Beautiful Mountain

My grandmother looked over at me as we stood juxtaposed in her kitchen. "Christine, you've been more confident lately. College has been good for you."

"Gram, you're the one who deserves the praise,” I said, yawning. Her eyelids drooped like a curtain after a show, and the kitchen became silent. I could hear my Dad's snores from his bedroom down the hall.

“Looks good,” I said, glancing at the pan of eggs. “We got the salmonella out, eh?" I said in my hodgepodge of accents. There was a hint of my trip to Wisconsin, and “eh”, the token reminder of my grandmother’s Canadian citizenship. Beneath it all, the “Standard American” dialect of Northern Virginia revealed where I was raised.

She didn't comment, but simply turned to the pan, and nudged the eggs. I saw her gaze meander in a vague trip around the grime of the periphery—the dried-on grease, the yellowed cream shade of the wall-paper beyond, and the pots stacked on the counter, some soiled. My dad’s software boxes and insulin syringes mingled with mugs, decor, and gizmos on the dining-room mantle. Though we'd done some cleaning this morning and the day before, we restacked too much, and threw away too little. Revolutionary change did not seem possible.

We had just prepared the first non-donut breakfast in a week. Yahztee scoresheets, Maxim men's magazines sent to Gram after my brothers’ practical joke, ads, and bills got lifted and shifted from the table to the junk-piles beyond. Gram grabbed an orange, I poured the milk, and we exchanged a smile as we served the eggs, as if to agree it was the start of a pleasant morning.

Orange juice dribbled down my hands when my dad came into the kitchen, tired and not hungry, but smiling. “Are you ladies enjoying your breakfast?” His lips were thin but wide, his eyes large, and his arms spread in the air as if to hug the table. Gram smiled back, so her lipstick-pink lips matched the delight in her eyes.

“Yes, very much so,” she said.

“Yup," I said, surprising no one. I would have said it that way after a gourmet feast or a stale bread crumb.

I gulped the last of my milk as Gram offered him a sandwich, only to hear him refuse it, his smile fading to show his nausea. Another stone was ripping his kidneys, bloodying his urine, and leading to an appointment that day at eleven sharp. He lifted the hems of his pants to show purple legs; crusted with pus, they held the scars of chronic illness, war injury and chronic pain. He stored his stones in an old orange plastic medicine bottle, and rattled them like coins in a spendthrift’s pocket.

Barely able to keep his eyelids from falling, he fumbled amongst the magazines for the Yahtzee sheets, while I took five dice from a shot glass next to the salt-shaker. It was a favorite game for the two of them, when they had pencils to keep score. Their dog, Gus, flossed his teeth on #2s, and left splintered wood and graphite under the elegant chairs in the living room.

At 10:15, my dad laughed in triumph while I glanced at the clock. He had arranged the dice—a forty-point combination of 2-3-4-5-6—back to back, with one on top to be the train engine, and was choo-chooing them to a drowsy Gram, in his usual "large straight" victory celebration. I looked past the clock and through the kitchen doorway, out to the wall beyond where someone, contrary to habit, had not closed the beige curtains over the windows.

The kitchen lamp, full of bugs and dust, grudged the same light in morning and evening, but the sun of a heat-advisory day burned the grass outside. I saw the Montebello bus, beige and brown, come in with a gruff hum and pause outside the building. I’d be taking that bus today for the first time since Spring Break in my sophomore year in high school, back when Gram could outclass anyone with Old Town Alexandria commentary.

My dad did a Yahtzee Victor’s Gloat on his way to the refrigerator. Once there, he grabbed two essentials for living: a small bottle of insulin and a twelve-ounce tin of pineapple soda. A shot and a drink later, he was on his way to the clinic, and Gram had become too drowsy to say goodbye. One hand rested on her pencil and the other on her game-sheet as she slumped towards the table, asleep.

My grandma, who loved coffee in her youth and up to her stroke, had left a sixteen-ounce mug of Taster’s Choice full, though well in reach of her hands. I took a sip from my own small mug, and suddenly noticed the gruff buzz of the air-conditioning, which had forced Gram into a sweater and was now raising goose-pimples on my arms. I looked at her dyed black hair, the suggestion of open-heartedness in her expression, the light pink color of her lipstick and the minute smear of dried egg-yolk on her chin. She looked like a luck charm in her shamrock-green sweater; small but solid, present and coping.

I had hugged her, not made-up and dressed-up, but crying in a blue bathrobe, months before, when the stroke was new and ways of moving on hadn't been invented. I had gone away to school later, and she and Dad had kept going without help--they had leaned on each other and remained standing.

