I sat across from Columbia at IHOP and gazed into her cocoa eyes. They were like two shiny, brown M&Ms. I could’ve stared at them all night. Sorceress of a blonde, I thought. My stomach tingled.
I’ve got nothing against blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls, but they’re to be expected. Run of the mill, as my mother would say. But blonde-haired, brown-eyed girls? They’re a different breed of beast, as my father would say. Life for them, I imagined, was an uphill battle. Victims of fate, the lot of them—prisoners of predetermination. I’m inclined to call them underdogs. But let’s get one thing straight about Columbia: she was no underdog.
“What’re you looking at?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I lied.
“You were looking at me really weird.”
“I’m sorry. Your eyes, they’re pretty.”
She smiled and said, “I know, right?”
Her teeth were perfect: pure white, immaculate. I could tell she never skipped a day brushing them.
She scooted her body further inside the booth, her collarbones showing through her V-neck.
I thought, What I really want to do is reach across and …
“Why’re you still staring at me?”
“I’m not,” I lied.
• • •
I was a sophomore in college when I ran into Columbia pretty much by pure chance. After graduating from high school, two years chugged along, then one day while I was on my lunch break at the mall—I worked at Dillard’s—there she was in the food court. I didn’t realize I’d cut three people in line at Subway to say hi to her. Actually, I’m lying.
“Jerk,” I heard a woman mutter. I waved at her friendly.
Then Columbia turned around and squealed. “Oh my God!”
“Yes, it is I,” I said, and we bear-hugged.
After she paid for her sandwich, we sat down at a table and small-talked a bit, both of us all smiles. The whole time I kept wondering, Why isn’t your number in my phone? When we hit a stopping point, I asked for it casually.
Then I said, “Would you like to go to dinner sometime?” Because why not. Because pure chance.
“Dinner?” she repeated.
“Yeah, like, can I take you to dinner? Unless you’re busy or something.”
“Whoa. Take me to dinner. That sounds like a serious proposal, good sir.”
I stayed quiet, unsure how to respond.
Finally, she said, “I’m messing with you, dork. Of course we can ‘go to dinner.’” The last part in a deeper voice as if to mimic mine.
“Great! Well, now that I have your number, I can call you soon?”
“Sounds bueno, señor!”
I waited two days—carefully planned.
“Hey,” I said over the phone, “how does IHOP sound, Friday night?”
“Um, yeah, sure, IHOP sounds … cool,” Columbia answered.
To me, IHOP was a more respectable option than McDonald’s, and much more affordable than somewhere overrated like Outback Steakhouse, which, on my budget, was totally out of the question.
“I can pick you up, if you’d like?”
There was a little bit of static, then she said, “Yeah, sounds good.”
“I mean, if it’s okay with y—”
“I said yes, silly. Come grab me at six.”
After we hung up, I got on MapQuest and mapped her address. It was a forty-five-minute drive from my dorm to her place. The damn girl lives in Djibouti, I thought.
When I arrived at her neighborhood, I was surprised to find myself in a trailer park in Devine, thirty miles outside the city. I had no clue she lived in a trailer park.
She was standing outside her home, looking criminally fine in dark blue jeans and a low-cut T-shirt imprinted with a faded American flag.
Suddenly, an image of her—draped in an American flag, Old Glory, nothing else on underneath—popped in my head, and I quickly brushed away the wicked fantasy, if such a thing were possible.
“I had no idea you lived in a trailer park,” I said. I had no idea how horrendous those words sounded until they escaped my trap.
“I mean, I wasn’t trying to say—”
“It’s all good,” Columbia said curtly. “This is where I dwell. Surprise!”
“Hey, you look great,” I said, changing the subject.
“Not bad for a trailer-park girl, huh?” she said, grinning like Satan himself and my face heating up.
“I’m messing with you. Why so serious?”
“I’m not,” I said defensively, childishly. Then I high-fived her to play it off. Amateur move.
On the drive to IHOP, we small-talked, and at some point I played music from my iPod. I’d created a playlist for our date. Columbia and I had both loved the same bands in high school. Green Day, Death Cab for Cutie, Dashboard Confessional, Panic! At The Disco, all of them. Thus, I’d titled my playlist, “Columbia Records.” When I showed her, she looked at me with her melted M&M glowing eyes.
