Bill from Philly

I don’t remember how or why I ended up in Vegas. I'd spent the 4th of July, a day before, a couple of days after, in South Beach with a friend. From there, I flew to Las Vegas to meet my parents at the Venetian, then one of the newer hotels on the strip or with the newest addition, at least, the Venezia tower. They, my parents, liked the bright lights, the whir of the slots, the restaurants run by some of the country's top chefs, and I liked spending time with them anywhere but Ohio, where they still lived.

My bag was filled with disposable clothing from H&M, synthetic materials in shockingly vibrant colors filled with stretch and strings, with descriptors like "halter" and "strapless." I also carried linen and cotton, silk, conservative black and simple white, that wrinkled and faded beside their counterparts. Not my typical wardrobe, the week's worth of hooker clothes (or so I dubbed them) fit into the nightclubs, casinos and beaches as easily as the pack on my back, and strangely enough, my parents didn't mind.

Not only didn't they mind, they encouraged me to go out, to find a nightclub, to "have fun." Of course, I didn't know a soul in the city of sin and I wasn't sure what would be worse – asking them to join me or going alone.

In platform shoes, halter dress, and sparkly makeup, I went alone to the Ghost Bar. With a little more confidence, I might have looked like a professional but I clocked myself on the door of the cab. I teetered on the heels. As it was, I just looked like a girl alone on the 55th floor of the Palms, which wasn't the 55th floor at all without unlucky numbers 4, 9 and 13.

I edged away from the window in the floor, fascinated and frightened by the thought of Plexiglas underfoot, with or without a 55-storey drop. Standing at the edge of the sky deck, I looked out over Vegas, with a grin and a gin and tonic and a bit of a shiver from the warm summer wind on my sunburned skin.

When I turned, I realized that I'd been penned in by a group of men, friends and brothers, a man named Bill. Bill from Philly. As we talked, the crowd shifted, pulled by the panoramic view, pulled by the bar. I found myself alone with the boy, talking about books, about Oscar Wilde and Dorian Gray, about music and art, Philadelphia and DC. The friends and Bill's brother headed to another club, to the hotel, to the pool, somewhere other than there, as he and I talked. As we laughed. As the hours drifted away.

We went back to his hotel for swim trunks. I waited in the hall as he dug through his bags and a friend slept in one of the double beds. He couldn't find the trunks but that didn't matter. The pool had long since closed. He walked me back to the Venetian where we found stools in a bar and pretended that the sun wasn't rising somewhere outside and that neither of us had slept. We kept talking.

As the music played overhead, I told him about my unbreakable habit of saying "I like Stevie Nicks" everytime I heard the Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams and how it all started with a college boyfriend. He told me about his brother, his friends, the man asleep in the double bed and somewhat sick but willing to make the trip. An old college friend.

I could have talked to him for the rest of my life. I realized that long before I noticed we were the only ones left in the bar. Even the bartender had disappeared and the casino jangled lifelessly around us, slots calling to the few people who remained.

I tried to hide a yawn in my hand, but he caught me.

"I wish I had a bed to offer," he said.

"It's OK. I should just go upstairs."

Neither of us moved and the silence stretched.

"I'm getting married," he said. "This is my bachelor party."

"I figured as much."

"I didn't think... I didn't know I'd meet a girl like you. I wouldn't have come."

"It's OK... Tell me about your fiancé?" I asked.

"I don't want to talk about her," he said, shaking his head. "I didn't know..."

"It's OK. Nothing happened."

"But I wish."

"It's OK."

We left the fiancé behind and kept talking, laughing, yawning until we could barely keep our eyes open.

"I have to go," I apologized. "I'm just so tired."

"Let me walk you up," he said.

"I don't think so."

We walked toward the door of the casino, toward the burgeoning day and he turned.

"You should stay here."

"I could walk you out," I replied.

"No, just... stay here."

He lifted a hand to my face and traced my cheek without really touching it, without touching me but for a light brush against my hair. Dropping his hand, he stepped closer, leaned, and stopped.

I don't remember if I kissed him or he kissed me or if we actually kissed at all. I just remember breathing the same air. I remember watching him walk away in the soft light of day before I turned and entered the air-conditioned cacophony of noise, color and light, over-oxygenated air, blue-haired chain smokers feeding one-armed bandits, tired waitresses in heels. My parents. My bed.

If life were a movie, he would have turned. Said something. Made plans to meet at the Ghost Bar in another year. Our paths would have crossed again someday, and we could have talked forever.

It wasn't my first trip to Vegas and it wasn't my last, but it's the one I remember, the one with Bill from Philly.


Tag: Travel

Scary movies

“No more scary movies,” I muttered under my breath as I walked the quiet streets of Capitol Hill, the tattoo of my flip flops on the pavement drumming a beat for my words. “No more scary movies. No more scary movies.”

I must have jumped a half dozen times on the walk. Wind in the trees. A man sitting behind the wheel of his parked car. People walking and talking behind me. I gasped but managed to bottle my screams; I’d screamed enough already.

The movie started quietly, simply, and voices rang out through the theater. The nervous twitter of laughter belied the underlying fear, the expectation of fear, the delicious anticipation of a proper horror flick inspired by true events.

The Strangers
After returning from a wedding reception, a couple staying in an isolated vacation house receive a knock on the door in the mid-hours of the night. What ensues is a violent invasion by three strangers, their faces hidden behind masks. The couple find themselves in a violent struggle, in which they go beyond what either of them thought capable in order to survive.

The movie seemed driven more by absence than anything else, a lack of dialogue, of development, of understanding, as the near real-time terror unfolded. The screams started about 15 minutes into the film when the entire theater jumped and shrieked en masse followed by a trailing aftershock of screams and tremors of laughter.

During the first half, I thought, “This is just one of those movies. The ones where people talk back to the screen.”

A dull murmur filled the packed theater, erupting into shouts and settling back into a soft blanket of sound. Even I almost talked back to the screen.

“Where are your shoes?” I wondered, half aloud, as Liv Tyler ran through the woods.

I waited for her to point, scream, run, fall and crawl, a formula I’d long since worked out for horror flicks. In high school, a friend and I mimed the motions in our AP English class as we awaited the results of our exams, of term papers. I must have watched horror flicks even then, though I barely remember when I started or why. I winced with every glance through a window, every shut of the door or pull of the shower curtain, never mind the ax-wielding maniac.

After a while, though, I noticed the talking had stopped. The whispered warning. The nervous laughter. The shrieks continued until the end of the movie, though, peppering the suddenly quiet theater and the perpetually quiet film. I couldn’t quite figure out what made me jump – the film or the audience – but I clutched the armrests for most of an hour and a half and walked quickly home, my flip flops pounding a staccato cadence for my new mantra.

“No more scary movies.”

Within 15 minutes of locking the door, though, I turned to Supernatural. I couldn't quite give up the thrill.

Tag: Movies The Strangers

Houseguests

A soft tap sounded at my door, pulling me from the hazy twilight between night and day, between sleep and wake.

"Kristin?"

"Mmmhmm?" I mumbled drowsily.

"I can't get out," a soft voice apologized through wood and I jumped out of bed, padding across cool tiles in bare feet to open the door. "I'm so sorry."

"It's OK," I yawned, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. "I should get up anyway... I'm just so tired."

I found the keys to let him out the front door. I blinked away my exhaustion and returned his hug of goodbye with a kiss on the cheek. A few minutes later, he returned, knocking so softly I almost thought I'd imagined the rap on the door.

"I thought maybe you'd be in the shower," he said.

"On the computer," I explained, somewhat sheepishly. I should have been getting ready for work, but I found myself working in pajamas from the room in the back. He apologized again and asked if I had plans for the night.

