Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris Read Free Book Online

hers and turned around in my seat. I figured we had our entire lives ahead of us, but by Thanksgiving I’d been accepted into a crowd of midlevel outcasts and had pretty much forgotten about her. We still said hello to each other, but we never ate lunch together or talked on the phone or did any of the things that real friends did. I don’t recall seeing her in the later grades and am not sure if she attended my high school or if she stayed on her side of town and went to Enloe. It must have been a good seven years before I saw her again. I had dropped out of my second college and was working as a furniture refinisher not far from downtown Raleigh. There was a dime store I’d pass on my bike ride home each day, and I looked up one afternoon to see Delicia walking out the front door. She had a name tag on and a smock, and when I stopped to say hello she seemed to genuinely remember me.
    “So, are you the manager of this place?” I asked.
    And she said, “You crazy.”
    I’d like to think that Delicia managing a dime store was not on the same level as a T-shirt reading “Fly United,” so her response saddened me. My invented version of her was pragmatic and responsible, but all I really knew was that she was nice and shy, and apparently still poor. By this time we were in our twenties, and I understood that friendship could not be manufactured. You didn’t look through your address book thinking, Where are the Koreans? or I need to meet more paralyzed people. Not that it’s outlandish to have such friends, but they have to be made organically.
    The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle-class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We’d all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it. No one wanted to call home asking for money, but we all knew that in a pinch our parents would come through for us. It was this, more than race, that set me apart from Delicia, for how could someone on the bottom rung of the ladder not be outraged by the unfairness of it all?
    Passing the dime store on subsequent afternoons, I’d think of my family’s former maid, Lena, who started working for us when my brother was born and stayed until my grandmother moved out. She and my mom spent a lot of time talking, and though my mother, like all the mothers on our street, thought of her housekeeper as a friend, I knew that what she really meant was “a person I pay and am on good terms with.” For how many mothers hung out with other people’s maids? What would the O’Connors have thought if my mom showed up at their door with a canteen around her neck? “Is Marthandra off work yet? I thought the two of us might try camping this weekend.”
    Maybe in a tent, away from the cars and color TVs and air-conditioning, a friendship could have taken root. As it was, there was just too much inequality to overcome. If you want a friend whose life is the economic opposite of your own, it seems your best bet is to find a pen pal, the type you normally get in grade school. This is someone who writes from afar to tell you that his dromedary escaped. You respond that your bike has a flat tire, and he answers that in his country August is a time for feasting. It’s all done through the mail, so he never sees your new suburban house, and you never see the hubcap his family uses to boil water in. Plus, you’re a kid, so your first thought isn’t Yuck, a dromedary, but Wow, a dromedary! Or a raccoon, or a mongoose, or a honey badger.
      
    As weeks passed and the cell phone salesman didn’t call back, I started worrying that he’d lost his job. Maybe, though, that’s just me being a cultural elitist, assuming that his life must go from bad to worse. Isn’t it just as likely that he got promoted or, better still, that he left the call center for greener pastures? That’s it, I tell myself. Once he settles into the new job and moves into that house he’s been eyeing, after his maid