First Segment: When a Third World Came West

First Segment

I heard the double front doors shutting against their heavy rubber catch, with my parents out the door.  I was riffling through my closet to find something to wear.  Whenever I heard the door shut and their car back out to leave, I’d run out through to the living room.  There were two steps down to the Mexican style tiled floors where the glass entertainment stand was with the radio.

With the thought of music on the way I got ahead of myself.  I opened the full length mirrored closet doors that my mother had chosen for her closet as well. I began going through clothes, pulling back the packed shirts and hangars stretched from blouses that were too heavy and searched through pants stubbornly hung to cheap metal hangars. I pulled passed more shirts and this dress and those pair of slacks until I was drawn to a brown velvet one. It was scrunched up and down the middle to look like a braid.  I took its hangar out of my closet, plopped the tank on my bed and went through my closet a few more times.  I found an Indian cotton skirt with white petals and I hung it up on the door.  I walked through the living room and down the tile to the stereo to turn the song up.  But I became aware of the two old couples who lived on either side of us, and I thought twice about it. I passed my couch and I heard my cell phone ring and I realized that I was probably late.  I still hadn’t eaten dinner but I dismissed any thoughts about it since the music was on and since it had wound me up.  I brushed off the top and had a good look at it.  I thought about Robbie and the four guys I’d met last time.  Other people were bound to show up to drink and mix on his dusty floors.  We’d danced in front of the couch to the stuff on his stereo last time while people thought up stuff to make inside the kitchen.

A half an hour later and dressed, I was in my parent’s 1989 Volvo, tilting my rear view mirror to see my makeup. My hair was still at disproportionate lengths on either sides of my face.  I’d cut it a few weeks before summer because I’d let my friend do what she’d wanted with it.  But one side was shorter than the other and I was tired of watching it in the mirror while I scrubbed my teeth.  I took matters into my own hands.  I’d snapped some here, some there and before I’d known it my hair was shorter than normal. Though now it had grown to the bony clavicle blade that stuck out of my chest.  I knew that I couldn’t keep starring at it.  I backed out of my driveway, drove passed my parent’s other car and headed towards Robbie’s.

Once there, I pulled into a driveway made up of rock, mulch, and overgrown ferns.  I pulled my gears into park, and got out.  I walked too fast in the humidity, trying to overcompensate for my bulky espadrilles. I pursed my raisin lipstick as I walked up the cement steps and onto the portico to Robbie’s door.  A woman I’d never seen before, a medium-height Columbian girl greeted me.  She looked about thirty and she was in a skirt that fell above her bulky calves.  She smiled when she asked me to come in.

I walked through the door and through the living room sitting on the white couch where I’d sat on Bobby’s lap the night before.  I remember we had fought over the remote.  I could hear his voice passing through the dining room and through the white shutter doors where his kitchen was.

Bobby came out later with his roommate and roommate’s girlfriend, who had wet long blond hair from a shower.  The roommate’s girlfriend came to sit beside me, wearing a blue jean skirt with white scrawl on it.  “We just got to wait for a few people.  It’s only nine,” She’d said. “Tracy, come sit,” Bobby said from across the room. I pressed my back hard into the back of Robbie’s couch pillows.  He was usually like this when there was more than one person, shouting out thoughts he had in front of everyone, singling out people in particular.

An hour later five or more people came up his driveway ready to get out and meet up somewhere.   The four of us got into Bobby’s two-door  mustang and pulled out for the red club which was five miles away.

