Doing the dishes with the radio on. The orange man in the white house claims he has been affected by the sounds of children crying after he had insisted they be pulled from their mothers, their fathers. I am waiting for a new platform bed to be delivered. Because I can afford it. Because, when the world gets uglier, I often do things to make my small place inside of it prettier. It’s a huge privilege, I know, to be able to consume as I do, to have a job that pays well enough, to have opportunities to work and to earn and to spend. I do not deny my privilege and the escapism it affords.
My phone rings and I know by the area code that it must be the bed deliverers. I dry my hands and turn off the radio and answer, and a man with a heavy Latinx accent asks me questions, rapid-fire and over a bad connection.
This is hard for me to confess, but I can be an ugly American. I have made bad taste jokes about people’s non-Anglo names that I regret, years ago and borne more from language play than xenophobia, but the effect was insulting no matter the cause. I am ashamed of that. And I am also ashamed that I can be that person who is impatient (read: rude) to someone whose accent is hard for me to understand the English through. Not face-to-face (I don’t think, although I do try to speak Spanish to people who I assume are Spanish speakers—or I used to. I know now that this Spanish speaking is not a kindness or courtesy, but a stereotype I am perpetuating, and I no longer, without invitation, enter into a conversation in this language that I love, have loved ever since I first learned a few of its words in third grade: lapiz, mesa, escuela, amor. This language that was my primary form of communication when I lived in Honduras the summer after high school, and again when I spent time at the Universidad de la Habana studying this language and Cuban culture.) I can be rude over the phone to call centers when I speak to folks stationed in India who dub themselves Chelsea or Derek, American names I am doubtful are really theirs, but chosen to sound American, even if their accents are something else, something other. And I am irritated when I try to speak with these people, because I am irritated by a system that
- farms out jobs for low pay to other countries so American corporations can make larger profits;
- makes people of other countries misrepresent themselves, pretend to be what they are not, as though what they actually are is not good enough; and
- fosters by practice an animosity between customer and service—an already fraught relationship—that further fuels anti-otherness.
And this irritation, while not created by the person with whom I must speak on the phone when I want answers to my tech or warranty or service questions, too often gets directed at that person. A person just doing a job somewhere on the other side of the world, someone simply trying to earn enough money to eat, to feed their family, to live.
I recognize this ugly Americanism in me, but sometimes too late, after I’ve snarled, after I’ve snapped, and here, useless as it is, is my apology: I am so very sorry for that bad, ugly behavior.
So when the man on the other end of the line asks me his questions, fast and thick, about delivery, about alleyways and street directions, about doorways and entry, I feel my ugly response at the back of my throat (What? Huh? I can’t understand a word you are saying… even though I can, just not every word) and I swallow it down, take a breath, say in a collected voice: “I’m sorry, I couldn’t get all of that.” And he repeats the important questions, speaking more slowly, and I listen harder, and we sort it out.
I meet him and his partner at the back door of my building, and I hold it open for them (is that so hard, holding a door open?) and we ride up the elevator, and I make small talk, because I believe in small talk, these little threads that connect us. More than one summer I have lived in a country where I did not speak or understand the language and the absence of small talk weighed heavy on me, on my loneliness. He, his name is Bacillio, answered yes, it is a busy day, already many stops, and more yet to come. A busy time. (Perhaps others like me are spending money to beautify what is close to them, to pretend to keep the ugliness away.)
I show them in, Bacillio and his partner, whom I suspect does not speak much English, quiet as he is, not answering my small talk questions. And at the door, they have slipped off their shoes, even though I did not ask them to, I never would have, it is disturbing to me this practice of requesting someone bare his feet like we all must now in line at the airport, on our way to and from our homes. And yet, I appreciate the thoughtfulness of their act because of my new rug, see, the light-colored one that will go under the new bed, the rug another pretty acquisition.
It is not a hot day, something our small talk addressed, but muggy, and I offer each of them a cold can of soda. I always do, whenever someone makes a delivery to my home. They accept, and I put the cans down close to them where they are working, assembling bits and pieces of my new bed.
I stay out of the way. How many people hover when these fellows are in their homes? And why? To ensure a job done to satisfaction or for some other ugly American reason? But I sit in the next room, close enough to hear if they call, for Bacillio to find me if he needs me. I look at my phone, flip through Flipboard as my new bed is built, piece by piece by Bacillio and his quiet partner.
On the phone, images of other beds. Under white tents and rooms of what was once a Walmart in Texas. Somewhere else, mats on floors in large, chain link cages, children under silver-colored space blankets, sleeping, staring, crying.
I want to ask Bacillio what he thinks of this, but I am afraid that I might insult him. I am afraid that this talk of other beds and children will not be small enough.
My new platform bed is up and Bacillio has put my old mattress on it, and it is indeed beautiful, more beautiful than I imagined, sleek and dark wood with an upholstered headboard the color of wheat, standing on my beautiful new rug and surrounded by my pretty older pieces, some bought from stores and vintage shops, others passed down to me from my parents. The desk where I write, my mother’s aunt’s. The heavy, carved wooden three-drawer chest now my bedside table, once the bedside table next to my parents’ bed, its cigarette burns and coffee cup and glass rim stains part of the narrative of their life together, up late and talking and smoking and drinking. Planning. Rabble rousers for labor, for national and regional politics, for local school boards and neighborhood groups.
“It’s beautiful,” I say to Bacillio, “isn’t it? Thank you so much.” I give him a generous tip to share with his quiet partner who has already carried the detritus out of my apartment, is already slipping his shoes back on and breaking down boxes in the hallway.
Alone again in my space, I straighten the bedroom, move things back where they belong, align things under the art on the walls, put linens and pillows on the brand-new bed. I am afraid, at first, to try it. This is not unusual for me, I often fear that newly-built things may break too easily (and recently, truth be told, I hope they might.) I press on the mattress first. Then I sit on its edge, and ease back to lie down. I turn the radio on and they are talking about those children in those other beds, the children without their parents, with little to comfort them as the cigarette scars on my bedside table comfort me, giving me something to remember my parents by, to imagine their nights in their bedroom together while their children, my three brothers, me, slept upstairs in our own bedrooms, close, safe. We all knew where we were.
From my new bed I can see Lake Michigan. And before that, green spaces and lakefront paths with people on bikes and on foot. The view is expansive, apartments and churches and cars on Lake Shore Drive whizzing past, going wherever they want to be. Is it any wonder people are drawn here to this place where the view opens and opens and opens? There are couples holding hands, mothers and fathers with their children in strollers. From where I recline, I cannot tell for certain what anyone looks like, the color of their skin; I can’t hear what language they speak. I don’t know where they have come from or where they plan to go. From here, it doesn’t matter. It should not matter anywhere.
Patricia Ann McNair’s essay collection, And These are The Good Times was named a finalist for the Montaigne Medal for most thought-provoking book of 2017. The Temple of Air, McNair’s story collection, received the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Finalist Award. Her work has appeared in various anthologies, magazines, and journals including American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Superstition Review, Word Riot, Hypertext, Prime Number, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and others. McNair also writes reviews for the Washington Independent Review of Books. She is an associate professor and director of undergraduate programs in creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.