I am inside of her head.
I am a nice person, she is thinking. I deserve more. She wants to believe it. If only she could see herself through my eyes. If only she could see herself through my eyes looking through her eyes. I deserve to be loved, she thinks. She doesn’t believe it. If only I could believe it for her. I want to believe in her, believe inside of her. Believe hard enough inside of her that it somehow seeps through. She turns up the road and the hill gets steeper. The air gets hotter. I feel her weight, the gravity on her grieving body with every step, and then, right near the top of the hill, just the faintest hint of it. She is remembering us. The few happy moments we had. Okay, so. I am standing on a hill. I am looking at a color I have never seen before. Ocean. I am not at a funeral. I am thinking of someone I once loved. I don’t know if I am her thinking of me, or if I am me thinking of her, her heart, my heart, aching, or its opposite, or if maybe, right at this moment, there is no difference. Okay, so. Okay, so. Okay.
WAIT TILL YOU SEE ME DANCE by Deb Olin Unferth
1
I know when people will die. I meet them, I can look into their faces and see if they have long to last. It’s like having a knack for math or a green thumb, both of which I also have. People wear their health on their faces.
—
There was a time I lived alone in the crappiest neighborhood I would ever live in and had few friends and worked at a place where the people I saw were all quietly abandoning their plans, like I was. I had the faces of dying people all around me. One day the office assistant called me over to her desk and said she was an Indian dancer and how would I like to go to an Indian dance?
—
This same office assistant had once said to me, “You know what I think every time I look at you? Guess. Guess what I think.”
“Here comes the bride,” I said.
“Wrong,” she said. “I think about that movie where the angel comes to earth and shows a man the future and how bad it’s going to be, and the man looks at the future and says, ‘But what about Mary? What happens to her?’ And the angel says, ‘You’re not going to like it, George.’ And George says, ‘Well, I have to know. Tell me, Angel.’ And the angel says, ‘She’s an old maid! She works at the library!’ And the man says, ‘Nooooooo!’ ”
“I don’t know that movie,” I said.
“ ‘She’s an old maid! She works at the library!’ You should put that on your voicemail.”
“I don’t work at the library.”
“People would know they had the right number.”
After that she called me Mary and soon had them all calling me Mary.
—
This office assistant sat at her desk and handed out notices about forms that people had forgotten to fill out. She wrote down on slips of paper chore lists, reminders, disclosures she’d received from above: Tag your food. Turn in your book orders. You have been chosen for a special assignment. I didn’t like her. She was young and hard to talk to and not nice. She wasn’t the only office assistant. There were two others who were locked in an eternal battle and fought every single day. A partition had been raised between them in the hope that if they didn’t see each other they would each cease to believe in the other’s existence. It hadn’t worked. All it did was make them think they each had their own office, which they protected fiercely. The entire setup was confusing and inconvenient. If you wanted anything done, you had to depend on the first office assistant, the one who had asked me to the dance.
—
So this assistant was a lot of things but she certainly was not Indian, and on the day she asked me to the dance I said so. “What kind of an Indian are you supposed to be?” I said. Then it turned out she meant Native American, or at least American Indian, not Indian. But she wasn’t that either.
“You have the cheeks of a cowgirl,” I said. “You have the face of a cowboy.” It was true. She was both pretty and masculine.
Well, she had learned how to dance some Native American dances and her own mother had sewed her a Native American costume. It was beautiful, the costume, she said, and if you drove out of the city, you could find the land the Native Americans once lived on and still do today and where they dance still. She had a flyer about it, look.
“I never heard of this place,” I said.
“Do you want to come or not?”
“I don’t know how to dance any Native American dances.”
“They’ll teach you, everyone will. They’re very nice out there.”
I didn’t know why she wanted me along. Maybe she wanted more friends, which might not be so bad considering the way things were going just then.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”
“Great,” she said. Her eyebrows went up. “You’ll drive? I don’t have a car.”
—
At this job, four times a day, thirty people assembled before me and it was my duty to tell them some useful fact about the English language, a fact they could then take and go out into the world with and use to better their positions in society. There were no grades in the class. It was a “pass/fail” class and whether they got a “pass” or a “fail” depended on an essay they had to write on the last day, which was read and evaluated by outside sources. These outside sources were supposed to be mysterious, were maybe not even people, were maybe just God, but I happened to know were simply whichever teacher or two the office assistant lined up to do it. It was a probationary class, intended for the students so illiterate that it was almost unseemly to have them there. It was the last-chance class. It went by the number 99. Anyone who passed got to enter college for real, sign up for 101. Anyone who failed had to leave. The students from 99 were all over the hallways. They didn’t care about any useful facts to take out into the world. They cared only about the essay graded by outside sources. Thirty percent failed most years and everybody knew this. The students in 99 disliked me with a vigor and a courage that was kind of amazing. I stood at the front of the room on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and said, “The test is graded by outside sources.” I used this to respond to every complaint, defense, and plea.
The test is graded by outside sources.
The test is graded by outside sources.
The test is graded by outside sources.
—
That day, after I agreed to bring the assistant to the dance, I went and stood in front of my third class of the day. It was nearly the end of the semester and they had that unstrung look to them — gaunt, spooked, blaming. “Let me remind you,” I told them. “I don’t grade the tests. And I can tell you this much. Any essay without a proper introduction will not get a ‘pass’ so let’s turn our attention back to the board.”
—
I was what is called an adjunct: a thing attached to another thing in a dependent or subordinate position.
—
The assistant had it a little wrong about the movie, by the way. It wasn’t the future that George got to see. The angel’s job is to show George what the world would be like if George had never existed. The premise of the movie — because of course I’d seen it, everyone’s seen it, if you were born in America you’ve seen it — is that George is unhappy and has been for many years, his whole life nearly, and he is so full of regret and fear that he wants to die, or even better, to not have been born in the first place.