Go Fly a Kite

The Sun

I WAS ON A TRIP back home to northern California — part work, part vacation — and I had a terrible head cold. My research for a magazine article on the wine country north of San Francisco had brought me to a chilly town on the edge of the San Andreas Fault, a place populated by a combination of wealthy tourists, ranch hands, and hippie holdouts. There, alongside the gift shops, the feed store, and the yoga studio, I stumbled across an herbal apothecary with a hand-painted sign that read, “Garden of Eden.” I stepped into this garden to buy some echinacea to supplement the Sudafed and Tylenol I was already taking. (When feeling this low, I discriminate against no potential cure.) The shopkeeper — whose long, graying brown hair identified her as one of the holdouts — watched me peruse her shelves, then asked, with a surprising French accent, what my symptoms were.

"If you like," she told me, "I can mix up a custom tincture for your problems."

She grew or collected all the herbs herself, she said, and she seemed to know what she was doing, so I offered up my symptoms to her: sore throat, congestion, headache, fatigue. With that, she turned to her workbench, a two-tiered table covered with large bottles full of various mud-colored extracts, and began to pour and mix. But my problems didn’t end with my cold symptoms.

"Oh, yeah," I said to the hair spilling down her back, "and my love life is a shambles, and I lose interest in anything I pursue, and I don’t know where to call home. You got anything for that?"

Eden – it turned out that was her name on the sign; not the name her mother had given her, but the name she had given herself – smiled as she turned to me with a handful of colored paper slips and asked me to choose one for the label. And as she wrote out the directions ("Half a dropper three times a day, with prayer") on the saffron paper I’d selected, she told me that she was studying an ancient healing tradition.

"Do you know the Sufis?" she asked.

"I know they do a lot of dancing," I replied. It was all I knew about Sufis. Once, when visiting one of my childhood homes as an adult, I’d come upon a Sufi commune whose inhabitants whirled like the dervishes they were. They had moved into the house on Norwich Street in San Francisco where my earliest memories had taken place: eating a parsley sandwich from a floating pie pan in the bathtub; slamming the window on my finger; reminding my older brother in the middle of the night to turn the pillow over to the cool side.

"Sufism is the mystical form of Islam," Eden explained. "In a healing we don’t dance; we breathe and chant and pray to Allah — though if you’re not comfortable using that word, you can pray to whoever you want." Then she offered to give me a free healing; she was in the student-teaching phase of her program and needed to practice. "The healing could address some of those other concerns you mentioned," she said with a little smile.

"I’m not really religious," I told her. "I’m not even what you would call ‘spiritual.’ " I gave her a brief rundown of how my parents – one Catholic, one Jewish – had abandoned their religions at a young age and didn’t have time to figure out what to tell their children before we started popping out: one, two, three. “But they did manage to teach us awe and humility," I said, "so I’ve never had the gall to disbelieve in the possibility that something benevolent, or at least concerned, might be trying to orchestrate behind the scenes."

If pressed, I would have to call myself an agnostic – an I-don’t-knower who doesn’t quite discount magic and luck and coincidence; someone who, just in case, picks pennies off the ground if they’re facing up and makes wishes on stars, moons, planets, and anything else that twinkles in the night sky. What I don’t believe in is congregations. As a child I watched teenagers, grown-ups, and whole families join the Hare Krishnas, est [Erhard Seminars Training], Scientology, Lifespring, Synanon, the Moonies, and various other groups that liked to accost you as you walked along Mission Street, offering free personality tests or spice-dusted popcorn. An imperviousness to cults is a blessing when one waits for you on every street corner, hoping to catch you in the aftermath of a fight with your lover or your mother or your boss — or other times when you might be particularly susceptible to kindness. So my skin was perhaps unnecessarily tough, sealing me off from hucksters but also from strange-sounding disciplines – Reiki, shiatsu, Feldenkrais – that might have done me some good.

I’d come of age in the center of the New Age – San Francisco in the 1970s and ’80s – and was currently an editor at a magazine called New Age, which required me to take seriously all kinds of theories and practices I didn’t believe in. Through it all my resistance had remained firm, but that day something in me melted just a bit. It was time, I supposed, to cast off at least a piece of the armor I’d been wearing for most of my life and try something new. Plus it was free.

"OK," I told her, through the haze of my head cold. "I’ll give it a try." We arranged a healing session for the following week, and Eden suggested a date — February 26 — that, as coincidence or God or the stars would have it, happened to be my thirty-ninth birthday.