"I... I don't think so," I replied and he asked me to dinner.

"If only I knew his name," I thought as I dressed for work, rolling my eyes at the situation in which I found myself, making plans for dinner with a beautiful blond stranger. A man who'd spent the past five days in my apartment. A man with a name I didn't quite know.

I had met him the prior evening when he came home to change between conference and reception. I assumed he was the owner of the case in the guest room. He seemed comfortable with the place.

The friend of a friend of my brother, he was in town for a conference and the friend in the middle had asked my brother for a recommendation on a place to stay. He suggested my apartment and I gladly agreed, pulling together information on the neighborhood, Metro maps, cookies for the pair I'd never met, that I wouldn't meet until days after they arrived, when our paths finally crossed.

I still hadn't met my brother's friend. She hadn't come home the night before the soft knocks.

After he left, the beautiful blond stranger with the bright blue eyes, the impeccable English and the incomparable manners, I got ready for work. It wasn't until later, explaining the situation to a girl in my office, that I realized the absurdity of the situation: sharing my home – the kitchen, the shower, the calm dead of night in which we both slept - with a stranger. Not knowing the man's name. Not realizing that I didn't or bothering to care once I did.

Over lunch, I tried to find a hardware store to make copies of my keys. Over dinner, maybe I would learn his name. If I were lucky, I'd meet the girl who connected us all.


Tag: Strangers Friends Home

Surreality

After a breakfast that consisted primarily of licorice followed by a fairly late lunch, we walked to the Recoleta Cemetery for our final stint as tourists to see the grave of Eva Peron and enjoy a bit of the day before the night on a plane.

“Mapa?” asked a woman by the entrance. “Map?”

“I already have one,” my brother said. “I just can’t find anything.”

He had wandered betwixt the crypts a dozen times before, winding his way through the city of the dead too many times to remember whom he might find where. I dug a five-peso note out of my pocket and waved away the change.

“No, it’s like gold,” said the woman with the map, laughing. “If you find change, take it. It costs 10 pesos to get one. There are no coins.”

Hours later, another woman would offer to buy mine as coins disappeared as quickly as they were found - required for the bus, required by vendors who preferred small change. Exact change. Cab drivers preferred to rounddown, to lose a bit of the fare, rather than give up their coins.

I felt guilty tucking the change in my pocket, knowing I would share it with my nieces and nephew, whom I had given coin purses and currency from most of my travels. They preferred money to the books that I brought, but I kept giving both. I had Argentine books in my bag for the kids and a bottle of Frenet for their father. Cookies all. Other than the change, I would not find souvenirs among the sepulchers.

Meandering through the cemetery, talking in hushed tones and taking pictures, video, we saw nary a soul but a couple who smoked under a statue, sitting atop someone’s grave and the crowds near the tombs of Eva Perón and of heavyweight boxer Luis Firpo (1894-1960), “The Wild Bull of the Pampas.” A couple from Missouri asked for directions from the former to the latter and we pulled out the map.

“Thank you,” the woman gushed in a bright Midwestern drawl. “We were trying to find someone who spoke English.”

As she walked away, another approached, asking for directions and peering over our shoulders as we unfolded the map once again. Poets and presidents, boxers and scientists interred within the cemetery gates and we wandered, snapping shots of the crypts, the cats, the statues, of the juxtaposition with the world beyond.

One of the towering stacks of individual tombs reached into the sky, oozing something rust-colored and sticky. Another, covered in flies, exhaled the bittersweet stench of death from an open porthole, a window between the living and the dead.

The stained glass windows were dull and featureless from the outside of the tombs. Only through the open doors, the windows in the front of the graves, could we see brilliance glowing in the dark, vibrant blues and golds burnished with the features of the Virgin, the Christ child, roses and lilies, earth and sky.

An alarm on a phone reminded us that we needed to leave and we walked through the crypts and the cats, toward the entrance. We stepped around piles on the sidewalk left by dogs. My brother stepped in one, breaking his three-month streak, cursing and dragging his foot to wipe the poo from the shoe. Back in his office, in the fishbowl, where we’d stored our bags, he joked with his coworkers.

“It’s still on my shoe,” he said. “See?”

He held a size 13 up for inspection as the Argentinean girls groaned and the blond surfer turned back to his Mac.

All too soon, the doorman buzzed and we made our way down to the street where a driver with impeccable manners waited. He played soft American rock in the car, trying to accommodate our limited language skills or the lack thereof. We whispered in the back of the car.

“I can’t believe we’re leaving,” I sighed. “I feel like we just got here.”

“That’s because we did,” my friend replied, shaking her head. “But it feels like we’ve been here forever.”

We arrived early, much too early, and settled into a lounge for a bottle of deliciously inexpensive wine and the wait. Our flight, filled with erratic lights and flickering films would take us from vacation to reality.

I watched a movie or two, trying to sleep and freezing under a stiff airplane blanket. I lost my pillow someplace over Brazil, back in the autumn before we crossed back into spring. My friend and I traded places when she realized she couldn’t lean left due to back pain, the legacy of an accident months past. I curled into the window and slept for an hour or two. Maybe three. And awoke to gritty eyes and fuzzy teeth, a desperate need to use the lavatories aft despite the illuminated seat belt sign, despite the queue. I wasn’t alone in my need.

On the screen in front of me, I watched our journey in silence, having lost my headphones sometime over the Caribbean.

“Our plane is the size of Connecticut,” I observed.

“Rhode Island, maybe,” my friend replied. “But not Connecticut.”

We watched our approach on the screen and through the window and suddenly, there we were. Leaving the plane, riding the people mover and waiting in line at passport control. Baggage claim. Customs. I made it into the office by 8, spending half a day in a dress dug from my bag and developing a project plan with Gantt charts and flowcharts, with timelines and deadlines and lines on a page that nobody would read.

“Yesterday I was in Argentina,” I thought. “Yesterday, it was fall.”

It all seemed so surreal.

Tag: Travel Argentina

Revolución

I didn’t know, when I booked the trip, that the weekend included a national holiday. Not for Argentina, anyway. I wanted to visit my brother after he settled and before winter set in. Memorial Day seemed as good a reason as any. A three-day weekend stretched a little on either side to accommodate a trip to South America. I hadn’t bothered to look at the Argentine calendar, the weather or guidebooks to figure out what I wanted to do. My brother and friends would take care of the first and the last, and as for the middle, I would layer.

At some points, I froze. For the most part, though, I was comfortable as we wandered the streets on the May Revolution Day, stopping by street vendors to look at old movie posters, photographs and phonographs, china dotted with fading flowers, frightening dolls with cracked faces and drooping lids.

In May 1810, a small revolution took place in Buenos Aires in the first step towards independence from Spain. Almost 200 years later, on El Día de la Revolución de Mayo, flags flew from the windows of cabs, of private cars. A band of two drummers and three singers walked the market in San Telmo, passing around a fedora for change.

Later, we discovered they came from Brazil and may have been homeless but we still we talked. We laughed. We all posed for pictures, at their prompting, and passed around kissed to unshorn cheeks before we left. I have their phone numbers with me still, just in case we want music at a party.

On a corner, near the plaza, a couple demonstrated the tango, pulling members from the audience. A woman with cascading red curls and a short black skirt lengthened with fringe danced with a boy who barely came to her waist, spinning and following his tiny lead.

Nearby, a puppet walked a tightrope, balancing precariously to the delight of small children and parents alike. Further down the street, an Amerindian (or a man in costume) played a flute while the artist next to him rolled his eyes and pointed at his headphones.

