Two Lives in Three Times: A Sandwich

by Gwynne Watkins

Marshmallows, chocolate syrup, candy-coated baking chips, a tablespoon of peanut butter and an ill-at-ease banana: this is what the two innocent slices of wheat bread on the table are concealing. Scarborough Fair composed the carbohydrate sculpture as an act of rebellion against her mother, whose idea of adult responsibility is being home at 10 but fixing your own lunch the next morning. Even if she doesn't eat it, the sandwich will be something interesting to ponder in the middle of the pointless school day.

Scarborough sits at a table the color of pencil lead, one that will soon be rolled away for spring cheerleading tryouts. A few interchangeable girls from her English class fill the other seats, fidgeting, peering at Scarborough from under their indecisive hairstyles. They feel safe around Scarborough Fair: she is quiet. But there is something dissentious about her too, which magnetizes the girls into an audience. For now, they poke straws into juice boxes and watch. They see that the tip of Scarborough Fair's nose points slightly to the left, as if the rest of her head is about to turn and follow. A beet velvet skirt weights heavily on her small frame; her feet are invisible under it. Like she's growing, skirt-first, out of the cracks in the tiled floor. There's a silk begonia behind Scarborough's ear, glaring unabashedly forward when her eyes are downcast. And then there is that sandwich - is she really going to eat that?

As Scarborough strips the cling-wrap away, Easy Rider can be seen across the room (quite easily, considering the height of her suede-clad shoulders), opening negotiations with the cafeteria ladies. Two apples and a chicken breast is her offer. Spaghetti with pesto sauce and broccoli, counters the procuress in the hairnet. Plus vanilla or chocolate pudding. Easy Rider offers to forgo the pudding for the extra apple, but the woman just glares. Stopping the cafeteria line entirely, Easy lowers her voice and explains. I can't eat green things. The cafeteria lady blinks, not expanding her vocabulary of eye movements and menu items. It's against my religion, Easy adds with complete sincerity. I'm a Taoist. Saving Easy Rider the trouble of screaming Religious persecution! at the top of her lungs, which she'd done to great effect in the last month of eighth grade, the cafeteria lady places two apples on her tray and hurriedly moves on to the next in line.

Diagnosed as an introvert by three magazine quizzes, Scarborough doesn't know what to make of the shy girls' stares. Their expectation makes her twitch. She pulls out their new English syllabus and mutters over it. The Pearl? They're making us read The Pearl? Scarborough notches up her voice. Can't they just hit us over the head with a shovel labeled "metaphor?" Incredulous giggles erupt across the table.

"You should borrow my copy," suggests an unfamiliar voice

Easy Rider will never again seem as tall as she does to Scarborough at this moment. All heads turn to the owner of the soft deep voice, whose dark hair runs the length of her beaten-up suede jacket, whose shoulders are dusted by feathers, whose jeans were stitched with bright yellow thread several decades before Easy Rider adopted them. The table-girls have a new focal point as Easy Rider rummages through her bag, producing a copy of The Pearl.

"That's the same edition we got," one of them pipes up, sensing a risk-free opportunity to speak. Easy Rider smiles.

Leaning over Scarborough, Steinbeck in hand, Easy Rider ruffles the pages of her deteriorating schoolbook. There in the margins of the flipping pages, a stick figure does a few jumping jacks, tries on a dress, runs in place, shoots himself in the head. The margin of the final page contains a puff of smoke.

"See, this is really only a subplot, but it's the best part of the book," Easy explains.

"And the most subtle," Scarborough notes. She flips from the back this time, watches the stick man save himself from death by donning a dress and doing calisthenics.

Easy Rider's voice comes so quietly this time that Scarborough doesn't catch the first few words. "If I lend this to you… can I sit here?" Easy Rider shifts uneasily onto her left Harley boot.

"Sure!" Scarborough Fair says too loudly, pulling the excess purple velvet of her skirt off the neighboring chair. As Easy sits, Scarborough notices that her open satchel contains several books, a mysterious vinyl record, and two yellowish apples - but no lunch to speak of. Without thinking twice on anyone's behalf, Scarborough places half of sandwich on a napkin and pushes it toward her new companion. Easy Rider peeks under the wheat bread hat, looks incredulously at Scarborough, and then, with the two of them laughing and the rest of the table struck dumb, takes a shameless bite.

