Three
I met Amanda five years ago in a bar. She was 22 and had just returned from Eugene, Oregon. I had previously finished a seven year, on and off again, relationship with a very narcissistic woman. Amanda had previously finished a three relationship with a guy who was suffering from schizophrenia. We were both ready to move on to functional people. Most people considered us weird but we were functional.
I saw her sitting in a bar holding a drink looking nervous and sad. A band was playing. What band I don't recall. She was tall with bleach blond hair hanging down to her shoulders. She was wearing a green shirt and black skirt. She looked beautiful. I thought, 'I want to talk to her tonight.'
At that time in my life I was hitting on girls constantly and was mildly successful. I ended up in several apartments having decent sex. But none of the people seemed at the same place I was. It was just people having sex with each other. That was all. No desire for a relationship or procreation. We were lonely and felt forgotten. Most of us had not gone to college nor were dropouts. We weren't people full of dreams; we were underpaid and had no outlet for attention. So we would get drunk and pay attention to each other.
Amanda and I flirted and it didn't seem like anything. We did get along. But people get along all the time.
Three weeks later I moved in her house. Amanda lived in a house owned by parents and didn't have to pay rent. She lived with a Jewish girl named Dedra in her senior year of college. I only mention that she was Jewish because she was very into studying Judaism, the holocaust, and even the Jewish massacres of medieval times. She left the house eventually to get her masters in Judaic Studies and then to work at a synagogue. And after 7 years, I was still living there.
Amanda had spent the last seven years of her life trying to graduate college. She graduated ninth in a class of 300 kids. She even scored out of her foreign language requirements. But Amanda like many people of her generation kept picking new majors. She was an English major at the beginning, then she was a linguistics major, then a sociology major, then an English teacher major, then she settled on Hospitality Management. She wanted to own her own restaurant or maybe a small hotel on the side of the highway in Kansas. Or maybe get one of those District Manager jobs where they give you a new car and have you drive around from business to business all day stopping in for a couple of hours, torturing everybody about rules, regulations, product cost, labor cost, invoices, who gets and doesn't get a raise and how much do they get.
Amanda didn't know what to do with her life. That phrase was said a lot this past decade. People back in the day didn't do things with their lives. They went where the jobs were. They went to the coal mines, to the factories, to the good soil. But the world had changed in the last 50 years. We had choices now. We could choose what type of job we wanted to do. This was unusual to humans. Perhaps as unusual to the tribes of Northern Europe when the Romans showed up and said, “Look, we need organization, laws, and ownership.” The Northern Europeans stared them and stumbled through it for 1000 years before getting it right.
Our parents didn't know what to do with us. They didn't have a choice either. Most of them went to the areas with jobs and took the first one they could get, and worked their way up to management. Even if they were white collar, the same thing applied, they went where the jobs were. They took the job and worked to get raises.
Things were different now.
Now, in that strange place called America a person could choose what their role in society would be. But we didn't think about it as a role. We thought about as, “How we want to live.” We didn't discuss roles; it was too Catholic, too medieval. Instead of role we had status and prestige; instead of a job being what a human did to benefit their society, it became a psychological symbol of status. People wanted to become lawyers because prestige and money went along with it. People wanted to become social workers and school teachers because that would represent they had some money but were getting the money from helping people. People wanted to become businessmen for money to buy impressive things. People wanted to become managers of restaurants, auto-body shops, hotels, and Walmarts because that would show they were in a position of power and it supplied enough money to buy houses and feed the children. And of course there was still the rabble. The rabble worked the low paying jobs, trying to feed themselves and their children. Even though they were poor and had little opportunity to become white collar there were still many programs to get them to become nurses, truck drivers, construction workers and auto-mechanics. Because the new cars were so complicated the job of auto-mechanic became a job that paid well and even had a little prestige. One would notice that I omitted the job of doctor. My generation gave up on the dream of being a doctor several years back. Going to medical school was too expensive even for white collar children, so America began to import doctors from India and South America where medical school was much cheaper. The ideal of a doctor being a person that helps somehow disappeared from the American landscape. Instead it got turned into a money-making device and turned off would be doctors, instead opting out for social worker jobs and nursing. People began to see doctors as agents of insurance and pill companies and not people trying to cure the sick. The role of the doctor was lost in America, and India with its billion people was glad to send us some of theirs to replace our lost doctors.
Amanda sat in the little kitchen with aged portraits of butterflies on the wall, a sink covered in rust stains. A refrigerator with magnets holding up articles we had written together, pictures her nephews had drawn for her, and postcards from friends that had moved away. It was a sad kitchen, not a new modern one. I remember this story by an old black woman I once worked with how her father used to sit in the kitchen at six in the morning, drink coffee and read the bible every day. I remember when I was young my dad's friends used to come over and they would drink beer, and my dad would pull out a bottle of whiskey from underneath the kitchen sink. They would sit and drink the whiskey and feel good; they would talk about previous times, about stores that didn't exist anymore, about people that moved or drifted away. It was a kitchen like that. The kind an old black man could read the bible in or the kind friends could drink whiskey and talk about the past.
Amanda sat in that kitchen. She wrote out bills. Staring at the numbers, thinking about money. She didn't feel like doing the bills. She didn't feel like giving anyone her money. But she rationalized that electricity and heat are important things and must be maintained to live a good life.
Amanda began to cry. She wasn't balling or wailing. They were just tears. They came out of the corner of her eyes and slid over her white cheeks. A crying woman. My life has been spent next to crying women. My mother cried, my grandmother cried, my female co-workers cry. I learned young that it was not easy being a woman or black in America. Being treated second class was not good for one's emotional state. Life was harder for them. It was easy to see that.
I heard her crying from the living room while I checked Hipster Runoff. I've heard her cry a million times, about how she doesn't want to be like her mother, and her father having diabetes. But these tears were different. Each one of her cries had their own distinct tears and sounds that went along with it. It was a cry of fear and anguish.
I sat there for a while and listened. Amanda was not the type of person that needed someone to interrogate her when she cried. But I believed she was crying over false notions concerning her reality so I stood and walked slowly to the kitchen.