Lost in the Quotidian

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Originally uploaded by Blue Dragonfly Girl.

We took our seats for World History. Mrs. A. was still grading papers at her desk. My friends whispered to me excitedly. It seems a junior named S. had seen me walking to class and said, “If only she were older, the things I would do…” within their earshot.

“Who’s S.?” I asked.

And so the crush of my 9th grade year began.

S. was older. 16, almost 17 but with the goatee of a 25-year-old. Rumor had it that he’d had to stay back a grade. He did nothing outstanding. And I was immediately fascinated.

I was a cute little thing who slouched because of scoliosis, wore short dresses with outrageous tights and hadn’t developed breasts yet. I was in all the honors classes, played in the high school band, was acting the role of Muriel in Harvey at nights at the local theater, read Kurt Vonnegut Jr. incessantly, had just been introduced to the pleasures of marijuana and loved Prince because my best friend did.

I approached S. one day as lunch was ending. He sat on a windowsill in the hall eating French fries. I laughed at him. He offered me a fry. It was salty. I ran to class and memorized the scene that had just occurred.

His mother cleaned houses downtown and some mornings she’d drop him off to walk the mile to school from there. Often we’d plan to meet up. I remember meeting him a block away from my house. “I brought you coffee,” he said. I looked down at the cardboard cup. “But, it’s cold now.” We left it entangled in the roots of a hedge and started our walk.

I couldn’t tell my mom about this, so I had to keep the morning walks a secret, touting the benefits of a little exercise over getting a ride to school. My mom would shrug her shoulders and drive off with my little brother in the passenger seat.

One morning after one such stealthy escape, S. and I emerged from a short-cut at the very moment that my mother drove past on the main road. His arm was draped around me. My mother and I made eye contact. I froze. The car zoomed past us.

Later my brother said, “S.? You like S.? He walks like a duck you know!”

I liked that he walked like a duck.

Later my mother gave me a talk about being careful not to lose myself in a relationship. I’m sure she disapproved but luckily she believed in my still intact innocence too much to forbid me to see S. or talk to him on the phone at night, stretching the cord so that I could sit on the couch. And I dismissed her prudent advice as silly but wondered about it in the back of my mind.

On weekends, S. and I sometimes met up and walked to Espresso (Or ‘Depresso’ as some enjoyed calling it) café together. It was the only café in town. And at 14 I was cultivating a habit for caffeine. I remember my mother handing me an article from Utne Reader talking about all its detriments. I didn’t listen then.

One Sunday, I sat in Espresso’s outdoor patio pretending to be in the south of France, looking at the peeling paint on the bricks across the way, smelling the cigarette scent wafting past my face. S.’s friend went inside to make a call on the payphone. S. leaned into me and kissed me. I tasted coffee and nicotine. His neck smelled of patchouli. His facial hair scratched lightly against my chin. I smiled — inwardly fireworks were exploding and I couldn’t wait to tell my girlfriends — and I took the initiative to sit on his lap.

Later they drove me home over the cobblestones of Main Street and down small streets to my house. I sat in the backseat. S. fiddled with the radio up front. Nearing my house, S. stretched himself over the seats, his face next to mine and kissed me again softly. Then he changed gears and started using his tongue. “Careful,” I said, “I’m getting a cold.” He retreated and I ran up my driveway, embarrassed – I hadn’t meant to ward off his advances.

We walked to school that Monday morning. My trumpet case clunked against my knees. My tights today were covered with images of pineapples and apples. I stared at the ground. “So?” I said, “So, what are we?”

“I guess we’re seeing each other,” he said.

I didn’t know exactly what that meant, obviously not yet boyfriend/girlfriend, but it was something. It was a label. I was ecstatic. We were together. Maybe we could move up the scale and someday be ‘going out.’

At lunch we walked through the hallways. A jock with geek glasses emerged from behind the stairs, began singing ‘Rock a Bye Baby’ and held his arms like a cradle.

After school, S. kissed me goodbye at the water fountains.

Two days later, I greeted S. between Marine Science and Honors English. “I need to talk to you at lunch,” he said.

“About what?”

“Nothing bad,” he said.

I ruminated over this in English class, sitting at my desk with the tan cover as our teacher spoke about the Oedipus complex. “What it means –” she said and then slammed her hand down on a boy’s desk. She paused. “– Is that you want to sleep with your mother!” The class giggled nervously. “Don’t laugh girls,” she said, “You know what it means about you!”