21: When I got married

Segment 31: When a Third WorldCame West

We stood linking the ends of each others hands in front of Diane more because it was the thing to do than because we really wanted to do it because we both felt uncomfortable and kept shifting our weights as we stood.  There we were under the white bridal arch with wicker X’s that crossed and made room for the fake plastic ivy vines to wind through their spaces to create a border that was as contrived as Sam’s idea for going through with this whole thing without any relatives around except for my dad who was doing injunctions seven feet from above us on the fourteenth floor.  Except Diane and except for the handful of English as a second language users who had seen me cross the waiting room aisle and into the door where this justice of the peace stood, no one else knew we were here.  She was saying all these things, Diane and I was thinking all this, how no one I was here, how I really hadn’t thought this through, how I’d picked out costume jewelry diamond earrings that didn’t even have the correct amount of pendants that the matching one did on my other ear.  How I’d rushed to pick out the wrong kind of cream colored shoes that didn’t really match my white dress, that I didn’t even do my hair in the bathroom, brush it, or sweep it behind my ears.  And in fact I was still catching my breath from not having had on my wedding dress in the first place and making Diane and Sam wait while heading to the bathroom to slip on it and the accessories that I was thinking would make this time more worth while.  But two minutes later practically and she’d gotten done with what she’d said and I’d said “I do” and he’d put the silver ring on with the scratches in the silver band on me and I’d said “yes” and didn’t put anything on his finger since he wouldn’t go to kismet or any other cheap store to find a plastic, hemp or hematite ring in the least, to match my own.   So there we were nearly at the end of the day, filing out with all the late workers at 530 through the parking garage except that he had a yellow carnation in the breast of his I mean my step-dad’s coat pocket, and due to me wearing a white dress down to my mid-thighs, holding some stems of dried flowers that I’d picked from behind our toilet seat from the glass blue vase of lavender.  I’d tied them with some yellow string that I used when I cross stitched the twelve days of Christmas ornaments and had some left over after I’d finished the pillow ornament with the three French hens.

“Well,” I said as we walked across level 5 of the parking garage and down the steps to the fourth floor where the elevator was, “What now?  Should we go to dinner?” It sounded appropriate and Sam agreed, but we didn’t want to go to anyplace around here so we made a promise to go out on west I-4 towards the Olive Garden on I-Drive.  I would drive.  We stepped across Robinson together without holding hands and Sam slipped some Camels out from his, I mean my step-dad’s pockets, that I hadn’t seen him slip in there before and I worried about the tar bits that would accumulate for the dry cleaners.  But I didn’t say anything, I just walked when the stick figure on the walk sign turned white and looked out at Lake Lily with her man-made fountain spitting water up into the air and saw the red awning of Lee’s Lakeside behind her, thinking that that restaurant could have been where I’d had my reception had Sam mingled with my parents more and made good with them.  But instead we hopped in either side of my black Jetta and headed west on the interstate towards the Olive Garden.

He ordered steak of course with tomato penne pasta and I had some lighter fare, the salmon with tomato concasse and spinach.  I kept looking at my ring the whole time thinking “I’m married, I’m married, I’m married”.  Because I would have never guessed it’d be this soon, I always pictured me older with my master’s degree, with some experience behind my back.  But who knew?  And Sam was smiling, he had a big grin and we looked at each other a few times and smiled and I felt close to him, like I hadn’t before, so that was good.  At least something felt right about crossing this big line that would lead to a big divide.  And then what usually happened when I ate too many bites at once was that I’d sit back and contemplate, like “When was I going to tell my parents? What if dad found out?  What was mom gonna say at church?  What was dad gonna say at temple?  What was I gonna say to my friends?”  I chewed my cheek then looked down back at my pretty simple linen dress, that I’d gotten from a rummage shop or vintage store in Chapel Hill, and I looked at my ring again and Sam so handsome and I knew I’d married my counterpart, so I took a sip of our wine and felt settled again.  “Should we order dessert?” I said.  “For our wedding?”  And Sam as usual said tiramisu because that was his favorite even though they had gelato on the menu that I rarely got to ever had and wanted.  So we ordered what he wanted with two forks, we told the waiter it was our wedding day hoping he’d give it to us for free, add some candles sing a song, have the celebration for us that no one else knew to give us.  I’d had birthday’s here where they brought out a fudge brownies with ice cream and a candle in the middle, embarrassing you in front of the long table with your family and friends, but this celebration was new.  I’d never been to one of these when you told them you’d just gotten married.  And so ten minutes later they came out with what they ordered and I clapped along with them when they sang congratulations to us, probably the same song they sang to students who’d graduated high school or college, or to new parents and blew out the candles before Sam could get to them as they lay our dessert on the table.

Sam ordered more table-wine but I put my tipsy hand over his and told him not a bottle, just the glasses and I stumbled to move my plush cushion chair to excuse myself to the restroom.  We were married!  We were going to have babies and I was going to have them with him, the handsomest artist in the room. He’d be a great dad.  I came into the bathroom and passed myself in the mirror going straight to lock myself behind the restroom stall, I didn’t need to see how young I was because I already knew I was capable and we’d live in a small low-rent apartment around the corner from my mom and dad and he’d work part time as a waiter at Dante’s where he’d gotten a job, and I’d go to college, for the both of us.  I sat down to pee on the toilet seat and grabbed for the paper from the metal slot and felt flushed.  I needed water.  I came back around to the dinner table five minutes later and saw the clasp of my small dress purse opened and my wallet out.  “Where’s my wallet?” I asked, feeling the blood rush from out of my cheeks.

