“I’ll talk faster,” I said. “I’ll try.”
Finally we went back to where we started, our family doctor. “Maybe,” he said, “he’s just thoughtful.” And for some reason, that seemed to satisfy everyone. In a way, I was the opposite of dumb, although I wouldn’t necessarily call me smart, either.
“So how’d you end up out here? Most people you meet in this bar either grew up here or go to the art school in the next town. Tell me you’re not a first-year sculpture student.”
You laugh. Oh, you have a charming laugh. It’s thick and hearty. Your laugh is blowing my mind.
“That’s sweet of you to say. My undergraduate years have long since passed. Want to see my ID?”
I laugh back at you. That I can do, no problem. Laughing is easy, though I don’t find much funny. I’m picky, I suppose. I hold my hands up, palms toward you. I give, you win. You’re no college girl.
“I got divorced.”
You drop your eyes to your hands, an imaginary ring still lingers on your finger. There is a delicate white line still wrapped around it, a final reminder you’ll have for a while. And in the center, the perfect center, is one perfect freckle.
I’ll bet you had a big old rock. I bet you made him treat you right. You seem a little fancy. Your hair is cut nicely around your chin, your skin glows like the moon on a clear night after a good rain. You look like you’ve been taking care of yourself, like you’ve had the time to take care of yourself. Most women I’ve met around here don’t even know they’re supposed to take care of themselves like that. Or maybe they’ve just got better things to do with their time. I’m not judging you, though. You’re just different is all.
“And then I had to work again. So I got my old job back, but they could only place me out here. Just for a few years, they said. But I’m glad. It’s good to be working again. No, I really am. I forgot what it was like. To work.”
I scratch behind my ear, I look down at my beer, I shift on my stool. Then, finally, grudgingly—it feels just like that, like my brain and my mouth are wrestling like brothers, and when I speak my mouth is saying “uncle”—I release some words: “I believe you.”
“Plus it’s quiet out here,” you say suddenly. “I like it. I like it a lot. People seem to just talk all the time out east. Talking, talking, talking.”
You put your hand in profile in front of your face, then bend your thumb against your other fingers like a pair of flapping lips. I notice the large diamond studs piercing your shapely, milky ears. There they are. There’s what’s left. It stings my eyes to look at them.
“It’s like, enough already,” you say. “Just be quiet.”
You’d think it’d be hard for me to get by in high school and even college, and I’ll admit my teachers stopped calling on me after a while, especially since the other kids loved me, saw my silence as a subversive act designed to throw the teachers off their perfectly timed lesson plans. I aced every test I took, though. As for making friends, well, I grew up with everyone I went to high school with, so they were accustomed to my pauses. Just as Ricky—now he’s Rick, I know, but old habits die hard—Waterman added five inches and forty pounds his sophomore year of high school, and another two inches a year till he graduated, I added ten seconds, then twenty, then thirty, to my pauses. Now I average a minute, minute and a half most days.
The pauses are different lengths for different people. Like Ricky, I see him once a month, I go over to the house, hang out with him and Cindy and the kids, and I might not pause more than ten, fifteen seconds when we’re sitting out back, drinking beer. We always talk about the same things, listen to the same songs on his boom box, and he always looks the same, give or take a couple of pounds, so there’s nothing new to distract me. But when I meet someone new, someone like you, and you’ve got a new story, and such a different way of talking than most people around here—don’t get me wrong, I like it, I like it a lot—it takes me a while to get to my next point. Right now, I feel like I’ve been pausing forever.
“I’m being coy,” you say. “Sorry.” You name the large software corporation close to Portland. Strategic thinking. Quarterly reports, 401(k). An office. A small one. But there’s a door you can close, and that seems important to you. You say “three weeks vacation” like it’s a mantra, then shyly admit “after the first year.”
I drop a coaster, bend over and pick it up, wipe it off. “You landed south,” I say. “Most folks just move to the city when they work there. Looking at you, I would have called city.”