by Deb Caletti
I clear Joe’s plate, bring the bookstore guy a bottle of ketchup for his eggs, which is just disgusting in my opinion—an egg crime scene—but never mind. Nick asks for a second orange juice. The Vespa guy takes off his jacket and hangs it over the chair next to him, and he’s right, it is hot in here. I have an eye on everyone and I’m pleased with myself, because it’s the point in waitressing that I love—it’s all going. I’m handling everything like a conductor handles an orchestra, or maybe more like a kindergarten teacher handles a room of demanding, messy five-year-olds. They’re all right there in my hands and everyone’s happy and has just been fed their snack. Things are running as smooth as can be. I’m God’s gift to waitressing.
The Vespa guy sets his cup down, nearly empty, and I’m heading over and I’m smiling and everything’s cool, the pot of coffee is in one hand, when I see something that just flips my mood. It’s that fast, fast as Luigi’s wrist-flick of a bubbly pancake from dough side to brown side. It’s that coat hanging over the chair that gets me. This beautiful creamy suede coat with a satin lining, slits for pockets. It’s what’s sticking up from one slit that starts this curl of anger. A square cellophane-wrapped pack.
Cigarettes.
You see people smoking all over—kids at school, guys standing around outside the Darigold plant, women in cars with one arm out the window. I am always revolted and marginally pissed, annoyed with that low-slung irritation you feel around stupidity. But this time, I am one notch over into really mad. The Vespa guy, he’s perfect. He’s supposed to be perfect. And now look how he’s letting us all down.
I pour his coffee, my lips pursed with disapproval. I am doing a Mom, where I’m trying to communicate with the vast vocabulary of my silence everything he’s done wrong. But he’s not listening, because when I tip my pot back up, he gives me only that smile, which is suspect now. I’m thinking it is perhaps insincere.
I just stand there wanting to speak, doing this yes-no, yes-no, yes-no thing in my head, and then, before I even realize the debate is over, I’m at yes and I’m talking to him.
“I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t care about your health and well-being,” I say, and suddenly I’m channeling the spirit of my mother, and she’s not even dead. “But do you know there are over four thousand toxic chemicals in cigarettes?” I gesture with my chin toward his jacket pocket. “Carbon monoxide, for starters. Cyanide, formaldehyde, ammonia…” I count them off on my fingers. “Should I go on?”
Well, I guess I might as well have just hooked Vespa guy up to numerous electrodes and shocked him with twelve thousand volts of electricity for the way he just stares at me, blinking.
“If you care about your health and the health of others,” I say.
“Well,” he says. “Well.”
“It’s only because I’m worried about you,” I remind.
“Thank you for your concern,” he says. “Your concern…,” he repeats.
And then, oh God, something awful happens. There’s this pause, and then his eyes—they get glassy, wet. He blinks. My God, I think he might be about to cry. He blinks some more. Shit. Shit! I’ve made the Vespa guy cry.
He clears his throat.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“Yes. Yeah. It’s just…” He coughs.
Oh, man. Shit, Indigo, I think. Now you’ve gone and done it. I made him feel terrible. I couldn’t keep my goddamn big mouth shut. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have…”
“Sorry? Don’t be sorry. Lately…I don’t know.” He gives a laugh that isn’t a laugh.
“What?”
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “This is waitress-client privilege. Purely confidential.” Except for all the Irregulars listening in, of course.
“I go to work and everyone’s ‘Yes, Mr. Howards. Of course, Mr. Howards. Can I get you anything, Mr. Howards?’ And no one means a goddamn word they say. It’s unreal.” He runs his fingers through his hair.
“Maybe it’s time for a job change,” I say.
“I haven’t heard a sincere expression of concern in five, six years.”
“A lifestyle change, then,” I say.
I’m taking too much time here, I know. The ladies have put their credit card in the plastic folder and are shifting around in their seats. The bookstore guy has pushed his plate away and I can feel his eyes tugging on me to notice. In terms of my kindergarten class, I’ve got one kid who’s knocked over the finger paint and another who’s jumping up and down with his hands in his pockets, needing to use the bathroom. It’s starting to fall apart, but I don’t care. This is Vespa guy we’re talking about, and he needs me.
