Bar Fight: Revisited

One of the cooks I liked has been fired. It's his own fault, I suppose. He was a bit of a drinker. He was quite a bit of a drinker. I sat with him in a bar one night and watched him drink down at least ten drinks in the span of forty-five minutes. He drank so much he couldn't get up in the morning, couldn't function, couldn't get to work on time.

The last time we were out he bought us shots and told us about what a tough guy he used to be, how he used to get in so much trouble when he drank. He told us about this one time he got into a fight and put a guy through a window.

"The first real bar fight I saw was actually in this town," I told him, "and a guy went through a window in that fight, too. It happened up the road. One of the guys crashed through the carpet store's front window."

The cook looked at me. I looked at him.

"Oh my God," I said. "Was that you?"

"I was the guy who put the other guy through the window," the cook said. He squinted at me, trying to see if he could imagine me being there, if he could somehow remember where I was standing. "You were really there? You really saw that?"

I told him yes, I was absolutely there. I was with Josh and one of his friends, and we were just coming back from a night of visiting as many of the small-town bars as we could. We stopped at that last bar--where the fight happened--on a whim, because Josh had a cousin who lived above the bar and he wanted to stand on the street and yell up to her. We were doing that when the action started.

I told the cook that not only was I there and not only did I watch him fight the loud mouth who was asking for it, I also went home and wrote about it.

"You wrote about it?" he asked.

I did. I went home and wrote a long blog about it. I wrote:

I am secretly thrilled. I've never seen anyone go through a window. It's
interesting to watch. Especially when Riverside, who is trying to salvage his
dignity, rises up from the ground and brushes off glass. Riverside's head, which
is bald, is now stained with small red rivers of blood that are trickling
everywhere. Into his eyes and mouth. Onto his shirt and pants.

"I'm okay," he says.

The cook couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. It seemed impossible that he and I had been sharing that air, with its crisp smell of blood and adrenaline, on the same corner in the same town over a year ago, when I wasn't even living in the state. Who knew that much later on I'd be standing in a cramped kitchen with him, listening to him explain that, earlier, he'd peed blood or that he was trying to find a date for a wedding he had to go to and did I know anybody who would want to go if he promised to not drink too much and get rowdy?

I didn't know anybody, and I don't know if I'll ever see the cook again. But I do know I'll miss him and the way that he was the only cook who warmed the dinner rolls for the customers, the way he assembled a seriously delicious almond cheesecake, the way he didn't mind so much pouring shot after shot after shot at the bar.

There have been things this summer that feel strange and a little like fate--like the universe is having a good laugh at how things fall into place and how we all relate to each other, how we are all running in circles that are smaller than we think, circles that are bound to intersect and overlap and get all tangled up together. This was one of them. One of many.

Decreased Whining Ahead

Yesterday the phone rang and, quite unexpectedly, the person on the other line was a woman--a writing program director--who wanted to give me a job. We were discussing the job, the teaching, the possibilities, when the director suddenly asked if I was married.

"You sound married," she said.

I wondered what part of my voice sounded married. What was it that somehow identified me as a girl who'd snagged herself a man? Was there a certain satisfaction in my voice, some kind of confident timbre, something settled and pointed?

"I'm not married," I said. "Not even close."

"Well," she said, "you sure sound like it."

I could have told her that maybe what she was hearing in my voice was along those lines, just not as drastic. I could have told her that for the first time in years I have a boyfriend, and that it was just recently settled that that's what we are--boyfriend and girlfriend--and I am still sort of surprised by it. It feels unnatural. It feels foreign. But maybe that's what she heard in my voice--some sort of half-surprised Hey, a boy likes me.

All of a sudden there's a quiet kindness in my life. It makes me feel foolish for wasting all those years and all that energy running after the Wily Republican, begging him to love me, love me, love me. It's a bit disconcerting to feel how simple a relationship with a boy can really be. I'd forgotten it's not supposed to be a fight every single day, that you're not supposed to wake up bristling and ready to take whatever small cruel thing--intended or not--that a boy sends your way.

It's also disconcerting to suddenly not be the single girl, that one friend who's always hopelessly bumbling through single life, who's always complaining that she doesn't have a man, that she can't find a man, that she'll never find a man, that she'll probably die sad and alone, save for the pack of cats she's named after famous literary figures.

I've been that girl for so long that not being her is going to take a little getting used to. I'll have to find new things to whine about. I'll have to find new ways to fill my time, now that I won't be busy being bitter or angry or frustrated at boys from my past.

I won't be the only one adjusting, of course. My friends--mainly Katy--will have to find new reasons to mock me. Now they won't be able to do 10 minute routines on the woeful state of my love life, on my choices in men, on how I am attracted to the suckiest guys of all time. Instead, they'll have to adjust their comedy routines to include the stupid things I did in grad school, any of the awful poetry I've tried to write over my lifetime, and how freakish I looked during middle school.

It's going to take some getting used to, especially for me, especially because I am very used to being single, to being the one who has adapted to stumbling alone through long stretches of life. But this newness--everything about it--is nice, and I'll take it. I'll definitely take it.

Lechery

At the restaurant, it's not just that one male cook who's foul-mouthed and sex-obsessed. It's also one of the waitresses (who routinely flashes the cooks and finds more reasons to use the word bone than you'd think were possible in a diner). It's also one of the ice cream boys (who likes to discuss porn and all the sex he will get--you know, eventually, after he finds a girl to take his virginity).

But it's also more than just the employees who engage in habitual sexual harassment. It's the customers, too. Well, some of them. Not so much the church-going ladies or the over-taxed mothers who look like they're two seconds from snapping the heads of their children clean off. Mostly, it's the old men. And, last night, for me, it was two old men, two regulars who tromp into the diner at least once a day for coffee, toast, a bowl of soup, or a grilled cheese sandwich.

These men love me. They are my at-work boyfriends. They call me by name, tell me jokes, press filmy dollars into my hands, call me over to their table just to talk. I fill their coffee, smile, laugh when it's appropriate. They say, "Will you be here later when we come back?" They say, "I'm so glad you're here." They say, "You're a such a pretty girl."

Last night they took their chatter to another level, though. The compliments took a turn after I delivered their coffee and cream.

"Have you gentlemen figured out what you want tonight?" I asked. I meant food. They, however, were not thinking about food.

"How about you?" one of them asked.

"Well now," I said, "that's definitely not on the menu."

"It should be," the other one echoed.

I knew I had to get ahold of the situation ASAP, or else this was going to turn into something vaguely gross.

"Let me rephrase," I said. I tapped my pen on my waitress pad. "What would you gentlemen like to eat tonight?"

As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized my mistake. Here I was dealing with two old men--who clearly still have the mind frame they had in high school--and I gave them that to work with.

"Well," the older-looking one said. He gestured toward my apron--slung low over my hips--and waggled his eyebrows. "You know," he said. He winked.

"FOOD," I said. "FOOD. Dinner? A sandwich? Some soup?"

They placed their orders then--and indeed it was a soup and sandwich kind of night--and I ran back to the kitchen to tell everyone what had happened.

"Well," one of the cooks said, "it looks like you're going to be getting a good tip tonight. And you won't even have to flash your customers like the other girls do."

The Two Words That Come to Mind are "Gulp" and "Vomit."

