Memoir of a Pseudo-Amnesiac: 3

I would be lying if I told you I remembered skipping home with brown paper bags clutched in my hands. That is not the way that real memory works, or at least not mine. (Also, I do not skip.) The walk home was probably spent thinking half-thoughts and imagining a romantic encounter, so there was nothing to store away for future reference. Still, the exchange made an impression on me. Daydreams aside, I could count on one hand the number of transparent post-puberty interactions I’d had with women. Naturally, I wanted another with her since even then I knew she was the reason for the genuine moment. Note: wanting is a far cry from willing. I was unwilling to do anything about this desire beyond hope it would merely happen as our other meetings had. An angling metaphor I was taught by a local with ample tufts of white hair around his ear canals is apropos. Some people fish with a live bait and others fish with artificial bait. With live bait, you cast your line out and let the worm wriggle an appetizing cha-cha for you. You watch and wait and if a bluegill comes by to nibble, the bobber goes under. Give it a yank and reel it in. With artificial bait, you cast your line out and have to reel it in again and again because otherwise the bait sits there, neither looking nor smelling (fish have a sense of smell) like anything worth swallowing. No matter which you use, fishermen are at the mercy of the fish. The shiniest, smelliest, most jitter-bugging lure won’t catch a thing that isn’t hungry. But the fishermen who use artificial bait won’t face facts. They think they should have used a different color or one with a longer tale. The point: no matter what you do, whether you go home happy or hungry is up to fate. Historically, I fished with live bait. There’s less remorse.

I kept my eyes open for her, but not exclusively. I kept my eyes open for a fair number of people. (She was in the minority of people whose name I actually knew.) I was a voyeur—minus the sexual connotations—for many years. The way people act is ceaselessly fascinating to me. This and my steadfast passion for spiting my parents were reason enough to declare a major in psychology. What others say (verbally and nonverbally) is, on the whole, more entertaining than your average Hollywood flick. College is a boon to those of us who like to people watch since the atmosphere catalyzes exhibitionism. Outside of the legislative houses of the world, there is no greater ratio of posturing per capita than within the confines of universities. Plus, few sports require less upfront investment. The only equipment a voyeur needs is dark tinted/mirrored sunglasses or a book/magazine/newspaper. Keeping your head askance while walking past someone or turning pages while seated is sufficient to disarm most unconscious human defenses. You can look or listen to your heart’s content.

She was nowhere to be found. The man returned to his post at the shanty, the grocery store only contained people reliant upon shopping carts to stay upright, and she apparently did not have a taste for subway sandwiches. Our rendezvous options were exhausted. I moved on. It turned out our paths did not cross because she did not leave home often. She was wary about the whole college scene. She declined many an invitation to underground bashes from boys who never heeded the first ‘no’. If you had spent as much time eavesdropping on the locals as I did, you’d know the university ripped a fissure in the community. Some of the folks (their term, not mine) found the clogged parking, rampant littering, and nightly fracases too much to handle. Jethro Slocumb, an antebellum politician, sold the hamlet’s soul to a pack of scholars and lawyer-types way-back-when and its founding fathers would spin rotisserie-like in their graves if they could see it now, so the story goes. Others, usually the entrepreneurs and their families, didn’t mind the commotion. Small markets are fertile ground for monopolies and at least it was something to talk about besides the fickle climate. She was in the former camp, but not rabidly so. To her, it was one of life’s inevitable trifles.

