Others of My Kind Read online

  That in itself to me was miraculous. Absolutely miraculous. My decision to make.

  I worked for Benny for close to five years. Poured thousands of cups of coffee, clipped order after order to the stainless steel carousel that spun around to the kitchen, handled my share of drunk, unruly, unbearable, bearish men, joked and traded insults with short-order cooks who came and went with such frequency that none of us bothered to keep track of their names, after many a workday plodded back down the outside stairway to pull another shift when the waitress du jour or de la nuit didn’t show, soaked red, swollen feet as much in abject apology to those poor dependent appendages as for any palliative effect.

  It had been a rocky first shift—but then again, I’ve always been a quick study. And halfway in, I’d nailed it.

  “Aunt Mae hasn’t failed me yet,” Benny told me my first week. “I knew when she sent you my way it would work out. I just never expected it was gonna work out this well.”

  I was freshly off duty, diner closed for the night. Illegal aliens, I assumed, unregistered workers anyway, would be doing scut-work: scouring the grill, disinfecting toilets, sinks and chop surfaces, dumping grease pans. Benny had asked me to stick around. I was a little nervous about that. Now he disappeared into the kitchen to emerge with slices of apple pie for both of us.

  “You charm them all, Jenny. I wish I knew how you do it. Guys who’ve been coming in here for years, hating everything from our cole slaw to the stools at the counter to the shades on the windows, suddenly they’re asking for you, wanting to know what tables you’re covering.”

  “It’s good, being liked.”

  “Yes. It is. Good for business, too.”

  Rotating with thumb and second finger his coffee cup in its shallow corral of saucer, round and round, he asked me how the pie was. The best, I told him.

  If that cup broke out of the circle, if any of us came to question appearances too closely, all havoc might ensue.

  Benny smiled.

  “Go get yourself some sleep, girl. We’re here.”

  And so he was. Squarely behind me when I put in hours for my GED and needed time off to study, when I took the test and passed, when I signed up for community college and found myself fifty dollars and change short of fees. Benny countersigned the loan on my first car, a Buick Regal resembling nothing so much as a shell used up and moved out of.

  We is another matter. Benny was on his third wife then. The first had skipped with no forwarding address, taking with her the only child Benny was ever to have. The second was diagnosed with MS early in their marriage; Benny spent the next ten years caring for her. Number three flitted about town in a red Mercedes convertible Benny could ill afford, touching down periodically in pressed jeans and clear plastic heels.

  It took me two semesters, not four, to complete requirements for the associate degree. Always a quick study, as I said. I was still working better than full-time then, seven or eight shifts a week. When I hauled a right turn to the state college nearby, Benny did what he could to work around my schedule, and I reciprocated by filling in the blanks in his whenever possible. One holiday weekend I remember working something like thirty-six hours straight. Patrons’ faces became elastic blobs like those in lava lamps. Walls warped toward me as I approached. I would come to and find myself staring into coffee cups or into the folds of the napkins of setups, wondering how long I’d been standing there and what messages I’d imagined these things might have for me.

  Even after moving to the new job, I stayed on at Benny’s apartment, which felt like the only home I’d had.

  It was there, on a warm Friday in April, that I brought Michael, my first guest in all those years. We worked together in postproduction at the local television station, WAAT, affectionately referred to as WHAT by its watchers, where I’d been much taken with Michael’s quick laugh and Old South manners as he compulsively opened doors for women, stood when elders entered the room, tacked sir or ma’am (or so it seemed) onto every sentence. He was a few years younger than me, many more years a member of the proper world. Both of us were prodigies of a sort, another thing that brought us together.

  I’d always thought of the scars as something I put on, like clothes or a hat, not part of me at all, nothing to do with my essential self. Michael, bless him, never once gave any indication that he’d so much as noticed them. He lay beside me as though all this were the most natural thing in the world.

  Moths hit the window and skittered down it.

  “You’re not disappointed?” I asked.

  What I meant was, repulsed.

  “Why on earth would I be?”

