Real
summer air came down over the course of about a single afternoon and evening a
few weeks ago, and now it's worked its way in. Humid and densely nourishing if
a little over-rich, heavy with the scent of lilacs and lawnmower fumes. It's just
past the time of year when I'd normally be staring down my collection of
flattened boxes and refusing to clean or put anything away since I'll just have
to clean it all and pack it all by the end of the month.
I'm
staying put for once, not that I've been immune to the flirtations of the For
Rent signs. But this weather makes me think of the real work of moving -- after
the giddy thrill of selecting the new, empty apartment and before the comfort
of having burrowed one's way into the neighborhood. The work of being
unsettled, trying to build new patterns of living and hoping that they aren't
the wrong ones.
I
feel like I've written incessantly about my first few months in the city, but
that isn't exactly true. It's mostly just that my antennae were turned up as
high as they could go; I seemed to feel everything three or four times over.
(And it's true that I did narrate much of it over the phone, long calls to
California that were the sole venue for a relationship for a while.) Later I
transferred much of the mood of that time into an ambitious work of fiction I'm
not ready to say I'll never finish. But it's still not done with me. In
beginning to write this here, I realize that it will be a multipart affair; a density of delicate threads occupied those short seasons.
I
would have been ready to take the first apartment I looked at in Chicago. My
mother and her urbanophobic boyfriend were driving me around getting lost and
hating everything while I became increasingly belligerent in the sincere hope that they'd kick me out of the car
and drive away. The first place was at the corner of North and Kedzie and probably
really was a worse apartment than the one I ended up with: small, dingy, with
matted gray carpet on the floor and a bathrobed older woman wandering the
linoleum corridor outside. $525 with heat, however; fair enough. The landlord
seemed nice; my family hated it. As we drove north and east into Lakeview my
mom was relieved by the increasing number of restaurants and coffee shops
where, she noted, it'd be easier for me to find work.
She
had a point. The place on Ashland had several dismaying features, but
it was technically just within the officially desirable neighborhood of
Lakeview, and close to two trains. So I could ignore the fact that the tub, in
lieu of a showerhead, had a sprayer attached to the faucet; that something in
the rental agent's demeanor suggested that the place had been sitting vacant
for many months; that the '70s-era stove was not hooked up to the wall. It was
a lot of space for a studio and for my barely-existent collection of
furnishings -- good windows, a whole separate kitchen with space for a table,
walk-in closet standing between it and the bathroom. I knew almost nothing
about renting apartments and was a little surprised and annoyed that the
landlords wouldn't let me move in that very day. It would have been so easy: all my things from college
were packed into and strapped on top of the car (including the newish, shiny
orange bike I'd bought myself, whose naive cable lock would be neatly clipped
the first night I moved in).
So
we all went home to Grand Rapids three hours away and packed it all up again
the next weekend. My mother and grandmother somehow found some empty corners of
the car to stuff with household necessities. "They have dish soap in
Chicago, you know," I grumbled in embarrassment.
I suppose
I had an idea about making it on my own, starting from scratch. As if some
silverware and cleaning supplies would corrupt that vision. Everyone -- and not
just my family but also the man at the bank who set up my new account and the
parade of tradesmen who would pass through my apartment trying to make it
livable -- was already extremely dismayed that I was staking my claim in a town
where I had no job and no prospects, with only two or three acquaintances, a
liberal arts degree from a tiny anachronism of a college, and $3,000 of
summer-job money to my name.
It
took three anxious, humid weeks to find a full-time job. I did manage to get taken on by
a temp agency right away. They sent me on a handful of $10/hour jobs across the
city, the first being a convention where my task was to sit at a table and
request that French doctors sign in as they entered the conference hall. The
French doctors fell into two camps: those who resented my presence deeply and
those who were delighted by the terrible French I served up to them. (All had
horrible handwriting, which we later were tasked with decoding into names to be
typed into a spreadsheet; many of the words we ended up with clearly could not
have been the names of actual French people, but no one we asked seemed to care
whether the spreadsheet had any particular connection with reality.) The caustic Frenchwoman in charge of the temps clearly sympathized with the former camp;
she'd spent a lot of time fussing with our appearance (I'd bought new clothes
for the job, which I still own and still dislike) and nearly sent another girl
home for wearing what were essentially fancy sneakers.
"It
is not that you must wear heels to look nice!" she spat. "Look at
her! Those are flats! Still appropriate!" The heels of my shoes were not
flat, just covered by my too-long pants, but I took in the extremely mild praise
anyway, feeling that I'd passed a test while shrugging sympathetically at the
sneakered girl.
I
have mostly not been very good at the various low-wage jobs I've taken, such
that I can still recall nearly every tidbit of praise I've received while doing
them. At the movie theater I was appalled and flattered and then appalled at
being flattered when the manager who'd hired me confided to a small group of us
that she "only hired attractive people." ("What about
Ashton?" "I didn't hire
Ashton.") There and at a couple of my restaurant jobs I served the
occasional customer who caught me in a rare moment of efficiency and said,
"Boy, you're really good at what you do." Part of me yearned to let
them know that this was false -- yes, in the obvious way that I was actually an
cringing klutz 90% of the time, but more than that I wanted to say,
resoundingly: "This is not 'what I
do.'"
When
I finally got a full-time job it was at a Persian restaurant about two miles
away, and when I finally lied that I'd gotten another, better job in order to quit as quickly and neatly as possible, the manager, Saad, said he was not surprised because, in his words:
"You are very great person." I was surprised and incredibly touched
by this. It was true that he'd been one of the nicest people I'd worked with
there -- sad-eyed, seeming a little too smart and refined for the work he had
to do, a man who insisted on trying to fix the watch whose back I'd removed and
been unable to replace before very gamely admitting it couldn't be done -- but
still: I had been a terrible waitress. I'd dropped a full glass of wine onto a man's chest and then desperately, idiotically offered to bring soda water to help shrink the ocean of purple soaking his shirt; I'd sent an entire tray of heavy, expensive lamb dinners crashing to
the floor and then, when the replacement order came out, slipped in precisely
the same spot and done it all over again; I'd brought customers dishes they had
no intention of ordering through cultural-linguistic misunderstandings.
Saad
seemed to understand that this was not "what I did." And though, as
my boss, he certainly had the right to disapprove of me because of it, instead
he accepted my chaotic presence in the restaurant and liked me well enough anyhow.
He believed in my fabricated future.
This
was valuable to me because "what I did" was very unclear at the time.
I went long stretches between in-person contact with anyone who knew anything
about the kind of person I was and the kind of goals I had. You have to make
small talk with a lot of people when you first move somewhere: repairmen,
utility workers, landlords. In response to their reasonable questions
about what I was doing with my life, I had nothing to say. I was just here,
taking up space in Chicago. Even after I got the waitressing job, I couldn't
quite say: "I'm a waitress." It wasn't a career. "I wait
tables," I'd tell them flatly, daring them to press onward. And I vacillated
between being comfortable moving through the world as a cipher and aching for
someone to intuit what it was I really stood for.
Maybe
that's part of what made my first months in Chicago feel so hyperreal -- that no one around me knew who I was. I was
the only one in charge of perpetuating that entity; I couldn't pawn off parts
of the task on the job I had and the routines I'd established and the friends I
interacted with. There was no shorthand yet for processing my day-to-day
existence, that series of constant collisions with a place that didn't know I'd
become a part of it.
This is much of the work of travel, too, I suspect. Such work
is exhausting, but exciting -- all that room for reinvention. I'd do it the
same way again.