In the meantime, I kept busy. Being steeped in the American ethos of productivity, I could not indulge in much thumb-twiddling. (Thanks to my grandma, the Puritanical mantra “Idle hands make Devil’s worship,” is lodged brain-stem deep. I still cannot watch more than a half an hour of television without nauseating guilt.) I’m not what used to be called ‘antsy’ and now is diagnosed ‘hyperactive.’ It’s not as though I cannot see things through to the end. Rather, I can and nearly must concentrate. I am profoundly uncomfortable with stillness or quiet and, if I am not acting (which involves concentration), I need to be thinking. Sharks have to move and I have to be attentive. Staticky news radio was always on, at least whispering in the background, for the times I wasn’t reading or observing. Whenever I lied motionless or am otherwise kept from stimuli, my brain cannibalized itself. I wouldn’t have even noticed this preoccupation of mine had she not brought it to my attention (which, ironically, was yet another concept about which to think). We hashed out possible explanations, doing our best impressions of psychologists. I proposed my inability to veg/chill-out is because of a latent fear of mortality. She thought I had an incipient case of autophobia. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Good—albeit selective—dweeb that I was, I completed all of the required reading and assignments for classes I thought worthy of the effort. School work was my alternative to consorting. Although I observe people with a passion, I preferred to be uninvolved with them. I had a misanthropic streak which manifested in the quiet judging and condemning of peers whenever I was in a bad mood. (In good moods, I smiled in agreement without showing my teeth.) I saved people a fair share of trouble by keeping to myself.

In those exceptional moments where I was not concentrating, I was likely inebriated. During the ‘play hard’ portion of my time, I drank to excess (usually propped up against a tree trunk in the hinterland). A backpack containing a note pad, flash light, and bottle of bottom shelf ethanol was my combination luggage-and-ticket. Once my BAC plateaued above a certain level, I could unwind. Fields of waving tall grass will put you at ease. I started a few poems, but found myself bereft of brevity.

Alcohol was the medicine I took to alleviate the swelling and fever of my hypertrophic head. Someone much smarter than me observed the systemic mistreatment of collegiate livers was due to anxiety about becoming an adult, the pot of coal at the end of the rainbow as it were. (I suppose if taking the training wheels off a bike could be drawn out for four years, kids might take to the bottle, too.) We were, then, pupa reluctant about emerging from chrysalises. We felt, semi-consciously, the nearness of it. Adulthood loomed over us and I, at least, could taste pennies on my tongue when I thought about the sun setting over the wonderland of academia. (It was a scenic spot so starkly different from my humdrum hometown I felt like a foreign exchange student. Campus topography was distinct for its gargantuan oaks and elms. Like the professors, they made you feel young and tiny. Tree hugging was physically impossible as the trunks’ circumferences overwhelmed even basketball players’ wingspans. In these groves, sunlight only appeared in irregular splotches when strong winds would part the sea of leaves. Architecturally, brick and sandstone was the order of the day. The buildings were Romanesque circa the first quarter of the twentieth century. Archways topped most windows and roof lines were embellished with thick ornate cornices. The president’s house was palatial and guarded by limestone gargoyles whose teeth must have been sharpened annually. Spear-tipped wrought iron fences kept the riff-raff at bay.) 

Procurement was never an issue. The deputy was more concerned with livestock rustling than underage drinking and the gas station attendants never consulted IDs since it was bad for business. Illicit substances and other intoxicants were obviously off limits on/in school property, so consumption was a tad stickier. Thankfully, the problem solving skills and critical thinking strategies we were taught had real-world applications. Prohibition could be circumvented largely with repurposed soda bottles and timely swishing of Listerine before interrogations with staff members. Should a student be caught red-handed, campus security guards (who were also campus construction workers, campus groundskeepers, and campus hosts, servers, and dish washers should a catering event arise) could easily be bought off with a share of the contraband. (Niccolo Machiavelli warned royalty against employing mercenaries. Human motivation is such that, devoid of personal investment in the outcome, players will quit when the going gets tough. Thanks to the changelessness of human nature, the advice is still credible.) It did not hurt, either, that the guards were grossly underpaid and knew their way around a 12-pack. The only guard to beware of was Reginald Young, who aspired to be the school’s equivalent of a sheriff and sporadically wore a cowboy hat to prove it. He was a one-man buzz-kill. There must have been a poster with Smiley Face stickers by Young’s name in the break room for all the tattling he did. 