  My head fit so well into the hollow of his shoulder. His hand lay lightly along my ribs. Moonlight in passing peered through my window, leaving its imprint or memory behind, a luminous door there by the bed, minutes before it moved on to other windows, other lives.

  Chapter 2

  Back to present time—past present, I should say. Eight-fourteen on a warm morning in May, when I first began jotting down notes for this in an old accounting ledger. I’m sitting in a red-and-white kitchen drinking green tea under a blue sky listening to news on the radio. Leaves of trees outside my window scarcely moving. High wind and possible thunderstorms later in the day, the radio cautions. Neighbors shower, water lawns, walk dogs, cart recycle bins to curbside, back SUVs out of driveways to let passenger cars exit.

  From my spider-colonized patio I watched dawn nose its way back into the world. Light sketched out the form of trees before filling them in. Candy pink of bougainvillea, impossible white of oleander ever more vivid. Then suddenly—though I’d followed its approach for most of an hour—morning.

  Cherishing night’s enclosure, I tend to sleep little.

  From the radio I gathered that we were engaged in another war about which I hadn’t heard heretofore. Words such as liberation, democracy and freedom blazed up like fireflies from commentary and call-ins, with that same cold, momentary light. Once upon a time there was a pretense that such wars had to be declared. Apparently no longer.

  Meanwhile, just before dawn that morning (as I sat on my patio watching daylight patch itself together), another plane lowered toward the White House and was shot down. This was getting to be a regular thing. As many as eighty dead, untold injured, fires still burning. President Burke had been spirited away. Onto a continuously flying Air Force One? To the sanctuary of some war room? Vice President Courtney-Phillips was likewise unavailable, tucked away elsewhere behind a thicket of Secret Service agents.

  Radio had been a constant companion since Michael gave me my first, saying “You shouldn’t be so alone.” Never mind that I like being alone. Never mind that I work in TV where day after day I take up fragments—tape, voice-overs, audio notes—and shape them into a simulacrum of the real world. I’d never have suspected I could have any taste for further such decantings. But radio’s subtle voices won me over, became the sound track of my life. They were there—simply muted—as I worked, shopped for groceries, sat in the mall over coffee watching people of every sort come and go.

  Observing, I suppose, would be the more accurate verb.

  Lacking any semblance of childhood, having spent my adolescence in the wild as it were, I could fit in only by a kind of adaptation scarcely known outside the insect world. I mimicked those about me, finally with such vigor that few were able to distinguish conjured image from real. Even I sometimes confused the two.

  Time now to rouse myself, shower, find clothes. This is what people do. At the studio, in fragments of tape and film, a shattered world waited to be put back together again.

  There’s something happening here, the bathroom radio, set to an oldies station, intoned. What it is ain’t exactly clear.

  This is what I remember about my mother: she deplored silence. Radios and TVs inhabited every room, bathroom and kitchen included. At table there had to be conversation, and in the kitchen afterward as well, as she did dishes, put up leftovers, and obsessively swa
bbed the stove. She filled any vacant spaces, any ellipses, with grunts of appreciation for the food, throat clearings, hummed snatches of unidentifiable songs. That’s all I remember of her.

  Drawing the shower curtain closed, I felt safe in a way I never will outside. Just as I go back to the mall at every opportunity, an immigrant returning to the homeland, and feel safe there. What no one understands is that, lying there in the box under Danny’s bed, miraculously I was able to stop being myself and to become so much more. I could feel myself liquefying, flowing out into the world. I became numinous. Sometimes, though ever less often as time goes by, I’m able to recapture that.

  Black jeans, pink T-shirt chopped off at midriff level, half-heels. Gray blazer over. Warrior dress.

  “I called in saying I’d be late, but shouldn’t take too long.”

  “So I guess breakfast is out.”

  “How about dinner instead—if you’re free?”

  “You’re on.”

