How It's Supposed to Be

Take snippets of conversations you overhear, weave them together into a story. . .


"I can't have someone that I don't trust work for me. And I can't trust a woman who puts a stick in her mouth, lights one end and sucks the tar out of the other."

"I'd like to have the job," I tell her. "You're short-handed. I can give you coverage for tomorrow."

She takes a long draw on her drink--not listening to me. "For the record, not that it applies to you. But. Men I don't trust under any conditions."

As part of the interview, she had me empty my purse. She's handed me back everything but placed the lighter on the table.

I am sitting in the booth across from her, penning anagrams on a napkin for Bingo Diner. . . go nine bird, be nonrigid, be riding on.

"You know my phone's gonna die," she says and shakes it like a box of Good'n'Plenty.

Her name is Vogie. She owns the diner.

A kid, a girl-kid, named Guy--about nineteen years old is mopping the floor. We both watch her as if she were doing something other than push the dirt and mud from one side of the room to the other.

She notices that she has our attention.

"My boyfriend says mopping is like playing hockey but at one-tenth the pay." She stops her work.

The word 'boyfriend' isn't agile enough to make it out of here alive.

Vogie tugs at a corner of her hair. "You're a riot my darling but there's not enough alcohol content in this diet-Sprite for me to actually laugh."

She turns her attention to me.

"You should have told me, I mean at least pretended, you were in the 'energy business.' What'd you pay, like $62.00 for this lighter? I know that the only work you've ever done is stack firewood. . . Carla. But jeez if you'd look the way people want you to look--I mean lose the flannel--tell your little white lies and shut up. Their imaginations will take over. They'll talk themselves into believing in you. You'll be working again in no time."

. . . bonding ire, bid one grin.

It starts to rain and I feel the storm-blown mist coming in through the slightly open front door and gust across the tables and booths. The lightning is unlacing the sky. The floor looks radioactive.

"Life, Carla," Vogie says, "It's like one of those ipod things. . . You have to have the volume all the way up. Always. Always have to max out the volume. In order to get anything out of it."

"Thanks mom," I say.