I told her. “They’re so prejudiced you wouldn’t believe it.”
I don’t know what response I expected, but a show of disappointment would have been a good start. If this relationship was going to take off, we needed a common cause, but that, it seemed, was not going to happen. All she said was “That’s okay.”
“Well, no, actually, it’s not okay,” I told her. “Actually it stinks.” I laid my hand over hers on the desktop and then looked down at it, thinking what a great poster this would make. “Togetherness,” it might read. I’d expected electricity to pass mutually between us, but all I really felt was self-conscious, and disappointed that more people weren’t looking on.
As for Delicia, what goes through a person’s mind the first time they’re patronized? Was she embarrassed? Enraged? Or perhaps this wasn’t her first time. Maybe it happened so often she’d simply resigned herself to it.
It’s a start, I thought as I lifted my hand off hers and turned around in my seat. I figured we had our entire lives ahead of us, but by Thanksgiving I’d been accepted into a crowd of midlevel outcasts and had pretty much forgotten about her. We still said hello to each other, but we never ate lunch together or talked on the phone or did any of the things that real friends did. I don’t recall seeing her in the later grades and am not sure if she attended my high school or if she stayed on her side of town and went to Enloe. It must have been a good seven years before I saw her again. I had dropped out of my second college and was working as a furniture refinisher not far from downtown Raleigh. There was a dime store I’d pass on my bike ride home each day, and I looked up one afternoon to see Delicia walking out the front door. She had a name tag on and a smock, and when I stopped to say hello she seemed to genuinely remember me.
“So, are you the manager of this place?” I asked.
And she said, “You crazy.”
I’d like to think that Delicia managing a dime store was not on the same level as a T-shirt reading “Fly United,” so her response saddened me. My invented version of her was pragmatic and responsible, but all I really knew was that she was nice and shy, and apparently still poor. By this time we were in our twenties, and I understood that friendship could not be manufactured. You didn’t look through your address book thinking, Where are the Koreans? or I need to meet more paralyzed people. Not that it’s outlandish to have such friends, but they have to be made organically.
The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle-class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We’d all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it. No one wanted to call home asking for money, but we all knew that in a pinch our parents would come through for us. It was this, more than race, that set me apart from Delicia, for how could someone on the bottom rung of the ladder not be outraged by the unfairness of it all?
Passing the dime store on subsequent afternoons, I’d think of my family’s former maid, Lena, who started working for us when my brother was born and stayed until my grandmother moved out. She and my mom spent a lot of time talking, and though my mother, like all the mothers on our street, thought of her housekeeper as a friend, I knew that what she really meant was “a person I pay and am on good terms with.” For how many mothers hung out with other people’s maids? What would the O’Connors have thought if my mom showed up at their door with a canteen around her neck? “Is Marthandra off work yet? I thought the two of us might try camping this weekend.”
Maybe in a tent, away from the cars and color TVs and air-conditioning, a friendship could have taken root. As it was, there was just too much inequality to overcome. If you want a friend whose life is the economic opposite of your own, it seems your best bet is to find a pen pal, the type you normally get in grade school. This is someone who writes from afar to tell you that his dromedary escaped. You