The Unprofessionals (19 page)

I
WENT OUTSIDE
to walk and take some photographs of the light on the reeds growing up around the pond. After a while I thought about calling the boy's cousin. I'd thought about it for a few weeks. Then I did it. Soon we were into the whole thing—every part of it all at once and going back and forth to the different parts: the year, the three years, the childhood, the high school, the psychiatrists, the last year, the last weeks, the last weekend, the last days.

During one part we had this conversation:

“You don't want to know—how they discovered him using heroin,” his cousin said.

“I do know. His mother told me. She said there was blood on the ceiling and on the floor.”

“The room was covered with blood,” he said.

I'd seen this look somewhere. It popped into my mind. A photograph in
Vogue
magazine in a dentist's office, maybe a room color favored by a person who was one of their favorite people to feature; or a room wallpapered by a male designer—red velvet wallpaper, red carpet, and red velvet ceiling. The pictures of red rooms I'd seen in waiting-room magazines were shocking in a different way and were stored in a nearby part of the brain—the color section.

Then the boy's cousin mentioned a book he was reading. His generation had been taught to respect bad writers by the academics of my generation, who had been influenced by the academics of the generation before. To change the subject, I asked whether he had read anything by the Swiss writer Robert Walser.

“Oh yes, I know about him.” He said that he'd read about the writer in an essay by the philosopher Walter Benjamin.

“What's the essay?” I asked.

“I can't remember,” he said. “It's in a book, either
Illuminations
or
Reflections.
”

I wrote it down on a scrap of paper. Then he said he had to hang up.

I
T WAS A
holy night. The stars were shining brightly, or brightly shining. Icy-cold winter air came back, “courtesy of the northwest cold front,” the weather forecaster said. I felt it was a special courtesy directed to me, personally, since most people didn't share the joy of it. I liked to look at the weather map, one of the only beautiful sights on television. I was glad to see the white, snowy arrow of cold, the white stars under the white cloud, the snowflakes, the minus signs, the single digits, the curved wind signal for the front rushing in from Canada, where the better air was stored, and the deep blue and green of the oceans and the states. The states were all depicted without showing what was in them: cars, highways, gas stations, factories, tall buildings, industrial parks, malls, and overweight humans in tight pants and T-shirts. It was a peaceful and calming picture inspiring the meditative frame of mind, even though I still hadn't learned how to meditate.

A Chinese acupuncturist had punctured a number of needles into my shoulder—thicker needles than those I was used to with an international specialist. Then he turned a hot red spotlight in the direction of the needles and ran from the room saying, “Close eyes. Meditate.”

I said I didn't know how.

“Not too much thinking,” he said as he scurried out the door.

The icy weeks of winter weren't going to last, and I knew I had to pack every moment of the coldness into each day and night. I'd already been to the all-night supermarket and T.J. Maxx once, at nine
P.M.,
and the experience was so delightful that I planned to go back for another trip.

I was the only customer at the discount clothing store. When I drove into the empty parking lot, I saw that the store was empty, too, and I was afraid they'd closed early due to extreme winds and icy blasts. Six or seven shopping carts had been blown over and were lying in a random pattern of beauty in my path. They looked so much better lying on the ground than standing up. Maybe the pattern of the carts signified a warning of dangerous weather reports I hadn't heard. Maybe it signified nothing, as Macbeth said.

I forged on ahead toward the vast, empty space of the store. The store looked better than it had in a few months. It seemed to have been emptied of most of the merchandise, and the remaining garments had been consolidated in the center of the white vinyl-tiled floor. A rack with a sign reading
LONG-SLEEVED SHIRTS
had become a rack with skirts, slacks, sweaters, and shirts. Only one employee could be seen—a young man with shoulder-length hair and bangs. People were afraid of him until they discovered how polite and helpful he was.

The same thing had happened with the all-tattooed cashier at the supermarket. He even said hello. Maybe that was the hidden meaning of the supermarket's Christmas commercial, which showed a holiday table of food, fruit, lit candles, and a message that read, “Wishing a happy holiday from our family to yours.”

I wondered what was meant by the supermarket's “family.” Of whom did it consist? The store looked nothing like the commercial's depiction of a holiday home. The tattooed cashier may have been one part. Then, at Christmas, there was a new member of the family. An African-American woman was wearing a red Santa Claus hat and standing at the cash register. She had an accent and expression in her voice I hadn't heard since my childhood; now I heard it when watching documentaries about the South. She was from the Mississippi or Alabama or Tennessee of the past. She sounded like a member of a jazz or blues group from the fifties—beaten down, trying to get up, discriminated against, all-knowing and resigned at the same time. She was addressing the customers with the names “honey” and “sweetie pie.”

“I'm so tired,” she said. “I'm just praying to God I make it through.”

When my turn came, I felt sorry for her and had to ask, “Do they make you wear the red hat?”

“No, that's from my other job, at the drugstore,” she said.

All I could say was “Oh.” Because this was her life, working around the parking-lot chain stores, one after another.

“Man, those crackers are good,” she said, picking up a package of Parmesan crisps. “Have you had them?” she asked me.

“They're too spicy for me,” I said. I didn't want to get into the discussion. I'd heard of people regretting having eaten an entire package of the rich, spicy crisps.

“Well, you try them, you hear?” she said. “You won't believe how good they are.”