We walked inside IHOP and an ancient waitress named Doris greeted us at the counter. I counted legit ten thousand wrinkles on her face. She asked us if we wanted a table or a booth, and I said booth, so Doris shepherded us to one slowly—oh so slowly. She called the both of us “honey” in a refined smoker’s voice. From the look on her face, Columbia was as amused as I was.
After Doris shuffled off to give us some time, Columbia said, breaking a smile, “Stop being mean.”
“I’m not being mean at all … honey!”
“God, don’t start!”
“Seriously, how many packs of Camel do you think that woman’s put away in her lifetime?”
“You’re evil,” Columbia said, grinning like Lucifer.
When Doris came back, Columbia’s stern gaze seemed to order me, Don’t you dare do it.
She ordered chocolate-chip pancakes.
“And I’ll have the Belgian waffle with scrambled eggs,” I said to Doris in a heavy smoker’s voice. I couldn’t believe I’d just imitated her right to her wrinkled face. With Columbia around, the court jester in me seemed to bumble out.
By a miracle of God, Doris seemed bothered not one iota by my sophomoric stunt. I was a sophomore, after all. And, after all, she had lived through several world-shaping wars, Eisenhower and Tricky Dick. She’d probably had a litter of children, all grown now. And lots of grandchildren. Me? I was just another punk-ass kid she had to serve on a Friday night in hopes of earning a halfway-decent tip. Back then, I lacked the decency to tip decently.
Columbia, she kicked me good in the shin.
The food arrived in a blink. My eggs were warm and fluffy. The waffle practically melted in my mouth, as if, texturally speaking, it was one and the same as the butter I’d spread across it affectionately like a Bob Ross brushstroke. Oh look, a happy little butter cloud.
I scarfed down everything fast like a wolf. Columbia had only taken a few bites of her pancakes by the time I finished.
“Cowabunga,” she said. “You weren’t that hungry, huh?”
“Nah,” I replied. “I hated every bite.”
I could only watch as Columbia ate and, surprisingly, she didn’t make a stink about my food voyeurism. She chewed each bite like twenty times, real methodical. Her lips stayed closed shut, all mannered. I imagined her looking up at me and saying, Not too bad for a trailer-park girl, huh?
In between chews, Columbia said she’d been attending community college, which, in this town, translated to a Venus flytrap for high school slackers. Columbia said she’d also been working part-time at a children’s daycare. She loved the job but hated going to school at the same time and was considering taking a year off. College was too much like high school, she said. I wanted to tell her right then and there to not unenroll, to just stick with it. Otherwise, she’d never go back. But I didn’t say anything. I just nodded my head and listened.
“And you?” she asked. “You planning to graduate on time?”
“That’s the plan,” I answered. “Two more years and I should have that degree in my greedy little hands.”
“Right on! You’ve always been smart like that.”
Her comment rubbed me the wrong way. I’d always felt I did exactly what I was supposed to do. Really, I felt, I was no smarter than her.
I broke up our serious talk by doing an impression of Michael Scott from The Office. Why? Because Columbia and I had both talked about loving The Office in high school. Because we were the coolest nerds and had immaculate taste. And because I was highly skilled at impressions. No one greater.
“Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me,” I intoned as Steve Carrell.
Columbia almost spat the last of her pancakes in my face.
“Oh my God, yes!” she said, pointing at my mouth. “That’s amazing! And that episode was the fucking shiz!”
Doris returned to pick up our plates and I noticed she had the sourest expression I’d ever witnessed on a human face. At least, one as copiously wrinkled as hers.
“You’re a doll,” I said to Doris in Doris-voice. Oops! I did it again, I thought in Britney Spears’ voice.
“Aren’t you the sweetest lil’ honey,” Doris replied, unleashing a frightening smile revealing missing teeth—holes that’d snugly fit multiple cigarettes.
Before I could clown again, Columbia kicked both my shins. Pop-pop! She clearly had a soft spot for old geezers.
As we waited for our check—though we’d soon figure out that we were to pay at the register near the entrance—I glanced around the restaurant. Except for an elderly couple sitting behind us, there was nobody else in the house. The graveyard shift had begun. People, it seemed, had better things to do on a Friday night.
