By Mardith Louisell
19th Annual Bronze Solas Award-winner in the Doing Good or Kindness of Strangers category
I was lucky to get a seat on the streetcar. I took out my book and began reading In the Land of Pain, in which the ailing author searched for a precise language to describe pain. A few stops later, a young woman carrying a yoga mat sat next to me.
“You don’t by any chance have two quarters?” she asked.
“I don’t think I do,” I answered.
Quarters were precious commodities for laundry and parking meters and I didn’t give them away easily.
Nonetheless, I opened my purse and searched my wallet. A quarter? Two? Did I want to give the girl two quarters? Any quarters? The yoga mat under the girls’ arm poked at standing passengers. Did the girl not realize that? She was probably the type who would scoff at a book like In the Land of Pain and explain why yoga eliminated pain. She might even think that people who had pain brought it on themselves, as a new age student had said in class during a discussion of the Holocaust.
Surely the girl had money enough to pay her two-dollar fare. What was the fine for no streetcar ticket – $50? $100? The streetcar didn’t give change, so if the girl had a five-dollar bill, she probably didn’t want to lose three dollars. But should I lose two quarters because the girl didn’t want to lose three dollars? Losing three dollars was worse than losing fifty cents, but not as bad as a $100 fine. Where was the girl’s transit card? If she could get herself to yoga, couldn’t she figure out how to get a transit card?
I extracted one quarter from my purse and told myself that I hadn’t felt the other quarter, in fact, wasn’t entirely sure there was a second quarter.
“Here’s one quarter,” I said.
“Thank you,” the girl said, “but I don’t think that will do it.”
The girl was polite. It made me feel good for having looked for the quarter and bad for not giving the girl both quarters. I’d known that one quarter wouldn’t help and so had been assured of not having to give the girl any quarters.
“Where are you getting off?” I asked.
“Church and Duboce.”
Two miles. A short ride, but several stops, many opportunities for the transit police to demand proof of purchase.
I returned to my reading but was distracted by the girl’s request. Should I look in my purse again? Pretend to discover the other quarter? I remembered a bus trip two days before. An old man, perhaps inebriated, asked me if I was a city voter. Yes, I’d said.
“Will you sign this petition?”
It was a petition to build a new condo in a complex with tennis courts. A month before, I noticed those tennis courts with envy and perhaps some hatred of the people who could afford to live where the tennis courts were curtained off so the wind didn’t blow the ball around, as it did on the courts I used and all the other courts in the city except these. Did I want more buildings for the very rich? I couldn’t live there – why should I help them do so?
I liked the man’s attitude though. On the bus, he spread himself over two seats, muttering and humming, not parading up and down the aisle or accosting people with glowing smiles. When someone sat near him, he asked the person to sign. If the person didn’t sign, he nodded. If the person did, he nodded. I wanted to sign if he needed a certain number of signatures to get paid. How was he paid? Regardless of how, I didn’t want more high priced complexes where I couldn’t live.
“I think I’ll pass,” I said and gave the petition back. The man nodded.
For years, I’d read sidewalk petitions. The day following the man’s condo petition, as I walked up Powell to Post Street in downtown San Francisco, three signature hunters approached within five minutes. They weren’t volunteers, they were paid. Still, it was hard not to respond because the bouncy perkiness of the signature seekers pretty much stopped you in your tracks, especially when a fourth blocked my way as I waited for the light to change. Waiting at that red light after years of smiling at these pests, I realized I had no obligation to read, sign, or even nod, and that not responding didn’t mean I didn’t care about fellow human beings, lost animals, or the future of the known world.
“Can you give me a quick minute?” the twenty-something petitioner asked.
“No,” I said.
“Not even one?”
I shook my head and the light turned green.
On the streetcar where I had thought of these petitioners, they approached Duboce and I thought again about quarters for the yoga mat girl – she might not work but she was going to yoga with her own mat, she had money. I tried to read but kept losing focus. Maybe the girl only had charge cards. I decided to keep an eye out for the streetcar police. If they came, I’d slip quarters to the girl quickly or warn her to jump off. Since the police entered at the front or rear of a car and they were in the middle, this should work.
Two more stops for the girl. Suddenly, I realized the girl had asked for quarters but what she’d meant was 50 cents in any form. I rummaged in my wallet again. Careful not to let the girl see I had two quarters, I pulled out one quarter, two dimes and a nickel.
“I have 50 cents. Do you want that?”
“That’s wonderful.” The girl took the four coins. “Thank you so much.”
I was pleased to see the girl didn’t pocket the money but stood up, deposited the money, and took a transfer.
“Thank you,” the girl repeated. “This is much better than getting a ticket.”
“No problem.” I smiled and returned to In the Land of Pain.
Daudet is better known for Lettres de Mon Moulin (Letters from My Windmill, 1866), written about a windmill in Fontvieille, Provence, which I first read in my high school French class. In Provence, Daudet never had to contend with people asking for quarters on the streetcar or begging you to sign petitions, although he was an ardent monarchist and might have favored expensive chateaux.
My partner and I visited Fontvieille’s market looking for a Provençal cotton table cloth but the only table cloth we found was made in China. Discouraged, on a whim we walked up a hill towards a windmill, Daudet’s windmill. My partner, now my husband, had never heard of Daudet and was uninterested in his story. An artist who makes wooden machines, all he wanted was to get into the mill, see how it worked and find out which it was used for, grain or water?
In the Land of Pain (La Doulou) was a different story than Lettres or Daudet’s novels. Daudet had, to say the least, an active sex life, partially spent with the mistresses of close friends, due to which he developed syphilis’s agonizing nerve root pain, aggravated by coughing and treatments sometimes as difficult as the disease.
Eventually, he became paralyzed. I remember the book as a horrific, graphic and compelling description of both pain and “cures,” as well as expressions of sympathy for fellow sufferers in the various sanitariums he visited. I understood the pain of syphilis as never before. Happily, I do not remember his detailed descriptions of the pain. I wonder if Daudet believed that people cause their own pain. The miracle of the book is its wit and complete lack of self-pity.
On that day, I was reading a witty, excruciating book and felt its pain because it was so well done, and yet didn’t feel its pain because I was taking a pleasant journey downtown on a calm bus. A young woman with a yoga mat, the picture of health, asked me for quarters and the distance between where I was in my mind and where I was on the bus disoriented me.
After I gave her fifty cents, my equanimity was restored, and I sank into the book and its pain.
~ ~ ~
Lake Superior, where Mardith Louisell grew up, affects everything she writes. Her fiction, essays and memoir can be found in South Dakota Review (about death, memory and scarves), Solstice, Persimmon Tree, and in The Best Travel Writing 2012, Italy, A Love Story, and The House on Via Gombito Street. Beside Myself, a book of flash with a single narrator, is her current wrestling project. She lives in San Francisco.