Prologue: “You Change”
Prologue: “You Change”
Let me be very clear.
I’m not mocking the tiny cashier’s fractured English.
As someone who is breezily called “ma’am” by pizza delivery dispatch, I don’t dare.
I hesitate to even quote her. I was raised not to ridicule the accent or language barrier of another. Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi and his buck teeth in Breakfast at Tiffany’s always disturbed me. Jonathan Pryce’s eyes taped back to look Asian as The Engineer in the original production of Miss Saigon was just wrong.
I could rephrase it more PC: “Here’s your change.” That would sound better. But I just handed this woman with a bun a twenty-dollar bill, and it’s what she said.
“You change.”
My attention is elsewhere. I am lost, as friends have called it, in aesthetic astigmatism, my eyes twirling different directions in survey of my radius. It’s what I do, what I used to do, edit your stuff, reduce clutter. I’m that precious someone who finds exposed electrical cords distasteful and wishes all lamps ran on batteries. I’m the dumbass who complains in the sports bar if an HD broadcast isn’t set to the right aspect ratio. Little things, big things, they all count, and gift or curse, OCD Me is compelled to mentally reset this bodega, counter to shelf, beginning with the crowded checkout.
Yes, I know bodega is Spanish. This Hell’s Kitchen mart is Korean. But everyone in New York calls them that, and I am a Newer Yorker.
The first thing I’d do is find a new place for those small foreign-made American flags, since I stopped counting at fifty-two stars. A chalkboard tells me I can have a $3 Sanwich! For fifty cents more, can I get the D? Only in New York City is a cellophane-wrapped stale corn muffin an impulse purchase. Vials of ginseng energy drink provide companionship to spools of twine. It takes a lot to lash your nerves together here, I guess.
This is the stuff that drives me bonkers.
A lot drives me bonkers.
Like that dairy case, which I want to squeegee. It looks like someone’s been kissing it. I can barely see the Yoo-Hoo behind the glass.
She says it again, serenely. “You change.”
The cash register says eighteen dollars and three cents.
A male employee, trying to activate an edible color from the bottom of a soup kettle, stops stirring.
“You change.”
Here’s an idea. Why don’t you change? And how’s that courtship working out for Eddie’s father?
It has been said that most of the biggest moments in your life pass unnoticed or unremarked upon. That’s funny. My last year has been accompanied by a John Williams’s score. I just did my damnedest to stay afloat. I can make order of your disorder, but for my own life, I’d need a considerably bigger feather duster.
This is not, you see, not where I thought I’d be on my forty-sixth birthday, buying two bunches of daisies in dripping, crinkled plastic for myself, ahead of another customer holding a plastic container of fake crab with the real stench.
No, this is not the life I thought I’d be living.