I turned back toward Columbia and caught her picking her teeth with her pointer finger.
“Oh my God, don’t judge me,” she said. “I get food stuck all the time.”
“I’m not judging,” I lied.
“This is like, totally inappropriate of me to ask, but, can you check to see if there’s anything else in there?”
“Gladly,” I replied.
She flashed her perfectly straight, immaculately white chompers at me. The girl oughta be in damn toothpaste commercials, I thought.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” I said officiously.
I focused in on one of her Chiclets. “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”
Columbia’s hand shot to her mouth.
“Shut up! For real?”
“You’d better go take a gander. Something big’s wedged in there.”
“Oh my God!”
She quickly slid out of the booth and, as she got up and zipped off to the restroom, I thought, What an ass—myself. I’d never felt this way toward her back in high school. At least, I didn’t think so. My stomach tingled.
When she returned, she playfully punched my arm.
“You freakin’ jerk,” she said.
“I’m gonna press assault charges on you.”
“You deserve a good kick in the gonads, too.”
“Usually, always.”
The elderly couple behind us—I glanced back at them again—collectively glared at me. They found nothing about me or our company charming. Perhaps we’d disturbed the final moments of their peace on Earth. For a quick second, I pictured Columbia and me as them, past our primes, past our expiration dates. Cottage cheese that used to be milk.
I nodded at them and they snapped their heads away in the same direction, kind of like angry turtles.
“What the heck are you doing now?”
“Twelve o’clock, right behind me,” I whispered. “Don’t make it obvious.”
Columbia snuck a peek at the couple, then said to me, discreetly, “Evil, evil man.”
Suddenly, her expression changed. It was as though she contemplated something heavy, wretched. A black cloud had dulled the shine of her M&Ms.
“You know,” she said, “I love old people. I really do. But they make me sad for whatever reason.”
“What’d you mean?” I said, legit confused.
“Like, doesn’t it suck to know that’s it’s all gonna end sooner than we think?”
She snapped her fingers.
“What’d you mean?” I pressed.
“Okay, like, here’s life,” she said, holding out her hands about a foot apart from each other, palms facing inward. “You live for all this stuff in between, then before you know it, we’re here,” she said, shaking her right hand.
I was taken aback.
“What the hell did they put in your pancakes?” I said. “Did you go and snort something in the bathroom? A little coke, you diabolical wench?”
Columbia didn’t smile.
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” I said, straightening my back. “Look, I think the point of life is to enjoy all the in-between stuff—really enjoy it—so that when this comes,” I said, shaking my right hand, “you’re good with it. You’re cool with it. At peace. Capisce?”
Columbia looked out the window, to a mostly dead parking lot.
“Yeah,” she answered softly. “I guess it’s just … I don’t know, I just see things differently. It’s hard to explain. I don’t really enjoy all the in-between stuff knowing the end’s coming. I’ve always thought this way. I enjoy things to a certain point, and then I don’t. I love going to the movies. I love watching people do weird shit in the snack line. I love the smell of movie popcorn. I love picking out the perfect seats in the dark. But at the end of the day, all the lights come on and I have to go back home. Then before we know it all the lights shut off for good. Do you see what I’m saying? I don’t know … I should just stop talking now.”
I wanted to bust out another Michael Scott impression, but it was like the water in my funny well had dried up. I had to dig us out of there, and pronto.
“Listen,” I said. “I get what you mean. I totally do. But I think when things’re going well, when you’re having a good time, just stop and enjoy the moment. Like right now, for instance. Let’s both take a second to enjoy how dumb you looked with all that pancake in your mouth.”
The edges of her lips curled up.
“You know what else there, lil’ lady?” I added. “Sometimes you make my noodle spin like a lasso at the rodeo, so I’sa reckon you knock it off and we hit that ol’ dusty trail.” My Hollywood Cowboy accent was always a hoot at parties.
“In case you’ve never been mandated,” Columbia said, smiling, “you need to have your head examined. As of yesterday.”
If I’d had the ability to freeze time, the minute that followed is the moment I’d’ve frozen. Comfortable silence, satisfied stomachs, infinite possibilities everywhere.
