Margaret looked at Lou and tried to imagine an identical twin. Lou was solid: 5’10” with dark hair on a high forehead. Perhaps the openness of his face was from skin’s slow advance under a receding hairline; Margaret wasn’t sure. His best features were his biceps, unfortunately hidden most of the time beneath the white shirts he always wore to the office. Each time she saw his bare torso she was surprised anew.
Lou kissed well and he was an intelligent lover. The sex was good, the rhythms of possibly being a couple comfortable. They were reasonably well matched.
Their relationship had hit the point where she knew everything obvious about the man. Margaret knew the cliché: You don’t really know someone until you’ve been a dedicated couple for years and gone through life’s trials together. Blah, blah, blah. But after the first few months Margaret wondered if he were clever enough to hold her interest when they had their clothes on. The afternoon Lou confided in her that he had a dead brother in his past, and a twin at that, Margaret’s flagging interests revived.
Margaret tried to express this to her sisters when they met to walk around Scupper Lake. It was an easy route, and once they were under way they would talk, gossiping and trading stories. Lila had established the walks around the lake after she quit her gym. “Too much picking up going on there,” was all she’d said. Lila was really determined this time to lose the extra thirty pounds. If her sisters began going with her out of sororal solidarity, all three of them had come to look forward to getting together twice a week.
“You guys, Lou was getting a little boring.” Margaret unconsciously sped up with the admission. Her stride was the longest of the three of them, and her slower sisters had to walk faster.
“Slow down,” they commanded. “Are you dropping him?”
“I don’t know.” Margaret slowed down a little, her face with its pointy features closed as she thought about how to explain it. “There’s something about the process of getting to know another person that’s depressing. It’s always the same. You meet at a party or in a disco, or get introduced by friends.”
“That’s just normal. How else would you meet?” Lila asked.
Margaret went on undeterred. “Here’s the experience you go through. First,” she said, “you eye the packaging. Height, check. Weight, check. Body mass proportional to the first two items, check. Reasonable intelligence? Does your date make the effort to appear witty and ease with you and the others sitting at the table? Check, check, and check.
“A potential lover needs to register on the all-important eroto-barometer. If your arm hairs don’t tingle ever so slightly as he or she brushes by, hopefully just ever so slightly closer than is absolutely necessary, forget it.
“So there you are, in potential relationship territory. Taking it slow or plunging ahead. In either case you keep that mental shopping list close to your chest by your heart, surveying the items. Every so often you tick another off the list. A couple months into this your knowledge of the other person moves beyond the superficial attributes without which you don’t even consider someone as a partner, and you reach the Dead Zone.
“That’s when the hook enters the picture. A big hook, you know, like the one in old comedy routines? It reaches across the stage and drags off your luckless swain as the curtain drops on the relationship. Or, the hook lands in you. The hook gets in under your skin, tugging you in closer. Something’s become so intriguing or comfortable – or both – that you stick around to see what other tricks this magician’s hiding up his sleeves, what new rabbit she might pull next out of that big top hat.”
Margaret realized her sisters were staring.
“My God, are you blushing?” asked Ginny. Margaret had actually turned red, nonplussed by her own eloquence.
“Didn’t you say he’s a good lover? Is he good in bed? If he’s boring and bad in bed, dump him!” Lila carried hand weights and they swung rhythmically from side to side with her comment; her sisters kept a measured distance away from her arms.
“Keep him as a boy toy.” Ginny, the youngest sister, the peacemaker, was more diplomatic.
“Well,” Margaret qualified, “Lou is starting to talk about his family. And man, is he ever full of surprises!”
“Like what?” her sisters exclaimed at the exact same time.
Lila added, “I thought you knew everything already.”
Ginny added, “Two sisters, both a lot older, one in Washington State and the other up in Maine? And his parents live in a Sun City condo in Arizona, right?”
Lila stared at Ginny as the three walked on. “How can you remember all that?” she asked. “Do you go home afterward from these walks and write everything down?”
“You said you feel like you guys make a nice looking couple, brunette and blond, yin and yang, right?” Ginny persisted, ignoring Lila. “Did he say something to change things?”
“He was yin and yang with someone else first,” Margaret started to say, and abruptly she stopped. She wanted to keep Lou’s deceased twin a secret for herself just a little longer. “Ask me later,” Margaret stalled. “I don’t know yet if it’s worth reporting back.”
Margaret’s sisters observed her with looks that meant, We know you’re holding out on us. Lila laughed and Ginny said, “Sure, Sis. Just keep us posted when you’re ready to talk about it!”
NOTES: ©Jadi Campbell 2012. “Hit and Run” is the first chapter of my book Broken In: A Novel in Stories. This story will run all month. Broken In and my other novels are available at Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
Click here for my author page to purchase my books.
For twenty-five years (minus a day) I had a memory of rose-colored glass. Uwe and I got married a quarter of a century ago. Aside from thinking Yikes, how did that happen?!, I have sighed Awwww. Not many things last this long, especially when we’re talking about human beans….
Our wedding anniversary recently took place, and we wanted to return to the little town in Alsace where it all began. We booked the same hotel and both think we may even have been given the same room. We drove over a day before our anniversary and checked in as it began to rain. The sight of the rain on the windows was get outta here romantic.
I took some pictures. But later, checking to make sure my photos turned out, I was puzzled. The views of the village outside the windows had stayed pretty. But, wait a second: where were the colored panes of glass both of us are sure we remember?
The mystery was solved by a friend who reminded me that hotels – especially old ones – spend money on renovations. So, along with the elevator that was not there when we checked in 25 years ago, the windows were probably recent too. The glass in the windows is now textured, ‘pebbled’ maybe is the word I want. The view is still ever so slightly wavy and distorted…
We were in Laos and Vientiane for the first time, and only had a couple of days there. So we booked a car and driver and a guide, and left the city for a day. On the way back, we drove down a road filled with stands selling food and drinks. “It’s a rocket festival,” our guide exclaimed. “Would you like to stop and see it?”
What really drew our interest were the large numbers of men in dresses and skirts, wearing make-up. It was still the afternoon, and most of them were already hammered.
This is a brand new feature for this blog: I’m transcribing selected entries from my old travel journals. Currently I’m working on a batch of new posts set in Laos. I hauled out the journal I kept on our first visit to make sure that my memories match up with the facts. My descriptions from that trip are raw. I use a travel diary to record first impressions and get down the details to go over later (like now, years later). I’ve decided to post some of them here for your amusement. — Jadi
A 1,000-year-old site we visited with our guide on yesterday’s tour:
Buddhas in the Angkor Wat style carved out of boulders in the jungle. And, not twenty feet away, a spirit altar by a tall tree. [1]
No one’s allowed to build anything on or near the site. But the locals come there for ceremonies and celebrations. It had a rather hushed and holy air as we stood on the jungle (forest) floor in the welter of the afternoon heat at Vang Sang. An elephant graveyard was once found nearby!
The buildings all high on stilts for the rainy times. We had my favorite meal so far in this trip: a soup with fresh Chinese vegetables and tofu and vermicelli noodles – it may be the freshest ingredients in a soup of this kind I can remember. And a lake fish grilled whole with garlic and ginger and lemon grass and cilantro; and it was all just too delicious for words.