Last night the worst thing happened. It was bound to happen, I guess, so I shouldn't be so horrified, so surprised, so nauseous. But I am. Oh, am I ever.

Last night my father walked in on me as I was kissing a boy. I've never seen my father move so fast, especially at 3:30 AM, a time when sane 54 year-olds should be in bed, sleeping and dreaming dreams where their daughters are young and not yet kissing boys, or dreams where their daughters are living far away in other states, where the kissing and whatnot goes on in houses other than their own.

The fact that my father walked in on and then ran away from me kissing a boy makes me want to cut out my tongue and scoop out my eyes. I am mortified. If this were a perfect world, he and I would both stay out of each other's way for several days, weeks, months until I felt okay to face him again. But no. Tomorrow I have to attend a graduation party with him.

The boy I was kissing last night was a Boy From Work, and the kissing was just that: plain kissing, straight up kissing, kissing without other things going on. We were, however, under a blanket, which I am certain made the situation look a lot more scandalous than it actually was. All clothes were on and accounted for, except for my sweatshirt, which was pooled at the foot of the couch. I had another shirt on underneath, but I'm sure my father's worked what he saw over and over in his head until he's imagined something very R-rated.

My father isn't one who handles things like this very well. I am, after all, his little girl, and his little girl would never do such a thing with a boy. As he sees it, his little girl bakes cookies and teaches English and likes cats and is a virgin. And because he doesn't handle things like this very well, my father and I have had had our share of uncomfortable incidents. Once, my senior year of high school, after he found out that I'd been sneaking around with a boy he didn't very much care for, a boy I was definitely wasn't supposed to be sneaking around with, my father drove home from work early and sat at the kitchen table until I got home from school. When I walked in the door, my stomach almost fell out of my body. The look he was giving me was pure disaster. He made me sit down with him, made my brother leave the room, then made me answer a string of awful questions.

He said, Did you let this boy touch you, Jessica? and I had to say, Yes, Dad. He said, Did you let him touch you with his hands? and I had to say, Yes, Dad. He said, Did you let him touch you with his mouth? and I had to say, Yes, Dad. I wanted to disintegrate, to spontaneously combust, to melt like the witch in The Wizard of Oz so I would no longer have to be sitting there answering those horrible questions.

I was barely seventeen years old, and what I'd let the boy do with his hands and mouth (no big deal, really--nothing scandalous, nothing advanced) were things that most girls in my grade had been letting boys do since they'd started high school. I was getting a late start, but at that moment, when I had to confess things that were really none of my father's business, I thought there was a good chance I was going to be so scarred by my father's interrogation that I would never let a boy touch me anywhere ever again.

Well, I was scarred by that day, but not scarred enough to stay away from boys forever. A few months later I had met and somehow charmed Keith into liking me. A few months into our relationship, Keith and I were sitting in my bedroom, on my bed, watching TV. My door was half-open, because I knew if I tried to close my door my father would have a royal conniption.

Whatever we were watching went to commercial, so I leaned over to lightly kiss my boyfriend. It wasn't a kiss that involved even the slightest bit of tongue--there were parents around, after all--but I was unlucky in that my father happened to be coming down the hall and--in fine Dad-Fashion--my father overreacted. He told me to meet him in the kitchen right now. He said he had to talk to me about something very important.

When I got out there, my father told me that there was no way his daughter was going to be lazing around on a bed and tongue-ing her boyfriend under his roof. I tried to tell my father that there certainly wasn't any tongue-ing going on, but this only made him angrier. He went on to say that there would be no more half-shut, three quarter-shut, or any kind of shut doors in his house while Keith was there. In fact, there wasn't really a reason for Keith to be in my bedroom anyway, so we might as well go watch TV in the living room, where there were no beds, only couches that were in plain view. My father, who was worked into a real frenzy now, went on to say that he also wasn't a fan of the fact that Keith had come over a few minutes prior to my parents' arrival home that night. He said there was a new rule, and that rule was that Keith could never ever ever ever be in the house if there wasn't at least one parent present. If Keith came over and my parents were running late after work, we had to stay out in the driveway and wait until they got home. He thought all these rules would somehow keep us from being consumed in a fiery swarm of sin.

Of course, my father's discomfort with my relationships with boyfriends didn't completely erase after I grew up, moved out, went to college and grad school. In fact, after my thesis reading last May, the Wily Republican and I were in a corner of the bar, half-hugging and half-dancing, when my father came over and put his hands on my shoulders and took me away from the WR for no good reason. I didn't think anything of it at the time, until I got back over to the table where my friends were gathered for the celebration, and one of them said, What was that all about? And I thought to myself, Yeah. Wait a minute. What WAS that all about?

This winter, when Josh came home from Quebec, he and I went out to our former place of employment on a Saturday night, when it was teeming with the trashiest of the local trash and the skeeviest of the local skeeve, and Josh had an awful lot to drink. There was no way he was driving home, so I drove him back to my house and put him up on my couch with a glass of water and a couple Tylenols. I put on some late night TV and we watched it for a bit before falling asleep. The next morning I woke up at 7:30 AM, and there was my father standing in the archway to the living room, surveying the damage. I was on one couch and Josh was on a separate couch on the opposite side of the room. We couldn't touch each other if we wanted to. But a few days later, while lunching with my cousin, she told me that her mother had come home from a family function and told her that my father had been talking about the horrors of waking up one morning and having a boy in his living room, a boy who had spent the night right there, right next to his daughter, mere feet--oh, those dangerously few feet!--away from her. I was twenty-five years old and on a separate couch from a boy, and yet this was quite the event for my father.

So I think it's easy to understand why this last incident is one that has my skin crawling, that has me wanting to bury my head in the sand, that has me wanting to spend several nights far away from here. There's just something about fathers and daughters--especially this daughter and her father--that takes embarrassment to another level. And if it weren't for this weekend's graduation party, you can bet I'd be long gone, that I'd be somewhere else, some other place that would keep me from running into my father and pretending nothing ever happened, pretending that he didn't demonstrate impressive agility and speed as he ran away from the living room and back to his bedroom, where he probably lay awake for long, long minutes, thinking he liked it so much better when I played in the sandbox and wore pink corduroy pants and called him Daddy.

Two Weeks

Today marks two weeks since I started waitressing again. In those two weeks, I've remembered one very important thing about working this kind of job: it's way easier to make friends with the boys than it is the girls.

The boys at work are very sweet to me. They leave flowers on my car, they buy me dinner, they bring bottles of my favorite pop to work, they ask for and then read my thesis and book about Russia. They want to discuss my stories and characters. They say, "I don't think the character in this story is as bad as he thinks he is." They ask, "What are you writing now?" And when I tell them I'm writing a story about a brother and sister, a story where the brother has always been so good and perfect and then something happens to change him, to make him an awful man, that's when the boys at work want to know if they can help, if they can illustrate the story for me:


Caption: You stupid bitch!

I tell them we're going to make a very good team.

Don't Get The Ice

Tonight at work I watched one of the dishboys climb up on a stepladder to peer into the ice container at the top of the pop machine. I watched him and thought, Huh. That's weird. Why is he doing that? It's our job. He must really be bored.

That's when the dishboy looked at me. He smiled his best smile from underneath his low-slung hat. "Hey, Jess?" he said. "Would you run and get me some ice, please?"