With the sun low in the sky and vendors packing up their wares, with the chill set deep into our bones, we sought the comfort of a local cafe. The waitress refused to bring us mate. Not enough people wanted it and those who did obviously didn’t warrant the effort. She also harangued us, in Spanish and disapproving stares, for the number of pastries we ordered – too few – and wine to follow coffee to join the girl who didn’t want to drink alone.

She, the waitress, joined a long line of servers who passed judgment on what we did, how we ordered, when we wanted things and our mental lists grew. No mate for two. No coffee until after lunch. No large desserts. No small desserts. No food left uneaten. No tips for cab drivers. No more than 10 percent in a restaurant. No purses on the table. And fish isn’t meat. Nor is chicken.

Nevertheless, we did what we wanted and they did the same, bringing out dishes, as they were ready, refusing to serve the mate and bringing the coffee in the middle of the meal. We found an unlikely balance and laughed. Lived. Learned.

Tag: Travel Argentina

Tango

Women who looked like teenagers from the back with their narrow waists, slim calves and flowing blonde hair, they made us cringe as they twirled, lifted eyes closed to follow the music. They all had the same pug nose, the same full lips, high cheekbones and bright eyes under penciled eyebrows.

“There’s a lot of money in this room,” my brother whispered.

“How do you know?”

“All of the plastic.”

We were among the youngest in the room, a room full of money and collagen, plastic and wigs. Later, a friend would call it “Fight Club for that generation,” an underground movement of dance and dating, competition to look the best, to be the best in the septuagenarian crowd. The women wore black – skirts, dresses or trousers – and dangerously high heels. Some with flowers. With bows. With tiger striped trim on yellow patent leather. The men wore suites. Vests. Button-down shirts parted to reveal ascots. Perfectly sculpted curls glistened under the lights on perfectly glistening foreheads creased in concentration.

When we arrived, the milonga filled with couples, real couples from tables around the room, circling the floor in a grownup version of a couples’ skate at the local roller rink. Soon, the floor cleared for a demonstration of five couples. The men in loose black pants, whites shirts and black hats. The girls in cream and brown, flowing skirts and tight, strapless tops. Heels with ankle straps. Smiles. Three dances together, one with the men and then they came to the tables, smiling, with baskets of pastries. They pulled people to the floor for another group dance, this one with members of the audience snapping and circling on the floor.

The American couple next to us, the couple with flutes of bubbling champagne, seemed almost pained on the floor, the lessons they’d taken for the wedding seemed more like homework than an expression of love, of passion. Others, the man in the black striped pants and the white shirt, the white shoes and the thick black ponytail, the man in the yellow shirt with hair hanging down around his shoulders, made it seem so easy. So effortless. With straight backs and fluid movements, they moved women around the floor, the endless ring of couples.

“Do you think he’s an instructor?” I asked when I returned from the bathroom, a series of chambers dating back to the mid-20s with marble and glass, gravity aiding the flush and gilt mirrors. The man with the ponytail glided past.

“We were just talking about that,” my friend shouted over the music. “We think he’s a gigolo.”

“That’s way more interesting than an instructor,” I replied.

“Instructor?” she asked. “I thought you said ‘male whore.’ He’s with all those women.”

“I thought they were his students.”

The man in the tux at the end of the room made an announcement and the floor cleared. A couple from a table to our right took the floor, tall and sinewy. Graceful. They twirled and kicked, legs wrapping around one another in effortless grace. They melted into each other and covered the floor in dance after dance with his serious gaze, her knowing smile, long limbs tangling and tangoing in time to the music.

I had forgotten, hadn’t quite realized, the sensuality of a tango well done. The fluid movements. The half smile, half smirk under half-closed eyes. Thick, shining ponytails and crisp goatees. Shoes with soles worn with the softness, with the give, of gloves. Almost all of the women danced with their eyes closed and many of the men stared unseeing into depths far beyond the crowd that circled the floor.

High overhead a chandelier sparkled. At one end of the floor, near the bar, the band played. Little old men in black shirts and grey jackets. Red ties. I could see three accordions bellowing from where I sat in a corner of the dance floor, near the back. On marbled columns, lights flickered. At the end of the room, near fairy tale doors leading to the balcony and a cool autumn night, an elevator waited, a large gilt cage, We took to the stairs, the sweeping marble stairs, and stepped into the night longing for lessons, for a chance to twirl without counting, to dance with our eyes closed. To tango.

Tag: Argentina Travel

Que hora es

“Que hora es?” I asked in Spanish that bore the traces of neglect. Musty and dusty. Tinged with mildew. As the day melted into night and beer thinned my blood, the words came back. Las palabras. Regresan…

“Como se dice ‘regresan’ en el… past?” I wondered. Every sentence dotted with English, with words I couldn’t quite remember, not yet, not two days into the trip and not at 4 o’clock in the morning, which was the hora que fue.

My Spanish, my Spanglish, served well enough to get by in the bar and at dinner with my brother’s French coworkers who spoke better Spanish than English and better English than anything I remembered. I had trouble with the double ‘l’ and the ‘y’ that sound more like ‘sh’ but I managed to get the single cheek kiss on greeting and leaving, and I kind of liked it.

“Besos,” a friend sang when he saw us and we made the rounds, leaning and kissing, kissing and smiling, calling out greetings.

After dinner, after one of the last set of besos for the night, when the Frenchmen went home, my brother, his friends from the Peace Corps and his current job and sometime in between, the traveling girl and I stopped by another bar somewhere in their neighborhood.

Men with guitars filled the tables and music filled the air. Strumming and singing. In the back, near the bathroom, stomping and dancing filled the space in between. At the table behind me, a man and his friend played a duet – classical guitar and ukulele.

Across the aisle, at the table beside us, a man looking distinctly like Al Pacino held a guitar and shouted something to my brother and the Traveling Girl. The space between them filled with Spanish as my brother practiced his newfound language and talked with the men, the poet and the musician, who seemed to love my brother and my friend. The three of us with the most Spanish watched from afuera, outside the conversation, translated at times, listening and longing for bed.

The man with a wine nose forgot his dislike of the Traveling Girl, whom he’d disdained because she couldn’t understand a word he uttered in Spanish or in English. He stood over the table, talking and gesturing with a lit cigarette, the ash dangling dangerously close to her curls, and we all laughed nervously until he took a seat, calling over the waitress and insisting on a drink.

They gave my brother and friend a book of poetry written by the one man and a list of lyrics written by the other, a man who sang Guantanamera for the table, the only song I recognized of the two or three that he sang. He seemed more content to talk than to sing and we whiled away the hours with broken conversation, laughter and a bottle of red we somehow ended up buying.

I would dream in Spanish, struggling to find the words. The first question I would ask upon waking, in the morning, in the early afternoon, would be “Que hora es?”

The words, las palabras, would shake off a bit of the dust and the must and start to breathe.

Tag: Travel Friends Argentina

Good air

The alarm sounded at 7. At 8. I couldn’t quite figure out the time difference or where I’d stored the alarm clock.

Vaguely, I realized that it must have sounded in the hold of the airplane, ringing useless amidst the rolling bags and duffels, people’s clothes and people’s lives stuffed into packages of 50 pounds or less. In my own bag, it found company in the jars of sugarfree peanut butter and the Mike and Ike’s, the clothes and the camping equipment, more than a dozen DVDs.

All of this ran through my head mixed in a confused puddle of realization and memory as I looked for my clock at 7. At 8.

“Sorry,” I whispered into the dark as the shape next to me mumbled incoherently.

I found the clock in the bottom of a cosmetic bag dotted with bunnies and eggs that matched pajamas long since relegated to the trash. I shut off the noise and found my cell phone to turn off that alarm, too, because I knew it would sound soon and I was tired.

