Memoir of a Pseudo-Amnesiac: 4

As it so happened, he was wrong on one account. She was interested and she went looking for me. (Proving once more that good things come to those who wait and that luck is not made despite the egotists who insist upon the contrary.) I was found milling around my school’s fenced perimeter, hammering out the kinks of a thesis on Skinner. I did not notice her coming as I was gazing intently on the ground slightly before my feet. “You didn’t tell me your name,” was uttered without origin. Startled, I erupted with an expletive. She laughed. When I realized who had spoken, I begged her pardon. She was cucumber cool and I was pepper hot. She observed my reflexes were stellar and that keyed-up animals live longer in the wild. The natural color returned to my ears attested to subjectively by a lack of heat in that region. We exchanged pleasantries, dealing in large part with what was new in our lives. (Although neither of us knew what was “old” for the other, it is not what one asks about). Near the end of our jaunt and at her behest, we exchanged mailing addresses rather than numbers. (Hers was one of those bumpkinny addresses—numbers followed by indecipherable abbreviations followed by still more numbers—with an air of encryption about it.) It struck me as quaint and entirely fitting the unspoken code of courtship I assumed presided over inter-gender affairs in Pike County. I was thrilled and aghast—thrilled to be pursued and aghast at the necessity of requital. I insisted she write first so that I could operate within the confines of tone she established.

Her cursive handwriting was graceful and slightly disorienting. (Longhand is alive and well in needle-point country.) It made me ashamed of my chicken-scratch script and I committed to writing more deliberately thereafter. The first twenty lines consisted of preliminary getting-to-know-you questions like point of birth to be gotten out of the way and stored for future reference. Beneath them was a set of three essay questions from which to choose one, none of which were especially personal. (This was a good-natured exercise and designed, presumably, to either pander to one of my strengths or speak in terms an undergrad could understand.) I wrote on “What’s wrong with us and why? Give concrete examples.” and made a convincing argument in 500 words or less for the dilutive ramifications of data influx on us progeny of the Information Age. After three drafts and many a minute of tapping pen-to-lip, I reciprocated with a quiz of my own. I dittoed the twenty questions* and formulated a biographical inquiry. (‘Is your father always so intimidating? If so, why? If not, when not?’ ‘What do you appreciate the most about living here and what could you do without?’, and ‘What’s on your mind when business at the produce stand is slow?’) She picked #2. What she appreciated most and least were the two sides of the same coin of time. The surfeit of leisure afforded by inclement weather or the cold season was a situationally-dependent blessing or curse.

We kept the pen-pal relationship going in part because we couldn’t see each other constantly. I had school and she had a considerable set of filial duties. Plus, neither of us wanted to be the one to blame for dropping the ball, letter-wise. They became supplementary material to our face-to-face visits and hastened our introductory phase tremendously. We never spent a dime on postage. Instead, we exchanged the notes at the outset of our sessions and tucked them away in hip-or-back pocket to be read later. At some point, we started folding them into exceedingly small rectangles and devised ways of slipping them to each other in homage to mafia movies. Who began this ritual I cannot say.

She met me more than halfway since I was functionally a pedestrian. (Car repairs were not easy to come by in those parts and I, not trusting my mechanically-inclined colleagues, opted to let my Civic languish until my parents caved into desperation and had it towed.) She had access to an ancient F-100 with two gas tanks, which came in handy since there were two trips: one to and one from campus. (This is hyperbole, but not outrageously so. The truck lumbered along at 7 MPG thanks to being engineered in the good old days of cheap crude. The cargo of cement blocks which was the stuff of an often promised but never realized retaining wall at the Benson Farm did nothing for efficiency either.) The exterior was burnt orange and gold with pitted and speckled chrome bumpers. From inside, you could watch the road speed by through a growing hole in the passenger side floor board (which, I warned, was destined to become a real problem for spare change or an ill-fated cell phone). The miniscule maroon waffle texture of the bench seat’s cloth made me nostalgic for a decade when “greaser” was a caste. In lieu of air conditioning were triangular windows that pivoted on an axis and scooped up passing air at a rate that made your jowls jiggle wind tunnel-like at interstate speeds. The truck was the sort of temperamental jalopy that begged for a name. The passenger needed to be slightly ajar in order for the engine to turn over. The windshield wipers did not function without the cigarette lighter being depressed. I enjoyed these eccentricities and became more partial to it than a person should be to an artifact.

