeted Mr. Shah, the sad man from Gujarat. He had arms like weeping willows and distracted eyes and gave me his usual sympathetic grimace. Then he got up from his chair and passed behind a panel that framed the space behind his desk and began singing. He did this a lot. As he sang his usual chanting, tragic song, which I imagined to be about death and loss, I stood waiting for the elevator with my hands over my face.
Upstairs, I plunked myself down at my desk and stared at the latest page of the proposal, which read like a list of canned soup ingredients.
An IM popped up.
Hi! Smiles?
It was from Qi-Shi.
Sad, I wrote back.
His workstation was only three away from mine, so I rolled my chair out and looked his way. He’d poked his head out from his workstation too, and greeted me with kind eyes behind his gigantic groover glasses. Today he had on something that could be classified as hair jewelry.
In a moment he came over for our Afternoon Visit.
“I’m liking the headband—very eighties,” I said. “Olivia Newton-John, aerobics, ‘Physical.’ ”
“Oh, I knew you’d get it,” he said, twinkling. “I miss the eighties! I mean I missed the eighties. They were probably pretty cool, right?”
“Oh, you must remember them. What were you, like, four in 1989?”
He had this cute habit of gingerly dragging his bangs across his forehead with his hand.
“Six!” he said.
“I’m just old enough to be your mom,” I said.
“That is so fucked up,” he said, beaming. Qi-Shi had a nervous, sweet way about him. After the holiday party we’d kept finding ways to talk until we’d evolved a daily Afternoon Visit, which was absolutely the only thing I looked forward to in my Nadir workday. Qi-Shi was a delight, a polymath with a mind both visual and verbal, a Fox with deep stores of Hedgehog. He was interested in everything and genuinely thrilled about all sorts of topics, such as Japanese Notan, the Slow Food movement, fisting, German noun declensions, and the travails of Egon Schiele’s long-suffering mistress, Wally. What he was doing in this dump was a mystery.
“Here, I brought you something,” I told him, reaching into my bag for a book. It was Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. “There’s a really great part where she’s in Germany for, like, a film opening and she’s really messed up and she has to get out of a hotel in a hurry and jumps out a window and climbs over this stuff and the next day she finds out she accidentally scaled the Berlin Wall.”
“Cool!” he said, beaming. “I finally just saw the John Waters movie where Divine eats the dog shit, and of course we had to skip back and watch it nine times.”
“He was lovely,” I said.
“He was lovely,” Qi-Shi agreed. “And so brave!”
I have to say, when Qi-Shi and I were having our Afternoon Visit it was the only time in the history of the Nadir company when the office was actually quiet. I mean, crazily quiet. There was something about our easy exchange of what I guess seemed like arcane enthusiasms that appeared to actually frighten people, as if we were using code to hatch a plot to murder them. Thus the hush over the office: how could they crack this code and foil our plan?
Qi-Shi had somehow managed to hang on at Nadir for a year without losing his mind, and because of this he was a treasure trove of gossip about employees past and present. We were working late one evening when he came over and said to me, “Wait, can I show you something?” He led me to a dusty plastic palm tree outside Dee-Dee’s office and dolorously pointed to its pot. I crouched down. Inside it were many small slips of paper. I selected one. It read: Rosie Sanchez 12/23/08. Rosie had been the accounting person until Dee-Dee, Cissy, and Petey had, for no apparent reason, called her into Dee-Dee’s office, shut the door, and told her they didn’t like the beads in her hair, she was missing too much work, and they didn’t care if she was a single mother whose son had whooping cough, she should clean out her desk and vacate the premises immediately. Nikki had stood outside Dee-Dee’s door and applied her L’Oréal Paris Infallible Plumping Lip Gloss for twenty minutes so she could get all the details about Rosie’s firing and instantly disseminate them around the office. Despite all our differences, this had created a bond among us, and we had nothing but sympathy for Rosie and contempt for the Dee-Dee/Cissy/Petey triad of evil.
