Darwinian weekend
Weekend mornings are an evolution. 1, 2 then 3 the children emerge in various stages of development but end as one in the same organism trailing at various lengths from the others but tethered by some invisible sinew electrified and taut, snapping with a whine, a scream, the pain of dependence in this amoebic mess of a morning. It’s breakfast time, and they remind us painfully and repeatedly with their bedside petitions for “raisin cereal” or requests to play the XBOX at what time is it?
This is Benjamin. Usually awake by 5:45 or 6 with no in between. He snaps to and is already training like a Ninja before leaving his bed. Jake up the street has been teaching him some moves.
Abigail is shortly after. She wants breakfast too, a fresh pair of pants and her hair up but then she can be preoccupied by a book or a song in her head, which she can dance to alone for more than an hour.
And I can still hear Sarah Kate snoozing over the whir of refrigerator and noise box. She snores lightly and sleeps heavily and used to, when she was younger, say loudly “I am awake. I am awake.” (Sarah did this until she learned from her older two that she could climb out herself.) Two-year-olds have mastered the art of chipping away with repetition, partly because they have no concept of how long ago they said the thing they’ve said every 30 seconds for as long as it takes. It’s like that dog barking into the night the same bark. Dogs and children can say the same things over and over, expect different results, and get them.
And cats, too. The black one we own, Oscar, meows through every room in the house at irritating times until someone feeds him or, stranger, turns the shower on then off so he can lick up the beads of water from the shower floor. He’s also been known to eat, or at least chew through, large amounts of plastic and power cords.
Each emerging life form is a threat to my survival as I fight keep my wife in her sacred sleep. This morning I succeed.
Friday Night
The server uselessly walks us through the new menu.Then I order the cheeseburger with the thick-cut bacon on top. My wife orders the chicken tacos. We both have Coke and talk about the DEFACS kids she tutors.
Later we join the middle-aged men browsing the history section of Barnes and Noble. A blond sporty mother with a smoker’s voice helps a younger girl find a book. The young teen girls peruse the Manga books. Young teen guys with hair in their eyes watch them. In the cafe a 13-year-old’s Victoria’s Secret purchase hangs in a striped bag on one hooked finger. I look at her to see what she’ll do when she sees me looking at her. She looks at me. She’s 13. It’s strange. Too adult for a girl her age. I show my wife. “Turn around,” I tell her. “Are you sure I should?” she asks. She turns around.
We order the plain cheesecake and two ice waters. The man behind the counter serves our order slowly, deliberately and with an Eastern European accent of a sort.
It’s date night. The kids are at home.
My wife reads People. I’m reading the Atlantic about a guy named Manelli and his Blue Oasis in Switzerland. It’s a death resort for suicide tourists. Over the past year he’s helped a thousand people kill themselves. A table nearby reminds us Easter’s April 4 and that we could buy an easter-y book if we wanted to celebrate. “Izzie’s coming back to Grey’s Anatomy,” my wife tells me.
"Can I buy this magazine?" I ask.
We get up. Walk into the night empty-handed fearing the day we become the people we've seen. Fearing we already are those people. Fearing what Mizelli's patients feared, not living whatever life they had left with the dignity their consciences required.
It is a very dangerous job
I do not know the clerk's name.
That makes me a bad journalist I suppose. His Asian Indian English runs together so quickly it sounds like a mumble to my Southern ears, but I pick out the words "prostitution" and "drugs" and finally "working at a gas station is the most dangerous job" before he steps out to move his car, leaving me alone with racks of porn mags in plastic bags, male part and pleasure enhancers behind the bulletproof glass enclosing the register, cigarettes and lottery tickets.
Why am I here? Well, I came here for this reason. To...buy a bag of trail mix and try to notice some things. But in trying to leave after five minutes of snooping I realized my keys were in my locked car.
This gave me plenty of time to peruse the Marietta Daily Journal and share several awkward moments of silence and difficult communication with the store clerk whose name I'll go back to get later on this week.
My job there isn't finished.
Last I remember about this store from many years ago was a large lady who worked the counter, swiveling in a backless chair between cigarettes and scratch offs. And when I was in fourth grade and used to walk here from a nearby park to buy a Fruitopia and wait on my dad to pick me up, the outside bathrooms worked.
Four or five months (could be longer) now, yellow caution tape has stretched across the bathrooms' openings, and I can only guess this is just as much a security measure as the surveillance cameras linked to a room full of men who will call at the first sign of trouble. (This is what the nameless clerk told me).
"They are broken," the clerk says. "You can go see. You can go try them. Go! Try them!"
He's smiling and saying all of this very quickly. I suspect he's had to explain this many times before.
I suspect the "broken" bathrooms are closely linked to "prostitution" and "drugs."
"It is a very dangerous job," he tells me, again.