Several
winters ago now, a man with a fading tan found me in the middle of a wet
snowstorm and asked me if I would like it if he took me out to dinner. I didn’t
take it seriously. He was polite so later when he asked me to sit on his face I
was surprised. His roommate offered me an Irish coffee before I left in the
morning.
I
didn’t take him seriously at all. I loved his cats and the way he talked about
growing things and how he introduced me to everyone he knew several times. He
would invite my sister and me over and make us casseroles and nachos and we
would rent movies he thought were funny or scary movies and curl up with the
tiny kittens he’d brought home from the farm.
In
December it still hadn’t snowed and he brought me up to the farm he worked at
to meet his boss and see where he’d spent his last summer growing vegetables in
the middle of a field. His boss was crude and the farm was beautiful. I walked
around the grounds and fields alone for a few hours, taking pictures of the
frozen water and the dead grass and his garden patch where the greens were
still thriving somehow. I shocked myself on the electric fence and sat in the
quiet, cold forest for as long as I could stand it. I peed by a fallen tree. And
then I went back down the hill to the glass house and went upstairs where
sheets separated beds into compartments and I fell into a deep sleep. As the daylight
faded he came up to get me and we went down to the barn to see the ducks and
chickens and then went to the greenhouse to get high.
I
liked the way he held doors open for me and how right away I was the right
person, somehow. I liked how I decided to feel comfortable naked in front of
him and how I could ask questions and be silly without feeling embarrassed
because he liked those things about me. I know now that I didn’t love him,
though.
I
can think of only one time in my life that I have ‘made love’. It was romantic.
When we woke up in one of the sheeted off sleep compartments in the glass house,
the first snow of the season had fallen and the light was white. Everything
felt new and we were alone. I came for the first time with him that morning.
And then he drove us back into town. In the truck on the way home we got high
again and then he dropped me off at work. I felt like something official was
happening, the way you sometimes feel. There was a slow permanence
developing.
We
sat in the mornings and evenings that surrounded work looking at seed
catalogues with the names that didn’t seem real, ‘Easter Egg Radishes’,
‘Strawberry Spinach’. We would turn on the lamps as the sun set so that we
could read on the couches as the cats continued to shed their summer coats. I
wouldn’t let him call me his girlfriend until six months had passed.
