Madame Caputo

Okay, I'm trying to get back into this. Apparently it's harder for me to get into writing habits than I thought. Below is a little story about housecleaning, hope you enjoy it.

J

It all started with facebook, what doesn’t these days? A friend of a friend had typed “Christina now has clean laundry and a mostly clean house” as her status update. I know Christina through my friends Holly and Jeremy. I’d run into her a couple times by chance, most recently in Grant Park at the Obama rally, and once last winter at the Alliance Française for a screening of short films. I’d gone to the screening alone, as I sometimes do to these kinds of events, and was happy to see a familiar face. The films ranged from great to forgettable. My favorite was about a woman who was about to get fired from her job selling candy wholesale, when her boss unexpectedly gets dumped by her boyfriend and is stranded at work. The saleswoman sees her boss looking forlorn at a bus stop, and offers her a ride home. The two spend the evening line dancing at a Texas themed club, and stay up late drinking red wine and talking about men. Whether or not the saleswoman ultimately gets fired is open to interpretation, as are most endings in French cinema. After the screening, Christina and her boyfriend Phillip invited me to join them for tapas, and we had a fabulous time. The moment I got home I sent Holly an email that started with “guess who I ran into at the Alliance Française?”

I commented on Christina’s facebook status update with:

“wanna come over and clean my house too?”

“What does it pay? LOL”.

“I would SO pay you to clean my house”

“I’ll do it!” she wrote.

Christina had recently been laid off from her job doing something mysterious in the suburbs. She had once been sent on an errand to buy $40 candles that were scented with her boss’s favorite cologne. The shop owner was familiar with him, and while holding a candle to her nose said:

“It smells like him!”

“I know,” Christina replied, “It’s like he’s in the room!”

I’ve toyed with the idea of paying others to do my housework for some time, but never go through with it. I’m intimidated by the efficiency and demeanor of housecleaning services, and feel like they’re for people with multi level homes in the suburbs, not people who have a 50% share of a two flat in northwest Chicago and can’t keep up with cleaning all of seven rooms.

My family had a housecleaner once when I was little, before my parents were divorced, when my mom was a homemaker and we lived in western Switzerland. Her name was Madame Caputo, which my mother said means “broken” in Italian, but according to the online dictionary wordreference.com could mean either the 1st person singular present indicative of the verb “capitare” – to happen or to occur, or the masculine singular past participle of the word “capire” –to understand. She had a daughter named Orfelina who was my age, and sometimes she’d come over and we’d play with my stuffed animals while Madame Caputo scrubbed our kitchen counters and mopped our floors with her substantial arms. We spoke to each other in French, as her English was limited, and my Italian was negligible. I had stolen an eyeshadow from my teenaged sister, and Orfelina used it to beautify a stuffed monkey. It never did come off, the monkey’s face forever locked in a wide eyed look of lavender surprise.

My mother drove me to Madame Caputo’s two room apartment once for a playdate with Orfelina, and we spent the afternoon inventing stories for her dolls in broken French, and trying our best to keep out of Madame Caputo’s way. Her father was still in Italy, the exact circumstances were unclear, but I’d heard that Madame Caputo sent part of her earnings there each month. When it was time to eat, Madame Caputo asked me:

“Jesska, ta famm?” stressing the “m” in the word “faim”. For years I would mispronounce this word, corrected only recently by Virginie Dasse, a teacher at the Alliance Française, who said to me:

“On ne prononce pas le ‘m’ J, ‘tu as faim’” pronouncing it something like “fan” without the “n”, and stressing the nasal ending.

“Faim”, I repeated, to indicate that I understood.

When my parents split up, my mother gave Madame Caputo an earthenware salt cellar that she’d admired during her tenure as our housecleaner. My mother replaced it, but the new one wasn’t quite right. The lettering was off – the old one had the word “sel” pressed into it in a pleasing sans serif font. The new one had the same word, but the lettering looked like an attempt at old English, like something you might find on the cover of a heavy metal album. She keeps it on a counter next to her stove, and every time I look at it, I miss the old one.

