Close Encounters (2 page)

“Honey.” Candice sighs and looks into the air. She usually goes to bed earlier than this. “You already make a lot of people happy. And you get paid pretty damn good for it. Now, speaking of money, how are we gonna pay this cable bill?”

Long after Candice has gone to sleep I think about him, although I'm not sure why. It's not like I'm in love with him or anything, but maybe he would make a nice little brother or something. I mean, he does make me a little uncomfortable, but if he can be comfortable with me, I don't see why I can't be comfortable with him. And maybe that's what's so nice about Chuckie—he's like a puppy who don't care who you are as long as you feed him. I can see myself seeing things through his eyes, getting excited about the things he might get excited about, like going to a baseball game and getting a hot dog or seeing the panda bears at the zoo. I ain't been excited about anything in so long that I suddenly feel giddy, like everything is new again.

And maybe he will fall in love with me. I will not fall in love with him, but it will be nice to know someone likes you.

I decide I am going to go see him. I feel this is the beginning of something big in my life, but I don't know what. We need some tampons and toothpaste, and although the Valu-Mart is usually a little further than I like to go, I take the bus over to the west end of town. I'm dressed real normal, you know, jeans and a tank top, but a nice tank top, black with lace. Not virginal, but not slutty. I don't know what I'm going to say to him. Maybe he'll want to go for an ice cream after he is off work—I'll be home in time to make something for Candice for dinner and before I need to get ready and go to work myself.

I can see him before I even get through the sliding doors. He is wearing a blue smock with the Valu-Mart logo stitched across the right breast. Underneath there is a red tie, I'm guessing the one he got for his birthday. He is standing with his hands clasped together, heels springing, his thoughts somewhere else but cheerful nonetheless. Most people walk by him quickly, heads down, trying not to see him, and maybe I would have done the same thing last week, probably, if I ever shopped at Valu-Mart.

Today I walk up to him with a big smile.

“Hey, birthday boy—remember me?” I hold my arms out slightly for a hug, but Chuckie becomes real stiff, taking a step backward. Remembering his shyness, I put my hands in my pocket. “How are you, Chuckie?”

“Can I help you find something, ma'am?” He asks, and I wonder briefly if he remembers me, even if his body movements definitely indicate otherwise.

“I think I can find everything OK, Chuckie. I was just going to see whether you wanted to get an ice cream after work.”

“I can't,” he stutters, wringing his hands and looking behind me, around me, as if for help. I clutch my purse tighter on my shoulder and wonder if I should have worn a nicer shirt or something.

“Well, it doesn't have to be today—maybe tomorrow or next week,” I offer helpfully, and it is then he finally looks at me, a mixture of frustration and perhaps anger.

“You are not a good person,” he says finally, and I wish he would talk quieter, but volume control doesn't seem to be an option for him. “My mother told me.”

“What did she tell you, Chuckie?”

“We're Christians,” he emphasized. “What you do is against God.”

“What do I do, Chuckie?”

“What you did to me the other night. My friends got in a lot of trouble. My mother won't let them come to the house anymore. She says they're not good Christians either.”

“So, what, we're not friends anymore?”

“You're not a good person, Sandra,” he repeats. “You spit at God. I am a Christian. I love God.”

By this time people are actually looking at Chuckie and, of course, me. I don't know what to say, and I guess it's just as well because I'm not the most gracious talker or anything. But I can't let it go, can't let this just end. I reach over and touch his shoulder, and he jerks away like I'm burned him with a poker.

“Please go away!” he cries, pushing me, and I know inside he doesn't mean to push me that hard but I almost lose my balance. I feel tears well up in my eyes real hard and fast, you know, like they've just been waiting to come out or something, and I feel like everything has stopped except this thunder inside me.