“Just so you know, I baffle everyone,” Columbia said, breaking our mutual quiet. “That’s probably why I don’t have lots of friends. People think they know me, but they really don’t. I guess that’s my schtick.”
“Your schtick?” I said.
“Yep. My schtick. Funny word, ain’t it? Schtick.”
“Schtick is a goofy word,” I agreed.
• • •
At the cash register, I told Doris to put it on one check.
“It’s okay, I’ll pay my half,” Columbia said, reaching inside her purse. I gently grabbed her wrist.
“I got it,” I said.
“No, it’s okay, but thank you.”
“No, it’s not okay. I got it.”
“One check or two?” Doris said impatiently. My earlier charisma counted for squat.
“One check,” I answered definitively.
Columbia squeezed me hard in the area where a love handle hadn’t yet grown.
In my ear, she whispered, “Jerk.”
My stomach tingled.
• • •
There wasn’t much small talk on the drive back, so I put on the same playlist we’d heard earlier. The Ramones. The Sex Pistols. Rancid. Black Flag. The Clash. blink-182.
“What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong weirdly slipped into the mix, and Columbia sucked in a deep breath and remarked, rather remarkably: “Who stops to listen to music anymore? Like, who lets it call to them?” Then another genre outlier infiltrated the party, Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good,” to which we sang together loudly the part where Amy says And sniffed me out like I was Tanqueray.
When we got back to her place, it was pitch dark outside. All the lights were off everywhere. For all I knew, I was in another country. I practically was: in Devine, the hill country. Country living. A different breed of beast, I heard in my father’s voice.
Then I remembered in high school when, during a lunch, Columbia confessed that her mom had grounded her once for two months because she forgot to bathe her baby sister. I did the math quickfire: two months was one-sixth of a year. I realized how Columbia had only mentioned bad things about her family. It didn’t seem to me, then, that a girl like her could come from a family like hers.
“Thanks for tonight,” she said. “And for paying for me. That was really sweet.”
“No problem,” I said. “I had lots of fun.”
Though I could barely make out her face—I’d killed the headlights when I got to her trailer—the moonlight painted a shape I knew belonged only to her.
I put my hand to my chest, felt my heart pound. Then she spoke again.
“Y’know,” she said, “I never did thank you that time you lent me your shirt junior year.”
“What?” I blurted.
“Your shirt, junior year, remember? So I wouldn’t get expelled?”
“I mean, yes, I remember that. I’m just wondering what made you think of that right now?”
“Well, because I hadn’t thanked you before, and now, I’m taking the opportunity to do so. See how this works, good sir?”
“No, it’s just … you baffle me. You do baffle me. I suppose this proves I’m exactly like everyone else.”
Her moonlit mouth formed a smile.
“Don’t you remember you kissed me on the cheek outside the computer lab? How could you forget that?” I said.
“I kissed you?”
“Yeah. On the cheek.”
“Dang. You’re right. How could I forget that?”
“Harsh. You’ll make a great public defender someday.”
“Wiseass,” she said.
“Show you a wiseass,” I said. A dare, sort of.
There was silence—less comfortable this time.
After a while—I don’t know how long—Columbia said, “Mr. Jenkins would’ve kicked me out of school. Mom would’ve murdered me. All for a lousy blouse. I didn’t even have boobs. I still don’t.”
“We all knew Mr. Jenkins had a hard-on for you,” I said, trying—failing—not to think about her chest. “He just wanted you to gush on his porn ’stache.”
“Barf, that’s gross even to joke about. I’d rather die.”
“Hey, everything turned out all right, didn’t it?”
Outside my window, I saw the dark mass that was Columbia’s home. Inside was her mother—her mother, in bed fast asleep, or perhaps waiting for her rebellious daughter to step inside so she could lock her up in her room. One-sixth of a year.
“Well,” Columbia said, breaking my impure imaginings, “I’d better get going.”
“Alrighty.”
“Call me again sometime?”
“For sure,” I said. “I’ve got your digits now.”
When our eyes met, different information was passed along. Damaging, is how I came to later think about it. My heart pounded through my throat. I felt all of its vitality. My brain drilled a single command into me, repeated it over and over.
