This Was The Way it Could Be

"Endless empty heavens of cabbage,
Eternal strawberry streams."

As they sang I was embarrassed by their old earnest faces. They had learned this English painstakingly, and were repeating it with mantra-like fervor. Such praise. So I turned from them and their restaurant and walked to the edge of the concrete pier on the placid lake where I heard the distinct thrushing of moving water.

Eight or ten plump women with dark hair and encroaching unibrows were sitting in two old sculling boats, rowing with rhythmic intensity in the bright sun. That the boats were welded to girders embedded in the concrete did not seem to bother them in the least. They seemed to span three generations, but all were plump and hunched. The women all wore bright T-shirts and black sweats. They were getting in shape so their arms wouldn't have flaps anymore, but there was something more exciting than that. Everybody along the tranquil little lake was honing a talent. Half of these dark women carried saxophone or trombone cases. I could see them down by their feet, like incomplete limbs. A harmonica rack rested on a bosom at the bow, and its owner was piping away furiously, swee fwee, swee fwee as she pumped her fat arms.

Boistrous voices echoed across the pier. Everybody I saw smiled and moved with a purpose. They were all getting ready, from the elderly Asian shopkeepers to the corpulent crew, for a jubilation-a combined, concentrated effort of such massive unconscious mediocrity that nobody else but they would understand it. And for their efforts and finery, all involved would shower one another with embraces. It was late afternoon already. I had to get out. I couldn't bear to watch that.

On the bus I met Nate and Caleb, two friends who didn't know each other. Caleb talked to me excitedly about a local girl who wrote some scathing article about the town and her petty friends for some magazine. His thick lips moved fast and his dark eyes were vivid with scandalized disbelief. Because he was listening, I had to explain to Nate why it was all important. Caleb continued to talk. I was losing track of what he said. The bus went down a great hill, and the setting sun dappled light in between the elm leaves and old houses. It turned my gestures into disjointed strobe tableaux and I worried that Nate couldn't understand me.

Nate and I got off downtown, almost twilight. We walked up another tree-lined hill and turned right on a street of slummy apartment houses and tight-lipped local markets. Nate rode his skateboard, and as we talked about music, about girls, I grew tired of looking up at him like some kind of wheeled saint. I could feel the herky jerk of my own footfalls all the way up my back. I could see us from a distance, complete teen and tagalong. I felt like a robot, the neglected rudimentary foray of some halfhearted tinkerer. I shambled and all it was was comical.

Nate picked up his speed, kicked sullenly twice, to glide around an old woman waiting for her dog to finish urinating against a lamppost. And I couldn't bear to see her face as I trundled past. I was like his echo, a shrugging remnant of an explanation. This must stop.

I stopped moving my left foot and began to pull myself along with my right. This was easier than I had expected. It had started out as a bad parody of that delinquent and his deck for the benefit of the old woman. But hey! This was kind of fun. And it got easier the longer I did it. There was no friction under my left foot and I wondered if possibly I had stepped in industrial lubricant or dog shit. But it was none of these things. I could glide! I could hover a mere inch off the concrete and streak past everyone else with shopping bags or baby carriages or upturned visors loafers or three hundred dollar sneakers, and never look back!

"Nate!" I must have screamed it. "Nate! Look at me! I'm skateboarding!"

He looked back at me for a minute, no astonishment, and then picked up his pace, kicking with a purpose now, his nose stuck forward into the wind. I held pace with him as we weaved through clumps of people. Their faces were blurs of skin and hair.

"It's nothing but the magnificent m-mucilage-" and here I fell, backwards, onto my butt. "It's nothing but the magnificant mucilage of momentum!" and I got to my feet and kicked off again. It wasn't comical at all. I know, because I never look back.

Soon I caught up with him, exhilaration beating at my brain, and still I could go faster, holding pace with the cars, swerving around front stoops and small, dirty children playing with dolls, all the while laughing. This was the way it could be. It was a minute or two before I realized that I couldn't hear the tinny lull of Nate's trucks anymore. I turned my head back and he was a figure in the distance, carrying his board and shaking his head. And there was something rough under my left toe.

Nate was standing over me when I woke up. My arm hurt a little, and my chin was scraped, but I knew I was fine.

"What happened? Did you trip?"

And suddenly, I didn't feel like answering him. I looked out, across the street, and then back past him to the stoop where a swarthy little Latino was cradling a revolver-shaped package wrapped in newspaper. He was making to open it. I jumped up to my feet. There was still some dizziness.

"Get to the laundromat," Nate said under his breath. Where people would see us. There was a shabby windowless laundromat up the street. I saw a Rastafarian walk in and we weren't far behind. But I knew we couldn't stay there. $0.50 wash $1.00 dry. The proprietor would be shooing us out shortly with a curt phrase of painstakingly practiced English, not comprehending or caring to comprehend anything we had to say. Anticipating this with dull loathing I walked back outside, down the street, same direction as before. Everything was gray now, dim. Behind me I heard the door swing shut.

"Hey! How are we getting home? Do you know where the bus stops? Where are you going?"

But I didn't feel like answering him again.