Carola Strassburg
Nina sold most of what she had, got her deposit back from her landlord, and chose to go to Amsterdam because, at the moment, it was the cheapest city in Europe to fly to; United Airlines was having a special. Her mother accused Nina of going only to get high. On the payphone, at the airport, Nina said, “Sometimes I just want to go. I've done worse things,” and drew a circle on the floor with the toe of her sneaker.
“Rarely,” her mother said and Nina hung up. She held the silver hook down for thirty straight seconds, only releasing it when she was sure she'd hear the insistent drone of the dial tone. She admired the fingerprints left on the glossy metal. She hadn't used a payphone in a long time, and thought it had a nice, nostalgic feeling. She was glad some things didn't change, that there were still payphones in airports.
The international terminal at SFO was busy and Nina felt her pulse speed up as she weaved through the crowds. She liked the mix of people, the Asians, the Latinos, the Americans. She liked the idea of blending into a crowd that was essentially different.
Her flight took off in two hours. When she had first arrived at the airport, she'd gone immediately into a gift shop and bought a t-shirt of the Golden Gate Bridge, a candy bar and a pair of oversized black sunglasses with costume jewels dotting the arms. “These are the style now,” she told the cashier, slipping the sunglasses on. She looked at herself in the reflection of the glass counter. The glasses almost completely covered the top half of her face and she giggled, liking the feeling of being unrecognizable. “Do you think they'll think I'm a movie star?” she asked the cashier, who was an Indian man, and reading a magazine.
“What movie star could you be?” he asked. He glanced at her with squinted eyes and looked back down at his magazine.
“Any movie star,” Nina said, pushing the glasses up on top of her head. The brightness of the overhead lights made her blink.
“I have seen Jennifer Lopez come into this store,” the Indian man said, nodding his head in jerky movements, “She bought a Coca Cola. A diet.”
“We call it a diet coke ,” Nina said. She grabbed her bag by its plastic handles and flung it over her shoulder. As a child, she'd once tied a handkerchief stuffed with apples and an extra shirt around the end of a broom and walked around for two straight days with it on her shoulder, until her mother had to sweep the kitchen and Nina ran to her bedroom, crying. “Why would you want to be a hobo, anyway?” her mother had asked. At the time the clunky, unbalanced weight of the broom had seemed like a big burden, hardly useful for such a small load, but Nina never told her mother that.
At the airport, Nina didn't have much luggage, just a small duffel bag that said Oakmont High Soccer on the side in big, cursive gold letters. The letters were fading, scratched away by years at the back of her closet. She had unearthed the bag only the week before, had stared at it, not recognizing it at first. She liked it though; it was just big enough to be carried easily, not heavy or unmanageable. She shoved her new shirt and candy bar into the bag, put her sunglasses on and walked towards her departure gate, anxious to get there, to see the plane. Amsterdam seemed very far away from Northern California, and even though she knew there would be Burger Kings and Gaps, she felt like there was something waiting there, something she'd never seen.
‘I need you tell me I'm being stupid,” she told her mother when she first called from the airport.
“You're being stupid.”
“I have two hundred dollars and a t-shirt of the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“How far do you think that will take you?”
“The t-shirt is nice. It's an actual screen print, not a drawing, like most t-shirts.”
“Nina, what you have to realize is that sometimes things get better on their own. You can't do anything to fix it.”
Nina heard a rustle behind her and turned around to see three paramedics in stiff blue uniforms jogging through the terminal, carrying red boxes. She pushed the sunglasses to the top of her head and followed the paramedics, clutching her duffel bag and moving directly in their wake. Her uncle Robert had once followed a fire truck, making Nina and her cousin Georgia squeal with delight in the backseat when they saw the house fire they were led to, orange, paisley-type swirls dancing up and away from the house, backlit by a calm half-moon and only two or three dozen stars. Two more paramedics came through, pushing Nina slightly out of the way. They rolled a metal cot, the top of which was covered in a thin, white linen. People in a medical emergency don't need sheets , she thought.
