“You’re everything that’s wrong with this country, do you know that?”
“Me? I’m sorry sweetheart, I thought that was your side.”
“Sweetheart?” she fumes. “Sweetheart?” She glances around the coffee shop as if to say See what I’m dealing with here?
“Relax, it’s a term of endearment. You should grow a thicker skin—it’d make your life a lot easier if you didn’t have to go around being so offended all the time.” Now it’s his turn to look around like, Get a load of this chick, amirite?
The other patrons avoid their eyes. This does not discourage either. They are among like minded people, surely.
“Oh, next you’ll call me a snowflake. It’s always the same old crap with you assholes.”
“So sue me. We’re just saying what everyone’s thinking. It’s about time somebody did.”
“You really think we’d be better off with Neanderthals like you in charge?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. But at the moment I’m just trying to get to my job, lady. Us Neanderthals have to work for a living. We don’t all have the luxury of majoring in women’s studies.”
She sniffs at this latest affront and performs another solicitous scan of the café. Of course these good, sensible people are on her side. How could you not be, unless you were an idiot?
“I’m a dental hygienist, douchebag. But since you brought it up, loud-mouthed bigots like you are the reason we need women’s studies.”
“Woah! Who said I was a bigot? You’re making a lot of assumptions about me, girlie, but let’s be real here. You’re triggered because you don’t like my hat. Well, I feel the same way about your haircut.”
“My haircut isn’t an open endorsement of fascism.”
“Maybe not, but it’s a definite crime against fashion.” He looks around to see if this strikes a chord with anyone. He,too, assumes he is in sympathetic company.
People bury their noses in newspapers, books, screens, and coffee cups.
Behind the counter, a beleaguered barista queues up the quarrelers’ orders. In this instant, she has an opportunity to defuse the conflict between her two most obnoxious customers of the morning. All it would take is to withhold one party’s beverage long enough for the other to exit the café. She opts instead to clear both problems from her plate at once. She doesn’t get paid to resolve conflicts; she barely gets paid enough to serve coffee.
“Mocha latte with an extra shot for Ty? Cortado for Hailey?”
Tyler thanks her, tips her, takes his latte, and heads for the door. Hailey stuffs a crumpled fiver into the tip jar on top of his desultory handful of change and exits hot on his heels. He holds the door for her with a pointed look, daring her to take issue with the common courtesy. “After you, miss.”
She doesn’t rise to the bait. She takes a deep breath and, determined to be the bigger person, marches past him with her chin held high.
Tyler knows he should let her go, but can’t resist a parting shot. Nothing ticks him off like the smug superiority this woman exudes from every pore. “Have a nice life, lady.”
It’s the insistent mention of her gender that irks Hailey most of all. As if by calling attention to it, this stranger thinks he can assert himself as the more rational party. The grown-up in this situation, and her just a hysterical woman. This makes her so angry she does something uncharacteristic. She pivots on her heel and follows him down the sidewalk.
“Listen, man,” she begins. She is two steps behind him, gathering herself to say something truly biting, something that sums it all up in one blistering retort. In this moment, she is champion of the downtrodden and oppressed. Defender of all that is righteous. If only more people were willing to stand up to bullies like this, she thinks, maybe we could make some real progress. “Just because you can’t see it from your white, male privilege pedestal doesn’t mean your awful politics aren’t hurting real people.”
As she says it, she gives him the slightest push.
He whirls to look at her, face flushed with anger, and
plummets
from sight.
One moment there, the next gone. Hailey blinks. Somehow, the sidewalk before her has immaterialized. No, look again: not the sidewalk. A loose sewer grate, onto which her antagonist just happened to be stepping at the moment she nudged him. It takes her a moment to apprehend this, another to believe it. By then, there is a loud metallic clang and a thud. An agonized groan rises from somewhere below.
What shit luck.
For a sliver of a second she wavers. Later, she will be ashamed to recall this moment of hesitation, how she looked around as if to—no, not as if to, —in order to check for bystanders. Then moral sanity returns. She peeks over the edge.