Do it. Do it. Do it now.
I put my hand on her lap—she didn’t remove it. My other hand went to her chin and raised it. Her breathing heavy, labored.
Then she pushed my seat back, climbed on top of me.
She clasped my face, bit my bottom lip soft, then hard. My hands slid up her shirt, then down.
She seized my hands and said, “Nah ah.”
Gripping both my hands, she forced them south, slowly, her control, her pace. She leaned into my ear and it was all hot breath.
“Good boy,” she whispered.
Some things you promise to keep to yourself your whole life. What happened then is one of them.
• • •
Back in my car, windows fogged up, Columbia smoothed her hair looking into the passenger mirror, our vision having adjusted to the dark.
Silent, I studied her slender fingers slide across her curls as if she was playing the harp.
When she flipped the mirror up, she said, “See ya later, alligator.”
“In a while, crocodile,” I said back.
She stepped out of my car and walked toward her front door, never turning around to wave goodbye. I couldn’t know what this would mean to me in the years to come.
I waited a few seconds, hoping she’d come back to send me off with a kiss. But no. There was nothing left for me to do. So I left.
Not once on the drive back did I peer at my rearview mirror. Not once did I play any music.
I drove.
• • •
I waited for a call, a text. None arrived. Three days in a row I texted a single question mark. Three question marks stacked one on top of the other. All unanswered. Soon, her voicemail message disappeared, replaced by a repulsive robotic voice informing me that the person’s voicemail inbox was full. Sorry, goodbye. Basically, I never heard from her again. Not really.
• • •
Quick sidenote: These days, whenever a song comes on from say, blink-182, Green Day, Panic! At The Disco—bands of my adolescence, basically, of the pop-punk variety—I listen to it with an initial pleasure that rapidly fades, as though seeing an old friend whose irritating habits the passage of time made me forget.
For the record, I never finished watching The Office in its entirety. I saw maybe the first three seasons and then in college got hooked on these new-at-the-time shows called Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Maybe you’ve heard of them? Good stuff.
Also—and sorry to leave this on a downer—one day during my last year of college, I was scrolling through local news articles when I read, to my complete shock, that Mr. Jenkins, my principal in high school, was caught having an inappropriate relationship with a seventeen-year-old girl. He shot himself in the head, having felt, I assumed, he’d flushed his life down the toilet. My first thought, though I’m ashamed to admit it, was this: I bid thee adieu, Mr. Porn ’Stache. What my former principal did with—to—that girl is absolutely disgusting. Unquestionably immoral. But knowing how his story ended makes me sick to my stomach. Just plain sad. I occasionally think about the wife and son he left behind. If they’re okay. If like the rest of us they manage to, on occasion, enjoy good meals and lively music, despite all the terrors.
• • •
After graduating from college, I saw this girl named Priscilla. She was short, dark, round-faced, opinionated—a braggadocious Catholic, basically. We’d met in undergrad but didn’t know each other well.
A superficial game of twenty-one questions on Facebook led to me asking her out to dinner. Easy-peasy.
On our first date, I remember her saying, “If I ever caught my husband watching porn, I’d throw that pig out of my life so hard his balls would spin.”
When you’re younger, red flags don’t mean as much.
We lasted a few months, Priscilla and I. Did all the things young people do fresh out of college. One night, I’d planned to pick her up at her apartment so we could go out for a steak dinner. I’d earned a small bonus at work. I’d made reservations two weeks in advance. When I got to her place, I called but she didn’t answer. I called twice more and still no answer. I waited a few minutes before trying again. Straight to voicemail. I don’t know how long I was out there stalling, my cologne seeping into my nostrils. Fed up, I sped off.
Halfway home, she called me back.
“I’m sooo sorry!” she said in a panic. “I totally crashed after I got home from work. I’m sorry!”
“Alrighty,” I said.
“You’re not mad, are you?”
“Why would I be mad, Priscilla?”
“Hey, like, I’m really sorry, okay.”
“Don’t be. You’re tired, right? So rest up. Have a good night.”
She immediately called back.
“You hung up on me? Like, seriously?”
“What’d you want me to say?” I said.
“You know what? All right then.” Click.