Later, I would awaken to find someone lowering the shade in my room. It may have been the cleaning lady, but in my sleep-addled mind I couldn’t quite figure out who or gather the courage to care. I slept more.

After a red-eye flight with too little sleep and too many edited movies, I walked out into an Argentine autumn morning. A friend and I collected our bags and met up with the driver holding a sign with my name who took us into the city to meet up with friends, with my brother who lived in Buenos Aires.

The day slipped quickly past, in a whirl of coworkers and friends, of food and Mendoza wine. We napped a little in the afternoon but it wasn’t enough. Not enough to make up for a red-eye, for crossing from spring into fall while movies played and travelers slept.

We were still tired on Friday afternoon.

“I could use a nap,” my brother said as he stood in the street, arm raised to hail a cab.

“It’s been a rough day,” I laughed.

“I know. We got up around noon, went to lunch, spent two and a half hours at a spa and went shopping.”

“It’s draining.” And everyone agreed.

“Now we’re going back to the house to shower and dress for drinks with friends, for dinner.”

“I’m sure we’ll all get online in the meantime.”

“It’s a rough life.”

In the cab, we passed through a charming little neighborhood that he had never seen, even though it lay directly between his apartment and his friends’. He said the whole city was like that, charming little neighborhoods that he had not yet seen, not in his four months as a resident. A day earlier, in his office, we’d stared at a map with the world turned topsy, with north to the right, to the east, and marveled at the size of the city.

In a few days, we’d go home, not having seen a thing, seeing enough to know I would want to come back. In the meantime, I had dinner with friends, wine, walking and talking and laughing, too little sleep and silent alarms.

Tag: Travel Friends Argentina

Even stranger

The man behind the counter seemed so familiar. His voice. His stories. The way he talked. I was sure that I didn’t know but I couldn’t stop staring, trying to place him. He reminded me so much of someone I knew and liked. Loved even. If only I could remember who.

For a while, it seemed almost there, on the tip of my tongue, dancing through the dark recesses of my mind, finding a spotlight and spinning into the wings when I’d almost placed him. I sat for a while, listening to him chat up the couple who bought sandwiches with Swiss.

“It comes with Swiss,” said the girl in the short dress, a girl who would be impossibly cold on the plane in an hour or so. The man behind the counter probably knew how to make the sandwiches on the menu, but she was full of pronouncements.

“We’re going to Argentina,” she said, tugging on the front of her boyfriend’s T-shirt. “It’s going to be, what, 80 tomorrow?”

The boyfriend smiled sheepishly and stepped back, his shirt still in her grip.

“A very mild winter,” she laughed.

I stopped listening, stopped trying to place the man, stopped short of correcting the girl. It wasn’t winter in South America. Not yet. And it wouldn’t be 80 when it was. It wouldn’t be 80 when we arrived, but it didn’t matter. It was her vacation. Mine, too. I sank back into my sandwich, my computer with the French dictionary that did funny things to my words and my punctuation, the classic rock blaring somewhere over my head. It didn’t matter.

Eventually, I forgot about the man, the one who reminded me of someone I knew and liked. Maybe loved. That didn’t matter either. The older I got, the more people reminded me of someone else.

A lifetime ago, I decided that everyone I met reminded me of one of the 23 people in my first grade class or the dozen or so adults I knew at that stage.

A lifetime ago, my parents, teachers and after-school special drilled a mantra into my head.

“Never talk to strangers.”

But the older I got, the less strange people seemed, reminding me as they so often did of the 23 people in my first grade class or the dozen or so adults I knew at that stage.

Over the years, like an old cotton sweater, the theory stretched and shrank, growing wider and shorter all at the same time, and everyone reminded me a little of everyone else, the stories, the memories, the features overlapping into vague impressions of people I just met. People I liked, maybe even loved, and people I didn’t, and the lines kept blurring.

I let people into my head and I let people into my bed. Strangers became friends. Friends became lovers. Lovers became strangers again and we drifted.

It wasn’t 80 degrees when we landed and it still wasn’t winter. I saw the girl in the painfully short dress with a scarf and sunglasses near baggage claim and recognized her, the memories of her building on themselves. Someday soon, someone would remind me of her and I would roll my eyes. Someday, someone would remind me of the man behind the counter and the man I liked. Maybe loved. And I would struggle to place him.

In the meantime, I would continue to talk to strangers that didn’t seem so strange. To make friends. To take lovers. To lose touch and see friends and lovers turn into strangers. We would all drift.

Tag: Travel

Honesty

I should have just kept my mouth shut. I stood to gain over $300 without doing a thing. Granted, I knew it was wrong, but it wouldn't hurt anyone. Nobody would even know. Or care. If only I kept my mouth shut.

"How can I help you today?"

"My credit card information was stolen a month and a half ago," I explained. "I just want to make sure that I pay for everything that was mine and those that weren't are taken off of my account."

"Sure, let me just pull that up for you," she said and the sounds of her typing clattered into my ear.

"I haven't yet paid for an airline ticket," I explained. "There still seems to be a Teleflora charge on my account and I should have received a credit mid-April."

"Is it OK if I put you on hold?" the woman asked, and I agreed, even though I thought she might have signed off to laugh. I would have done the same, having done the math.

$473 plane ticket
- $97 refund for the flowers
- $63 partial refund for the India trip
$313 (net)

Basically, I called my credit card company to complain about the fact that they'd undercharged me.

When she'd finished laughing or whatever she had done when she wasn't talking to me, the woman transferred me to a man who said he couldn't help. He transferred me to a woman who said the same and I ended up on the line with a woman in investigations who knew all about the plane ticket, the Teleflora and the credit. Either she'd known for quite some time or somebody else did as they'd entered my information into the system, the approved charges, the denied charges, the credit. They just didn't bother to fix the math. To correct my statement. They seemed just fine with letting me slide with a $300 gain. I just couldn't do it. It felt a little like stealing.

On some level, I knew that they could come back and sling the charge onto my account, the airfare to Jazz Fest, a flight delayed by a day to a festival plagued by monsoon rains with a river running through it, or so we heard. We never made it to the fairgrounds.

While it was entirely possible that the charge would be written off with a whole slew of fraudulent charges, I bought the ticket. I went to New Orleans and I enjoyed every second of the weekend, dreary weather and all. It wasn't a gift from my Visa card company, a bonus, a consolation prize for dealing with the hassle of stolen information, and I knew that.

Damn honesty.

A friend once joked that if we snuck into a concert, I'd leave my money at the gate, tucked under a rock or pinned to the fence, and it was true. When my landlord wrote to say she was raising the rent, I replied that I would pay more with a new lease and the completion of certain repairs. Every month, I set aside the difference in rent, which I would pay as soon as she came through with either or both. I once called Human Resources to complain about an error in my paycheck, an error in my favor.

I've lost money. Airline tickets for bumped flights. Flex spending. Cash from my pocket in a Port-O-John. I spent a couple hundred dollars replacing a smashed window in my Jeep – the unlocked door and zippered roof proved too complicated for the thieves – and I've lost countless small things to the constant flooding of my apartment.

Maybe the universe wanted to pay me back, to give me a few hundred dollars for my efforts. I just couldn't take it.


Tag: Money Honesty Stealing

Strangers

I am tired. Exhausted. I have been for days. Weeks. Months. I can’t remember how long. Ages. But this time it’s my fault. Instead of coming home and crashing or cleaning or finishing my packing for a trip to South America, I met up with my roommate from India, a girl I met little more than six months ago with whom I spent the better part of three weeks and the experience of a lifetime. She’s in town for a conference.