Aaron would find her ridiculous, Nina thought. On vacation, he bought practical items; shawls for his mother, salt and pepper shakers, a bong or pipe. On Pier 39, he scoffed at the tourists in their San Francisco sweatshirts and hats. “They could at least wait until they get home to wear that stuff,” he'd say. He wore his UC Berkeley sweatshirt like a jacket, tugging it on over whatever shirt he wore, and when Nina pointed this out to him, he responded, “Mine's a school ,” and Nina realized how simple she was to not be able to tell the difference between supporting a city and supporting a school.
She'd met Aaron during her one semester at UC Berkeley, before she lost her financial aid and went to work at a bookstore in the Haight. Aaron was disappointed that she'd dropped out of school but forgiving because he liked the Haight, liked talking to the old hippies—the ones still “true to the game,”—liked getting discounts on the I Ching or The Odyssey . He'd try to read his book as he walked along Haight or Page, but failed because he constantly had to swerve out of people's way.
“It's impossible to walk and read anymore,” he said once, resting his elbows on the glass counter and grabbing a bottom lock of Nina's long brown hair. He smoothed the strands out between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it, just enough to make her wince. “Sorry,” he said, letting go and shoving back.
“I've never been able to,” Nina said. Aaron looked at her and then quickly flicked his eyes away again, his teeth biting into his lower lip. “Why don't you go to the park and read? There's benches,” she said.
“Benches.” Aaron gave a sharp laugh, grabbed his book and walked away.
Nina went to Golden Gate Park during her breaks, would sit on a bench and watch the people walk by. She liked to guess who was a tourist, who was a local, who had driven in for the day. She wondered what she looked like, a native or someone who had no idea where she was going.
Sometimes she'd go and stand on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The people who walked by in tie-dye and beads looked like cartoons to her, the constant parade of people in their comfortable sneakers and sunglasses propped up on their heads much more interesting. Once, she closed her eyes and tried to feel the history, tried to imagine a revolution starting amidst the cracked sidewalks and the constant car horns around her. She felt only heat as the creeping sun ate away at the morning fog. The small tendrils of sweat forming in her lower back were cold when she touched them, and made her feel startlingly alive.
The paramedics led Nina to the food court, where a woman lay on the cold tile in front of La Salsa. A crowd had formed in a neat circle around her, a respectable distance away, and though people dodged and tugged their way to the front, an empty circle of space remained around the woman and her fallen tray of food, scattered bits of lettuce and beans on the floor next to her.
Nina moved her way up to the front and squeezed in next to an Asian man with a small black suitcase on rollers and a gray business suit. She watched as the paramedics knelt next to the woman and checked her breath and pulse, strapping tubes to her. “One day you just want some Mexican food,” Nina told the Asian man, “and then you go down. Just like that.”
The Asian man turned slightly away from her. Her bag hit his suitcase. “The funny thing is,” she continued, “La Salsa's supposed to be healthy. It's not like she's in front of McDonald's. La Salsa's fresh .”
“I'm sorry,” he said, his words accented. He turned farther away from her, until she saw the straight line of his shoulders and he had to observe the action with a turned head.
Nina noticed an Air China tag on his suitcase and she nodded. The puzzle of this man made sense to Nina; he was Asian, he was going to China. A businessman, she thought, and was going to verify it when all four paramedics lifted the woman onto the cot. “She's not even that big,” Nina said.
A woman on the other side of Nina, short, with dark curly hair and thick lines carved around her eyes and mouth said, “You never know what will happen.”
“It would be nice if you could have a good guess,” Nina said.
When the paramedics had rolled the woman away on the metal cot that squeaked once her weight settled onto it, Nina returned to finding her gate. She was flying United, which disturbed her, because she'd rather fly KLM, the Dutch airline. It made sense to fly the Dutch airline to Holland. The United planes had big red, white and blue stripes on them. She was not unpatriotic; she had held sparklers at Fourth of July and had marched against the Iraq war until the sign she carried had given her a splinter. She liked being American because it was a solid something , a claim she could take without hesitation or question. Still, she understood a desire to escape from one's own country, if only to verify one's own existence, to assure oneself that daily life was not a fixture of country, but of life itself.