He said it so sweetly that I couldn't say no. Sure I could go get him some ice. But I still wasn't convinced that what he was doing was virtuous, and I told him so. "I swear to God," I said, "if someone is hiding in that ice cooler, I am going to come back here and beat the crap out of you."

Last week when I started, one of the waitresses took me aside and warned me that if ever one of the cooks, dishboys, or ice cream boys asked me to go get them ice when it looked like they were perfectly capable of doing it themselves, then I should go with caution. The ice cooler, which is in one of the back rooms, is pretty big. When lowish on ice, you can fit a human body in there no problem. A few minutes of waiting in ice-cold is worth it to these boys just the second they see the look on the person's face, just as soon as they hear the person scream. "They do it all the time," the waitress told me. "Just watch out."

So I walked back to the ice cooler. I checked the other back rooms to make sure everyone was accounted for. I couldn't find one boy--the ice cream boy--so I headed over to the ice chest with tremendous care. I steeled myself for whatever was going to happen just as soon as I grabbed the handle and opened.

I put my hand on the handle. I thought, Don't be afraid if a teenage boy pops out and screams Boo! I thought, Also, try not to pee your pants if a teenage boy pops out and screams Boo! After all, I come from a long line of women who have trouble controlling their bladder in certain dramatic moments, and while I've never had a problem, I'm figuring it's only a matter of time until someone scares the hell out of me so bad that I have to start wearing Depends.

I eased the handle back and slowly opened the door. That's when a teenage boy pushed off a stack of bagged ice and said Boo!

"Bastards!" I hissed. I ran back to the kitchen. "Oh that's it," I said. "That's it! You're all dead!"

The dishboy shook his head. "No, no, no," he said. "Sssh. Don't say anything. Let's get some more people. Okay? Okay?"

I crossed my arms and glared at him, but I kept my mouth shut. In fact, I kept my mouth shut the entire time as the dishboy took his station again--climbing to the top of that step ladder--and called out to someone else. "Hey," he said. "Do you think you could run and get me some ice, please?"

And then he and I were both quiet, waiting for the eventual yelling and slamming to occur--this time the person being scared had the presence of mind to get back at the ice cream boy by locking him into the freezer for several minutes--and during that silence I tucked silverware into precise napkin triangles and thought, This isn't the worst way to spend an afternoon.

The Things We Believe

The other day the Wily Republican and I got to talking about harems. Really, we were discussing the perks of being royalty, and he seemed to think that having a harem was an excellent fringe benefit.

I told the WR that when I was little I'd wanted to belong to a harem. Back then, I had these opulent, full-color cartoon books that retold all the best old tales, and one of the books was about Scheherazade. In that book there was page after page after page of willowy, tanned women draped in pink and purple and green veils, in tiny garlands of gold coins. I could imagine the way they sounded when they walked into a room, swishing, clinking. I wanted to be that kind of girl. I wanted to command attention when I breezed through archways. I wanted to lounge around on satin pillows and eat fruit and be amused by trained monkeys. It sounded like an okay life, but I didn't quite realize the implications of the harem. I didn't quite realize these ladies had a function other than being pretty and being audiences for monkeys.

The WR found this to be amusing. I'm sure the thought of me at seven years old, running around and draping hankies into my jeans so that I too could swish when I walked into a room, was pretty amusing. So he laughed.

"Yeah," I said. "It is funny what we'll talk ourselves into believing as children." Which reminded me of something else, something worse, something more moronic that I'd believed when I was young. But instead of being founded from something I'd read, this other belief sprung from something I'd watched.

I was eight years old when John Travolta and Kirstie Alley starred in Look Who's Talking. I was little. I was impressionable. I was stupid.

In the beginning of the movie, Kirstie Alley is locked in a passionate embrace with her boyfriend. They are about to have some sex on top of his big mahogany desk, but at eight years old, I didn't understand that was where this was going. I just saw the kissing, and that was something I did understand. When two people loved each other, they showed that love by kissing. Fine. But what happened next I did not understand. Not at all. The editing of the film shows the two kissing and then cuts directly to a shot of sperm racing toward an egg.

Oh my God, my eight year old brain thought. That's how a woman gets pregnant! By French kissing a boy!

Needless to say, that made me very nervous. People were always kissing on television, in movies, even out in the real world. I wasn't sure they knew what they were getting themselves into. After all, that sperm was pouring from the boys' mouths into the girls' mouths, and that meant that, in a matter of weeks, those girls could be sporting beach-ball size lumps under their tank tops. It seemed too dangerous to risk. So I made myself a promise right then and there. I would never, ever, ever, ever French kiss a boy unless I was certain I wanted to have babies with him.

I'm not exactly sure when I came around to thinking that this particular train of thought was inaccurate, but I do remember it took a long time. My mother tried to talk me out of it once, after I'd told her I had no interest in kissing a boy because I didn't want to make any babies. She tried to tell me that kissing didn't automatically mean baby, but I informed her that she didn't have to protect me. I told her I'd seen Look Who's Talking, and I knew what was up. My mother, I'm sure, had to walk out of the room then to go have a good laugh at my expense.

I would assume it took years of listening to snippets of conversation from the high school girls on the bus, listening to the boys in the lunchroom, and listening to things my friends had learned from older siblings for me to finally shake the belief that if I locked lips with a boy I might become a young mother, the kind that was always making tearful appearances on Oprah and Sally Jesse Raphael. And thank God for my coming out of that phase. Thank God. If I'd somehow continued on in my sheltered way, I would've missed so much goodness, and it took me long enough to get to that sweet point in my life as it was.

On the Bus

We've been through this before. When I was younger, I was not what you'd call a beauty. In fact, I was not much of anything, save for the recipient of one too many Fantastic Sam's perms.

At twelve, I was logging long hours pining away for boys who played football on the town team, boys who dated cheerleaders, boys who French kissed before the age of sixteen, which is when I finally got down to business. At twelve, I was following Tammy around and watching as she--just by walking by--could cause a group of boys our age to snap their heads around as if they'd just witnessed some sort of minor miracle. And I suppose she was some sort of minor miracle. She was, after all, a twelve year old who didn't look angly, gawky, sweaty, nervous, or confused. Which were all the things I looked like as I trailed behind her, popping open Pepsi after Pepsi because I had a crush on the guy who sold them at the racetrack beverage stand and the only way I could get him to talk to me was to fork over a dollar at a time and then guzzle the pop on the way back to our seats.

In short, at twelve, I was a mess.

However, there was one place I wasn't a mess, a freak, or an ugly girl, and that place was the school bus. I was a different girl on that bus, mainly because it wasn't populated by people who could make fun of me. The high schoolers had a policy of ignoring everyone who wasn't above grade nine, and the elementary kids were too busy discussing what was in their lunchboxes to care about what went on in the middle of the bus, which was the middle schoolers' territory until the very last high schooler got off the bus. That's when we claimed the back as our own and practiced for the days that we'd get those seats by virtue of being the oldest, the wisest, the cleverest of the bus riders.

And while I was flying under the radar of the high schoolers and the elementary schoolers, I was being noticed for the first time by boys. These boys weren't the boys I wished would notice me--none of them were golden-haired Ryan McLean, after all--but they were boys nonetheless. And I wasn't stupid. I knew exactly how much power I had on a daily basis, and that amount hovered close to zilch for many years. But those bus boys got a little doughy in the face when I came around, so I learned to be thankful for the pinch of power I had during the forty minute ride to school and the forty minute ride home from school.

