Page 83 - Contrast2014

mouth becomes a line, weighted with sadness, and
trembling slightly as she reaches to take the forms; then
she returns to her seat, and does not look at me. I cannot
look at her, or the clerk, who has now grown quiet. She
did not have to understand Spanish to have heard the
pitch of angry embarrassment.

Silence blankets the car ride home. An awful turmoil
roils inside my stomach. Pride now catches the words in
my throat. It is humiliation, my general shyness, and the
inherent intimacy of language that has always tied my
tongue. I settle for watching her subtly through the corner
of my eyes, and examine this complexity of a woman.
Does she wonder, I think, what would have become of her
life had she not come here, following the brazen footsteps
of my father?

What is she doing here? A simple cashier at Safeway?
When her gentle hands can reduce complex calculus
problems to a neat answer, the process explained patiently
to her daughter - a daughter who has not one iota of her
mathematical prowess. I can see her now, at the job that
works her much too late, punching numbers into a
machine, asking in that mishmash English that is all her
own,

"You like paper or plastic?"

Did she know, I wonder, that my words were borne of
my own private insecurities, of uncertainties about who I
was becoming and who I have been?

Her voice follows my unspoken question, as her
fingers settle on mine and she speaks the redeeming truth
that exists in any language, a wonder that I will name
"love."

"There is nothing to forgive. "

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