I woke up at 6:15 that morning so that I could catch the bus on Poplar at 7:00, so that I could transfer to the 88 line at 7:46, so that I could make it around Winchester and hoof it to the corner of Quince and Kirby (only about ten miles from my house on Marne) by 8:30 for my appointment with the temp agency. Bethany hit the alarm clock on the second ring, rolled over and fell back to sleep. I staggered out of bed in my boxers and scoured the closet for a presentable set of clothes. In three weeks of full-time job searching we had found no one in Memphis who wanted to hire us to do anything. I called every book store, record shop, video store and coffee bar in town--"not hiring, but we're taking applications," "we're hiring, but not you," "why don't you try back in the fall?" Bethany and I were only in town for the summer; we would be gone in a few weeks. The search was further limited by our lack of a car. Any job we looked at had to be reachable by foot, bus or trolley. By this time she--a recent college graduate with the promise of employment in the fall--had resigned from the job search, but I--a starving college student in search of the blues--couldn't afford the same decision. I could hardly afford to live in Memphis, and if I didn't find a job I wouldn't be able to afford to get out of Memphis. The interview with the temp agency seemed like my last hope. I showered and dressed quietly (making sure not to chop my hand in the whir of the ceiling fan as I pulled my shirt over my head) breakfasted, turned on the AC in the living room and popped out the door, locking it behind me.

Marne Street looked polished in the morning light. In the leafy overgrown trees that hung their branches down into the street, the cicadas buzzed like eggs frying. Our yard was scrubby and barren, and where grass grew among the fallen pine needles, it was growing suspiciously long. But ours was the exception to the rule; on long walks through the neighborhood, down Marne and around to the Pink Palace Museum and back, Bethany and I noticed how trim the neighbors all kept their grass. It was short and even, with straight edges running down the rocky driveways and along the sidewalks--so short and straight that it made the houses, all fashioned in variations on the box theme, look unreal, like models or gingerbread houses in some cozy Southern Christmas diorama.

I kicked a pine cone into the street and found myself whistling Louis Armstrong's "Ain't Misbehavin'" as I headed towards Poplar, passing the mysteriously empty lot where the grass grew waist-high and trading the sidewalk for the street where, a week before, I had noticed a dead bird surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes. Television news coverage had been flooding Memphis with stories about the arrival of the West Nile virus from New York via Louisiana, and the presence of dead birds being eaten by mosquitoes was said to be an indication of the virus' spread.

The big rumbling Memphis Area Transit Authority bus arrived ten minutes early or ten minutes late. At this hour I was one of only a handful of riders, the others presumably being commuters, mostly middle-aged black women. There were advertisements on the panels above the handrails for Schnucks’ groceries and medical clinics and AIDS tests. The outside of the bus was covered with enormous photographs of NBA basketball players (the newly-formed Memphis Grizzlies) swooping in for slam dunks and obscuring the view from inside. These were the worst of the buses, since no one but the driver could really see out and so we all had to rest our eyes on things inside, usually on other people. I watched sleeping babies rise and fall on their mothers’ ample bosoms, stole glances at weary sighing working men. Coming from the rural Pacific Northwest I had never done this kind of thing in the United States before, never lived so near a city in which I was the racial minority. I had been the only white face in a minibus taxi in South Africa, however, crammed in between sighing working men and ample-bosomed grandmothers, as we weaved in and out of the city and townships. But that had been different. I always felt safe in the minibuses there, and, if not welcome, then at least acknowledged; after all, it’s impossible to ignore someone whose elbow is lodged between one’s third and fourth ribs and whose armpit has become one’s headrest. The municipal system, the Golden Arrow line, on the other hand, always looked foreboding. Dark faces seemed to stare angrily at me, floating above blocky orange lettering: “the bus for us.” I never rode these buses; it didn’t seem my place. It felt the same in Memphis. We were rarely acknowledged by anyone other than the drivers. In the photo-covered buses, where watching the city pass was nearly impossible, I longed to get someone’s elbows in my ribs. Instead we all stared at our shoes in silence.

This morning, though, I sat in the front seat so I could watch the streets approach through the windshield. The nice thing about living off of Poplar Avenue was that it was a straight shot into the city, to the west, and everything we needed to survive was either along the way, or a few blocks to the north or south. MATA route 40A was the only line we ever took, into and out of the city, in for drinks at the Hi-Tone, out to Kroger’s for groceries. A few blocks from the house we passed the vast commercial composite that contained Starbucks ("currently not accepting applications"), Blockbuster Video ("not hiring, but come in and fill out an application") and Bookstar, a former movie theater (the marquee still juts out from the storefront) turned into an enormous bookstore. Bookstar had been my first hope for employment, especially since the adjoining coffee shop was looking for an assistant manager, a position for which Bethany had considerable experience. I dreamed of wearing a pair of smarty-pants glasses and moving in between the shelves of brightly colored novels and self-help books all day, perhaps flirting with Bethany in the coffee shop on my lunch break. At the end of the day when I swung by to pick her up, she would wipe down the counter with a rag one last time, gather her things and we would walk home together. Bookstar never called back, and neither did the coffee shop. So it goes.
I transferred onto the 88 at Ridgeway and boarded an empty bus. Even the driver had gone out for a smoke break. When she returned she asked where I was headed. She was thoroughly confused by my interpretation of the route map, and rightly so. I was ahead of schedule and so decided not to get off where I was going but to stay on, round the prescribed loop and disembark at the return of the loop. When I finally got off I couldn't find the address I was looking for and ended up wandering around an empty strip mall parking lot with a burgeoning headache and a bad case of stomach gas. At some point I turned around and realized that the temp agency's office was inside the great hulking office park building on the corner where I had gotten off the bus. It looked like a hunk of black lava rock sunk into the ground, surrounded by corporate green space, hemmed in by the freeway running behind it. Inside it would be lit up like a fluorescent circus, with gray cubicles everywhere and inane secretaries whispering Nutra-Sweet nothings into shoulder-mounted telephones. I just knew it. I thought for a moment about turning back.