We took a lot of walks together, regardless of the season. They were our dates and my exercise. Walking is an act of penance for the consumption of rural cuisine. (Pies were as much a fixture of the dinner table as forks and knives.) Either we walked the lengths of First through Fourth Street until civilization disappeared or devolved into boarded-up houses or we strode down Route 3 until one of our sets of legs began to throb. There was a lot of pointing on these jaunts. We liked seeing the same sights.

Provided I was wearing tall enough socks, we occasionally made excursions into the family’s farmland. At dusk in the summer, you could not have a conversation over the ambulancean wail of the cicadas and katydids. An array of flora and fauna stuck to whatever cloth brushed against the tall grasses and weeds. On return, we’d retire to separate unoccupied rooms to modestly inspect for ticks scrambling towards nether regions. (This in itself shows how far I had come to making peace with nature because of her.) Once cleared by private scrutiny, we presented bare backs to each other for visual inspection of those hard to reach places. This practice was for novices like myself an emulsion of sensual and repulsive emotions. In the end, the sensual rose to the top. Removing parasites is a work of affection. (See generally: primate behavior).

This continued for months. I did not quickly ask her out (which is a phrase I’d like to avoid since “out” always struck me as a vacuous place, but is the only real prospect that fits the bill). To me, the categorization was superfluous. Giving something an official name aspired to nothing more than discouraging others from transgressing against it, not because of authentic care but authoritative diffidence. (This is why security cameras are more affective at deterring than no trespassing signs.) Principal stance aside, I did not want to rock the boat and was frightened any shift in status might land me in the sea. To her—I later learned—it was a great disappointment and a sign I was not simply bashful but altogether spineless when it counted. She had to ward off passive aggressive attacks from her ill mother nightly on account of my reticence.

I don’t know what attracted her to me. It was not charm or mysteriousness and, despite her flattery, it was not looks. (I am to Adonis what yellow is to Tuesday.) At the time, I thought it was a certain je ne sais quoi radiating from my indefatigable candor and earnestness (a trait which I both staunchly believed I possessed and completely lacked given my self-referential obliviousness). What attracted me to her is too long a list to enumerate here. Being around her was like looking at a diamond. I felt a multifaceted sentiment around her. Firstly, there was the novelty of it all. I was not one to garner attention and if I accidently happened to, I could not keep it. She was, as I have already mentioned, physically attractive and seeing her sparked textbook arousal responses. She was smart to boot and a straight-arrow, morally speaking. Exhibit A: She had been letting her hair grow out in the fall. When she exited the truck, I noted it flipped playfully above her ears. I complimented her on this, thinking it was intentionally styled. She told me to kiss off without making eye contact. Before I could be fully offended by this outburst and counter with some barb to make the situation worse, she apologized. Apologizing was easy for her, not because she had a lot of practice, but because she indulged in no delusions about what she did and was capable of. I have never met a more sober thinker. I don’t know if it was the Bible, the cows, or the lack of any sort of pollution—whatever the source, she never hid anything from anyone, including herself. It was as though the lack of pre-processed input kept her head from getting clogged up with excuses or falsehoods. She knew she was disappointed with her appearance, that she snapped at me, and that she shouldn’t have snapped at me. So she apologized.

I do not mince words. I do not say I love pasta or some much-lauded band because I don’t consider them objects of such momentous affection. I do not respond “good” or the grammatically preferable “well” when someone asks me how I am because I am almost always “fine” or worse. To be well is a rarified state of happiness/contentment/peace I am not often in. I was happy then in those first few months. I was happy to be near her, happy to see her walk towards me, happy to hear her recollections of Indian summers and creek beds and crawdads squirting backwards in crystal clear water. It was magical, not in the incredulous way a skeptic describes a conviction, but in the way a child knows fireflies—an ineffable glow both real and uncanny.

__________
* Her answers were: 1) Allison Benson, 2) 10/14/87, 3) Salina, KS, 4) 2 – Donnie (older) and Jimmy (younger), 5) Yellow, 6) grandma’s corn pudding, 7) strawberry mint sun tea, 8) lately Franny and Zooey, 9) I don’t watch much TV, 10) That’s difficult. Pet Sounds was my first –how about that? 11) Am I a sap if I say Shawshank Redemption? 12) Flint Hills, 13) no one, really, 14) yes, 15) not like Casper, no 16) when you said your name was Shit 17) when Pappy (my grandfather) died, 18) flying by a mile—what good is invisibility really? 19) Italy or Australia, 20) both half-full and half-empty if we are going to be accurate about it.