The Ultimate Judgement Tool.

 It is a truth universally acknowledged that you can judge a man by his cheese.

It’s true.

If a man likes American, be cagey. He’s not just mind-numbingly predictable; he’s numb, a flesh-covered boulder of carbon and patches of chest hair swaddled in a David Taylor polo. You’ll be spending your time watching the Saturday night movie on FX and eating in various Ruby Tuesdays where girls named Christine are the hostess, and he will dribble mayonnaise from his Bison Bacon Cheeseburger onto his chin and not notice because he’s too busy talking about how he needs to have his car serviced, and while he’s mumbling about how much a new catalytic converter is going to run him your eyes will be fixated on that white glob clinging to his chin and you’ll think to yourself, This is it. This is what I’ve chosen. And he’ll lift the burger to his mouth with that orange slice between two pieces of medium-broiled substandard pressed ground beef – and, well, that will be your life. You could make a run for it, but there’s no point – the door is being blocked by Christine, who is chewing a piece of chartreuse Strident and talking to three enlisted 19-year-olds, one of whom is going to get her pregnant in the next twenty days (though which one’s sperm did the actual fertilizing will be the question), and do you know why that is? Because they like American cheese, too. Your vagina is no match for American Cheese Men, all of whom are horrifyingly potent.

If man likes Cheddar, keep an eye open. Cheddar is that unsettling neon orange color, almost identical to American, only sourer, which makes you wonder if they didn’t leave a wedge of it soaked in urine out overnight. Cheddar comes off as a sophisticated choice now and again, especially when paired with pouched salmon eggs or whatever it is the kids are smoking it with these days, but the truth is, it is the cheese of the nouveau riche. Cheddar is the choice for people who snicker at American for being déclassé and then buy a house on the oceanfront and name it Life’s a Beach. Cheddar Men are a healthy mix of Adidas cologne, megalomania, and Fox News. Men who perceive themselves as a wellspring of originality and then proceed to wear Old Navy flip-flops are not men in which you should be allowing entry into your vagina – sorry, Cheddar Men, these ladyparts are premium parking, and you need to go find some handicapped lot down the street.

If a man likes Pepper Jack, take the utmost care. He likes his ladies like he likes his Tupperware: easily stored in the fridge. He ain’t nothing but danger. This is especially true of men who like pepper jack cheese on their eggs. Jesus, these kinds of men are the worst. Who the hell needs something that piquant first thing in the morning? Clearly not someone who is concerned about SBS (Spicy Butthole Syndrome) for the rest of the day, meaning they’re the sort of men who have zero qualms about taking a dump in your guest bathroom mid-morning while reading your Glamour. They’re probably also super into anal, for reasons which I have not yet scientifically correlated but likely relate to their comfort with poop issues. And by anal, I don’t necessarily mean your anus. You can spot them before they order, as most of them are in fatigues.

If a man likes Muenster, he’s at least interesting, though likely a bit showy. If he wasn’t Ivy League, he had dreams of getting there which were likely crushed by socialized fundamentalism. I mean, structuralized functionalism. I mean, subsidized socialization. He smokes a lot of a cigarettes. His glasses are wire-rimmed. He owns at least three Brooks Brothers ties. He has Japanese prints in his living room. He will switch to Roquefort as soon as the trust fund left to him by his grandfather, a newspaper mogul, kicks in at thirty-five.

If a man likes Swiss, he’s what we here in the business call “a keeper.” Nice Jewish boys order Swiss. Husband material orders Swiss. Not too intense, pairs well with everything. Lovely grilled, and tastes comforting just out of the plastic-sealed package. As an added bonus, you can thread your tongue through one of the cheese holes, and, taking care to make small and gentle bites, fashion a heart with your teeth, making it the most romantic of the cheeses.

Gruyère, the fondue cheese? Gay. But a lot of fun to shop with. And they always make the best blowjob jokes.

I suppose you could argue that these are all broad oversimplifications, but, as is so often the case when I make sweeping generalizations based on my own blind cheese prejudices, I can earnestly assure you that I don’t care.

The most exciting thing I anticipated happening at No Frill Bar & Grill’s most excellent brunch was that I would get gravy on my biscuits, thus further alleviating the slight hangover I had going from the night before, but when I turned the car down Spotswood Avenue and spotted the CREIGH DEEDS FOR GOVERNER bus, I should have realized that gravy-laden bread soaking up the renegade alcohol I had trouncing around my system would be but a footnote in our day of brunchiness.

Ricky and Ursula, also in the car with heads hung, were slightly under the weather – Ursula because she had a few more beers than she had originally anticipated and Ricky because of lack of sleep. Ricky, a light sleeper as it is, had foolishly allowed me to settle up in her bed after a night of drinking, and consequently paid the price. “I have never, never in my life,” Ricky hisses at me upon our waking, “heard someone moan as much as you in their sleep. I’m not George Clooney sleeping next to you, what do you have to moan about? Or snore so fast! You must have the heartbeat of a fucking gerbil.” She had kicked me several times during the night, but as a tree could have fallen through her roof and literally between the two of us and likely not rouse me, her abuse did little more than provide me with slightly bruised shins come dawn. It was a small consolation for her.

So when we spot the CREIGH DEEDS FOR GOVERNOR bus, emblazoned in yellow and white blue and parked on the left of the one way street, my initial reaction is not, “Some of the most important figures of Virginian government could be on that bus, and they’re right here in my own neighborhood,” but rather, “Who parked this fucking bus right here?!” I grip the steering wheel and narrow my eyes, as though this will help navigate around it, and screech, “Right here. RIGHT HERE! Like this street is so wide you could park a goddamn tour bus on it! Goddamit. GODDAMIT.” Ursula and Ricky, still hazy, nod in agreement, and when I make it past the bus and into the parking lot, I shoot the monstrous vehicle a dirty look in my rearview. It does not seem to notice.

We walk into No Frill and put our names down. It will be somewhat of a wait, which is a small price to pay for the best chicken and gravy in town. We take a seat on a hard wooden bench, and a woman across from us talks loudly about how much she likes Clarks; she is wearing a pair of them right then, black clogs that resemble Peter Boyle’s in Young Frankenstein, which she as paired with chartreuse socks with cartoon spiders all over them. “They are just so COMFORTABLE,” she tells her dining partner, a woman with an eye patch on who nods in agreement but I deduce that her dominate eye is clearly the one with the patch, if she is truly in agreement. After five minutes of this, the bench starts to feel like a pew, and I figure having to sit for 15 minutes and listen to someone talk about their style preferences when what they think is really fetching is Halloween socks on November 1 while I’m hungover on a Sunday morning is likely my karmic penance for not taking a vested interest in organized religion in the first place. We were all meant to be miserable on Sunday mornings at some point.