IN OTHER PARTS OF THE COUNTRY February is dreary and cold, a month of bare branches against a gray sky, but in northern California it is a time of pink and white blossoms emerging from moist, vibrant green. It wasn’t until my first semester at a New England college that I understood what my high-school English teachers had meant when they’d said winter is a symbol for death. In California things die in summer, when the rains stop and the heat bleaches the grass to a pale, crispy brown. Winter, by contrast, is the season when water pumps life into rivers and fields, creating rich black soils covered with improbable shades of green. Now, after twenty-some years on the East Coast, I almost couldn’t adjust to the lush vitality humming all around me. I spent much of my time trying to convince myself that I had a right to partake in such beauty and opulence.

In New England people would ask me why I’d ever left San Francisco, that city of light and charm. But for me San Francisco is the place where I grew up poor and learned to be a Have Not; a city of sadness and divorce and impossible dreams; a city drenched in cold, damp fog, while just over the bridge – any bridge – the sun is shining and anything is possible. I’d stayed away for decades, afraid that whatever fragile sense of possibility I had created for myself would not survive a return to my birthplace. But the small town in Maine where I’d finally settled had started to feel too cozy, and I missed this Northwestern landscape: the soft, sloping hills going down to the Pacific; the foggy wind that whipped through the valleys; the green-and-cream streetcars and bright gray sidewalks of the city. This was the geography imprinted upon me at my most impressionable age, and I had begun to yearn to see it again.

As soon as I’d stepped off the plane in San Francisco, though, the wavering had begun. No one was there to pick me up – it just wasn’t done in our family – and on the bus from the airport I closed my eyes against the city and even the bridge, not opening them until we’d passed into Marin County, then Sonoma, where both my father and younger brother had settled. Neither father nor brother met me at the bus station, and I took a five-dollar taxi ride to my brother’s house, where he lived with his wife and two young girls. And with a hollow thud I was "home," trying with all my might to remind myself of my right, and my desire, to be here.

ON THE MORNING OF MY BIRTHDAY Eden and I sat in her little shop with the door locked and the closed sign in the window. The sun was out, and the sky was clear, but the damp chill of the ocean air seeped under the door and through the threads of our sweaters. She had asked me to come up with a concern – physical or emotional – that I wanted to work on, and so I was confronted with the eternal question What seems to be the problem? Though I’d been having on-and-off pain in my lower back for some years and a lifetime of insomnia and digestive complaints, I wanted to focus on the one problem that felt most impossible to solve. I’d spent the week tracing my ailments back to their origins, trying to describe this mother of all problems, the Big Kahuna from which all the others had hatched. But it’s hard to condense a life’s worth of troubles into words, and once you’ve done it, those troubles can come off sounding petty.

Mine had mostly to do with poverty. They refer to poor kids these days as "at risk," but when I was a child, the word was "deprived," and there was something accurate, if condescending, about the concept of deprivation. I grew up wanting many things, including a safe and reliable home where the family ate dinner together every night and the kids had to call to ask permission to miss a meal or arrive late. But even after I got out from under the laws and habits and necessities of poverty, even after I got jobs and apartments and stereos, I still couldn’t shake the sense of scarcity. I no longer had to live in poverty, but I chose to dwell there nonetheless, because I knew no other way to live.

"My problem is in my head," I told Eden, who regarded me with a serene, closed-mouth smile. "Or, at least, that’s where it started, but then it spread out to every part of my body, like a cancer. It’s not actually a thing; it’s an idea, or a belief, really. In fact it’s a lie. But it feels so real that it might as well be a physical disease."

"And what is the belief?" Eden asked.

"That things that are possible for other people are not possible for me. That I am excluded."

Honestly, I thought to myself, haven’t I gotten rid of this ridiculous theory yet? After all these years I was bored of my own way of seeing the world, and the evidence no longer supported it. Back East I had a decent car and a good job, with health insurance and a retirement account. I owned a small sailboat and a surfboard and made use of both. I’d spent my summer vacation in France – flying into Paris, then surfing the beaches down the Atlantic coast to Biarritz. The article I was currently working on – about the vineyards, restaurants, and spas of the wine country – would go on to earn me a nomination for a prestigious award for food writing. But this other version of myself was fragile and tenuous, especially in my old setting.

"Excluded from what?" Eden asked, her tone somewhere between compassion and incredulity. Sometimes I forgot that I looked normal on the outside, and that this "exclusion principle" was invisible to others, no matter how pervasive it felt to me.

