Closer Than It Appears

The lady in the Taco Bell drive thru line in front of us was wearing too many pounds and a permanent frown on her face. She was driving a beat up gray pickup truck, a Dodge, with rust and red stripes on the tailgate. It was New Year's Eve, almost eight o'clock, and as I watched her lean out her window to order, it was hard to tell if she was happy.

From forehead to chin, the woman's face filled her side mirror, and I studied it. I remember it now and still study it sometimes, trying to figure out what this image from two weeks ago contains that makes me unable to get it out of my head.

I should probably be honest and say this memory is more than an image; its also the feeling of angst that comes from being 18 and in a Taco Bell drive-thru with your mom and brothers on New Year's Eve, instead of out celebrating with friends. And it's the feeling of resenting that angst, because you know you're grown now and shouldn't succumb to whinyness anymore. It's knees pulled up in the seat, trying to forget the last rotten thing a father said, trying to pretend you didn't say anything extra rotten back. Mostly, it's knowing and for once hating how true all the cliches are.

I thought if I could, I'd trade my crumbling kindness for her rusting truck and all her wrinkles, and feel guilty for knowing then the unfortunate answer to her Mona Lisa smile.  

But I didn't really think that, not in any articulate way. Self-aspersion will do it's best to keep away from the part of the mind with words, especially if it's deserved. And in my discontent I didn't have the presence of mind to want to shove unhappiness away, only to wonder if this woman had any of her own.

Probably not, I concluded. Here was a woman who looked at home in an environment that, chosen or not, was settled and was her own. She had a companion in the passenger seat, a daughter or a sister-in-law, perhaps. She looked like many of my distant relatives, women of hard-working histories in what used to be hill country, satisfied now to smoke cigarettes and dish out baked beans at family reunions, capable of doing so much but not quite willing to know or chase down what life should have offered and asked of them.

It occurs to me that what might cause me to remember this woman's face and to have noticed it in the first place is the thought that I could someday be her. Not that I aspire to be a frowning woman in a beat-up pick-up truck, or even to ever, ever go to Taco Bell on New Year's Eve again, but just...knowing that time is on my side. A few feet and metaphorical miles away from me, a stranger ordered a burrito and soda and, contrary to everything society would tell you based on appearance, no doubt was kinder to the people in her car and in her life than I had been that day.

That woman's face - her eyes in the mirror - are a promise. And a challenge. And the reason we don't forget the things we struggle over.