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Like Suzanne
by Randall Brown © 2006
As we're pulling onto Broad Street after the Bright Eyes concert at Temple, my Volkswagen's doors lock.
“Oh, God. You're one of those people,” Suzanne says.
“The car does it automatically,” I say. “You reach ten miles an hour and click, you're locked in. Whether you want it or not.”
She claps her hands together. “That's good. No, really good. I mean that you didn't lock it. Well, I mean, I couldn't be with one of those people.”
One of those people. Car Racists? Discriminating Door Lockers? “Right,” I say, “I mean a group of black men approach me saying something like shizzle my nizzle and I'm cool. But when a group of Penn guys come my way talking trash about the Lacanian lack in a world of arbitrary signifiers, I start freakin.”
“The black men could be talking about Lacan.”
“Of course. Or the white guys could say shizzle.”
I'm so ready for this night to end, for Suzanne and her race rules and righteousness to take a flying leap. She's alternative, my sister told me. She wears black and listens to Bright Eyes. If you're lucky, she told me, you might get to see Suzanne's piercings. Her skin's translucent, just like you like it. “Please,” sis begged, “like Suzanne. You never like anyone.” Ah sis. You never mentioned she applauds you if you aren't one of those people.
Of course, Suzanne wants me to drive down Broad Street because she's not one of those people who would ever avoid a neighborhood with boarded up restaurants and gangsta rap stereotypes walking beside the crawling line of cars.
A Yankee-hat, Randall-Cunningham-throwback-jersey-wearing black man knocks on Suzanne's window. She looks at me just a bit terrified. I roll down her window.
“And how may we help you?” I ask him, leaning over Suzanne and she's moving oppositely, away from the window. Her head bumps my chest with a thud.
“You need any weed?” he asks.
“Weed? Do we Suzanne?" She shakes her head. “You should've hit us before the concert my man.”
“Next time,” he says, pushes away from the car. Suzanne rolls up the windows.
“You happy?” she asks. She looks out the window, at the closed-off buildings, the sidewalks filled with people she'd never ever lock out of her car.
“Not really.”
“He could've—”
Yeah, he could've a million things. And we could've, I don't know, bought the bag of weed, gotten stoned, and looked at each other with glazed-over eyes and forgotten the door-locking car and the opened window. Maybe she was going to say he could've been a white drug dealer. But I like Suzanne like this, shrunken and jittery. “You okay?” I ask, but she's not talking.
We've crossed the line into Elkins Park and the suburbs. You can breathe easier here in the space and the verdant islands of undamaged homes and storefronts.
We pull up to her apartment. She gets out and says, through the crack of the open door, “You're worse than one of those people.”
Slam. I'll now have to face my sister's accusations, how I'm a big nasty hater, how I can even find something sick and wrong in the bright eyes of alternative Susan, how I have to feel superior to feel in control, how screwed up and messed up and destined for bitter loneliness I am.
I roll down the window. “I'm sorry, really.”
She'll have none of it. Driving away, the doors lock me in.
The End
Randall Brown is a teacher who lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife Meg, a cabaret singer, and their two children. He is a Pushcart nominee, a fiction editor with SmokeLong Quarterly , and on the editorial board of Philadelphia Stories . He holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College and a BA from Tufts University. His stories, poems, and essays have been published widely, with recent work forthcoming in Clackamas Literary Review, Del Sol Review, Cairn, and The Saint Ann's Review. He's currently working on a short short collection, Mad To Live.