“Your card declined,” groaned Sam.
“What?” I said.  I felt the wine and the enthusiasm from my bathroom thoughts drain from my face and I searched around the white cocktail linen table cloth for my wallet.  “Where is it?” I asked.  He plopped it on the table from where he was storing it underneath the table.  I looked through it for other cards but one was a Target card only good for in-store, the other one a Firestone card good for the same thing.  I groaned but I was still in a good mood and I so I waved my waiter over still seeing that I had wine in my glass and that Sam still had some in his.  We could still enjoy ourselves and have a good time.  There was half the tiramisu on the table with a lump of caramel on the top that had gone untouched.  I whispered into the waiter’s ear once he got to us,

“You know, it’s our wedding day.  We’re so excited.  Our parent’s can’t be here and we’re also sad.”  I didn’t know how I came up with this part but I did: “So we’re saving up enough, I work at Disney, to bring them all here.”  I was still whispering, “So you know how it is, you do, you know?”  The man was a shorter Mexican guy who spoke broken English and waited politely but still for an answer.  “I have a roommate,” I whispered, I pulled the cuff of his coat sleeve towards me so that I could do some more whispering, “who has lots of money.  She’s rich.  I’ll go back to my house and I’ll call her and I’ll give you her credit card number, I swear.  I’ll leave something with you so that you’ll believe me. You know?”  I dug out my Target credit card that I swore I was gonna cancel just as soon as I got to my cell phone outside and I handed it to the waiter, ‘Almo’ was his name.  He seemed to agree sort of to this and I took my wine and gulped a sip of it and tapped Sam to do the same.  He looked away from me.  “I solved it,” I said.  “Don’t be mad.” I’d talked to him once more this confidently while we were smoking pot next to the wall in our old apartment against the blue couch at Elon.  “Take a sip, I want to kiss you.”  But he wrote me off as tipsy and paid attention to the game instead of soccer on TV because he loved soccer and so I ate the rest of the caramel on top of the tiramisu since he wasn’t watching and drank the rest of my wine and tried to drink the rest of his.

Of course I had to drop him off at the homeless shelter before 9 and it was 8 45 so we weren’t gonna be able to do anything after our wedding which was fine with me because I still had to drive twenty minutes to my house and I was tired from today anyway.  But it was sort of sad having to wait in the Orlando Magic’s parking lot across from the BobCarr theater while he changed out from Jim’s suit and back into his sleep pants and worn button down shirt that he used for pajamas, to go back to my house.  I had to do the same thing, changing into a pair of jeans and a long Indian cotton brown shirt I’d gotten one time at the beach.  I tried not to look at him when I kissed him because I didn’t want to think of it all, how I wouldn’t be able to crawl over into the covers with him tonight, and let him out.  I drove home and parked as usual, turned off the hall lights when my mom complained that they were too bright for her to sleep, washed my face in the sink, brushed up, and hopped into myGarfieldnightgown that had twice been shrunk in the wash.  I hopped into bed and kept the light on before going to sleep so that I could slip out from the white wicker in-table the thin baby naming book that I’d bought at our Walgreens two months before.

