Oliver Benjamin
as she talked and made a whole lot of excellent points that would
have looked fine on paper, I couldn’t help but think, “The only person
who I am incapable of hating in the whole world is walking out of my
life.”
“I’ll go with you,” I suggested.
“You can’t,” she replied, turning her eyes to her lap and down at
loosely clasped hands. Those gentle hands which had offered me so
much comfort in the past would be made to suffer unspeakable
indignities under the auspices of the blazing African sun, and would
return calloused, rugged and hardened. It would be a defilement of
what I considered sacred objects, and suggested to me the potential
for my own weatherbeating in the face of a world I had grown
incapable of dealing with alone and unprotected. Charly
Witherspoon was my love glove.
“Why can’t I go? It’s not like I have anything pressing here. I
haven’t had a real job since I graduated!”
“It’s a special program, Jake. You know how many interviews
and applications I had to go through. It’s some kind of miracle that I
got in, and I have the background for it.”
Sure enough, in the preceding months I hadn’t even recognized
the possibility that she would even get into this program, let alone
leave me for it.
“Plus,” she pointed out, “it’s too late to apply now, honey. You
know that.”
“But I don’t have to be in the program. I’ll just go to Ethiopia
with you. I’ll get a job there, you know, harvesting dirt or something.”
I was desperate.
“That’s not funny, Jake,” she snapped, and then took a deep
breath. “Listen, I know how you feel, and don’t think that I don’t feel
the same. This is really hard for me too.”
“Why does it have to be hard? Listen, the US dollar is like gold
in third-world countries. I could scrape enough money together in
two months working at Gordon’s Grill for a whole year in Ethiopia.
We could have a great time! I’ll work with you, they don’t even have
to pay me. You always said that I have to stop only thinking of myself,
right? This could be a big step for me! I’m psyched to go! Really!”
Tightening her mouth, her face took on the color of strawberry
milk when you put in one spoonful too much strawberry powder. Her
eyebrows curled into a dance of compassion, of a burden that had to
be let free. She breathed again, and stared in my quivering eyeballs.
17
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