Gerri Davis

Assignment #1

6/26/01

Department of Motor Vehicles

I could see, even before pushing the door open, that the DMV was packed. There were people sitting in all but three of the waiting room chairs, and many more stood here and there filling out forms and applications. I noticed that the reader board installed above the counter cheerfully blinked a red "22". I grabbed my computer printed-out receipt which told me both my number, 36, and my approximate wait time, 14-20 minutes. My skepticism only slightly edging out my optimism, I made my way over to the nearest empty chair and prepared to wait it out. I sat down next to a young stubbley-faced guy. He squirmed at my nearness. We shot each other constipated-looking grins, carefully avoiding eye contact. Then he quickly stood up and moved to one of the remaining open chairs, choosing instead to sit next to an old man with a cane in one hand, a Mountain Dew can in the other.

Twelve minutes and thirty-eight seconds later, one of the counter people yelled, "Number twenty-three!" Number 23 nearly threw off one strappy sandal in her haste to reach the counter. She was a woman who looked as though she had spent her whole life, and any past lives, too, on the back of a Harley-Davidson. Her cheeks, perfect powdered circles, were permanently pushed up and back by the wind. Thick black eyeliner emphasized the not-so-tiny lines around her eyes, and her mascara was so heavy I wondered how she could blink with such grace. She wore her hair tall and blonde, curled and sprayed, with black roots sneaking out from underneath. As she carried her white plastic sunglasses up to the counter, her sweet acrid smell following, I noticed how her red-striped shorts clung to the g-string up her crack. I appreciated that this woman, with her unique sense of style, so obviously gussied herself up for me and the other strangers at the DMV.

The majority of people in the DMV were women; I wondered at this. Were men somehow exempt from the tangle of transferring titles and renewing tags? From taking their newly legal daughters and sons to try for their driver's licenses? But there was one man, sitting in the corner under the reader board, with a flock of children surrounding him and a wife cooing into his collar bone. The man's bare-legged children took turns hopping in and out of his lap, while the wife wrapped a tattooed arm around his back. Scratched jaggedly in home-job teal ink, the wife's tattoo was just three letters: SWA. SWA?were those her initials, her husband's initials, an ex-lover's that would otherwise be forgotten? The SWA didn't fit in with the woman's soccer-mom facade, with her pedal pusher jeans and neatly shaved legs, her white teeth and lipstick-lined lips. The mother stood up and walked around, shedding herself of my visual queries.

The reader board numbers continued to climb, one at a time, closer to the one I held in my hand. I no longer minded the wait. Though I had been at the DMV for almost three times my approximate waiting time, I was content to look into the faces of these people I had never seen before, would never see again. For a moment I thought I found perfection in the black roots of a woman's hair; I thought I understood love through a home-job tattoo. I began to see the similarities we all shared, both the crude and the divine, the crude as the divine, though we may wish it weren't so. In the end, we were all just fellow travelers awaiting our turn at the counter.