Leo, a photographer I know from the paper, comes through the door. “Hey!” he says. “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to cattle prod my hangover with chicken biscuits,” I tell him. He has his camera by his side. “Are you working?”

“Doing a story for the Deeds campaign,” he says, and nods his head towards the corner, where several people in suits are hovered around a booth.

“Oh, I didn’t realize they were coming in.”

“Brunch, I guess,” Leo says. “I’ll come by if they make their way to your table.” Leo adjusts his press pass, shakes his eyebrows, and makes his way over to the booth.

When the host calls our name, we shoot up as though we were on fire and he has the only bucket of water in the building.

He seats us on the patio. I order a regular coffee and Ursula opts for a mimosa – a hair of the dog, if you will – and Ricky, more traditional, goes for a huge glass of water. We order our chicken and biscuits and are in the middle of discussing our opinions on escort ads when a huge commotion erupts at the entrance of No Frill. The milk-colored glass distorts our view from the patio, but several people are walking in, and there are cameras and boom mikes behind them. The restaurant hits a new sphere of energy, people craning their necks and leaning over the table to their dining partners. I hear someone say, “That’s the governor!” I can’t see him clearly, but there is someone standing in the entryway. He is talking with to somebody, and I wonder if the woman with the chartreuse spider socks has cornered him to let him know her opinion on footwear.

The waitress brings our chicken and biscuits, and the three of us are far too ravenous to concentrate on the parade of Democrats, no matter how much we admire them. A hungry stomach, sadly, will always trump a bleeding heart.

The moments where your life changes are sometimes very recognizable, incredibly instant: a stroll through the crosswalk that leaves you giving your name to a fireman in the back of an ambulance, turning the corner with a car-full of groceries and catching your partner out with someone else, walking into your front door and seeing furniture toppled and your television missing; but how was to know that spilling gravy on the front of my shirt would lead to a life-changing moment? How could I know that when I, in an uncoordinated state, let a glob of chicken gravy faint from my fork and settle on right breast that it would lead to a moment in time that I would replay over and over in my head, likely plaguing me until I am an old woman, prostrate in my hospital bed, toppled brunch drippings my deepest regret?

But when it fell, I thought little of it. I took my cloth napkin and wiped it off, ignorant that the grey smear against my salmon-colored top would be perhaps the greatest political, not to mention social, downfall of my life.

For the patio door swings open, and out comes a man in a simple steel-grey blazer and a red and navy blue tie. He has nicely styled but unfussy hair, and what strikes me most about him is how humble he seems when he steps up to a table in the corner, a young couple sharing cheese dip, and says, “Hello, I’m Creigh Deeds.”

“Oh, my God,” Ricky says. The three of us stare at him until finally a camera man tries to get a shot and hinders our view.

“Are we going to meet him?” I ask, and feel a pull of joy until I remember that I have an enormous gravy stain on my shirt. “Shit,” I say, trying to scratch it off with my fingernails. Creigh Deeds makes his way to the next table, and we get a better look at him.

“Damn, he is cute,” Ricky says. “Those ads don’t do him justice.”

“He is handsome,” Ursula politely agrees. She’s from Massachusetts, Kennedy territory, where they’re used to having sexy politicians.

Creigh Deeds spots our table. Ursula takes a napkin and folds it politely in her lap. Ricky takes a napkin and covers up her desecrated chicken and biscuits. I take a napkin and hold it against my gravy breast.

“This is so exciting!” I whisper, and then to Ursula, who has never been to a Ghent brunch before, I bubble, “This usually doesn’t happen at brunch.”

Creigh Deeds catches my last sentence and looks at us bashfully. “Forgive me for interrupting,” he says. He looks at the cameras behind him and says with an odd amount of apology, “Sorry about this, they just sort of follow me around.” He looks at us with sheepish brown eyes and we are sold.

“No!” says Ricky. “Not at all!”

“Well, I hope you’ll come out and vote on Tuesday,” he tells us, and shakes our hands. “We would really, really appreciate the support.” His voice is soft but confident, not at all like a politician’s, but that’s what I like about him. He thanks us for our time, apologizes for interrupting again, and moves on to the next table. We are smitten.

“He was precious,” I coo.

“Very nice man,” says Ursula.

“Totally hot,” Ricky says. Ricky immediately whips out her iPhone and updates her status: Just met Creigh Deeds. Very firm handshake, great ass, too.

We are finishing our plates when Jody Wagner, candidate for lieutenant governor, stops by. She is petite and wears a fetching black suit with white trim, and small silver earrings. “Hello, I’m Jody Wagner,” she says. She tells us that she’s running and hopes we will come out and vote. “And bring your friends!”

“I love to vote,” says Ricky.

“We will bring our friends,” I tell her. I have Ursula’s unfinished mimosa in my hand. “We’ll get everyone together. We’ll drink mimosas and then go vote!”

The idea sounded better in my head.

Jody Wagner likes this, and adds emphatically, “YES! I might do the same!” She makes her way to the next table and the three of us decide that if we ever had the choice of going out drinking with a politician, she would be the clear choice: Ursula because of her vested interest in feminist studies, me because I appreciate anyone with a personality, and Ricky because she believes Jody Wagner looks like she could pound a glass of bourbon.

We meet Steven Shannon, who is quite cute, and then there is a slight drop off of candidates making the rounds. We pay the bill and are just about to leave when the patio door swings open again and a man comes up to our table. I recognize him as Glenn Nye.

Glenn Nye is dressed in an impeccably tailored navy blue suit which stands rigid on his narrow but erect shoulders. His hair is chestnut, cut close in the typical Democratic ’do, something that says I’m no hippie but I can grow a good head of hair because I am young and vibrant and have new ideas but I’m definitely not a socialist, old people. He is good-looking, though not necessarily immediately striking, but he has startling grey eyes and their contact is so concentrated that suddenly he becomes the most handsome man on the patio.

“Are you ladies all from Norfolk?” he asks.

“No, Massachusetts,” Ursula says.

“YES, WE ARE FROM NORFOLK,” Ricky and I say in unison, and lean towards him with our eyelashes fluttering.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, shaking our hands. “I’m Glenn Nye.”

Because I was afraid I would miss the huge chance to really show him I was a savvy, politically-oriented woman with a liberal background and a penchant for hot dudes in suits, I forget about my gravy bosom and hear myself say, “I just read your Wikipedia entry!”

What. The. Fuck. Was. I. Doing.

Glenn Nye stares at me with his steely eyes and says, “Really? Was it good?”

“Yes,” I say. “Good.”

“Lot of biographical information on there,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “Lots.”

