Kay got an award for fourth-grade spelling bee champion, there were earnest-looking parents — clean, bright faces, ready smiles, the knowing and glowing types. At the reception, I got around and behind the table, and stepped over a brick planter, but I tripped and hit the woman who was serving.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m Jenny Byrne. I teach here — fifth grade.”
There were one hundred people there, among the folding chairs.
“Nice to meet you. I’m John. I don’t come here very often,” I said.
“I’ve never seen you at one of these before,” she said. handing me a tray and stack of napkins. “Do you mind helping me for a minute?”
I waved to Kay then gave a guy who’d come for some vegetable bites a couple of napkins. I handed them out while Jenny ladled the punch. When the reception thinned, I collected Kay and the three of us walked out together.
Jenny reached in to fluff Kay’s hair when I introduced them, but thought better of it and stopped mid-gesture.
“You don’t look like a Kay,” she said.
“What does a Kay look like?” My daughter said.
We stopped between two lines of cars in the parking lot, and I put my arm around Kay and said, “I think she’s more of a Grace. She’s got a Grace about her.”
I named her Grace; her mother chose Kay.
Ordinarily, Kay would have come with her mother, but her mother had the flu, so I got an extra night with her.
On the way home I pumped her for what she knew about Jenny, Kay wasn’t cooperative. She didn’t know a thing.
“You want me to ask about her?” Kay said.
“No, no,” I said.
“I could go around to all my friends and tell them my dad is interested in Miss Byrne and ask them what she’s like.”
“No thank you, dear,” I said. “Let’s change the subject. I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“Do you like her a lot?” Kay asked, warming up to the idea. “I guess she’s probably going to be your girlfriend now. You guys’ll get married and kiss and everything. If that’s what’s happening, I’m telling mom.”
“Go easy on me, Grace,” I said. “I’m only a casualty.”
“Oh, Daddy,” she said, pulling my pant leg. “What’s that mean? Why do you always say things I don’t get?”
I pulled her over next to me in the seat, sat with my arm around her tiny shoulders as if we were buddies years ago. She leaned her head against my shoulder.
“That’s the way it goes,” I said. “When you get old like me some things become a mystery.”
“A mystery? I don’t ever want to be a mystery,” she said
…
I dropped Kay at her mother’s house and drove over to Nimoys, a remade, windowless science fiction/family fun fusion chain restaurant. I never did think the concept would work. I was there once, one of Kay’s birthdays; everything was done with their own currency that looked like thick aluminum quarters. They were just like quarters, only they looked like tokens dipped in a radioactive alkali metal bred from a Star Trek scene. I guess they figured if you bought ten bucks worth of tokens, you weren’t going to cash in the leftovers; they probably had market research to prove that.
When the old country club went under, the Richardson Company refurbished the cinderblock building into this fan-fiction restaurant, but instead of installing windows, which would have been costly, they hired an undergraduate realist to paint a floor-to-ceiling mural of a tropical beach — leaning palm trees, bright cobalt sky, and water like a deep blue marmalade. It was out of place, but management said serenity knows no specific culture. I guess the artist wanted to make a subversive statement about the manager’s nit-picky mural demands by painting a group of people dressed primitively and uncivilized on a distant island. The people of the island hidden way in the background were parading around like a reenactment of the Lord of the Flies just before the chubby boy was killed. It was a real lesson in groupthink vs. individuality missed by management.
When Jenny arrived, we took an outside booth next to the wall on which a couple of squirrels, nuts holstered steady in their mouths, stood up on their haunches chewing. We unwrapped our silverware. The napkins were small and thin as tissue. It was awkward at first. We studied the menus and placed our orders with a middle-aged man in a long white blazer, who looked kind of scientific as if he’d been in the beaker too long.
For a second I was worried there was going to be nothing to talk about. I was pondering about the act of picking up women, something I’d done maybe twice in my entire life — what do you say when there’s no reason to be together? I decided we’d picked each other up, but that wasn’t better that — just made us consenting adults for one another’s time.
Jenny was eyeing the mural. “This reminds me of a screen saver I saw,” she said. “Or better yet it reminds me of one of those Corona beer commercials where people are relaxing on the beach with no worries and no sunblock.”
The skyline was beautiful — white sand beach against a blue color sky streaked with an orangish-pink horizon like a thumb covering the bottom of the camera lens.
“You know that’s way too perfect.”
“I had that feeling,” I said.
“I mean, it’s just like this,” she said, pointing at the mural. “I wanted the people in the faraway island to be better prepared. At least, the perfectly etched humans can hire a parasailing company to survey the area for sharks.” She made a flying motion with her hand, diving at the table and doing interchangeable picture-taking motions with her fingers and her thumbs.
