America
It’s better if I don’t smoke right before I see my doctor. I’ve been trying to quit anyway, but the scent of failed attempts lingers on my clothes and in my hair. Sure, I’ll say I’m not a smoker. I’ll say I’m fine. But medical records tell the real story. And I haven’t been fine for a long time. I’m sick forever with MS. I’m in a wheelchair.
It’s Tuesday morning in a strip-mall parking lot just off the highway. Dunkin’ Donuts flags one end of the stores, my doctor’s office at the other. A blur of businesses connect the two. My world feels like a never ending agenda of appointments where it’s easy to lose sight of my country, its people changing.
Julie, my driver, is packing up the van that got me here. She’s through a driving service for the elderly and sick. I hardly leave my house. Julie’s just giving me her number so I can call when my appointment ends. I’m putting it in my phone. I get halfway through the number before Julie stops talking.
Coming at us is an angry woman with frizzy hair. She’s yelling and fast approaching. Where she has been means very little. Where she is going seems extremely important. Right now, I’m just in her way. I’ve slipped into the category of things that are in the way. Off course is a lonely experience for each of us.
“I have to go places. I don’t have time for all this,” begins the chant of the screaming woman, her sedan blocked-in by the tail end of Julie’s van. “I don’t have time for your chitchat.”
The woman before us, the stranger, the citizen, has to catch her breath. She stops a few feet away from me, and clutches her thighs. She pants with her head down. She is livid that Julie’s van is blocking her in.
I tell her we’ll be done in a second. This is my driver. And I just need her number. And I have to see the doctor.
But the woman is infuriated. She stands in rage, wearing a pastel sweatshirt and mom jeans. Her face is flushed. Her breathing still quick. Julie manages to get out two more numbers before the woman pulls out her own phone and threatens to call the police. I laugh because the idea of the police showing up for this is ridiculous. It’s a light laugh born out of discomfort, a soft chuckle that quickly vanishes.
Julie’s just going to wait at Dunkin’ Donuts, but she can’t get the rest of her phone number out. The angry woman won’t stop talking and yelling, and threatens to call the police a few more times.
I cut her off because this can’t go on. I’m disabled, perhaps, now making me a fringe citizen, grasping at my connection to humanity, going to the doctor. I just need a phone number. We would have been gone by now. You’re not even in your car, I say to her. I can’t remember the last time I made someone so mad.
“I have a lot of disabled friends,” she says, slipping her phone into the back pocket of her jeans.
Quickly, she moves in with just a few steps. She’s coming at me. Her arms seem to be going everywhere. She’s trying to grab the phone out of my hand. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I dodge her the best I can. I cannot back up. The van is there. I am trapped, but I’m not giving up my phone. This is the sort of thing I’ve seen on YouTube. It’s out there. I just didn’t think it was here, in my world, at my doctor’s, in an otherwise quiet parking lot where the buzz of the highway sounds in the distance. No one is watching, and I don’t think to start recording anything because, surely, this is nothing.
She grabs my arm. She’s got me. We are middle-aged women in the suburbs. We are women who have things to do and places to be before eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning.
“Don’t touch me,” I want to scream, but it comes out mild and weak.
This woman’s hold is tight, but she lets go quick. With an open hand she smacks the van. She takes a few steps back and then paces in front of me. Her strides are long, but her legs are short. She only takes a few steps before switching directions. She’s out of shape, and this quickly proves tiring. She still looks too angry to be thinking straight. I don’t know her next move. I don’t know where Julie is — I’m sure she’s not trying to be a bystander. Julie would step in if she needed to. But she is close by and silent.
I am the target. Julie and the van are the backdrop, but I am the problem. The woman cries out that I’m in the way, that I’m blocking her. It’s all my fault, but I don’t understand what this all really is. The more the woman says such things directed at me, the more crazed it all becomes. She doesn’t acknowledge Julie and hasn’t asked her to move her van. She doesn’t yell at her, grab her. She says again there are places to go and people to see, losing her breath just when she had almost caught it, panting again in the loop of ordinary madness and what seems to have become acceptable acts in a strip-mall parking lot.
* * * * *
Am I in the way, America?
Regardless of your political beliefs there's a climate of aggression which does affect us all. My America is slipping, disappearing. Confusion and division has created a pecking order. I’m close to the bottom in a wheelchair, relying on medicare and disability checks. Relying on drivers like Julie to see doctors. I’m feeling pushed out with nowhere to go.
When I listen to the cry of the American people, what I hear is that other people are in the way. This new narrative has tarnished what you’ve always been to me, my country.
I am caught in the assault of this new mindset. America, your strip-malls are everywhere and your bookstores and common sense disappearing. What is going on, America?
We’re in an ecosystem which has changed drastically under the leadership of President Trump, who has appointed cruelty and meanness to the public mindset. I don’t know if this woman is a Trump supporter. I don’t know if she’s a republican or even votes. None of that matters as she’s grabbed my arm and hasn’t stopped yelling. That doesn’t seem to matter either. America, are you still there?
My father was a Trump supporter the last time I spoke to him. I don’t know if anything has changed, but we haven’t talked in years. America, your divisions are cracking our personal worlds. What you are becoming has set me up to lose. The spread of us vs. them came down hard, and its borders were never clearly defined. No one is winning their private wars. Division only works if some of us are on the outs.
America, I registered as a socialist when I was in college. I’m not sorry. I used to think socialism and peace would work if adopted on a global scale. The ideals of the youth. Are you still handing out ideals, America?
The woman suddenly changes her story. She says I can call the police. She doesn’t care. She’s not sticking around. I don’t say anything back to her. She gets in her car. She starts to back up. Her wheels turn, and at a slight angle she pulls out of the space, clearing the van by at least a foot. And just like that she's gone — so why do I still feel like I'm in her way?
Julie emerges, or maybe she was always there. She stands next to me. I didn’t know what to say, she says. She didn’t want to get hit in the crossfire. She wasn’t trying to be a bystander. She’s just trying to make a living driving disabled people to appointments. She says she’s never seen people acting like that, well, except for those viral videos. Then she gives me the remaining numbers so I can call her. A thin veil of normalcy comes back with the woman now gone, but this blanket has holes and I’m late for my appointment.
America, I fear what you’re becoming. I fear I can not save you. I fear I’ve become in the way.
Andrea Gregory holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her fiction has appeared in The Sun and Consequence Magazine, with a story forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly. She is a former journalist and world traveler, having spent time reporting from the Balkans after the wars. Her work from the Balkans has appeared in Transitions Online (TOL), Balkan Insight, The Christian Science Monitor, and other places. She holds a BS in journalism from Emerson College. Her journalism career ended when she came down with multiple sclerosis, but life has a way of calling writers back to their roots.