He continues, “The governor will be coming around to meet you soon.” We turn around and there is Tim Kaine, dressed in a faded jean jacket and nice trousers, shaking the hand of the cheese-sharing couple.

Ricky sighs dreamily, “He’s in denim! Like a cowboy.”

“Oh, I guess he is,” says Glenn Nye.

I find myself saying out loud, “I can’t believe the governor of Virginia is coming over and I spilled biscuits on myself.”

“Did you?” says Glenn Nye. “Where?”

“Here,” I say, and point to my chest. In hindsight, I will never understand why he didn’t seize that golden moment to invite a woman who was so classy to point out that she had spilled brunch on her tits to invite me back to the campaign bus for a glass of merlot, but I like to think it was simply an issue of time constraints.

“It doesn’t look bad,” he lies.

Not to be outdone, Ricky mentions, “I VOTE IN EVERY ELECTION.”

“Great!” says Glenn Nye. “So you’ll be out Tuesday, because it’s a close race and we could really use your support.”

“I WILL BE THERE,” Ricky says.

Leo comes up behind Glenn Nye and takes pictures of him talking with us, giving me a thumbs up that probably signals, I see you looking at his crotch.

Glenn Nye thanks us for our time and walks away. We are drunk from his magnetism and the strong mimosa we were sharing between the three of us, and are just basking in the haze of charm he has left lingering at our table when Tim Kaine comes up and says, “I saw you ladies talking to Glenn Nye.” He doesn’t wink but it is implied that he is doing so vocally. I imagine when they get on the campaign bus Tim Kaine will probably crow, “Did y’all see Glenn talking to those three girls on the patio? Oh, Glenn – so good with the young ladies.” Then Tim Kaine will nudge Glenn Nye with his elbow and wink, and Glenn Nye will laugh quietly, too professional to mention that, upon meeting him, one of the girls forced him to look at her breast.

We finally get up from the table and make our way towards the door, and we run into Tim Kaine again. He smiles at us and gestures for us to go ahead of him. “Ladies,” he smiles. We get in the car and can barely contain ourselves.

“What an exciting brunch,” coos Ursula.

“I wouldn’t have been more excited if I had met Brad Pitt,” I sigh.

“That Creigh Deeds,” says Ricky. “Jesus, what a great ass.”

Though they say the GOP will likely sweep the election, I am pleased to say that, fifteen years from now, when I’m driving my children past the GLENN NYE FOR PRESIDENT bus that has parked itself on a narrow Norfolk street, I can say, “Hey, I forced awkward Wikipedia conversation onto that man once, and even made him glance at my boob.” And perhaps I can remind him of it again, should I meet him out someday. Because really, a love of the Constitution and the everyday American citizens and their gravy breasts are what shaped this country – and, really, isn’t that what politics is all about in the first place?

What I will likely remember most about my Thanksgivings, a time where my entire family set aside their weekend and drove to Richmond to meet at the home of my grandmother, the family matriarch, is the time my grandmother put down her spoonful of cranberry sauce and preceded to tell us that it’s hard for men not to ejaculate once they get to a certain summit in any said sexual act.

“There comes a point where a man just can’t stop,” she tells us in her Old Virginia drawl, blotting her fuchsia lipstick with a paper napkin imprinted with blue hydrangeas. She sets the crumbled napkin next to her plate, filled with slices of tanned turkey, and takes a sip of unsweetened iced tea. “So when you have this Kobe Bryant – now, I don’t know if the sex with this girl was consensual or not, now, so I’m not saying either way because I was not there – “

“Jesus, I hope not,” I hear my dad mutter.

“ – but I do know that these women that say a man rapes them, but if they change their minds halfway through, there comes a point where a man just can’t control himself. He has to finish.” She puts her hand on my arm as she expels the word finish from her mouth, maybe because I am the only fertile woman in the room or more likely because I am sitting closest to her, but I purse my lips into a pained grin and nod thusly. The room is hushed except for the sound of her two dogs chewing their turkey bones in the foyer.

My grandmother loved a scandal, particularly a sexual one. So when Kobe Bryant’s rape case hit the papers, my grandmother flipped the channels of the TV accordingly so she wouldn’t miss any coverage of the basketball star’s fall from fame. If there was one thing she enjoyed, it was the theatrics of a good meltdown.

“I don’t know if they’ll find out this girl is lying or what,” my grandmother continues, shaking her fork at the room. “But they’ll have to take into consideration that when you have sex with a man, he can’t just pull out when you want him to. It’s timing.”

My mother sits on the couch next to her sister Courtney, and they both throw a horrified look to their brother Chris, who is chewing a mouthful of green beans while trying not to laugh. My brother and my cousin, both middle school boys, less controlled than my uncle – who, in all fairness, had forty-five years to learn to contain himself – start to giggle.

“You laugh now,” my grandmother says. “But you wait until you see what I’m talking about.”

“Lord, Jesus,” I hear my father murmur into his mashed potatoes. He regrets that both his parents are dead, not just because he loved them, but because now this is the only place he has to go for holidays.

I shuffle the turkey slices around on my plastic red plate, a staple of our Thanksgiving dinners once we realized that none of us cared enough to use the fine china, and eye my mother, who is sitting on the couch with a plate of sweet potatoes looking good and horrified. She’s had a long day. Though the turkey was prepared by Ukrop’s, it still had to be cooked, a thankless task that went to my mother. Worse, the turkey drippings were running hot in the oven and burst into flames. Worse than even that, it was my grandmother who discovered the diminutive catastrophe.

“Oh, shit, Nemi, the turkey is on fire!” my grandmother hollers. My mother runs into the minute shotgun kitchen and the two of them wave oven mitts wildly at the small flames rising from the stove.

“Oh, shit, oh shit!” my mother wails. “Move, Mama!”

She tries to place my grandmother to the side, but my grandmother is still shouting instructions. “You have to douse it, Nemi! You have to douse it!”

My aunt runs in and the three of them try to shout at the flames, under the mistaken belief that if you yell loud enough at a fire it will eventually put itself out, and smoke starts to billow from the outskirts of turkey drippings. The dogs take the chaotic opportunity to waddle through the kitchen and see what the commotion is about. My uncles stand to the side and sip their Miller Lites. My father is in the living room working on the crossword puzzle. “I got to do two crosswords in one day,” he tells me while the cries of my mother and aunt resound through the house. “One in our paper and one in the Richmond one. Not bad. Almost got this one completely finished, too.”

The yelling subsides and the three women back away from the oven. My mother is holding the aluminum pan the turkey has fainted in, and drops it onto the stove-top with a dull thud. Thuck. “Whew,” she sighs. She pokes part of the blackened skin. “Fuck.”