In my eternal obsessive compulsiveness, I made a list of events in the District of Columbia, ranging from the National Symphony Orchestra to the Rock-N-Roll Hotel, poetry to drag bingo. In the end, we ended up shopping for indie films and documentaries to take to my brother and splitting a pitcher of beer and a plate of pasta at happy hour as primary results from Oregon and Kentucky stream across the televisions over the bar. (I live on Capitol Hill; election season is like March Madness.)

As we walked, as we talked, I remembered how much I liked this girl, this woman, that I’d had the good fortune to meet over breakfast in Delhi. Nothing more than a conversation at the hotel, a shared tour of the city with an already matched pair of travelers meant that the leader, the one we got fired, put us together for the length of the trip.

I could have just as easily shared a room with the ginger-haired man from Perth like our friend Helen or found myself in a room of French-speaking Swiss girls.

Growing up, my mom, my dad, my kindergarten teacher Ms. Butler taught me not to talk to strangers. They never really addressed how one moved from strangers to friends. I guess they just figured I'd sort it out along the way. It took a while, but at some point, I transformed from a girl who cried when directly addressed to a woman who found her job by way of a conversation on a plane.

Last night, when the very cute waiter asked with a smile if we needed anything else, I looked at my friend and she looked at me.

"I don’t know," she said. "What do you want to do?"

"I don’t want to go yet. I like talking to you."

And so we got another beer.

I needed to clean. To pack. To come home and sleep. Instead, I shared a pitcher of beer, a plate of pasta, and conversation. We watched the primary results and talked about everything, anything, about life. A year ago I didn't know her. Six months ago, we shared a tent outside the camel mela. Today, she's in my pictures and in my stories. In my history. In my life.

And I am tired. But happy. I like my friends.

Tag: Friends

Friends

"Why is this so hard?" she moaned.

"Because you still love him," I replied. "If you didn't still love him, it wouldn't bother you. Of course, if you didn't still love him, you wouldn't want to meet up for a drink. Catch 22."

"I think I'm going to cancel."

"There's a reason I don't stay friends with my exes."

After a number of catastrophic attempts, I realized that it didn't do anyone any good, staying friends with the men I loved and in some cases still loved. My brush was still tinged of the watercolors of those relationships; I didn't need to bring the entire palette along with me.

Even without dating someone new, I had enough friends; I didn't need someone who'd seen me naked to give advice on my job, my car or the color of my toenail polish. I definitely didn't need to ask him how I looked in a dress or what he thought of the guy behind the bar.

Between my family, my girl friends and my platonic male friends, I had more than enough advice without my heart breaking a little each time we talked, but for some reason, I decided to do the grownup thing, keeping in mind that the grownups nearest and dearest to me haven't talked without anger in more than 25 years. I would be different. I would take the high road and to stay friends with the exes. After all, we shared history, friends and the city. Our paths were destined to cross.

Granted, I might have told a guy that I deleted him but he accused me of calling in the middle of the night even though he couldn't say it was my number. And I might have called the cookie guy a "bad person," but he had stopped talking to me, returning calls, answering texts after several months of dating. Months. More than half a year. Not a word. But other than that, I'd decided to leave the lighter at home and keep the bridges unburnt.

That was the plan, anyway.

Email. The occasional phone call. The supportive "hey, congrats on the new girlfriend" sort of message, with nary a snarky word. I might have thought, "I'm so glad you found someone to deal with your freakishly small hands and equally small… feet" or "you're so lucky to have found someone who really doesn't like kissing," but I didn't say a word. And somewhere along the way, I forgot why I wanted to try.

It isn't fun, and it isn't exactly healthy, the way an ex knows exactly what buttons to push and how. The words so loaded with meaning, with history, with love and anger and sadness. If we weren't friends before we dated, how could we stay friends after the exchange of goods?

"I gave it to you."

"But I only think of you when I see it."

"I don't want it."

"I don't want it either."

"Just leave it… there… there on the curb. Someone else can have it."

And a couple walking past, holding hands and smiling at their good fortune can pick through the remnants of our life together. I can give the book he left next to the bed to my new boyfriend. He can give his new girlfriend the perfume he bought for me and hope that she smells like me or doesn't smell like me or erases and replaces the scent of me in his mind.

When my friend called to talk about her plans, about seeing a man she still loved and pretending she didn't just to keep him in her life, I could hear her pain and I didn't know how to help her. They broke up for a reason. He hadn't changed. Neither had she.

Was staying friends with the guy worth all the heartache?


Tag: Ex Love Friends

Monkey fire

"What's next on your list?" my friend asked as we strolled and rolled through the aisles at Target Greatland.

"I don't know," I replied, scanning my crumpled list. "Lighter fluid."

"Lighter fluid?"

"I want to make fire come out of the monkey's head."

I lifted my arm to demonstrate and dropped it.

Arm up = no fire
Arm drop = fire

I clicked and used jazz hands to demonstrate fire and my friend laughed.

"It's good that it made it on your list," she said. "Dish soap. Face wash. Fire coming out of the monkey's head."

"A girl's got to have priorities."

Unfortunately, we only found lighter fluid for charcoal briquettes. We each picked up a bottle and scanned the back.

"Blah, blah, blah. Do not use in cigarette lighters."

We replaced the bottles on the shelf and found a man in a red shirt and khaki pants. He looked like he worked there but he might have just had the misfortune to dress in something close to the uniform.

"Do you have lighter fluid?"

He looked at us, at the grills, at the shelf of fluid, and back at us.

"For lighters?"

"I don't know. Maybe on the other side."

We walked through the store but couldn't quite figure what he meant by "other" side. It was only so big. Another guy in red and khaki told us they didn't carry fluid for lighters and I sighed.

"I guess I have to go to a smoke shop."

"Puff, puff."

"No monkey fire."

I managed to cross off the rest of the list.



Tag: Shopping

Procrastination

I've spent the better part of the weekend cleaning. And procrastinating. And making a mess through my procrastination leading to more cleaning and more procrastination.

I needed to find the source of the wet dog smell - I don't have a pet - the Turkish rug, the sodden cardboard, the putrid puddles under the bed. My exciting weekend plans included scrubbing the floors and the floorboards. Washing everything that had touched the floor in a week.

By Sunday morning, I'd cleaned the floors in my apartment three times and set the rugs outside to air and dry in the sun. I dropped the roof on my Jeep and gave it a chance to dry as well as a friend and I drove to Fredricksburg to pick up her packet for the Marine Corps Historic Half. With sunburned cheeks and windblown hair, I pushed off the thoughts that woke me at 4 on a Saturday morning, a time I've more often seen at the end of a night than the start of a day.

I stripped the beds, the bathroom, the kitchen and pulled together the clothes I'd set out to dry and made a 7 a.m. trip to the laundromat. I had scrubbed the kitchen and the bathroom, the guest room and the hall. I scrubbed the living room and I knew I would have to do it all again, at least twice. With heavy heart and aching limbs, I needed the break. The drive in the sun. Trips to the grocery for things that were fun and completely unnecessary.

These…

These were really hard and took entirely too much time, but they are delicious. And they helped me procrastinate, to bake and to feed with little expense and a whole lot of learning. I didn't really get the hang of it until the end of each stage. If I were to ever make them again, I might do a slightly better job, but even the less-than-perfect cupcake bites served a purpose.

They did manage to improve relations with my neighbors who continue to see me more and more as a human being than the girl under the stairs. They called to let me know they were draining their canoe, which might have drenched the drying rugs.

I also traded a plateful of cupcakes for a book and some conversation with some of my favorite guys at my local bookstore. They would have given me the book without the baked goods and I would have delivered the treats without anything in return.