I called back and it was straight to voicemail.
That night, I had a wild dream. I don’t remember it, but I woke up with my shirt drenched.
Priscilla and I squeezed two more dates out of each other. The last time, we were both mostly on our phones.
What can I say? It wasn’t meant to be. Life, it chugs along.
• • •
Christmas season, Friday night at the mall. My old stomping grounds. The best time of the year, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, shut your piehole.
I walk around and think, Nothing’s changed. The gray tiles lifeless as ever, hella dirty, too, for bad measure. What used to be an Auntie Annie’s is now space for rent. Waldenbooks is gone. People don’t read anymore. They sure as hell don’t go to the mall on Friday nights.
I stop right in front of the Dillard’s, the one I used to work at, and stare up at the glowing white sign. All of a sudden, I’m getting kinda hungry.
I look down the walkway and see the woman in the distance with a toddler. She’s holding the child’s hand and they’re moving in my direction. Moving closer. I watch closely—very, very closely.
Closer, closer, closer, then I process it’s her. It’s absolutely her.
Suddenly, a new organ seems to fatten in the space between my heart and my stomach. It’s the size and density of a bowling ball, the motherfucker.
She bends down to tie the girl’s shoes. Speaks something into her ear.
What immediately comes to my mind is, Who the Daddy be?
Then an urgent message from my command center:
Run.
Do it. Do it. Do it now.
I bolt across the lifeless tiles like idiot Forrest Gump, my braces fallen off. I hit my stride and I’m smiling. Why am I smiling? I’m disturbing the graveyard peace of the mall, the final resting place of yesteryear’s capitalists. I don’t look back. Not once do I look back. That’s the important thing to remember here. I’m at the opposite end now. Sucking air. How sweet and painful the oxygen is. I realize how absurdly out of shape I am. I’m wheezing and wheezing and wheezing, and as I wheeze my stomach growls, then a hot stab pierces my right knee, the one I injured playing league basketball, and I grab my pathetic excuse for a knee as the pain spreads down my leg. My shirt is soaked in sweat and blood rushes to my head and my corpuscles deconstruct to goop. I’m losing weight now. I’m diving. Weightless. Wheeeeee!
• • •
A gentle tapping on my chinny-chin-chin helps me come to.
“He’s alive!” shouts the little girl. “I knew he was playing dead, Mommy!”
From the ground, supine, I study the girl’s face—not long enough to distinguish the similarities—then I turn toward her mother, who’s kneeling beside her.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hello,” Columbia says. “Are you okay? Shall I call an ambulance?”
“Shall not,” I answer. “I’m just resting my eyes. My bruised cortex.”
Another sentence sprouts in my head and try as I might to repress it, it bum-rushes out of my throat like a convict on the run: “It’s nice to know your phone’s in working order.”
She stares at me. Her eyes are the same, but not the same at all. For a hot second I can’t read her but then her expression loosens into something that seems unreachably sad. Nostalgic. Before she can say another word, her daughter again taps my chin.
“Are you a monster, mister? Is your name Fwankenstein?”
• • •
“Hey, think you can be ready in fifteen minutes?” I ask my wife over the phone.
“What?”
“I’m going over to pick you up. I’m starvin’ like Marvin.”
“Aren’t you out shopping right now?”
“Yeah, but I had a little accident and built up a healthy appetite.”
“What? Did something happen?”
“Ran into a brick wall called My Past. I think I tweaked my knee.”
“What?”
“Mall cops.”
“Is everything okay?
“Yeah. Everything’s fine,” I said.
“Why’re you acting weird?”
“Usually, I always do.”
“Look, I’m not ready right now. I need at least thirty more minutes.”
“Thirty more minutes? All right, your wish is granted. How does IHOP sound?”
“IHOP?”
“Yeah. Been craving waffles and scrambled eggs. Maybe some pancakes too. Mmm, pancakes.”
“Craving? You pregnant?”
“After last night, you might be,” I said. “We might be.”
“Shut up.”
“All right. Be ready in thirty minutes?”
“You know, you’re very annoying sometimes.”
“I know. I usually always am.”
“Ugh. Don’t speed on the highway. Bye.”
“Love ya too.”