This Is How It Is
Jessica Collins
Across the parking lot, out of the dust, Sam is coming, dragging cigarette smoke behind her tiny shoulders which are slouching out of her thin-strapped tank top. She is so pale in the glare of the summer sun, so frail a frame against the backdrop of screaming semis and speeding cars, that at first I think perhaps she is a ghost, a shimmer in the air from the heat, a deity rising out of the concrete.
Even as she nears, as I can see the sharpness of her cheekbones and the darkness of her eyes and hear her sneakers scuffing and smell her Camel Light, I can’t be sure she’s really there. It seems so natural and plausible and fated; but, then again, I’ve spent so many lunch breaks at the picnic table imagining this scene—plotting her movement out the screen door, down the porch steps, along the shoulder of the highway, across the couple dusty blocks to see me—it could be a daydream. It’s like one of those commonplace things that gets all distorted and grotesque if it’s stared at too long, like the mouth of somebody chewing.
But she is here, and she says “hey,” and she sits down on the bench across from me and begins picking at the fray of her cutoff jeans.
It’s a day that, even though the air is dry, it’s so hot that it’s heavy in my lungs and on my skin. It’s better than the humidity that we’ve been having this summer, I guess, the kind that beads up on my face and neck if I so much as try to move. But it’s still only bearable in the shade of the Coke umbrella, on the white concrete of the patio, within arm’s reach of the automatic door so that bursts of conditioned air reach me as it blinks open and slams shut again.
The sky is a dark, dry blue. Cicadas drone from the trees, louder even than the hum of the air conditioning unit and the interstate traffic. I’ve got iced coffee in a paper cup that is soggy and sweating from the heat.
“How’s it going in there?” Sam juts her chin out at the dumb blank face of the market. It’s brand new and still smells like fresh paint and plastic. Its new baby blue vinyl siding and the perfect black asphalt and painted lines of the parking lot stick out like a sore thumb on this strip of Route 6 that’s all dank hotels and body shops cluttered with the carcasses of cheap cars.
There’s a hopeful new sign out by the street, the soil around its pressure-treated posts still settling: Truckers Welcome. It mirrors, on the other side of the highway, the remnants of another sign from another decade, which hasn’t lit up in years and is now caved in and sinking lopsided into the ground: Pleasant View Lodge Motel. The motel’s crooked red shutters on the windows look like weary-lidded eyes. It’s an exhausted building, not refreshed by its new view of the Ashlin Market and Restaurant.
“It’s going all right,” I say. “Josh Jones is my boss. That’s kind of funny. Nobody really knows what they’re doing. The food’s not so good.”
Sam smiles vaguely at the road, squinting her eyes as she exhales.
“God, how can you smoke on a day like this?” I say, and then regret it. “The air’s just so hot already.”
“Yeah, but it’s not carcinogenic.”
“That’s true,” I say, and we both laugh. I’m still wearing my apron, and I twist my fingers up in its strings.
We don’t fight, we never have. Other girls fight over boys or what somebody said behind their back, but Sam and I, our silences come like snow drifts and then gradually melt. It hasn’t always been this way. We used to talk on the phone every day and write notes in school and letters across town in the summer. We had indistinguishable handwriting and would finish each other’s sentences.
I try to remember the last time I saw her. I think it was at the party at David’s the weekend after graduation. She had come late, with Shawn and some girl I didn’t know, who hadn’t gone to our school. They had sat apart from everybody else and I had gone over and tried to talk to her a few times, but she was on something and she wouldn’t look me in the eye. She’d been hanging out with Shawn and Gray for a few months. I went out with them once in awhile, but they’d just drink behind the bowling alley in the beds of their trucks. It was boring so I stopped going.
I tell her some stories from the restaurant, for something to say. Some stuff about Christie and Charlene from school who also work there, how the soft serve keeps going bad in the machine and we have to drain it into buckets. Last week, a little boy licked his vanilla cone and cried, “It tastes like medicine!” His mother snatched it from his hand and licked it herself before handing it back over the counter to Ashley, who tasted it, too.
Just last night we’d had to drain it, and somebody had left the bucket propped up on the thin rim of the machine, so that once it filled three quarters full the weight shifted and the whole thing toppled to the tile floor. The sticky mix was everywhere; it splattered all the way to the back of the kitchen and on the walls and the counters, which we’d just cleaned. It pooled in thick puddles on the floor, and we had to open the doors and windows in spite of the air conditioning because the sick sour smell was so strong. We went through two mop heads, pushing the dirty gray sludge across the kitchen and back again, and a whole bottle of bleach.