After our exchange of facebook comments, I sent Christina an actual email:

“I'm not even kidding about paying you to clean my house. The big problem right now is that we had some water damage in the basement that weekend in September when all it did was rain, and our main bedroom is in the basement. Since then we've torn up the part of the carpet that was damaged, and moved our bed into the "guest bedroom” (it's really a junk room), and it's been chaos ever since. Does $10 per hour and all the coffee you can drink sound fair? I'd pay extra if you cleaned the inside of the refrigerator. I'll throw in whatever beer happens to be in the fridge too.”

She accepted, and I told M that we were getting our house cleaned on Monday. His argument against hiring a housecleaner has always been that in order for someone to clean our house, it has to be orderly enough to for a stranger to come in and make sense of it. We would have to do something about the mountains of paper on the dining room table, and the clothes hanging limply over the backs of chairs and stacked in piles on the floor. After discussing the relative weirdness of having someone else go through our things, we agreed that it was not okay to ask her do laundry, but okay to have her clean the bathroom, and impossible to ask her to clean our disaster area of a bedroom. We decided it was fairer to pay her a flat rate than by the hour, since our place is small, but disgusting.

Christina and I had a few more email exchanges, and spoke on the phone Sunday evening. For an amateur, she sounded very professional. She asked that I leave the cleaning supplies in a central location in the kitchen so she wouldn’t have to root around looking for them, confirmed which rooms needed cleaning, and offered a refund if we weren’t completely satisfied with her work.

“Just the fact that the house will be clean and I won’t have to do it will be awesome,” I said.

I wrote up a quick checklist to make it easy for Christina to mark her progress through each room, put the compost bucket on the back porch so it wouldn’t gross her out, and wrote a note telling her not to use comet on our tub because it’s made of fiberglass.

It felt strange to write such tediously domestic details in a note, and for a moment I felt like an ageing dowager unable to keep up with the housecleaning, shouting orders at hired hands from my daybed. In a surge of guilt, I put an extra $10 into the envelope that I’d left for her next to the coffee pot.

The pre-cleaning done, I settled into the couch with the remote control. And then I heard something. It was soft, but insistent, like snow landing in big flakes on a screen window.

“Are you sweeping?” I asked.

“Yes!”

“What are you doing? Someone is coming to clean our house tomorrow.”

“I can’t leave it this way, I’m too ashamed,” M said, sweeping together enough fur to make a new cat.

“Well, just do that one thing, and then stop,” I said.

In the morning I made an extra large pot of coffee, and left for work. All day I wondered what it meant that someone was else cleaning my house. Was I a slob? Perhaps. Did I officially have disposable income to throw around? Well, this week I did. To soothe myself, I imagined that I was doing my part to stimulate the economy in a time of financial crisis, and putting good karma into the world by throwing a few extra dollars to someone who needed it.

When I got home, it was like stepping into a dream. Where there had been dust there was shiny wood floor, where there had been oil and drippings cooked onto the stovetop, there was smooth reflective surface, and where there had been a colorful assortment of refrigerator spills, there were now neat rows of condiments.

So this is what it’s like, I thought. Unsure of what to do with myself, I surveyed the spotless scene. It was like walking through someone else’s house, someone better than me, someone who kept up with vacuuming and knew how to pronounce things correctly in French.

I made dinner, obsessing over every tiny drip on the stove, and wiping it up immediately. Afterwards I put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher instead of leaving them in the sink, and set up the coffee maker with water and grounds instead of leaving it for the morning.

With no housecleaning chores hanging over our heads, we settled into the vacuumed couch, disturbing the perfectly arranged cushions, and turned on the spotless television.

We watched a documentary on PBS about Kennedy’s assassination, which was riveting even in its repetitiveness. Was Oswald acting alone? Was Sam Giancana involved? Why are assassins always known by their first, middle, and last names? As I watched Jackie climb onto the back of the convertible in frames 212 to 230 of the Zapruder film, I couldn’t help but think that maybe she was just concerned about the appearance of the automobile, tidying up after bits of her husband’s grey matter had sprayed onto the back of the car.