Spinach aids the detoxification process and I bought more than my fair share of it. (The only items in the cafeteria that would settle an upset stomach were the packets of instant oatmeal. The exorbitant tuition fees had no impact on the quality of the ingredients. Recipes involved grease, salt, something inorganic, and, if desert, high fructose corn syrup.) Eventually, I inquired of the grizzled yeoman about her. Our first conversation went something like this:

“Where’s that young woman who was here week before last?”

“She’s my daughter and she’s not interested.”

Memoir of a Pseudo-Amnesiac: 2

Within my first year, I had been to nearly every place there was to go within a three mile horizontal radius of my dormitory. The lone exception was the picturesque white chapel where the locals went to worship, marry, baptize, and bury. I was curious, but refrained from visiting as even God-fearing students kept away from Christ’s Church of the Fields (which was situated, eponymously, in cornfields). Fear of judgment from the flock there was not the cause. They were far too meek to ever rebuke strangers. The prospect of instantly becoming One of Them and never being able to leave without crippling guilt/remorse was ample disincentive. The congregation made an annual pilgrimage to our college to spread the Good News via smiles and pocket-sized green New Testaments. If you made eye contact, you invited a sales-pitch more forceful and cheery than any telemarketer’s script, which included an inquiry into contact information, and precipitated a Campus Mailbox stuffed with handwritten notes every Monday, from the third week in August to the second week in May until graduation, cursively stating, “Sorry we missed you.” Niceness can be frightening, especially to cynics. The ferocity of their tuistic sentiments was suspicious. We students surmised (wrongly in hindsight) either they (1) had ulterior motives beyond our personal salvation or (2) their motives were based on some vague idea of us and therefore without merit because they didn’t know us from Adam. A classmate of mine with a soft spot for Star Trek remarked the flock was like a nicer sect of the Borg. The analogy was not without merit (both came off as selfless, artificial, and quickly confused if sequestered individually), although the townies got a lot more sun for obvious reasons.

All this is to say I had been to the produce shanty before. (It was less than three miles away by foot.) On those visits I bought my weight in blackberries. Where I come from never had access to berries beyond the usual berry suspects (i.e., straw, blue, and rasp). A calloused (in both senses of the word) middle aged man with needles of blond hair stiffly distending from under his John Deere cap kept to the shadows like a brown recluse. His stubble was so thick you could have struck a match on his chin. He did not look like a man who would risk his goods to the honor’s system of many roadside stands. It was a cash-only sort of place with a squeaky tin box once forged to hold military wares standing in for a vault. He never gave me exact change. He capriciously over-or-undercharged me to the nearest dollar as though he was unwilling to trifle with coins. I resolved to not inquire into this practice out of an unconfirmed (but not unfounded) suspicion there was a shotgun on the premises. Later I learned this man was her father. He sired four children and hailed from one of those identical exurban towns, neither small nor large, a traveler drives through fifty times while sojourning across the American Middle West. While on tour with the Army, he was bitten by the gambling bug. After inheriting a forlorn family farm by casting lots with his two brothers, this troubled man kept himself honest by only chancing the coins he acquired through the farm’s revenue. (He drove into the City to get his fix, the cost of gas alone typically necessitating a net loss for the night prior to any lever-pulling or drink specials.)

It was about the time the sugar snap peas started sprouting fast and furious that I definitely recall getting to know her specifically. On approach, I was shocked to see a young woman my approximate age standing in for the mulish older man. She was not dressed in flannel and her shirt was not tied above the navel. She was wearing the townie’s well-practiced look suggestive of either vacancy or concentration. (Statues commonly have the same ambivalent stare.) Her closely cropped hair made me think I had seen her before, but I doubt I could have placed when or where. 

