The Headlines Will Read Bootsie Smith Weds Taffy Miles

This is what my father has told me ever since he and my mother got divorced: "I will never get married again. I'm done. It no longer interests me."

This is what my father told me last week when he called from Florida, where he was vacationing with his lady love: "I'm getting married."

This news struck me as surprising for several reasons. First, I've had his I'm never getting married again mantra driven into my head for the last seven years. Second, he never mentioned a thing about it. He was stealthy in his secrecy, a regular James Bond--just without fancy gun-pens or floating cars.

As soon as he told me, I hung up the phone and called Amy and Keith to break the news. "How do we feel about this?" I asked.

Amy was happy. "When's the wedding?" she exclaimed. I could tell she was seeing summer dresses and strappy shoes and another reason to drink Bacardi-Cokes in the warm summer afternoon. I could tell she was thinking, Yessss. We get to see the girlfriend's hot son in dress-up clothes! I could tell she was thinking that because I was thinking that, too.

Keith was happy, too, but for different reasons. The news meant he could gloat. He'd been predicting this for months, and I'd been repeating the same words my father had drilled into my head since the divorce. "No, Keith," I would say. "He's never getting married again. He told me so. They might live together, but that's it."

"We'll see," Keith would say in one of those irritating sing-song voices. "We'll just see about that!"

When I told him the news, Keith yelled into my ear. "Ha!" he said. "I told you so!" Then he said, "Can I sleep with your mom now?" and I had to inform him that no, he could not sleep with my mother now. He couldn't sleep with my mother ever, no matter how much he might want to or how much he liked to say that to irritate me.

They both went on to ask me how I felt. How was I dealing with it? What did I think?

I felt fine with it. I like my father's girlfriend. He's had some girlfriends I really wasn't fond of--for example, the girlfriend I nicknamed Rafiki because she resembled the blue-butted monkey from The Lion King--but this one is an all-around good time. And she has a hot son. Really, it's a win-win situation for everyone. So, I feel good about this. I am happy for my father, happy that he gets a second-go at marriage, even if that's what he spent years thinking he didn't want.

Really, I suppose, there were hints, and I should've seen this coming. About a month ago my father walked into the kitchen balancing his and my mother's wedding album on his palm. "I think," he said, "it might be time to get rid of this."

"Are you freaking kidding me?" I exclaimed, snatching the album from him. I could see him tossing it in the garbage. I could see the album getting buried in the landfill, underneath a cascade of rotten bananas, socks with holes in the heels, forgotten furniture. I told my father I was taking over custody of the album, and I pushed it underneath my bed, where it would be safe forever.

He must have been considering it--a new start with a new woman--for awhile now, and if I had paid closer attention maybe I would've guessed it. But that's okay. The surprise was fine. And last night I decided it was extra fine because we all sat around figuring out our porn-names, and my father's would be Bootsie Smith and his girlfriend's would be Taffy Miles, and let's face it--that's a good-sounding couple. I can see the invitations, the headlines now: Bootsie Smith Weds Taffy Miles; Children Smoky Place, Dusty Place, and Squeaky Kelly Throw Reception in Their Honor.

Let's hope, though, that my father picks a more attractive outfit and hair situation than he did the first time around, when he married my mother:

Back to an Old Place

Well, I thought to myself, that sure looks familiar.

This was yesterday, when I was killing time in between two of my classes. I was sitting upstairs in a lounge with broke-down couches. I was leafing through the papers I'd just gotten from my students when two of them slumped down onto the couch across from me. "Hi!" they said, and they smiled.

One of the students was a boy, the other was a girl. The boy is the type that qualifies as Really Attractive--a little on the short side, but otherwise brilliant. His skin is tan, the power of his smile could be measured in wattage, his eyes are the type of blue that guarantees he will often get laid even if he has no other redeeming qualities than those eyes. The girl is short and spunky. She's always willing to participate. She always says goodbye and have a nice day to me as she leaves the classroom. Her hair is jet-black, her lips are always perfectly glossed.

This girl and her other beautiful short friends are in love with this boy. They surround him in class. They are always giggling and batting their eyes and tossing their hair and finding reasons to touch him on the shoulder, on the arm, on the thin bones of his hand. No one finds more reasons to touch him than the girl with the jet-black hair.

When they spread themselves out across the couch yesterday I pretended it was no big deal, that I could care less that they were sitting across from me. I went on looking at the papers. I pretended I wasn't eavesdropping.

I was completely eavesdropping.

She asked him if he was going to come out to the bar with them later that night.

"Maybe," he said. He didn't look at her straight on.

"Oh come," she said. "It's going to be fun."

"We'll see," he said. Then he made a phone call. Someone was waiting for him in the union. They had homework to copy. He said he'd be over soon.

That was when the girl tipped her body closer to his. She leaned in. Her posture was screaming Stay! Stay! Stay!

They talked for a few more minutes. They laughed and swatted at each other. When he smiled at her the light from his perfect, perfect smile was unbearable. I knew exactly where this was headed.

Finally, he started to gather his things.

"You're going?" she asked.