But after awhile--after love notes and declarations of feelings--I let it go to my head. I became a mean girl, an awful girl. I became a tease.

The boy I could tease the most was Justin.



His love for me was established early on, and this love lasted for years. He wrote me notes on the bus, in study hall, in social studies, in English, and at home. Later, when we were older and taking a language, he sat next to me in French and slipped me a note every single day. I would read it, write back, tap it up over his shoulder so it would fall gracefully on his desk without our teacher--an overweight man who was a man fond of smacking his pointer on the desk to scare students when they weren't paying attention--noticed what was going on. We had whole conversations this way.

You look good today, Justin would write. Are you ever going to let me kiss you?

Sure, I'd write back. In the back seat of the bus when Mr. Custard isn't looking.

I never let him kiss me in the back seat. But I did do something in the back seat, and what I did was cruel, cruel, cruel.

One day, teasing, Justin said I should wear my bathing suit to school so he could see what I looked like in it. I'd been bragging to him, telling him I'd gotten a brand new red plaid bikini and that I was going to show it off to all the Canadian boys over summer when I went up to Long Point. Justin said that wasn't fair. He said he wanted to see it. I told him the only way he'd see it was if he happened to show up at the local pool on a day when I was there. I told him that seemed very unlikely.

But I was lying. I was lying because I had a plan forming in my brain. I fully intended on having Justin see me in my new red plaid bikini because no other boy had any interest in seeing it, because no other boy was dreaming of seeing me in it, and because I needed to see what it felt like to be the center of attention, to do something scandalous, to do something that would send a boy's head spinning off its axis.



So I did. One day I substituted my bra for my bathing suit and carefully hid the halter straps under a thick t-shirt so my mother wouldn't see and wonder what on Earth I was up to. Our school didn't yet have a pool, so there was no reason for me to be donning the bikini under my school clothes. But I made it out the door without arousing suspicion, and I made it through the entire day without having a teacher or a friend grill me as to why there was a plaid bow tied under my hairline.

Once on the bus, I told Justin what was happening. I told him what I had in store for him. I said, "Just wait until you see this."

I could tell just by looking at his face that he was dealing with sensory overload. I think he was shocked, pleased, and terrified all at once. I think I was all three of those, too. This was a me that didn't show up at school. This was a confident me, a me that thought I was fun and interesting and impulsive. At school I was awkward and goofy and predictable. But for those eighty minutes each day, I had a chance to prove that wasn't all that there was to me.

I sure proved it the day I wore my red plaid bikini.

After most of the other kids had gotten off the bus, and after the middle schoolers had scuttled to claim the best seats in the back, I crammed myself into a corner and smiled at Justin, who was sitting in the seat across from me.

He wanted me to do it, do it, do it already. "Come on," he pleaded.

I did it. But right before I did, there was a moment--a terrible, sickening moment--that made me sit back and think, Is this really the best thing to be doing? I knew what I was doing to him, and I also knew what I was doing to myself. I was taunting him, and I was trying to grasp some measure of power by exploiting what little I had to offer in the attractiveness department. Justin loved me for things other than beauty. He liked that I was witty and willing to play with the boys. He liked that I had scathing things to say about other people on the bus and people we went to school with. He liked that I could spend the ride home writing stories that starred us as beloved crime-fighting heroes. I was different. Really different. And maybe that was just a little bit refreshing. But with this move, with this little red plaid bikini stunt, I would be trading in some of that. I would be saying, Now worship me for this. And what if that didn't work? What if it did?

Even though I knew there were a lot of better things for me to be doing with Justin right then and there--watching him load a straw with spitballs, for example--I peeled my shirt off and folded it in my lap. Then, triumphant, I leaned back against the window and rode the rest of the way home like that. Justin was happy with the result, and he talked about it for weeks. As for me, I was just starting to learn what a girl could do to mold a boy, to take him up in the palm of her hand, to turn him this way and that, to make him--even for forty minutes, for a bus ride, for a few short years--hers and hers alone.

Further Proof That He's Literary

When I got the news yesterday that my latest story was going to be published I couldn't help but thinking, Huh. That's interesting.

I thought it was interesting because it's one of those stories that was fueled by the Wily Republican--things he did, things he said, things he was. I wrote the story the week after I moved away from Minnesota and back to New York. It wasn't the greatest week I ever had, and it's important to remember that I spent most of that week pantsless and wandering around my childhood home thinking Oh my God oh my God oh my God. My mood was foul. My hygiene was questionable. My head was a mess. And when I sat down in front of the computer all I could think about was what I'd left behind, and the Wily Republican was one of those things.

While he was in college, the Wily worked at the nearby psychiatric treatment center, where the state threw the most despicable people it could dig up. He told me so many stories. There was a man who committed a string of rapes by first hitting women joggers with his car, knocking them down, taking away their only means of escape--their fast legs--and then he would get out, drag them off the beaten path and finish what he'd come to do. Another man was locked away because he'd kept his wife locked in a closet for days without food and water. Shortly after his arrival at the treatment center, he was beaten within an inch of his life by someone who had fashioned a heavy whip out of an old sock stuffed with batteries.

The Wily often looked tired when he told me these stories, and I wasn't sure how he--or anyone--did it, how they kept going back to a place like that without snapping, without taking these people up in their own hands and taking them apart little by little. Snapping bones, tearing out hair, snipping off fingertips.

So I wrote that. I wrote all of that. And I made the main character fall in love, a hard love that, when held up next to his life and work, made the people he watched over seem even more repulsive than they already were.

I like the story quite a bit, so I was happy to see it get picked up--especially because it got picked up by the first place I sent it to, and that's something that hasn't happened to me before. But what was more interesting to me was this: that's the second Wily Republican piece to go. Sometimes I think he and I lived our strange intersecting lives for three years just so he could feed me inspiration, just so we could run around town and do strange things that would eventually turn up in my writing. Sometimes I think the WR is a lucky charm. Sometimes I think that's worth all the times he made me cry, all the ways he made me crazy.

In the story that just got taken, there's a line the main character thinks the first time he sees his to-be-wife. He's looking and looking and looking at her. He can't stop. He doesn't know what it is exactly, but there's just something about her that takes away his ability to talk, breathe, move. He keeps on staring and thinks, Now that's someone worth knowing. That's one of my favorite lines of the story, mostly because I like to think that's what the Wily thought when he was first getting to know me. That he was watching me be quirky-strange-bumbling me and thinking, This is someone I'd like to know for a long time. I like to think this because I know that during those first few months we knew each other I kept looking at him and listening to him tell his stories, and I couldn't help thinking with almost complete certainty that this was going to be trouble, trouble, trouble, but I was going to go along with it anyway because it felt like it was going to be really good, really worth it, one of those things that would change the way I looked at the world.

Do You Like Me? Check Yes or No.

His name was Matt. He was tall, gangly, tan, all hard angles--knees, elbows, chin. He had silky brown hair, and he wore it in the way that a lot of the boys were wearing their hair in the early 90's: parted in the middle, flopping down over the ears.

This was eighth grade, and Matt and I shared a homeroom in the warm English room that overlooked the soccer fields. The room was plastered with Mark Twain posters and quotes. The man in charge of that room became my Ultimate Crush, the man I wanted to love me, the type of man I wanted to be with when I grew up, my English teacher for both eighth and twelfth grade, the best English teacher in the entire world.

