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Unengaged

Feigning Smiles and Fake Engagements

I was waiting at the bus stop in the evening, heading home after a post-work errand. There’s only one person — this older man — there, so I keep my distance and try to keep to myself.

But he closes the distance I had set, walking away from his bike and backpack to ask what time the next bus is arriving.

I glanced at the NextBus app on my phone and say, “Oh, about 6 minutes.”

“I’ve been waiting for like 30!” He wasn’t drunk but the smell of earlier drinks caught my nose.

I responded politely, “Yeah, I think there was one 40 minutes ago.”

I’m hoping that’s the end of the exchange. But, rather then fade into an appreciated quiet, I’m asked a familiar question with no transition except a well-acquainted look that crosses his eyes.

No dark gifts were necessary to deduct that the follow-up question would be one of two options: origin of Asian-ness or relationship status.

“Are you Korean?”

“No.”

“Japanese?”

“No.”

He rattled off in rapid succession at least three more countries he knew, like throwing darts blindly at a board shaped like a continent named “Asia”, before landing on the right one.

“Vietnamese! I knew it!” The response was boisterous, as if he had gotten it right on the first try. He was trying to throw jokes but his demeanor also showed his hand. There was an audaciousness to it, a willingness to dismiss past wrongs as not having occurred because he had been right…eventually.

The next question was tiresomely prophetic: “Are you single? Married?”

Sometimes I make up fake stories like: “I’m engaged.” Like, when you’re at a bus stop in the evening and there’s this man who won’t stop asking you questions.

He looked surprised, “Engaged? Are you sure?”

“Yes…” I was confused as to whether he believed me or if I was supposed to question my own knowledge about my, albeit fake, relationship status.

His attention span shifts as he remembers something, “Oh, I need to show you this mask I just bought. It’s over here.”

I stay put because you don’t walk over to a stranger who wants to take something out of his bag, especially when he says it’s a mask. He walks over to me with his bag and I try to maintain some semblance of calm over the simmering panic. Because unlike questions, I don’t know what to expect.

He eventually pulls out a skull mask with a steampunk aesthetic. It’s interesting enough for me to continue the small talk and assure him of the good purchase he’s already so sure he’s made.

The mask is a temporary cover, the subject matter switches back to me as he goes to put his backpack down.

“So you’re going to get engaged?”

I feel my forehead wrinkle as I clarified the backstory, “No, I am engaged.” I expected to then have to fill in some blanks, wondering what celebrity I was going to model this one after, but then the question shifted.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

I was assured that this had nothing to do with my very perfect, fiancee of convenience — only because he hadn’t asked me a single thing about this imaginary person.

He followed, “I only ask ‘cause, you know, I’ve been there with the marriage thing.”

I expected him to talk about a wife — current or otherwise. But whoever she was or is, I didn’t find out. Maybe marriage doesn’t have much of a chance to work out if you’re the only person in the narrative.

He instead talked about his grown sons: “It was hard bringing up my kids.”

One had gotten involved in drugs and in trouble with the law — he almost killed someone. The other had gotten himself shot because someone thought he was in a gang. Shaving your head, apparently, is the gateway into gang violence. He had warned both of them not to shave their heads.

The sage wisdom continued as the bus began to make its arrival: I shouldn’t stand too close to the curb because large car haulers like the one that just passed by might snap. To emphasize this, he laughed and unnecessarily tapped my arm before he went to get his bike.

I entered the bus first, hoping to find the right seat — the one where I wouldn’t spend the next thirty minutes talking to this man I hadn’t wanted to talk to in the first place.

Sometimes kindred spirits are easy to spot: a young woman with headphones on looking at her phone. I sat in the empty spot next to her, happy to settle back down to my original state.

I want to tell you the story ended here, that I landed in a safe spot in the historic solidarity of silent women helping silent women.

But there was a temporary moment of anxiety as the man asked a woman to move so he could sit in the seat in front of me. And then there was my own sense of guilt and empathy as he began to speak in Spanish to the woman now beside him.

She kept her eyes straight forward and her responses short. Sometimes kindred spirits are easier to spot because you can’t help them.

I couldn’t help but overhear his misogynistic jokes to two young men in scrubs sitting in front of the bus: about how all nurses are women and how all firefighters are men. These men looked uncomfortable, awkwardly laughing but not dismissing him otherwise.

A woman in the front of the bus started walking to the back. She was outspoken in her own right and told him that no one wanted to talk to him. But he paid no mind to her straight forwardness as he kept on with his joking demeanor with “the boys” in front of the bus.

I wish I could say there was victory in this weird solidarity of shared annoyance, but it was pretty much everyone for themselves.

Eventually as people hopped on and others left, he did become quiet, taking swigs from a brown paper wrapped can from his bag. He eventually made his own exit toward the front, so I didn’t have to make eye contact or feign a polite smile.

Unengaged, I could now just be a young woman with headphones on looking at my phone. But I wondered, why did I have to stop being myself for so long in the first place?

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