There, ten feet below, is the red ballcap with its maddening slogan, the rubicund face covered in five o’clock shadow, cheeks now paling with pain and dawning horror.
“You pushed me!”
“I didn’t! I—”
“You did! You pushed me, and I think my ankle’s broken! Oh, it hurts!”
“You provoked me!”
“What, by holding the door for you? How the hell am I supposed to get to work now? Never mind that, how the hell am I getting out of here?”
“Oh don’t play dumb, you know what you did! Your whole persona is designed to needle people like me.”
“People like—what, because of the hat? Are you listening to yourself, lady—agh!” He cuts off with a groan of pain. “My lawyer’s gonna have a field day with this.”
“It’s stuff like that! The ‘lady,’ and the ‘girlie,’ and the general air of boorishness!”
“So what, you shove me?”
“Not shove you! Lightly nudged you! I didn’t mean for you to fall. How was I supposed to know the grate was loose?”
“I could have died!”
“Oh come on, that seems a touch dramatic.”
“You’re a monster! Don’t just stand there, are you crazy? Go get help!”
“Okay, okay! Hold on.” Hailey pulls out her phone, dials 911, and walks a few steps away, so he doesn’t hear how she describes the situation. By now several passersby have taken interest, including a couple who witnessed their spat in the café.
Great, she thinks. Just great.
Then the operator starts asking questions and she says, “Yes, hello, there’s been an, um, accident on…” She hangs up once she’s given the location and returns to the sewer grate. “Alright, I called 911. They’re sending help.”
As her face, framed in that offensive haircut, reappears in the window of sky above him, Tyler grits his teeth against a fresh wave of pain. “Good. Don’t think for a second this makes us even, either. My lawyer’s going to love hearing about you!”
“Me? If anyone, it’s the city sanitation department you should be blaming!”
This makes him splutter. “Oh, that’s rich. See? This is what you get when you let liberals run your city. Blue-state politics at their finest!”
“Well, the fire department is on its way. Should I screen them for political views when they get here? Make sure they didn’t send the diversity hires?”
“You’re pretty snarky for someone who just assaulted me!”
“Oh sure, it’s very easy for you to claim the moral high ground now.”
Tyler sniffs in contempt, and immediately regrets it. The air down there is fetid. “Like you wouldn’t do the same if the situation were reversed. Believe me, if you were in my shoes, you’d give pretty much anything for higher ground! Don’t you feel any remorse at all?”
“…I am sorry you fell into the bowels of the city.” Like the piece of crap you are, she doesn’t add.
“There you go. How about a little empathy for the guy with the busted leg?”
The appeal to her better nature is not lost on Hailey. “Fair enough. Sorry. Does it hurt?”
Tyler grits his teeth. “It’s pretty bad, yeah. I can handle it, though. And let’s be honest, the view down here’s not that much worse than the dumpster fire up there.”
“If you hate how this city is run so much, why don’t you leave?”
“It doesn’t work that way. I got family here. I got a job here—which I’m missing right now, thanks to you. I can’t just pick up and go wherever I want, whenever I want. Plus, forgive me if I feel extra stuck at the moment.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that. We don’t choose our own circumstances. But here you are asking for empathy, and yet you don’t seem to have much compassion for the other side. Why can’t you see that sometimes we have to sacrifice a little to make life a lot better for everyone? Change doesn’t happen overnight; it takes time for the effects to be felt across the board.”
He scoffs. “Pssh. Better how? By hiking taxes and taking away our freedoms? And for who? All I see is how they’re trying to make things better for certain groups of people. Meanwhile, us blue-collar guys get short shrift.”
She rolls her eyes with such vigor that it’s visible even from his vantage. “Just the response I’d expect from your typical entitled white guy.”
Tyler throws up his hands in exasperation. “You’re white, lady!”
“If you call me ‘lady’ one more time, I’ll replace this grate and be on my way.”
“Fine, fine. What was it again? Kayleigh? Tragedeigh?”
“Hailey, asshole.”
“Hey, that’s Mister Asshole to you. Tyler Asshole.”
She smiles despite herself. “That a family name?”
