I am an alumnus of a self-contained-and-sustaining college on the perimeter of a town (you won’t recognize the name, so I’ll spare you) so small the mayor doubled as the lone medical doctor and had ample time to wear both hats. There was one grocer, one gas station, two functioning restaurants (one of which was an annex to the gas station and specialized in apathetically prepared 6” and 12” long sandwiches), and zero movie theaters, video rental kiosks, or over-the-air television signals. Parents (mine included) liked to deposit their young-and-impressionable freshmen-to-be in this monasterial enclave with its exhaustive rules and regulations as a way to mitigate coed temptation. The college, which liberally embellished all of its pamphlets and promotional material with the term ‘Judeo-Christian values’ and glossy spreads of students supine against pin oak trees, cracked books in laps, capitalized on parental paranoia. [Psychological foresight on the part of parents would have predicted the futility of this move. The cautiously overseen matriculations’ macroeffect was the conglomeration of three hundred repressed-and-antsy young men and women into close quarters with nothing better to do (besides homework) than devise means of infiltrating forbidden places, fornicating, and otherwise carousing. It turns out debauchery finds a way.] I met her down the road from this place.
Our first encounter was at the grocery store [the ‘Midtowne IGA’ I think (although it would have passed for up-or-downtown(e?) as well, given the town’s size)]. I know when we first met because she told on me on a few separate occasions once we were considered an item. The topic of first meetings is in the ice-breaking top five and I, as her eventual long-term beau, could not afford to stutter or mumble through an unprepared spiel in a town like that without igniting rumors this College Boy thing was no good. Without her assistance, I would likely have thought our third or fourth meeting was actually our first since they were more substantial.
I was buying something healthy and boring like plain yogurt or a pound of walnuts, which in the land of red meat and things fried was the nutritional apex of stocked items. She told me later she had made mental note of my purchase (“What college kid buys that?”) and how attractive I was in my tight T-shirt and long hair. (I had no muscles, mind you, beyond what is physiologically necessary to carry, lift, pull, and push my own weight.) She was behind me in line at the checkout. I gave her one of those over the shoulder glances that surveys a person’s upper torso in maybe half a second. (I’m being honest here. Please forgive my ogling. I was callow.) I don’t remember the specifics of the sight other than she was “in shape,” had short hair for a woman, and, judging from the pale band of skin wrapping slightly below her deltoids, tanned in the old-fashioned way. I found her, then, triply intimidating. I wouldn’t have said anything to her. I probably smirked in her direction as I brought the look to a close. Smirks were the deepest mode of communication I felt comfortable offering unknown and/or attractive women at the time. [Although I was a habitual looker, I knew women didn’t appreciate the looking, generally—and nearby men, who could very well be with those looked at women, really don’t appreciate the looking either, generally—so I tried to keep everything respectful beyond the impulsive looking itself. I kept my face vacant and innocent. I refrained from lip-licking, winking, or anything else I thought could be construed as a come-on, lewd, or otherwise aggressive. I tried to give this all a casual air, as though what I was (mildly) interested in was some other proximal object on a display.] I doubt I even gave her the opportunity to smile back. Whatever she bought, it wasn’t much either. Her arms were at her sides. In that town, you spread your trips to the grocery store out because it was something to do. Groceries were an event. I paid and gently exited, trying not to overly disturb the cowbell tethered to the crossbar of the entrance/exit door (which, when disturbed, made both a dreadfully clatter and me nervous).
By that account, our relationship had the unassuming origin story most real relationships have. There were no butterflies or alluring one-liners, just her wondering about my health-conscious food choice and me giving her a once-over and leaving it at that. I don’t even remember it well. Like so much of what shapes us, it attains the quality of importance only in hindsight.
Since I am committed to a great deal of candor here, I will not pretend to know the dates of our second or third meeting either. I do know the locations of those meetings, however. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she managed a faded produce shanty (a word which I hope conjures images of dried and crackling planks of wood, wind-tattered tablecloths, and prices on torn pieces of cardboard scribbled with a thick black marker) conveniently located at the crux of the town’s main drag and highway exit. (My course load was more manageable the second semester of my sophomore year. I could afford the luxury of adventure on Tuesdays and Thursdays.) It was at this shanty I learned her name was Allison. She was a local (a.k.a., townie), which would explain why I had never noticed her on campus or in one of the forbidden places mentioned above.
Before I get too far, our story was not some sort of City Boy meets Country Girl tale. She did not wrap her arms around me and teach me how to milk a cow and I did not teach her about motorized carriages and the wonders of adding machines. I lack the heart and the stomach to be on such intimate terms with a lactating bovine. And, although she was sheltered twice over—being both from a rural area and being lackadaisically home-schooled—she was an autodidact. Her family’s library was not anemic thanks to her grandfather. Pappy, as he was honestly referred to, was swindled into a subscription throughout the 1970s for hardback Classics from a traveling salesman (who must have been lost or in a bad, bad way). Plus, her family paid out the nose to receive the internet via satellite since 1999, a godsend for those drab winter evenings that otherwise were filled with bickering and making jam to pass the time. I can only assume they knew about the existence of the internet from an encounter with her brazen uncle who liked to flaunt his relative wealth via telephone bimonthly. He ‘got out of Dodge’ on a wrestling scholarship in ’82 and landed a job lifting heavy things for a truck parts distributor in a city famous for its truck parts.
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