Thursday, December 20, 2012

Wise Potato Chips












 
Above, Bloomingdales was a cube of white gold. Proud as a beacon, guiding the faithful through the chill rain and cobalt sky.

Below, the 5 train was a southbound sardine can. Belted coats and woolen necks and sour, sweaty faces. We were all very intimate and not so much in love. As usual I was racing to a gig in order to affect a breezy lateness. As usual the MTA was cooperating like sugar in a gas tank.

The ‘Express’ crept. I was already giving lie to my once crisp shirt. My back was flat to the doors. Unseeing faces dotted my view. Our halting progress gave me glimpses of chalk and spray paint scrawls in the tunnel. I couldn’t read them. The chipper fake-voice assured us there was traffic ahead, cheerily made it sound as if there were only a few minutes before it was your turn to meet Santa. I leaned my head against the glass behind it.

Pressed up hard to my left was a pair of munching jaws.

Her left hand cradled a bag of potato chips, while the right kept the steady feed of a conveyor belt. No hurry, just a continual, happy crunch and chew and rolling tongue to pry loose some bits.

I watched from the side. Miss Chomps was less inhibited. She leaned on a shoulder and faced my left profile. She stared at me with popping, watery blue eyes. Then, as if to punctuate a thought, she raked the corners of her mouth where some fried yellow flakes had clustered. Her tongue as deft as a Musketeer's blade, the crumbs never stood a chance.

Miss Chomps’ mental gears spun at the same inexorable speed as her chewing. I didn’t mind her stare so much. Some stares feel harsh, hers was evaluative. All I had to do was stand there.

I reached into my coat pocket and turned down the iPod. It was coming. Do I open the door long before I even hear someone ring the doorbell? Could be.

"God know I shouldn't eat these damn things, but I will. Normally I'm so careful, eat so cleanly. But today, I dunno."

Miss Chomps’ voice was nasal, unvaried, steam-rolling. She was already mid-conversation and I was late in joining the party.

"Ah to hell with it, right?" Munch.

"Can't eat just one, remember that commercial?" Smeck.

"They're too good, I mean, who'd want to stop?" Crunch.

"You like potato chips? You must, I mean, really who doesn't like potato chips, not all the time, God knows, but really who doesn't get that urge for a potato chip now and then?," she asked.

I smiled. Her wide, thin mouth was a pink rubber band stretching and snapping back. Without being able to prove it, I had the sudden thought that she was less daffy than she portrayed. She was gauging my responses. What for, I wasn’t sure.

Miss Chomps was short and late-middle age solid, her frame filling out a turquoise overcoat. The chin was strong and jowls pulled the face into a ruddy square. Lemon yellow hair was bundled up in a violet beret, cheekily tilted. Her watery blues were watchful, a flare of silliness in there but a skeptical crease between them. What she thought, she kept to herself. She had managed six questions that didn't require a single answer.

"You want a potato chip?" 

That, I assumed, required an answer.

"I would,” I told her, “But you can't have just one."

She nodded sagely and looked down to the crumbs in her palm. Then she hoisted them into her mouth. "That's true, you really can't."

Miss Chomps relished those crumbs.

The 5 went from sluggish to dead stop. We were jostled into each other and righted ourselves. That pinging bell-tone, the impotent groan of the crowd, then the chipper fake-voice. Another train got precedence, rumbling over ours, like furniture being moved in the apartment above.

"You deserve it,” I suggested to her. “Treat yourself."

"How do you know?"

"That you're treating yourself?"

"That I deserve it." The skeptical crease deepened. The merry, lightly salted mouth carried on.

"You said before that today was an exception...?," I offered.

"Yeah. Heh. I did. It is. It’s a treat. I'm anxious.”

“About?,” I pressed.

“About Friday.”

“I see.” I didn’t press further.

Another jostle and the ‘Express’ resumed limping.

“So I thought what the hell, satisfy your urge, right?,” Miss Chomps insisted. “It’s so rare. Not like my husband. He's such a terrible eater, really awful."

"In what way?"

She shrugged. "Oh God, when I first started dating him, that was in the Sixties, I thought, oh God, I can't stay with this man. Hot dogs, pastrami, you name it. All this shit. And I was eating macrobiotic! Well. We all were. I guess it was fashionable. Anyway I married him. He's still alive. Lousy eater but not as bad as then. I've made a dent I guess. Know what's funny?" Miss Chomps’ drone up-ending was my cue.

"No, what?"

Lip licks, then a sandy chuckle. "All these macrobiotic eaters back in the Sixties, God were we anal about it. But here’s the joke: we all smoked!"

She laughed, shook her head. "That's what we thought was pure I guess. Go figure, right?"

I smiled in response. Not to pacify, but because she was what I'd hoped.