And then I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. One of the cats was playing with something, something small and brown and shaped like an Easter egg.

“Is that a turd?” I asked.

“Is what a turd?”

“That – that thing there.”

I got up from the couch and walked over to where our tabby sat, just outside the closet that houses three litter boxes.

“It’s a turd all right” I said, and went to find some tissue to pick it up. “Well,” I said, flushing it down the toilet, “how long was that, about four hours?”

“How long was what?”

“Having a clean house.”

In class exercise

So, I haven't written a new post in a while. I'm having a hard time making this a habit, and I really REALLY want to post regularly. I think about it too much, and suddenly it seems difficult, so please bear with me while I try to create good writing habits.

This is from an in-class writing exercise where I had to incorporate the words: “potato”, “purple”, and “willfully”, and start with the sentence “I leave the church and go for lunch.”

I leave the church and go for lunch. I’m not generally one for churches, but Deirdre has a fascination with them, finds comfort in them, even. She grew up Catholic in Ireland, and remembers the moment she was riding in her parent’s car when the news broke over the radio that Pope John Paul II had been shot, and she burst into tears. I’ve never known her to attend church outside of Christmas and specially called masses, but she lives in Pilsen, and has a view of several churches from the balcony of her condo, situated in an old factory building on 15th street and Blue Island Avenue. The church we stood in front of was tucked away from the street behind a garden, and had baby blue shutters - or, as Deirdre called it - Virgin Mary blue, and looked as if it had been picked out of much older surroundings in Eastern Europe and transplanted in it’s entirety onto this particular block of Pilsen.

“J,” she said, “that color looks lovely on you. Pose next to the shutters and I’ll take your picture.”

I was hungry for barbeque, but I complied. The barbeque place didn’t open until 4, and it was only 3:15. What kind of restaurant willfully closes their doors to two hungry women in Pilsen, I wondered.

As we crossed the street, an old woman pushed a wheeled cart filled with belongings. She wore flip flops, dark sweatpants, and a purple t-shirt with a white shark printed on it and the words “out for blood.” I tried not to smile, or do anything that might suggest amusement on my part, concentrating instead on the meal that was soon to come: potatoes, preferably fried, but I’d take mashed, some kind of pulled pork sandwich, definitely peach cobbler, and maybe some sides - cole slaw perhaps.

Walking back to Deirdre’s after our meal, a child of indeterminate sex stepped in front of us, performed a wiggly dance, and chanted:

“Do you like my style? Sexy-sexy-sexy!” And then just as suddenly melted back into the herd of children they had emerged from. Later, I rode the #60 bus with a man who had the name “Pumpkins” embroidered onto the name tag of his blue coveralls.

I Heart Gapers Block

A big thank you to Andrew Huff at Gapers Block for publishing my story about Marie's Golden Cue. Thanks also to Paul Goyette for letting me use his wonderful photos, not to mention Ms. Dierdre Colgan in Pilsen, who took me to the blogging event at the Chicago History Museum that started this chain of events.

Thanks a million,

JP

Marie's Golden Cue

Photo by Paul Goyette

A couple Sundays ago my husband and I played pool, something I haven’t done in years. I’d been invited to an appreciation party for volunteers of the Old Town School of Folk Music, a Chicago institution that recently celebrated it’s 50^th anniversary. I’ve never attended an OTSFM volunteer party, but this one took place about two blocks from my house, in an old pool hall named Marie’s Golden Cue. I’ve been a volunteer at Old Town for about 3 years off and on, depending on how busy I am at work and how high my tolerance for crowds and strangers is. I’m a secret agorophobe, so having to help strangers find their seat in a concert hall or selling artist merchandise to crowds of people waving twenty dollar bills at me can sometimes be terrifying. On the other hand I’m also a secret extrovert; I sometimes like to pretend that I’m in a rock and roll band, and I enjoy the questionable authority that comes from wearing a name tag that says “Volunteer”.