"I've got to," he said. Then they sat there for a minute, just looking at each other. In complete silence. She smiled, but it wasn't so much a smile as it was a thin line cutting across her face. He reached over and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. Her body swelled. You could actually see it. Her entire self bloomed. He was touching her. My God, he was touching her like that. But then he rose, and her body deflated, collapsed in on itself. "See you later," he said.

She watched him leave, watched him walk down the hall and far away from her. He never looked back.

When he rounded the corner toward the elevator, the girl slouched over. She put her head in a pillow of her hair and hands. I thought maybe she was going to cry. I wanted to put my folders and notebooks away and go sit next to her on the couch. I wanted to gather her up--all that jet-black hair and loose, broken limbs--and hug her, tell her it was okay, he was gone, she should just cry, get it out, get it over with. I imagined what I could tell her. "I've done this before," I would say. "I know it feels like your heart is too big for your chest right now. I know you think it's possible you could die from this feeling, from loving him too much, from him not loving you enough or at all." I felt for her.

What I was feeling most wasn't understanding or sympathy, although they were certainly there. I wasn't thinking, You poor thing. Just cut and run, and do it quickly. No. What I was thinking and feeling as I sat there watching her finally sit up and lean backward, close her eyes, and pretend to sleep--which is infinitely better than crying in front of your English teacher--well, what was going on inside of me was much more complicated, much darker than all that. I was thinking, I'd give anything to go back--to even the worst times, the times where I cried in my car, in bar bathrooms, on my own bathroom floor--just so I could love a person that way again.

While I watched her breathe and try to keep the tears locked behind screwed-shut eyelids, I thought about two Septembers ago, a day I drove up to the place the Wily Republican had moved to after he graduated. He and I had lain on his bed and looked at each other for a long time. Things were said, I'm sure, but I don't remember them. We were holding hands in that way you hold hands in high school: fingers twisted into fingers. Later, we watched television and sat on separate couches. When I went to leave, he walked me to my car. We both stood in front of the driver's side door.

"Thanks for coming," he said.

"Sure," I said, like it was no big thing, when in reality I'd spent an hour picking an outfit, gotten a haircut, and arranged my day around the drive up to his place. He'd moved in the middle of that summer. I'd helped him pack boxes and load his car. I'd folded and stacked clothes. I'd searched for the lids to his grungy Tupperware. I'd waved goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. For the rest of that hot Minnesota summer I sat on the edge of the local pond and repeated song lyrics in my head. I'm wishing my summer away just to see you again, I sang. And I did. I wished my way into July and August and straight into September.

The moon was rising over his shoulder. The night was quiet. I could hear only two things: my heartbeat and the hum of the distant highway traffic. It was an important moment, although I shouldn't have known that then. I shouldn't have known that a few weeks later the Wily Republican would call me up, say he had something to tell me. A terrible, awful something. But somehow I did know.

I wanted to stall. I wanted to keep him outside forever. I wanted him to say, "Let's sit in the car for a little bit." I wanted him to say, "Stay the night, okay?"

I would've. I would've stayed the night, the week, the month, the year. At that one moment in time I would've dropped out of school and left everything behind if he'd just asked me to.

But he didn't. Instead, he picked me up in his arms. I balanced on my toes and he hugged me. He crushed me underneath the weight of his arms, and we stayed like that while the traffic continued to hum, while the moon slid in and out of a veil of clouds. His hand was moving slowly against my shoulder blade. He drew circles against my skin. "Goodbye," he said. "Drive safe."

Then he let me go, let me down. He backed away from me. He waved. Then he turned around and walked away. I eased into my car and turned the key. I watched him go. He never looked back. Several weeks later he called, told me about this girl he'd met, how he was going to give it a go. I could still feel the circles he'd drawn on my freckled shoulder blade. They burned while I cried and cried and he said, "I didn't mean to do this. I really didn't."

But he did. And so did I. And my students were doing it, too. I could see it clear as day. I could see my own face in hers, the Wily's in the boy's. I saw us looking at each other and smiling and running around town and laughing and letting the snow fall down onto us.

And I could've whispered, "I know what you're going through, so let me give you some advice..." and then told her to stop answering his calls, to sit on the other side of the room during class, to tell him she was busy and couldn't see him right now. But I didn't want. I knew it was too important that she go on loving him and that he go on doing what he was doing. I knew there were too many lessons she had to learn about love and what it should be and--more importantly--what it shouldn't be.

A Note for Crazy Dave

I can't help but think that Crazy Dave would have enjoyed leaving his favorite waitresses sexually-explicit notes on these.

Crazy Dave

I met Crazy Dave when I was nineteen years old. I was a waitress wearing khaki pants and a jean shirt. He was a cook wearing sagging jeans and a black t-shirt that stretched against the strain of his enormous gut. Crazy Dave wore hats in the kitchen. He tied a stained white cloth around his middle. He liked to talk about which waitresses he'd sleep with and how, his bowel movements, his ex-wife, his "hot daughter," and even his hot daughter's friends.

If Crazy Dave was making a dinner plate for someone he didn't like--a customer who gave sass, a waitress he loathed, a dishboy he wanted dead--then he would stick his hand down the back of his pants, into his underwear, and let it squirm around in there until the shrieking of the other cooks, waitresses, and dishboys grew too loud to be contained by the swinging metal doors.