"Everything," I said, trying to convey how deep this belief went. "A husband. A home. Nice underwear. Dinner parties with stimulating conversation. Vacations abroad. A garden with nasturtiums and sunflowers . . ." As I was listing these things, I realized that I actually had some of them, but curiously that didn’t stop me from feeling they were out of my reach. I always chose the off-brand, on-sale, low-cost version; either that or I won a scholarship, a pity prize. So even when I got hold of the car, the surfboard, the vacation, it felt cheapened, and I went on yearning. In my hands possessions and accomplishments felt insubstantial, as elusive as smoke.

Saturn is the Biggest Planet on Earth

The Sun

“What do you need to sit fully into your seat?” the yoga teacher asks us in an earnest, probing voice. “To sit fully into your pose, into yourself, into your life?” she continues, as we sit on our mats and try to figure out what she’s talking about. Then she instructs us to bow and “dedicate the energy of your practice” to someone. I wonder: is dedicating my practice to someone the same thing as praying for them? I wiggle my butt on the little, round meditation pillow, trying to sit fully into it, and decide to dedicate my practice to my younger brother, who has just been “transitioned” out of his job.

Dedicate, transition: every little corner of our culture has its own dialect, its own way of using words. English is a hard enough language as it is, with so many exceptions to so many rules. It makes me want to apologize to the immigrants trying to learn it, and also to my brother’s daughters, ages four and six. Though born and raised in California like me, they still get tripped up by the odd conjugations and pronunciations of their native tongue: Why, for instance, we say we caught something instead of we catched it. And why we pronounce Ford one way and word another. “I’m sorry,” I want to say to my nieces, to the children I tutor in the San Francisco schools, to the Mexicans I meet in the dressing room at Mervyns, to all students of English, both native and foreign born. This language makes little sense. Even the sound of it is harsh, unlike Spanish, which jangles like oversized earrings.

“I got transitioned out of my job,” my brother tells me in a soft, sad voice. He’s speaking English, but I don’t understand what he means until he explains that “transitioned” is a fancy way of saying “fired.” His name, Isaac, means “he who laughs,” and he usually lives up to it. His is a sweet giggle that can be endearing coming from a big, sports-loving, meat-eating guy like him. He also cries more than any other man I have ever met. And that, too, in a man his size, is endearing, and also heartbreaking, especially since I’m his older sister and our “family of origin,” as the social workers call it, was poor and divorced, we children evicted too early from our one and only childhood. I want to give my brother a severance check and a gold watch — everything that his company, a local television station, did not give him. While I’m at it, I want to give him parents who attended his high-school football games, a car for his sixteenth birthday, and introductions to a couple of sports-media personalities who could, with a phone call, set him up with fifty thousand dollars a year and video equipment to produce his own local sports program.

My brother’s six-year-old daughter is named Mille — pronounced “Millie.” Her first-grade teacher has taught her about silent e’s, but her name, she and I realize one day while she’s practicing her reading at the kitchen table, has the opposite of a silent e. What would that be? A noisy e? A loud-and-proud e? Mille’s sister, two years younger and always wanting to keep up, tells me she can write her name as well. She just throws down those letters — and she’s got a lot of them in Tallulah — onto the paper. She doesn’t care what order they’re in: that’s her name. She is at the age when she does not understand the difference between fact and opinion, between knowing something to be true and wanting it to be so. Like certain politicians and talk-show hosts, she operates under a paradigm of conviction: if she feels strongly enough about something, it must be right.

“Saturn is the biggest planet on Earth,” she told me the other day, as if daring me to contradict her.

“I don’t know about that,” I said, taking her bait.

“Yes, it is,” she said, not a trace of doubt in her voice, as if she were saying, I like strawberry yogurt best.

I appreciate her boldness, and I respond with a giggle that sounds like her father’s, he who laughs. This kind of conviction can be endearing in a four-year-old, though not so endearing in a talk-show host, nor in the president of a country — people who hold the fate of so many lives in that slender gap between their confidence and their ignorance.

THE FIRST THING I need in order to sit fully into my seat is a better chair. Everything I own I’ve scrounged, so none of it necessarily fits the purpose to which I’ve put it. I grew up poor, and I still don’t know which verb tense — past or present — to use between the subject I and the adjective poor. No matter how much money I’m pulling in, it just doesn’t seem right to buy something brand-new and designed for only one function: like, say, a chair to use at a computer.

