Conversations
created May 1997
Text of this page ("Conversations") copyright © 1997–2005 by Eric Bourland. All rights reserved. The content of this page is a public resource and may be distributed freely if unchanged and credited to the author. Thanks.
At the bus stop two ladies converse in Spanish. We have been meeting on this road for several months, a bit before eight-thirty every weekday morning. We straggle in from our separate homes, hurrying across the grocery store parking lot so as not to miss the bus. They talk easily. Maybe they have known each other a long while, or perhaps it is just that they are two women, and original Spanish speakers, that conduces their free and relaxed conversation even in the stuporous morning. They face each other without any posturing, their bodies resting squarely on work-heavy, venous ankles. Their pastel skirts flap in the cold wind, battened to their knees by handbags. After a few weeks of seeing each other's faces at the bus stop, the ladies and I have begun politely to greet each other. Generously, they greet me in American-English. They fall immediately into conversation. I stand to one side reading a book. In a little while the bus comes.
A conversation is an exchange of objects, objects like metal spheres. Two people sit at a table each with a collection of metal spheres before her or him; some of the spheres are bright and silvery; others, iron-colored and less valuable. The conversants slide their spheres across the table, one party hopefully improving the other's collection.
On the bus, the two ladies meet a third lady, somewhat older than they. An energetic sliding of spheres begins. One of the original two ladies sits rather quietly, while the second lady and the older lady carry on a rapid conversation. The quiet lady pays close attention and sometimes nods in agreement or adds an augmentative Sí. The first two ladies accord the older lady a goodly measure of respect. The older lady, with clipped silver hair and a pinched, weather-chiseled face, sits tall in her blue plastic bus seat and makes declamatory gestures as she speaks.
I take the bus to the East Falls Church metrorail station, where I catch the subway into DC. Often I can get a seat and sit comfortably reading and oblivious until the train reaches Foggy Bottom. Today I fall into a seat beside an elderly Asian gentleman who is reading aloud from a book inscribed with Asian figures. "Doors closing," calls the metallic female voice over the intercom, and the train lurches forward. Peripherally I can see the gentleman's eye moving vertically on his page as he reads (not laterally, as my eyes move). Unrecognized and half-whispered his words wrap around the base of the nerves in my neck. It's very soothing. I stop reading, but hold my book in place and my eyes half-closed, one of many somnolent passengers rolling toward the city.
May 16, there is a wine tasting at Mount Vernon and I am there in the company of three friends. Ladies in colonial get-ups walk around giving directions. I stop to watch a cooper at his work and to feel the splintery barrel-planks in my hands. We push around the tent packed with sloshed yuppies tasting wine, stewed in a babble of voices. One fellow is going on about the alchemical properties of the down-end of a wine cork. A young lady, my age, is talking about her too-tight shoes. The words are herded together and urgent — conversations built within the press of a crowd. We swirl the vintages in our glasses, sniffing at the bouquet and estimating tannin. Generously, Dana buys a bottle of merlot for us, and bread and tart cheese, and we all sit on the hillside facing the Potomac. The wine turns the still river into a shifting pool. Zoey wipes bread flour off the tip of my nose. A half moon hangs overhead and jazz strains drift on the hill. In a while we stagger up and walk around the dimmed estate. We see the brickwork of old cellars and the carved wood walls of the mansion. We join a crowd of hecklers gathered around two glassblowers, who are shaping molten crystal pulled from the maw of a forge. A particular spirit invests this group, who sometimes seem angry at the glassblowers and bent on rebuking them, but who shift abruptly to tones of merriment and appreciation. The glassmen weld an ornate plate, spearing the hot wad of glass like the fulgurous heart of a salamander, compressing it within a mold, swirling it to take its shape from the centrifugal air and now replacing it through the bright door of the oven like a portal to a sun's core.
When the workday is done, familiar faces gather at the East Falls Church station to wait for the 3A bus back to Annandale. There is a tall bulb-nosed fellow with slicked silver hair and a leather jacket who is always conversing with a well-dressed middleaged lady. The lady has large eyes and an unchanging sincere expression. There are two teenaged Asian girls who sit together. There is one woman who always wears sweats and a sun visor and sits at the front of the bus talking loudly with the driver about the tv shows they regularly watch. The driver herself is kind and very competent, deftly maneuvering her vehicle through rush hour traffic even while discussing the innuendos of body and language that constitute the dialog of "Friends," a popular American tv show. There is a middleaged Asian woman, in professional dress, who sits alone and reads a book. She wears a gold marriage band. One time, the two Asian girls are talking in the seat in front of her, and they turn to ask her a question in their Asian language, and she looks up from her book and replies in same, in a calm and precise voice — it is the first time I have heard her speak. After her reply, the girls turn back around, satisfied with their consultation. An authoritative answer has been given.
From the middle of the bus I can see the shoulders and heads of the passengers in front of me. The middleaged Asian woman has perfect posture and a good haircut. Her hair is straight and thick and encloses her skull in an aureole quitting at her shoulder. It is dark but not black, giving way to shades of brown when the sun touches it through the window — unlike the blue-black of the teenaged girls' hair — and it has a general sheen of gray, as if it is graying along its full length rather than at the roots.
The commute to and from work devours two hours of my life every workday, but fortunately I am able to spend it reading, in the company of these people who are generous enough to show me some signs of their lives. I am grateful for the steadfast shoulders of the middleaged Asian woman, reminding me to sit up straight, myself. Her hair grows like a pour of oil from the lit lamp that her face would be, were she ever to smile or laugh.
— EB
May 17, 1997