Small Talk

This guy is driving what looks like a 70’s model Ford, so bright red it's like an eyesore in the snow, with those huge all-terrain tires and one of the side mirrors duct taped on. Not a typical asshole kind of car, I think - it’s the cool stepdad type, someone with kind eyes and a low voice - but this guy is shaping up to be anything but.

“I’m telling you,” the girl sighs, “this blizzard on the interstate’s backed everything up like crazy. We just have to wait it out.” 

“Oh, like hell!” Leaning out into the cold, his nose is the same ugly red as his car. “Some of us have places we need to be, for God’s sake!”

The girl shrugs. “Que sera, sera.” She has a sweetly moony mien, thin lips and tapered fingertips, and seems almost lost in the midnight-colored folds of her sweater. We’ve only been stuck for half an hour or so, but I like her already. She looks like her name would be Sierra, in the way that some names just click in place like cosmic puzzle pieces. Her boots are scuffed, lovingly so, and there are faint acne scars on her left cheek. Definitely Sierra. If she were less pretty or less confident, she might be Joan, but she is radiant.

The red Ford-man rolls his window up and slouches out, slamming the door behind him; Sierra is sitting on a suitcase, and I’ve spread some of my old windbreakers out like a picnic blanket in the snow. “I have some sodas,” I offer, but he just shakes his head no, pulls his hat closer around his ears, and plops down next to me.

“That stuff’s too much sugar,” he grouses. It’s diet, but I don’t think that would be a good point to make. “You’re waiting for this to clear up too, son?”

“Yeah,” I sigh. “Probably won’t be too long, though.” There are delicate crow’s feet around his eyes, and his hands look strong. I was thinking Lewis, but that’s much more David.

“So,” Sierra says, “where were you headed?”

He frowns, pulls at his hat again: he doesn’t want to say.

The snow had stopped falling a while ago, at least where we’re at, but it’s still powdery and gorgeously untouched, like a held breath of silence, a stretched tarp of milky perfection. I’ve met God knows how many people who like to step all over it, leave their footprints crushed in, but I don’t understand it. It’s like I don’t understand artists, I think: so many people want to leave something behind, something to prove they’ve existed, something that tumbles out with their name or their footprint and goes look! Here! This is me, this is what I have been! I suppose, when it comes down to it, I cannot in good faith convince myself I am worthy of such a thing. 

“I’m heading home,” David finally says, and we nod as if he hadn’t paused at all. “I was at my sister’s place for Christmas, and I think she’d rather kill me than have me there another week.”

I give a bare chuckle; Sierra doesn’t. She puts her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, and fixes him with an inscrutable look. “You don’t get along?”

“Well…” There’s another pause, but shorter this time, and a licking flame of passion finds its way into the lines of his face. “We used to get along fine, that’s the thing! We were never incompatible, just the two of us. She’s gone and gotten stuck in something, that’s what I think, some idea that she carries around so it’s never just us anymore.”

I squint. “Like how?”

“Like, I never look nice enough for the pictures anymore. I don’t keep up with politics enough and I don’t make my bed the right way. She wants to put her kids through college, right, so I’m always the bad example, the blue-collar hick with no future. She’s got plastic plants and bar carts you aren’t meant to touch, and her husband talks about stocks like we’re meant to really care, and… I just…” He gives a sudden, barking laugh. “Ah, God, I don’t know. Can I have that Coke?”

“Dr. Pepper,” I frown. “It’s diet.” 

“Thank you.”

The air is fresh, pine-scented, and almost cold enough to hurt in my chest. It surprises me, but it’s easy to look at David and at once know too little and too much about him. It’s the easiest thing in the world. There must be, I think, some mechanism in human hardware that resets my expectations of social interaction with every new person. While some part of me, deep down, expects to only know this man’s opinions on the weather, a much larger part has accepted the conversation’s turn with a shrugging immediacy. That is, I think, the great beauty of strangers: the potential for momentary reinvention, the terrifying and liberating likelihood that we will never see each other again. Strangers are like blankets of snow, momentary paradigm shifts to melt away with the morning sun. 

“What about you?” I ask Sierra. “Were you visiting family, too?”

“Yeah.” She gives a faint, dreamy smile, as if surprised at my interest. “I mean,” she gestures to David, “I’m with him. There weren’t very many Hallmark movie moments, but I guess that’s just how it is sometimes.”

When David looks up at her from the windbreaker, peering over his soda and under his hat, it is with the bittersweet empathy of shared negative experience, at once pitying and hopefully expectant. Openness suits him, shining in his face like the sunrise, clear and delicate. When he lets his guard down, he looks more Owen, more Austin, more cider and cardboard and burlap. “Do you have siblings, then?”

“Yeah, but the problem’s more my parents.” She talks quickly, softly, maybe worried that she’s oversharing, maybe worried that she won’t get it all out. “They don’t want my wife coming to family things, since it’s not proper or whatever, so I just go alone and bring a plate of gingerbread back and pretend I’m not breaking her heart.”

“Please!” David scoffs. “The only thing breaking her heart is a pair of crappy in-laws. I mean, you - God! You know that’s not your fault, right?”

Sierra doesn’t nod, but doesn’t shake her head either, and she looks for a second like she might start crying. “You’re a good wife,” I tell her, because it feels at once like it would be true.

She smiles at me, he smiles at me, and I realize that I’ve been given the metaphorical microphone. There’s no pressure to it, no expectation, no demanding register, only a warm sense of opportunity.

Then, from the road, there is a honk. “We’re moving!” someone calls, and the reverie is shattered, broken glass shards mixing with the snowfall. 

Sierra hopes that I travel safely; David thanks me for the Dr. Pepper. As I walk back to the car, I can hear the crunch of my footsteps.