Dating a self centered man27. Jean and I had to pay for our SATs and college applications ourselves, so we got jobs every summer. I’d worked as a neighborhood landscaper, an ice cream parlor boy, and a driving range ball-retriever. The summer before moving away to college, my dad set me up to deliver furniture. The store had a yellow Penske truck with its name plastered on the side — MAVEN’S. I lugged mattresses and box springs and entertainment hutches and curio cabinets from the store’s loading zone — a curb painted green in the small lot — to the houses of people who, seeing me struggle so thoroughly, either offered a tip or offered to help. No one did both. “See you tomorrow morning?” 13. In the fall of 2001, Mom was working in Men’s Suits at Dillard’s. At least three times a week, she said, she helped a customer who, hearing her accent, asked to be helped by someone else. “They say they want a man’s help.” She was wearing her pajamas as she told us this, but she was still the daughter of a tailor. “I’ve been altering suits for how long?” she asked no one in particular. “The reason isme. They hear my accent, think I’m Muslim. Thesebeeble are idiots,” she said. “Don’t they know what Muslims did to Armenians a hundred years ago?” “This room is quite stark,” she said. “Is it your husband’s design?” It can drag on for months, a year, but I know that I will go; I am still there and already I’m absent. I had satisfied a great core of lethargy that hides beneath my activity; I had wanted to be a woman from a harem, the experiment was terminated. Fishing for salmon is not life. Any kind of poverty is better than that kind of wretchedness. The holidays were over. They had cost me a fortune, I had neglected my house, deserted my business, and showered gifts on hundreds of servants. Morris pushed Frazier aside.“Because someone broke the system,” the sergeant snapped. “Someone stole our secrets or we wouldn’t be here. Because there’s more they want to know and don’t they try to beat it out of one of us most every day in that damned smokehouse of theirs. Goddamned spider will keep changing its web ’til it catches fresh meat, eh? Just when they realize the runners stand together and won’t be broke, you show up.” “Sure. The glasses are over your head. You need ice?” On the stone wall around the community center sits a group of tourists who are probably from this place’s sister village in Brittany, which has a name that no one can remember. French and Icelandic flags fly on a flagpole. We’re in a foreign country in Iceland. Where the other country in the country is. I could tell by her eyes that she was only partly aware of where she was and what she was doing, so I laid her in the bathtub and turned on the cold water of the overhead shower. She was so high that it took five seconds or so for the chill to take effect. When she started shivering I held her in place for a few seconds more and then pulled her from the tub. “I don’t understand.” “So the science means reducing things to their spirit.” dating a self centered man “How could you know when I only just realized it right now?” Woof, he says. “I’m not trying to do anything,” he said. “I mean, I was, I am attracted to you, but I wouldn’t have even said anything in the restaurant if you didn’t want me to. And I came here because you asked me.” You poor thing. Why was everything always like that with you? The man muttered a low complaint then stepped into the open and gestured them forward. As they reached the barnyard another guard with a musket appeared, watching them warily. These were men of the frontier, who well knew that Indian attacks would come from the west, from the wooded slopes behind them, but these men too were only watching the east, in the direction of the soldiers. Seventh day of evidence, 21 MARCH 2016 dating a self centered man. |