I looked up at Qi-Shi.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“Yup. I mean, nope. No kidding. Each time Dee-Dee fires somebody, he writes their name on a piece of paper and adds it to the palm tree.”
“A thoughtful feng shui gesture,” I said, shaking my head.
“You know that feng shui is like goofy white people’s stuff, right?”
He crouched on the other side of the palm tree and we rummaged around in the fired people. There might have been a hundred.
“Dee-Dee always says a perfect day for him is to fire somebody, beat down a sucker in small claims court, then go for dinner at Sizzler in the Cross County Mall.”
“I feel like someone should kill him,” I said.
“People have tried,” Qi-Shi said. He adjusted his enormous groover glasses thoughtfully and found a slip. “Check it out. This was one of the old accounting guys: Rick Johnson 3/11/08. He was a Scientologist, crazy fucking bonkers, and he told me one day Dee-Dee was a Suppressive Person—an SP. Someone who gets in the way of the true spread of the Scientology moment. Like, Rick also told me Hitler was an SP, right? Though how he reconciled that on the historical timeline is beyond me. When Rick got axed he went to choke Dee-Dee, but old Deed gave him the slip and next thing you knew Rick was in the lav ripping the sink off the wall. Then he just bashed it and bashed it until, did you ever see that documentary where Werner Herzog talks about Klaus Kinski getting locked in the bathroom and he pulverized the tub, the sink, the toilet until they were a powder so fine you could sift them through a tennis racket—jah? That’s what Scientology Rick did. Smashed the sink to baby powder. They had to threaten him with a staple gun and carry him out.”
We were crouching there by the palm tree.
“Sweetie, you’ve got to get out of here,” I said to him.
“Oh, you too, Frances!” he said very sympathetically.
That night I took the elevator down from Acme lost in thought.
Out on the street, even though it was the supposedly quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s, the Garment District evening rush hour was in full cry. Usually I could push through this like a cowcatcher, but this evening somehow I felt so dejected I didn’t have the heart to push back. As I was buffeted by the throngs of ticked-off fashionistas pouring down Seventh Avenue, I remembered a friend of mine from Turkey once telling me how she’d have to walk the streets of Istanbul to get to her lycée during a military coup in the 1980s and how it wasn’t uncommon to pass dead bodies lying in the street. There were so many bodies that people would just cover them up with newspaper. I felt like if you died in the Garment District during rush hour, people wouldn’t even take the time to cover you with newspaper. They’d just trample your body until it was reduced to bits, and then they’d look at those various bits—intestines, pinkies, hanks of hair, pieces of bone—long enough to kick them into the storm drain, cursing you for being in their way.
On the subway home
I went back to thinking about Qi-Shi, the kid who was interested in everything. I was thinking I used to be like that, excited by all kinds of stuff, the World of Ideas my oyster. Until a certain family beat it out of me. Snobbed it out of me. Showed me the error of my foolish, trusting ways.
*
The day after Christmas—in the eighties, this would be—Kendra and I drove back east together. We’d gobbled up a few handfuls of aspirin, said good-bye to Aud, but done an Irish exit on the rest of The Walking Irish Tragedy. Not good manners, but it was just too much. Neither of us was in much of a people-loving mood, but I had softened toward Kendra, and when she lit up a spliff in the car and passed it to me, I took it, mostly in the spirit of solidarity. Together we got quietly baked as we rolled east through the blindingly white Pennsy hills, driving into the sun. I remember we talked about religion and how fucked-up the religious landscape was in those parts. Here was a place where religions, punitive and damning, we said, are founded, angry-god religions. Kendra wondered aloud how angry the Catholic God was and I said the Catholic God was never so much angry as disappointed in you, which was really much worse. I found myself telling her about my dad, which was something I just never did, unless I could make a joke out of it.
