“Dead.”
The waiter came by, reeking of weed and burnt bacon. Jenny handed him her menu and ordered a patty melt, fries, and a big side of ranch. “Big, China-big.” I was in a breakfast mood, but not a meat mood, asked for eggs over easy and hash browns to soak up the yolk with.
“See? You didn’t need a menu to know you wanted that.”
Silence except for the frying of the grill and the occasional fork and knife scraping against plate. An elderly couple at the table next to us eating pancakes and not talking or looking at each other. A table of college-aged guys too enthusiastic about everything to have had anything less than a six-pack each. The guys cheered and pumped their fists in the air when the waiter refilled each of their waters. “Hey,” Jenny said suddenly, grabbing both my hands in hers. “I’m really sorry about your dad.”
“Oh.” I looked down at our hands. “It’s okay. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
She let go of them and nodded. “Okay, what do you want to talk about?”
It was an awkward question even though it shouldn’t have been. I realized that directness wasn’t a quality I was used to, that the conversations I had were often dictated by others and made me feel nervous, like I was trying to transport a handful of sand from location A to location B without losing a single grain. Conversations full of questions that were looking for very specific answers, leaving no room for any bit of thought or meaning. Existing on conversations like this was much like eating grilled chicken and steamed vegetables for every meal—doable, but dull. What did I want to talk about? So much.
Last week, I learned that raccoons were actually clean creatures. I was leaving Dad’s shed at around 4:45 a.m. to crawl back into bed before Billy woke up when I saw a raccoon hunched over the cat’s water bowl, meticulously scrubbing his paws as if he couldn’t stand the thought of sullying the taste of two-day-old garbage spaghetti with dirt. He was washing harder than I did before my shift started.
No one knew I was an avid basketball fan. It wasn’t that it was some big sort of secret, I just never had anyone to talk to about it. Dad had been a tight end for a semester in college and thought all sports where you weren’t pounded into the ground were pussy shit. Billy was the type of athlete that thought nothing of sports after he de-cleated, Mom liked admiring the player’s bodies but didn’t care about strategy, who won or lost, all my old high school friends thought sports were low-brow. Tim Duncan was a badass motherfucker and I just wanted to say that out loud to someone.
I had been thinking constantly about han, a feeling that had been killing generation upon generation of Korean people. According to Mom, han was born in the gut and rose to the chest. Every injustice, every instant of helplessness, when the only reply to a situation was a mumbled “Fuck this,” all of it noted by an invisible scorekeeper in your heart. Han was a sickness of the soul, an acceptance of having a life that would be filled with sorrow and resentment and knowing that deep down, despite this acceptance, despite cold and hard facts that proved life was long and full of undeserved miseries, “hope” was still a word that carried warmth and meaning. Despite themselves, Koreans were not believers, but feelers—they pictured the light at the end of the tunnel and fantasized about how lovely that first touch of sun would feel against their skin, about all they could do in wide-open spaces.
I wondered if a more complex language like Korean had a singular word to describe the feeling of getting off a long shift of a physically demanding job and finding that, for at least half an hour after, everything, every last thing, was too beautiful to bear.
Jenny asked the question so simply—“Okay, what do you want to talk about?”—and I nearly reached across the table and grabbed her hands back, whispered thanks against each of her knuckles. I was about to ask her opinion on lakes and oceans—which did she prefer, contained and musty, or vast and salty?—when she suddenly sat up straight, eyes wide. “So—what did you think of that meeting today? Hold nothing back.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know, it was fine.”
“Come on, you can do better than that.”
“Okay,” I said. “It was hard to sit through. And I don’t mean that it was too long or that the seats were uncomfortable. It just hurt to be there, you know? Every time someone finished speaking, I wanted someone to hug me and then, immediately, I felt bad for being selfish. There didn’t seem to be a right thing to say.”
“It’s the clapping that gets me, the forced support,” Jenny said. “I just want someone to finish talking and instead of clapping, say, ‘Wow, Patricia. That really fucking sucks.’ ”
I laughed. “I liked what you said in the meeting.”
After a woman who was trying to decide the proper way to tell her husband she didn’t want to name their future daughter after his dead mother, Jenny told the room about her hometown of Bismarck and how the sky looked different there, the flatness of the land allowed you to see more of it than in a place like Los Angeles, where buildings covered every square inch. The speed of things was slower there, people didn’t walk places, but strolled. If someone in front of you in line at the supermarket was taking over a minute to fish out that last penny they needed from the depths of their bag, you wouldn’t yell or ask for a manager, you just smiled and said, “Take your time.” If you knew their name, and you probably did, you might offer them a penny of your own and tell them not to worry, there would be a next time and they could help you out then. Cheap gas, diner sandwiches slathered in mayo, multiple lakes a short drive away—there was no better day than picking up a grilled cheese and fries to go, eating them by the lake as you read your book, hopping off the dock for a swim when you got too hot. When you got home from the lake, damp and satisfied, one of your neighbors would probably be hosting a BBQ for someone’s birthday, a husband’s promotion, just because it was a day that ended in “y.”
“Bismarck sounds like a nice place,” I said. “I wish I grew up somewhere like there.”
The waiter dropped off our food. What sounded good to me less than fifteen minutes ago now seemed disgusting. I shouldn’t have gotten the eggs over easy, they looked too soft and runny, like the chicken who laid them barely had time to say goodbye. The hash browns glistened where I wanted them to be crispy. I forced down a few bites to be polite. Jenny finished half her sandwich and all of her fries before she spoke again. “I didn’t grow up in Bismarck.”
“But you said in the meeting?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That was a lie.”
I sucked on my fork. The metallic taste was soothing. “Where did you grow up, then?”
“Actually, not far from here. I went to high school around the corner. My first kiss was on the bridge over the 110 Freeway.”