S. pulled me into the handicapped girl’s bathroom adjacent to the cafeteria. I’d just laid my lunch out on the table. Tofuna salad sandwich, made by my mother. I didn’t want to eat it. My friends watched us walk away.

“We have to break up,” he said.

“I knew it wouldn’t be good!” I said, “Why? Why?”

He couldn’t really tell me. And launched into issues of age.

“We can still be friends, right?”

I marched to the salad bar and using tongs scooped iceberg lettuce as ferociously as possible onto my paper plate. That night I listened to Tori Amos by the light of half a dozen candles and wrote about the events of the day in my journal, nearly crying, but not quite. My mother yelled at me to go to bed.

A few weeks later, he approached me and my best friend at Espresso. We sat at a circular table with the light of the window shining in. I had been contemplating buying a slice of chocolate cake.

“We’re going to see Handel’s Messiah this afternoon,” I said primly, “Do you want to come?”

“I can’t,” he said.

“I hadn’t thought you would go,” I replied. “I doubt you could appreciate something like that.”

I watched wistfully as he walked off to join his friends.

I couldn’t keep myself from wanting to stop and talk with S. in the halls. I couldn’t keep myself from thinking about S. Sometimes he’d ask me to wear a particular blue corduroy dress with orange trimming to school. Sometimes I would.

Occasionally after school, when I had time to spare in between extracurricular activities we went and sat in a dark stairwell that nobody ever used. We didn’t say much. We didn’t touch much. We fit into the rubber square, backs against the concrete wall, feet resting awkwardly on the staircase. Fifteen minutes later we got up and he’d kiss me goodbye on the cheek.

Every once in a while, S.’s face would appear at the window to my Spanish class after lunch. I’d wait a few seconds, then ask for the bathroom pass. We’d meet at the water fountains and hug each other hello. Then I’d go back to class.

The crush faded slowly between spring and summer, but sometimes I still felt a flicker of delight in passing him. Why was it that I’d liked him so much anyway? I always berated myself about that. My friends thought he was a loser and I feigned that I did too. I pretended I was above him because I felt vulnerable. Clearly he never read Sylvia Plath! What did he know?

And I think that the simple truth is I liked him because he noticed me. He noticed me that day as I walked past oblivious through the high school hallways. He saw something in me – even if he said it crudely – and at fourteen I didn’t have any idea what that something was, but felt special that he saw it.

Someday, I thought, I’d be doing grand things. And my teachers thought so too and encouraged my voracious reading habits. But, what mattered to me at the time was S. noticing my Doc Marten’s were untied and kneeling down to tie them for me on the stairs to the second floor in the middle of the in-between classes rush. It set my heart a flutter and then I had to concentrate on Algebra.

Looking at it now, I’m grateful that he never tried to push any boundaries with me. He must have ended our two-day stint of seeing each other because he knew I was still untouchable, and jailbait beyond that. I might have the vocabulary given to me by more experienced friends, but I was too naïve to move beyond kisses, and mentally I couldn’t really conceive of it – things were blurry in my vision of how to proceed. At that age sex seemed about as foreign to me as sushi, and as a vegetarian I didn’t eat fish anyway. I heard that S. once boasted a couple years later to an acquaintance of mine, that he had kissed me and I felt that same twinge of pleasure that such a thing would have mattered to him.

I last ran into S. two winters ago. I had graduated college a year earlier and had been working on the island as a gardener and part-time ESL teacher, living at home like the rest of my friends. My ambitions were to save money and then travel far, far away and begin my true post-college existence. My deadline was December.

I backed my red truck up to an enormous hill of debris, pulled the tarp off the back of the truck and began pitch-forking the results of a day of emptying window-boxes onto the hill. S. pulled up next to me in a pick-up and began doing the same.

We eased into casual conversation. He told me about traveling around Australia, around the world. And now, he had started a landscaping business and he was expecting a baby. He looked exactly the same age that he had 9 years ago. I probably did too – if you could find me somewhere underneath the many bundled layers I had on to combat the cold.

I finished first and drove off, feeling peaceful and pleased, my gloved hands against the cold steering wheel. I had been feeling the discontent of unfulfilled wanderlust, but there was this man that I used to know and he was happy with his life and that made me happy and somehow tinted all our old high school interactions with a pretty glow. I could see why I had spent so long liking him.