Grey's Journal:
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``No, that's all right. You're making me uncomfortable enough as it is, and that's a good start.'' I was talking to `Gertie' and Billie Jo at a restaurant in my home town, Garden City. While I was visiting my parents over Christmas break, she convinced me to drive two hours to the town where I grew up to see her. Usually when I'm on Long Island, I don't mention this to my high school friends, preferring them to only know I was there after I've left. Expectantly, this has lead to some awkward situations such as when Gertie called my parents' house just to see if I was home from college and caught me as I was packing to leave for London in an hour. She was not happy. I'm not sure my high school experiences were worse than any other typical geek's, but I avoid Garden City because it was not a happy time in my life and I always feel that it's trying to pull me back in. The feeling of being trapped hangs in the air for me. But, despite my relentless insistence to pretend that high school never happened, Gertie was determined not to let me forget her, and this Christmas, she convinced me to return to Garden City. ``Jesus Christ, Grey,'' she said while watching me squirm and fidget at dinner. ``If you don't relax and act like a normal person, I'm going to kick you out.'' Gertie fails to see the connection between pointing out my discomfort and my increasing levels of discomfort. Luckily, Billie Jo, whom I had not seen for years, came to my rescue. ``Hey, I was nervous about seeing him too.'' Billie Jo is the oldest friend I have and the first who is starting to look different to me. She was physically the same but the way she moved and spoke had changed in a way that nagged on my mind until I had to broach the topic. ``You seem,'' I hesitated, trying to find the right adjective, ``sarcastic is the word that comes to mind, but it's not right.'' ``Jaded,'' she said without hesitation. ``You're looking for `jaded'. I bartend down in D.C. now. The world's a shit hole and I serve it liquor.'' Ah. There was the mandatory pause that comes after a comment like that before Gertie continued with conversation by expressing her disappointment that I don't have an English accent nor do I dress like a European man. ``And how do you think European men dress?'' ``You know, like gay men.'' This opinion contrasted with my male friends from college, one of whom when I last met them, Troy, looked me up and down and, by way of a greeting, said `I'm glad you don't dress like one of those Eurotrash fags.' It was nice to see Gertie and Billie Jo again but I admit to feeling relieved when the snow started to fall and Billie Jo suggested, because of the long drive I had ahead of me, that we should get the bill. Hugs goodbye in the falling snow and I drove away... ...but I didn't get far. A storm was coming in from the east, the direction I was driving. But I wanted to go ahead with the two-hour drive. Never mind that I had not driven in seven months and now lived in a country with reversed driving laws, I was sure I would be fine. Ten minutes and two skids through traffic lights later, I changed my mind and picked up my cell phone. ``Hello, Gertie? Can I crash at your place?'' I was trapped in Garden City. *
* *
The next morning Gertie left for a ski trip in the Catskills Mountains. While I waited to make sure the roads were clear, I called another ex-girlfriend of mine, Siobhan, to have brunch. Siobhan graduated from nursing school a few days before and was going to start looking for work. I still find it strange to think of my friends as having proper grown-up jobs. Siobhan, however, fit my experiences with nurses. Every time my doctor asks for a blood sample he disappears and is replaced with an attractive nurse my age. ``I don't fare well under blood-taking conditions,'' I told Siobhan. ``And embarrassing myself in front of a cute girl doesn't make it any easier.'' ``Oh, really? What happens? Do you cry? Do you faint?'' She asked the question with an eagerness in her voice that made me think she likes nothing better than when a patient faints on her. When I told her this was not the case, she looked disappointed. When getting my blood taken, I ask lots of questions of the nurse as a stall tactic. How much blood? How big a needle? Where are you stabbing me? Will you use antiseptic? When she grows tired of this and approaches me with the needle I look the other way and talk quickly and inanely about some topic, usually what I'm doing in school. In my last doctor's visit, the nurse had to tell me, `You can stop talking now, I'm done taking blood'. ``Aw, that's cute,'' Siobhan said. ``So, how was crashing at Gertie's?'' While Gertie had packed for her ski trip, she let me look through her `Grey Box', the repository of all the things she kept from our high school relationship: photographs, a corsage I gave her for a dance, and the notes I wrote her. Reading those was an enjoyably embarrassing affair. ``You kept your notes intentionally cryptic and without names,'' Gertie told me. ``In case they `fell into the wrong hands'. You were so melodramatic.'' ``Didn't you bring Gertie's notes with you when your parents moved out of Garden City?'' Siobhan asked. ``I'm not sure I even kept them in school. I don't know what I did with them.'' ``Of course you kept them. You hid them in the ceiling of your basement. I remember you showing them to me once when I came over.'' Then I remembered the zip-lock bag stuffed full of folded sheets of paper and the ceiling tile above the foot of my bed. I had saved the notes. ``You know you have to go back and get them,'' Siobhan said. ``Go knock on the door of your old house. You look like a trustworthy guy. I'd let you in.'' Then, before I could think it through and realize it was a bad idea, I agreed. We got in my car and a few minutes later I stood in front of my old house on my old street. Aside from a different car in the driveway, all was the same. I walked through the snow and rang the doorbell. A middle-aged woman answered and I explained my dubious-sounding story: I grew up in this house and hid some notes I forgot about in the ceiling. I'm visiting from London and wondering if I can poke around in your ceiling. ``Just a moment,'' she said and went back inside. As I waited, I felt like this moment would settle my history with Garden City. By retrieving those notes I would pull the last bit of myself out of the town. Perhaps then I could make peace with it. The woman returned. ``I'm sorry,'' she said. ``Now isn't a good time.'' I thanked her for her time and apologized for interrupting her day. Driving back to my parents' house I had to deal with the fact that, no matter how hard I tried, part of me would always be left in Garden City. |
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Copyright © 2005 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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