“Fine, fuck you, Chuckie, you retard!” I cry and turn on my heel, out through the in door, almost taking my knee out on some woman in a motorized shopping chair. I wish I hadn't said it, but it just came out, real forceful and all, and I feel like everyone is staring at me, even the shoppers who haven't even entered the Valu-Mart yet. I turn my head to look back through the entrance, and Chuckie is there, the same as always, only he isn't smiling. I wonder where I should go for tampons and toothpaste as I wait at the bus stop, but I don't feel in any shape to do that now. I feel my body still shaking and want to cry, but I can't let my face get all puffy 'cause I'm dancing tonight, and I wish I wasn't dancing tonight or ever again. When Candice asks me what I did today besides get toothpaste and tampons I am going to shrug and say maybe sleep or something. And if she comments that she thought maybe I was going to say I visited my friend Chuckie, if she smirks that smirk of hers like she knew all along what would happen, maybe I'm just gonna have to leave her.

THE MOVIE VERSION OF MY LIFE

IN THE MOVIE VERSION OF MY LIFE I will play myself unless I'm not available. In that case, Scarlett Johannson or Christina Ricci or—for the more finicky Midwestern markets, Kate Hudson—will suffice.

The movie version of my life will mirror my own all-American story, in which an ordinary Polish girl from a blue-collar neighborhood of Baltimore (or perhaps a Native American—no—child of Indian immigrants in the city of liberty and brotherly love, Philadelphia) decides she wants to become a writer. She writes short stories on the back of takeout menus from her father's Indian restaurant—tales of love and adolescence and identity that runneth over between CHICKEN VINDALOO $10.95 and CHICKEN TIKKA MARSALA $9.95 and TEN-DOLLAR DELIVERY MINIMUM.

In the movie version of my life, I attend a mid-Atlantic, second-tier liberal arts college (but let's just say Brown or Columbia or Harvard for audience-recognition purposes) through a combination of Pell grants and student loans (actually, a full scholarship, earned on the strength of my entrance essay, about the trials of an Indian living in a North Philadelphia ghetto that was written entirely on the back of an Indian Palace menu). I come into the possession of a fake ID, experiment with drugs, declare myself a lesbian, a bisexual, and finally an anything-sexual, am placed on academic probation once, and change my major three times—from English Lit to Russian studies and back to English Lit. However, the script may want to focus on the fact that although I had multiple partners of both sexes during college, I eventually fall in love with and marry a wholly unconfused, faithful Midwestern economics major, who will allow me to become the safely edgy Diane Keaton housewife model over ten years' time in addition to popping out a few well-rounded children (read: no art or goth freaks). It will also be emphasized that I didn't actually inhale.

In the movie version of my life, I will graduate with my BA, meander aimlessly for a few years in service-industry jobs replete with
Clerks
and
Reality Bites
jokes and characters, and then settle down as a community events reporter for a mid-circulation local newspaper that pays in the upper twenties. For a dose of realism, however, perhaps it should be rewritten so that I actually fall into a cushy job as a columnist for a magazine in New York that pays in the upper fifties. And my editor, a strikingly handsome man, looking very much like Dylan McDermott or Ben Affleck, discovers the first draft of my memoir in my desk drawer while searching for a takeout menu for the Indian place on 45th. It is a draft, looking very much like this one, that will take the publishing industry by storm. Editors will salivate: she's edgy! She's eclectic! She's ethnic!

In the movie version of my life, my big fat Indian book advance will allow me to leave my job at said cushy New York magazine to work on my follow-up book somewhere in the liberal Northeast. It is then the that pivotal scene in the motion version of my life emerges. Do I stay with the faithful Midwestern economics major or leave him to share samosas at lunch with that ruggedly handsome Affleck character, who now stares wistfully at me from the window of his office in Manhattan three-hundred miles away, opening his desk drawer during a particularly heart-wrenching instrumental and staring with soft, sad puppy eyes at the takeout menu that simultaneously created and destroyed the two of us?

The movie version of my life will soon be playing at a multiplex, stadium seat theater near you. Take your book club, which has undoubtedly read my Oprah-recommended bestseller, or watch me on “The View” next Tuesday. I'm also doing a tie-in with McDonald's called the McChutney, a delicious all-beef patty topped with mango chutney and, perhaps, if we can get my facial features right, a doll by Mattel, complete with sari and menu. After all, I'm a stickler for realism.