EIGHTEEN

Easy Rider's long fingers are carefully disassembling a portobello sandwich: bread on the left, lettuce in the middle, mushroom at the head of the line. A sandwich refusing its own hierarchy. The elements rebelling, marching in protest of -

"Are you going to eat anything?"

Scarborough Fair had sacrificed a handful of cash for Easy to eat at the dining commons, crinkled bills that could have been exchanged for cups of Tropicana and vodka at a senior dorm party that evening. Scarborough is planning to share the better parts of freshman life with Easy Rider, the simple joy of being underage and drunk at parties. Only when they're staring into empty plastic cups, flecked with orange pulp, would she be able to share her lurid tales of dancing on that table, kissing that girl on the dance floor who was taking off everyone's bra and throwing it into a pile, out-witting inebriated 22-year-old boys with quick one-liners ("I'd say these screwdrivers are 90% screw") that come so much more readily when she's walking crooked. But here is Easy, getting the night to a rollicking start, repaying her generosity by performing a sandwich autopsy.

"I don't want to eat on your dime," Easy answers. "And I don't really like mushrooms…. but this place, it seems nice. They give you lots of food."

Scarborough's arm, laced into a peasant sleeve, lies on the fake wood table. It seems twice the size of Easy's arm in a t-shirt sleeve beside it, Scarborough's freshman pounds brushing against Easy's wandering asceticism.

Where has her friend been these past few months? Scarborough wonders. Easy Rider speaks excitedly of trailer park guitarists and long dirt roads, of new friends without names, but she gives no locations or distances. Scarborough looks out the window at post-Woodstock concrete and pre-Depression brick, the buildings of the campus to which she has drafted herself. Scarborough Fair will be here for the next four years; Easy Rider doesn't know where she'll be in the next four days. Scarborough is supposed to find herself in college, find her calling. Something, presumably, more steady than poetry, more lucrative than charcoal drawings. But next to Easy, Easy Rider with the mysterious new scars and oddly quiet manner, Scarborough feels half-formed, infantile, from her newly acquired baby fat to her ignorance of America's dirt roads.

Easy Rider thinks, I can't stay the night. She thinks, I should eat something. But eating is not her thing, not right now. She likes to see how long she could go without. Every day has been an exercise for Easy Rider, discovering how much she can do without. The post-graduation road trip had begun with fanfare, but every town Easy passed through was just the same, folks who stared at her as if she had come from a time machine, some strange girl wearing their old clothes from the 60s, looking for an America outside of the suburbs, a place without dead-end jobs and racist slurs, someplace where music still brings people together and idealism burns like a candle in a shrine to the virgin. And she found it, in pockets, but the journey between these, the disappointment of the endless highways and the strange looks and the diner grease on her shoes, brought her a circle, right back to outer Philadelphia. Now she is resting - temporarily, she tells herself - in a trailer on the other side of Philly, the side she'd never thought about before. The man who owns the rusted little home is a 60-year-old street musician who has fallen in love with Easy's black hair and the burning search in her eyes.

Scarborough Fair, who hasn't seen anyone over the age of 23 since September… Scarborough, with her ever-expanding collection of books and political opinions… Easy wants to tell her. But something inside, some mental gag reflex, stops the words in her mouth. Easy Rider looks down at the sandwich on the cafeteria tray, trying to remember the sensation of hunger.

TWENTY-TWO

Easy stares up at the fake-handwriting script on the menu and orders the PBJ - organic wheat bread, non-preservative jam, peanut butter ground on the premises. Scarborough's eyes are crossing with all her vegetarian options, having finally given up meat now that she's out of college and no longer conforming to a stereotype.

Peanut butter and jelly? Couldn't Easy Rider make that at home for $6 less? But there Easy stands, wax-wrapped meal in hand, glowing smile above the bookstore name tag that declares her neglected real name to the world. Having an income has made her extravagant, Scarborough thinks. If a peanut butter and jelly sandwich could possibly be a luxury item.

"Good peanut butter and jelly is an art," Easy Rider informs her, moving toward a seat.