“It doesn’t look bad, Nemi,” my aunt offers. “We just pull that skin up and it’s fine. Look, it’s just that part there that burned.”

My mother peels back the turkey crust with a look of disgust, throwing it in the trashcan like it was a roach.

I am leaning against the laundry room door watching my mother mentally calculate how many Xanax she has brought for the weekend and what is a safe number to take with two glasses of merlot  and still have some left over for Black Friday when my grandmother comes up and takes my arm. “Now, Laura, the turkey was on fi-yah,” she laughs. She leans into me as though we are sharing a grave secret. “Now, you know that’s funny.” When she pulls back her fuchsia lips into a smile they reveal her white teeth, beautifully straight but slightly angled out, a very British mouth. My father had always teased her for looking like the Queen of England, whom she was oddly the exact same age as, a comparison she didn’t much care for her son-in-law to make. “She’s ugly!” my grandmother would sniff.

“Ugly,” my mother would mutter when my grandmother would leave the room to get ham sandwiches from the kitchen. “I don’t think she’s ugly. I think she looks like an eighty-year-old woman. Because that’s what she is.” Before my grandmother would come back, my mother would add, “And she has all those damn dogs shitting all over the palace. Just like Mama, only on a grander scale.”

Until I was ten, I slept with my grandmother in her bed when we’d visit her. She slept in pink, cushioned curlers, the kind you think are only in movies when the director is trying to make someone look especially old and hideous, but she looked sweet in them, like a teenager getting ready for a dance. Over her bed was a picture of a colonial girl in a pink dress holding a pink rose. It was a striking portrait because no matter where you walked, the girl’s eyes seemed to stay fixed on you. When we cleaned out my grandmother’s house, my mother asked me whether there was anything I wanted, and I said, “The colonial girl.” I hung it over my bed. A guy I was seeing used to tease me that it was haunted, and would whisper that she was watching us while we laid in bed after sex. But guarding my grandmother and her curlers while she slept was the only way I could see her, and the threats of post-coital hauntings were nonexistent in my head.

My first offhanded sex advice I got from my grandmother. “You have to watch those men in business suits,” she tells me one day. We’re sitting on her living room couch and she’s balancing a Coca-Cola wrapped in a paper towel on her knee. “They look respectable, sitting in the mall eating lunch in the food court, but the truth is, I see them eyeing you. Thinking, Oh, what’s she got under there?” The way it sounds when she imitates their voice sounds more lecherous than if it came from a convicted sex offender. She adds, “Those are the kind of men that pee in a restaurant and don’t wash and then put their hands in the mints on the way out.” I find myself strangely revolted by men in business suits to this day, as I know they secretly undress me with their eyes while they eat Peppermint Starlights coated in urine.

“When are you going to grad school?” she would ask me.

“As soon as I can figure out how to pay for it and not live in a cardboard box behind a Denny’s,” I tell her.

“You need to go,” my grandmother says. “You’re the kind of person who does so well in school because you like to learn and you don’t like to sit around. You’re afraid of being idle.” What surprised me about this was that I always considered that my grandmother knew very little about me; she knew my major, but she couldn’t have told you my favorite book or what movies I liked. We had a blanket relationship rather than focusing on the details. But what really surprised me was that she was right.

The older I get, the more concerned she becomes about my dating life – oddly, not that I will never settle, but that I will. “You need to date around,” she tells me. “Don’t latch onto the first boy that gets his hands on you, because, Laura, they all want to call to the shots.” I had never met my grandfather, but from what I hear he was an inoffensive, droll band teacher whose crippling anxiety prevented him from driving over bridges. He hardly seemed like a shot-caller, but something was pissing my grandmother off about men, and while she never told me directly what it was, she did give me a horrifying Dr. Laura Schlessinger book for my birthday entitled 10 Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives, and signed it with love in the inside cover. “I think this has a lot of good advice,” she had told me upon the unwrapping. How Do I Teach a Man to Respect Me? one of the chapters asks. I look up at her and she sips her Coca-Cola through a thin white straw, a blue line going up the middle.

I visit her one weekend. We sit in the living room and read together. “You’re smart,” she tells me suddenly, and I look up at her blankly. “You’re a smart girl and don’t you let anyone tell you differently. And don’t you ever let anyone treat you like you’re not, either.”

I got the call she had fallen one evening from my mother. “Chris found her on the floor of the foyer,” Mom says. “She had been there for hours, Laura. And the first thing she did – “

My mother stops and I think that she is sobbing.

“What? Mom, what?”

“ – the first thing she does is ask him,” my mother continues, and I realize she’s laughing that astringent laugh, the one where you’ve given up on fighting the humor in even the most critical situation, “is ask him if he wants a soda.”

I see her in the hospital and she is much paler than I’ve ever seen. Her hair, which has gone un-dyed, is electric white, and sticks up in tufts from where she’s been laying her head on the thin hospital pillows. She calls me Paige, the name of her niece, but tells me that I’m pretty and that she’s glad I came. We visit for a while and when I tell her I’m going to leave, she starts to mumble something incoherent, and then her eyes look up at me. “I was in a boat and I was so scared,” she tells me suddenly, and starts to cry. I’ve never seen her cry, not once, and so when she weeps and it sounds like she’s a kid, lost and impatient with herself, my throat prickles and I find my face scorching trying to hold back my own alarm. A nurse comes in with lunch and she calms down slightly, and he says he is going to change her IV. “I’m going to give you a little privacy,” I tell my grandmother, and the nurse smiles warmly, a kindness just enough to make my eyes water when I leave the room.

I walk through the hallway. It smells like bleach and cherry lollipops, oddly. The waiting room chairs are upholstered in grotesque blue-grey vinyl. There are brochures in the lobby reclining in a pine holder, huge black knots stamped into the wood. Plants stand in peach-colored vases, their leaves drooping in a filmy wax.  Goddamit, I think when the hospital doors float open to the outside. She’s gone. The sun stings my eyes. I watch someone wheel an old man into the hospital lobby. He stares blankly ahead. He is wearing a black hat too big for his head, pushing down the tops of his eyebrows and I want to shake the person staring at him and tell them to just get the man a hat that fits. No fucking thank you.

The nurse is just finishing up when I walk back in, and he smiles again as we trade places, he into the hallway that smells of bleach and lollipops and I at her bedside. “That hurt,” she whispers and looks at her IV.

“I know,” I say. “But you’re okay.” I smile at her as if I believe it to be true.

Her lunch is sitting in front of her. “You want some of this?” I ask her. “Looks good.”

“Take my roll,” she says. “I don’t want it.”

Her request surprises me.

“No, eat it,” I say. “It’s good.”

