NONFICTION
Chocolate
by Jen Michalski
Hero and I meet the crazy girl during our walks. Everybody likes Hero. He's a French bulldog, smooth and black and roundish, shiny. The crazy girl walks on the opposite side of the street, an opened box of ice cream sandwiches in her arms.
"Nuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuh black dog, nuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuh black dog," she sings to the tune of "Batman." Hero ignores her. "Black dog, black dog, black dog. Nuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuh — black dog!"
I don't know where the crazy girl came from. We live in a nice community, by the harbor, but lately the manicured parks and waterfront promenades have thinned of joggers and dog walkers and mothers pushing strollers and in their place have sprouted overstuffed shopping carts and trash bags full of cans and indigents as rumpled and sacklike as the possessions around them. It's April, and their faces already are browner than the resident yuppies that started hitting the tanning beds back in March. Some of the homeless around here are antagonistic, like the black woman who accuses people of racism as they walk by her, wordlessly, in the town square, to the nice restaurants and fraternistic watering holes covered with beer banners and shrimp specials. Others are quiet, knowing the truth: it's not the color of their skin that drives people to ignore them; it's the fact they are homeless. It's eracism.
But what can Hero and I say to them, those folks out in the elements, aside from hello, a few comments about the weather? We may as well be living on different planes. Although we all eat and defecate, have the same basic desires, it's the small details of my life that I fixate on endlessly, pointlessly: why doesn't Evan at work appreciate me? Why does my mother always judge every little thing I say? Why do I feel such a sense of hopelessness at night, when I've got a home, a bed?
"I bet when those black dogs have puppies, they're so cute," the crazy girl says to me now. She has crossed the street and is sitting on a bench at the park, ten or so feet from where Hero is making his bank deposit. "Such cute little black dogs."
"I'm sure they do," I answer. She is young and clean, this girl. Plump, dark-haired, mid-thirties, maybe. My age. She is probably not homeless, living instead at home with her family. She is probably, as my grandfather would say, "soft" in the head. Or maybe she lives here and there. More likely in her forties. She is not that clean.
"Don't eat the chocolate ones," she warns, although whether she is talking to me, or someone else, I do not know. There are chocolate and vanilla ice cream bars in the box, and I assume this is what she means. "No, no chocolate ones."
I cannot think of what to say to her. She is like me and yet she is not. I am afraid she will turn on me, like a rabid dog, although I am not sure why. I have seen some of the homeless scream at people, go off on them, or some imagined threat. Crazy girl seems so docile, rummaging through her box of ice cream bars.
"Why don't you eat the chocolate ones?" I ask. She looks at me as if I'm from other planet. Suddenly she stands up and moves on, a sense of urgent purpose, swinging her box of ice cream bars. I wonder whether she will be able to eat all those ice cream bars, chocolate or not, before they melt.
Jen Michalski lives in Baltimore. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, Failbetter, Ink Pot, Fiction Warehouse, Thieves Jargon, Unlikely Stories 2.0, and many others. She currently is the editor in chief of JMWW: A Quarterly Journal of Writing.
Copyright 2006, Jen Michalski