Vignettes III

I knew I didn't have any dollar bills, the lunch line wasn't an option today. I turned the puddle of nickels over in my palm. The California sun or the light of childhood memories made or makes the crumbs of my lesson money reverberate with liquid silver. Everything in the vending machine was more than 65 cents. I'd have to try to sneak off campus to get to the Albertsons on Longhorn Drive.

I sat with uncharacteristically bad posture, breathing in my classmates' lunches. Peanut butter. Pizza. Chicken strips. Lunch period talk in the band office was of the new Maslanka symphony, the wailing mother trombones in movement one, and the new piece whose title was an incomplete line of the Lord's Prayer. Bread. Banana. $1.00. A flute player unwrapped her muffin. Blueberry. Muffins, $1.50. “Where's your lunch, Brittany?” My teacher's question shot through the chatter. “Oh. Oh, it's okay.” Green paper fluttered into my field of vision. “Go get lunch.” Bread. “Oh, no, no, it's okay, it's, I'm okay.” Bread. “Take it.”

“Take it.” I shouldn't have told him. I didn't even particularly want to see her again. “No, I can't, professor. It's okay, I'll call my mom and see, or I can work out a payment plan. Or I'll... I can't take this.” Thirty dollars was a lot more than five. Therapy was a lot more than bread, although it was bread I had faith in. “Call Betsy and make an appointment for next week.” I didn't need therapy twice a week. Once a month at the most. She'd already cut my bill to the lowest possible she was allowed to accept. Desperate to make rent (which I didn't end up making anyway), I'd cut back on the none-essentials. I cut a lot more. And this man, who'd already given me thousands of dollars of the university's money, gambled on me (and lost, as it turned out, four years and zero Bachelor's degrees later), and put up with so much of me, had noticed, and was making an offer on his peace of mind. And I sold it to him. “Okay. Thank you. Thanks. I'll call her in the morning.” “Promise? You will call her tomorrow?” “Yeah, I will. Thanks. I definitely will. Thank you.” I tucked the crisp, square money in the securely-hole free front left pocket of my jeans, walked home in the perpetually noontime Tucson sun, and tried to fall asleep before I felt hungry again.

Vignettes II

"There is no continuity to my subjective experience," I explain to the wall. "[white]," says the wall. When I recover some bits of myself, volatile bits, jumpy electric phenomena, the roaches in the duplex, the moldy smell of the bathroom, being so cold before school, waiting for the sun to come up, scared, too, but mostly cold, before the janitor got there to open up the gates, they become solid and present and I become volatile and mysterious. "This is why I must be suppressing the feeling of being oneself," I figure. "[white]," says the wall.

"I feel guilty, terrible, so guilty it lingers for days, spending money on groceries." The look she gave me across the table, kept at the ready with kleenex, disoriented me like an outsider's astonishment always had. "You feel guilty," she leaned a long time on the mouthy vowels of the word, "guilty about buying food?" She paused. "You don't have to feel guilty about buying food." Other people don't feel bad about buying groceries? You mean people just go to the grocery store and put things in their cart-- I guess I never use a cart, I guess those are there for those people who would just put things in a cart-- and it's okay? They don't feel guilty about it? "Oh, um--" I looked at my knees for thirty more minutes until she gently suggested I come in the same time next week.