Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

He pulled the automatic-transmission lever over to park and killed the ignition, then turned to me. “You don’t remember being in my truck this weekend, do you?” he said.

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Memory flashed, but only dimly. I’d been dancing Saturday night, as usual. I’d gotten a ride home from friends. Hadn’t I?

“That’s when you told me about wanting to buy a car. I didn’t know if you were serious. You were saying a lot of things. You were drunk.”

I looked around the cab. “I didn’t throw up in here, did I?” It was the only reason I could imagine for the disapproval in Kenny’s pale-blue gaze.

“No,” he said. “But you were staggering when I saw you walking. You were drunk out of your head.”

“I had a little too much,” I said. “It happens.”

“I saw a girl once, died right on her porch, key in her hand. She was too drunk to get it in the lock. Laid down to sleep it off in ten-degree weather. I had to tell her parents,” Kenny said.

“I can take care of myself,” I said. “We’re into spring, anyway.”

Kenny watched Silva cross the parking lot. “This isn’t much of a job for you, you know,” he said. “Do you ever think about the future?”

“Actually, I do,” I told him. “I might want to work in the field.” The field was where the real mining was done, where miners ran shovels and drove production trucks so large their tires were taller than I was.

“You want to work in the field,” Kenny repeated, his voice skeptical.

“Women can be miners,” I said.

Kenny shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. This isn’t about women’s lib, Sarah. Don’t pretend that it is.”

“Someone’s got to do that kind of work,” I said. “The money’s a lot better than what I’m doing now.”

He sighed.

“Don’t worry about me, okay?” I said. I pulled the strap of my purse back up over my shoulder. “I’ve got to go in.”

In early June,a freak storm dumped five inches on us in the middle of the day. A Thursday, with the weekend coming on. The fresh snow occasioned an impromptu snowball fight among those of us on the 8-to-4 shift. I hit a rangy young mechanic, Wayne, square in the face. He caught me and put a handful of snow down the back of my shirt. Screaming, I yelled to Silva to help me, but she was laughing too hard.

On Monday morning, Silva was in a more sober mood.

“What’s wrong?” I said, when she didn’t respond to my attempts at light conversation.

“Aren’t you worried about Wayne?” she asked.

Wayne. I’d danced with him Saturday night, I remembered. More than one dance. After that, my memories jumped ahead to Sunday morning. Cheryl Anne had come into my room, angry. Someone had knocked her hair dryer from its hook on the wall into the toilet bowl last night; did I have any idea how that might have happened or why someone just left it there?

“What about Wayne?” I asked Silva.

“You don’t remember?” she asked.

That was fast becoming my least favorite question.

“You broke his nose,” Silva said.

I shook my head, stricken. “No way,” I told her, but already I was uncertain of my own words.

“He’s saying a guy did it, and his friends are backing him up, because he’s embarrassed that a girl did that to him. But it’s all over that you did it. They say he was hitting on you pretty hard all night. You don’t remember any of that?”

My hand rose to my upper arm. I had a bruise there, since Saturday night. I’d written it off as the result of stumbling into something, perhaps in my encounter with the bathroom wall and the hair dryer. Now I realized it was the right shape for fingers, squeezing hard. Wayne ’s grip. I heard a young man’s voice hiss in my ear. Rigid, he was saying. No. Frigid. The general shape of events was beginning to re-form in my mind.

“Maybe,” I began defensively, “if he’d listened when I said-”

“You don’t even remember how it happened,” Silva said, cutting me off. “You don’t know what you said or what he said.”

She was right. She saw through me. But in the moment, her voice reminded me of Cheryl Anne.

Prissy bitch, I thought, and looked away, leaning down to yank the laces of my boots tighter and knot them.

Wayne neverconfronted me about the incident, and his lack of righteous anger confirmed my suspicion that he bore at least some of the guilt for what happened that night. Still, I decided to cut back on my drinking.

That resolution lasted a few weeks. Not long enough.

“Probably halfthe young people in town are drunk on Friday or Saturday night. Why aren’t you lecturing them?”

It was summer. I had followed some of the maintenance guys on a cliff-jumping trip to one of the pit lakes. Cliff was a bit of an understatement, but jumping from the bluffs over the water was a local tradition among young people. The mining companies tried to chase kids away, because of liability issues, but it never really discouraged anyone.

I couldn’t swim, and had only hooked up with the guys because I’d expected that in light of the summer squall we were having, they’d call off their plans to go to the lake in favor of something drier and safer. Not true. The worst of the lightning had passed, they told me, and they were going to get wet by swimming anyway, weren’t they?

So I’d gone along, and as we’d all progressed in our drinking, their encouragements to jump began to make more sense to me. There’s really nothing to swimming, they said: once you’re in, instinct will take over. We’ll come get you, if you get into any trouble. Besides, you’re already wet.

In addition to my whiskey courage, I was beginning to dimly perceive some kind of slur on my gender if I didn’t do the things the guys could do. So I was very near to jumping when a white light lower to the ground and of longer duration than lightning splashed over us. The headlights of Kenny’s truck.

He’d sent the guys on their way, but I was sitting wet-haired and sobering fast in the cab of his truck.

“Tell me you never went cliff-jumping as a kid,” I demanded.

“That’s not what bothers me,” Kenny said. “It’s your drinking. You’re getting something of a reputation, Sarah.”

Reputation. That word had a connotation beyond drinking.

“What are you trying to say?” I demanded. “I haven’t slept with any of those guys. Not a goddamned one. If anyone’s saying so, they’re lying.”

“No, that’s not what they’re saying,” Kenny said. “They’re saying you’re a lush and a tease.”

“That’s not fair.”

“You drink and dance with these boys, Sarah, go out to the lakes with them with no other girls around. What do you expect them to think?”

“That I like drinking and dancing and going to the lakes. If they think I owe them anything, that’s their problem.”

“If you get hurt, it’s not going to matter whose fault it is,” Kenny said. “You’re a tall, strong girl, but one day it isn’t going to be enough. One morning you’re going to wake up and be the last person in town to know you pulled a train the night before.”

Never would I have believed that Kenny knew a phrase like that. It was like a slap in the face. I was a child to chiding, at least with him. I swallowed hard and didn’t let the hurt show. “I can take care of myself,” I said thinly.

“You keep saying that, but you’re not doing it,” Kenny said.

Later that month,coming home drunk, hot, and thirsty late on a Friday night, I knocked a glass from the kitchen cupboard. I thought I was being a good roommate as I got out the broom and dustpan to clean up.