If ants got into the pie--because sometimes waitresses were lazy and left pies uncovered in the cooler--Crazy Dave said, "Eh, just flick 'em off and cover it with whipped cream. No one will know."

Crazy Dave liked to fart and burp and make foul noises. He liked to yell. He liked to say fuck! and fuck you! and stupid fucking fucker!

The dishboys liked Dave. "Wow, Dave is so cool," they would say. "Dave's the best! Isn't he just so great?"

The waitresses liked Dave's alfredo sauce. He was in charge of the saute pans on Friday and Saturday nights. He made a chicken alfredo or a shrimp scampi like no one's business. "Dave's alfredo is top-notch," the waitresses would say. "Nothing else like it in the world!"

Crazy Dave was rumored to have been in jail, to be on probation, to have killed a man, to have busted up his ex-wife's car with a baseball bat. When the waitresses bent over to get bread or salad, Crazy Dave liked to yelp. Now that's a juicy ass! he'd say.

I knew enough to stay out of Dave's way. I didn't want to be on his Most Hated list, and I certainly didn't want to be on his Most Beloved List. The waitresses on the latter list were subject to his persistent offers of sex--oral, anal, and otherwise--and to a towel-whip when they happened by his station.

I never bothered Dave, and Dave never bothered me. Of course, that's not to say Dave didn't disturb me. Because he did. Often.

One time I was making a tray of salads for a big party that was coming in later that night. I had the salads lined up and was methodically thunking chick peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, cheese, and croutons onto the chilled plates. Dave was behind the line, bitching about this and that, saying how much of a whore his ex-wife was, and how everyone in this restaurant was a no good fucking fucker. Then an order for an alfredo came in. That put Dave to work. He was no longer idle and aimless, and he did his best work when he was talking, so he started spinning his story. The pans sizzled over the heat and the smell of garlic rose in the kitchen.

He told the other cooks that because his daughter was hot, she had hot friends. Hot young friends. They were fourteen, fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. He had a little trick he liked to pull on them, he said. He'd drink a couple beers, draw himself a bath, stack the cans next to the tub and pretend to pass out in the warm water. If they stayed long enough, the hot young girls eventually had to go to the bathroom. But what could they do? Crazy Dave only had one bathroom. One tiny bathroom. So they waited and prayed he'd get out or wake up, but when it became apparent that he wouldn't--he must have had an awful lot to drink, the hot young girls thought--they just tip-toed in and pulled down their jeans, their pink and purple and polka-dotted underwear. Crazy Dave watched all this through narrowly slitted eyes. He watched the parade of pink and purple and polka-dotted underwear and thought, Ah, now this is the life.

I was thinking about all this today--Crazy Dave, the restaurant, his stories--because my students read a story about a strange workplace and strange coworkers. They journaled about the strangest person they'd ever worked with. And I just let them talk. There were so many stories, so many interesting stories. There were knife-throwing dishwashers, there were transsexuals, there were pizza throwers who'd drink bottles of vodka during their shifts. There were people who groped, people who punched, people who stole drugs and condoms and frozen donuts.

And my God, I couldn't get over it--how there are some really bizarre people out there, how they are, at this very minute, turning small circles in our lives--preparing our meals, cashing our checks, sliding our purchases over scanners, fielding our phone calls. I couldn't stop thinking about motivation, about what makes them the way they are--from the disgusting to the perverse--and I couldn't help but wonder how many bad days, how many strikes of bad luck, we are all away from throwing knives or stealing frozen donuts. Somedays I feel like I could. I have a stack of papers to grade this weekend. Sometimes that's enough to do it.

The Man I Will Never Get Over

I have a lot of bad habits (ignoring dishes, not filing important papers, losing my mind when boys mimic me in those high-pitched screechy voices they always do when imitating women), but another is this: I have a bad habit of falling in love with some (a lot) of the male characters I write.

This isn't love in that creepy I've-lost-sense-of-reality kind of way where I carry on conversations with the characters in my head, where I think they're somehow going to materialize in my living room and say, "Come on, Jess, we're going out for a nice steak dinner." I have a grip. I have control. I also have my sanity. My love for these characters is hypothetical. It's a love that says, If these characters were real men in your life, you wouldn't stand a chance. Not a single chance.

This weekend I started writing a new story with a whole new boy that I first thought was going to be one way--disgusting, foul, and shady--but turned out much different than all that. Suddenly there was a scene that showed him as vulnerable, damaged, and even noble. The whole story changed. The whole story got better. And I was in love.

I think that's how I like my men: with bite and bent and attitude. I like my men to come from bad places so they appreciate what they have, so they will fight if anyone ever tries to take it away from them. And so that's who often shows up--whether I want them to or not--in stories I write.

But no one ever showed up more than Oliver Covet. I will never be able to stop thinking about Oliver Covet: tall, blond, perfect hair, worked-in jeans, a hammer in his hand.