Aaron said once, “The U.S. has no culture.”
Nina thought of her mother's tuna casserole, of Brady Bunch reruns when she was a child, of Popsicles on hot summer days that dripped down her face and made the back of her hand sticky when she'd wipe it up, and said, “How do you define culture?”
“By anything but this ,” Aaron had said, and waved his arms with such vigor that Nina believed him. They were in the Marina, at a café on Chestnut, drinking black coffee and watching the people walk by with their controlled, fast clips, their cell phones, their twine-handled shopping bags. “They're all so uniform,” Aaron said. “In sweat suits .”
“I think it's called lounge wear,” Nina said. “And it's Saturday. Who dresses up on a Saturday?” She tapped her fingers on the tabletop and her lips thinned into a straight line. “People who are going to weddings,” she said, “and 7 th Day Adventists, because they go to church on Saturday. Oh, and people who are going somewhere fancy, like the opera or ballet.”
“Let's go,” Aaron said, and he led them over to the Palace of Fine Arts, where Nina looked at the murky water and wondered what it would be like to strip off her clothes and dive in. She wondered if there were rules against it, laws maybe, even in San Francisco. She looked over at Aaron, who was staring across the water and tugging the grass up in small, childish fists. “Oh no,” he breathed then, and she watched as he tried to smooth all the grass back into place, to cover the melon-sized, circular bald spot he had made. “Oh, no,” he said again, trying to push the fragile, thin stalks of grass back into the dirt and Nina looked away, pretending not to see.
*
At her gate, Nina stood at the large glass window and looked at the planes. She saw Air India, Air China, and, in the back, so she had to squint to see it, Kenya Airways. Her mother had never left the country, but when Nina had called to tell her she was going, she'd said, “At least you're not flying on one of those third world airlines.” She hadn't liked Nina going to the Bay for college, hadn't approved of her dim, damp little apartment above a dry cleaners in the Mission. Nina's roommate, a lesbian activist with a butch haircut and an overbite, had scared her mother, had made her whisper, “This can't be safe .” As it was, Nina's roommate paid little attention to her, and seemed surprised when Nina brought Aaron home, looking between the two of them for some kind of answer, then shrugging her substantial shoulders and complimenting Aaron on his bike. Her name was Dorothy but everyone called her Diz, except Nina, who considered nicknames an inner-circle privilege. Aaron liked Diz immediately, had even kissed Nina on top of her head after she had left, saying, “Sometimes there's hope for you.” Later, Diz said that Aaron hadn't “looked like Nina's type” and nodded like an answer had been given when Nina said they were friends, not lovers.
Nina tapped her hand on her leg. The gate area was filling up with people reading, listening to music, staring idly into space, talking to each other. She leaned her forehead against the cold glass, closed her eyes and listened to the noises around her. At first she heard mostly English, but some people walked by speaking in a rapid Asian language she didn't recognize, and nearby two flight attendants in blue business-like suits chattered and laughed in Italian. I could be anywhere, she thought.
Nina opened her eyes and saw a teenage girl standing quietly a few feet from her, her hand on the glass.
“Which plane is yours?” Nina asked.
The teenager didn't look at Nina. “We're going to London,” she said. “On vacation.”
“Are you excited?”
The girl dropped both her hands to her side and sighed dramatically. “I don't like being with my parents,” she said, and Nina saw lines of metal on her teeth.
“I had braces too,” Nina said.
“I hate them.” The girl shrugged. “Whatever.”
“Whatever,” Nina agreed.
Nina called her mother again. “I'm not going to get high,” she said. “Pot gives me a headache.”
“I can be there in four hours. If you want to be picked up.”
