Sympathy Between Humans

by Jodi Compton

  That was when I realized something I hadn’t planned on: I was homesick for the Range. The shivering birches and white pines, the green grass and mine-scarred red dirt, the pit lakes as blue-green as semiprecious stones: somehow, when I hadn’t been paying attention, it had gotten into my blood.

  When my aunt Ginny had her stroke and died, that summer, it destabilized me more than I realized at the time. In the fall I went back to school as normal, but nothing there made sense to me anymore. Within two weeks of the start of instruction, I wrote a letter to the coach and caught a Greyhound back to Minnesota, earnings from my summer job rolled up as traveler’s checks in my duffel bag. I didn’t know what I needed so badly, but somehow I was certain it lay back in Minnesota.

  Drinking a cold, sweet Pepsi in a coffee shop across from the bus station in Duluth, I scanned the want ads. A taconite-mining company based in a small town was looking for a cleaning-and-maintenance trainee in their shop; it was one of the few entry-level positions in that kind of operation. On the opposite page from the job ads were “housing to share” listings.

  The three-bedroom house I moved into was already occupied by two women in their mid-twenties. Erin and Cheryl Anne were a nurse and a medical receptionist, respectively, and close friends. They’d lived in the rented house for over a year, losing their previous roommate to “marriage and real life,” Cheryl Anne said. They were cordial and pleasant to me, and I to them, from the start.

  That’s where we got stuck, at cordiality. The passage of time and the fact that I paid a third of the rent did nothing to lessen the feeling that I’d moved into their long-established home. Sometimes, when the TV’s blue light flickered over the living room, I joined them, but we rarely spoke. I never turned on the TV set on the occasions that I was home alone. So, at the end of my first days on the job, hot Indian-summer days of late September, I’d walk down to the small and thinly stocked city library, to check out paperback thrillers.

  When I think about those days, that’s what I remember, the simplicity of it. Shopping for food not in the grocery store but in the drugstore, where the center aisle was full of cheap nonperishables: soft French bread so full of preservatives that it lasted for weeks, strawberry jam, 99-cent spaghetti and macaroni that stuck together no matter how carefully it was prepared. Evenings on the porch, drinking store-brand cola with ice cubes that tasted like the freezer, the last of the day’s light dwindling in the west.

  ***

  “What are you doing up there, Sadie?” my father asked, over the long-distance wires. “Your aunt is gone, you’ve got no family there anymore.”

  “I have friends here,” I said. “I have a job.”

  The job part was true, of course, but I had nothing that rose beyond friendly acquaintanceships so far.

  “I just don’t understand it. You up and quit school for no reason that I can see, go live in a little town that isn’t even where you grew up,” he said. “You’re not even taking night classes, are you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why would you want to live up there, in the middle of nowhere?”

  “It was good enough-” I started to say, then caught myself.

  “Good enough for me to send you there when you were 13?” he said, finishing my thought. “Is that what this is all about? You’re angry?”

  “No,” I said, “no, I’m not. Look…” I twisted the phone cord around my thumb. “I’m just trying to have a life. To make a life, that’s all.”

  In the silence that followed I could almost hear him think that it wasn’t much of a life, an industrial job and a rented room, but he couldn’t say any more. I was 19, an adult.

  “What about Christmas?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you like to come home then?”

  New Mexico at Christmastime. Light glowing from the farolitos- sand-weighted brown paper bags with candles in them- and the sopaipillas and rich mole sauce of a traditional Noche Buena feast on Christmas Eve…

  “Is Buddy coming home at Christmas, too?” I asked.

  “Yes,” my father said. “He’s got a week of leave.”

  I put another twist in the phone cord. “I can’t come,” I said.

  “Why not? Surely you’re not working?”

  “The mine runs 365 days a year,” I said. “It costs too much for them to shut the equipment down and then start it back up. And I was the most recent person hired. It’s too early for me to ask for Christmas off.”