I looked again at the clock, and with a final gulp of coffee, rushed to find the bus schedule amid the clutter of the message board next to the phone. The bus would come at 11:15, and would arrive at the subway station about ten minutes later.

In the bathroom, I tossed cold water on my face, and changed from my maroon sweatpants into a loose light-blue skirt. I left my footwear as it was—white sneakers, not too scuffed. Today called for an hour or two of riding and twice that time walking. I grabbed my laptop bag, filled not with a laptop but with fifteen resumes in a red folder, and was nearly out the door when a soft snore reminded me of something vital.

I went into the kitchen, turned Gram’s Yahtzee sheet over, and penned a note. She may have remembered I was taking the subway into Washington—I’d told her three times I think, or twice at least—but she’d been known to worry anyway. I took a moment to kiss her on the forehead, checked the time, and disappeared with a minimal bang out the front door and into the beige emptiness of the stairwell. Gus yapped his disappointment after me, and I had gone down a full flight before the barking ceased.

I didn’t mind the heat—I can count the occasions when heat has bothered me on one hand, not counting sunburns. It was over ninety Fahrenheit—edging towards one hundred degrees in fact, if the Weather Channel predicted right. The bench outside of the building was built of polished wood, which was warm but not scalding when pressed against my legs. I blinked my eyes and then kept them closed, getting a bit more rest for my eyelids before the squinting to come later.

Two minutes had passed when the sound of a vehicle made me open my eyes again; then I ascended and walked down the chill aisle of the brown-upholstered Montebello bus, after a casual “hi” to the driver. None of the seats faced forward—they were arranged sideways, with the aisle broad enough for a walker or wheelchair. I looked toward, but not out of, one of the tinted windows that lined the length of the vehicle, and stretched my feet out for what would be only a short ride. The trip from the bus to the Metro subway train was perfunctory, almost unconscious.

I didn’t take the time to examine the Metro then, after knowing it so many years. When I was six years old, I remember thinking of a subway ticket as something that promised fun, like a trip to an amusement park—that much excitement and anticipation, with none of the sick-to-my-stomach apprehension going along. At that age, the air conditioned, seventies oranges and faded whites, the crowds of people and the quick-passing lights of the underground tunnels were the sights of a new journey into the world.

But as I rode today, I didn’t look out the windows or around, more than the token amount I would have in any other place. Instead, I fixed my eyes on The Brothers Karamazov, my favorite book from the high school days in which my sole obsession beyond genre-fiction fantasy was Dostoyevsky. It was a library copy, brown and well worn, and perhaps its pages were more inviting for me, seeing the book so well used. I prepared for motion sickness as I opened to the marked page—Ivan on his way to Smerdyakov, knocking a man unconscious in the snow.

Dostoyevsky's morals, blended as they were with his understanding of human horrors, lit candles in my mind in high school. Alyosha, like Christ in Ivan’s story of the Grand Inquisition, was someone I could believe in, whose presence walking the earth required no leap of faith; someone who elicited in me the non-theistic acknowledgement of sainthood. Like Alyosha, I was devoted to the holy elder Zossima.

There were few people on the subway then, in the middle of the day—the rush hour crowds were already nested in their cubicles. Mothers with small children, en route to the Smithsonian perhaps, found plenty of sitting room, sharing the space only with me and a handful of old men, gray-haired and for the most part, gray-suited. One moment I’d be reading, the next letting the book fall to my lap as I thought through some Karamozov theme threading its way though my own identity; and then at times I’d be conscious of eyes on me, covering my powder-blue skirt.

The clothing felt unnatural. The last time I’d felt comfortable wearing a dress was at age thirteen—thin and gawky then, I still hadn’t outgrown my child-sized glasses, though I had graduated to a woman’s size three outfit. It was floral and loose and short, back in the early and short-lived days of lace-style bras, before the costume stage of womanhood lost its childhood appeal and became foreign.

But I had chosen the powder-blue skirt from the back corner of my closet, home of the dust-gathering outfits from middle school. It was tighter on my hips than it used to be, and the length, once past my knees, was now slightly above them. Half the pantyhose in my drawers had runs, mixed in with the unflawed hose years ago by a somewhat careless child-me who didn’t believe in waste, to say it charitably. Gram and Dad would have called me a pack-rat, with the knowing smile that implies the accuser is a rat of the same color—or, of course, the same family.

