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The Country Club
J.F. Chavoor
J.F. Chavoor
Teachers get forty minutes at lunch. That’s five minutes to get to the lunchroom, five minutes standing in line which leaves you with half an hour. I know one year they gave us thirty minutes at lunch, leaving us twenty minutes to dine and socialize. So when we have institute days, which are non-student days featuring seven hours of meetings, we like getting a whole hour for lunch. Many teachers are very creative with their sixty minutes. They know that the administrators in charge won’t roll up until at least the seventieth minute and that people will mill around for another five minutes after that which leaves late comers with an eighty minute lunch. Now with eighty minutes you can actually go to a nearby restaurant and not have to rush. There is no dawdling though. You have to have already asked a few friends where they’re heading before lunch starts and then you have to head straight to your car and go. If you don’t plan ahead you might end up eating where you didn’t want to or with people you hadn’t planned on hanging out with at lunch. Or you might end up eating lunch alone until you spotted someone you knew only tangentially. I don’t know how I missed connections with my friends that day but I ended up at my car alone with no plan and no idea who was going where. I guessed that some of them might go to Javier’s, a popular Mexican restaurant only a couple of miles from Roosevelt. There was a place closer to school, El Sombrero, but the food there was old and stale, served warm not hot. The ambience was worn, torn and faded. It was the kind of place you would only go if you had been going there for years and years and now you just couldn’t give up on the relationship; after all those years it had become a matter of loyalty. I could have driven by El Sombrero’s first but I didn’t. I didn’t want to eat at a place that was a distant second to Javier’s even if my good friends were there. I made myself believe that they had chosen Javier’s as I headed up Kings Canyon Avenue. None of my colleagues were there. There was a good noontime crowd but even after I surveyed the place front to back, side to side there were no Roosevelt peers to be seen. The clock was running and I was hungry so I decided I would eat there alone and go back to the dull meetings with that full, sleepy feeling. I would even buy myself an after dinner mint. I was being escorted to my seat when I saw Aram. I wasn’t sure at first but as I passed his booth we glanced at each other but didn’t speak. I knew him and he knew me but ours was an unusual history: fifty years earlier he had dated Mom. I also had been on good terms with his daughter since meeting her seventeen years earlier at an Armenian Christian Endeavor Union retreat where she was the keynote speaker. I liked what she had to say at the time and I liked her calm, occasionally droll speaking style. It was as if she could understand things and help others understand things by slowing everything down, and it was a time when everyone was anxious to speed things up. Debra’s approach was a gift few people possess. But in the moment, we were two men, a thirty-four year old English teacher and a seventy- four year old retired chemist. I thought about going over to his booth to say hi and possibly join him for lunch but I worried that we wouldn’t have much to say to each other, and besides maybe he was waiting for a friend which would serve only to underscore my eating alone, which in my mind was second only to going to the movies alone under the category of social oddness. I felt obliged to at least say hello. I got up and walked back to where he was. “Oh hi,” I said cheerily, as if I had seen him for the first time. “Hi,” he said, “what’re you doing eating alone?” “I don’t know,” I answered, unable to think of anything, “I just, it was lunch time and I….” “Wanna come over here?” “Oh, yeah sure.” The waitress handed me a menu without comment. “You like this place?” “Yeah. We come here a lot.” “Huh.” “You?” “It’s all right.” He seemed distracted. I didn’t want to ask why he was eating lunch alone. His countenance was stern; he looked like Winston Churchill in one of those pictures where he appeared to be considering weighty matters. “How long’ve you been in Fresno?” he asked after I ordered. “Almost ten years.” “Like it?” “Yeah. I like the affordable housing. Coming from LA.” “Huh.” “I mean what do you with your social time? You have someone over or you go over to someone’s house. You go to the movies. You can do that here as well as anywhere.” “Fresno’s not like it was.” “Yeah.” I thought he meant it wasn’t as good as it once was. ` “There was a lot of prejudice against Armenians.” “I’ve heard about that.” “I was a good athlete when I was in high school.” “I played football in high school,” I said, not sure why he suddenly jumped subjects. “I was good at football and track.” “Never liked track. Running any distance was like torture to me.” “I was good at sprints. I ran for the JV squad.” “Yeah?” “I ran better than the kid who ran varisty. Understand?” “Better?” “Better times. Record times.” “But….” “Know what the track coach said to me?” “No.” “He didn’t want an Armenian doing better than a white kid.” “What?” “That’s why he kept me on JV.” His face and the tone of his voice indicated that the incident was still causing him pain. “You gotta be kidding.” “That’s what he said. That’s exactly what he said.” I had heard stories. Uncle Harry, Mom’s brother served in World War II, came home and couldn’t find a job; they weren’t hiring Armenians in Fresno. According to the story, Dad suggested that Uncle Harry put on his uniform and go back to the dozen or so places where he had been