“No, I don’t want it,” she says. “And they make you eat it here. You eat it.”

“Buckey, I don’t want it,” I say, using the name I’ve called her since I was a child, since the days she would take me in her Oldsmobile over the small Richmond hills that felt like mountainsides the way she drove, faster than probably she should have at her age and with a five-year-old in the car, but we drove anyway and she would say in her gruffest voice, “I’m a racecar driver!” And the hills would embrace us in their tender paved curves, the trees and the sun blurring by in a haze of emerald and honeyed fragments.

“Laura,” she laughs, and it is the first time I heard her say my name since she forgot everything about us, and the last time I’ve heard it since, but there it was, ringing in the air, quietly in its way, an icicle between moments, a splinter of books and Kobe Bryant theories and that damned white napkin she always had under a sweating Coca-Cola. “Eat some.”

So I pick up the roll and I break it in half, and she places her fragment of it in her mouth and I take a little of my piece in mine. Neither one of us wants it but we eat it, and she leans into me and smiles, her lips pulled back and her straight teeth and how I remember that gold watch she used to wear around her neck and the sound of her pressing the foot pedals of the piano and her arm leaning into my shoulder like she is sharing some life secret she forgot, at one point during our time together, to say.

“Before I met your mama, all I cared about was drinking, chasing women, and antiquing.” – Pops.

Dear Creepy-Ass Neighbor:

I first spotted you several months ago, hanging around inside the chipped white doorframe of your appalling bachelor pad, an apartment so dilapidated that should the occasion arise that we have to give the neighborhood of Ghent an enema, your abode is where we will likely stick the hose. Your chest hair is auburn. I know this because you were shirtless.

It was around 8 p.m. I had just gotten off work. I was walking from my car to my apartment, and I’m sure you heard the click-clacking of my high heels, which signaled to you that a.) there was a woman within 50 feet of your dwelling, and b.) that said woman would derive pleasure in being wolf-whistled at by someone who, measured by the spectrum of modern scientific advances, contradicts all known evidence of human evolution.

My response was to whip my head around like I was the understudy for Linda Blair in The Exorcist and make my most aghast face. I thought this might effectively serve as an indication that I even the mere suggestion of attraction on my part was thoroughly non-existent. You wiggle your eyebrows at me anyway. I scowl.

So then I see you a few days later, around the same time. This time, I am walking to my car and you are standing at your screened-in living window, and when I make the grave mistake of glancing at who-in-the-hell-is-staring-at-me, I am met with your husky, “Hey.” And this, sir, was no ordinary hey, one that signifies, Hello, neighbor, lovely night we’re having. It wasn’t even a, Sorry you’ve caught me shirtless again, standing at my window – I’m terribly embarrassed for the gauche, but maybe if I say hello we can both alleviate our mutual discomfort. This was a lecherous hey. This is a hey that says I want to bend you over the apartment city-issued trashcans and touch you in your underwear places.

As time progressed I got used to having you around. I would park my car, walk past your apartment, and you would be, in what appears to be an inordinate amount of free time (perhaps you’re unemployed?), standing at your door, clearing your throat until I look over in annoyance. It was a process.

Until yesterday.

I parked my car – at noon, mind you – and I saw you standing at your window.

Taking. A. Shower.

What kills me – what fucking kills me – is that you took no pains to hide the fact that you were bathing. You lathered up your hair and stared at me at the same time. You even flashed me a smile. And while it was disturbing that you were scouring your head and watching me, it wasn’t nearly as unsettling as when you put your right hand down where I couldn’t see it. Christ. Jesus.

To your credit, you didn’t leave it where I couldn’t see it for long, but just by looking at you, I would guess it probably doesn’t take a whole lot to get you where you want to be, either.

Well. Allow me to enlighten you.

I have been masturbated to by men more daring than you. One (that I know of) was even in public. He got arrested for it. That may be sickening, but goddamit, that’s dedication. I’ve had several other verbal confirmations of said act, mainly by drunk guys (“Sometimes…I think about you.”), and I’ve done a little math:

First we have to deduce how many men are whacking it to me on a given day. If you count the number of men I see on a daily basis (roughly 300, but we’ll say 265 since I hang around with a lot of gay dudes, but I am adding 4 for lesbians, equaling out to 269) minus 50 (I’m not so self-important to think that everyone is masturbating to me), multiplied by 6 days a week (I’m assuming that as we live a quasi-conservative area that no one would ever masturbate on a Sunday), we have me being masturbated to by 1254 people a week. That’s 65,208 per year, and multiplied by the 11 years I’ve been post-pubescent, that totals up to 717,288 people. And of these 717,288 people, isn’t it peculiar that only you and another dude I pressed charges against are the only ones who are amateurish enough to get caught? So 717, 288 – 2 = you are a fucking dickwaffle. That math does itself.

And if me schooling you in pervy calculus isn’t enough, take this little fact into account: I serve up bagels to roughly 10 cops a day in Yorgo’s, all of whom, if prompted with a breakfast burrito, would be more than happy to pay you a visit.

Yours,

Laura C. Watkins, esq. (Thought I’d fancy it up a bit.)

P.S. – I will be pleased to buy you curtains for your bathroom window. Perhaps something in taupe?

My dad and I are walking past the record shop Skinnie’s on our way to Yorgo’s to get an Everything bagel toasted with herb cream cheese and a honey wheat bagel toasted with light butter, respectively, when my father stops and points to black shirt emblazoned with a white screen-print of a decaying skull and above it, a band name: GOAT ORGY.

“Goat…orgy,” my father reads, sounding out each syllable as if he were new to the English language. Then he looks at me, one eyebrow raised. “Who are they?”

“Dad, I don’t know!” I sigh. It’s early. I am ready for coffee, holding a purple mug with Goddess painted on it, a gift from my parents for my 23^rd birthday. People with purple Goddess mugs, as a general rule, do not listen to any band with the word “orgy” in the name.  

“You don’t know what they sing?” he asks. He slides his reading glasses up on his nose and cranes his neck towards the window for a closer look. Then he looks at me as though I hand-selected the members of Goat Orgy myself, standing outside the locales of known cult congregations in my best pantsuit to solicit Church of Satan members for auditions and to pass out free Kool-Aid. 

“I doubt they do much singing,” I say, and open the door to the bagel shop for him.

“Heh, Goat Orgy,” my dad chuckles as he walks inside.

Because the members of Goat Orgy were probably born in the 80s, 70s at the latest, it somehow means that we are peers, even though I have never attended a concert that doesn’t involve the acoustic guitar with the exception of the Virginia Symphony fall showcase and somehow I doubt Goat Orgy is terribly interested in the 5-hour BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, but since we are young we must all be in cahoots, a plot to turn the world into our personal orgiastic playground, corrupting the arts with our goat music and making reality shows instead of curing lupus. Or at least my father must think this. He looks at me over his reading glasses while he eats his Everything bagel. Goat Orgy, I can hear him think. Jesus.

