data points

(in no particular order, from the past couple decades. This will be my last post on this site, planning to move to a different server soon, will drop the link when it’s up and running.)

Michigan

“Just so you know,” said Bob, as he handed me an apron on my first day at the butcher shop, “The women will hate you.”

It was close to Christmas. I had just moved to Michigan and had walked into the butcher shop the day I arrived, looking for work; Bob had hired me on the spot. $18/hr. Told me to come in on Saturday morning.

I looked at him with confusion, half smiling, thinking he might be joking. “They’ll hate you because you’re beautiful. You’re bright.” He peered at me over the tops of his heavy black frames. “They hate that,” he repeated. He said it without emotion, the same way you tell someone that porcelain tiles are good at conducting heat, or that walnuts can be found in aisle 9.

Miriam, the butch manager, smiled sympathetically and gave me a wink. 

* * *

Bob was right.

Miriam, not caring about the opinions of men and therefore devoid of that particular strain of jealousy, was kind.

---

Italy.

I was standing outside an apartment building with the Australian by my side. He was grumbling at his phone, searching through messages on a ride-share app. “I think this is the spot,” he said. I stared up at the building. A middle-aged, attractive woman leaned out of one of the windows. She had a cigarette in her hand and looked satisfied. Somehow I instinctively knew she wasn’t married. Her eyes traveled down to mine and she waved. I waved back, ever responsive to unmitigated friendliness. She disappeared and I could hear her talking to someone inside. Moments later, a bespectacled man poked his head out of the window and shouted down at us as though we were his long lost siblings. He was our ride to Turin; we’d come to the right spot.

His name was Nicola. He was wearing a sad coat that looked like a Ukrainian carpet. We climbed into his car – I took the backseat, not feeling up for making small talk in broken sentences – and set off. 

He spoke of the woman in the building as “his friend,” and explained that he had to go to Turin for his daughter’s 18th birthday party. He smoked cigarettes continuously. We asked where he lived and he said, “I live my life in boxes. I do not have a home.” At one point his cellphone rang. We could hear a woman yelling on the other line. Nicola yelled back.

 “The wife,” he said afterward, in a tone that made me like him less.

* * *

At the end, some five hours and two gas station cappuccinos later,  he refused to take our money. “You listened to me,” he said, “You wanted to learn about me. That’s more than enough.” When he said that, I felt a protective affection towards him, a blurry kind of goodwill, the same love I feel for the laconic men in my family.

What a bunch of fickle clusterfucks we are.

---

Gmail, omnidirectional

When the weight and levity and flavor and color of the day belong to a singular emboldened name in your inbox. Refresh, refresh, exit, close the laptop, peel an orange, fantasize, scold yourself, open the laptop, look again. There he is. Gravitational pull, everything to the center again.

---

West Virginia

Years ago, as a freshman in college, I went with a group of fellow students to a nursing home somewhere in West Virginia as part of a campus outreach program.

When we got there, students wandered off in various directions. I could hear my classmates entering rooms and greeting people using the tone of voice one might use with a child, and I hated it. I imagined that the old people hated it, too, but that they were lonely enough they were willing to accept being approached like docile fools. I wondered if they could see the self-serving elements of our piousness, or if they even cared. I wondered if one starts to generally assume better or worse of people as time goes by.

I wandered into a room where a bright-eyed lady was sitting upright in her bed, staring out the window.

“My name’s Alanna,” I said, as I took a seat near her bed.
“Beulah,” she said. “That’s my name. Ever met a Beulah before?” I had not, and told her as much.

“You ever had sex in the woods?” she asked me, suddenly, with a glint in her eye. I could tell she was laughing at me – she knew I hadn’t. At this point, at eighteen, I hadn’t even been kissed yet. It was jarring to meet a woman in her late eighties who seemed more instinctively in touch with vitality than I was at the time.

I blushed. She observed my embarrassment with a kind of benign amusement and then went on, “My husband was into it. Always wanting to make love in the woods. My god, but didn’t we always have an audience. I remember looking over to the side one day and seeing a deer staring at us, wondering what the hell we were doing.” She burst into laughter, then closed her eyes like she was savoring the memory. I laughed awkwardly, feeling a mixture of fascination and something like envy. I’d never heard anyone describe sex with such frank and irreverent delight.

As I left her room I noticed a large green dot on the name-board next to her door. I asked someone in the lobby what the green dots meant.

“Oh,” they said, “The green dots mean those are rooms you shouldn’t go in. Staph infection, usually. Contagious.” 

I’m still here, over a decade later, so I obviously didn’t end up getting whatever Beulah had; at least, not as far as staph infections go.

---

Upstate

I’m eight, and I’ve just gotten my first pair of glasses. The definition they bring enchants me, but after my brother calls me four-eyes I stop wearing them as often.

But I have to wear them – I’m severely myopic. My parents gently encourage me to increase the amount of time I wear them each day.

One night I lay down on the couch with my glasses on. I close my eyes. I hear my parents come into the room and feel the two of them leaning over the couch, looking at me. I think I’m fooling them into thinking I’m dead asleep, but now, as a parent, I know they knew I was listening.

“Have you ever seen someone look so beautiful in glasses?” my mom whispers to my dad.
“No, never,” he replies. I feel them gazing at me for a moment longer, and then they tiptoe away.