Volunteering at Old Town, besides being a nice thing to do for a great institution, has its benefits. If you volunteer at a concert, you get to see most of it for free. I was introduced to the music of Alejandro Escovedo through volunteering a couple years ago, and I got to see Tinariwen and Mamadou Diabate last fall, which was amazing.

There’s also a system of points that you earn through volunteering, and after accumulating enough you can register for a free class, I’ve taken a few guitar and dance classes this way. Volunteering can be fun - if you’re at the right concert, and work with a good group of volunteers, it’s not a bad way to spend an evening. It can also be quite taxing, as I discovered when I made the mistake of volunteering for teen open mic night. I spent the evening sitting at a card table next to an angry, barrel shaped man who yelled at the kids like they were delinquents. I kept my nose in a book to avoid conversation, but he wanted to know what I was reading – The Story of French, a fascinating book by Jean Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, but just knowing the title wasn’t enough. The angry man gave me his opinion of the French judicial system, denounced the Napoleonic code as barbaric, and put me on the defensive for a civil code that was written a hundred and sixty seven years before I was born, in a country that I’ve never lived in. I went home exhausted. I’m pretty sure that was the last time I volunteered at Old Town.

My only experience of Marie’s Golden Cue up to now had been as my polling place, I’ve cast my vote within its walls in every election since I moved to this neighborhood, and it tickles me that the site of my civic duty occasionally sports lettering on their 1950’s era astro style marquee sign spelling out things like “we have smooth shafts and the clean balls”.

Marie’s Golden Cue is located in a 1930’s deco storefront with white glossy terra cotta tiles. Across the street is a funeral home, and one door over is the El Gallo Carniceria y Fruteria, and the Clothespin Laundromat bearing a sign that reads “Open at 6am only for you”. Gentrification hasn’t quite made it to this block of Chicago, although it has touched just a few blocks north in the form of Starbucks, and in the countless condos that have sprung up in recent years. The picture window is hand painted with the words “Cue Stick Repair Shop, Professional Workmanship”, and if pool isn’t your game, there are a handful of video games and a coin operated claw machine at the front to keep you busy.

Although Chicago is now officially smoke free, there’s plenty of evidence of Marie’s smoky past – beneath the rails of each of her 20 Brunswick pool tables are dark burn marks from cigarettes smoked long ago. I took a moment to read the signage on the walls, and there was plenty of it; fading signs written in pre-Helvetica script with directives like “Masse shots are not allowed”, “rule of the house – keep your butt and your butts off the table”, and “I once gave up pool, it was the most terrifying weekend of my life.”

The front desk featured a hot dog spit slowly spinning three wrinkled franks; it was the most well lit object in the whole place. The spinning mechanism moved in starts, resting every few seconds, then soldiering on for another cycle. Behind the desk and out of reach on a back shelf were boxes of instant ramen noodles in Styrofoam bowls. Like the rest of the house, there was plenty of signage. A caricature of a chef beamed next to one that read “Snack Bar Special #1 - 2 Hot Dogs, Chips, Sm. Drink $4.50 plus tax”. The price had been written in black marker on a sheet of 8x10 paper and taped over the original price. There was also a Snack Bar Special #2, which advertised “Polish Sausage, Chips, Sm. Drink $4.25 plus tax”.

My fellow volunteers were scattered about the room, some huddled against the wall in observation, others enjoying a slice of free pizza and a dixie cup of soda near the video games, and some playing lighthearted games of pool with each other. My husband picked up a rack from the front desk, brought a couple of cue sticks down from the wall, and someone at the front desk flipped a switch that lit up our table.