  I wanted him to believe it, but he wasn’t stupid. “I haven’t had you and your brother under the same roof for years,” my father said. “Why is that, Sadie?” The bafflement in his voice seemed, for all the world, to be genuine.

  My thumb was turning red from having the phone cord wrapped so tightly around it. You know why. I tried to tell you, and you wouldn’t listen.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t come.”

  ***

  January came, and with it the coldest weather of all. Night came so early that I walked home from work in darkness, and it was too cold and icy to go out after dinner. My chief entertainment became the paperback novels I checked out, several weeks’ worth at a time, from the library on Saturday afternoon.

  I should have realized something was wrong with my life when I strayed into the wrong section of the library, found a paperback of Othello, and immediately wanted to check it out.

  After leaving school, I’d believed I’d never torture myself with anything an English teacher would approve of ever again. But then, standing amid the faint attic scent and educational posters of the public library, I felt a thrill of pleasure and nostalgia, remembering Othello as being the only Shakespeare I’d really liked. Something about the world Othello, Iago, and Cassio lived in, that world of martial duty and sometimes perverted honor, had spoken to me. At home on those coldest of nights, I read and reread Othello. The library had to send two overdue notices before I returned it.

  If this were a movie, Othello would have changed my life. I would have moved on to other Shakespeare plays, loved them too, and finally enrolled in community college. But it didn’t work out that way. After Othello, I went back to the pulp novels I’d preferred before.

  And then, in the spring, I found something else I liked to do.

  ***

  In the maintenance shop, I worked with an Armenian-American girl, thick-waisted, dark-haired, pleasant-looking, easy to talk to. Her name was Silva, and she seemed to live for one thing: the dance at the VFW hall every Saturday night.

  “You should come,” Silva said more than once, but I’d been noncommittal. Dances at the VFW hall sounded too much like bingo or pie suppers at a church to me, but one March night, I decided there was no harm in checking it out.

  At nine-thirty, the scene at the VFW hall was surprisingly animated; people spilled out onto the steps along with light and music from inside. The high spirits of the crowd surprised me, but it didn’t take long to learn the secret.

  Technically, these dances were dry, meaning no alcohol was served. But, as is painfully typical of small-town life, the majority of the young people inside the hall were in some stage of intoxication. Bottles were passed around in the shadows of the parking lot, and if you weren’t lucky enough to know someone who’d brought a bottle, there was Brent, a local entrepreneur who parked his Buick LeSabre near the VFW hall and sold liquor from the trunk. Ill at ease, and feeling like an outsider, I quickly sought him out.

  Alcohol hadn’t been a part of my life since a few girls’ nights out at UNLV. The single shot of whiskey hit me hard. Pleasurably hard. Not long after, a young man I didn’t know asked me to dance, and I said yes. Silva, flushed with exertion and pleasure, brushed by and winked at me. I felt the world beginning to drift away, just a little. I liked it. Up until that moment, I hadn’t realized how depriving and monastic an existence I’d created for myself. It was like a burden that I was only now letting slip from my shoulders.

  That week I’d gotten my first pay adjustment, the one that marked t
he end of my initial six-month period at the mine. I felt newly rich, and in my current state of elation, I realized something: if making the world recede a little was pleasant, there was no reason not to make it recede even more. A lot more.

  * * *

  “Morning, Sarah. You want a ride?”

  A bright Monday morning in early May. Kenny Olson had pulled up alongside me in his big Ford pickup truck, about a half mile from work. I clutched my purse closer to my ribs and ran around to the passenger side.

  Kenny was one of the mine’s security officers. Security mostly meant he kept hunters off company land, and chased away kids who came to cliff-jump and swim in the pit lakes. He was as good-natured as anyone I’d ever met, virtually never calling the police on trespassers, but merely sending them on their way. In addition to his security job, he was an every-other-weekend citizen jailer for the Sheriff’s Department. When he wasn’t doing that, he was hunting and fishing. Somehow, he and I had become friendly across the three-decade-plus divide between us.