Segment 16; When a Third World Came West

I was sitting on my porch smoking watching the mess Kim’s dog had made in the sand when Sam had offered it hot dogs and at the same time I was ringing up my brother and waiting for him to pick up on the other end of the line from back home in Orlando. This was the third cigarette I’d smoked in a half hour and with each time I’d called David they seemed to get shorter because I felt like inhaling them in more quickly. I left a message the third time, tapped my Keds against the wooden floor of the splintered deck and decided what to do next. Just after I’d been biting the end of the phone cord too long my roommate Skye walked in from his day job at Checkers eating two hamburgers wrapped up in tin foil from a paper bag he held onto in addition to a kitchen chair so that he could sit half way inside, halfway out, at the entrance of the screen door. I didn’t wanna go into it about Sam. They didn’t like each other and it was clear by how they moved around each other almost skulking and by how Sam sat me down once in my room to get a direct answer about whether my roommate and I had ever dated ( I’d reassured him that we hadn’t cause we were friends and we probably always would be). But Skye had sat me down too a couple of days ago along with his brother asking all sorts of questions about Sam, where he was from why he was so dark skinned, why…was he really from Italy, why was he here, how come I’d never mentioned him before or called about him prior to bringing him to live here at our house. Skye asked where Sam was and I made a diversion tactic, walking through the space between him and his chair to the kitchen and back through the living room towards my bathroom. In there I sprayed on some of Sam’s cologne next to the sink just to make it smell like he’d been here last night and then I waited for my phone to ring, wishing and willing it to be David calling back in a good mood on the other line with an answer to all my problems. I bailed Sam at around a quarter to twelve with the money I’d put on David’s credit card with a promise that I would pay him back in interest once we received the money back in court in Graham around two months from now. Then I’d gone over to Pizza Hut, picked up some food and brought Sam back so that he could wrap himself in our blue towels, take a shower, take a nap and smoke his Camels out on the front porch. I turned up the stereo really loud once we got home and while he was in the shower I got out my textbooks from under the bed and took a look ahead at the plans on my linguistics syllabus for the next week running through my head what we’d done the last week in class and thinking back on how I’d written half an A quality paper the other night on a British film we’d watched on Tuesday. Sam came out wet from his shower with his towel wrapped around him and half a piece of pizza in his mouth, flipping through a pile of used cds I’d brought in from my trunk and opening a disc who’s cover was cracked in three places. I walked through the screen door outside to the deck to my trunk where I grabbed a black folder who’s plastic had started to peel all the way to the cardboard from the heat and from leaving it in my car too long. I saw the blond-haired neighbor of ours next door studying Sam through the pane in our glass door or someone through it and I stopped to check out what she was doing before walking up the steps and going back once again, inside.

Segment 9: When a Third World Came West

  I looked out my window trying not to stare at Sam and watched things I didn’t really care to see, like some trash dumps near a gravelly road and a torn up fence, and some tiny houses with car ports filled with ripped black trash bags and beaten up old cars.  About ten minutes later the driver asked something that I couldn’t hear under his grovelly breath and I thought I heard “Where to”.  I checked out the lake out my window, making out old benches and leaning palm fronses from the trees hanging all darkened near the edge.  I looked all around out through the windshield at passing restaurants, bikers, closed dark stores for something that would jog my memory since Sam looked restless, checking out all sides of the cab, out all the windows, looking behind him at cars and people.  It felt like the driver was driving in circles and I kept watching the meter go up and up so at considering the lake a good distance from anything, I looked at Sam and then asked the guy to drop us off somewhere near a parking lot by the water.  I paid him one of the last twenties I had, got out, felt a wet stain on the back of my dress where I must have sat in beer spilled on the stool back from the Red Velvet, waited for Sam to crawl out my side from my door and asked him if he’d wait with me awhile until I got hold of my friends (Robbie).  “Sure, why not.” He said. Agreeable.  He was still acting like this whole thing was just a chain of events, the flow of the natural things to do tongith.  Where was he from? We got out and I walked towards the edge of the lake feeling like there were lights on all around us, pulld out a cigarete from my purse, and puffed up towards the blaring lights that were lit from the basketball arena from across the interstate and from the several orange ones that followed around the cement walkway that went around all the water.  I began to feel that whatever form of ecstasy I had taken at the bar had not hit me in the slightest like Bobby’s stuff did.  I was disappointed about spending, dropping forty dollars for it. I turned and saw Sam kicking stones or lose roots of the tree next to us, popping out from dried grass, from lack of rain, and dialed up Robbie on my flip phone.  My sandals were wet from the water that was seeping through the sand near where I walked and I slipped them off and kept my feet in the marsh while I waited for someone to pick up on the other end of the dialtone.  I reached no one and walked towards Sam.  He grabbed me, kissed me, shoved his tongue in my throat and I knew, felt, that I would be raped.  Except he stopped after a minute, reaching in to grab some of cigarettes out of his front pockets,  he lit one with a lighter, and walked along unaffected, as he had before.  I picked up my phone from out of my purse and flipped it open, scrolling down to Robbie’s cell number again.    He answered after about three rings, yelling at a person who was driving with him (it sounded like a girl) about leaning their seats back because he had an area light in his backseat that he needed to replace in his office tomorrow.  “What!” He screamed into the phone.  I knew he would be testy.  I hung up the phone and looked at Sam thinking up something to say when Robbie called back.  He called back and I said, “I couldn’t find you anywhere.  I was all alone in the bar. I didn’t know where you guys went.  Where are you?”