You don’t have to be poor to cultivate this habit of buying secondhand or doubling and tripling up on the uses of things; you could also be an environmentalist. But those of us who reduce, reuse, and recycle out of necessity can sometimes have trouble spending money on something costly that we really need, even if we could maybe afford it. We live in fear of becoming poor in the future, like we were in the past, and maybe even are in the present. But that doesn’t keep us from wanting: Wanting that office chair covered in breathable blue, red, or black nylon with the adjustable seat and padded back. Wanting this thing so badly because we believe that if we get it, it will help us achieve everything we’ve ever dreamed of doing or having or being.

Truth be told, though, what I really want is that cool Eames-style task chair with the ergonomic design that relieves neck, back, and shoulder pain; the one that comes in muted tones of burnt orange and pale puke green and has levers for shifting back and forth, up and down, and around and around. Then I’d be sitting pretty. Then I’d be sitting fully into my seat. Then I’d be wheeling around my desk, watching my fingers buzz along the keyboard; seeing the words and sentences blossom onto the electronic screen; letting the answering machine take my calls from nine to one every day, because those are my creative hours; and returning those calls only after I did my yoga and had my lunch of crab and avocados (if they were in season) and organic baby spinach dressed in a locally grown Meyer-lemon vinaigrette.

Not everyone who grows up poor is infected by such an audacious imagination. My older brother, for instance, succumbed to cynicism instead of escapism. But when I was a girl, I used to dream of a voice on a loudspeaker picking me out of the crowd on our busy Mission District street corner in San Francisco, and a helicopter sending down a rope ladder and then transporting me to a kind of Paris salon in the clouds, where I really belonged, where everything would finally be perfect. My life would be (conditional tense, describing the future of my past) my art: writing, filmmaking, whatever. My younger brother’s conditional life would be sports: first playing them, then reporting them on television, plus a little acting in movies and TV commercials on the side. It would be the O.J. Simpson trajectory. This was before O.J. became a joke about a glove and a white Bronco, back when he was a star athlete who came from an even worse neighborhood in San Francisco than we did.

Pulling Up Stakes

Utne Reader

The eviction notice arrives in the mail, just like any other bill or letter. That night, when my parents have a spare moment, one of them will open it and read it and then read it again. It doesn't matter that they've got three kids and a broken-down car and Dad is only sort of working and sort of trying to be an artist; it doesn't matter that it's the middle of the school year and they've always paid the rent on time and kept the place relatively quiet and clean. It's just that the building has been sold, and the new owners want to live in the third-floor flat we call home.

We visit courtrooms, stalling. My father does not have a suit or tie, so he puts on his least-paint-stained shirt and pants and takes one or two of us kids with him downtown to plead his case. But it's no use. Soon enough we are packing up boxes and loading them into the blue Ford pickup with the homemade wooden camper on the back. It's a sunny, cool June day in San Francisco. School just let out for summer, and the neighborhood is saturated with children and noise. Upstairs my mother is packing our belongings into boxes, which we kids will then carry down the stairs so Dad can load them onto the truck the right way, the way that doesn't waste space or break anything. We have moved several times now, but we are not getting any better at it. Mom is running behind with the packing, so Dad has to wait on the street with the truck double-parked. My brothers, who are 6 and 11, and I, 9, sit on the stoop listening to the chorus of kid sounds emanating from the schoolyard: the thwack of the bat hitting a ball; the thump of the basketball against the backboard; the angry trill of voices arguing over fair or foul.

My father sighs and looks up at the traffic he's disrupting. 'Why don't you go help your mother,' he says to us.

It's not exactly a command, but neither is it a question. I run up the staircase, and in the kitchen I find my mother frantically emptying shelves of dishes into boxes. 'Is he ready for another one?' she asks, her face framed by thin bangs and feather earrings. 'Uh, yeah,' I say, trying to sound casual. When Dad gets mad, Mom gets nervous. She moves faster, but accomplishes less. To preserve some semblance of peace, I've got to get boxes packed and down the stairs. 'Just shove that stuff in there, Mom,' I say, piling plates into a box.

'But some of it is coming with us and some is staying,' she explains. These boxes and our furniture will go to a friend's garage. Then we will load the rest, plus some camping gear, into the homemade camper and face the truck brazenly to the north, toward optimism. The plan is to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and look for Land-my father pronounces this word as if it were a proper noun-so we can get out of the city, escape the corner of Sixteenth and Sanchez, and live a better life in the country.