“I don’t know. My situation’s…complicated,” he says. “But man, sometimes I want to just…” He shoves his hands away from himself as if pushing something heavy. His voice is soft.
“Whoa. You’re not talking drastic measures here—”
“No, God. Suicide? No, never. Never. I mean, like quit my job. Give it all up. Become a basket weaver.”
“Why not? My father did that. Well, he’s not a basket weaver. But he up and quit one day, ditched all the high pressure and moved to Maui and now he rents surfboards.”
“Wow. Sounds great.”
“He loves it, I think. He’s got this small house by the beach. Surfboards, and what are the things with the sails that you stand on? My mind just went blank.”
“Windsurfers?”
“Yeah. Windsurfers. I went there once. It was beautiful.”
“I’d love that. Maui.”
“I don’t even think he wears shoes anymore. Of course, you have very nice shoes,” I say.
“I have very nice everything. It’s exhausting.”
“Look, I gotta take these people’s money,” I say.
“Sure, sure,” he says.
I grab the ladies’ credit card and give it to Jane to run. She’s already cleared the bookstore guy’s plate, and I give him his check and sit a Darigold worker and make change for the salmon hatchery folks. Nick’s trying like crazy to catch my eye, and so is Trina and Funny, and Jane keeps nudging me every chance she gets and Joe even whispers Well? even though it is hardly a whisper. I ignore all of them, and it takes some doing.
The Vespa guy holds up his hand in a Stop motion to indicate no more coffee. When I bring him his check, he says, “Thank you, you know. Really. I have faith again that everyone doesn’t give just to get.”
And he seems to mean it. One little gesture, you know? The Oh, shit from earlier is gone, and I fill up with a fellow-man-humankind gladness. I have this sense of satisfaction. A beach-ball-just-blown-up feeling, or a full tank of gas feeling. “Hey, just promise you’ll ditch the smokes,” I say.
“Promise,” he says.
The Vespa guy leaves the plastic padded folder on the table. On his way out, he stops me, holds out his hand. “Richard Howards,” he says.
“Indigo Skye,” I say.
“S-k-y?” he asks.
“With an E,” I answer.
“A pleasure, Indigo Skye. And thank you again.” We shake. When he leaves, I see there is something else on the table too, left in the saucer of his coffee cup. It’s the package of cigarettes. It’s a brand I’ve never seen before, a white package with a red square in the middle, Dunhill Special Reserve. I hear the Vespa start up outside. I watch him ride off, and he’s butterscotch, melting into the distance.
“Well?” Trina practically shrieks.
“I couldn’t hear hardly anything from over here,” Nick says.
“Something about quitting his job,” Funny says. “Becoming a basketball player.”
“Basket weaver,” I say. But I feel suddenly proprietary about our talk; decide to give them crumbs and crust, not the squishy center of the bread. “He’s unhappy with his work.”
“He said his life was complicated,” Nick Harrison says.
“I thought you said you couldn’t hear,”
I say.
“He said he could hardly hear anything, is what he said.” It’s the bookstore guy, interjecting. We ignore him.
“A smoker?” Jane waves the package in the air, gives it a shake.
“He’s quitting,” I say. I hear the defensiveness in my own voice. You feel responsible to someone when they’ve given you something private.
“Tell me you didn’t give him shit about it, Indigo. I can’t afford to lose any customers.”
“She’s merely doing her civic duty as she sees fit,” Joe says in his old, gruff voice. “Those are cancer sticks.”
“Unhappy with his work. Why is he unhappy?” Trina presses, but I am saved from revealing more, because just then Leroy comes in.
He is holding up one arm, the right one, with the dragon, breathing flames that lick up the back of his hand. In that hand is the red and black sign from the window of the Thunderbird. “Trina, God. Someone put a ‘For Sale’ sign in your car,” he says.
