Hermosa

A Conversation Between Acquaintances (Part 4)

Someone's Apartment 2

(Someone with Jules on the couch. Jules is now leaning on a pillow, her legs curled beside her.)

Jules: After the conversation in the break room, I started to notice that any time Diego and I were at work at the same time, he'd be staring at me. And I mean like even if he was across the store working in a totally different department, if we were in site of each other he would be staring at me. I was just kinda like, "Uh, I dunno. Seems like this guy's kinda got a crush, but also this is the first person I've met in months, maybe even years, who listens to the same music I do. We can actually have conversations about things that I like and that I care about instead of just your every day greetings and weather talk." We were actually able to say that we had something in common. 'nd so when [clears throat] sorry, I really – I have trouble remembering because it's been a few years, but I think that we really talked for the first time on a night that we both closed on a Saturday because closing on a Saturday always meant that you had to park way far away from the store. You had to park on the other side of the mall in the back of the lot near the movie theater. Since we were all new, most people were parking over there because we hadn't realized that it was a little bit closer to park on the other opposite side of the mall, but anyway, that's not important [puffs]. I just remember that we both left at the same time one night, one Saturday, and we started talking then. God, I really, I [tugs on a lose string at the bottom of her dress] don't even remember what we talked about. I just remember that I wasn't sure that I wanted to engage in the conversation because of my concern that he might have a crush on me. I didn't want anyone having a crush on me. I didn't want anyone flirting with me, but we were already going in the same direction and it would have been rude to just walk past him. Of course, like I said, some part of me wanted to engage because of the commonalities that we had discovered. We took that long walk, and when we finally got to the lot that our cars were in he didn't leave me to go to his car. He actually walked me to my car, said "goodnight", and went to his own car. E-e-e-even a gesture that small meant so much to me at that time. The fact that someone would go out of their way to come to my car before going to theirs' – that felt really nice [eyes move to the wall above the flickering television]. Pretty soon, we were being scheduled the same closing shift every Saturday. We'd go a whole week without talking to each other, but by Saturday, we would always walk to our cars. One day, we worked a day shift together and I remember we decided we were going to take a walk around the mall together because it wasn't dark yet. This was like a midday shift. I want to say it was like two pm or something [inhales, abruptly laughs]. That was the day I found out he doesn't brush his teeth. That part, I can remember [looks down at the string, looks back to the wall]! But no, I remember he started talking about his family and where he was from. I was very closed off, so I let him do most of the talking. Um, but I-um-I have a tendency to keep asking people questions to keep them talking so I [laugh] I don't have to, so I think I-I was doing a lot of that. I found out he was from Santa Ana, California, and that he has two siblings. He has two younger brothers, with only a year a part in age between each of them. I found out that his parents don't speak English, like they are legit immigrants. They don't speak more than just enough to get by. All of this was very fascinating to me and I clung to all of it because I was raised in a very small town made up of less than a thousand people – very teeny tiny. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I started moving to different cities. In my hometown, everyone was white. There was like a small community of black people, and that was it as far as minorities. I mean even the Mennonites were white. Maybe you could call those a minority, I dunno, but for the most part there like, pfft, eight hundred and fifty white people. So even moving to different towns, I didn't get a lot of exposure to minorities until I got out of the more rural parts – when I moved to Clarksville, Tennessee for school. My first exposure to Mexican people came from going to a Mexican restaurant in Dickson, Tennessee that my family liked on a regular basis [laughs]. That was it, that's all I knew. I knew they made really good food. That was it. When I went to college, there were other minorities. It was mostly white kids, some black. Um, more black people than I had ever been around, now that I think about it. Not a lot of any other minority, or race. Actually, sorry, I don't even like the word "minority", so let's go with "race". Uh, foof, so I wanted to know everything and that continued for the next few years obviously. I constantly, if I had any opportunity to ask about his culture or his family's culture, I asked because it was just so fascinating. It still to this day feels new when I'm sitting here thinking about it, or if I like take a notion to try and go into a Mexican supermarket or something. Something about it still feels new. It's not entirely familiar to me.