A Trip Out of the City

Charles boarded the train and sat on the second deck. He put on his headphones and spaced out, watching the railroad tracks and the landscapes disappear. He arrived in Crystal Lake an hour later. His grandmother was at the station. She was wearing jeans and sneakers, a sweatshirt and a pink headband that propped up her short bright white hair. She looked at least twenty years younger than she really was. They walked together through the commercial district of the town and settled on a place to have lunch. Charles had a bowl of chicken soup as his grandmother picked at an arugula salad. She asked him what he was doing and he said he was going to dictate his history. He asked her what she was doing and she said she was just trying to survive. She asked him what history he had to dictate—he was still so young. He said he had a lot of interesting things happen to him that required telling. She looked on as if befuddled. She asked him to tell her one. He said she wasn’t the proper audience. She told him to forget about embarrassing details. He asked her if that meant he should filter the story. She said yes, whatever made him comfortable. He told the story of what had happened to him on Wednesday night:
“I was out there, and I was looking around. There was nobody that could assuage the pain I was feeling. I was stuck. I couldn’t be happy. I felt sad, but I didn’t feel justified in my sadness. I was walking around, and I went to Rory’s house. You know Rory, he was glad I came to see him. He wanted me to stay later than I did. He said he was losing it over a girl. I told him he was lucky. I was losing it over questions that had no answer. I had to go back on the street to know what it was I should do. I left, and I started walking down the sidewalk, and I realized I had to go see a friend of mine, and I went there, and he keeps a garden in his back patio and he gave me this bag of the freshest parsley practically for free. So I went home and used it in some leftover pasta and it was really delicious. But then it was after dinner and I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t just want to try to fall asleep, so I asked my roommate if he wanted to go out on the town. He agreed, and his girlfriend came along with us. We went to a club, we had a few drinks, he started dancing with his girlfriend, and I walked around looking for someone to dance with. Everybody was paired off, and what few girls were not dancing were standing, sipping their drinks, talking to their girlfriends. I became flustered by the scenario, so I bought myself an energy drink from a guy who was selling them independently, and I went into the bathroom. I gulped it down and ten minutes later the entire scenery of the club changed. Everything before that was menacing and wrong, scary, unholy, suddenly appeared to be good, one of the best ideas anybody has ever come up with, a true gift. This club that I hated upon entering became a wonderland. Suddenly I slid into the most densely packed area of the dance floor. There, everyone was sweaty, nobody was saying anything obnoxious, it just seemed like people were happy to have you there. It was like this big hug from humanity. Feeling so weird at the club and really not liking the music we were all supposed to be dancing to, and suddenly this huge hug from seemingly everybody in the club. I felt so happy for an instant. Then, I saw a girl dancing by herself, kind of looking towards the floor, flipping her hair back every once and a while. I nonchalantly moved over towards her, and she saw me, and she kept dancing the same way, until finally I was right up next to her, and she grabbed me, and she pulled me close to her, and we danced like that for a few minutes. I was feeling so good I tried to explain how happy I was at the moment, and she just looked astonished. Like, this was a typical night for her, I guess. For me, this was one of the very few times in my life I had actually danced with somebody at a club.”
“We used to go out dancing,” Charles’s grandmother said.
“But it was a different sort of dancing I take it.”
“It used to be the only thing we would do on the weekends. We would work all week, making twenty-five cents an hour, and on Friday night we would dress up as pretty as we could, and we would put on all kinds of makeup, and we would go out to a dance. I met your grandfather at one of those very dances.” She finished.
“I don’t think spouses meet at clubs nowadays.” He took a sip of his iced tea.
“Well, we met one night, and we stayed married for fifty years. So why don’t you tell me, Charles, what is a good place to meet a spouse?”
“That’s obvious.” He said.
“Oh is it?”
“School.”
“Bah,” his grandmother said, “In my day, schools were separated.”
“School is a predetermined matchmaker.”
“That’s an easy excuse to use.” She said. “What if you couldn’t afford school? What would you do then?”
“But I can afford school.” He followed.
“I couldn’t afford school, and look at what I accomplished.”
“You’re a very unique lady.”
“School taught me nothing. Working taught me everything.”
“Are you trying to tell me I should get a job?”
“I certainly wouldn’t be going out to dances on a Wednesday night while I was working. If I did that, I would blow all of my measly savings. Just because you think you don’t have to worry about money doesn’t mean you can’t try to make as much of a difference as everyone else who does work.”
“You’re losing me, grandma.”
“Just keep it in mind. One day you won’t be expected to work. Now, more than ever, you’ve got to be working hard. Just believe me.”
“Okay, I’ll believe you,” Charles answered at last.
They had sandwiches and ice cream and they left. Charles asked his grandmother if she would like to visit him in the city next time, and she said it was quite a hard trip to make, but she would do it. He promised they would go out to a fancy lunch and they could walk all around the city, and through all of the parks that she hadn’t seen yet. He hugged and kissed her before he boarded the train home, the sky beginning to darken.