Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

“What areyou doing up there, Sadie?” my father asked, over the long-distance wires. “Your aunt is gone, you’ve got no family there anymore.”

“I have friends here,” I said. “I have a job.”

The job part was true, of course, but I had nothing that rose beyond friendly acquaintanceships so far.

“I just don’t understand it. You up and quit school for no reason that I can see, go live in a little town that isn’t even where you grew up,” he said. “You’re not even taking night classes, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“Why would you want to live up there, in the middle of nowhere?”

“It was good enough-” I started to say, then caught myself.

“Good enough for me to send you there when you were 13?” he said, finishing my thought. “Is that what this is all about? You’re angry?”

“No,” I said, “no, I’m not. Look…” I twisted the phone cord around my thumb. “I’m just trying to have a life. To make a life, that’s all.”

In the silence that followed I could almost hear him think that it wasn’t much of a life, an industrial job and a rented room, but he couldn’t say any more. I was 19, an adult.

“What about Christmas?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you like to come home then?”

New Mexico at Christmastime. Light glowing from the farolitos - sand-weighted brown paper bags with candles in them- and the sopaipillas and rich mole sauce of a traditional Noche Buena feast on Christmas Eve…

“Is Buddy coming home at Christmas, too?” I asked.

“Yes,” my father said. “He’s got a week of leave.”

I put another twist in the phone cord. “I can’t come,” I said.

“Why not? Surely you’re not working?”

“The mine runs 365 days a year,” I said. “It costs too much for them to shut the equipment down and then start it back up. And I was the most recent person hired. It’s too early for me to ask for Christmas off.”

I wanted him to believe it, but he wasn’t stupid. “I haven’t had you and your brother under the same roof for years,” my father said. “Why is that, Sadie?” The bafflement in his voice seemed, for all the world, to be genuine.

My thumb was turning red from having the phone cord wrapped so tightly around it. You know why. I tried to tell you, and you wouldn’t listen.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t come.”

January came,and with it the coldest weather of all. Night came so early that I walked home from work in darkness, and it was too cold and icy to go out after dinner. My chief entertainment became the paperback novels I checked out, several weeks’ worth at a time, from the library on Saturday afternoon.

I should have realized something was wrong with my life when I strayed into the wrong section of the library, found a paperback of Othello, and immediately wanted to check it out.

After leaving school, I’d believed I’d never torture myself with anything an English teacher would approve of ever again. But then, standing amid the faint attic scent and educational posters of the public library, I felt a thrill of pleasure and nostalgia, remembering Othello as being the only Shakespeare I’d really liked. Something about the world Othello, Iago, and Cassio lived in, that world of martial duty and sometimes perverted honor, had spoken to me. At home on those coldest of nights, I read and reread Othello. The library had to send two overdue notices before I returned it.

If this were a movie, Othello would have changed my life. I would have moved on to other Shakespeare plays, loved them too, and finally enrolled in community college. But it didn’t work out that way. After Othello, I went back to the pulp novels I’d preferred before.

And then, in the spring, I found something else I liked to do.

In the maintenanceshop, I worked with an Armenian-American girl, thick-waisted, dark-haired, pleasant-looking, easy to talk to. Her name was Silva, and she seemed to live for one thing: the dance at the VFW hall every Saturday night.

“You should come,” Silva said more than once, but I’d been noncommittal. Dances at the VFW hall sounded too much like bingo or pie suppers at a church to me, but one March night, I decided there was no harm in checking it out.

At nine-thirty, the scene at the VFW hall was surprisingly animated; people spilled out onto the steps along with light and music from inside. The high spirits of the crowd surprised me, but it didn’t take long to learn the secret.

Technically, these dances were dry, meaning no alcohol was served. But, as is painfully typical of small-town life, the majority of the young people inside the hall were in some stage of intoxication. Bottles were passed around in the shadows of the parking lot, and if you weren’t lucky enough to know someone who’d brought a bottle, there was Brent, a local entrepreneur who parked his Buick LeSabre near the VFW hall and sold liquor from the trunk. Ill at ease, and feeling like an outsider, I quickly sought him out.

Alcohol hadn’t been a part of my life since a few girls’ nights out at UNLV. The single shot of whiskey hit me hard. Pleasurably hard. Not long after, a young man I didn’t know asked me to dance, and I said yes. Silva, flushed with exertion and pleasure, brushed by and winked at me. I felt the world beginning to drift away, just a little. I liked it. Up until that moment, I hadn’t realized how depriving and monastic an existence I’d created for myself. It was like a burden that I was only now letting slip from my shoulders.

That week I’d gotten my first pay adjustment, the one that marked the end of my initial six-month period at the mine. I felt newly rich, and in my current state of elation, I realized something: if making the world recede a little was pleasant, there was no reason not to make it recede even more. A lot more.

“Morning, Sarah.You want a ride?”

A bright Monday morning in early May. Kenny Olson had pulled up alongside me in his big Ford pickup truck, about a half mile from work. I clutched my purse closer to my ribs and ran around to the passenger side.

Kenny was one of the mine’s security officers. Security mostly meant he kept hunters off company land, and chased away kids who came to cliff-jump and swim in the pit lakes. He was as good-natured as anyone I’d ever met, virtually never calling the police on trespassers, but merely sending them on their way. In addition to his security job, he was an every-other-weekend citizen jailer for the Sheriff’s Department. When he wasn’t doing that, he was hunting and fishing. Somehow, he and I had become friendly across the three-decade-plus divide between us.

“Thanks,” I said, scrambling in. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work already?” Kenny usually came on at the same time as the first shift of miners, the 7-to-3. Support staff, like me, came in an hour later, at eight.

“I told ’em I’d be late. Took Lorna to the doctor.”

“She’s not sick, I hope?” I said.

“Oh no. The ear doctor. She’s getting a hearing aid,” Kenny said, swinging wide through an intersection. “Now she’ll be able to hear all the stupid things I say. She’s gonna lose all respect for me.”

I laughed. “That’ll never happen.” I set my bag between my feet. “Hey, I’ve started saving up for a car.”

“You told me something like that,” Kenny said.

“Really?” I said, puzzled. “When?”

We bounced over the entry to the employee lot, the bad shock absorbers on Kenny’s truck intensifying the bump. Kenny didn’t say anything as he steered the truck into a space at the end of a row. He didn’t answer my question, and I thought maybe Kenny needed hearing aids of his own, although he’d never seemed to have a problem before.