“A real issue is when the locals of the area have to battle tourist infestation and high demands, “she said. “These yokels scramble out of the trenches of the cruise liner, heading for a different day, falling over each other, splattering in with wet sand, and their dignity blown to smithereens.”
She popped herself high on the forehead with a flat palm.
“I’d put sharks in the painting,” I said.
“Maybe one,” she said. “The rest of the population wants to be duped.”
She was peering into my eyes. I hate it when people look in my eyes too long. I mean, when they stare right into my soul, when I can see that what they’re doing is looking right in there for a piece. Because it means they want something. It means they’re way off the mark.
I said, “You’re really nice and I like you more and more as the date goes on.”
“What?”
“Joke,” I said. “Kind of a funny corny ice-breaker.”
She got embarrassed, looked at the table. It was one of those tables with real planks encased in resin.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I missed the cue. I did too much reminiscing about old screensavers. I tend to get existential when I have a drink in me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
She looked up, showing new resolve, “So, you want to just zip through dinner and go back to my apartment? I saw this interesting documentary on Netflix, “Sex, Explained”. We can do that too. It’s an educational film. You know for sex and the biology of attraction. I’m really into documentaries.”
She uncomfortably traced an outline around the logo on the menu.
“This is wrong, too, isn’t it? Aggressive? I don’t care about sex, really. My previous statement didn’t hold any implications, I promise.”
She sat up, straightened her place setting. “Okay. Great. Can we just start over?” She tapped the wall. “I don’t know what we’re doing. Let’s talk about you or something, Okay? I tend to misconstrue things.”
“Okay,” I said. “Definitely. I know what you mean. So…me.”
“I am so sorry,” she said. She was going into the tabletop again. “I always do this. I get out here and I don’t know what to do. I don’t fit in this kind of situation. I talk too much and my cards aren’t anywhere near my chest.”
I said, “Why do you feel that way?”
“School,” she said.
“What’s wrong with school? PTSD?”
“I don’t like it,” she said, “She turned to look toward the cash register, drumming her fingers. “I used to love school, but now — I don’t know why you’d want to hear this, do you?”
“You have my attention.”
“We’ve got teachers you wouldn’t let near your kid,” she said. “Lots of them but in our evaluations. They’re all graded with perfect scores. It’s a joke. I mean, to hear us tell it we’re all one in a million.” She shrugged, shook her head. “I’m going to stop.”
“It’s okay.”
“So today I had a fight with the guy in the room next to mine. He was playing the radio all day. I asked him to quit it.”
“Radio?” I said. “You still have radios in your room?”
“Well, no. He was playing his phone through a Bluetooth. What’re you, a guy who’s stuck in the eighties? Everybody has the ability to do this in mere seconds. You never heard of that? They’re supposed to be for teaching matters, but we use them to shut the kids up because we are so good ourselves.”
I watched her. When the food came she quit talking and started eating. She held her knife wrong, like a pen.
…
We took both cars to her apartment at River Rain, a sixty-unit wooden project buried in tall pines back off the highway feeder. It was near eleven at night when we pulled into the parking lot and walked up the hill to her stack of apartments. I watched the uneven sidewalk as we walked, listening to the wind chimes — there was an abnormal amount of them. It sounded like a Russian choral symphony. Two guys and a girl were in the laundry-building drinking peppermint schnapps and sitting on tables. Jenny’s apartment was on the third floor, a two-bedroom model with beige Berber carpet and a low, mottled ceiling. There was a crummy light fixture in the center of the ceiling in each room. She went to get drinks from the fridge, and I sat down in front of her television.
I thought it was going pretty well. Usually when I was out I mostly wanted to be home.
Jenny came back with a glass of wine for her, and a coke for me. She sat at the end of the couch, her legs crossed under her knees. I didn’t look at her.
“Why don’t you tell me about your wife?” Jenny said.
“Who?” I said.
“Ha! Okay, I get it.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Every memory that I have of her is gone. I don’t know why, but it’s all hers.”
Jenny didn’t say anything.
“I probably should have phrased that in a different way,” I said.
She went back to her glass, “You have my attention.”
“No,” I said, shaking my hand. “It’s not. It’s not good. It’s like I feel like I’m going to be a sheltered old awkward guy for the rest of my life.”
“Well, It’s better than too sensitive,” she said. “You know, we’re all serious, right? You don’t have to be obsequious.”
I thought about “obsequious”, what a weird and good word it was.