My husband set up the balls and made the break. It had been a while since either of us had played, so it took a few turns before either of us sank one; he took stripes, I had solids. Leaning over the table to get my shot I was transported to a different game played years ago, in a pool hall on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. I don’t remember how old I was exactly - nineteen, maybe twenty, and I was home for the summer. It had been a few years since I’d lived in Brooklyn, my mother and I had moved to Pelham – a suburb just north of the Bronx, right after I finished junior high because my mother was engaged to a widowed Catholic man who she met at work, and he lived in Pelham with his four children. We moved to a nondescript two bedroom apartment on the other side of town rather than move into his house – he didn’t want to live with my mother before they were married. They broke it off before the end of the school year, but we couldn’t move back right away because my mother had rented out the brownstone in Brooklyn, so I left home and went to boarding school in Poughkeepsie for the remainder of high school.

Ninth grade is a fragile time to move, and I lost touch with everyone I’d known in Brooklyn. We moved just a few miles away, but may as well have moved across the country. My mother recently sent me a few boxes of my old things, and I found an autograph book with signatures of classmates from the end of junior high at I.S. 88.

“To J,” one begins, “I really had some fun with you, don’t tell my mom. Do not allow weeds to grow on the road to friendship. I love you. Love, Gabby 24 E. 2^nd St.” Folded in half along the crease of the page is a late pass dated 6-20-85 for Gabriella Napolitano, she was late for Mr. Neilson’s language arts class. Everything on the slip is written in pencil, in Gabby’s handwriting, except for the time – 9:32 am, written in ink in Mr. Neilson’s handwriting.

There are signatures of the popular girls I idolized – the two Francescas, Amanda, and Abby – whose real name was Almond. Someone named Simon wrote “I already wrote something in the other one”, and Adam Ableman wrote “I hope you have a dandy time in Pelham with all them goyem”.

My best friend Anna wrote “Dear J, Well it’s been 4 years that we’ve known each other. God! Now we’re both going to H.S. It’s going to be hard for the both of us regardless of what town we’re in. But look at the good side – no more Mr. Ashkar or Mme. Winkler! Yeah! So let’s keep in touch. Love, Anna”. In the corner in all caps she wrote “ONLY WIERDOS READ CORNERS”. We’d first met in the fourth grade at the local temple’s after school gymnastics program, we were both latchkey kids and needed a place to go after school before our mothers came home from work.

By the seventh grade she’d blossomed into the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in real life. While I had become more awkward over time – I’d gotten a pair of pink plastic framed glasses in the fifth grade, and braces in the sixth, she’d become lithe and elegant. She went to modeling classes where an instructor taught her how to tweeze her eyebrows, started wearing makeup to school, and blow drying her dark blonde hair. I felt possessive of her, and intensely jealous as all the boys who’d previously ignored us flocked to her, almost helplessly, while I remained in the background with my mass of frizzy hair and lack of social skills. I wasn’t with her when the photographer took pictures for her portfolio; I only saw the slides later. Here, a picture of Anna posing coyly on a park bench, there a picture of Anna leaning against a tree. When I saw her kissing Nico outside the candy store on 16^th street where we played Pac-man and hung out after school, it was as if I’d been stung by an electric eel. Nico was my lab science partner, and I’d developed a monster crush on him. With tears in my eyes I asked Anna why she’d kissed him – as if she could give me a reason that I’d find acceptable.

In the eighth grade she started dating Drew, a kid from the neighborhood. He was older than us, probably only by a couple years, but he seemed like a grown man to me. One night we all hung out in Prospect Park with two 40 ounce bottles of Olde English 800 that Anna and I had bought from a corner store, the clerk didn’t even ask to see our I.D. Drew’s friend Stan was there, and Anna had said that Stan liked me. Where Drew was tall and mysterious - a man of few words, Stan was a little thick around the middle, wore Cazal glasses like D.M.C., and talked a mile a minute. We drank too much, and Stan offered to walk me home. Anna took me aside and whispered:

“Don’t let him take advantage of you!” She was kidding, but I was terrified. I’d never gotten drunk before, and had heard about boys who took advantage of situations like this. I practically ran home, looking over my shoulder every few paces to make sure I wasn’t being followed. When I got home I threw up, lay down on my bed, and watched the ceiling spin until I fell asleep. A few months later my mother and I moved to Pelham.

