Coming Back

Partway through college I transferred to UCLA and moved into a studio apartment near campus. When I introduced myself to my new neighbors, many of them were hesitant to open their doors. “I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness,” I said. “I’m not selling anything. I’m just moving into Unit 3.”

I loved my simple life with one room, no TV, and only my uncle’s hand-me-down record player, some good books, and my new friends to occupy my time. Working out at the health club was part of my daily ritual. I’d park in a large garage, and as I left after my workout, I’d speak to the man in the ticket booth. He was from Mexico and knew little English. Since I wanted to learn Spanish, we began to trade words: I’d teach him an English word, and he’d teach me the same word in Spanish, all in less than a minute.

After graduation I moved away, but I returned two years later to visit my sister, who belonged to the same health club. Leaving the club with her, I discovered that the Mexican man was still working in the ticket booth. When he saw me, his eyes lit up, and he said, “Where have you been?” I told him I’d moved to Seattle. Looking as if he was going to cry, he said, “You are the only person who ever spoke to me.”

Kim Hunter
Los Altos, California

I was nineteen when my roommate asked if I wanted to drive with her from Minnesota to Mexico. It was 1972, and I’d never seen the ocean or a palm tree. My impressions of Mexico had been shaped entirely by Zorro stories. I planned to stay for two weeks, but remained for two months. We spent the night in mountain villages, washed our clothes in stone basins, and ate tamales in people’s kitchens. I also saw crippled people begging on the streets.

Coming home was a shock. The houses looked like castles, the lawns like golf courses. There were Cadillacs everywhere. My neat, orderly neighborhood was free of peddlers, beggars, and germs, but also free of music, dancing, color, life. I saw who I was for the first time: rich, secure, naive, American.

Nancy Bee Zhao
Minneapolis, Minnesota

At twenty-one, I took a road trip to New Orleans with my eighteen-year-old sister. Everything I knew about New Orleans came from National Geographic and a Janis Joplin song.

It was January, and as we traveled along the Gulf Coast, away from our parents and the little town where we’d grown up, my sister seemed different, more confident. She held the wheel in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She’d recently started smoking, and it made her shyness seem cool.

In Tallahassee, Florida, a rear power window of our old Buick got stuck in the down position during a rainstorm. The first garage we went to told us it would cost three hundred dollars to fix. We kept looking until we found a kindly mechanic who said he’d put it back up for twenty bucks. It would be fine as long as nobody pushed the DOWN button again.

While he fixed the window, we told him about our big trip to New Orleans. He finished up, and we tried to pay him, but he shook his head. If we really wanted to do him a favor, he told us, we should turn the car around and go back home. Two beautiful, naive girls like us, he said, alone in the “City of Sin,” were a disaster waiting to happen.

That evening we checked into a New Orleans youth hostel. We stayed up all night, drank too much, and cavorted with European tourists. A funny American boy named David was staying at the hostel, too. Though he had bad skin and his clothes didn’t fit quite right, my sister and I took an immediate liking to him. When the three of us went places, he would walk with one of us on each arm while men stared in amazement at his luck. Sometimes David would run ahead and climb lampposts to impress us. In the evenings he played Leonard Cohen songs on his guitar.

He flirted recklessly with both of us, whispering in my sister’s ear while he squeezed my knee under the table. Why did we let him get away with it? We were smitten. It was New Orleans. We were drunk. Maybe if he’d been more handsome, we would have been more suspicious. We even forgave him for accidentally rolling down the back window of our Buick.

Secretly, I imagined that David preferred my sister. The thought of the two of them together made me jealous, so when my sister said, “I don’t think either of us should kiss him,” I agreed. We made a pact. A few nights later my sister went out on a date with a Swedish boy from the hostel, leaving me alone with David. We sat for a while on a pier, looking at the Mississippi.

We drank coffee at Café du Monde. We lay on park benches in Jackson Square. We drank mysterious drinks at a bar on Royal Street. David held my hand, and we wandered through the French Quarter. People who passed us said, “Oh, you look so good together!” At three in the morning, as we passed my parked car on the way back to the hostel, David opened the door to the back seat. I mentioned my pact with my sister. He laughed and started kissing me. We made out until the sun came up.

That night I told my sister to pack her things: we were going home. I waited until we were just over the border into Mississippi before I told her that I’d broken the pact. She cried an awful, convulsing cry. “I’m sorry,” I said, but she didn’t respond. She didn’t look cool anymore; she looked like my little sister.

When I told the story recently to a friend, he thought it was hilarious.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “We made a pact.”

“Those kinds of pacts don’t count,” he said.

But when I think of my little sister crying in a Mississippi hotel parking lot, I know they do.

S.B.
Tucson, Arizona

When I was in high school, my mother worked at Newberry’s department store. I walked there after school every day and did my homework in the “ladies’ lunchroom.” But first I would go to the menswear department in the basement to visit Mom. I always paused on the landing of the basement steps and looked for her in the maze of aisles. As soon as she saw me, her face lit up.

Mom died years ago. I recently returned to my hometown on a business trip. The downtown had declined, and many of the stores were abandoned. The Newberry’s building was now an antique mall. I hadn’t set foot in it for more than thirty years. As I started down the stairs to the basement, I felt an impossible hope that Mom would be there, waiting. I wanted nothing more than to stand on the landing and see her loving face looking up at me.

Margaret Mitchell
Cottonwood, Arizona

For the first time in six months I am back at work. I haven’t been to work since Leo died. Leo was our baby boy.

It is strange to be here. Everyone is being oddly kind, as if they don’t quite know what to do with me. When my office mate asks me how I am, I’m not sure what to say. I managed to get out of bed today, dress myself, and get to work. My husband and I have continued to go to the grocery store and feed ourselves. I haven’t moved back to my hometown. I haven’t killed myself.

“I’m doing OK,” I say.

Name Withheld

PRINT

E-MAIL

DOWNLOAD PDF

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE