Out Of Touch

So young, so old, so... untrendy.

by Rachel Carpenter

I was walking down South Street one day last fall with my old and good friend Bill, whose real name that is. I had been semi-glamorously out of the country for four months, and was now enjoying Philadelphia in a way I never could when it had seemed to be the only place in the world to see.

Around us the weekday afternoon crowd moved along, its faces now looking my age or younger where once they had seemed far older. We passed a tattoo and body piercing shop whose windows held books on sexual positions.

"Wow," I said, "There really are a lot of tattooing and body piercing places. It really is getting popular." I said it just like that, it just came out. I just said it to say something. It was that kind of day.

My friend Bill, who grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis and so prides himself on both his knowledge of and disdain for trends, said: "Uh, yeah, right, like where have you been?"

I had no ready excuse. These things have been popular for longer than my absence from the country. They have been popular, and I have not noticed them. I have too long considered myself to be in the world and not of it; this is the legacy of fourth-grade geekdom.

Bill laughed the kind of laugh that seems unalterably embarrassed for you and said, "God!" Because we have known each other since we were 13, I chose not to be offended; I laughed also, a spitting kind of laugh that horrifies me and persists no matter what I do. It is a laugh that prevents me from becoming a junior high school English teacher, because the students could not help but snicker at my lack of salivitory control. 12 year-olds can be so cruel.

"Hello?" Bill said, snickering though he is 28. "Like, where have you been?" If he was a spitter he would have spat. (This is the way my mind works these days: fixated. Spat, spitting, spittoon. Drool.) If he'd been carrying a cup of coffee he would have spilled it, but I may only be saying that out of secret bitterness. We spluttered our way down the same street over which I used to rollerskate on my way to meet the jugglers gathered at Head House Square, who are, by now, perhaps only in their 30s or 40s, though it seems to me they should be in their 50s; they are undeniably older in any case, like me, like Bill, no matter how stupidly immature we try to be. I would never juggle with strange men now, and I would discourage all young girls from doing so. Since the dangerousness of the world depresses me I try not to think about it too much. I crack dumb jokes to disguise my deep and searching maturity. Bill does this as well. He has his own reasons for doing so.

We walked into a coffeeshop at 4th and South to get coffee to go. "Wow," Bill said, "Did you notice how many coffeehouses are opening up? Look, you can get cappuccino, too." We snarfed. We looked pleadingly at the counter guy, who was genial in a distinctly un-Borders sort of way. (Borders is not really a trend, because so far — in Center City, at least — there is only one. But their employees are a trend. They are all my age, about, and they are all so unhappy, especially when you ask them a question.)

The coffee guy asked what we wanted and set about getting it in a charmingly clear-headed manner. His smile said he understood the joke and would be just as funny as we thought we were if only we would let him, but we were selfish and would not.

"30th Street Station," Bill said, "It looks just great. Like it was renovated or something. But then, it also looks like there was a fire in it. But then, it looks almost like it's been cleaned up after a fire, too." I tried to think of something clever to say, which is difficult to do when your blood sugar level is low. "Uh..." I said, and then our coffee was ready and we paid and walked out into the bright sunlight sipping our drinks through the sip-lids that will no doubt catch on all over the country. ("Do you want a sip-lid or a regular lid?" they will ask you at the McDonald's on every major exit of every major highway, "Do you want a fried apple pie with that? Are you happy?")

I covered the sip-lid with shades of my sheer lipstick while the sip-lid shielded my delicate lip from burnable heat, which is justification enough for its plasticky invention. For one brief shining moment I felt content on South Street, with my warm drink and my old if sneering friend, all four of our feet on the same streets on which I had failed to grow up. At last I was not afraid that a passing stranger would mock the length of my jeans with two clean evil motions of their eyelids. I knew that would never happen again, because, like everyone else, I was wearing Gap jeans. Do you remember, I wanted to ask but didn't, when the Gap was a really tacky store? "Fall into the Gap?" I looked at Bill. He had a dreamy look on his face which bore no relation to what I had wanted to say.

"I think that they should let people build buildings higher than the top of William Penn's hat," he said, "even if they have to let some guy from out of town do it." As he said this a woman passing us gave him a look of pitying surprise, and we knew both that we had gotten the response we wanted, and that we had gone too far. If we did not stop soon we would be goofy forever, our minds frozen like that, as minds sometimes threaten to do.

"Get serious," I said, and he did.