Boca 2, or Snapshots - catching up

[click]

In the snack car en route to California, a scraggly middle-aged man starts talking to me. He's working on what smells like his fourth or fifth little bottle of train wine, and I know this because his mouth is about two inches from my nose. He's talking about his ex-wife, a "crazy bitch" who "ruined him forever." I back up into a booth and sit down. He say something like "Aw sweetheart, you don't want to sit with me?"

I look up. "You don't get to call me sweetheart unless we're related or dating, got it? Now back off."

He starts to yell about crazy bitches again. I shoot a pleading look at a woman standing near us. Come on honey, help a sister out? She looks away, possibly searching for a staff person, I tell myself. I look the man in the eye and try to talk slow, certain, controlled. "Sir, you are in my space. I need you to back away at least three steps, right now."

Another voice interjects: "Honey, is this man bothering you?"

I look up, and up. The voice is coming from a person about six feet tall, with shoulders like a former football player, a fuzzy pink sweater, dangly beaded earrings, and fitted flare jeans. The voice is deep. I see the hint of stubble on her chin.

"Yes," I say, while the man looks up behind him.

"What are you, some kinda freak?!" he shouts at her. I'm on my feet in a flash - "Don't you dare -"

"Sir," she says, cutting me off with an I'll-handle-this look. "I am probably the only person on this train with both a pair of stillettos and a pair of genuine cojones, so take it from me: you don't want to be on the recieving end of one of my shoes. Now leave her alone."

He sputters, and a train staff person shows up, takes him by the elbow to lead him to parts unknown.

I stick out my hand. "Thank you - I'm sorry, he - oy. Thank you ma'am. I'm Dane."

"Charlotte," she says, shaking my hand like my dad taught me. Her hands are perfectly smooth, with the vaguest hint of lotion. She smiles a little bit. I try again,

"All of us gotta keep an eye out for one another, y'know?"

"Yeah," she says, with an eyeroll towards the woman who ignored me. "Be careful, ok?"

I want to stay and talk to her for as long as the train ride, but she slips past me, buys a hamburger, and makes her way up the stairs without another word.

[click]

I'm two hours early for the open mic and slam in Denver, so I ask the sweet (white) server with dreadlocks for a safe place to stash my duffel bag and some dinner. She obliges cheerfully, bringing me a plate of pasta the size of my head, asks where I'm coming from. "Hwarlakeity" I say, mouth full. It's the first meal I've had since my last dinner in Salt Lake City.

"Oh, cool. And where are you staying here?"

"I don't know yet. I'm planning to see what poets show up and if I know any that would let me crash for the night.

She nods like this happens all the time.

Two and a half hours, and one announcement on the open mic later, I'm still almost without a roof for the night - one poet, a stranger, offered her couch as a last resort. I'm pacing around outside the cafe, strategizing for the slam when I run almost headlong into Paulie.

Paulie runs the Jewish reading at the National Poetry Slam, so we've been in the same room for about four hours in the last year. He catches me in a hug, old leather, cigarettes, two-day beard and fruity body wash. "Do you know where you're staying?" he asks my shoulder.

"Not yet," I say.

"Sure you do - with us." "Us" is him and Ian, the hetero-life-partners extroadinaire. Their couch turns out to be squashy and big, the kitchen clean and free of dirty dishes, and the hundreds of vinyl records arranged thematically, or alphabetically, or somehow. I spend my days in Denver mostly alone, wandering, writing, reading, watching movies. The boys get home at 8:30 and 10:30, and I make dinner every night and ask about their day. By the second night, I've stopped feeling guilty about imposing on them. They tell me to come back anytime.

[click]

Grandmama and I sit on the white couch with our laps full of photo albums. This is the fifth one, chronologically: her childhood, her high school yearbook, her first wedding album (from getting married at 18!), the book of her first son's first year, then my father's first year. She tells the stories that go with them as though she's been repeating them over and over in her head until I ask.

We pause from the page-turning to talk about Grandpa, the first one, the one I never met. She says my father is just like him, that sometimes, he'll say a certain word or turn his head a certain way and it makes her pulse pause. She asks me if he ever talks about him, and I say only when I ask.

We're alike, Grandmama and I. We let the past keep our shoulders warm, pull stories around ourselves like the coat of many colors that nobody wants. We keep the dead on our lips, in our children's names, next to shopping lists and in poems. My father does not do this, except in what he can't help. He goes to the cemetary once a year, and brings my sister with him. I haven't asked him to take me. They are alike, she and him, needing the separation, the distinction. A time for everything.

Maybe he knows I can't go with him, that's not how I make memory sacred. But he knows what is important, or guessed well enough. The deep blue tallis bag with the goldenrod embroidery spelling out his father's initials appeared from the closet a week before my Bat Mitzvah. A place to hold that which I wrap around my shoulders.

Grandmama's husband peeks around the corner. I wonder if he feels left out of these hours we spend on the couch. I remember to thank him for his patience later, at dinner, Grandmama's and my in-jokes settling like the ghosts of extra guests at the table.