Ollie came around when I was twelve years old. He just showed up because I had started writing a story about the girl I always wanted to be: the daughter of a racing tycoon. My childhood had been soaked in the boozy-smokey world of auto racing. My mother owned a NASCAR memorabilia store, my father took me to the local track on Saturday nights, and my best friend's father had a race team of his own. I once stood in their garage and helped to rub the lettering of the driver's name on the car's roof. I wished and wished and wished that the name could be my name on my own car that I would get into on Saturday, a car I would drive hard and bang up and win with.

I never would get it, and I knew it, so I wrote about it instead. I created my perfect world. I created a prissy mother who was depressed her daughter was a tomboy, a father who was pleased about it, and a raggedy crew of attractive boys who fixed the car. I created a better version of me. I created Jessie Roberts: smartassed, tough, sarcastic, beautiful, worshipped, uncontainable. Then I created the world's best man to head up the crew of attractive boys. I created Ollie: tall, with long blond hair and blue eyes, the only boy who knew how to reign in Jessie Roberts, the only boy who ever saw her cry.

I could go on about Ollie Covet for hours, days, weeks, months. It's a strange combination: I feel proud because he's mine, I created him, and I put him together with my own two hands; I also feel like I wish he would materialize out of the thin air and tell me we're going out for a nice steak dinner, then we're going shopping for wedding rings. I'd marry Ollie Covet in a New York minute. In a hot, hot second.

I thought about Ollie Covet a lot over the last few days. For one thing, I spent half my day on Sunday in front of the television, watching the Daytona 500. For another thing, Diana sent me an e-mail this morning about the newest onslaught of Harlequin books--they'll feature racing themes and "appearances" from real-life drivers. It made me angry to think of that. I wanted to yell at the authors of those books, to tell them they couldn't possibly be accurately portraying what it's like to love the institution of auto racing, to love its roots and legacy, to love the boys who slip themselves into those tenuous sheet metal shells week after week. The Harlequin stories, I was sure, would be goofy and gross. They would feature silly, giggly, wormy girls who would know nothing about racing yet they would end up bagging the hottest racer around. They would say, "I just don't get what you do! Will you explain it to me again?" Jessie Roberts would never be a silly, giggly, wormy girl. She wouldn't stand for anything like that. Her story would be so much more compelling, so much more real.

Both of those things worked me into an Ollie overload, but one more thing threw me right over the edge. This weekend Amy and I, in our quest to see as many Oscar-nominated films and performances as possible before the ceremony--watched Half Nelson. In it, Ryan Gosling is scruffy and lost and vulnerable. He is beautiful, one of the world's most beautiful boys. And that's when I realized it. He could be Ollie. He could be Ollie with no problem, with very little effort. I'd never been able to pin that down before. I'd never been able to say, "Oh, in a perfect world where they turned this story into a movie, so-and-so would play Ollie." I thought a younger Matthew McConaughey might've been able to pull it off, but that line of thinking was never quite right. Ollie would be a little grittier, a little tougher, a little less perfect.

So this weekend when I looked at the screen I saw, for the first time ever, Ollie Covet looking back at me. And I thought Oh God and Wouldn't it be nice and Jesus. I thought it was perfect, that Ryan Gosling's body and face could be Ollie's body and face, and if we could just scoop up all the words and details and images I'd ever written about Ollie Covet then somehow pour them into Ryan Gosling--well, that would be it for me. That would be my man, my love, the one thing I would never quite stop thinking about.

In This Story, The Role of Jess Will Be Played by a Drunk Hobo

Yesterday my father called me in the morning. He called from Florida. Specifically, a beach in Florida. I thought this was cruel and unnecessary, especially since I was sitting on the couch and staring out at the front yard, which was buried under another blanket of snow we'd gotten the night before, a blanket that had me rubbing the sleep from my eyes at 5:30 AM and saying No way am I driving to school in that. I'm going back to bed.

When my father called later he wanted to know about the weather and the snow. The news down there was making a big deal of the snow that we'd gotten the night before.

I told him it was enough to make travel sort of crappy but the amount didn't seem staggering. "I think we got a couple inches," I told him. "Maybe four. Something like that."

My father wanted to know if I was going to need to plow the driveway. He was concerned because I've only ever plowed the driveway once in my life, and that was while he stood outside and watched to make sure I didn't foul it up too bad. I told him I probably would but later, maybe in a day or two. It was no big deal I told him.

I must have been drunk. I must have been hallucinating. I must have been blinded by the fresh sunlight falling on all that new snow because what I'd identified as being maybe four inches turned out to be much more than that. Later that afternoon as I was squinting out the front window to see what kind of shoes (flats? boots?) I would need to go outside and get the mail, I realized the driveway looked funny. The snow wasn't as low as I had originally thought. I no longer needed to concern myself with what kind of shoes I'd need to get to the mailbox--now I needed to think about what kind of pants I'd need to get out there. When I went outside, the snow came up to my knee.

I misjudged that one. A lot.

Now it was clear that I was going to have to plow, and soon. It couldn't be avoided. So I did what every good country girl would do: I trooped out to the garage and slid into my father's Carhart coveralls. I wrapped my feet in a double layer of socks and stuck them into his boots. I wrapped a scarf around my neck, bundled my hands in two different pairs of gloves. I considered the blaze orange hunter's mask but decided against it. I would, after all, be sitting in the enclosed cab of a tractor.

