Читать книгу No One You Know - Jason Schwartzman - Страница 13

“This is a big country club of nothing,” complains an older white woman when she has been waiting for a few minutes in the Verizon store. A younger Black female employee is trying to figure out why my iPhone isn’t charging. She’s convinced that something is stuck in the slot. She pumps compressed air into it to remove lint and dust, but that doesn’t work. The older woman asks if she’s the manager. She is.

“The real manager?”

“The real manager.”

The older woman snaps at her when she returns to my iPhone. She complains loudly to a sympathetic customer who is also waiting a few feet away from us. Her temper worsens the longer she waits. When she demands the corporate number, the employee restrains herself and simply goes to a back office and returns with it. I see her own anger flare and then retreat in her face. She is used to it, I imagine, sadly. She turns back to my iPhone, now with a thumbtack. The older woman is standing very close to us, still bitter and complaining. She is so close she sees the colored fish on my screen saver. She asks if I photographed them, full of curiosity and grandmotherly enthusiasm. I am so stunned by the shift that I just nod, even though they are illustrations from an exhibit at the Natural History Museum.

“Such nice fish,” she says.