The summer when I came back, I ran into them again – Anna, Drew, and Stan. Anna and Drew weren’t dating anymore, and the four of us began spending evenings on the stoop of my mother’s brownstone. It was deep summer, too hot to stay inside. My bedroom was on the top floor of the house, and at night I’d put a fan in each window – one facing out, the other facing in, for maximum air flow, and took a quick shower to cool off before trying to sleep through the sticky Brooklyn night. Gradually it became clear that Drew had become interested in me. My years away had given me the advantage of disappearing for most of my awkward phase, and I had returned appearing more comfortable in my own skin. I wore contact lenses, the braces had been removed from my teeth, and I had figured out how to tame my frizzy hair.

One evening someone suggested a game of pool, so we all headed for Brownstone Billiards on the corner of Flatbush and 7^th Avenue. Drew was wearing a purple silk shirt that made his plum black skin look iridescent under the streetlamps, and when he looked at me I felt like I’d been hit in the chest with a bb gun.

It was a weeknight, and not many tables were in use. I didn’t know how to play, so Drew taught me how to line up a shot, standing close to me and reaching around my waist to adjust the cue stick in my hand.

“You gotta line up the shot”, he said, his breath tickling my ear, “and then follow through.” I was entranced.

It was still early when we finished playing, so we walked back to my mother’s house and sat in the kitchen, sipped ginger ale, and traded stories. After a while Anna left, and then Stan, and it was just me and Drew. We talked, leaning forward on our elbows, faces getting ever closer.

“Can I kiss you?” Drew asked, looking right into my eyes. At nineteen years old I had kissed exactly four boys: Dan, the Jewish kid from the suburbs of Philadelphia who I met at summer camp; Paul, the boy from Pelham High School who tricked me into kissing him one day when he walked me home - I avoided him for the rest of the school year; Mick, the troubled kid who I met in upstate New York at a Quaker youth retreat; and Mark, my high school sweetheart, who was the most non-threatening boy you could ever hope for. Nothing in my life had prepared me for this moment.

“No,” I said, surprising us both, “But ask me again sometime.”

After that I got a job, so I couldn’t hang out as much. I remained awkward, Drew remained mysterious, and eventually the summer ended.

Back at Marie’s, I won a game and lost two. There were cardboard boxes full of t-shirts that had a drawing of a guitar and a banjo leaning against each other, and the word “Volunteer” printed in capital letters underneath; if you won a game, you got to take a t-shirt. My husband didn’t want one but I did, so I sifted through the pile until I found one in my size in a mustard orange color. We left the pool hall, walked home in the unseasonably cool weather, and settled in for the evening.

All paths lead to Whole Foods

Why is it that all paths lead to Whole Foods? I got on my bike today to yet again search for the elusive trail that I’ve heard exists on Lawrence, just north of my house. My husband called me at 1:50pm to tell me that it was beautiful outside, and that if I didn’t go out and enjoy it I’d regret it. Good weather is hard to come by in Chicago, and I’d already spent the entire morning playing online scrabble. A friend of mine introduced me to scrabble a few months ago, and I’ve quickly become an addict, sometimes playing as many as half a dozen online games at a time. I’m not that good, but that doesn’t stop me.

On the "Host" and "Join" tables people post their stats, and their preferred dictionary (TWL, the standard American dictionary; SOPWODS, the standard British dictionary; French, or Italian). Your stats get posted automatically – I’m currently 1294, and I can’t tell you what that means. When you request a game, you must ask for either a regular or challenge game, and dictate the speed – fast, moderate, or slow. You also have to chose “yes” or “no” to the question “Is this request for Adult users only?”, because, amazingly, people troll the scrabble boards looking for someone to talk dirty with. At any given moment you can read game requests like:

“**** PLZ READ **** scrabulous is 1st & foremost but open 2 NAUGHTY CHAT (women only). no cheats or i will delete. similar ratings. *** TYPE 2625 TO LET ME KNOW THAT U'VE READ THIS OR I WILL DELETE.*** thx”