Having spied her at thirty paces, I had time to compose myself. I believed composure was the gateway to sexiness, a principle I’d likely gleaned from girl’s middle school locker posters of James Dean or Johnny Depp scowling. (Sex appeal could also have been the effect of black and white photography, an effect which I could not achieve in living color.) I tried to look through everything I saw as though nothing could really hold my interest. I blinked a few times at the bushel of russet potatoes. I was trying to push mystery out of my pores. (It had not yet occurred to me this ‘putting on’ forbade women from taking a genuine interest in me.) I went back and forth about whether or not I should even buy anything. Would it betray my disaffection? Would it be insulting not to? All the while I felt her eyes on me. I do this often, feel like I’m the center of everyone’s attention. This is not unusual among humans. My high school psychology textbook detailed how paranoid symptomatology included thinking that any laughter within earshot was at one’s expense. As I never entertained other, more outlandish propositions (i.e., people following me) I never qualified for a medical diagnosis of paranoia. Still, this perspective is consistent and not without side-effects. I call it the evil twin of narcissism because I have not found a name for it other than despair, which is entirely too dramatic most of the time. 

Because I did not have access to a kitchen or cooking apparatuses, I was limited to fruits and vegetables requiring no more preparation than cutting and/or the application of dips/dressings. (I did have a Swiss Army Knife courtesy of an uncle and two complete place settings courtesy of the cafeteria.) I decided the best course to take was a modest purchase, which seemed to split the difference between apathy and intrigue. I placed my choice of Cameo apples and broccoli onto the wooden crates that doubled as counter space. She weighed them. I did not make eye contact. I paid attention to her hands. She had a few wisps of bleached hair on skin between her knuckles. Her fingernails were trimmed and unpainted. There were no freckles. I could not find a scar on either. I remember this because I assumed living her sort of life must have involved cuts, breaks, and/or other miscellaneous mangling. I concluded she must have keen control of her body. There was daydreaming. While I surveyed the countertop and what was on it, she multiplied the weights by their corresponding prices and added the two. I was staring into the stippled green surface of the broccoli when she told me the total ($4.50). It occurred to me this was an excellent opportunity. I wanted her to take a shine to me and thought flattery would make inroads to that end. (Had I the presence of mind to think reflexively and reverse the roles, I would have discerned the malignancy of cash.) After less than a moment’s consideration, I slid a $10 bill across the surface that was not conducive to sliding. I gathered my purchases and rotated away from her. (Offering women money is an ice-breaker, but after it’s been broken by that device you realize the ice kept you from drifting further away rather than being apart.) 

Instead of thinking me gallant, she thought me hard of hearing. She called—not hollered—after me and clarified the price. My next move could either have been feigning miscommunication or trying to explain the balance of the payment was for her benefit. Our eyes met and it frightened me. I felt shackled. “Four-fifty” does not sound like “ten.” Knowing that “Keep the change,” was entirely too cliché for our situation, I simply said, “Keep it.” She looked bewildered. (Note: there are no tip jars in produce stands.) I left. Gravel undeniably scattered behind me at the rate of a moderate pace. I didn’t stop. My forehead was starting to glisten with liquefied anxiety. She did not command me to stop; she gripped my shoulder. It could not be ignored. I made an about-face.

“My name is Allison.”

Those were the first words she said to me outside of a transactional context. They were disarming and snapped me out of the trance I was in. It was her first act of mercy. She was not interested in getting to the bottom of what had transpired. She wanted me to know who she was (or at least start to). As someone who was generally backwards, I appreciated her forwardness. Interactions are not games and I wish I hadn’t spent so much of my youth thinking they were. She took my hand, turned it palm up, and deposited a $5 bill and two quarters. I am certain I apologized without saying “sorry.” She smiled and I stared into the distance to the side of her face. The landscape presented like a solidified ocean. There were no impediments to the horizon. Nubby rows of soybeans converged at a vanishing point in the cloudless bleached blue sky. We stood there for less than thirty seconds in relative quiet. Crickets and grasshoppers provided the soundtrack. I don’t know what she was thinking. I didn’t ask any questions. Despite appearances, I am not loquacious in person. I probably nodded and turned away again.