I can recall the moment I passed from childhood into adolescence. I was sitting in my sixth-grade classroom, working on my mathematics drill, when one of those messengers from the office entered the room. She was a student my age, and I noticed something about her. Those excrescences I associated with grown-up women were there and quite prominent. And the mere contemplation of her bodily features was having an odd effect on me. It took me twenty years to realize this was the worst moment of my life — for I had entered a battle of sorts, one I was doomed to loose, even when I thought I was winning.
And so, by the time Alice Mary came along, I was divorced and rather denuded of assets. I hadn’t noticed her until she came sidling along the bookstore rack where I was standing. I was trying to decide whether to buy Homage to Catalonia or forgo it until next payday. She selected a book by Ortega y Gasset and was flipping through the pages and sighing as though she wanted conversation. But I was mulling over Orwell and the eight dollars they wanted for the book.
Yet I did glance at Alice Mary long enough to notice her figure and see her dark eyes flash. She closed her book, finally, and replaced it on the rack, and by the time I looked around, she was halfway out the door. That left me with Orwell, and I decided to pay the price. A tough decision — parting with money was painful, though I parted with more of it at bookstores than I did anywhere else. I was making six dollars an hour at a combination dry cleaner’s and laundromat just down the street. While most people wanted jobs, and Help Wanted signs bloomed like azaleas all over Brightown, North Carolina, I was always looking to resume a life of leisure — to retreat into my book-lined shell. The next best thing was simple fetch-and-carry work. It required no great decisions, no fight for love and glory. A day’s work, a day’s pay — all without complication. Of course, my limited means and the job itself almost guaranteed I would never remarry. I couldn’t afford it, and I was no catch.
Anyway, that afternoon, I arrived at work to find a sleeping bag had burst in one of the washers. Laundromat customers weren’t always brilliant, and some couldn’t read labels. And so, from time to time, small disasters like this occurred. I cleaned the wet feathers from the machine and the floor and then fell into my evening-shift routine.
An odd thing about the business — the same kinds of people came to wash on the same nights. All the pretty girls might show up one night, and all the homely girls the next. Then it might be all the fat people, or all the nut cases — for this last group, I would check the phase of the moon. This particular night was pretty-girl night, and at one point, not surprisingly, Alice Mary stepped through the double-doorway. She clutched a wicker- basket full of laundry and looked around with eyes big and brown, before choosing a washer and getting down to business.
I was sweeping the floor at the time. The customers and I conversed easily as I pushed the floor debris into a neat pile. Only in the laundromat business did a pushbroom confer status. Alice Mary dawdled over her wash, and we ended up talking about writers we admired. Then, out of the blue, she asked me whether I was the manager — women often asked me that question. I always gave them a simple, honest answer: “No, I just work here.” I could sense the words bouncing in their heads — see the blinking eyes, the pensive looks. I’m not complaining, just dissecting the phenomenon of womanhood.
And yet, I did finally ask her out. She said, “O.K. — great,” with a smile quite genuine, and she kept our date the following Friday. At this point, I should describe the dating ritual as it evolved in the 1980s. I can recall an earlier attempt, after my divorce, to get back into the social swim. When I called for the woman, I offered my arm as I had always done on dates, and she shied away — yes, shied away. And as she shied, she said, “That would suggest an intimate relationship existed between us.”
It was then I began to understand the contemporary dating protocols. First you dated on Fridays, then on Saturdays — that was the big transition. You stayed together and enjoyed sex until Sunday morning. Then and only then did you hold hands or lock arms — and go to brunch, thus announcing your intimacy to the whole town. The one time I did go to brunch, alone as it happened, I felt I was invading the privacy of all those worn-looking heavy daters munching scrambled eggs, pancakes, fruit salad, and whatever else they spooned from the buffet.
Well, anyway, Alice Mary was five-foot-one and dark-haired and effervescent. The studied informality of the times suited her. She wore the designer jeans that were everywhere, and they looked especially good on her, revealing the roundness of her hips and the perfection of her posture. She liked to laugh, and I did my best to make her laugh and laughed myself when she said she would rather have gone out in my old car. I had borrowed the boss’s sporty model for the evening. It was far more reliable than my old Volkswagen, which, by now, burned as much oil as gasoline. We had a long, pleasant meal at a popular vegetarian restaurant with a menu featuring beanburgers and smoothies. At the time, it was fashionable to consume “alternative protein” sources — for some silly reason involving the worldwide protein supply.
She confessed she was a socialist. “But not as radical as my sister Lorelei.” She spoke with a semi-lisp, and I mimicked it, and she laughed. Lorelei, I later discovered, was a twenty-four-carat bomb thrower and inciter of a violent demonstration in a nearby town that wiped out a portion of the local communists.
About Robert Watts Lamon