I’ve lost as many games as I’ve won, partly because I’m foolish enough to try playing French games occasionally. Judging from the comments on the Join Table, people must accidentally start games with French speakers all the time before realizing their mistake, typical French requests read like this:

“Partie RAPIDE et EN FRANÇAIS SEULEMENT avec joueur +1600 SVP **************** FRENCH FRENCH FRENCH *”

The trouble with playing scrabble in French, besides the fact that it’s not my native language, is that people communicate with their opponents via instant messaging, and I don’t understand French texting. I sweat it out, trying to look up incomprehensible abbreviations on wordreference.com, only to reply with meek statements like “Jai trop de voyelles” (I have too many vowels), or “je suis encore vivant” (I’m still alive). I never fess up that it’s not my langue maternelle, but I have a feeling they figure it out – I typically lose by about a hundred points. So far on the French boards I’ve lost to Richard D. 250 to 338, Sylvie D. 221 to 333, and to Marc G. 267 to 356 – even after scoring 43 points for EX, and, inexplicably, 45 points for FREAK – who knew it was a French word?

Panicked by my husband’s warning that I would regret it if I didn’t get outside to enjoy the weather, I stopped what I was doing on the scrabble boards, and jumped on my bike without any real destination in mind. I headed north a bit, looking for the elusive trail I mentioned earlier, and ended up at Granville, then headed east to the bike path along the lake. The bike path is great, but on sunny Saturdays it can be treacherous – everyone was out: rollerbladers, bikers, and couples strolling hand in hand, it makes for some of the most dangerous biking in the city. I navigated my way south to Belmont, and turned off into boys town because the wind was getting to me, and I was feeling a bit peckish. I biked up Broadway looking for a suitable spot; the neighborhood was teeming with Saturday traffic. Outdoor seating had sprouted up everywhere, but I didn’t want to stop at any of the bustling cafes – an unshowered 37 year old woman seated alone at a cafe in boys town is a tragedy; but at Whole Foods its par for the course.

I worked at Whole Foods years ago as a cashier, and as a result the grocery chain has created in me a sense of familiarity and safety that I’ll never shake – like a grown bird might find comfort in its fledgling nest. And so I found myself perusing the salad bar at the Whole Foods in boys town on a Saturday afternoon. I chose my greens, and proceeded to the front end, where the cashiers are located. My cashier was a young man with spiky dyed black hair, copious amounts of black eyeliner, and black nail polish. He had a pallid complexion, and was reedy as a bamboo stalk. Next to him was a copy of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”, one of my all time favorite reads. As a former Whole Foods cashier, I feel compelled to make conversation with others of my ilk. I once went shopping at the Whole Foods in Cambridge with my mother, and after observing the exchange between me and the cashier, she asked:

“did you know him?”

“No,” I explained, “I’m just nice to cashiers.”

There’s an understanding between cashiers, an understanding that you too have had to memorize long lists of PLU codes for fruits and vegetables – both organic and conventional, numbers that mean nothing to the customer but are vital to charging them correctly. After a few months I had the entire produce inventory memorized; it was like learning the vocabulary of a language that had no grammar, no native speakers, and no practical application in the outside world, and yet it adhered to my brain quicker than any other language I’ve studied.

“Reading ‘In Cold Blood’?” I asked my new friend, stating the obvious.

“Yeah, it’s going pretty slowly,” he said, opening the book and fanning through the pages to where he’d inserted a bookmark, “but it’s starting to pick up.”

“Once it gets going you won’t be able to put it down,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard. This is the first true crime novel I’ve read.”

“Have you seen the movie starring Philip Seymour Hoffman?” I asked, hoping to engage in mutual admiration of PSH.

“You know,” the cashier said, cocking his head slightly and putting the book down, “that movie was like white noise to me.”

“Really?” I asked as flatly as possible.

“Yeah, it just – I watched it, but I was like… it just…”

“It just wasn’t for you?” I interjected helpfully.

“Yeah, it just wasn’t for me.”