The rest I'll take to my office.

As I get back to my cleaning, to scrubbing and shelving, tossing and sighing, I'll remember that I made something delicious, something pretty and somewhat impressive, just for the sake of baking and making them.



Tag: Home Cleaning Procrastination

Fired

I think we got a man fired. I almost feel bad about that. He lost his job, his livelihood, and he is angry. Or so I've heard second or third hand from a friend about a Facebook comment.

While it doesn't exactly say that he lost his job, the man who'd never left India has changed his location to Vancouver, which would make it rather difficult to lead tours from Delhi to Mumbai. The pen might, in fact, be mightier than any of us thought.

Nobody intended to get him fired. I didn't intend to get him fired, but I did send my comments to the company. I also asked for a partial refund. And I might have mentioned to my roommate during the trip that we could get him fired. But that was in response to his mews of apology in Mumbai when he showed up at the hotel that we had to find for ourselves. Because four of had to find a hotel for ourselves in Mumbai.

On Thanksgiving Day, after several hours on a bus and a night on a train, we found ourselves lost in Mumbai. Our cab driver hadn't paid attention and leader refused to give us the name of the hotel, preferring to talk to the driver. Who didn't pay attention. He stopped in the middle of a street, left the car and walked away, presumably to look for the other three cabs. Personally, I thought he was hiding, waiting for us to give up and leave the cab so that he could come back for his car. He'd been paid in advance and he had the keys. He had nothing to lose.

We started to worry after 10 minutes. 15. The one man in the cab, the one in the front, wrestled his way from under his backpack and out of the car; the three of us wedged in the back shifted to allow the girl on the right, my roommate, to dig the leader's number from her bag. With number and wallet, the man crossed the street to another hotel to find a phone. The driver came back and went in search of our friend while we sweated quietly in uncomfortable closeness in the back of the cab.

Eventually, they came back. Our friend. The driver. Men who'd stopped to ask for directions.

We spent the next four hours in a parking lot, sitting in plastic chairs waiting for our rooms, a half hour after that in tuk-tuks riding through the slums outside of Mumbai to a second hotel because they didn't have room for four of us at the first and another hour waiting for the leader to join us. He'd sent the four of us from the lost cab on our own and the four of us decided that we wouldn't stay in a hotel two hours outside of Mumbai, a hotel in the middle of nowhere, a hotel in the middle of slums.

The leader never showed up. After an hour, we found our own place to stay, in the middle of Mumbai. When we called, we asked for two rooms, and agreed to take one. A family room. We weren't picky. We wanted to be safe and we wanted to enjoy our less-than-36-hour stay in the city.

It was actually one of my favorite parts of the trip – walking through Mumbai, watching the sun set on the Back Bay of the Indian Ocean, eating dinner on a sand-covered, rooftop deck.

"Can we come back here tomorrow?" the man asked. "For lunch?"

"We haven't even eaten yet," his girlfriend replied, laughing.

"I know, but I like it."

We ran into friends, others from our group, on the street while we walked. They'd been looking for us and we'd been looking for them. We'd sent them a note by way of the leader who came and cowered in our lobby. In the long run, we ended up saving time and money for the group who left their bags at our hotel instead of their own, an hour and a half outside the city, in anticipation of another overnight train.

Sometime between finding the hotel, between showering and walking, before being asked if we wanted to dance as extras in a Bollywood film or seeing another being shot, before visiting Elephanta Island or eating on the rooftop deck, I mentioned to my roommate that the leader had reason to cower, reason to fear for his job.

Unfortunately, he didn't pay attention. I don't know that any of us really complained about Mumbai or his part in it, in any event. We did, however, tell the company that he used his position to meet and bed women who paid for his service as a tour leader, if not an escort. We might have mentioned that he orchestrated the arrangements at dinner, in cabs and in hotels so he could seat himself near the girl who reciprocated. And I'm pretty sure that at least a few of us wrote of our surprise in seeing him race through the halls of a hotel chasing said girl in his towel and turban. He might still be paying the price of our comments, but that unfortunate image is seared in my mind.

We might have complained, which might have cost him his job, but he took a position in a Western company with Western clients. We exercised our Western right of freedom of speech. Apparently, his employer took our words under advisement and he's paying the price. I think we got the man fired.



Tag: Travel

Rot and prom

One week later. One week and my apartment still reeks of rot. Rot and mildew and putrid water. It's nice.

I apologized before letting a friend use the bathroom on a walk from bar to Metro.

"It's a mess," I explained. Mildewing clothes hung in the bathroom to dry, awaiting a trip to the Laundromat. Furniture floated away from the walls to expose puddles that just didn't dry. Things that lived under the beds, storage bins and the like, found their way to the hall, the bathroom, the living room to dry. "And it smells really bad."

"That's OK," she said, afraid of walking and riding without stopping. I turned the key and paused, apologizing again. "It's fine."

I opened the door and we walked into the dark swamp that I called home.

"It does smell bad, doesn't it?" I asked.

"It is a little... musty," she replied and dashed toward the bathroom. I stayed in the living room, forlornly poking at piles of shoes and clothes, tempted to throw it all.

As the week passed, the work seemed to increase, rather than decrease, as I found new and fun damage from the flooding. Apparently, the dress I wore in my sister's wedding bled onto my junior prom dress. Fat drops of greenish blue on the cream colored satin and gold-flecked lace, a fairy princess sort of gown – off the shoulder, bubbled sleeves, flowers and lace. Gaudy.

I remember posing for pictures.

"I guess I'm not going to dance," I laughed.

"Why not?"

I held up my arms, corsaged wrist and all and looked down through the dress, the gaping neckline, to my toes.

I think that I danced. It doesn't really matter, though. I remember the pictures, the laughing, my friends and the dress. That's why, 17 years later, I still have it in a bin under my bed. That's why, 17 years later, I'm trying to save it from the effects of my bridesmaid's dress. Some day, I will give it to my nieces as a dress up dress; sooner rather than later, if the drips and drabs of bluish green set into the bodice.

The cleanup might go faster if I hadn't stopped to save the dresses, which dripped onto the floor, the shower curtain, the tub. At some point, I will have to stop and clean, wash the floors and the base boards. At some point, I will have to stop wandering through my memories and put things away. At some point, I'm going to have to try to save the shower curtain and not just the dresses that I no longer wear.

With any luck, the cleaning, the bleaching, will kill the smell of rot.


Tag: Flooding

Illegal

Montana. None of us knew anything about the category, the state, and even logical guesses, correct guesses, were pushed aside for equally logical, incorrect answers.

"How many of Yellowstone's five entrances are located in Montana?" the announcer asked.

"At least two are in Wyoming," I whispered to my team, even though we were in a room by ourselves. "So no more than three."

"Are there any?" someone asked.

"Yes, I went out one to get some cigarettes," another explained and we nodded, accepting his authority on tobacco, states and national parks.

"Three," I said.

"There are no more than two," another mused. "And if someone were holding a gun to my head, I'd say one."

The man with a pen held his hand in the shape of a pistol and pointed at each member of the team.

"One."

"One."

"I have no idea."

"I could go with one."

"Three."

He wrote down one.

Ages later, despondent and certain we had already lost the game, we heard the answer. Three. I shrugged. I hadn't contributed much and wasn't sure of my answer. I wasn’t sure of anything but the fact that I enjoyed sitting on high stools, leaning on a barrel and playing trivia with friends.

Four of us wore t-shirts that two of the men sold from a table outside the bookstore where they sometimes worked. Melancholy Ninja. Red Rover. Do you trust your kids alone with high fructose corn syrup?