There are many things associated with my generation that I can neither explain nor defend. Music, for instance. Besides Goat Orgy, I’ve never been particularly attached to pop ballads, and God knows I can’t explain the appeal of boy bands, a sprinkling of pre-pubescent men singing their asexual songs of blind devotion to throngs of women who adore them for presumably being neutered (I’m looking your way, New Kids). Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I would rather have a man take a dump in the middle of my living room than sing me a sterilized love song. On the other side of the spectrum is hardcore gangster rap (gansta? How are the kids spelling that these days?), which, though it can be broken down and assessed as rhythmic urban social commentary, I don’t care much for the delivery or the tone, mostly because I have the soul of a 76-year-old man (“Why are these people yelling? This isn’t music. THIS ISN’T MUSIC.”). Though, in my defense, I do own a CD entitled Old School Hip Hop, on sale at Target for $6.99, which serves as a scathing commentary on the bastardization of music culture, capitalism, and my own suburbanity. I don’t care. I’d stand my ground for the Sugarhill Gang any day (“Now that’s when rappers made music. THAT’S WHEN RAPPERS MADE MUSIC.”).

And if you need cold, hard proof that we live in a spiteful and unjust world, take note that The Fray has a record that was certified double-platinum while some people have still never heard of Rufus Wainwright.

Other things associated with my generation that I do not remember putting my stamp of approval upon: not using sunscreen, Kanye West and his glasses that function as Venetian blinds, the entire Twilight series, wearing sweatpants with PINK emblazoned across ass, The Hills, martini-themed decor, Linkin Park, the term “sexting”, Jackass: The Movie, claiming one doesn’t like to read, and sex before marriage (just fucking around on the last one. Sorry to get your hopes up, Ma.).

And then I find myself editing the obituary for a guy I graduated high school with, killed in action in Afghanistan, and when I go to file his picture in the archives, I look at his face and he looks back at me and as I have yet to hear one compelling argument as to why we’re still fighting, one solid case, I don’t really know what to tell him, either. Because he’s real and we are real and the whole thing is real, and when I lock the file drawer it all feels a little too finite.

So there are many things I can’t explain. My father doesn’t believe it, of course. He eats his bagel, shaking the seeds that fall onto the paper plate under it back onto the cream cheese. I want to question him, too, for many things: Jerry Lee Lewis, for instance. What the hell was going on there? And why did it take so long to work out that smoking was a bad idea? Who decided Nixon was a good idea? I suppose we could do this all morning long if we really wanted to, but Dad gets up and throws away his herb-covered napkin and grins at me, opening the red-lacquer door of the bagel shop for me, letting particles of sunlight burst onto floor when we exit.

We walk past Skinnie’s, dozens of alternative band t-shirts hanging in the window, all black, one with the Queen’s face whited out, another with lettering so distorted even I, a member of the generation that inspired it, can’t make it out, and GOAT ORGY hanging front and center. We walk past, and if Dad still cares about it, he doesn’t say so.

We get to his car and he turns to me. “Love you, sweetie,” he says, and puckers up his lips, plants a kiss on me the way he has done for twenty-five years now, and gets into his car. When he starts it up I hear the clear sound of his New Orleans Jazz Funeral CD playing through his car speakers, with trumpets blaring as he puts the car in reverse, the explosion of drums and the clambering of saxophones, and he waves out the window and honks twice as he drives away. I’m standing back in front of Skinnie’s as I watch him. The morning is warm and the sun is piercing, the glare from the glass storefront blinding me to the reflection of the cars passing by, and me, and the t-shirts sitting in the window, white flags, every one of us.

If people knew what their obituaries looked like when funeral homes sent them in to the newspapers – broken grammar, run-on sentences, information out of order, names clearly misspelled – they would take it upon themselves to never die.

That is where the obituary writers come in. Writers is a misleading term. Editors is closer, though I wouldn’t say that nails it, either. We are a mix between scavengers, piecing together the fragments of information that we find buried in the hurried e-mails of the funeral directors who are eager to go home to their family dinners of roast beef and boiled baby carrots, and voodoo priests: the portal between the dead and living, the mysterious gatekeeper of memories, mysteries, and lies.

I keep two IKEA lamps on my desk that illuminate my hands in a soft yellow glow while I clack on the keyboard about maybe someone’s father, maybe someone’s reviled enemy, maybe both, and all I know is what the funeral home has sent me: Claude Joyner expired August 20, 2009. I recoil at the word expired and change to died. Perhaps the terminology seems a little finite – died – but at least Mr. Joyner no longer sounds like he shares the fate of a jar of spoiled mayonnaise. I like to think of it as one last little kindness for the man.

I retrieve the obituary pictures from the photography department, and on my way back to my desk I go to the kitchenette to heat up my dinner. While I situate paper towels on top of my bowl of minestrone so that it doesn’t gurgle over, I lay the photos on top of the microwave; so when twenty seconds go by on the microwave timer and I happen to glance down, I am greeted by the beaming face of Mr. Potter, a now deceased banker with a fondness for bowling. I feel a little guilty for tossing his picture down on a kitchen appliance while I drum my fingers on the counter, waiting for my broth to be heated to a suitable temperature, and I tell him so in a hushed apology while I lift them from off the microwave: “Sorry about that.” Mr. Potter smiles back at me. He doesn’t seem to mind. Probably liked soup a lot. I take the folds of pictures under my arm anyway, a less degrading placement, just so there are no hard feelings.

When I get back to my desk I have a middle-aged man who has just lost his mother on the phone. He is weeping. We get passionate phone calls. Bereaved family members who wail over the telephone line, crackling like old paper. “I’m sorry, it’s just sudden and there’s so much work…” It’s alright, take all the time you need, I’m not going anywhere. Moonlight consolers.    

I read an obituary that claims the deceased was the first person of color admitted into a university medical school. Any claims of someone being the first of anything require a CQ, a fact-check of sorts, to ensure that the largest newspaper in Virginia remains as accurate as possible. I can think of few things more embarrassing than the potential to be called into the editor’s office to explain my lack of follow-up – that’s editorial suicide, even for a non-journalist.

I make a few calls to an archivist and try my best to sound professional, “Yes, Laura Watkins with The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk. I need to verify an academic history with you…” I hope the archivist can’t tell I am faking this, trying like all hell to sound like the reporters I hear around me every day, all of whom I am amazed can stomach the incessant dogging of other human beings to vomit forth desired facts. I don’t say I’m with the obituary department. It always sounds made up. The archivist alerts me that the deceased was not the first, but the third admitted. Fuck. I call the funeral home.

