At a birthday party north of the Panhandle, my Portuguese office friend Mona’s roommate, Mary, sat down beside me and struck up a conversation. I felt, all of a sudden, very handsome and interesting. Never in my life had I pulled a girl across a crowded room.
Later, I would learn that this was just Mary’s approach to social gatherings: as a software marketing executive who hung out almost exclusively with people who had majored in the humanities, she was sensitive to outsiders, predisposed to seek out and engage the person who looked most bored at a party. I had been sitting alone on the couch, she said later, not talking to anyone, trying to tap my feet in sync with the tropical house playing out of someone’s phone, and staring at the bookcase: programming manuals, books about ethical polyamory. Her’s was an easy kindness.
Mary was soft-spoken and she lisped lightly when she pronounced the letter S. With iron straightened hair and a crooked narrow smile pointed slightly upwards, towards the right, she asked questions and then asked follow-up questions, a novelty. It took a while for me to steer the conversation over to her. What do you do? I asked, like the esoteric Indian therapist that I faked myself to be at times. She worked in a startup, she said but didn’t feel like talking about it at a party. A girl who worked in tech who didn’t want to talk about tech: very endearing.
As the night slowly wound on, our talks progressed to deeper topics. Our trajectories had been asymptotic, we discovered. Mary and I had office friends in common — mostly software developers and start-up folks who worked on Mission street, whom she knew from college. Her band had played a show on the lawn of my startup when it got its second round of funding. I had even been in that event, I remembered, on a detour before heading back to Fremont. She’d been home that night, she said, cooking dinner in the back. The more we compared notes, the stranger it seemed that we had not yet met.
We wandered into the kitchen together, in pursuit of fresh beverages. A cluster of people sat on the linoleum, drinking wine out of old jam jars.
“What is your most or least favorite trait inherited from your parents?” one of them was asking, with great solemnity.
A man wearing a light fleece jacket with slippers leaned forward, placing his chin in his palms.
“Resilience,” he said. Everyone nodded.
“And do you feel like they see that in you?” someone else inquired with equal seriousness.
Nightmare, I thought. The prospect of engaging in therapeutic maieutics with a group of strangers seemed more stressful than a tech interview. I could not fathom interrogating my relationship with my parents as a form of socializing. I felt uptight, conservative, repressed, corporate by comparison — but I also felt okay with that.
I eyed the back door and then accidentally looked across the room at Mary. She nodded slightly and then started to make her way slowly towards the exit. On the way, she grabbed two cans of organic ginger beer and lifted her head back at me with a wry smile.
Back in the living room, people were beginning to mobilize for karaoke: wetting down the hookah charcoal, collecting empties, wrapping road-beers in handkerchiefs and recycled paper.
Mary and I continued talking as the party slowly paraded toward Chinatown. I felt calm around her, at home, somewhat familiar. The night was slightly chilly and there was a layer of damp in the air — Yet the spirits of the people around me were warm and bright.
Winding through Alamo Square Park, she gently took my hand and put it in her jacket pocket, holding it there as we walked
As if it belonged there in perpetuity….