Segment 8: When a Third World Came West

We stayed and talked for awhile and I watched people walk by outside the window, able to drowned out the R & B music that was playing so loudly towards the right end of the room, with girls in short dresses grinding with guys in sweating button downs, their shirts now nearly wet by now.  I turned to Sam and tried to make some small talk, but he said he couldn’t hear me.  He just kept putting a plastic cup of empty beer that someone had left, up to a silver beer tap next to Yeungling, lemons, cherries, limes in a black tray, and next to used hand rags that had brown beer stains on them.  My beer was gone by now and I wanted more but the people crowding the bar made it hard to get the bartender’s attention and I wasn’t one for yelling and demanding him to come my way.  I thought about my car and the speeding ticket that must be there, I sipped the last of the beer in my bottle and remembered that you had to pay a fee for a ticket by the yellow box building with buttons that asked you to put in your space number.  I didn’t do that.  I was too bent on meeting someone and checking out hot guys and getting drugs that I’d skipped away past the instructions without taking note of them or of where my car would go if it was towed.

About an hour later and after I’d searched the bar for Bobby, I hoped to run up to him and leave Sam momentarily, wanting to be able to balance a rendezvous with both.  I told Sam I was going outside to smoke a cigarette, but while stopping by some guy with a lighter and a pack of cigarettes from whom to get a light, I was also checking out both sides of the street, listening to the sounds of a siren on a red EMT medic truck, puffing in this Camel ultra light, and looking towards the Barbeque Bar for any signs of the red checkered pants that Robbie had dared to wear.  He was the weirdest kind of chiropractor I had ever met.  Ashes blew all over the bottom part of my Indian skirt.  I thought of the time or two when Robbie had made me come over to his office off Edgewater Drive, near or next to or five blocks away from Bishop Moore, and I’d walked through kids and parents in his waiting room and made out with him in the room behind his adjustment table.  I was pretty sure that most of the women out there had been schemed into believing he could fix their posture because he had at one time or another kissed them or done something more and gone further.

 I came back into the bar and sat down next to Sam, smelling of smoke and laying my brown clasp purse next to his plastic beer glass, asking him if he’d gotten something to drink while I was gone.  I had no way of getting back to Robbie’s house and I really could only find it from mine during the day when it was light. I didn’t really know the way back to it from downtown in the dark. Sam fingered my chin and yelled over the music, “What’s wrong?  What’s the matter with you?”

“I can’t find my friends,” I said, looking to both sides of the room and out the doorway, through the window.  I need to get back to my friend’s house to get my car. The bar’s closing soon.”  I thought for a second, I said “Maybe I’ll take a taxi. Yeah let’s do that.  You wanna do that? You wanna take a taxi with me?” I asked.  I searched for something to chew on, picked up a cherry from the black tray of condiment fruit, sucked it from side to side in my cheeks and  I said, “I don’t want to go alone.”

He thought for a second, he patted the back of his jeans and his pockets for cigarettes found them and put one up to his mouth.  He took out a lighter before I told him that he wasn’t allowed to smoke in here. “Yeah, sure.  Why not,” He said it in a tone that sounded like he was being made to go or pulled along.

            I  paid my tab, walked slowly out of the bar so that I could keep pace with him behind me, crossed over the curb and crossed the street and walked back to the corner of where the Bank of America building was.  I walked up to the ATM machine to grab forty more dollars and waited as he caught up with me and turned around to try and hail a cab from Central .  One came about five minutes later, we got in, and I glanced around at Sam smiling, as the cab pulled away and went in the direction of the interstate. I asked the driver to get off at the Princeton exit, but he didn’t hear me and he looked like he was about to pass it.  I turned to look at Sam and Sam yelled to the driver one last loud time and the driver made a signal that he’d heard us,  turned left from there onto Edgewater Drive.  I couldn’t remember how to get to Bobby’s house from there.