“Laura, The Virginian-Pilot obit department,” I tell the director. Drop “obituary” and they’re easier to coerce. We are on the same level. “Listen, I did I little verifying.” I tell him about the misinformation and I feel a bit like a know-it-all, the people who are entirely too clever for their own good, and worse, who want you to know it. Listen, I did a little verifying. God you’re an asshole, I would think if someone said it to me.

The funeral director laughs and says, “I trust it. You wouldn’t believe this family. Bunch of crazy people. Sister and the mother got in a fight in my front lobby.” Funeral directors love to tell stories of their grief-stricken familes. My favorite is from a director named Keith who had a sister pull a knife on her brother during a disagreement concerning casket options.

“Can I put he was ‘one of the first’?” I ask.

“That’s perfect,” he says. We’re negotiators, every one of us.

I keep a file two inches thick of obituaries that, for reasons good or bad, caught my attention. Some of them are lyrical: Her home sparkled with stained glass sun catchers, the air scented with her candles and the subtle sounds of wind chimes. Some of them smack with family humor: Mom’s greatest achievement was making everyone feel like they were the most loved…until you walked out of the room. That is why her daughter Beth never left the room…or Lynn…or Judy. Some of them are downright bizarre: She was a very proud member of Alcoholics Anonymous for 26 years. She loved anything Tweety Bird and musical stuffed animals. And then one obituary read simply at the end of the funeral arrangements, B.Y.O.B. Assuming it was the deceased man’s request, at least he has put on no airs to exit this earth.

Or take the obituary of Mr. Gerald Powell, a handsome Naval officer whose obit read: He is survived by his former wife, Pat (whom he loved until his breath). I type it into the database and imagine Pat sitting at her kitchen table the next morning, her aged hands running down the newsprint and around his picture, a handsome portrait of him in his uniform, her coffee growing cold. On the other hand, it could be one last infuriation for the pitiable woman, who had grown tired of his infidelities and his deception and used the obituary page to pick up cat shit in the den, dropping it with a final, merciless thud in the kitchen trashcan. Fuck you, Gerald!

The most heartbreaking obituary I had ever come across was that of Mr. Pagonis, a 90-year-old alcoholic bachelor. Mr. Pagonis struggled with alcohol addiction most of his life but made the best of his circumstances. He fell in love with only one woman and loved her throughout his life, but he never married. What a terrible, tragic thing to be known for, and I decide that I would sooner be known as an avid duckpin bowler. I look at his picture, a wilting old man in a newsboy cap, and I want to shake him. Did you tell her you loved her? Did you ever try to sober up for her? Did you do everything you could to stop her that night you stood on the city sidewalk, feeling the wind of the cars passing by on the straight hit your whiskered face when you watched her walk away, never to see her again? I get angry at him and have to put him back in my drawer, letting it shut with a heavy clink.

Some submissions are downright nauseating. Mr. Smith passed away peacefully, surrounded by his children as they sang ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.’ I type it in anyway, and am impressed with my own fortitude when I don’t vomit in my desk trashcan.

Being the obit writer means editing out things that could be deemed inappropriate, which most often show up in the form of nicknames. If you think that families would know better than to send crude monikers in to be published, tell that to the obituary submitters for Leo “Sheet Shaker” McIntyre, Joan “Tit Mama” Anderson, and Jean “Crotch Man” Willis. Usually funeral homes will know better than to send anything profane in nature, but I’ve passed on a surprising amount of vernacular to some directors. When Sean “420 Cowboy” Smith came across my death, I had the thankless task of calling the funeral director, Mr. Pegram, who is roughly 400 years old, to tell him that the epithet wouldn’t fly.

“What part is it that isn’t okay?” Mr. Pegram asks. I can hear him shuffle papers in the background. “Cowboy?”

“No, it’s the 420,” I say.

Silence.

“It’s a reference for cannabis,” I tell him.

Silence.

“Marijuana,” I clarify.

“OH MY GOD!” the voice on the other end of the phone screeches. A hear a thud and hope it’s a file and not his lifeless body, dead from shock, but he continues, “If I had known, I would have – I just…I just had never even HEARD of that before!”

“It’s fine,” I say.

“I would NEVER have sent you ANYTHING if I had only known…” and so it goes until I can calm Mr. Pegram down enough so that he does not have a small stroke, because having to call the medics for him would guarantee that I wouldn’t be able to leave early that night.  

Working on the obituary desk means that you inevitably start to think of death in different way. It is reality, it is daily, it is inked words on graying newsprint. I do not envy the tasks of those who see death in its physical form, who have to face it head on, put their hands on the cold guts of the lifeless. Brian had been with the Norfolk Police Department for eight months when he came across his most disturbing death, not because of the nature of the demise but because of the physicality of the scene. “Laura,” he tells me over a chicken wrap, “This woman. She was older. Probably in her mid-seventies. The neighbors complained about a smell and when I walked in, I could tell immediately there was a dead body somewhere. When I walked in her bedroom, she was dead on the floor with her legs spread wearing shorts. And I saw it.”

“You saw it?” I ask.

“I saw it,” he says, lowering his voice.  

Silence.

“Her vagina,” he whispers. “It was horrible. Like, you know how yours is young. It’s like a flower. Well. Hers was a steak. It looked like a grey steak.”

I look up the news report and find the woman’s name. I’ve written her obit. Mildred. She seemed nice enough. Yet what no one reading the paper would know was that she had the unique duality of being someone’s grandmother and a rookie cop’s genital equivalent to decomposed meat.

I wonder if I would prefer that kind of story in my death. It’s an interesting departure. Your last impact on someone through your own material existence urges them, or the persons to whom they relay it, to reflect on mortality, the fundamental nature of being. And the nature of vaginas. Nothing to be embarrassed about, really. You’re dead, gone to burn up in the crematorium and funneled into an Oriental jar. Did you hear about Laura Watkins? They found her dead, completely naked, sprawled on the ground with breasts drooping on either side. How bizarre, people would say. How strange. A pause. What did her vagina look like?

But I know how I want to be sent off from this place. I want everyone to wear a hat to my funeral, the fancier, the better – feathers, flowers, jewels and lace, no timidity allowed; I want a variety of cupcakes served, from the glamorous ones with names like Lemon Martini Red Velvet to the ones with the cheap pink icing so sweet they make your teeth hurt, and gaudy green sprinkles like tiny mile markers, and “You Can Call Me Al” singing over the speakers while people peel back the wax wrapper on the bottom; a reading of Rita Dove’s “Dawn Revisted”; an open bar, a dance floor, friends calling me Twatty and telling stories about how I got drunk at a party and pitched a teapot off a balcony, the time I shit myself and the police came, the time I accidentally dated a stripper; a joy, a finality, a last wail of perfect, untouchable elation.