It’s May, and on my way to school after work that day, Nine Mile Falls is all warm-weather promise. It’s that perfection that comes just before something; summer, in this case. You see all that it can be before it becomes what it is. No lawns are brown yet, no one is cranky from too-high heat, there are no splinters or sunburns or bee stings. The air is just all jazzed up from school almost out, and the usual signs that the prisoners are about to be released for summer break are appearing—the telephone lines in front of the school are strung with old tennis shoes that had been flung there and are now hanging by their tied-together laces; the kids walking back home wear short sleeves and sandals and floppier, less-homework backpacks, and the ones in cars are almost required by law to shout things out windows. Prom invitations and graduation class years are written on windshields with soap. The slams of locker doors sound triumphant rather than doomed.
I was part of it all and not part of it, as always. Part of it because there were kids I liked, such as Melanie and Liz and Ali and Evan (who we call King Tut because he once wore this metallic-gold shirt), and teachers I liked—Jane Aston (art class, who never marked me late for class, even if I got there ten minutes past bell because of work), Mr. Fetterling (American Government). Not part of it because I couldn’t care less about prom and rah-rah shit like that, and because there were these rituals and rules I just didn’t get, things I was supposed to be interested in that I wasn’t, like who was going out with who and like those magazines with makeup tips and who-gives-a-shit articles. “What does your favorite nut say about you? Take our quiz! If you like almonds, you’re the romantic type…” Yeah. When you want what’s real and you try to find that in high school, you might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle.
I didn’t get things and people didn’t get me, ever since the ninth grade. I went to this concert, and the chick at the door stamped my hand with what was supposed to be a sun. She’d probably just OD’d on coffee—her shaky hand gave me a crappy ink mark with only five solar rays in the exact shape of a marijuana leaf. I was Lady Macbeth trying to scrub that thing off. But the dyes they’d used sunk so deep they’ll probably give us all cancer in thirty years. Anyway, ever since then, people decided that my unique clothing choices plus the design on my hand equaled STONER, and the closest I’d ever gotten to dried herbs was my mother’s oregano. I’m sure no one would even remember that mark specifically, but it never went away in people’s minds, which just goes to show how badly we have the need to sort people into groups and keep them there. It’s some twisted, limited, grocery-store mentality, where people have to be dairy products or vegetables or frozen foods for us to be able to understand them and feel safe. Maybe we’ve just become such mega-consumers that we can’t deal with anything that’s slightly inconvenient (basically, anything that requires thought). I was the tofu amidst the Baking Products and Cleaning Supplies.
Anyway, that day I’m having what I consider to be a regular school day. My schedule is pretty light; the only truly sucky part of the semester is that I have to take PE as a senior, because I couldn’t stand the idea of taking it as a freshman, or as a sophomore, or as a junior. I’d backed myself against the take-it-or-don’t-graduate wall, and now I was in there with a bunch of freshmen and Mr. Talbot, who was only a few years older than us and hadn’t gotten the news flash yet that he was still the dumb jock he was back in high school. He occasionally tried to be a real teacher and gave us tests on basketball that you could take with your eyes closed. Bouncing a ball in basketball is called (A) Dribbling. (B) Bribbling. (C) Passing. He’d write something on the chalkboard, step back and squint at it, because the word “didn’t look right,” that favorite old cover of people who can’t spell.
That day, we spend the period sitting on the gym floor in our PE clothes, as Mr. Talbot tries to figure out how he’s going to get five volleyball teams to play on four courts in a rotation lasting two weeks. It’s a bit like watching a chimp try to macramé, and beats actually getting sweaty and stinking for two periods afterward. At lunch, I think about sitting with Melanie, but she’s hanging out on the front lawn with Heather Green and Amelia Swensen, and Amelia’s boyfriend, Jay. Not only are they likely to give me crap about my clothes or something equally as important (they will use the word “interesting” to describe what I’m wearing, and we all know that to most people, “interesting” is not a compliment), but I don’t especially want to watch Jay with his hands practically up Amy’s shirt right there on the front lawn. So I decide to go with Ali and Liz, who are walking to Starbucks. I hate to spend my hard-earned money on expensive coffee when I get it free at Carrera’s, but it’s either that or go back and join the audience of Feel-Up Fest, and darn, I forgot my ticket.