  Jack Collins’s ride was an early-eighties Buick custom-painted and slightly raked, and you could tell he was self-conscious to be driving this young man’s car, which he’d had since he was seventeen. Not much else in his life had proven that enduring or dependable, he said. Bought it with what he’d earned working construction the summer he graduated from high school.

  Cheryl was everything I expected, a plain girl like myself, quiet and superficially ingratiating, with still eyes that reminded me of my onetime friend Bishop, or of walls spackled with unreadable graffiti.

  Collins took me in and introduced me, then discreetly withdrew.

  What can I say? I told her how I had come to pass the middle years of my admittedly short life, and at what cost. I talked about not carrying forward regrets, about simply getting on with things. Halfway through, it occurred to me that what I was saying sounded not at all different from the harangues that hundreds of teenagers suffer daily from parents. We all think we’re special, somehow exempt. When the real lesson’s how much alike we all are.

  I told her I’d check back with her later, that she shouldn’t hesitate to call me if she needed to talk, any time, day or night. Wrote my name and number on the back of a deposit slip, the only piece of paper I could find at liberty in my purse.

  “Miss Rowan?”

  To that point Cheryl had given no indication she was listening, not the least register of recognition, as I spoke.

  “Yes?”

  “Where are they going to take me next?”

  For her, I well knew, the world seemed at this point little more than a congress of theys, dozens of theys shoving her about like a pawn on the board. Pawns had no say in things, pawns were sacrificed, pawns got captured and went away.

  “Some kind of holding center would be my guess. You’re overage for the state juvenile facility. They’ll probably try for a shelter of some sort. Depends on what’s available. I’ll call in later, find out where you are.”

  Jack Collins held up one hand in abject apology as I walked out and caught him with sacks in the other.

  “I had nothing to do with this. They followed me home. I swear. Can we keep them?”

  Bagels and coffee.

  We ate them sitting in his Buick in the parking lot outside WAAT, not talking much, watching traffic on the elevated turnaround a block away, watching a police chopper hover somewhere near downtown.

  “I’m really late,” I said, draining my cup. Grace would have another waiting for me inside.

  “So am I. Or will be by the time I get there.” Finishing off his bagel, licking stray cream cheese from fingers, he set the rest of his coffee in its glazed paper cup in the holder behind the gearbox.

  I reached for the door handle only to find his hand lightly on my arm.

  “Thank you, Jenny.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “How late do you work?”

  “Sixish.”

  “Well, since I’ve stranded you here, I have to give you a ride home.”

  “I can take the bus, no problem.”

  “Sorry. That’s the rule.”

  “Oh my God, there are rules?”

  “And besides, we’re doing dinner.”

  Leaning over, I kissed his cheek and told him yes we were, and I looked forward to it. If this were an old-time movie and we’d been standing, I’d probably have gone up on one foot. I said I’d give him a call.

  Grace handed off a coffee as I swung past. You’ll need to zap it, she said. I know, I know, I told her, this late I didn’t plan on. I could swear sometimes that Grace has multiple built-in clocks. She can be working at one of the computers, completely absorbed in her task, then, two minutes before something else needs doing or an appointment comes due, she’ll surface. I thanked her for the coffee and asked after her husband, who months back had been diagnosed with cancer. Holding his own, she said. Chemo’s working—so far. She’d got used to the sound of retching in the night, and to his prowling the house, unable to sleep.

  In my studio the blazer and shoes went off, warrior dress was no more. Everyone called it my office, but there was nothing officelike about it, and here, working, I was utterly alone, absolutely on my own. No one intruded. News- and anchormen, directors, camera jockeys, producers, the occasional intrusive actor—all that got dealt with elsewhere. Here, I lived among frames and clips and soundings, pure abstractions. For that moment in time it came down to date-coded footage of gutted apartment complexes and refugee lines, tapes of reporters-at-the-scene, snippets of talking-head military men and civilian experts. I was focusing so intently that when Michael came to ask if I’d join him for lunch I was startled to realize it had gotten to be one o’clock. Michael and I hadn’t been together for years, yet remained close.