"You have an accent. You're not from here,” Miss Chomps declared. “Where are you from?”

I get asked that a lot, often a barb of suspicion lurking. Her tone was bright, clean of any barbs, or of any doubt.

My biography was brief. Parents’ nationalities, summers abroad, languages, all those credentials that can be ascribed to you but you haven’t earned. They simply are, and simply are you.

The watery blues glinted. “So you spent a lot of time in France?”

“That’s right,” I nodded.

“Been there recently?”

“About six, seven years ago,” I sighed. “It was a lot easier to do as a kid.”

“Speak French?”

I nodded again.

Miss Chomps’ look warmed and her chewing slowed. “That’s beautiful. You’re so lucky. Some languages are like listening to music, don’t you think that’s true, I think that’s true, French is like listening to music. Even if the voice isn’t that hot and you don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, it’s still like a song!”

She bunched a jolly shoulder and the beginning of a laugh rippled on her mouth. “Of course you know what the hell they’re talking about so maybe it’s not so much a song to you. Your parents taught you French growing up?”

“Right.”

“Yeah,” her laugh bubbled over, “So when they were yelling at you, it wasn’t so much music!

I laughed with her. “Not a song I’d listen to twice, anyway.”

Miss Chomps’ giggle belied the rest of her.

“I’m Estonian,” she told me. “Born there after the war, not such a cheerful place.”

“No, I shouldn’t think so,” I said.

“I loved it though, was there as a young girl until my parents finally brought us here. We spoke it at home. I still speak it.” A half-shrug, a flash of resignation there then gone. “Not as much as I used to.”

Miss Chomps pushed on.

“My son, he’s really bright, really very bright, about your age, well maybe a little older, how old are you, I bet you’re older than you look, my son looks his age, whaddya gonna do, right? He’ll be fine. Anyway, my son is so annoyed with me that I never taught him Estonian growing up.”

“If there’s ever a time to learn a language without effort, that’s it. But you must know that,” I told her.

“Sure, I know it,” she answered. “Who knows, maybe I should’ve taught him. For you, it’s such a gift, French. Lots of people speak it all over the world, it’s romantic, right? God. Beautiful. But Estonian? I mean I love it, sure, but really who the hell uses Estonian? For what? I mean, let’s be real. I guess my son wishes he could speak it, just to be able to say he speaks something other than English. I told him, '...and what, when you were a kid, if I’d made you go to Estonian classes in the afternoon after school!? Yeah, that’d have gone over great, who are you kidding?'”

Miss Chomps’ giggle resurfaced. “Maybe he’s right, I dunno. But really, can you go on a date and woo some girl with Estonian?”

Now it was my turn to shrug. “Lonely Estonian girl, far from home? Could be the magic ticket.”

“Heh.” The bag of potato chips crinkled as she foraged. “Trust me, it’s still not music.”

“Skype comes from Estonia,” she added. “Did you know that?”

I admitted I didn’t.

“Estonians gave Skype to the world, it’s true. Pretty remarkable. You’ve never been there, I’m sure you haven’t?”

I admitted I hadn’t.

“I still have family there, friends. I miss it now and then, don’t go back very often.” Her skeptical crease deepened again. “It’s not a creative culture.”

That struck me. I asked what she meant. Miss Chomps’ watery blues popped a bit further.

“It’s a culture of engineers! Ever tried to connect with an engineer? It’s not the most exciting moment of your life, believe me.”

I laughed and she went on.

“They’re literal. They’re rigid. Right now, they’re also so damn nationalistic, really conservative, ‘get tough to make up for lost time’, you know, that whole thing? You talk to Estonians and get all this nationalism.”  Miss Chomps made a weary face. “Not my bag. At all.”

The ‘Express’ idled into Grand Central like a royal carriage past an adoring mob. Through the window I didn’t see too many adoring faces crammed on that platform.

Miss Chomps balled the now empty bag of potato chips, the metallic foil gleaming and collapsing between her fingers.

“That was good,” she said.

I looked at the face of an older woman, a face with the cheer and radiance of a girl who has snuck a special treat and no one need know.

It reminded me of something. There wasn’t much time, soon the 5 would stop and its doors would slide apart and I’d step out and others would flood in.

“Why the potato chips if you never eat them? Why are you anxious about Friday?,” I asked her.

“Oh,” Miss Chomps’ pink rubber band mouth pulled in a rueful way. “Friday I’m having surgery.”

I didn’t ask more. More would have been intimate.

Miss Chomps’ pleasure was intact. “The potato chips cheered me up.”

I wished her luck on Friday. She thanked me. I offered her my hand and said I was glad we had spoken. Miss Chomps said likewise. The doors parted. A wall of coats pushed forward and I went sideways and slid through a break in the wall.

I thought about potato chips.


 
© Eric Yves Garcia 2012







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