Cape May Diaries
12- A girl named Sobina
We didn't know her name until just before we left, a gregarious short-haired girl named Sobina, who served us breakfast four straight days and never stopped talking the whole time.
She talked form table to table as she served coffee or deposited dishes of ham and eggs, fully expecting people to pick up the threads of her diatribe and fill in the connections for ourselves.
"I was born and raised in south Florida," she told us during on encounter, in an accent so acutely southern she might have picked it up from repeated viewing of "Gone with the Wind." At another table, she explained how she had made her way north to Cape May via Virginia, following a trail Southerners had used before the Civil War.
Sobina had that mixture of innocence and experience I found in many small town girls. Her vision of the world seemed colored by images procured from MTV. I found myself studying her as she made her way from table to table, attempting to follow the trail of her conversation as it weaved through the room.
Along with dishes of food, Sobina left snap shots of her life at each table, self-portraits of a moment she insisted on sharing. Each day, we learned a little more about the on-going soap opera of her life. On our first day, she informed us she worked two jobs, George's Restaurant on Beach Avenue for the morning shift, then some pizzeria in the afternoon.
At age 20, Sobina had managed to collect personal experiences most people twice her age lacked. She had also developed a personal philosophy on life.
"Don't mind me this morning," she told us at one point. "I partied hard last night and I don't feel at all well. I shouldn't have mixed drinks like I did. I get one night off from both my jobs and I do this to myself. I serves me right to pay for it today."
At other tables, she detailed the kind of drinks she had, and at a third, she groaned over her stupidity as she poured other people's coffee.
"It was the cheap champagne," she said. "That's what happens when you don't have enough money to buy the good stuff."
So frail was Sobina local birders might easily have mistaken her for some new species. She had thin fingers and bones that seemed to poke through her flesh at her elbows. When she balanced plates on her arms for transport to the tables, I felt certain she would break a bone.
If anyone else studied her as closely as we did, they might have also caught the disparity between her public persona and the rather desperate look she bore during those moments when not performing. During those very brief interludes of silence, she seemed to float in a limbo of her own thoughts. Whether this reflected sadness or weariness, I couldn't tell. She simply seemed like two different people, her private side struggling desperately to keep up with her public side.
In subsequent encounters, we even learned the name of her boyfriend as she flashed his huge high school graduation ring under our nose, testimony to his eternal commitment. It was a ring nearly large enough to serve this skinny girl as a bracelet.
"Some things just bond you to a person," she told us. "Jason is so sweet that I would head off to New Orleans tomorrow if I didn't have him here."
Sobina claimed her stay in Cape May was merely a stopover on her way to either New Orleans or the Virgin Islands.
"I have a friend in the Virgin Islands who has a job and a place to stay, and he told me anytime I became unattached, I should look him up there and stay with him," Sobina said. "Though it's a real attractive offer and all, I'm really in love with my Jason, and I wouldn't want to give him up just to get a taste of the overseas. He's the only thing that would make me stay so long in one place. I thought about taking a vacation to go, but I'd be miserable worrying about not finding Jason here when I got back."
We tried to break into her diatribe to find out why she had come north to Cape May at all, but she had gone on to another table before we got the chance, and didn't learn the reason until our last day.
She claimed a relationship with a married Marine caused her to flee.
"I didn't know he was married, so I didn't know he had a pregnant wife," she said in the same matter of fact way she relayed all other information. "He invited me up to his apartment and when I got there I saw all these pictures lying around all over the place. When I asked him about the pictures, he told me he had separated from his wife. He said he'd tried like the dickens to make it all work out with her, but it was no good for him. I liked the guy and all, but my momma never raised such a fool as to mess with no married man until he had the divorce papers signed. I didn't want to get into the middle of nothing like that."
None the less, she felt sufficiently tarnished to make her leave that neck of the woods.
"But I can tell you I've got a mighty weakness for men in uniform," she said. "Why just the other day I run across of flock of Marines over at the pizza parlor. They were so polite. They wanted to do everything they could for me. I had to tell them to stop because I was supposed to be waiting on them, not the other way around, and if my boss every caught a gander of them doing all my work, I'd have lost that job in a New York minute."
She claimed Cape May was a constant source of temptation for her because of the Coast Guard Academy just up the beach. Recruits from the facility wandered the streets of Cape May in packs, wearing their blue/gray uniforms.
"I love Jason," she said. "But I also like to look. I won't do anything as long as I'm going out with him. But those boys sure look fine to me. I just can't keep myself from staring at them sometimes."
Since we left that day for the north and she was not there when we got back the next year, we never learned if she headed to New Orleans or the Virgin Islands. We did not learn whether or not she married Jason.