But my English teacher wasn't my only crush that year. There was Ryan McLean, of course, and this new one: Matt. But I liked Matt in a way that was different than the way I liked Ryan. For most of our lives, Ryan had been beautiful and popular and stunning. He was unreachable and untouchable. He was the boy the popular girls would sigh about, sing about, gossip about. He kissed all the popular girls. He never kissed me.

But Matt seemed more attainable, more realistic. For one thing, he had glasses. None of the really popular guys had glasses. They weren't marred by imperfections. Instead, they were smooth canvases of perfectness. They were golden and sparkling. They were frat boys in training. Matt, though, had flaws that took him out of that category. He was loud and goofy. He was just the right amount of awkward. And--best of all--he liked me.

I thought it might be in that way. I thought it might be more than just a friend. He was sure giving me the indication that it might be so. He pinched me, he grabbed me, he pushed me, he caught me under his arm, he kept putting his hands on me. He called me Jessie, sweetly, like I was his best pet. He and I had inside jokes, tender moments, good times. He liked to pose for my camera. He'd flex his muscles, show off his teeth, stand his hair on end, twist his body into unfathomable poses. I pressed the shutter a thousand times for his poses. I was bringing my camera to school a lot back then. It was like I knew this life wasn't going to last, that these friendships weren't long for the world, that everything was about to change.

But for awhile I was very bold. And I let myself think Hey, maybe, maybe. I let myself think about that for a good long time, and then, when I was certain I'd examined his actions from every angle, when I was certain that his actions were saying I like you, Jessie! I want you to be my girlfriend but I'm just too good and shy to ask you myself!--when I was certain of all that, that's when I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I wrote Matt a note. The note explained that I was glad he and I had become friends, that he was making eighth grade extra memorable for me, that I thought he and I could be good together. Maybe, I said, just maybe we should be boyfriend and girlfriend.

And like the squirrely eighth grade girl I was, I handed that note to one of my best friends and made her deliver it to him before lunch. In lunch, I knew, I'd have to have my answer. It would be impossible to ignore me. His table of boys sat next to my table of girls, and he would have to face me at some point, whether it was to barter for a piece of my friend's Fruit by the Foot or to shoot milk at us with a straw.

I almost vomited in the lunch line. I knew in a few short minutes I would come out into the lunch room and see him. I was almost certain my life would be over at that very moment. After all, I'd never admitted my feelings to a boy before. I'd never felt capable. I'd never felt like I had a legitimate chance of having those feelings returned to me.

Luckily for me, I didn't have to wait very long to have my answer. I came out of the lunch line clutching my tray and barreling down the aisle toward my table. I ignored Matt's table because I was afraid of seeing the looks he and his friends were sharing. Surely I would be able to tell what my answer was by those looks, and I didn't want to know anymore. No, no. I decided I should tell him I was kidding, I didn't mean it, it was an early April Fool's joke. Ha! Gotcha!

But he was merciful. Merciful Matt. He took me aside during lunch and told me he didn't mean to have made it seem one way when it was actually the other. He didn't think of me that way, he said. In fact, he liked one of my best friends. He was sorry, so sorry. He said, "You're one of my best friends, Jessie. We shouldn't ruin that, right?"

Right, I said. Sure, absolutely, great, glad you think so, I think so too, I need to go eat the rest of my sandwich now and maybe puke in the trash can but that's besides the point oh my God I am never doing this again.

I sat back down and shoved the remains of my sandwich in my mouth and chewed and chewed and chewed until that bread was a masticated piece of cud in my big fat mouth. Why? Why? Why? I couldn't stop asking myself why I'd done it, why I'd even been possessed, why I'd been crazy enough to think there could be a happy ending at the end of that road. I sat in that lunch room and listened to the buzz of everyone around me and to my friends whispering it's okay, it's okay, you can cry later and I said to myself I am never ever ever doing that again.

But I did. To varying degrees of success, of course. But those are stories for another time.

The Hookup

This is what my mother says to me this afternoon: "Don't you want to meet our friends' attractive son? We could go out to a fish fry tomorrow night. Or maybe I could slip him your e-mail address the next time I see him. Or maybe we should print off a picture of you. Yes, maybe that's what we should do. You decide on a picture, print it out, write your name and e-mail and phone number on the back, and I'll bring it to him. That's a good idea."

I ask her if I should write my height and weight, my likes and dislikes on the back, too. "You know," I say. "Long walks on the beach, sponge candy..."

"Listen," she interrupts, "I'm just worried he's going to meet some other girl before he meets you. He's such a nice boy, Jess."

My mother sounds so sincere and a little heartbroken--as if she's imagining the friends' attractive son meeting some girl, falling for her, bringing her to the next bowling party--and that's why I say okay, okay, I'll do it. I'll find a picture. I'll write my name and e-mail and phone number on the back. I'll sit around try not to think how sort of lame that makes me seem, how desperate. My mother, after all, thinks it is a good idea. My mother also thinks that her boyfriend's gay black belt son is not gay, so her judgment can sometimes get iffy, but I want to make my mother happy. She's mostly stopped giving me the normal pep-talk, the one that involves her saying things like you're actually lucky you're single and everything will work out in its own time. Now sometimes when she looks at me I think it looks like my mother is wondering if she gave that pep-talk a little too fervently, if she's worried I'm actually starting to believe I'm lucky and that things will come my way if I just wait around all patient-like.

This attempted hookup smacks of disaster. Any attempted hookup that involves me smacks of disaster.

Katy once tried to get me interested in one of her husband's friends. He worked in some sort of meat-packing plant. He had a child. He drove a purple Grand-Am, which--if I remember correctly--had pink flames on its side. He had nine and a half fingers--a result of a tragic accident at the meat-packing plant.

Katy also tried to get me interested in another of her husband's friends. This one lived in a trailer, didn't own silverware, didn't do dishes except for once a month (if you were lucky), slept with every dirty girl and stripper in town, and got fired from a job--even the Happy Chef--every few months.

My uncle has tried. My mother has tried. My cousins have tried. My friends have tried. It has only worked once. Once.

That once was Ex-Keith. He'd seen me once at a party thrown by mutual friends. He liked what he saw, and he asked his best friend about me. His best friend asked his girlfriend, who was my best friend's sister. Then, at a baby shower thrown for my best friend's other sister--who had, consequently, been knocked up by a man who moved away with his gay lover several months later--my best friend's non-pregnant sister, the one who was dating Keith's best friend, grabbed me by the arm and towed me into their parents' bedroom. The bedroom was small and cramped. I felt a little nervous. The sister was looking at me with big eyes, telling me she had something to tell me, to ask me.

"What?" I asked. "Just what?"

Then she told me about Keith, how he thought I was cute, how he wanted to take me out. "I know it's all very overwhelming," she said, "so I thought maybe we'd all go on a date together. A double date. Very low pressure."

A week later I was sitting across from Keith at an Olive Garden in his hometown. I was eating chicken parmesan and praying I didn't get a little crazy with the knife, send a hunk of the chicken catapulting into my lap. Later that night Keith and I stood awkwardly at the foot of the sister's car while she and her boyfriend said goodbye with loud, loud kisses. I told Keith I had fun. I was shivering. I was thinking low pressure my ass. That's when Keith put his arm around me, tipped my chin up for a kiss. And that's when I realized it was all worth it, that things were going to be okay.