told that he—as an Armenian—was automatically disqualified for consideration and stand before the employer and ask, “Now what am I?” Armenians, African Americans and Mexican Americans could not buy property on the exclusive Huntington Boulevard; neither could they join the country club. We were even assigned our very own pejorative label, “Fresno Indians.” I didn’t bring up Uncle Harry or anyone else on Mom’s side of the family though; I didn’t want him to think that I was going to try to draw him out on the subject of him and Mom. Mom told me the story when I was in high school one rainy day while she made dinner preparations. She had dated him. She went to Fresno State while he attended Cal Berkeley. She had a job at her uncle’s hamburger place across the street from Fresno High, and she used some of her money to send to him. Now, according to Mom—and it is freely admitted that Mom would not be an unbiased source—she went one day to meet him at the train depot and he got off the train with his finance. This, according to Mom, after six years as his “steady girl.” She told the story without any animosity, and she didn’t describe anything past that moment when Aram stepped off the train. We simply listened to the rain drumming on the kitchen window and then she put the pot roast in the oven. She never brought the subject of Aram up again. Ten years after she told me the story I met Aram for the first time. It was the Fresno High School fiftieth Class Reunion at the bar at Cedar Lanes Bowling alley. There were about twenty-five alumni in attendance and someone took roll which turned into toll accounting. “Floyd Johnston?” “He’s dead.” “Bernice Thompson?” “Alzheimer’s. Doesn’t recognize her own kids.” There was a kind of grim humor and nonchalance to the whole procedure as the man in the front taking roll would draw a line through the name of the newly discovered dead or disabled. Aram was near the front; Mom and I arrived late and hung in the back while she looked for familiar faces. Between sips of gin and tonic, I wondered if she would make her way up front and what she might say to her former beau from forty-five years ago. “Come on,” she said like a hunter who had spotted a well-hidden prey. I debated whether to put my drink down where we were or take it with me and she got ahead of me. I worked my way around men who were recalling fifty year old football games as if they had just happened that week, maneuvered past women who were trying to figure out if they knew each other back when, and finally almost bumped into Mom when she stopped suddenly where Aram was sitting. “Hey,” she said. “Hey, kid,” he replied. They stood eyeing each other wordlessly for a beat, then Mom turned, apparently satisfied with this exchange, and we went back to our original spot. They didn’t speak to each other the rest of the night, and I don’t think I saw him again until we had lunch together at Javier’s. “Prejudice against Armenians?” I said, to see if he had any more experiences to share. “It was like a country club.” “Yeah, Armenians couldn’t get in to the….” “No, that’s not what I’m talking about. The coaches, the school, the college, everything. It was all like a country club. Armenians weren’t invited.” “Oh, yeah.” “I was good in sports. They had no reason to keep me on JV.” It still had power; he appeared to be freshly enraged. When our food arrived we ate with vigor. We kept moving the conversation from one topic to another. He was clearly intelligent and articulate. I couldn’t help comparing him with Dad. It seemed that Mom’s paradigm for boyfriends did not change much. Both men had a clear sense of right and wrong and had expectations for everyone to uphold those ideals. They also had remarkable long-term memory capacity. I drove back to Roosevelt in a starch induced daze. I thought about the all the Armenian names I had seen flipping though old Roosevelt yearbooks: Abajian; Hanoian; Manoogian; Garabedian. Had any of them been discriminated against? According to what I heard from the older teachers, Roosevelt and the Sunnyside area was awash in Armenians. I imagined it would be nice to attend a public school with my fellow Armenians. At Burroughs High, my high school, there were four of us: Mike Ezmerlian; Mike Delbarian; Virginia Frankian; and Chavoor. Maybe no one bothered us because they didn’t know we existed. I pulled into the parking lot thinking I should have asked Frankian to the prom, among other cloudy, far away thoughts. I went to the English department meeting exactly fifteen minutes late, sat in the back of the room. I was thinking about Kathleen, my three year old, wondering what kind of town Fresno would be for her or if she would ever encounter any kind of exclusion for any reason. I thought about Mom who experienced a different but no less damaging kind of exclusion. Would she have gone to college at all if it were not across the street from their house? Would she have stayed in college long enough to graduate if she weren’t waiting for Aram to finish at Berkeley? And might it have been said that I was following my mother’s footsteps if she had become an English teacher instead of a homemaker as prescribed by the era? It seemed that Aram and Mom were both victims of the same country club. The department chair went on and on about literature based instruction, unaware of all the other issues moving around in my head like a hypnotist’s watch. I closed my eyes and started to doze when a colleague leaned over and asked me where I went for lunch. “I met an old friend at Javier’s.” He nodded and I leaned back, laced my fingers together, set them on my contented stomach and nodded off. © J.F. Chavoor. All Rights Reserved Millionstories.net |
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