“I don’t seem like a child anymore. I can’t live like a child and feel that way. I could only do that with her.”
Jenny nodded, waited a minute as if she were thinking, then said, “I’ve got a new LaCrosse cloud comforter that fits two.”
I looked to see whether that was sarcastic or not; she wasn’t smiling, so I figured she was flirting. I traced the lifelines on her palms and said, “What color?”
…
It was a nice night after that. We slept together and it wasn’t a disaster or awkward, and then we went for a walk through the park across the street. It was a cool, damp night. We stuck to the sidewalks and didn’t say much; but after we’d gone through the place once, we were holding hands. I was comfortable. I hadn’t been in an apartment complex for a while, and I had forgotten the odd comforts of them — being close to people in your economic bracket with whom you have almost nothing else in common, the community feeling even though you never talk to these people and only rarely see them. I had forgotten what it felt like to look down a five-hundred-yard line of apartments, cats parked in front, yellow street lamps dousing the asphalt with little slicks of light; forgotten the pleasure of somebody pulling up across the street in the wee hours of the morning, some couple coming in from a party or the bar, their too bright, too loud voices. Heavy trucks soared by on the highway above the park’s edge. Under the cover of night, the complex was gently transformed into a place of small mysteries — elegant shades cast by young trees on badly painted wood siding, the distant clicks and whines of air-conditioning compressors snapping on and cutting off, the almost inaudible thump of somebody’s garbage disposal shutting down. I could make out the music next door. I could picture the people, a young couple turning up the volume as high as they could.
Somebody screamed in the distance. It sounded to me as if it had come out of the woods, but Jenny thought otherwise. Jenny thought it had come from the other direction, from one of the apartments toward the entryway, toward the highway. We stopped and stood perfectly still, listening. There it was again like an argument about to escalate into the stratosphere.
After a minute she whispered, “What. Is. That?”
We decided to move along. The grass alongside the path glittered as we passed. Things were getting kind of foggy the way it does when the air cools and when the humidity increases. Jenny and I went from hand-in-hand to arm-in-arm. She leaned her head against my shoulder. We stopped in front of a dormant garden with old-growth to watch a gray cat with a twig, flip it up into the air and then catch it and roll over on its back.
We walked a little more and ended up sitting on an apartment building’s entry way, facing the central office of the apartment complex, watching the shining blue honey of the in-ground pool through the chain-link fence. After a time, Jenny asked me if I was ready for sleep. I said I was, and as we walked back toward her apartment I pointed out somebody’s purple endless summer hydrangeas.
…
Jenny made breakfast while I was showering, and she was self-conscious about it, about what it suggested or what it might suggest.
“I didn’t mean to force you into anything,” she said, pointing at the dishes on the table. “I always eat first thing in the morning. It calms my nerves.”
“It was surprisingly delicious,” but I realized that sounded wrong. That was something people said to get out of the door faster. “I didn’t mean that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was delicious, but I didn’t mean the other part — you know what I’m talking about?”
“The part where you insulted my eggs?” She said.
Jenny was clearing away the breakfast dishes. I watched the way she stacked the plates. I liked it; she scrapped the leftovers in a compost pile outside, then removed the utensils from between the dishes. I imagined her driving Kay to school, and then later, in the evening, the three of us in the car picking up Chinese food. I looked around the apartment, and it looked a lot better in the daytime — less cluttered and dingy. There was plenty of sun in there — white Formica counters, light colored pine floors and spider plants in the windows. One of the morning news shows was on the TV — the sound was low. Even the carpet looked clean and approachable.
I figured if we were together we’d be like ugly people or odd people or old people; however, we weren’t any of those. I don’t mean we were young and beautiful, but we were only half old, and we weren’t so much uglier than everybody else that you’d run and scream if you saw us. If I had to say, I’d say regular. Jenny had curly brown hair that was kind of specked with gray strands, a slightly troubled nose as if she’d broken it before, manicured skin, blue eyes that reminded me of the beach, and a slender body at thirty-five. Maybe I was a little shorter than what most women preferred — under six feet, although well over the average height for American males — and I guess I didn’t help myself much with the Khakis and the sweater over a button-up shirt. My face was adequate. People said I was ruggedly handsome for a guy just below the line to get on a ride. I had all my hair, even if it wasn’t tamed — voluminous and unruly. Brown hair. Washed with conditioner nightly. I wasn’t the best judge of what I looked like, but I was strictly attentive, and I’d spent some time studying other attractive men — in the movies, on the TV, and on the street. I figured I had a kind of look. Maybe, we both did.