“It costs sixty cents every time I want to call you,” Nina said. “Do you remember when it cost twenty five?” She pushed her sunglasses down over her eyes. “What does the oak tree look like?”
“It's blossoming early this year. There's little white buds, already.”
The bank of payphones Nina used was in the center of the terminal walkway. She turned to lean against the stand and watched the crowds of people walk towards her, then split into two groups to go around the line of phones. As the people passed, no one looked at her, everyone too busy with their tickets and bags and the children they led along with one hand to glance her way. She had the sense that everyone was moving too fast to be more than a consistent blur winding around her.
When Aaron had seen the flowered duvet and pairs of colored flip-flops that Nina had in her dorm room at Berkeley, he'd said, “I've never met anyone like you.” He'd smelled of B.O. and cigarettes, but he seemed to be part of what one did in college, so she went to Phish concerts and thrift stores with him, sat quietly in the middle of his bed while he studied philosophy, laid awake at night listening to his husky snores and uneasy, tangled breath. “Without me, I'd hate to think who you'd be,” he said once. “I hope I've shown you reality.”
“You've shown me the city,” she said. Aaron was a question, a puzzle she didn't know how to solve. His passion for city life was addicting, invigorating, and yet he had an awkward, stilted way with people outside the city; in front of her mother his arms had hung loosely at his sides, his head slumped, his voice a mumble. His self-assurance had fled, and a day later, when he came into the bookstore, he was higher than she'd ever seen him, his movements slow and languid, his voice escaping from the corner of his limp, sagging lips when he said, “Your mom. What a piece of work.”
Nina watched a plane take off, impressed that its massive bulk was not a deterrent to its flight. The belly tucked up like a woman sucking in her stomach. “There's a million reasons why I want to go,” she told her mother.
“In a way, I don't blame you,” her mother said.
“Learn the world,” Nina said, quoting from a poster for a study exchange program she saw across the way.
Her mother sighed. “Learn something ,” she said.
Aaron used drugs, he told Nina, as a way to alleviate stress, to gain clarity on a world that was becoming more dark and shadowy everyday. “It's a fucking mess,” he said.
He had started to hang around the bookstore more, was often seated outside when Nina showed up to unlock the door, talking to the bums who frequented the corner, giving them sandwiches and crumpled bills. When he wasn't high, he was pale and drawn, angry sometimes, grinding his teeth, and somber others, touching the pale skin on Nina's arms reverently, talking in a soft voice about his mother, goat cheese, when he lost his first tooth, popularity, George W. Bush.
He told her, “This is life. This is the heart of the city.”
Back at her gate, Nina sat down at the end of a row of black vinyl chairs. There were armrests between each one to discourage napping, she supposed, and the thought made her sleepy all of a sudden, made her yawn so wide moisture seeped from her eyes. She looked at her ticket, which showed an arrival time of 15:35 into Amsterdam. She did the math from military time to standard time in her head, and thought about a world where you didn't immediately recognize what you saw, where you had to learn a new way of doing something you'd done a million times before.
She curled her feet up underneath her, rested her elbow on the armrest and tucked her head into the crook of her palm. The sleepiness was now a yawning ache. She looked around the gate area. Most people looked bored, a few tired, no one excited. Their plane coasted in, and airline workers perked to attention, walked to the podiums, picked up phones, pushed buttons. People noticed the plane, looked up, but few went to the window to watch. Nina remembered how, as a kid, she'd thought airports would be exciting, everyone happy, in a good mood, going somewhere different from where they were, being whooshed away to a place too far, too exotic to be covered by car.
They would board soon. The plane stood at the bottom of the jet way like an answer, large, solid and overwhelmingly real.
Nina knew Aaron would notice she was gone when he woke up with a headache that made his eyes pinch, when he was asked to adopt a Cambodian orphan for twenty dollars a month, when the thin, wispy fog wound it's way through the city streets. He would notice she was gone, would consider the world and realize it all fit together perfectly.