The Gifted Classes

The Sun

When we would walk down Sixteenth Street in San Francisco to the schoolyard or across Sanchez to the corner store, we'd keep a lookout for cool cars. If one drove by – a red Mustang convertible, a tiny MG, a black jag with the silver cat ready to pounce off the hood – whoever saw it first would point and say, "That's my car!" We could play this game anywhere, my brothers and their buddies and I, shouting the words loud and fast to drown out anyone else who might be thinking about claiming the same car.

Bodies In Water

New Age

Just last Thursday, I sat on the dock here in Maine with my friend Cary, talking about my dream of saving drowning children. I've had this dream for years; it's my version of ... read more

At Home in the Wild

Natural Health

This past spring, I spent a month living close to the land and sea in a surfing village in Mexico. Every morning I woke to the slight breeze that came with the first hint of dawn, and watched the stars disappear into the sky. I walked down the dirt hill to the market, bought eggs laid a few hours earlier and a quarter-kilo of warm corn tortillas, then went back to the open-air villa and cooked breakfast. The rest of the morning was spent in the ocean, bobbing on my surfboard and getting intimate with the waves. Immersed in the sea, I absorbed its rhythms, which stayed with me long after the heat of the afternoon forced me toward shelter and more tortillas. Evenings I felt the moon rise before I could see it, watched the stars take over the sky again, and fell asleep as soon as the air cooled down. Life was reduced to the basic elements of nature--wind and water, heat and cold, night and day--and these were more than enough to sustain me.

When returned to my small box a home in a California suburb, the round looseness of the world seemed crammed into squares and rectangles, into sidewalks and freeways and shopping malls. No longer could I feel the change in the wind or the light. Outside, the earth was spinning, trees were budding, the tide was rising and falling--but I was stuck inside walls and ceilings, away from everything vital. Then I had to spend a week in New York City, where I could barely see the sky. One evening on the concrete balcony of a Times Square nightclub, my date pointed up to the lights of Broadway, brighter even than the stars. "Isn't this beautiful?" he whispered. "Sure" I said, but my body groaned at the lie. My feet, strapped into high-heeled sandals, wanted nothing more than to get naked and walk me away from the asphalt and into some sand.

(1.) Naming
First, notice the elements of your surroundings through what you see, hear, feel, taste and smell. Your senses alert you to both your body and your environment, and naming the things that you notice--like learning the name of a new acquaintance--is essential to developing a relationship with them. Walking in a city park, for instance, you may hear cars and birds, feel a chilly breeze and see a patch of grass.

(2.) Describing
Next, deepen the relationship between you and one thing in the environment that draws your attention. Applying all of your senses, describe it in detail, either writing or speaking aloud. That grass isn't just green, you might realize. It has shades of yellow and brown, and it feels silky here but dry and scratchy there.

(3.) Interacting
Now you can interact more intimately with this one element of the environment, allowing it to trigger emotions, wishes and memories inside you. Perhaps the dry brown grass seems thirsty and neglected, and you wonder who takes care of this lawn. That thought, in turn, may remind you of your own needs and make you reflect on who is taking care of you. You are now involved in a reciprocal relationship with your surroundings.

Time Alone

Natural Health

Loners have long had a bad rap. We characterize them as outcasts and undesirables--old maids at best; at worst, potential Unabombers. But experts are now suggesting that it's not spending time alone that can make you sick--or at the very least stressed-out and unhappy.

Depriving yourself of solitude "is the cause of many manifestations of psychological and physiological distress" states psychiatrist T. Byram Karasu, M.D., in The Art of Serenity. "Being with other people for long periods of time, no matter how loving, wonderful and interesting they may be, interferes with one's biopsychological rhythm."

According to Karasu, this rhythm is a combination of the body's circadian cycle and the hormones and neurotransmitters that affect factors such as mood and sleep patterns. Each of us creates our own inner pulse to help us synchronize with the solar, lunar and other cycles of the outside world. The constant presence of others can literally throw our rhythm out of sync.

As a person with a great natural leaning toward solitariness, I have felt this interference all my life. But I never knew it had a name or an explanation. Eager to find out more, I called psychologist Ester Schaler Buchholz, Ph.D., who in her book, The Call of Solitude, introduced the concept of alonetime, describing it as "a basic need," as essential and universal as the need to bond with others. Buchholz comes to this belief through a series of infant studies and analysis of historical and anthropological data, as well as studies on how meditation, rest and relaxation bolster the immune system. When we don't get enough solitude, she says, "we get very out of touch with ourselves; we get forgetful; we get sloppy." Depending on our personalities, we can get angry, anxious and depressed as well. Modern life, filled with cell phones and pagers, with e-mail and express mail, with televisions that offer 300 channels, is far more tumultuous than in the past.