I waded through the snow to our big garage, where my father's workshop is, where the cars and tractors are kept. I stood staring at the trusty old John Deere--the tractor my father has owned the entire time I've been alive--and tried to mentally prepare myself. Something was going to go wrong. That was a given. I saw the tractor exploding or it getting stuck in one of the snow drifts. I saw me running into the split-rail fence that was almost invisible under the new coating of snow. I saw me arcing a beautiful shoot of snow into one of the lights attached to the garage, the light shattering in a brilliant pop of glass shards.

But before I could get to any of those scenarios, I'd have to start the tractor. That was no small task. It's an old tractor, and it's been through many repairs over the years. My father has things rigged to work in ways they didn't work when they came off the line. The choke, for instance, used to work just fine--I could start the tractor with no problem, just by pulling out the choke, letting the engine gurgle to life, then pushing the choke back in. The choke lever, however, no longer works. Now you have to pop the hood open, find the choke cable, and pull it manually.

Even though I'd recently had a crash-course on which cord was the choke cord, when I opened the hood and peered down into the engine, every cord looked the same. They were all black. They all led to the engine. I sighed. I sighed and started pulling.

Miraculously, I identified the right cord and when I turned the key the engine flopped over. Exhaust coughed out the sides. I clapped my hands--proud of my accomplishment--and swung my leg over the tractor seat and tested out all the levers: this one was to raise the plow, this one was to lower the plow. There were levers to start the plow blades and levers to turn the plow chute so the spray of snow went where exactly where you wanted it.

That's where I ran into the first problem. The chute was frozen and wouldn't turn. If I eased out of the garage right then, the snow would spray behind me, back into the tractor's bay. I sighed. I sighed and swung my leg back over the tractor and walked around to the front. I kicked the chute. I kicked the chute again and again and again until it gave and moved when I told it to move.

I got back on the tractor and eased it out of the garage. I'd forgotten to lower the plow, so I had to back up and try again. Snow shot out of the chute. I clapped again and pushed the tractor forward even more. The snow was thick and high. The tractor groaned and the plow tried to chew the big drifts. The tires spun, trying to find traction. I started praying that I didn't get stuck in the middle of the driveway. If that happened, I'd have to call my uncle or my grandfather, and one of them would have to come over in their own Carharts to dig me out, all the while thinking what a silly, silly girl I was. I was determined to do it on my own.

I backed up and did another pass. Things went better this time, and I was even able to angle myself so I could take a large pass at the top of the driveway. Then I was able to take another and another and another. I plowed only the part of the driveway that was absolutely necessary. I didn't want to push it. I didn't want to get cocky. I just wanted to clear enough space for me to walk between one garage and the other, enough space for me to back my car out of its bay, enough space for me to sneak out of the driveway.

After I was done and had parked the tractor back in its bay, I went outside and surveyed my handiwork. The cleared sections weren't even. Some were cleared closer to the ground than others. There were even triangles of unplowed snow--places where I couldn't get the tractor to maneuver the way I wanted it to. It was messy. It was ugly. It was a real slipshod job. It looked like a drunk hobo had clambered up on the tractor and decided to pass some time by seeing how the contraption worked.

Still, I felt pretty damn good about myself. I hadn't gotten stuck. I hadn't broken anything. I hadn't had to place an awkward phone call to any of my relatives, asking them to dig me out. I went back inside and peeled myself out of the coveralls, the boots, the gloves, the scarves, the hats. I threw another couple logs on the woodstove, made myself a hot chocolate, and stretched out on the couch to watch reruns of Project Runway. I felt accomplished and badass. I didn't even care that if my grandfather or uncle happened to come by and survey the driveway they would think my father had gotten looped on a little too much Mogen David blackberry wine then decided to get up on the John Deere.

I didn't care at all. I had a way to get out, and in an hour I would drive to West Seneca for my Valentine's Day dinner with Becky, where we would eat wings, drink vodka, and then comb two different drug stores to find just the right half-price Valentine's Day candy for dessert.

The Worst/The Best

I haven't had much luck with Valentine's Day. I've had a few alright ones--decent, fine, not anything to write home about--and I've had a few Valentine's Days where I've wanted to throw things, yell, and punch people.

Ex-Keith is responsible for my worst-ever Valentine's Day. This was my junior year at Fredonia. He and I were back together, but tentatively. He was giving me the run-around, telling me he didn't want anything to do with a "relationship." The last girl had driven him crazy and soured him on commitment. He wanted things loose. He didn't want to be with anyone else, but he didn't want to feel obligated to take me out, show me a good time, make dates, or anything like that. I told Ex-Keith he was a moron.

On Valentine's Day he called to tell me he was going to be late. "Just a few hours," he said. "Well, actually, I don't know how late I'm going to be. I'll be there when I'm there."

We'd had plans for weeks. He was coming down to spend the night in Fredonia. There was going to be dinner and romance--as much romance as you could milk from a boy who insisted he was wary of long-term love. When he told me he wasn't sure if he was going to be able to make it until much later because he'd found some work he wanted to get done I just about lost it. I told him it was unfair that he was treating me the way he was--after all, it wasn't my fault he'd cheated on me and gone on to date a girl who bordered on clinically insane, a girl who turned him against love and commitment. While he'd been off doing that, I'd been sitting around and crying and being good and praying he'd come back to me. I was sick of him not making plans, of breaking plans, of treating me like I was some toy he could pick up or toss away whenever he felt like it.

