valuables

I don’t have to worry about misquoting Derrida, or confounding Bach with Chopin or Durkheim with Weber or Rem Koolhaas with Daniel Leibskind or Matthew Barney with Richard Serra or fertility with fecundity or co-dominance with shared dominance. When I talk to my favorite coworker at my new under-the-table manual-labor job, it never comes up. I used to think of myself as valuable because I can deal in those terms. But he doesn’t care. I’m not going to bother telling him I’m a Fulbright Scholar. I’m the Duchess of Gumdrop Land.

He cares about his car, and the $12K system he put in it. He works in an auto body shop, goes to school half the day then leaves for tech school. He’s been suspended every other week since September, he says, for fighting, or for leaving campus, which is permissible for seniors but technically he was left back in ninth grade, he admitted once. He's not embarrassed about being suspended from school, or about being held back a year. He was embarrassed when I learned that technically he's still only a junior.

At first I liked to think he was covertly impressed when I used words he seemed not to know, when he would look at the ground and change the topic. It’s not only that I don’t feel like I have to impress him- boys who deal in much loftier terms tell me earnestly they're so impressed with me, not to worry about impressing them- but with him it would be improper, it would ruin everything, to try to seem smart, to impose my weight on a scale he isn't using.

Anything that happens “well” rather than “good”, everyone I "call" rather than “cawll”, everything I “thought” rather than “thowhut” is a reminder that I speak more properly than him, know more words than him, am older than him, more experienced.

He does construction. He’s good at it, at building, at details, at making decisions about that kind of stuff. BMW will be paying for him to go to college, and paying him $100K a year when he gets out, to fix BMWs.