So maybe someone will have that kind of success with me again. Maybe someone will find me a boy who will give me his coat because it's just so cold out, it's starting to snow, and the sister and her boyfriend won't stop making out. Maybe someone will find me a boy who will take me to the bottom of a ski hill at the end of the night--just when everyone is doing their last runs before slipping out of their skis, just when everyone is doing their fanciest, most elaborate, best moves of the night. And maybe this boy will sit there with me and tell me all his best stories until it's late, until they're shutting the lights off and the whole world goes dark right there in front of us. Maybe I can have that sort of luck again. Maybe it can start this way. Maybe it can start with a picture and my name and e-mail and phone number on the back.

Maybe.

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.

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.

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.

Notes on Hickeys

This afternoon when I was doing my hair I burned myself with the curling iron. There is now a bright red square singed into the skin of my neck. I tried to cover it with carefully placed curls, but then realized that if someone looked quickly they'd think I was taking pains to hide a hickey.
When I was younger I was obsessed with hickeys--or, more precisely, the idea of hickeys, since I was in no position to be getting any of my own. At twelve, I was still caged with braces and hidden under a crackly lump of permed hair. This meant none of the boys were paying attention to me, and I was just a spectator of the popular kids' lives. I watched all their strange drama play out in homeroom and lunch and gym and on the bus ride home. I listened to the gossip and took as many notes as I could, confident that someday soon I would need to know the valuable information they were getting from first-hand experience.

Like information on hickeys. In eighth grade, girls my age started talking about, obsessing over, and getting hickeys. These purple-yellow marks materialized mostly during middle school dances--dances that took place in the sock-smelling gymnasium or, like one Valentine's Day dance, the elementary school cafeteria, which was decorated with rope lights twisted into hearts that looked like they were slowly melting down the wall and ready to ooze onto the floor.

If someone had plans on giving a hickey, if someone had gotten a hickey, or if a hickey was currently in progress, everyone knew about it. The news was passed through a sophisticated chain of gossiping twelve and thirteen year olds.

Did you hear? Carl is giving Megan a hickey. They're over there by the bleachers.

Did you see that mark on Michelle's neck? How is she going to hide that from her mother?

Well, that was the question on everyone's mind. How did you hide these things? I remember one dance in particular where my best friend Tammy's neck bloomed purple and green and yellow after her boyfriend had danced her around during "Stairway to Heaven." He'd been insistent. He'd been thorough. He'd been territorial. He'd left his mark from her collarbone all the way up the right side of her neck.

When he went off to the bathroom she dashed over to me. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and revealed the bruise. It looked almost like a flower. Like a tattoo of a something from a spring garden.

"Just what do I do with this?" she hissed.

Like I knew. The only man I would let anywhere near my neck to do such a thing was Ryan McLean, and the our social interaction was limited to conversation in Home Economics. He liked to call me a whore in Spanish. He liked to ask me to help him sew his sweatshirt. That's it. He would never have kissed me on the lips, neck, or anywhere else.

I shrugged. "Wear a turtleneck?" I asked. It seemed like a safe thing. It was winter, after all. Turtlenecks seemed reasonable. But how many days could a girl get away with wearing a turtleneck before she stirred her parents' suspicion?

But Tammy was panicked. She was spending the night at my house and she hadn't packed a turtleneck. How was she going to sneak in past her mother the next day? How was she going to get rid of it before we had to go back to school on Monday?

Later that night when my mother picked us up from the dance, I slid into the backseat of the station wagon first so I could monitor the way Tammy's hair moved, so I could rearrange her long curls in a way that left the bruised skin buried under layers of perm.

Before we'd left the dance, girls who'd had hickeys before had come up to Tammy and dispensed advice. A comb. Green eyeshadow. Sleeping on flannel. Aloe. I tucked all these things into the back of my head, in case I'd ever need them.

It would be years. Years.

The hickeys I've gotten have been mistakes. Accidental hickeys, not purposeful, not the kind middle schoolers are intent on giving when they're hiding from the chaperones in the dark corners at a dance.

I'm a bruiser. I can brush against something and get a welt. It doesn't take much. And it must not have taken much the summer before I moved to Minnesota. This was the first mark that ever got me in trouble, and I didn't even know it was there. I was waiting tables during a Saturday lunch shift. My first customers of the day were two roadies--rough and dirty truckers--who were rolling through town towing equipment for a circus. Their manners were few, and their approach was less than subtle. They whistled when I walked away. They called me cutie and sweetie and sugar-pie. They said, "Want to come with us? Want to ride to the next town with us?"

I smiled and poured them some more water. They'd wanted Bloody Marys, but it was before noon and we couldn't serve alcohol before noon. "As much as I'd love that, I just can't," I said.

"Why not?" one asked.

"I'm just not the type of girl who unties her apron and follows strange men out to their trucks so she can ride to the next small town with them," I said. "You have to be a certain kind of girl to do that."

"Yeah?" the other asked. "And what type is that?"

"A little wild," I said. "I'm just not."

"Well," one of the truckers said, sipping his water, "that hickey on your neck begs to differ."

I thought he was joking. I thought he was teasing. I laughed. "Right," I said. "That hickey."

"Oh no," the trucker said. "I think someone needs to go to the bathroom and have a look."

I shrugged it off, grinned, and turned to leave. I told them to enjoy their meals and to let me know if they needed anything. But on my walk back to the kitchen I thought back to the night before, to the sweltering heat and the upstairs bedroom and the boy whose bed was just a mattress on the floor. I thought back to the candles and the piles of clothes on his bedroom floor. I thought about the music playing in the background. I thought about the snake he owned and kept in a giant Tupperware container on his dresser. I thought about the wooden floor creaking when I left at three AM.

It was possible there was something there. It was possible I didn't see it when I came back home for a few hours of sleep before work. It was possible I didn't see it as I squinted my way through getting ready in the morning. And when I got into the restaurant's kitchen and reached for the small compact one of the older waitresses kept under a stack of miniature doilies, I saw that it was more than just possible. It was true. It wasn't much of a hickey, but it was something. A little ring of yellow bruise, a few small pinpricks of broken blood vessels. I wondered if my father had seen it that morning. The thought made me want to die.

After the truckers paid their bill and left a ten dollar tip, I went to the bathroom and shook my hair out of its ponytail. I let it fall down to my shoulders so it could cover the small mark. I prayed the rest of my customers wouldn't catch a glimpse of it, frown into their French onion soups, think their waitresses was loose and wild. No one except roadies towing carnival equipment rewarded a waitress with a hickey.

But that was one of the last times a hickey was a problem for me, until recently. I thought I was past the age where hickeys would be a problem. I thought I was immune to them.

I thought wrong.

It was November. I was in Minnesota. I was visiting all my favorite people, and I was staying at Katy and Matt's, in their spare bedroom. I had an air mattress and a big mess of blankets, and one night that air mattress and that big mess of blankets went unused because I spent the night at New Boy's house. The next morning I woke up and rolled over and said good morning to New Boy. He sort of just stared at me.

"What's wrong?" I asked, because he looked vaguely terrified.

"You're going to hate me," he said.