“I’m dating Gray,” Sam says, when I’ve run out of stories. She doesn’t look at me, and I don’t react. I don’t like him, and she knows it. He never talks, just sits sullen on the couch when we hang out, with his dirty jeans and his long ponytail. He’s got two kids and, according to Sam, a psycho ex-girlfriend.
“Yeah? How’s that going?” I ask.
“It’s pretty crazy,” she says, lighting her third or fourth cigarette since she sat down. “Crystal has it out for me. The other night at the bowling alley she chased me in the parking lot in her car. I swear to God she almost ran me down. Gray jumped out at the last minute, and she stopped. And then she threw a bottle out the window at him.” Crystal is the ex-girlfriend. I can’t really blame her.
“And before that whole thing, Stacy and I were in the bathroom, this is still at the bowling alley, and Crystal’s hoochie friends came in, these two haggard fat girls with huge hair, and they were getting all in my face and one of them had these nail scissors and she was like, holding them to my neck and shit.” She fiddles with her beaded necklace. It looks familiar. I think I made it for her or she made one for me just like it.
“That’s incredibly fucked up.” Somehow, at some point, we developed this act, and we fall right back into it now. She tells me these stories, and I express mild amazement. Maybe on some subconscious level we both know it’s better than awkward silence, than the fact that we just don’t have much to say to each other anymore. In a weird way I can tell she wants me to be impressed but at the same time she’s indifferent to what I think, as if she’d be sitting here telling this story whether or not I was across the table.
The sliding door bangs open, and Josh Jones comes out with his nametag on and his clipboard.
“Hey, Sam, how’s it going?” he says, smiling at her and sitting down with us at the picnic table.
“All right” she says. “You?”
“Eh, it’s going,” he says, and runs his hand over his thick blond fuzz of hair. “Man, working on salary is not what it’s cut out to be. I was here sixty-five hours last week!” He waits for a reaction and gets none. His family owns the Ashlin; his uncle built it and his dad is the general manager. They gave Josh the restaurant manager job the day we graduated.
“That’s crazy,” Sam says.
“What have you been up to all summer, Sam? I figured I would have seen you around more. Where are you working?”
“I’m not. I haven’t been doing anything really. Just kind of hanging out.”
“Well, do you need a job? I’m going to have plenty of openings in a couple weeks when school starts up. A bunch of the kids will be down to part time. You guys could work together,” he says brightly, looking from her to me across the wide red board of the picnic table. “Wouldn’t that be great?”
Sam has on her thin suggestion of a smile. Neither of us says anything. It’s the sort of thing we would have dreamed up for our future together a few years back: waiting tables at a truck stop grocery store, drawing on paper placemats with crayons.
“I do the schedule and stuff, so I mean it would totally work out. Or, I mean, if waitressing’s not your thing, Sam, I’m sure my dad will have cashier spots opening up. Or even the courtesy desk. I mean, that’s the best job really. You just cash checks and sell cigarettes.”
There’s silence for a moment and then all three of us open our mouths to speak at once. There’s silence again as everybody abbreviates their words for everybody else.
“Josh,” Sam says finally. “That’s sweet of you, thanks. But I’m not really looking for a job. In fact, Isabel, that’s what I came by to talk about.” She clears her throat. There’s directness in the way she looks at me that takes me off guard. Her gaze is perfectly still and fixed. She looks like a different person all of a sudden, like she knows something, or has made a decision. She looks sure. I have never seen her look this way before. The Sam I know is vague and disinterested; normally she wouldn’t flinch if a plane crashed in the parking lot right now. But here she is looking at me like, “This is how it is.”
“Let’s go for a walk,” she says, quietly. She means her and me. She picks up her cigarettes and her lighter and her keys that she’s laid out on the table. We leave Josh sitting there with his papers; I give him a little shrug. A very thin breeze lifts the split ends of her hair just a little as she stands. Her nails are raggedy and bitten raw. My heart flutters in my throat like a thick butterfly. Something isn’t right at all. I follow her into the sun, into the wide black of the asphalt parking lot. She walks slowly, with her free hand in the pocket of her shorts, like she’s waiting for me to catch up with her and walk side by side. But for some reason, I hang back; I study her thin ankles above her dirty black Converse. There’s a black flower drawn above one, and I wonder whether it’s marker or a homemade tattoo.