I finish up with American Government and the Gettysburg Address, which is 2265 Alder Street, in case you want to send a postcard, ha-ha. I walk home and I pass QFC, where Bex is already there with her table and new, large sign that says PLEASE HELP THE HOMELESS and, in smaller letters, TSUNAMI VICTIMS. Underneath, she’s drawn an unhappy face, two dots for eyes and a half-circle mouth pulled down. Her bike rests against a display of bags of bark and potting soil that’s out front. I put a couple of bucks into her can and ask her if Mom knows where she is, and she says yeah, and that Mom thinks it’s better than her hanging out with that Lindsey, who’s always getting her into trouble. This is just one of those annoying and unjust differences between you and your younger sibling, because the only place I could ever ride my bike alone was the end of the driveway. I was probably fifteen before I could go to a friend’s without giving Mom an FBI dossier on the people; Bex can practically hitchhike on the freeway with a mere “Have fun, honey.”
At home, Severin is there, which is pretty unusual. He’s in the front yard, and he’s mowing. I’m thinking Mom should get mad more often, because the chores are really starting to get done around here. The lawn mower is roaring, and I can’t hear a word Severin’s saying but I see his mouth moving, and I scream “Whaat?” and he tries to scream back, and we do that routine once or twice before he lets the engine cut out and it’s suddenly quiet.
“Jane called,” he says. “She wants you to call back as soon as you can.”
“Okay,” I say.
“She said it was really important.”
Which probably meant she wanted me to work late tomorrow, which would mess up Trevor’s and my plan to hang out at Pine Lake and swim. “What are you doing home? Did they finally come to their senses and fire you?”
“Nah. MuchMoore is having sales conferences for a few days, so they let us off early.” He raises his arm, wipes the sweat from his forehead. There are big rings of sweat under his arms.
“What’s with guys and sweat, for God’s sake? You’re, like, leaking.”
“Get me a glass of water, would you?”
“What, my T-shirt says ‘Personal Slave’? Forget it. You gonna give me a tip?” But I actually do go inside, and I get a glass of water
and even get the tray of ice and give it a twist, chase some ice cubes around the countertop to put into his glass. He’s my brother, my twin, and even though we don’t do the twin-bond-till-death routine, we’ve been around for the same length of time so we’re there for each other. From the kitchen window I can see him yank the lawn mower to life again by its string. He’s wearing this grin. It’s this inner-pleased that seems to be about something more than the happy that comes from the smell of cut grass.
I slam out the screen door. “Let this be the end of your macho bullshit,” I say, and hand him the glass. He cuts the engine again.
“Thanks.” He drinks. His Adam’s apple shoots from penthouse to lobby and back again.
“What are you so happy about?” I ask.
“What? Nothing.”
“Yeah. Right. I saw you smiling from the kitchen. God, see? Look, you can’t help yourself.”
“Quit it.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You are. Aha, you’re smiling. Look at you smiling,” I sing.
“Shit,” he says, and tries not to grin. “Why do you always do that?”
“Why are boys so secretive?”
“It’s nothing. Get your hands off your hips. You look like Mom.” He drinks more water, peeks at me over the glass. “Oh, all right. Okay, are you pleased with yourself? I asked Kayleigh Moore to our prom.”
My sweaty brother is standing before me, hopeful on a hopeful day. The sun is out—birds are twittering. Okay, birds aren’t actually twittering, but there’s a crow on a branch of a nearby evergreen, cawing at Freud, who sits calmly on our porch step, staring with sly killer eyes. That hope, it’s worrisome. It’s Snow White type hope, where she’s tra-la-la-ing in the forest and not realizing that (1) her stepmother is plotting her death by fruit, and(2) seven short guys who want to live with you is just sick.
