Styrofoam

I swipe the last twenty dollars from my plastic Fisher-Price piggy bank. So much for savings. The air is cool, but the evening is sunny and pleasant as I pull away in my Camry. The trunk still has several suitcases left over from college, which ended eleven days ago. Sometimes I could confuse eleven days with an eternity.

The symposium is empty when we arrive, aside from granite slabs and chips of stone on the path between the millyard and the river. Wandering among the sculptures, we assent to return another day. Wait. Are those voices?

The Cuban keeps telling us that the artists are locked up inside the mill building. He is obviously an artist, wearing a painter's suit and what was probably once a baseball cap that lost it's brim. The Czeck brings two styrofoam cups balanced between the fingers of his left hand, the wine in his right. Our polite refusal is ignored, so we take the cups of wine and sit down in the loading bay. We all introduce ourselves.

I need to work on the way I describe my profession. Once social work is out of the bag, people like to change the subject as quickly as is possible. I try grad student instead. What are you studying? I respond, and the characteristic change of subject ensues. My friend talks about the cafe where she works, and the artists listen with interest and try to solicit donations.

There's a lull in conversation, so the Cuban proposes a wet t-shirt contest, just for my friend and me. We laugh. He gets up to bring over the mock-up of his sculpture, a woman's draped figure, and shows it to us. He's persistent, but so are we, so he abandons his proposal and returns to his spot around the table.

Soon after, our steward wobbles away on his bicycle and our brief party starts to wane. We walk back to the car, styrofoam cups in our hands, to the last lights of the sun.