“Nah, that’s just how they anglicized it when my ancestors came through Staten Island. In the Old Country it was Assholioni.”
This earns a reluctant snort of laughter. “See? That’s the systematic bastardization of culture, that’s what that is.”
“Exactly what I’d expect to hear from a leftist.”
This time they both laugh.
“Seriously though,” she says. “You don’t seem like a total imbecile now that we’ve talked for a little. I mean, not completely irredeemable. I refuse to believe anyone’s completely irredeemable. So help me understand. Why the hat? What’s the appeal of all that willful ignorance and punching down?”
“How’s my hat any different from your haircut or those Doc Martens you’re wearing? And as far as ignorance and punching down go, you got it all wrong. What’s ignorant is expecting people to give up the ways they’ve always lived on the drop of a dime. So I see it as a way to protect our future and our past. To get back to the original vision of this country, how it was meant to be, even if that means stepping on a few toes to make it happen. Shit, politics ain’t beanbag. America didn’t happen without stepping on a few toes. Besides, that’s better than lionizing weakness.”
“Every person deserves dignity and respect. It’s not weak to show people basic humanity.”
“It is if it means sacrificing our national interests.”
“Politics doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.”
“It does if you’re part of the group they’ve decided to take everything away from.”
“Oh, spare me.” Another eyeroll from the heavens. “Take everything away from? Please. If anything, it’s about evening the playing field. Giving everyone a seat at the table.”
Tyler rolls his eyes right back at her. “Wow. You really drank the Kool-Aid, huh?”
“Really plumbing the depths of the gene pool today, huh.”
“Hilarious. Are those firefighters getting here anytime soon?”
“Any moment now.”
“Can’t come soon enough.”
When the firefighters arrive, neither Hailey nor Tyler mention the push or the argument that preceded it. The rescuers lower a harness and hoist Tyler to safety with only a minor hitch: he loses his hat as they raise him up. Paramedics diagnose him on the spot with a double ankle sprain; contrary to his fears, neither ankle turns out to be broken. He profusely thanks the first responders but refuses an ambulance ride to the hospital (“Oh no, I couldn’t afford the medical bills—I can hobble home just fine from here.”). Worst wounded is his pride, which he doubts they’d be able to treat on his crappy insurance.
Hailey stays on the scene out of a sense of moral obligation until the last of the emergency personnel leave. “Sorry about your hat.”
“Ah, no worries. I got two more just like it at home.”
“Of course you do. And um, listen. I really am sorry about this, you know. This wasn’t like me at all.”
“I got under your skin that bad, huh?”
“Yeah.” It physically pains her to give him the satisfaction, but there’s no use denying it. “I guess so.”
They exchange numbers, since, as he assures her, “You’ll still be hearing from my attorney. But…maybe just to help corroborate my case against the sanitation department. I could’ve died, y’know?”
“I think ‘died’ might be a bit of an exaggeration,” she says, then adds in response to his glower, “But sure, have him give me a call.”
A slow, shit-eating grin spreads across his face. “Maybe I’ll hire a woman attorney.”
At this, she turns on her heel.
As Hailey struts away, wondering how the hell this morning got away from her so fast, Tyler shoots his shot. “So, you want to grab a drink with me sometime?”
This prompts another sharp heel-turn. “Are you shitting me? The nerve of some men!”
“Hey hon, it’s a compliment. Don’t be uppity.”
“As if attention from someone as asinine as you could be taken for a compliment.”
“Asinine? I don’t know the meaning of the word.”
“Why am I not surprised? Nope, sorry bud. I think we view the world a bit too differently.”
As she attempts to walk away for the fourth time this morning, he calls after her. “Oh well. You got my number—maybe you can call and try to change my views sometime! Who knows, maybe you’ll even come around to my way of seeing things!” He laughs.
She scoffs and says over her shoulder, “Ha! Don’t count on it, guy.”
The stoplight on the corner changes, and she joins the press of pedestrians in the crosswalk. He turns and limps the other way, wondering how the hell he’s going to explain this to his boss. Within seconds both are out of sight.
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