Sweat dribbled down my armpits as I rode the escalator into the sun. The shock of the heat grabbed me and I felt the sun pressing my bare arms like a lover. I had forgotten deodorant and suntan lotion, but decided that the coolness of the sweat would cancel out the reddening of my arms. On an active one-hundred degree day, it’s healthy to sweat; and besides, as the eggshell white was sweat-stained, I felt more powerful—twenty-one instead of thirteen, a woman instead of a child, a real person instead of a dressed-up doll.

The prim and clean me, manufactured to join the vast system of manufacture--the workforce--was gone. Going rather, but not gone yet, since the mission remained. I clutched my laptop bag against my shoulder, and fumbled with its zipper till I could fish out my thrice-folded list of addresses. The first stop was just a block away, and if it weren’t for the overwhelming silent presence of the heat, I would have gone cold from frazzled nerves.

The city smelled of tar, and reminded me of London, where my nostrils were fringed in black each afternoon from smog. The theatre was just around the corner from a 7-11, large and with a red sign impossible to miss. The doors were glass, wide enough for a 400-pound person to get through with ease, and a gold and satin interior was visible within.

As I pushed against the door, I realized I had no notion where to go, whom to speak to. I blushed as I thought of the near empty resumes warming in the black heat of my laptop bag. A handful of amateur theatre experience building and painting. A bit of playwriting and dramaturgy. Some theatre history, some mediocre directing, and a wealth of knowledge about Shakespearean acting and plays that spent itself to near-poverty along with my memory. What would a theatre like this hire me for? For Shakespeare or for nothing.

I looked again at the sweat streaks on my white shirt. Light and bright, I’d done my best to play the bushy-tailed role in this scene, but the contradictions in me, I saw, had reached their hands to the forefront nonetheless. The sweat, tennis shoes, and lack of make-up combined to make me look not like a geek but worse, like a nerd, and a shy one at that. Wrong costume for the day. I turned to the box office, where a young guy surprised me with politeness. He instructed me to go out and in again at a different entrance—one not open to the public, where administrators presided from the second floor.

Turning, I dragged my feet a few yards down, and paused at that door where I didn’t belong. I hesitated, thinking of Gram, who had worked her way into independence and rent-paying by age sixteen. She hadn’t been qualified to work as a stenographer then—she was only halfway through the training course—but she kept her job by unstretching the stretched truth. She learned to process the sound, spelling and meaning of a word in an instant—any word, even the ones they used in college, where she, as a girl, had not been sent. Confidence was the key for her—persuading whoever needed persuasion, and enacting the same deception for herself, so that in the finale, the retirement, there was nothing but clapping and no one was let down.

I remembered what she told me this morning—how she admired me for standing on stage, just remembering lines and not going too gray-faced from edgy nerves. I opened the door, and as I reached in my mind and my muscles for a smile, I found that it took little forcing. The laughter of young women came from above, and a mass of them passed me on the stairs, rubbing their ebullience into the roots of my mind. Moving past them with a “hi” that they returned more than once, I saw, in the manager’s chair at the top, a woman who looked no older than me, in a pastel-purple shirt, little makeup, and the most welcoming silly smile I’d seen before mounting those stairs.

The brown and dark blue upholstery and the polished wood of the desk reminded me of Montebello—that community of the elderly named “beautiful mountain” though it was located in the flatlands of a city suburb. There were plants on the desks, filled more with greenery than flowers, and I suspected that, unlike the Montebello plants, they weren’t silk or plastic. The alto of her voice, smoother than my treble, was like wine on my sweat, but she had no excellent news for me. She’d recommend me for the only thing open, the box office, she said. Her voice was helpful and yet held a cultivated hopelessness, which I recognized only because the two of us had it in common.

"Thank you," I said, smiling not so much from what she said as from the heat-headache that was gradually diminishing in the air-conditioned room.

"I remember..." she began. She entered into a talk about jobs and theatre that lasted perhaps ten minutes, and managed to seem neither perfunctory nor impersonal, though we were strangers. Listening with half an ear, I supplemented the story with my own imagistic daydream.

That day depression was out of reach; that moment her pep talk was an outreach to me. She was one of the Alyoshas of the world for me then, one of the Zossimas, one of the Grams. She remembered being in school four years ago, she said, walking down these streets in powder-purple, doing the same thing, with what I think must have been a bit more promise and success. I guessed two things then: I would not get a job here or anywhere today, but I might at best come away with the knowledge of her smile, as long lasting as my grandmother’s old memories and my dad’s war horrors. The afternoon, in keeping with the morning, was exquisite.