I found myself telling her how I was always made to feel like I was extraneous, like I was a fifth wheel. Like I had to apologize for taking up space. Like I had no business living. So I always had to jump higher, run and fetch, make myself useful. The worst thing to my father, my terminally furious father, was a person who was useless. He would say things to us kids like Don’t just stand around with your hands in your pockets. Make yourself useful. What are you, useless? There was no room for dreaming, there was no room for error.
And I was telling her about how my father had been a failed public-interest lawyer. Never passed the bar, even though he took it six times in several states. Which was the main reason that he was always so furious, probably. After he died and my mother and I were trying to throw stuff out, a previously unknown event in our house, I’d found taped in one of his seven copies of Robert’s Rules of Order a newspaper clipping, no doubt meant to be inspirational, about a Kennedy relative who had failed the bar something like eleven times before finally passing it. But as luck would have it for my dad, he died before anything good happened. Fucking died at sixty-two, still studying for the bar exam.
Somehow I went on to tell Kendra about how I had actually saved one of his shoes, one of my dead father’s shoes, a budget-priced wingtip of great lawyerly pretensions, and how even at that moment it was stowed in a dresser drawer in my Barnard dorm, and how every once in a while I would take out that wingtip, hold it in my hands, and smell it. And how it mostly just smelled like Kmart.
I even told Kendra what a violent motherfucker my father had been, and how he had broken the dining room table with my sister Olivia one day, never mind throwing my brother Sandy down the basement stairs, dragging my sister Stanze up the stairs by her hair, and contributing to my brother Horatio’s many nervous breakdowns by forever giving him sucker-punches to the head and referring to him as the Pussy. Or as My son—that bitch.
All along Kendra had been listening to me, asking helpful questions, making sympathetic sounds, but now she stopped replying. There was utter silence as we drove through the Pennsylvania hills. I swallowed hard. I realized I had gone too far, shared too much. What a dope I was, telling this silver-spoon girl about my cheap little problems. How stupid! Why didn’t I realize that rich people’s problems are much more interesting? Much more noteworthy and tragic?
I cleared my throat, looking straight ahead of me.
“We were poor, my father was violent,” I said, “but at least my mother didn’t collect Hummel figurines.”
I looked at Kendra out of the corner of my eye. She was pulling over into a strip mall.
She stopped the car and turned to me. She hadn’t put on any makeup, and her unprotected face with its rosacea blotches looked sad in the harsh white light. Sad but real. A rolling sensation overtook me, and I felt like this was the first time we had really looked at each other. It was as if our many masks had finally dropped. And then she reached forward and took my face in her hands.
“Chess,” she said, “I love you.”
And then, she kissed me deeply on the mouth.
I wonder where we were. I wonder if we were in one of those tiny Pennsylvania towns with the strange names. There is Panic, there is Desire. I wonder exactly where we were.
After that we somehow got out of the car and went to get a falafel.
It is hard to explain exactly how exotic it was to find a falafel shop in a place like that. The young man who came out to wait on us wrote down our order on the ticket exactly like a dot and a dash. Kendra and I both leaned forward and stared at it. That must be Arabic, I remember thinking, glad to have this other thing to wonder about.
We ate our falafels looking out on the nearly empty parking lot. Every once in a while we would look at each other, searching, and then look away. Once we were done we simultaneously wiped our mouths with our wax-paper wrappers.
“That was the fucking best falafel I’ve ever had,” she said.
“Fucking delicious.”
“Fucking outstanding, private.”
“Fucking tremendous, sergeant.”
“Fucking fuck-off brilliant.”
She ended up dropping me off outside Philly. There was a SEPTA line I could take that would put me in downtown Barfonia, where I could walk or take the bus to my mother’s house. Kendra wanted to drive me to my mother’s door, but I couldn’t bear the thought of her seeing that house. I think she understood this, because she pushed and pushed but then just let it go.
