I Was Here(40)

             While Tammy was interviewing me, a bunch of high school students came by. The DQ had always been the local hangout, and it was then that I realized that if I got the job, I’d be serving burgers to people I’d spent the last four years not exactly snubbing, but sort of. Meg knew everyone here and she had her admirers for sure, but she wasn’t close with that many people. She had her family, the people she met online, and me. In middle school, teachers started calling us the Pod and it took, and then all sorts of people referred to us as that. We were known as a twosome. Even Tammy Henthoff, seven years out of high school, knew about us. Working here, it would be a daily barrage: Aren’t you Meg’s friend? And the piggyback question to that: If so, why are you still here?

             Right about the same time, the night manager at the restaurant where Tricia works inquired if she knew anyone trustworthy who could clean her house, Tricia asked me—almost on a dare, it seemed; she knew how much I hated cleaning. But you can be good at things you hate. Pretty soon that one job turned into two and four and now six.

             Just a couple of weeks ago, I got a call about a job as an attendant at Pioneer Park. Sue knew the woman who ran the parks department, and somehow, in the midst of everything, she put a word in for me and I got called in for an interview.

             It was a good job, decent pay, benefits even. On the day of the interview with the superintendent, I walked to the park. And then I saw the rocket ship.

             Pioneer Park was where Meg and I learned to ride our bikes. Where we’d run through the sprinklers and dreamed of the swimming pool the town sometimes talked about putting in there (it never happened; nothing here ever does). It was a place that wasn’t her house or my house or school or the DQ, where we could be alone and talk.

             The capsule at the top of the rocket ship was like our magical private clubhouse. Anytime we climbed the rickety stairs and ladder up to the nose cone, we were the only people there, though it was obvious from all the ever-changing graffiti that we weren’t the only people to come up here.

             Reading the graffiti out loud was one of our favorite things to do. There were hearts of couples long since broken up, and lyrics nobody remembered anymore. New stuff was always being scrawled over the old, though one line, Meg’s favorite, remained gouged into the metal: I Was Here. She loved that. “What more can you say, right?” she’d ask. She’d written the phrase on her own graffiti wall and kept threatening to get a tattoo of it one day, if she ever got over her fear of needles.

             The whole deathtrap probably should’ve been condemned years ago, but it wasn’t. It was the highest point in town, and on clear days you could see for miles. Meg used to say you could see all the way to the future.

             I turned around. I never even called the superintendent to cancel.

             So I still clean houses. Maybe it’s for the best. Toilets are anonymous. They have no stories to tell, no recriminations to fling. They just take crap and flush.

             Since coming back from this last trip to Tacoma, I actually find myself looking forward to work. The scrubbing, the endless repetition, the arriving at a manky sink, attacking it with bleach and steel wool and after a time, leaving it gleaming . . . befores/afters in life are never quite so stark.

             Today I clean two houses in a row, hauling laundry and ironing pillowcases, and cleaning the squared kitchen tile with a squeegee. The tile isn’t really tile; it’s linoleum. But that’s how Mrs. Chandler likes it done, and who I am to argue?

             Over the next few days, when I’m not working, I carry my cleaning zeal over to Tricia’s and my tiny house, taking bleach and an old toothbrush and going at the shower grout, which has gone black with mildew. Tricia is so shocked when she sees the tiles go from gray to their previous white-and-blue state, she doesn’t even say anything sarcastic.

             I keep myself busy in a frenzy until I don’t have a gig, and our house is as clean as it’s been since we moved in. I sit on my bed and organize my earnings by bill denominations: I’ve made two hundred and forty bucks this week alone. I have to give Tricia one hundred dollars for my share of bills, but that leaves me with quite a surplus, and nothing to spend it on. Theoretically, I am saving for the move to Seattle. Theoretically, I learned in physics that the universe is expanding at a rate of, like, forty-five miles a second, but it sure as shit doesn’t feel that way when you’re standing still.