  “Thanks,” I said, scrambling in. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work already?” Kenny usually came on at the same time as the first shift of miners, the 7-to-3. Support staff, like me, came in an hour later, at eight.

  “I told ’em I’d be late. Took Lorna to the doctor.”

  “She’s not sick, I hope?” I said.

  “Oh no. The ear doctor. She’s getting a hearing aid,” Kenny said, swinging wide through an intersection. “Now she’ll be able to hear all the stupid things I say. She’s gonna lose all respect for me.”

  I laughed. “That’ll never happen.” I set my bag between my feet. “Hey, I’ve started saving up for a car.”

  “You told me something like that,” Kenny said.

  “Really?” I said, puzzled. “When?”

  We bounced over the entry to the employee lot, the bad shock absorbers on Kenny’s truck intensifying the bump. Kenny didn’t say anything as he steered the truck into a space at the end of a row. He didn’t answer my question, and I thought maybe Kenny needed hearing aids of his own, although he’d never seemed to have a problem before.

  He pulled the automatic-transmission lever over to park and killed the ignition, then turned to me. “You don’t remember being in my truck this weekend, do you?” he said.

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. Memory flashed, but only dimly. I’d been dancing Saturday night, as usual. I’d gotten a ride home from friends. Hadn’t I?

  “That’s when you told me about wanting to buy a car. I didn’t know if you were serious. You were saying a lot of things. You were drunk.”

  I looked around the cab. “I didn’t throw up in here, did I?” It was the only reason I could imagine for the disapproval in Kenny’s pale-blue gaze.

  “No,” he said. “But you were staggering when I saw you walking. You were drunk out of your head.”

  “I had a little too much,” I said. “It happens.”

  “I saw a girl once, died right on her porch, key in her hand. She was too drunk to get it in the lock. Laid down to sleep it off in ten-degree weather. I had to tell her parents,” Kenny said.

  “I can take care of myself,” I said. “We’re into spring, anyway.”

  Kenny watched Silva cross the parking lot. “This isn’t much of a job for you, you know,” he said. “Do you ever think about the future?”

  “Actually, I do,” I told him. “I might want to work in the field.” The field was where the real mining was done, where miners ran shovels and drove production trucks so large their tires were taller than I was.

  “You want to work in the field,” Kenny repeated, his voice skeptical.

  “Women can be miners,” I said.

  Kenny shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. This isn’t about women’s lib, Sarah. Don’t pretend that it is.”

  “Someone’s got to do that kind of work,” I said. “The money’s a lot better than what I’m doing now.”

  He sighed.

  “Don’t worry about me, okay?” I said. I pulled the strap of my purse back up over my shoulder. “I’ve got to go in.”

  ***

  In early June, a freak storm dumped five inches on us in the middle of the day. A Thursday, with the weekend coming on. The fresh snow occasioned an impromptu snowball fight among those of us on the 8-to-4 shift. I hit a rangy young mechanic, Wayne, square in the face. He caught me and put a handful of snow down the back of my shirt. Screaming, I yelled to Silva to help me, but she was laughing too hard.

  On Monday morning, Silva was in a more sober mood.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, when she didn’t respond to my attempts at light conversation.

  “Aren’t you worried about Wayne?” she asked.

  Wayne. I’d danced with him Saturday night, I remembered. More than one dance. After that, my memories jumped ahead to Sunday morning. Cheryl Anne had come into my room, angry. Someone had knocked her hair dryer from its hook on the wall into the toilet bowl last night; did I have any idea how that might have happened or why someone just left it there?

  “What about Wayne?” I asked Silva.

  “You don’t remember?” she asked.

  That was fast becoming my least favorite question.

  “You broke his nose,” Silva said.

  I shook my head, stricken. “No way,” I told her, but already I was uncertain of my own words.