By then I had packed up my own items, including organic kale and Desert Essence Tea Tree Shampoo, into a paper bag, and she said, “Thank you for packing.” Even though I always packed, instead of “You're welcome,” I said, “You were tired,” but it didn't sound quite right.

“I am tired,” she said. “I'm so tired I could drop down right here. So thanks again, sweetheart.”

“You're welcome,” I said.

 

THE HOLY
nights are good for getting things done around the town. Only one or two people are out.

On my next visit, the supermarket's parking lot was almost empty. As I got out of the car, I felt that frigid air they kept warning about on the Weather Channel. The new bad thing they have on the channel is a diagram showing and telling viewers what to wear for the weather. On hot days in November, before it cooled off, they were still showing and announcing short sleeves, shorts, sunglasses, caps with visors. This was right before Thanksgiving. In the cold weather they say, “Sweater, heavy coat, gloves, scarf, hat,” and show small computerized pictures of the garments, too. This is one of the bad parts of the Weather Channel.

As I walked toward the entrance, past the empty parking spaces, I heard two birds suddenly start chirping into the cold night. Maybe they were shocked out of sleep, or just desperate from their inability to find some warm evergreen branches for their night.

 

WHEN I
returned on an icy night just before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, there was the same cashier, this time in a white knit cap with a white faux-fur trim. I assumed it was her own hat, but then realized that it might be the drugstore's winter-theme cap.

“Are you feeling any better?” I asked her.

“Sure I am. Last time I had just got out of the hospital. I had an aneurysm and a heart attack. That's why I was tired.”

“Which hospital?” I asked.

She named the small local hospital.

“Go to the university hospital,” I said.

“I know it, honey,” she said. “They don't know nothing at this place. I said, ‘I'm getting out of here!' My friends and relatives prayed for me, that's why I'm alive. That place! They are confused!”

I wanted to ask her about her past—how long she'd been here, where she was from, what kind of jobs she'd had before, all that. What I really wanted to understand was how she was still speaking in that accent and style and why she was stuck in these jobs. There it was, Martin Luther King weekend, and no improvement for the plight of this woman and others like her. Because of the sadness of this, I didn't ask her anything more.

Then she picked up the Parmesan crisps and said, “These crackers are so good!”

“Last time I was here you told me that, remember?” I said.

“And wasn't I right? They better be good for seven dollars.”

They must be good if so many people had experiences with them, I was thinking, and now this poor downtrodden cashier, aneurysm and all, was still remarking on their excellence.

“Pray for me, sweetheart,” she called in my direction as I left. I said I would. And I'd add something to the prayer about helping her not eat too many Parmesan crisps. Among the ingredients, butter was listed, along with Parmesan cheese.

 

I WAS
able to speed right through T.J. Maxx nearby and see that there was nothing to buy. “Get in, and get out” was the motto everyone had for the place. During the five years of trips to the store, I'd purchased only three shirts and eleven pairs of socks.

I'd been scared away for a week after having seen some decorated bell-bottom blue jeans. On these blue jeans there was everything possible, including long pieces of wool sewn on and hanging from the waist, trouser bottoms, and pockets. Just six pieces of wool—black, orange, brown, red, green, and blue. Then came sequins, glitter, appliqués, embroidery, metal spikes and studs—everything sewn on, stapled in, or hanging from these pants. I noticed the sign on the display rack:
EUROPEAN DESIGNER JEANS.
I tried to imagine who the European designer could be: Yves St. Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Sonia Rykiel, Valentino, Ungaro, Versace. But perhaps Europe included Poland, Slovenia, and Yugoslavia and the designer was from one of these countries, or from what's called an outlaw state.

I was relieved to see that the manager was absent. When she was there, her voice, in range between a squeak and a shriek, could be heard throughout the store. I checked for the usual placement of the “designer jeans” on my way out. The song on the radio was unidentifiable, but something like a torture to force prisoner spies to tell government secrets, and this was speeding up my journey to the exit door. I'd left the store on another occasion when I heard the words from a song. “Lay down beside me” were the words.

I wondered what had been done with the “designer jeans”—had they been shipped off to Africa? Thrown in a Dumpster? Left on the doorstep of a thrift shop? Dumped in a vacant lot and burned? Burned in effigy with our flag in one of the many countries where America was hated?

Outside, alone in the cold and empty parking lot, I heard the roar of the outdoor cleaning truck. The truck seemed to have grown to twice the size it had been—the many thick wheels in front and back had increased in size and number, and now the center had been displaced by a twisted black machine: an external motor-engine resembling a monster from a science fiction movie.

 

EVERY TIME I
went out the door of our house I was happy. The sky was lit up with an almost full moon, but it was so clear that the large extra-bright stars were visible. I don't know the names of stars or stellar constellations. The same goes for the new movie stars. In astronomy, there was too much to think about. A friend of ours compulsively said the names of the stars whenever we went out walking at night, but people who named movie stars were worse to be around.

Naming the stars interferes with absorbing the night. These are the nights that teachers in schools try to re-create for Christmas pageants—deep, dark blue, with starlight and moonlight, without cars or humans. These are the holy nights. Holy night came into my mind, not the song but the scenery. The Christmas carol always reminded me of a grade-school Christmas concert from my childhood. My role was to hit the chime in one part of the musical score and at every rehearsal I missed the right moment.

Finally, I was demoted out of the important, chime-playing position. The music teacher had once held such high hopes for my role in the recital. Only Paul Shaffer's annual imitation of Cher singing “O Holy Night” on the David Letterman show could counteract the memory.