"Women in Montana are not allowed to dance on a bar unless their what weighs 3 pounds and 2 ounces?"

We stared at each other blankly, our own private images running through our heads. I hadn't danced on a bar since… Had I ever danced on a bar? I'd definitely danced on a table in a bar in Mexico. I believed I had stood on a bar; though, I couldn't remember where or why. I could only remember the smooth, worn wood, faded under my feet. Ducking my head. Trying to avoid glasses and the raised edge of the bar.

"Women in Montana are not allowed to dance on a bar unless their what weighs 3 pounds and 2 ounces?"

We looked at each other and struggled for answers.

"Bra?" one woman asked, erasing images of my feet on a bar.

"That would be a really heavy bra."

"Skirt?" I asked.

"Shoes?" suggested the man with the pen.

"Lasso?" I threw into the mix.

"What?" the cigarette man stopped and looked at me.

"I'm sticking with lasso."

"That's a heavy rope," he replied.

"It makes more sense than a bra."

I think we went with shoes, but a skirt would have made more sense as a woman in Helena cannot dance on a table in a saloon or bar unless she has on at least three pounds, two ounces of clothing. Apparently, it is also illegal for married women to go fishing alone on Sundays, and illegal for unmarried women to fish alone at all, which seems safer than the law stating "seven or more Indians are considered a raiding or war party and it is legal to shoot them."

Fortunately, we weren't in Montana or Native American or from India, as the law didn't seem to make a distinction. We had enough for a raiding party but the only thing that seemed in danger came in little silver cans with a red stripe and a big blue ribbon. That and a plate of sweet potato fries made the night almost perfect.

I don't know how we placed or where. We lost. Our best round came in the form of philosophers and our worse in identifying facial hair – the Hulihee? The Balbo? The Anchor? The French Fork? At least we knew that William Howard Taft was the last president with facial hair. It served as little consolation as we muddled through numbers and game shows and I went back to thinking about dancing on the bar, on a table, and wondering how much my clothes would have weighed ages ago.

I probably would have broken the law in Montana. Mexico seemed a little more lenient. If only I hadn't been with coworkers...


Tag: Trivia

18:18 and unknown numbers

I knew better than to pick up the phone. The screen displayed "unknown number," and unknown numbers mean people I don't know. People I do not know do not deserve either the unexpected wrath of phone Kristin or the few minutes of phone nicety that I manage to eke as often as Smurfs are born, otherwise known as once in a blue moon. With any luck and clear skies, one might next catch a glimpse of it on December 31, 2009.

I hate talking the phone, the fact that I cannot hear very well and have to close my eyes, to turn off the TV and focus, seriously focus, on words that barely register, even with the phone turned up high. I hate the strange, almost painful vibrations in my left ear, which I swear mean that I'm going deaf. Most of all, I hate the sudden interruption in my life, changing gears, trying to figure out what to say on the fly.

While I relish spontaneity, I have to get my head around something before I enjoy it and I generally prefer preparation and order. My closet is organized by garment type and color. My Christmas list includes pivot tables, status and tracking information. Dollar amounts. Stores. The number of gifts per person, by family. Despite the fact that I smile before answering, I'd rather not answer at all unless it's my sister, and that's a different story altogether.

I didn't have a caller ID for years and wouldn't have known an unknown number from my office but these days I do. I recognize the almost-daily calls for Rent-A-Center, which apparently has my number or had my number or has a number something close to my own. I didn't even know there was a Rent-A-Center in the District or that so many people suffer from the sheer inability to dial a phone correctly.

The Rent-A-Center mistakes are peppered with infrequent calls from family and friends who try email, my cell phone and/or smoke signals once they realize they haven't talked to me since Christmas. Even then, they seldom call me at home.

For reason as unknown as the caller, though, I picked up last night. I picked up and smiled. I answered questions along a hollow, echoing connection between DC and the nether regions of outsourced customer service and telemarketing. Desperately, I wanted to ask, "Are you in India?" and "When was Holi?"

I could hear myself on a two-second delay, answering questions about fast food restaurants and advertising, how often I ate out, where and how. Eat in, drive through, carry out and delivery. Breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack. About dusty places from the recesses of my mind, places I hadn't visited in years, if ever, and the place where I bought my lunch.

In front of me, across the room, a paused picture faded to black and a logo bounced around the screen as I focused on understanding the questions. The accent. The man at the other end of the wireless to cable to wireless line pronounced the L's in tortilla.

"How many times in the past year have you eaten at California Tor-till-a?" he asked. "How many times in the past three months? The past month? How many times of the one time have you eaten there for breakfast? For lunch? For dinner? For snack? And of the one time you ate there, how many times were 'eat in'? And carry out? Drive through? Delivery?"

Before he hung up, he asked if he could call back with additional questions, and I said yes. I agreed. It felt like hours. Hours of painful, echoing, hard-to-interpret questions about food that I ate maybe once or twice a month.

I looked at the screen when I hung up. Eighteen minutes and eighteen seconds. The longest 18 minutes of my life, or so it felt at the time. I'm sure I've had longer, but future phone nicety would definitely have to wait until the end of 2009.


Tag: Telephones

Mechanical difficulties

The train stopped somewhere between Rosslyn and Courthouse, still in the darkened tunnel for a minute or two. It had happened on other mornings, other commutes. It would happen again.

"This train is experiencing mechanical difficulties," the conductor announced. "Please bear with me."

Twenty minutes earlier, I had noticed her voice, her clear resounding voice as she announced, "Orange Line train in the direction of Vienna. Next station... Capitol South." The latest announcement was equally clear if far less welcome.

It took two or three attempts before I left the house. I'd forgotten my SmarTrip and forgotten my phone. I forgot a pair of shoes to replace the rain boots when I got to the office. I almost forgot the magazines for the shelter, the children's book about chickens and bed time. I unlocked the metal gate to let myself out and locked it behind me. Unlocked and locked. Unlocked and locked. To the sidewalk, the apartment and sidewalk again.

I worried for a moment that I'd missed my train. The board outside the turnstiles read Vienna, three minutes, but from the top of the escalator, I saw an orange line servicing the platform. I might have made it but I'd never found much use for running in a Metro station. I waited and another came along. Two orange. I thought of all the times I'd been thrown off by a pair of blues running end to end, realizing my mistake as I emerged from night into day at Arlington National Cemetery.

The announcement, the clear resounding "Orange Line train in the direction of Vienna. Next station... Capitol South," brought a smile to my face as I settled in with the Express and then with my book. It wasn't until we stopped somewhere between Rosslyn and Courthouse, somewhere on the uncomfortable line between near and far, that the smile faded.

"This train is experiencing mechanical difficulties," the conductor announced. "Please bear with me."

I sank back into my seat and back into my book as the train pulled forward 10 feet, 12, 15. It rolled back three or four and lurched forward again, crawling up hill. Limping.

In front of me or behind me as I rode backward, a girl stared absently toward the door, an earphone hanging down. The snapping of her gum pulled my attention and held it as she stared at the men waiting by the door.

I looked back at my book and tried to read as we lurched, rolled and jumped a few feet at a time. Heaving. Swaying. My stomach heaved and swayed with it. I looked up from the book and stared out the window at a flat expanse of unbroken cement draped in cables.

Lurch. Roll. Jump.

The girl continued to snap her gum. The men still stood at the door. I weighed my options, deliberating between my messenger bag, tote and Strawberry Shortcake lunch sack. None seemed ideal. Neither did vomiting on the morning commute.

Lurch. Roll. Jump.

