Sometimes, when you take an aimless drive from one quaint suburb on the manicured shores along the bay to another, when you reach the farthest point, you could find a man sitting on a bench. From your car, the bench could look to you like the vestige of a lost continent, sunk between the million-dollar-plus condos that rise like waves on the shore and the yachts buoyed by winds in distance in the bay.
The man himself, maybe you tell yourself, is Robinson Crusoe, for surely there is something of the shipwreck about the way he looks, even through your dusty windshield, even at the distance from which you glimpse him. Then, should you park your car and walk to where land and water meet, you are likely to see that the man is clutching a rumpled paper bag. At this point, you will know, without a doubt, that what is in the paper bag is cheap liquor. As you turn away, because turn away you will, you might notice the other parked car in the tiny lot meant to discourage disruptions in traffic of any kind.
What you’ll see, when you pay attention, is the odd couple waving towards the sea in an idling expensive foreign car. Maybe you will find yourself struck by the deep brown skin patina of the driver, or maybe it’s only her youth that will impress you. Neither her skin color nor her age happens to be a characteristic in plenty supply in the population that lives along these shores. Of course, you are now curious about the driver’s companion, who is as ghostly white as the driver is richly dark. And, without a doubt, you will know that the ghostliness is the mark of years and illness and that no amount of money or nothing in this world -- or of this world -- can exorcise it.
Well, then, you think, it is time to move on. Not that you have somewhere to be. No. But here you feel like an intruder. You take one more look at the boats, their hoisted sails blinking in the light amplified by water and fog.
And you move on, that you do, as you drive through the winding road, back toward more familiar sights. Along the way you decide to stop at the grocery store before it closes for the night. It’s a local grocery store, but one that caters to complicated appetites. You know that if you want to, you can have something of the world beyond this place, at least in small bites of the fare that comes from far and wide and which crowds the shelves of the store.
By the time you park your car and enter the store, it is dusk. It is Friday night, so the store is nearly empty. You push your cart aimlessly, because there is really nothing you need, but you want something. Then, as you turn into one aisle, you come face to face with a woman in a wheelchair. The woman is huge, her flesh billows over the sides of her chair. Her chin is covered with rough patches of hair. She won’t look you in the eyes. You don’t blame her, because you figure she knows already, only too well, what she’ll see in the eyes of whomever she looks at.
The two of you keep crossing paths through the aisles, as if on purpose. Which is odd, because by now it is clear to you that the woman is roaming as aimlessly thought the store as you are. But the woman still won’t look at you. You look away and she floats by in her wheelchair, touching items on the shelves.
The last you see of the woman is her wheelchair gliding through the exit door. You wonder why she didn’t buy anything. The fact that she left empty-handed rattles you more than when you first glimpsed her. Because, admit it, no matter how sensitive you think you are to such things, seeing this woman, the enormity of her being, of her self, immobilized in a chair that ferried her so silently did unsettle you.
But let’s face it: you were unsettled already the moment you got into your car and drove off. Sure, the countryside promised to soothe you, to ground you, to place you. And it did put you in your place. In a way. In the end, no matter how far from home yo got, you were in your own neighborhood after all that traveling. The man with the paper bag, remember him? You turned and walked away as soon as he got up from the bench and started to walk toward you. Weren’t you curious in the least bit if he was going to offer you a drink, share some stories? The young black driver and the old white woman waving at the boats that might have well been bobbing on the seas of another planet, so out of reach they were for both, though not for lack of vigor or money, but in the wrong distribution for each one of them, well, they looked at you too, but you looked away, the same way the enormous woman did in the store where she preferred to stroke the merchandise instead of looking at you and seeing the hunger that no money, no armada on golden seas, no grocery store filled to the brim with foods from every corner and curve of the world can satisfy.
So there you are, Friday night, let loose in the suburbs. Maybe you think you don’t belong here. But then, surely you will realize that is where you live. You can stop driving now: you have reached your destination.