We fought over the phone for an hour. He told me I'd blown it, that I'd ruined everything, that he wasn't going to come down anymore. Fine, I said. Fine, fine, fine. And then I got under my covers and cried myself into a big snotty mess.

He came down, though. He stood outside my door and said he was sorry. He admitted to being a jerk, an asshole, a cruel, cruel boy. He filled my apartment with flowers. He made awkward jokes. He bought me a chocolate cake. And even though I came out of my room and stood in front of him with my mascara-streaked eyes so I could tell him I forgave him and that he should never do anything like that again, I knew there was something ugly brewing on the horizon. We couldn't go on like this forever. If he was soured on love and commitment, I was now soured on Valentine's Day. I was dreading what was going to happen next.

Still, Ex-Keith is also responsible for the best Valentine's Day ever. It was our first year together. I was seventeen years old. His mother had gone away for the night, so I lied and told my parents we were going on a double date with his best friend and his girlfriend. There would be dinner and coffee afterward. In reality, Keith and I were going back to his place after our dinner. I had to lie because my father was still very nervous about me being in such close proximity to a boy. He wanted us to remain in public at all times. He somehow thought that would keep us from spontaneously combusting into a lusty pink tumble of limbs.

Nothing that would have distressed my father happened on our first Valentine's Day, though. Keith brought me back to his house, where there were roses arranged in the living room for me. He lit a fire. He lit candles. We stretched out on the couch and listened to the wind outside. He told me he'd never liked a girl the way he liked me--in fact, he'd never met a girl like me. He said for a long time he didn't believe that girls like me even existed. He told me he wanted to go on like this forever. And then we were quiet for a long time. The snow whipped against the window but inside everything was just the way it needed to be: warm and dark and nice. The night was quiet and relaxed. It was just what I'd wanted and all that I've wanted since. It hasn't been like that in the last eight years, though. I don't know if that's because it was the first time and nothing ever feels like the first time, or if it's something more than that. Maybe I haven't had that kind of quiet connection to someone since then. Maybe I'm waiting for something to feel that easy again. Because even though I loved good men after Keith, none of those relationships have been easy. Not even close.

So I'm still waiting. And in the meantime at least I have the Pink Torpedoes, who came over and drank a lot of champagne and ate a lot of chocolate tarts on Monday night. And at least I have this man, who, really, is probably the love of my life:

Husbands and Heads

I have a bad habit of introducing complete strangers as my future husbands. Jared Leto, Bradley Whitford, James Franco, Dale Earnhardt Junior, Hugh Grant--they're all my future husbands. My mother says I'm going to be a very busy girl. There are worse things.

Lately, though, I've been leaning solidly toward one future husband that I think is a bit more logical than my others. I think it's only right that I be allowed to meet, charm, fall in love with, and marry Ryan Miller, the Buffalo Sabres' goalie.



This isn't the first time I've talked about him. Previously, I mentioned that Ryan Miller and I should never be allowed to meet, charm each other, fall in love, and get married, and for one simple reason: we have the same head. The two of us have the longest faces in the history of faces.

Not too long ago I was in Barnes and Noble with Pedro. He and I were killing time and thumbing through the bargain books. I picked one up that had to do with makeup and finding your true inner beauty. Before I did that, though, the book suggested I needed to fully understand the implications of my face shape. It listed all the common face shapes. It had an example drawn next to the description and a picture of a celebrity who had that face shape. There were round faces, oval faces, heart-shaped faces, square, and long. And then there was mine: Horse.

"You've got to be kidding me!" I hissed and jabbed Pedro in the ribs with the book's spine. "They actually call it horse face! I mean, that's me, right? We can't make a case that I'm just a long face?"

Pedro looked down at the pictures then back up at my head. He looked a little sad and a little bashful. "No," he said. "You're definitely of the horse face variety. Sorry."

At least I'm not alone. If I'm considered a horse face, at least I know makeup artists would consider Ryan Miller a horse face, too. And it's true that at first I thought we should never join our genes to produce long-faced hockey-playing children--mainly because I was concerned that they would have to face the same scrutiny that Hilary Duff gets for her horse face. In my head I could see bullies squaring off with our children on the playground. They would neigh and stomp their feet. They would yell, Hi-ho, Silver! or Who's ready for the Kentucky Derby?! And that's when our children would beat the shit of those bullies--because, really, they are children of a hockey player, and they aren't going to take any shit. But still, the thought of them being taunted for the long faces that had been passed down after their parents so thoughtlessly combined their genes was too much for me to handle.



When I told Ex-Keith this and instructed him to keep me from falling in love with Ryan Miller because if you put our heads together, length to length, they would combine to create The Longest Face in the Milky Way, Keith agreed. "Yeah," he said. "If you two had kids, they would come out looking like that mask from Scream."

But I've since gotten over those concerns. I've since decided that it's important that the long faces of the world unite, stay strong, band together, and, if at all possible, make out.