Scarborough glances from the menu to that name tag. After all these years, it lacks the familiarity, the worn edges of constant use. It is pristine as a collectible on a shelf. Scarborough wants to smack the hand of the dozens of patrons and coworkers who use it every day, no doubt handling it roughly, casually, not understanding that it is new and might bruise easily. Easy Rider had been too long with too many different names. When they'd first met as high school freshmen, she'd concocted a string of them for herself, an expanding contracting, breathing name, occasionally augmented with celebrities, literary characters, or - very rarely - the last names of high school crushes. Easy Rider had been known to drop the names easily when strangers inquired of her. I am Pamela, she would say (after Jim Morrison's girlfriend). It's under Rochester, she would say (after Jane Eyre). Call me Athena, Amelia, Katerina. She had a signature for every name, a geographic or emotional place where each was appropriate. And now, so simply, the name her mother gave her, a name for the workaday world, for the concerts in the city on weekends, for quiet corners with the books she purchases on discount. Cooking breakfast, playing cds, driving down long roads in her new ancient car, it is all the same name now.

It's all part of a change that Scarborough noticed the second she walked into Easy's store. The stacks of books and labyrinths of shelving were laid out like an elaborate gameboard, but Easy Rider was easy to find, the star in the center of a Scrabble board. She smiled - itself a thing Scarborough hadn't seen in some time - and a quiet hum was released onto the store, a white noise that made Scarborough stop in her step. Easy Rider had always had an itching, restless presence, an infectious energy that caused her to blur when she moved, a human sound wave. This restlessness hadn't vanished, but it seemed now more like the rustling of leaves, constant, quiet, springing from something firmly rooted in the ground. The store seemed covered in Easy Rider's footprints, large and leather, the same combat boots she'd sworn by in high school for those feet that wouldn't conform to women's shoe sizes. The way she stood in these shoes right now, the whole store, the whole ground, seemed to have been molded around those two feet, Easy Rider the sturdiest, strongest, most central thing.

And as she walked toward Scarborough, the dynamic shifted alongside her, floorboards skewed Escher-like to keep Easy Rider in the center, til Scarborough stood opposite her, feeling the center of gravity become both of them. Scarborough's arms lept to Easy's tall shoulders, and the world curled around their embrace.

Now in the next-door café, Scarborough's glowing, composed friend, as settled as something left on the lawn and snowed upon, takes a high stool and bites at her sandwich. Curves are returning beneath Easy Rider's jacket. Scarborough Fair's hand runs along her own velvet lapel, a garment she hadn't been able to squeeze into just a few months ago. Poverty has returned Scarborough Fair's figure, once happily abandoned to college excesses, now donning presentable business clothes for unpromising interviews.

Scarborough hadn't expected unemployment, had expected college to yank doors open, allowing her to at least squeeze her foot in before they slammed shut. But now she lives rent-free with her parents, a few broken metaphorical footbones and a terribly wounded pride. College-defector Easy Rider is doing quite well, and here she is, Scarborough with a degree, feeling her knowledge arcane and her place in the world more than unsteady, more than undefined: ill-fitting and unwelcome.

What can she do now? Scarborough has no excuses, having been given four years to figure it out. Teaching seems like a cop-out somehow, the business world soulless, the literary world too difficult to pursue. Which leaves what - waitressing? Assembling over-priced PBJs for the equally underpaid bookstore clerks under Easy Rider's management? Truth is, Scarborough didn't made her mind up about anything at college. High school certainties have all but vanished at this point, even those that had once seemed unquestionable, such as her preference for sleeping with men… but where does one meet willing women in the suburbs, in her parents' town? Suddenly, all those times over high school that she and Easy Rider had lamented, "If only you were a man," brought uneasy questions. Had they meant it? Did they realize, were they even aware, that one of them didn't have to be a man?

But no - Scarborough Fair's reality has already been broken into little pieces. Easy Rider is her rock now, the center of the carousel, and she wouldn't do anything to change that. She can't let all her actions be puppeteered by loneliness.

Easy Rider licks peanut butter off her thumb, watches Scarborough Fair look up at the wall menu, her friend's brow deeply pensive.

God, Easy Rider thinks with a smile. And people think I take forever to make a simple decision.

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