Plate of Shrimp
Apr. 23rd, 2010 06:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraVery odd – there’s someone in my census-training group who knows me. And I don’t have a clue who she is. She’s a tall rangy blonde with a weathered Appalachian face. Maybe my age, maybe a few years younger. Soft Florida swamp accent. Type of woman I might have been very attracted to, say 20 years ago – that kind of boyish.
“My God, Patrizia,” she said. “Imagine running into you. So you finally got tired of California.”
“Not exactly,” I said. Where the fuck do I know you from? I was thinking. “But, you know. It was time for a change. How did you get here?”
“Oh, you know. I graduated from Cornell. Long time ago. So I decided to come back here.”
I did the right, of course duck thing with my shoulders.
“California’s so crowded now,” she said. “Was out there a couple of months ago. Suburbs as far as the eye could see. Take you an hour to drive 10 miles on those freeways.”
“And what have you been doing?”
“Well, you know, my people got sick. So I went back to take care of them. And then they died. And I was in Nashville. Can’t stay in Nashville.”
“No, you certainly can’t stay in Nashville,” I said brightly.
“I do this, I do that. And now I do census.” She grinned at me. Beautiful teeth, I thought. Since my own teeth are in such bad shape these days, that’s often the first thing I notice when I look at someone – teeth.
Still. She put the Fear in me. Partly because though I was searching desperately, my brain didn’t have a single reference hook to hang her on. I’ve always had a lousy memory, of course: it’s one of the reasons why I’m such an obsessive diarist. If I write it down, I remember it; if I don’t write it down, I forget. It’s kind of an odd thing but it’s always been that way for me, perhaps some kind of dissociative survival mechanism left over from my brutal childhood. I exist in a present tense.
But also the driftiness of this woman disturbed me, her marginalization. The Ghost of the Christmas Present or perhaps footsteps on my grave. Please God, please, I found myself praying. I don’t want to be like her.
In other news I’m reading the definitive Dorothy Parker bio – talk about your sad lives.
And B did not turn up last night. I was glad on my account – I am keeping odd hours since I am essentially working three jobs now to make sure RTT and I make it out to California for Max’s Stanford graduation. I don’t bear him any active malice so long as our lives don’t intersect. In fact I was thinking yesterday for the first time in ever so long, I was feeling happy – beautiful spring day; great masses of tulips blooming everywhere; interesting people at the census training; when I put something down in the kitchen, it stays where I put it and I don’t have to spend twenty minutes searching frantically for it because somebody picked it up to use it and forgot where he put it down.
I think more than anything else with B, it was not his fucked up behavior per se so much as the uncertainty factor. I was always wondering: what horrible thing will he do next? That kind of thinking turns the future tense into a minefield.
If Robin was upset by B’s absence, he didn’t show it. I cooked an elaborate dinner and took Milo for a long twilight tramp. Tiny violets in the grass, a herd of white-tailed deer. Afterwards, RTT and I watched Repo Man. The “plate of shrimp” scene still holds up.
“My God, Patrizia,” she said. “Imagine running into you. So you finally got tired of California.”
“Not exactly,” I said. Where the fuck do I know you from? I was thinking. “But, you know. It was time for a change. How did you get here?”
“Oh, you know. I graduated from Cornell. Long time ago. So I decided to come back here.”
I did the right, of course duck thing with my shoulders.
“California’s so crowded now,” she said. “Was out there a couple of months ago. Suburbs as far as the eye could see. Take you an hour to drive 10 miles on those freeways.”
“And what have you been doing?”
“Well, you know, my people got sick. So I went back to take care of them. And then they died. And I was in Nashville. Can’t stay in Nashville.”
“No, you certainly can’t stay in Nashville,” I said brightly.
“I do this, I do that. And now I do census.” She grinned at me. Beautiful teeth, I thought. Since my own teeth are in such bad shape these days, that’s often the first thing I notice when I look at someone – teeth.
Still. She put the Fear in me. Partly because though I was searching desperately, my brain didn’t have a single reference hook to hang her on. I’ve always had a lousy memory, of course: it’s one of the reasons why I’m such an obsessive diarist. If I write it down, I remember it; if I don’t write it down, I forget. It’s kind of an odd thing but it’s always been that way for me, perhaps some kind of dissociative survival mechanism left over from my brutal childhood. I exist in a present tense.
But also the driftiness of this woman disturbed me, her marginalization. The Ghost of the Christmas Present or perhaps footsteps on my grave. Please God, please, I found myself praying. I don’t want to be like her.
In other news I’m reading the definitive Dorothy Parker bio – talk about your sad lives.
And B did not turn up last night. I was glad on my account – I am keeping odd hours since I am essentially working three jobs now to make sure RTT and I make it out to California for Max’s Stanford graduation. I don’t bear him any active malice so long as our lives don’t intersect. In fact I was thinking yesterday for the first time in ever so long, I was feeling happy – beautiful spring day; great masses of tulips blooming everywhere; interesting people at the census training; when I put something down in the kitchen, it stays where I put it and I don’t have to spend twenty minutes searching frantically for it because somebody picked it up to use it and forgot where he put it down.
I think more than anything else with B, it was not his fucked up behavior per se so much as the uncertainty factor. I was always wondering: what horrible thing will he do next? That kind of thinking turns the future tense into a minefield.
If Robin was upset by B’s absence, he didn’t show it. I cooked an elaborate dinner and took Milo for a long twilight tramp. Tiny violets in the grass, a herd of white-tailed deer. Afterwards, RTT and I watched Repo Man. The “plate of shrimp” scene still holds up.
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-23 01:02 pm (UTC)No one deserves to live like that. I hope he stays away from you.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-24 11:28 am (UTC)