Yesterday morning when I woke up, there was a human interest piece about Ryan Miller on the morning news. They showed film of him playing in a band, of him taking photographs, of him brooding and looking out over the ice. It looked like he was testing out lines of poetry in his head. And I wouldn't even care if they were lines about the beauty of the ice, the way it smelled, the way it felt, the way the crowd sounded like a pack of wild animals after the Sabres scored. I would take it. He seems sensitive and dark. He's tall and lanky. He can wear a pair of jeans like nobody's business.



He also has some pretty stunning hockey hair. If you say the phrase Ryan Miller's hair in the presence of Amy or Becky, you will immediately hear sighs escape their mouths in staccato bursts. Ohhhh, Amy will say, When he takes his face mask off and whips his wet hair back... Jesus.



So, our children might inherit our faces, but I think it's safe to say my God would they ever have some good hair. Also, they would be hockey players. Little hockey players. Good deed-doing, sensitive, brooding hockey players, just like their father. Maybe one would retire from his hockey career and become a writer like his mother. That would be enough for me. That would be enough to balance out the heads that certain people would consider horse-like.

I Found It in My Entryway

A few copies of this showed up on my doorstep just the other day:



It's my book! I'm on Amazon.com! See?

It would make such an excellent gift for Valentine's Day--well, if you had a teenager who was interested in reading a book on Russian teen culture because they don't have a date for Valentine's Day. I can relate. I'll probably be sitting home reading on Valentine's Day, too. And if I hadn't written it and already read it a thousand times, I'd totally read this book. My favorite thing is the section about the Moscow Metro. It's just so stunning.

Spring Break 2007

This is where I'll be for Spring Break 2007:



I plan to cause as much trouble as I can with these people:







I plan to once again be the girl who let herself be talked into doing things like putting on a spangly dress and hooker heels to pose for her thesis posters while reading a Maxim:



The girl who drives to the big city just to go see a stellar drag show:




It's going to be a Time. A real honest to goodness Time.

Banned: Driving

Today my drive home was a sixty minute drive that took me from the city of Buffalo, whose roads were completely dry and clear, to this town in the middle of ski country that looks exactly the way it looked when I left it at 7:00 AM: snowy hell.

Today on my drive home a snowmobile roared past a line of slow-moving cars. I was in that line of slow-moving cars, somewhere in the middle, behind a Blazer that boasted a MY SON IS IN THE US NAVY bumper sticker. The snowmobile, which I had seen in my rear view mirror, pulled into the other lane and zipped past, raising a plume of snow and flurry behind it. The roads were perfect for snowmobiling: a compressed coating of snow, no visible pavement, no nothing. We drove forty miles an hour the entire way home.

When I went to bed last night, a lake effect snow band had been dumping snow onto western New York--specifically the south towns of Buffalo--for three days straight. It was getting bad out, and I didn't know if I should cancel class or not. Several of the towns I'd need to travel through the next morning had issued travel bans. The major highway I needed to use to get to both colleges where I teach was closed. But I went to bed on the assumption it would be open by the time I woke up.

It was. So I got ready, packed my bags, warmed up the car, packed myself a snack, and went on my way.

I have no idea why they opened that road. It was ridiculous. The plows had been on it, sure, but there was barely a clean swatch of road. The snow had come down so hard then frozen in sheets over the last few days that there were giant divots in the snow pack that covered the road, which had to terrorize every suspension that rumbled over it. I felt like I had gotten stuck on some clackity amusement park roller coaster--a wooden one, half broken, half ready to fall off the tracks.

But I kept on. I kept on because I had a class to teach at 8:00 AM, and I wasn't going to leave my students without a teacher. This class is at a community college, and my students are an eclectic mix: mothers with daycare issues, guys with full-time jobs. I didn't want to inconvenience them by making them come in when they could've stayed home, paid the babysitter one hour less, gotten some extra sleep, accomplished some extra work for the job.

I was almost late. I dashed from the parking lot across a couple one-way city streets and up the stairs to the front door. I tore around the corner and up the stairs. Four flights of stairs. And when I pushed into the classroom--which has an old US postal safe, complete with a bristling and patriotic-looking eagle painted across it, mainly because the building used to be the city's postal headquarters--there were only two students sitting in the classroom. It was 8:00. They stared at me. I stared at them. I thought about my warm bed back at the house, about how I could've stayed in that very bed for several more hours because it was evident we weren't going to get any great amount of learning done with only a couple students present. I was a little angry--after all, Buffalo was clear, clear, clear. Not a flake of snow in the air. Not an unplowed street to be seen. The only thing the city was dealing with was a -20 wind that was whipping off the lake.

Later, after I drove to my other college where I would teach three more classes, one of my students--a repeat, a boy I wrote a letter of recommendation for, a boy who refers to me as Miss Jess! Miss Jess! Miss Jess!--looked at me with big sad eyes.

"You couldn't cancel class today?" he asked.

"Please," I said.

"But weren't there travel bans?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "technically."

"And doesn't that mean no unnecessary travel?"

That's when I smiled at him and the rest of the class, told them to open their notebooks so we could start the day. "Oh, trust me," I said. "You're necessary."

