Please Ignore Vera Dietz(7)
Author: A.S. King

I take as many suburbia runs as I can. Part of it is for better tips. Part of it is for safety, too. I can’t send James or the Potheads on every town run, but I can’t ignore the fact that I’m a girl. I never thought about this until I had a delivery on Maple Street during my first week delivering. I was about five minutes early, but the guy who answered the door said I was late. I knew I wasn’t. The sticker on the box said 7:32, and it was 7:55. I was seven minutes early. But he argued with me at the door, and when I told him to call my manager, he somehow got me to come in and walked me all the way through the skinny row house to the kitchen in the back, where I put the pizza down on so many skittering roaches, the box made a crackling noise. He got agitated then, when I reminded him to call my boss, and I realized I was so stupid to have ended up in this guy’s kitchen. Luckily, he wasn’t a crazy ra**st. Luckily, he was just a poor guy who wanted free pizza.

Though most people don’t even look at their pizza delivery person and most people never even figure out I’m a girl—especially in my steel-tipped boots with the Pagoda Pizza baseball cap down over my eyes—I still prefer suburbia. I guess it feels familiar or something. I know the roads. I know people who live there.

I forget, until I drive by the high school on my way back from the burbs, where a thousand spinning, singing Santas live, that there’s a football game tonight. We’re playing Wilson, an old rival. The last Wilson versus Mount Pitts football game I went to, I was fourteen and Dad and I took Charlie with us. When we dropped him off after the game, I saw Mrs. Kahn was crying and seemed really shaken.

As we drove out of Charlie’s drive, I said, “Dad? Do you think Mrs. Kahn is okay?”

Dad said, “She’s fine, Vera.”

“But she didn’t look fine, did she?”

“Just ignore it,” Dad said.

When he said that, I felt myself deflate a little. I’d spent the better part of my life hearing my father say “Just ignore it” about the loud arguments I’d hear coming through the woods from Charlie’s house.

In summer, the trees cushioned us. I couldn’t see Charlie’s house and I couldn’t hear Mr. Kahn yelling. In winter, I could hear every word, depending on the direction the wind blew. I could hear every slap and every shove. I could hear him call her “stupid bitch” and could hear her bones rattle when he shook her. If I looked out at night, I could see the tiny orange ember at the end of Charlie’s cigarette getting brighter when he inhaled.

“Ignore it,” my father would say, while my mother fidgeted in her favorite love seat.

“But can’t we call someone to help her?”

“She doesn’t want to be helped,” my mother would say.

“She’ll have to help herself,” my father would correct. “It’s one of those things, Vera.”

Dylan Pothead is smoking a joint in the parking lot when I get back. He holds it toward me, soggy end up.

“No thanks, man.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Is it slow?”

“Dunno. You tell me,” he says, giggling.

There’s another reason I like James. He doesn’t smoke pot. Says it makes him paranoid.

When I go in, it’s Friday night chaos. There are three different stacks of orders and the oven is packed with more.

“Where are the rest of the drivers?” Marie asks, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist.

“Dylan’s outside,” I say.

She looks up and squints out the plate glass. She knocks and startles him to attention, and he arrives in the store, still exhaling pot smoke.

“Get your lazy stoner ass over here and pick this up.”

She throws the hot bags to him, inserts the pizzas, shows him where they’re going on the map on the wall, and just as he’s forgetting the two six-packs of Coke, she runs over and balances them on top of the pizzas and opens the door for him.

We watch him burn rubber as he takes off down the parking lot.

“That kid is a total idiot,” she says.

Marie says the basic requirement for employment these days is a heartbeat, which is why she doesn’t fire him. Even though he doesn’t mop the floor right when he closes, he still gets the same money I do, and I mop right. When he does the dishes, there’s dry food stuck on them in the morning that someone has to chip off with a table knife, but he’s still on the schedule, week after week.

It seems the older people get, the more shit they ignore. Or, like Dad, they pay attention to stuff that distracts them from the more important things that they’re ignoring. While he’s busy clipping coupons, for instance, and telling me that a full-time job will teach me about the real world, Dad is overlooking that the guy on Maple Street could have killed me and chopped me up and distributed my body, piece by piece, along the side of the highway. He’s overlooking every story on the news about drivers being robbed at gunpoint, or getting carjacked.

It’s one thing if he wants to ignore it. I guess that’s fine. I mean, I ignore plenty of stuff, like school spirit days and the dirty looks I get from the Detentionheads while I try to slink through the halls unnoticed. But there’s something about telling other people what to ignore that just doesn’t work for me. Especially things we shouldn’t be ignoring.

Kid bullying you at school? Ignore him. Girl passing rumors? Ignore her. Eighth-grade teacher pinch your friend’s ass? Ignore it. Sexist geometry teacher says girls shouldn’t go to college because they will only ever pop out babies and get fat? Ignore him. Hear that a girl in your class is being abused by her stepfather and had to go to the clinic? Hear she’s bringing her mother’s pills to school and selling them to pay for it? Ignore. Ignore. Ignore. Mind your own business. Don’t make waves. Fly under the radar. It’s just one of those things, Vera.

I’m sorry, but I don’t get it. If we’re supposed to ignore everything that’s wrong with our lives, then I can’t see how we’ll ever make things right.

It’s ten-thirty and we’re nearly down to closing crew. Dylan wants to leave early to go to a party, so he has Marie cash him out while I take my dinner break sitting on the cold stainless-steel counter in the prep kitchen, next to the sink.

“You working New Year’s Eve?” Marie asks, counting out his commission.

“You kidding?” he says, shaking his head. “Count me out, man.”

“We could really use extra drivers. I’ll pay double commission.”