We stood on the platform of the small suburban station, somewhere east of the Schuylkill, saying an awkward good-bye. It was as if neither of us could make it end, and we were both dancing about forward and backward and side to side, looking around us as if to find an answer. A kind of giddiness overtook us both, and we launched in with our Etiquette schtick—“Mr. Vanderslice, won’t you please avail yourself of the crack pipe?” “Mr. Vanderwhipple, perhaps you would lend me your shiv?”—and when some guy walked by blaring the new Kool Moe Dee album on a big boom box, we both spontaneously busted out in a purposely ridiculous white girl’s bump.
And then the train came.
In the air was a real kind of beauty, previously unknown. And yet I was glad to leave. We hugged good-bye, barely looking at each other.
Once I got on the train I looked out the window for Kendra, but she was already gone.
*
I couldn’t say how I loved her. Or even if I loved her. This would not matter for some time, however, because it would be years before I saw Kendra again.
10
It’s probably no surprise to hear that Audrey also didn’t come back to school after that semester.
Our friendship became phone calls, endless, excruciating phone calls, during which Audrey would fall silent for minutes at a time but never want to hang up. This was, needless to say, before cell phones, and even before Columbia installed a fancy new campus-wide phone system with voicemail. The infamous Little Mermaid chain message on it would crash the entire Columbia phone network in 1990, a moment that was later captured in an episode of This American Life, which was nice and all but somehow killed the subversive beauty of the thing in my memory. At any rate, there was no voicemail in those days, so if the suite phone rang someone would have to answer it, and if it kept on ringing for fifteen times or more you could bet it was Audrey. Sometimes I would stand by the ringing phone with a towel clamped down on it rather than pick it up and get trapped on a two-hour misery call with Aud. Mostly I just hoped she would snap out of it and get well again. I was a simpleton in those days and thought a person could will herself back into sanity. On top of all this, I was sick of walking around feeling bad all the time, worrying every last feeling, making the world into an endlessly problematized landscap
e.
So it was just Trina, Fang-Hua, and I back in school, and for a number of reasons, one being that Trina and I were both Latin minors, she and I got very tight. By junior year we were onto Catullus and we worshipped him, his suffering at the hands of the woman he called Lesbia, his rancor, his changeability, his melancholy soul. We made endless jokes about people having goats living in their armpits and loved recounting how our bashful professor almost expired from shame as he blushed through his translation of Catullus 16: I’ll, um…fuck you up the ass, um, and in the mouth, fellator Aurelius and, um…catamite Furius. We had glee in our hearts. Trina had a way of making everything fun, like Mary Poppins—a cooler, cuter, and more groovily dressed kind of Mary Poppins—but I also began to see that she had a real kindness about her. Senior year we got assigned the same dorm, 600 West 116th Street, right there on the corner of Broadway over the Chock Full o’Nuts, Trina one floor up from me. The underclasswomen in Trina’s suite, besides the bonus of their all being into punk rock, were much more fun—and much more tolerant of my many stupidities and rudenesses—than the ones in mine, so I spent a lot of time up there. The D.C. vibe hung heavy over that suite: the two juniors, Sarai and Zany Mina, were, like Trina, D.C. scenesters, while the sophomore was a quiet, conscientious, nonracist skinhead from Chittendon County, Vermont, who had taken the whole straightedge thing to heart (no smoking, no drinking, no sex) and whom, because of her wholesome, clean-living ways and general niceness, we all called Baby Skin. Fugazi tapes were always being played in that suite, and everyone sure knew the correct pronunciation of the surname McKaye. To top it off, Sarai had a computer, a beautiful new Macintosh SE, and she was a very generous person, so I was always haunting the halls of their suite writing my dithery-assed papers and eating up their vegan snack foods. Sometimes Trina, Zany Mina, and I would fall into the gin rummy pit and plant ourselves at the kitchen table until the wee hours, drinking hot toddies, smacking each other on the forearms, and smoking like burning buildings. This would often end with Zany Mina, deck in hand, throwing herself across the table and flipping the cards into the air fifty-two-pickup style.
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