We limped toward the station. With every pull, I hoped we'd break free of the cement, of the walls, and find ourselves at a platform. Even if only the first car made it, we could open the doors between cars and walk single file. We could find our way out.

Lurch. Roll. Jump.

The girl snapped her gum. The men waited at the door. I longed to pry open the doors and walk along the tunnel in my pink rubber rain boots. Avoiding the third rail. Avoiding the lurch, roll, jump of the train and the roiling nausea, and the girl snapped her gum. The men waited at the door, and I tried to read. I tried to focus on anything but the nausea.

I would have rested my forehead against the window if only I had not seen the windows on a Metro train.

The words blurred together on the page, even with all of the different typesets, with the different voices, even the different colors. House in blue. And the girl snapped her gum while the men waited by the door.

The bag, the messenger bag that I'd hooked over my knee to make space, rested between my feet, tugging with each lurch of the train. Eventually, I pulled it beside me. Nobody needed the seat.

Lurch. Roll. Jump.

I longed for a horizon to steady my gaze, a window through which to hold my hand, swimming against the breeze, diving through it, as the girl snapped her gum and the men waited at the door.

"Mechanical difficulties," I thought. "It will be worse if I throw up."

With a final lurch of the train, one final heave, the tunnel birthed us into the station.

"This train will be going out of service after this station," the conductor announced. "All passengers please exit the train. This train is out of service."

As I walked toward the door, I saw a man that I knew. He'd been in the car with me the whole time. Somewhere in front of me or behind me as I rode backwards.

"Well, that was fun," he said.

"Interesting," I replied.

My 20-minute commute took something closer to an hour and a half. I wanted to retch; I almost did. But I was still the first one in the office. Mechanical difficulties.


Tag: Metro Washington DC

Games

Six and a half hours. It took more than six and a half hours to make the 250-mile drive. On the way down, we made it in something closer to four but the rain, a detour to the book fair, running out of gas somewhere along I-81 sidetracked us and hours after we left, I crawled into bed, ready to sleep.

When I opened the door to the apartment, I thought a smell from the trash under the stairs had followed me, and I quickly closed the door. Seconds later, I realized that the smell came from the apartment itself. Something resembling death permeated the air and I gagged as I walked back toward the bedrooms, along the dirt-lined hall to empty the dehumidifier.

My rug, my beautiful old rug from Turkey, showed spiky patches of over-dried tufts and damp, mildewing spots. The clothes in the bathtub had bled onto each other and stubbornly refused to dry, even a little. I hung them from the towel rod, the shower basket and a handful of hangers, sniffing each garment and poking forlornly at new, dye-based stains.

In the living room, I lit a candle and prayed the scent would overpower the stench of rot and mildew. I knew my nose would stuff shortly and my eyes would swell. I'd smell and see precious little of it before dumping the water basin again in the morning.

At some point, though, I would have to clean the floors, the clothes, the everything. I would have to strip my bed and wash the bed skirts, the sheets, the washable throw rugs and the shower curtain as well as the clothes marinating in the tub. I would have to do it sooner, rather than later, expecting houseguests when I left for Argentina in a week and a half, but it could wait another day, maybe two, while I targeted individual pieces instead of the whole.

I was exhausted, and I needed to sleep. Desperately. Operating on days, weeks, months of sleep deprivation. The drive tired me as well, even though I didn't take the wheel. I sat in the passenger seat, reading questions from a box of trivia cards, adding details, commentary and songs in my own off-key way.

When we ran out of gas, I found a box of cookies in the back and joked with the driver who'd missed the warning signs. I looked for a number for AAA. I considered walking three miles back to the closest gas station in my capris, T-shirt, cardigan, dress coat and pink rubber rain boots with the blue plaid umbrella, fully aware that none of the above matched, fully aware that it would take me well into nightfall to walk three miles in my pink rubber rain boots, buy a gallon of gas if I could find a container and walk back along the road, mere feet away frighteningly-fast-moving traffic. In the end, I sat in the car with the trivia questions.

Hours later, closer to home, after a rescue from AAA and a stop for a proper tank of gas and some food, I read the questions by the light of passing cars, using a cell phone when I found myself without. It had been a day of games and they'd made the time go faster.

Before lunch, I played hide and seek with a couple of toddlers.

"Play with me?" the 3 year old asked.

"What do you want to play?"

"Hide and peak," he said and I agreed. I would have agreed to anything but I wanted to know how his little mind worked.

I followed him into the living room where I covered my eyes and counted to 10 time and time again. He and his sister hid in the bedrooms, the bathroom, the closet, reusing hiding spaces and giggling loudly. They never really gave me a chance to find them, poking their heads around doors or out from under the beds as soon as I stopped counting.

After the 15th or 50th time, I asked to play something else and we scattered memory cards across the living room floor.

"Good job, Charlie," I said, shooting for positive reinforcement.

"Good job, Kristin," he repeated when I found my own match. His younger sister took my cards and squealed with glee.

"I have a match," she piped unintelligibly, waving them over her head.

"Good job, Emma," I smiled.

We gamed away an hour or so while their mother napped and others cooked. The rain started falling sometime between memory and fondue, so we waited to leave, playing dominoes on the dining room table, scattering the tiles, the bones, across the table where we'd so recently broken bread. By the time we finished, the rain had cleared and we headed out into the sunshine.

It stayed clear for a while, through much of the drive, the detour, the wait for help, but closer to home, the rain started again. Drops splattered on the roof of the car, the windshield, the road. We hydroplaned for a second and my voice shook as I read the next question by the light of the car behind us. I'd make it through dozens of cards or so plus dozens of songs, movies and useless facts that I wrestled from dusty corners of my mind to entertain my friend.

Six and a half hours. It felt shorter until I walked into my apartment, the dirt, the mildew and the smell of death. I needed to sleep.


Tag: Road trip Friends

Happy Mother's Day

Trains

From where I sit, I can hear a fountain bubbling outside, birds screeching and voices raised as the grownups try to find a bandage for a toddler's booboo.

"Mama," he said. "I tore the skin on my hand."

On his arm, a tattoo of Thomas the Train smiled cheerfully, oblivious of booboos.

"He has a booboo," his 2-year-old sister affirmed in an almost incomprehensible 2-year-old voice.

"What, honey?" his aunt asked. "Oh, you're right. He does have a booboo."

"I have a booboo on my leg," she said, lifting her little, capris-clad leg and croc-covered foot up the stairs and into the house. She placed a hand on the wall to steady herself and I imagined a trail of tiny, shin-height hands lining the fresh white paint. She, too, had a Thomas on her arm, remnants of the morning's adventure, of a shiny red caboose and balloons twisted to look like trains and bears, hats and swords.

We'd played with Thomas and his friends the previous night as the 3-year-old brought the roundhouse, the engines and a cash register out to deck.

"Can I buy one of these?" I asked, holding up one of the cars.

"No, they're on sale," he replied.

"They're on sale? Then, I'll take two."

"No, you can't have them. They're on sale," he replied. "You can buy the roundhouse."

He counted out his pennies.

"I'll buy it for you," he said and opened the drawer. "That's one vanilla and one chocolate milkshake and one straw… one st… one stra…"

"Stawberry?"

"One strawberry," he said. "Which one do you want?"

"I'll take chocolate," I said.

"It's not chocolate," he told me. "I call it chocolate milkshake."

"One chocolate milkshake," I repeated and he handed me my change, his change, the cost of a roundhouse or a frothy ice cream drink in the form of a gold plastic coin. I wasn't sure which – he was 3 – but we continued to play with the register, the imaginary shakes and the trains until his mom called him to bed.

After that, the adults played with dominoes, making up our own rules and racking to remember distant games of Mexican train. We read the rules and understood even less