"Solitude puts the individual in touch with his or her deepest feelings and allows time for previously unrelated thoughts and feelings to interact, to regroup themselves into new formations and combinations, and thus to bring harmony to the mind," says Karasu, who believes that solitude helps connect us to the worlds of nature and spirituality.

Then there are what Buchholz calls "the healing aspects of alonetime": the restorative, refreshing and recharging feelings we get by stepping back from the overwhelming stimuli of every day. There is the immeasurable delight that comes from being unproductive, from having the freedom to daydream, to think or not think, to open the senses or close them down, to let ourselves wonder and wander, to process the past or make plans for the future, or just to loll about, to simply be in the world as it is.

Perhaps it isn't fair for me to prescribe alonetime to my friend Rachel, or anyone else who dislikes it. Solitude comes easy to me, and I'd have no trouble qualifying as one of Rufus' "natural loners" or Cagen's "quirkyalones." But unlike Rufus and Cagen, I don't believe my tendency toward solitariness sets me apart from, or above, the rest of society. I tend to agree with Buchholz, who feels that each of us must find our own balance between the need to connect with others and the need to connect with ourselves. "Some people may crave many hours by themselves; others may find sufficient solace in small doses of separate time," she says. "Regardless of the dosage, solitude is a deep, soothing and persistent call in life."

Those well practiced in the art of solitude know that aloneness is not the same as loneliness. When we're alone, we are actually in good company; we have our own undivided attention. Heeding the call of solitude provides us with an opportunity to get to know ourselves better and to explore our inner world without distraction.

4 Bird-watch. Set up a birdfeeder on or near a window, and spend several moments every day just staring at it. When darkness falls, turn your gaze from feeder level up to the stars.

5 Just stop and sit for a minute. Whether you're running errands, cleaning the house or working at the computer, take a break to sit and do nothing for five or 10 minutes. This can help center, calm and refresh you, and may actually make you more productive as you go back to your activities. As Martin Luther wrote in the 15th century, "I have so much to do today that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer."

Fighting With Fire

Glimmer Train Stories

My father was an East Coast Jew who headed west out of desperation and a romantic notion of finding himself by wandering amongst ranchers and riflemen. He left a gaggle of women who clustered about him in New Jersey, the aunts, sisters, grandmothers combing his hair, whispering in his ear, picking the lint off his sweater, and intended on working on the railroad or maybe the waterfront, whatever he could do to get money for food and beer and a few hours now and then with a woman of questionable morals. He hitchhiked three thousand miles – this was in 1956, when you could still do that – to see how the Pacific differed from the Atlantic, and was all set to spend his manhood in motion, sleeping in doorways and bus stations, waking up in towns he'd never heard of, holing up in the corner of seedy bars with the afternoon drinkers who'd come in for some relief from the heat and the emptiness of their lives. ...

Southbound

Fiction

People cross their fingers so she won't sit next to them. But she's headed for the back, swinging her bags and baby as she goes. Finds a smoking buddy there, young, with sculpted hair. He helps shove her stove in the rack. She says, "My girlfriend threw my stuff in the dumpster. Don't know what I did wrong." He has a vodka. She has a Kool-aid. The baby cries. ...

Service With a Smile

Fiction

Finally one day she approached him, right there in the doorway between the kitchen and the pantry counter, asked him point-blank if he liked her, and though he jumped a bit to see her there, he must have known, from the mousy walk, and the smile, and especially the the eyes, you can always tell by the eyes, that she was liable to do something like this one of these days, and so he paddded his voice with snow, yes, he said, yes, he liked all his customers, and she stood there, in the Employees Only section, digesting his reply, which went down her throat as soft as sherbet, a brilliant reply to an impossible question, but a brush-off all the same, and it froze her insides as she became aware suddenly of the ringing cash register, and people twisting the arm of the espresso machine and reaching into their pockets for change and her teeth pushed her lips into a smile but she was afraid that she didn't know how to tell her limbs to walk away from the doorway, and then later, in her flat, sitting on the floor, still in her jacket, with the streetlight sliding through the bars on the windows and the bag lady with the rat face yelling in the street on the other side of the wall, she tried with all her might to remember what happened, what she asked and what she was told, but she kept slipping away, as if on ice, hard, so that a bone cracked every time she fell, it was much nicer to freeze her body into a smile, surely there was something encouraging about his answer, He did say he liked me, he liked all his customers, but he liked me too. Nonetheless, she began having her coffee elsewhere.