Where are you from?

Earlier tonight I ordered takeout from Sitar, formerly known as Maharaja, which is the only Indian place in town. Later I paired the meal with the rubbing alcohol-esque Glen Ellen Chardonnay from the PB gas station and am feeling alright, though slightly guilty for not cooking enough lately. Every time we've got a little extra money we become super lazy and less creative with meals, so much so we often forego preparing them altogether. When Brock and I are broke, though, it's artistry: two-meal spaghetti dinners and four-meal tuna casseroles, and for lunch, Brooke-style-Subway sandwiches. I've learned to slice onions looseleaf thin, and one head of romaine lettuce lasts for two weeks' worth of sandwiches if wrapped correctly. Sometimes, there's beauty in the pedestrian.

At least when you're broke. When I'm broke, anyway, the slow circle I make with my wrists when washing the dishes is a goddamned miracle. The way I slice an onion makes me feel like Botticelli's Venus. Movies cost too much so I pleasure myself in these small ways, by thinking of myself in big ways. Sometimes I'll even think, why isn't there someone way high up in the sky filming this shit? It's brilliant! Brooke washes a dish and is so calm and serene and selfless about it that, really, the whole world should see.

But no poetic poverty today. My benefactor, Lala, came through for us this week with my belated birthday cash, so I'm not broke, but in fact full of Sitar. I've got Sitar in my stomach and Sitar on the brain.

Three hours later Sitar is still in my head because of my strange takeout experience there. The restaurant was, not surprisingly, empty at 5:15, so both men behind the bar opened their eyes wide and smiled the perfunctory we've-got-a-customer smile. My order was already bagged and on the counter. I pulled out my debit card and felt the usual long moments of horror--do you know these moments?--when we're all just standing around and waiting for the machine to do it's gobbledy-gook, process the transaction, spit out the receipt and get me the hell out of there. I busied myself with some invisible thing I was looking for in my purse, and one of the guys clicked and unclicked a pen half a dozen times. Smile and look down. Smile.

These moments make me inwardly, maybe outwardly, cringe, because the older I get the more I'm incapable of small talk. I'd like to think strangers appreciate this, that I don't ask them about their days, or comment insipidly about the weather. It's not rudeness, I swear: I'm all smiles with strangers, smiles and nods. But there's absolutely nothing to say sometimes--I give you money, you give me food--and I'm not going to pretend there is.

The men behind the bar waiting for the receipt to spit out appeared to appreciate my smile and nod and general pleasantness. We were happily silent. But as I was signing the receipt and leaving one dollar on $15 (a fair tip, I think, for a quick styrofoam-wrap-and-bag job), one of the men asked me a seemingly simple question: "Where are you from?"

For a long time (now, still!) I was flustered by the question. This sounds strange, but I didn't know what he meant. I made the famous rhetorical move of responding to his question with another question: "Do you mean, like, physically where was I born? Or where is my family from?"

Then he did the strangest thing. With his index finger he pointed at his own face, and drew a continuous circle around and around its periphery. He didn't answer my questions but pointed at my face. He said, "You. Where are you from?"

After realizing I didn't know how to answer the question, I said very quickly everything I knew about myself at that moment to be true: oh, I don't sound like I'm from around here, do I, some people say I've got a Brooklyn accent, which I think is ridiculous, well I was born in New Orleans and that's in Louisiana, but my mother's from Ecuador and she's where I get my face, I believe, but I did live in Baton Rouge for the last six years before moving here, and no, I'm definitely not from Tuscaloosa.

In retrospect I should've left three dollars.

My confusion is not the Sitar bar man's problem. He asked a perfectly legitimate question, even if he didn't exactly have the language to clarify it afterwards. Where we are from is basic human knowledge, and it is what we ask when we want to get to know someone. It's a question on every survey I ask my students to fill out at the beginning of every semester. They never struggle with it.

Still, I struggle. Maybe it's because my first impulse is to read the question as a pejorative: you don't look like other people around here, thus you are unfamiliar and strange, thus you don't belong (and thus, in my head, no one loves you except maybe your mother, so go home and cry to her about it).

Also it's scary because it proves that someone has really looked at me, looked at and studied my face if only for a couple of moments, and made an analysis of it: this shape, that shape, brown this, brown that...ah, not from around here. And despite what I said earlier about imagining my more impoverished, mundane moments as poetic and beautiful, it's a frightening thing to be simply looked at. I'm scared I will somehow be read, and will not come across as a particularly enlightening text. I worry that if I were to be filmed from on high, the picture wouldn't be as pretty as I'd imagined it to be, that it would be boring, actually, that the lens would focus in on the soap scum I can never quite scrub off the edges of the sink, the big dots of sweat on my upper lip, on these increasingly wrinkled little hands.