  “Welcome back to earth,” he said.

  Always a hard landing.

  He glanced at the screen. “Bombing escalated as of this morning. Word just came in that they’re offering a bounty on every U.S. serviceman killed.”

  I begged off lunch, explaining that I’d come in late.

  “Delivered to the door personally, it’s said, by one of our city’s finest.”

  No one with whom I work knows anything of my past. They wonder, though. Curiosity peeks out from behind pillars of small talk and rodomontade. My lack of history becomes a kind of negative space, a gravity. Worldly things bend and swim and fall toward it.

  “A friend,” I said.

  “Of course. And as for lunch, no problem. But just for that, tomorrow you buy.”

  By two I had a rough cut for the spot on our latest undeclared war, more than an hour of video and tape boiled down to a broth of just over a full minute, and what easily might have been a full day’s work. Depending on available broadcast time, further cuts and assembly would be made by proper news editors, but it was out of my hands now, wrapped and delivered, as good as it was going to get.

  I turned then to files of raw footage for a documentary on PO-box schools offering diplomas and degrees on a pay-your-money-take-your-choice basis, running through it all, staying loose and letting it roll, for the moment not thinking about nips or tucks, what I’d take out, what I’d leave in.

  What I thought about instead, as those images and voices washed over me, was Bishop back at the halfway house, maybe the first friend I’d ever had. Doctors operating pro bono like lawyers had told him his spleen was shot, kidneys barely functional, liver operating at 10 percent. We can’t say it’ll help much if you quit doing drugs and alcohol, they told him, but you’ll die slower. Immediately he took that as his slogan, showing up with T-shirts for all of us, DIE SLOWER! printed across front and back.

  Last time I saw him was in an apartment just off downtown that Miss Taylor found for him. That part of the city had gone to seed pretty much by then; what once was a luxury hotel now hosted transients, enfeebled elderly, exiles from psychiatric hospitals, and long-out-of-work entertainers. In the apparition appearing before me I barely recognized my friend. He’d grown thin and gray, his bo
dy clenched around arthritic pain that could be ameliorated only by the aspirin that, if he took it, opened fissures of blood in his esophagus and stomach. Eyes that once seemed to me to hold the world entire, all the world’s marvel, multitudinousness and mystery, now were dull stone. He still wore one of his DIE SLOWER! T-shirts, letters faded to illegibility. To my shame, I took the first opportunity and fled. He called a couple of times after that, but I never answered or went back. To my eternal shame.

  By four I had a rough cut of the bogus-diploma feature and, delivering it to my producer, asked what else was on the boards.

  “Damn, girl,” Mickie said, eyes slightly out of focus from too many early mornings and too many demands coming down the draw from suits and sharp-creased MBAs above, “I just now got the New Olgate package you kicked upstairs earlier. You trying to make the rest of us look like slackers or what?”

  Those suits and MBAs were the very reason she had dropped back to a local station; now it seemed they’d followed her. Going on sixty, with the body and attitude of a thirty-year-old, Mickie’d been around damn near since TV news started. She was as responsible as anyone else for the form and direction it took. She was also the one who hired me.

  I’d signed up for an art course, at which I was hopelessly inept, taught by a friend of hers who died of AIDS four years later, and from sheer desperation had started doing collage. Come to meet her friend for lunch, Mickie saw a piece of mine—snatches of blurry satellite surveillance photos, the CIA seal juxtaposed with the USDA stamp put on meats, photos of emaciated bodies of children in the Far East placed about the edge of a U.S. grocery ad in the manner of medieval illustrations—and took an interest. By month’s end I had dropped out of college and was working for her, shown the ropes by Luis who (her expression, my sentiment) knew everygoddamnthing.

  By six I’d put to good use all she and Luis had taught me and got a solid start on the new project, the profile of a journeyman African-American senator from Maryland who, though he denied it, appeared to be inching toward a run for president. Exciting stuff. Clichés and grand intentions coming down like showers of rain. Mud puddles at your feet.