“Catherine Keener was in it,” I said, hoping that this would salvage the movie in my new friend’s kohl-rimmed eyes.

“Yeah, you know, she’s great. I loved her in ‘John Malkovich’. Have you seen the original ‘In Cold Blood’?”

“No,” I replied.

“It’s from the 50’s, Robert Blake is in it, it’s great.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’ll have to check that out.” He told me what I owed him for the salad, and I paid him.

“Enjoy the book,” I said.

“Okay, thanks, enjoy your lunch.”

Blue line, 8:30 am

On the el this morning two women, one sitting directly behind the other, applied makeup as the train barreled towards the loop. The one in front patted powder onto her face with staccato movements while her counterpart held a mirror in one hand, and imprisoned an eyeball with a lash curler in the other. Several people watched them, two women engaged in unintentional synchronized grooming. Morning theatre for the nine to five crowd.

It reminded me of a moment in Boston years ago when every person who walked past me giggled, or made some inexplicable facial expression as they passed. Finally someone stopped me and said “look who’s following you.” I stood in my tracks as a couple, deep in discussion, approached – the woman wearing the exact same floral print dress as me. I was amused and disgusted – only in Boston, I decided, would strangers make a point of letting me know that I was wearing the same dress as the next woman.

The woman with the powder was quite pregnant – at least six months. The eyeball woman, having completed her ablutions, watched as the powdery woman in front of her began applying lipstick.

We got off at the same stop – the powdery woman and I, and in the moment after she stood from her seat, but before everyone exiting the train made a mad crush for the open doors, I saw that the eyeball woman was pregnant too – and at about the same stage in her pregnancy.

Once off the train, everyone headed for the same exit, and began forcing their way up the stairs like spawning wildlife. I stopped at the elevator bank – the door was open, and while I’d have to pay for this shortcut in the form of inhaled piss molecules, it would be worth the price to bypass the teeming masses on the stairs.

I stepped inside and pressed the button for the street level. Just before the door closed, the powdery pregnant woman stepped in, and we shared a short, silent, aromatic journey.

Saturday morning

“Hello, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” They looked so unassuming, three teenage girls who walked up the front steps of my house and rang the doorbell on the first truly nice Saturday in Chicago in recent memory. I wasn’t expecting this, we don’t get a lot of foot traffic out where I live – nobody even knows the name of my neighborhood. I always tell people I live near Albany Park, and even then most people don’t know what I’m talking about. Generally I say “end of the brown line”, which prompts the question “how far west is that?” “About thirty four hundred west”. “People live that far west?” The kicker is, I don’t even live west of Pulaski, and if you ask any true West Side native, they’d tell you my house is on the North Side.

I felt sorry for the girls, and couldn’t bring myself to be rude to them. Maybe that was the point in sending out young girls to do the business of old religion – how could I do anything but politely smile, nod, and as tactfully as possible explain that I have no true religious beliefs. “Well,” I finally said, “I’m not religious, so I don’t really think about Jesus.”

“Oh”, the lead one – the only one who’d spoken, said. “Well, do you believe in the bible, or…”

“I wasn’t raised religiously”, I said.

“Oh. Well . I was, so it’s… you know – different.”

“I’m sure it is,” I thought, but held my tongue.

“Well, we’d like you to at least take this,” she said, extending a pamphlet titled “How can you be sure you won’t go to hell when you die?”

“Okay”, I said, and took the pamphlet.

“Have a good day” the lead girl said.

“Thanks, you too. Good luck,” I said, and I meant it. I walked back inside and heard my upstairs neighbors’ doorbell ring. I knew they were gone for the weekend – although they are practicing Christians. I opened the door again.

“My upstairs neighbors are gone for the weekend.”

That’s all I can think of to say about that particular incident. There was another time when someone tried to sell us a home security system, and the occasional alderman, but other than that, we really don’t get much foot traffic out by us – south of Albany Park, east of the West Side, north of fashionable addresses everywhere, and too far west for most people to know about.