When I went into the bathroom and leaned in close to the mirror I saw what he was talking about. A hickey. A surprisingly large hickey that stretched across the right side of my neck.

"Oh my God," I said to the mirror. This was it. This was real. This was something I had to worry about. I pictured my father picking me up from the airport, seeing the mark and frowning, giving me a lecture about morals and standards and about being a good girl. I pictured my students catching the slightest glimpse and gossiping about it. Our English teacher is quite the ho, the girls would say. Their eyebrows would raise. Yeah, the boys would agree, and they'd elbow each other in the ribs. She sure is.

For the rest of the afternoon--including lunch at Chipotle--I zipped myself into my coat and flipped the neck up, even though it was too warm for such measures. When we got back to Katy and Matt's, they handed me a laptop and told me to start googling hickey remedies.

What I found was a goldmine of information spread across the web. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen year old girls (and some boys, too) had built giant discussion boards on the subject. There were millions upon millions of posts. People wrote mini-essays on the proper application of treatments. They wrote humorous paragraphs about fooling their parents. They wrote about remedies that hadn't worked, that had made their hickeys worse.

I decided the best course of action would be intense. I needed to layer treatments. I needed to try everything I could. After all, in less than forty-eight hours I would be back in New York, and I would be conferencing with students and teaching them about all things English.

First, I combed the hickey. Then I rolled a frozen spoon over the mark. Over and over and over. Then I combed again. Then I did what one girl who signed her post as sugarnspice16 suggested: I lathered the hickey with deodorant. She didn't supply a medical reasoning behind the remedy, but I didn't care. I was willing to do anything.

The next morning I woke up and the hickey was almost completely gone. It was a miracle. It was amazing. I wished I could go back in time to that one Valentine's Day dance where my best friend got her giant hickey and tell her it was okay, that we'd take care of it, that I knew exactly what to do. But I couldn't do that, of course. I gathered that knowledge over ten years too late to help her, but at least I could help myself. And at least I was spared embarrassment (except for that which I suffered at the hands of Katy and Matt and Rachel and Dan and Megan and Diana, who all saw me in the hours after it happened). I still think it was one of the funniest things that ever happened to me--I never would've thought to account for that as I was packing my suitcase for the trip to Minnesota--and even though I had to worry about it eons later than everyone else, I'm glad it happened. Maybe someday I'll have a daughter who comes home from a dance with her head hanging at an odd angle, with her hair arranged just so. Maybe I'll put my arm around her shoulders and take her into the bathroom. I will draw back her hair and see the raw flush of blood and bite that's been etched into her neck, and I will know what to do. It's okay, I'll say as I stroke her forehead and reach for the comb, for the deodorant. Let's take care of this before your father sees.

The First of the Firsts

Usually monumental changes don't come announced. Often they aren't realized until they've passed and a person has had enough time and distance to look back and say, "That day. Oh, yes. That was the day I learned the value of such-and-such."

But when I was seventeen years old I had a moment that didn't want to be one of those quiet, subversive moments. It wanted to make itself known. It was the first time I ever looked at a boy and he looked at me and in that second I knew that if he leaned in and kissed me, if he took me up in his arms and said Come with me, I would have gone, and I would have slept with him.

It was a startling feeling. I'd thought about sex before, of course. When I was sixteen I had my first big love, and there was a day when I thought it might happen. There was a window of opportunity. The boy had a few hours where he could slip away before he had to be to work, and he called to ask if I was interested.

"Do you want me to come over?" he asked. I was sitting on my parents' bed. I had the phone cord wrapped around my ankle. When he asked me that question, I pulled that cord tight. It was so tight I thought it might break and his question would go spinning off into obscurity, like it'd never come through the wire. He might think we got cut off before I heard the question. I almost wanted him to think that. I wanted to get cut off and I wanted him to go to work, to not call back. That was easier than answering the question. The answer, of course, was complicated and murky. The answer was yes, I wanted him to come over. The answer was also no, no, no I did not want him to come over.

I'd thought and talked about a lot of hypothetical sex, but in that second I had to open my mouth and offer a real-life answer to a real-life question. I tried to think about what would happen if I said yes. He would come over. I would make him park his car in the garage so my grandparents wouldn't drive by, worry, stop in, or--worse--make a call to my parents. And then what? Where would we go? My room? My parents' room? How would it start? I imagined fumblings, some breathy kisses. But what was I supposed to do with my socks? Nothing I'd ever seen on TV or in the movies explained what to do with socks. I couldn't think of a graceful way to get rid of them, but I couldn't imagine standing there completely naked with a boy for the first time, save for a pair of white ankle socks.

And what's a girl supposed to do with those questions? I told this boy no, I didn't want him to come over. I told him to go to work. I told him the timing wasn't right and there would be too much stress. It never occurred to me that he wouldn't be around in a few months, that I wouldn't get a second chance. But he wasn't around, and I didn't get my second chance. And I found it hard to get out of bed and go on with my life after he was gone from it.

But I had to get out of bed. I had to go to work at my very first job. I was waitressing at one of the several cozy country cafes my hometown boasted. This place had a driving range, a putt-putt, and it hosted a yearly tractor pull in its backyard. The interior was decorated entirely with strawberries. Strawberry wallpaper. Strawberry paintings. Strawberry-shaped napkin holders. Strawberry flour canisters. Strawberry knickknacks. On Sunday mornings the kitchen staff loaded one whole side of a warmer with corned beef hash. The pies were homemade. I had to buss my own tables and make sundaes and milkshakes, and it seemed that the only time all these things needed doing at once was when it was impossibly busy. There were only ever two waitresses on a dinner shift, so sometimes things got so hard I wanted to take a few minutes to go have a cry in the bathroom.

But I loved working there, and I loved waitressing. I especially loved my Sunday shifts, when I started at one and worked until close. Sundays were usually long, leisurely days with less tip potential but a lot of regular customers. Sundays were also the days I worked with my favorite waitress--a thirtysomething with long blond hair. She was the type who'd been around the block more than once, who smoked, who said wise things when we sat sharing a slice of caramel-apple pie. She thought I was cute. I thought she was funny.

I also loved the Sunday-shift cooks, girls my age who attended the school district that was next to mine. They had short boy haircuts and they swore a lot. They knew the boy I had loved--the boy I'd turned down--and they said mean things about him, which pleased me to no end. I wanted to hate him, and they were helping me do it. At night, after we flipped the sign to CLOSED, we would switch off the country radio station and slide in a CD we could dance and sing to. I ran the vacuum, flipped the salad bar, wiped down the tables, and restocked the bathrooms while the girls scoured the grill and washed the floors. We all sang and sang and sang.

The Sunday-shift cooks were good for more than just singing, for more than making me a veal cutlet whenever I wanted one. They were also good because they were friends with two very beautiful boys. These boys were older boys, and they were very tall. They ducked whenever they entered the restaurant or whenever they shuffled between the smoking and non-smoking sections.