Unreasonable

When we were younger, Amy and I used the word unreasonable an awful lot. Everything was unreasonable. He was unreasonable, she was unreasonable, it was unreasonable. There was no logic to anything. Things happened without cause, without discernible reason, against sound judgment.

This is the first thing I think about today when I'm on the phone with my mother. I'm thinking about this, this word--unreasonable--because I am crying. Crying and trying not to be heard. It's hard to tell exactly why I'm crying because, really, there's nothing to cry about. What my mother is talking about isn't scandalous or appalling. All she wants me to do is come to a bar for the Superbowl, eat some buffet, watch the commercials, meet a boy she thinks I'd like, a boy who will just happen to be at this bar with the killer Superbowl buffet.

It's the last part that throws me for a loop.

"It's like a date!" she says brightly, as if this will somehow win me over.

It has the exact opposite effect. My stomach clenches. I get angry. I tell her I have plans already, plans that involve me wearing sweatpants all day, plans that involve me eating molten brownies and stuffed crescent rolls and my favorite pizza from my favorite pizzeria. I stress the importance of the stuffed crescent rolls. I tell her dad and I have made these plans, and they are unshakable.

She laughs. "Your father?" she asks. "Your father is watching the Superbowl? What planet is this?"

This doesn't make me any less angry, but I can recognize the anger is completely unreasonable. I have no idea why I'm feeling the way I do.

"Come on," she says. "You really should meet this guy. He's so sweet. And it's really hard to organize a time where we can get you two together. Who knows how long it will be until we can get this to happen again?"

And there it is: pressure and guilt all stacked against me. Suddenly it doesn't matter about my plans. I should be ditching them for what my mother thinks is the opportunity of a lifetime. It's like a date! she'd chirped. I can see it in my head: a crowded bar, all my mother and her boyfriend's friends--people I don't know--the noise, the jostling for drinks. I can see me and this boy standing close together because it will be impossible to hear over the blaring football calls and people shrieking Go! Go! Go!

If I don't like him, I'm stuck in a bar for the rest of the football game. Stuck, stuck, stuck. It makes me feel claustrophobic just thinking about it--another unreasonable feeling. But then I tap into the most unreasonable feeling of them all: sadness. I start crying--soft enough so she can't hear. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't want my mother to be setting me up on things that resemble dates. I don't want to go into anything blind. Two weeks ago I made the decision that I was never going to do it again--this after a date my uncle passed off on me, someone he thought would be just so perfect for me. The boy, while nice, was not even close to what I want or need right now, and I had to do an awkward dance to get myself out of the next date he wanted to go on. After I lied my way out of a second dinner, I couldn't get out of bed I felt so awful, so evil, so shallow and mean. It didn't help that all my male friends, after hearing my reasons that he and I should never be together, asked, "Was he attractive?" which I had to answer, and they didn't like my answer. "You're shallow," they told me. "You should've given him a second chance. You just didn't like him because he didn't look like a frat boy. That was a shitty thing to do."

But what did they want me to do? I told them there was no way I would ever take my clothes off in front of this boy, so where would that leave me? What type of relationship would that be? Should I just lie to myself, pretend, go ahead with it, close my eyes, pray it'll be done soon?

I felt bad enough myself--after all, he was so nice! So sweet! Trying so hard! Why couldn't I have just liked him? Why couldn't I just reach inside and manually flick some switch to override my ambivalence? And when my boy friends rolled their eyes and called me shallow it made me want to drink my way into a ditch. They confirmed it: I was a shitty person.

Now my mother is telling me to just come on, to come to the bar, to give this guy a chance. She's sure I'll love him. Isn't this what I want? Don't I want to meet a nice boy? Well, here he is. Waiting for me. Break your plans, she says. Come see what happens.

But I want to tell her how messed up I am, how I don't understand why I am so upset, why I am crying, why I am angry, why I want to go back to bed. I want to yell at her. I want to go to bed and wake up in 2003.

Back then, there were boys who liked me, and I was not afraid of anything. I went head-on into something dangerous and stupid, and I said yes! yes! yes! I'll be okay, this is going to be fine, let's try it, let's go.

Back then things weren't hard. I just opened my eyes and there were boys all around. They were cute. They thought I was cute. They thought I was interesting--a little crazy, but fun, too. They wanted to spend time with me. And so that's exactly what happened.

But now I feel damaged, dried up, a little off my game. Relying on uncles and mothers for boys seems wrong and, ultimately, like a really bad idea.

Still, it's unreasonable to feel this way, and while the silence over the phone sits ugly and dark I say the word over and over in my head. Unreasonable. I am unreasonable, unreasonable, unreasonable.

What happens next is predictable: my silence irritates my mother. My unwillingness to break the plans I've made with my father also irritates her. "He'll understand," she insists. "This is important."

But now she is angry with me, and I am angry with her and myself. And I stay that way for the next hour and through the phone call to Amy and the conversation with my father. I stay that way until the guilt eats me alive like some sort of parasite--like a tapeworm twisting its way through my insides--and I pick up the phone again, call her back, tell her I'll think about, tell her I'll call her back with my final answer in a couple hours.