I don’t know where she intends to walk, since there’s not much around except some sad dead shrubbery, the parking lot, and the trailer park. She starts to head around the building, down the backside, in the shade again, where the fans and air conditioning and ventilation system hum and drip and breathe hotter than the sun. I feel like we’re going somewhere weird, like something has shifted and may never be the same.
Out back, the dumpsters are hidden by a thin wood lattice, still fresh looking, unweathered. It sure doesn’t keep the smell in though; I relive the spoiled soft serve, the bloody butcher paper, the reject produce. Sam lifts herself with her thin arms onto the loading dock. I get up beside her; we let our sneakers bang, soft rubber on the hard concrete, almost in sync. We are looking out at the chain link fence that divides our lot from the trailer park.
“At night, by myself, I used to come over here when they were building this place, and sit up here or on some piece of construction equipment. It’s funny how it always seems like nothing will change. This lot has been vacant all of our lives, this scraggy place next to Pine Acres, across from the hotel. Now all of a sudden it’s the Ashlin, and it’s totally normal, and it’s where you work. It’s just here.”
“It’s still new,” I say. “It’s not quite normal yet.”
“You know what I mean. Soon, we won’t be able to imagine life without it. The time when it wasn’t here will seem like a whole different time and place.”
“It’s good though. I mean, we needed this in town.”
“I know it’s good, Isabel. It’s just different. That’s all I’m saying,” she says, as if I’m not getting it.
“Listen. I’m leaving. Gray and I are going to go out west somewhere, and get our own place and get jobs. I came to say goodbye.”
My stomach feels full of cement, my head blank like the sky today, transparent and clean. I think carcinogenic.
“Out west? What’s out west?”
“You know. California or something. Or maybe Seattle. Gray wants to start a band.”
“California? You’ve never even been to California! How do you know you’ll like it?”
“I just will. I know I will. Anyway it’s bound to be better than here. This place is rot, Isabel, you know it. You hate it too.”
“Sure, I hate it, but what else is there? Do you have any money? How the hell are you going to get to California? And what are you going to do when you get there? You’ve never worked a day in your life. And you won’t know anybody. What the hell are you going to do there?”
“Gray has money. He’s been saving. And I’ll have him.”
“What about his kids? You can’t take some kids’ father and just go off.”
“Don’t get so fucking moralistic on me, Isabel. I don’t want to hear it. Have you heard of natural selection? Survival of the fittest? I’m not going to survive if I stay here, Isabel. I will suf-fo-cate. I’m saving myself, all right? You always talked the big talk about leaving once school was over, but now here you are settled into this job like it’s the last thing you’ll do. Not me. I’m not going to get some job and get knocked up and stay here the rest of my fucking life, like my mom, like the rest of these guys will do.” She points with her chin at the back door of the building, white without a handle, the kind that doesn’t open from the outside.
I have never seen Sam express so much opinion about anything. I can’t think of a thing to say. This isn’t our act at all. Of course we used to talk about leaving, about getting in the car and driving off down Route 6 and never coming back. And of course we talked about California—the golden glow on our horizon, another world, with palm trees and perfect weather—but everybody does.
“Look, I don’t expect you to understand,” she says. She jumps from the loading dock then, landing bent-kneed, and I see her jumping from the swing set in elementary school. I jump too. The hard asphalt hits like a hammer at the bottom of my feet and all the way up my legs. Sam is half an inch shorter than me and a month and a half older. Looking at her face with her high cheekbones and crooked teeth, her thin lips, her bangs falling over her eyes, is like looking at my own reflection. It’s so familiar, so routine, but suddenly it makes no sense to me at all. It’s just a collection of molecules and cells and bones and colors.
I must look at her a long time, trying to put the atoms of her face back together in a way that seems logical, so that finally she grabs me by both shoulders and gives me a little shake and her accommodating smile. She puts her arms around me, and she smells like cigarettes and dryer sheets.
“I’ll miss you, Isabel,” she says.
She turns to go, and walks off, at her same unhurried pace, as if she’s expecting me to come walk beside her but is indifferent to whether I actually do. She heads for the chain link fence at the back of the lot and toward a thin gap in it that I hadn’t noticed. Before she goes through, turning sideways to fit her little hips, she gives me a slight wave and a half smile.
I stand next to the dumpsters and the loading dock with my arms crossed and my apron on, as she goes through the fence and across the field and into the low pinewoods. There are a bunch of kids playing war in the trailer park, and a huge blue sky above the parking lot, and way up, almost indiscernible, I see the wide wings and slow loop of a buzzard circling.
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