IN FETU

THERE WERE ALWAYS TWO, even as they all thought we were only one, even as you listen incredulously and think, no, there is only one, one voice, one story. Although it is true that sometimes it is one voice or the other, or one story or the other, please be clear: this is
our
story.

But perhaps it is easier to start at the beginning.

We were born as one to our parents and placed on the single trajectory that we would call our lives. It was innocent enough, the mistake of it all, the oneness, for there was no evidence of twoness: one egg, one heart, one mind, one name. Just as we have always known that there were two, it was thus only natural to us that there were two. It could be no other way, and all the complications that came with the inconceivability of two were, for us, merely the nominal struggles of life.

Yet when our mother heard us playing in our room, she would find it strange that we would argue over which clothes to put on the doll, whether to paint or whether to build blocks, or whether to eat the snack cookies now or save them for later, when we were really hungry.

“No need to struggle, Julia,” she would comfort us, and we thought she understood also, understood the inherent struggle between us who were both Julia but were not one Julia. “You do whatever you'd like, OK? No need to beat yourself up over it, dear heart. Don't fuss so.”

But she did not understand, nor did our father. Although they used the words
conflicted, struggle, torn
often enough in describing us to our grandparents, friends, pediatricians, it was as if they were eclipsing the tip of the iceberg. They talked in figurative, metaphorical terms when, in reality, the situation was much more literal than they could ever expect.

The cusp of the problem began to dawn on us when we learned to speak and comprehend others. We did not understand why they thought of us as one when there was so obviously two of us that communicated, albeit at different times. There was no rhyme or reason as to who spoke; rather, it was who could get their thoughts out the loudest, the fastest:

“Mother, I don't want to wear the green dress. I hate green dresses!”

“Mother, it's really all right; you know I think the green dress is lovely.”

“Mother, I shall tear a hole in the dress if you put it over my head!”

Although we drove mother to tears with our bickering, she began to think of it as a game, which calmed her, in a sense, but infuriated us.

“Which Julia has come to play?” She would muse when we'd join her on the porch. “Naughty or nice?”

“Momma, why is there only one name when there are two of us?”

“What do you mean, dear?”

“We are as different as night and day and yet you speak to us as one person. How come you only talk to one of us and not the other?”

“Because you are still my Julia, sugar or spice.” Mother would envelop us in her arm, and we could smell the honeysuckle of her perfume.

“Which one of us, Mommy, is sugar and which one is spice?”

“Who
, dear Julia,
who?''

Our father perceived the situation differently.

“You must tell your friend Julie-Ann to behave,” he explained gently after we had acted up again. “Or she'll have to leave. Imaginary friends are guests in this household at our discretion.”

“She's no friend, papa; we're sisters!”

“Well, regardless of what you consider Julie-Ann to be, she must abide by the rules of this house, just as Julia does.”

“Sometimes it's Julia who doesn't behave! Sometimes Julie-Ann is a perfect angel!”

“I'm not arguing with you, Julia; you should work with Julie-Ann together as a team to be the best you can be.”

And so our father christened us: Julia and Julie-Ann. But who was Julia and who was Julie-Ann? Our father had delineated us clearly along the lines of good and bad, when obviously we were a little of both in each our own way.

As we became older and attended school, it dawned on us even more clearly that the others were one, not two.

“What is your other's name?” We would ask our friends, puzzled that they were simply Rebecca or Robin.

“What other?”

“The other inside you, of course.”

At times we were comforted that there were two of us—the ones didn't want to be friends with us. They thought we were strange, crazy perhaps, and teased us mercilessly.

“When you say two, Julia, whatever do you mean?” Ms. James, the school psychologist, would ask. We wondered whether her question was a trick, whether there was a right answer. We glanced down at the pictures Julie-Ann, the artist, had drawn of our family at Ms. James' request. In thick, crude strokes of crayon stood the soft, pale auburn-haired woman who was our mother, and beside her a tall, fair man with a beard and short-cropped hair colored in laboriously with yellow. We stood between them, our fair hair, blue eyes, and our smile. We held each of their hands, a happy unit, a triptych of four.