Some Place Better Than Here

Chapter 25: The Sound of Silence

What is up with this woman? I thought. Is she, like, nervous to talk to me?

"I'm going to—next job," she said.

"You work two jobs?"

Nenita murmured with a nod, and then put up four fingers. "Four kids," she said and flicked her eyebrows.

"Do you have a husband?"

Her giggle went into turbo-mode as she shook her head. Everything she did was done with a hint of giggle behind it. My bafflement made me curious at the same time.

Was her nonexistent husband, like, funny?

The realization crept up on me that perhaps Nenita hid her mouth behind her hand, the same way I hid my eye behind my hair. For the rest of our conversation, I tried to see if there was something wrong with her dental work, but she had mastered a way of talking without ever showing her teeth.

Conversation ran to a sudden stop as Nenita and I had little to talk about, let alone the ability to communicate fluently in the same language. Nenita's phone started to ring and she reached into one of the plastic shopping bags by her feet and whipped out a silver flip-phone. Her tongue began rapid-firing a strange language that did not sound remotely close to what I recalled from ninth grade Spanish. Perplexed as hell, I tried to pick out the sounds that sounded Asian with a flamboyant enthusiasm that exaggerated the vowels.

Then pulling up in a deep heave of exhaust, the 6:30pm bus came to a stop across the street. Nenita said something in the phone that I assumed was Bye, then bent down to pick up her shopping bags that were tearing at the seams. Just as she began to hurry away, I said, "Nenita, you're not Spanish, are you?"

Giggling, looking down to hide her mouth because her hands were full, Nenita flicked her eyebrows, said, "Filipino" and continued her rush to the bus.

Nenita did a better job of concealing her mouth than I did my eye. And that was why I began to wonder, as I watched her bus pull up and watched Nenita waddle away, that if it was because of my eye that, for the first time ever, Nenita had decided to talk to me and call me prittee.

I continued to watch as Nenita struggled to scoot through the doors with her full plastic bags, and embark upon that empty-seated bus.

As the bus sighed and pulled away, I thought of an endless amount of questions I wanted to ask Nenita: What happened to her husband? Did he just pick up one day and leave without a trace? Did he die? Did Nenita, while chopping vegetables within the gray cinder-block walls of the storage room, also feel like she was in a timeless void?

I wish I had asked her what her second job was. With her half-broken, Filipino accented English, I doubted it was anything remotely glamorous.

If I quit Wright Bros tomorrow and went a week, two weeks, or even a month without work, life would obviously be shitty because I wouldn't have any of my own money of course. But I could still eat the crap Jim brought home. As long as I didn't ask about my mom, my eyes would remain intact.

I realized that if Nenita quit one of her jobs, for even just a day, her children would go hungry.

What I hated, absolutely hated about this messed up world, was that nobody really gave no shits 'bout whether or not you's gots a big heart or cared about your kids. It seemed to come down to: Are you attractive enough? Or, could your provided intelligence financially benefit me? For what was undoubtedly an overworked, and what brazenly appeared to be an unrewarding life, was it even possible for Nenita to ever go through a day without pertaining to the responsibilities of her employers or children? What if she wanted to go out on Friday nights, and go on dates, and feel loved and romanced and sexed like the rest of us?