  “He’s saying a guy did it, and his friends are backing him up, because he’s embarrassed that a girl did that to him. But it’s all over that you did it. They say he was hitting on you pretty hard all night. You don’t remember any of that?”

  My hand rose to my upper arm. I had a bruise there, since Saturday night. I’d written it off as the result of stumbling into something, perhaps in my encounter with the bathroom wall and the hair dryer. Now I realized it was the right shape for fingers, squeezing hard. Wayne ’s grip. I heard a young man’s voice hiss in my ear. Rigid, he was saying. No. Frigid. The general shape of events was beginning to re-form in my mind.

  “Maybe,” I began defensively, “if he’d listened when I said-”

  “You don’t even remember how it happened,” Silva said, cutting me off. “You don’t know what you said or what he said.”

  She was right. She saw through me. But in the moment, her voice reminded me of Cheryl Anne.

  Prissy bitch, I thought, and looked away, leaning down to yank the laces of my boots tighter and knot them.

  ***

  Wayne never confronted me about the incident, and his lack of righteous anger confirmed my suspicion that he bore at least some of the guilt for what happened that night. Still, I decided to cut back on my drinking.

  That resolution lasted a few weeks. Not long enough.

  ***

  “Probably half the young people in town are drunk on Friday or Saturday night. Why aren’t you lecturing them?”

  It was summer. I had followed some of the maintenance guys on a cliff-jumping trip to one of the pit lakes. Cliff was a bit of an understatement, but jumping from the bluffs over the water was a local tradition among young people. The mining companies tried to chase kids away, because of liability issues, but it never really discouraged anyone.

  I couldn’t swim, and had only hooked up with the guys because I’d expected that in light of the summer squall we were having, they’d call off their plans to go to the lake in favor of something drier and safer. Not true. The worst of the lightning had passed, they told me, and they were going to get wet by swimming anyway, weren’t they?

  So I’d gone along, and as we’d all progressed in our drinking, their encouragements to jump began to make more sense to me. There’s really nothing to swimming, they said: once you’re in, instinct will take over. We’ll come get you, if you get into any trouble. Besides, you’re already wet.

  In addition to my whiskey courage, I was beginning to dimly perceive some kind of slur on my gender if I didn’t do the things the guys could do. So I was very near to jumpi
ng when a white light lower to the ground and of longer duration than lightning splashed over us. The headlights of Kenny’s truck.

  He’d sent the guys on their way, but I was sitting wet-haired and sobering fast in the cab of his truck.

  “Tell me you never went cliff-jumping as a kid,” I demanded.

  “That’s not what bothers me,” Kenny said. “It’s your drinking. You’re getting something of a reputation, Sarah.”

  Reputation. That word had a connotation beyond drinking.

  “What are you trying to say?” I demanded. “I haven’t slept with any of those guys. Not a goddamned one. If anyone’s saying so, they’re lying.”

  “No, that’s not what they’re saying,” Kenny said. “They’re saying you’re a lush and a tease.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “You drink and dance with these boys, Sarah, go out to the lakes with them with no other girls around. What do you expect them to think?”

  “That I like drinking and dancing and going to the lakes. If they think I owe them anything, that’s their problem.”

  “If you get hurt, it’s not going to matter whose fault it is,” Kenny said. “You’re a tall, strong girl, but one day it isn’t going to be enough. One morning you’re going to wake up and be the last person in town to know you pulled a train the night before.”

  Never would I have believed that Kenny knew a phrase like that. It was like a slap in the face. I was a child to chiding, at least with him. I swallowed hard and didn’t let the hurt show. “I can take care of myself,” I said thinly.

  “You keep saying that, but you’re not doing it,” Kenny said.

  ***

  Later that month, coming home drunk, hot, and thirsty late on a Friday night, I knocked a glass from the kitchen cupboard. I thought I was being a good roommate as I got out the broom and dustpan to clean up.