It was a snowy Sunday the first time I ever saw them. They rode up to the restaurant on their snowmobiles, which they parked in the parking lot like they were Buicks instead of Ski-Doos. The cooks, who had squealed and crowded around the window to watch the arrival after they heard the first rev of the motors coming our way, patted at their hair and wiped the crumbs from their jeans. And then the side door swung open and in walked the boys, looking like they'd just stepped out of a glossy outdoor living magazine, like they'd taken a break from shooting a spread about winter recreation. One was blond, one was dark-haired. The dark-haired one was taller and skinnier, and I loved him from the first second he turned his eyes on me. His name was Mike, and he stood there looking at me with his pink-cheeks and his toothy grin. The cooks introduced us, but then I quickly went on my way. I didn't want to step on any toes, after all. It was extremely clear that the girls liked Mike and his friend, and who was I to sit down at the counter with them and try to flash a smile or bat my eyelashes to get a little attention?

But then their Sunday visits started to become a habit, and if ever there was a Sunday when they didn't come by on their snowmobiles to drink hot chocolate and order hamburgers--medium-well, no onion, American cheese--I would sulk as I flipped over the CLOSED sign. I started spending my Sundays turning an ear toward the doors, hoping to hear the far-off rumble of two sleds flying over the snowy driving range.

Mike and his friend showed up one Sunday night shortly after we'd gotten slammed. There wasn't an empty table in the entire restaurant, and people were sitting at the counter waiting to be seated. The peppy thirtysomething and I were doing the best we could, but we were falling behind. We were dying. I was fantasizing about running into the bathroom, slamming the door behind me, and sitting on top of the toilet to have my cry.

I didn't even have time to appreciate the boys' entrance, which was always spectacular: the tamping-off of snow, the harsh metallic hiss of unzipping, the tousling of the matted-down hair. Instead, I dashed from table to table, delivering meatloaf and ruebens and hot turkey sandwiches. The boys waited their turn at the counter, and when they finally got seated I ended up as their waitress. They sat at a two-top next to the swinging door that separated smoking from non-smoking. Mike wanted a burger. He also wanted a chocolate milkshake. I looked around the restaurant--at the other two tables that had just gotten seated, at the two that I hadn't yet been to--and I wanted to kill him. A chocolate milkshake? Now? Was he kidding me?

The ice cream was too hard. I had to put it in the microwave to even be able to work a scoop through it. I spilled milk. I spilled chocolate syrup. I worried I'd filled the metal canister too full and that it would explode everywhere. The peppy thirtysomething had already accidentally sent the coffee maker into a double-brew, which caused an entire pot's worth of decaf to cascade over the counter and onto the floor. There was a small non-caffeinated pond we tracked through for hours, until we were finally able to stop running and clean it.

But the milkshake maker whirred on normally, and I yanked the finished shake off the beater and ran it back to their table in record time. But I was disappointed and sad. I wasn't able to linger at their table like usual. I wasn't able to breeze by and wag the ties of my apron at them. I wasn't able to put my hand on Mike's shoulder and say, "How does it taste, Mike? Is it delicious?"

But even after I brought the boys their check, dumped it on their table, and ran off after the old lady who was complaining that there was no more ranch dressing on the salad bar, those boys stayed. They cleared their own dishes. They wadded up their napkins and placemats. They went behind the counter and filled a bucket with soapy water. They found two rags and a buss bin, and they started going around the restaurant, clearing dirty tables, washing them down, and setting them with silverware.

It was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. I thought it was perfect. I thought it was love. I thought it was romantic.

I still do.

An hour and a half later the restaurant had calmed down. I had two tables left, and they were taking their time over cheesecake and coffee. The rest of the place was clean and orderly, thanks to the boys. They were now sitting at the counter with their own cups of coffee. I went and sat next to Mike. I put my head on his shoulder.

"It's okay," he said. "Everything worked out."

They stayed. They stayed and stayed and stayed. All the tables finally left, and we flipped the sign to CLOSED. I dragged out the vacuum cleaner and started working on my closing duties. The boys talked to the cooks and ate a couple baskets of french fries.

A few minutes later, one of the cooks asked me if I'd fill the giant yellow janitorial bucket with sanitizer and water for her so they could start scrubbing the grease off the floor. I said I would, so I swung my way through the non-smoking door and headed to the tiny space that was concealed behind the salad bar, in a tiny room that jutted off parallel to the bathrooms. When you were in that tiny room you were completely blocked off from the entire restaurant. You could hide there. You could cry there. You could take your first deep breath of the night there.

And I did. I wheeled the bucket over to the spout, poured the bleach powder into it, ran the hot water. As it filled, I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. The next thing I knew Mike was putting his arms around me and picking me straight up off my feet. I hovered a few inches from the ground, suspended in his arms.

I thought, Oh my God. He's going to kiss me. He's going to kiss me.

I had never wanted something more, not even the last boy I loved.

The water was running. Steam was rising up from the stomach of the yellow bucket. The whole world smelled like deep fryer and bleach.

"Hi," Mike said.

"Hi," I said.

He put me down. He let me go. He took a step away from me, but only for a second, only long enough for him to snake his arm around the corner and grab a chunk of ice from the bottom of the salad bar. Then he came back to me. He backed me against the wall, which was tinny and hollow-sounding. He placed the ice on the tender spot where my jawbone joined my neck. It immediately started melting, and a thin river of water ran down my neck and under the collar of my shirt.

"Does that feel good?" he asked.

I couldn't breathe or talk, so I nodded.

"Do you like it?" he asked.

This time I managed speech. "Yes," I said.

The steam was all around us. The water was going to overflow, but I didn't care. I closed my eyes. I waited. He moved the ice downward, following the path that had first been cut by the melted water. When I opened my eyes and looked at him there was an entirely new feeling inside me. It was something definable and tangible. I swore I could reach into my stomach and pluck this feeling out as if it were solid. It was hot and heavy. It was part understanding and part wanting. I didn't care about socks or what I would do with them at that second. I didn't care about how clumsy things would be. I didn't care about anything except the way his body was pressing against mine and how it could go on like this forever and I would be happy.

If he asked me, I would go. If he kissed me, I would let him lift me up and take me out of that place.

But none of that happened. Instead, one of the cooks called for him, told him to hurry up and come help her, and he sighed a sigh that I could feel in my own chest. He let go of the ice and it slid along under my shirt, into my bra. I left it there to melt as I watched him smile apologetically and back out of the tiny room. I wanted to stand for a minute and think about what had just happened. I wanted to memorize that feeling in case I would never feel it again. I wanted to remember that moment just the way it was, because nothing would ever be the same ever again, and I knew it.

But I couldn't just stand. I had to save the bucket from overflowing. I had to push it out to the kitchen, where Mike would take it from me and start working on the coffee and chocolate stains that dotted the floor.

I have never felt anything as simple and authentic as that first moment where I understood what my body wanted, and I have never loved anyone the way I loved that boy that night. It was a pure love, one that never had the occasion to be messed up by real life. It was just a few seconds of recognition and wanting. It was the first time I ever said yes inside my head.

Nothing ever came of it. The boys still came by on most Sundays, but this was after I learned that one of the cooks was in love with Mike--and it was a hard, hard love, a love that I could identify with--and I knew that I could never again let him back me into a corner and put his hands on me as if they belonged there, no matter how much they did.

I met Keith not too long after that busy Sunday night, and I stopped working at the restaurant so I could go off to college. I haven't seen Mike in eight years, but every once in awhile I can reach back into my memory and bring up that night, and I can lean back and close my eyes and breathe in and feel the press of his body against mine. I live in there, right there in that tiny room, for just a second and then I can open my eyes and face the world again, knowing that there's so much more to come. So much more.