And for God’s sake. No run-on sentences in my obituary.

I am on the patio of Colley Cantina waiting for Eric, who is fourteen minutes late. I decide that it’s my comeuppance for being habitually tardy myself – a pattern that I am often surprised to get away with – and read the lunch menu while keeping in mind the last time I met up with Eric, I was twenty-two minutes behind schedule.

The high school has just let out. When the kids – kids? I hated being called that at their age – walk by, I can’t tell exactly how old they are anymore, a sign that am I so divorced from their age group that they probably can’t tell how old I am, either. Thirty? No, not quite yet.

A girl clutching a viola case walks by the restaurant. She has an air of cleverness about her marked by both her instrument and her clothes, which consist of an unfussy purple blouse, a turquoise scarf and high tops. The restaurant door swings open and she nearly flattened by a hurried busboy who is taking out the recycling to the curb. She leaps back onto her right foot and lets him spin past her with an armful of cardboard boxes. She is still at the age where she is surprised that people are rude. She looks at me as she walks past, and I realize that in my observation of her, I have a hard, concentrated look on my face. I immediately ease it into a smile, but she’s past me now, conditioned to believe, yet again, that all adults are assholes. I can’t say that I blame her or that I disagree with the notion.

A group of boys walk by in their Beta male pack. All of them are dressed in black pants, tighter than was in fashion when I was in school, with neon graphic tees. One of them is proudly wearing an orange sombrero outlined in lurid green straw. I know their type. Compliant with the idea that they are not a part of their high school’s admired faction, they become bold in other ways, jovial misfits parading their social infantry down the street. In their division lies their identity. The sombreroed one waves at me. “Hola!” he calls out, and the other boys chuckle.

“Hola,” I say back. The sombreroed one breaks into a grin, pleased that I have played along.

I see Eric, in no particular hurry, walking down the sidewalk. He waves. I wave back and point to an imaginary watch. Eric’s mouth parts into a smile.

When he reaches the patio, the first words out of his mouth are, “How the hell are you, Watkins?”

He’s been calling me Watkins since I met him my junior year of college, when he showed up on the doorstep of my sorority house at 1 a.m. so drunk that I thought he was mentally challenged: the doorbell rings and when I open the door, a boy is standing in front of me, shirtless, cross-eyed and leaning against the doorframe. “I need EGGS,” he slurs. Living in the sorority house, we had bizarre visitors at all hours of the night: fraternity guys, passers-by curious about who was living there, and the occasional police officer. It was part of the residential charm. But never before had I seen someone who I believed to be mentally impeded on our porch, and my first pang of fear came when I realized that I would have to figure out just where he came from and how to get him back there.

“Are you okay?” I ask, looking him over for any signs of trauma.

“I’m fine,” he laughs, his bare shoulders heaving, and looks down at his feet.

“What…what do you need?”

“I just need some eggs,” he says, and looks up at me, his eyes suddenly uncrossed. “I know – I’m sorry, I know it’s weird.” He stands up straighter but his speech is still slurred. There is a nanosecond that I can’t piece the situation together until I hear giggling in the bushes behind him, and he starts to laugh as well, his entire body reverberating like a tuning fork, and I realize that he’s not retarded. At least legally. He is just shittingly drunk.

“Who are you with?” I ask.

“I’m a Sig Ep pledge,” he says. I glance at the bushes behind him and see several shadowy figures crouching behind the moonlit-laced shrubbery, one of whom I am sure is their pledge master, putting him up to the task of standing half-naked on the porch of girls he didn’t know at 1 a.m. asking for eggs. He looks up at me and through a smile he whispers, “Please.”

That’s it all takes. “Come in,” I say, and he stumbles into our living room. I shut the door behind us.

“Oh, God, thank you,” he says. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I just need some eggs.”

“For what?” I ask. I try not to giggle as he folds his arms over his chest, presumably to warm his nipples, which remind me of tiny pink pepperoni cubes.

“It’s a scavenger hunt. We have to find eggs, flour, sugar – stuff to bake brownies.”

“Jesus,” I sigh, and motion for him to come into the kitchen. He leans against the counter, his white skin a stark contrast to the black appliances of the kitchen, and I dig through our refrigerator.

“I’m Eric, by the way,” he says. “I figured you should know that since I’m in your house and all.” He has what my father would refer to as a Yankee accent. I ask him where he’s from. “Jersey,” he replies, and before I can say anything, he adds, “Yeah, yeah, we hate you, too.”

“Well, I’m Laura,” I say, and hand him a carton of eggs. “Here. There’s four left in there. What else do you need?”

“Uh,” Eric says, putting a hand to his head and tapping it softly. “God, I don’t even remember. I’ve been drinking since I got outta class. Flour?”

I dig in the kitchen cabinet. “I may have some.”

“Are you allowed to have boys in here?” he asks, looking around. “God, it’s nice in here.”

“We can’t have them spend them night, but they can be downstairs,” I say. “On the record, anyway.” I had never much cared for or abided by that rule.

“How old is this house?” he asks while I fish through the cabinet.

“Um, the 20s I think. We’ve had it since ’64, though.” I feel a tinge of pride in telling him that.

“Alpha Xi Delta,” Eric says, reading a magnet on the fridge.

“Yep. Oldest sorority on campus. And the only place you can get flour at 1 a.m.”

Eric laughs into his hands. “Oh, God, thank you. I had to get so much shit and I didn’t know where we were gonna go at one-fucking-thirty, you know?”

“What’s your major?” I ask.

“English,” he says.

“Me, too!” I beam, excited to have found common ground. Rare is the fraternity man who is also an English major.

“Awesome,” he says. “Gotta love that literature. We’ll probably have a class together.” We did. I ended up doing his paper on Emily Dickinson twenty minutes before it was due because he got too high to pound it out the night before.

“Are you going to make it to class tomorrow?” I ask, handing him a baggie.

“Nah, I’ll probably just make it to tables,” he says. Tables was Greek slang for the sororities and fraternities meeting during lunch hour in the cafeteria. It was the see-and-be-seen hub for the lettered groups, where you solidified plans for the weekend and where social boundaries were defined. Certain groups you sat with, certain groups you didn’t. Everything was unspoken, blind classicism in its highest collegiate form, but if you wanted to survive, your group played along.

“See you at tables?” he asks, and hugs me.

“See you at tables,” I say. I open the front door for him, and he lurches onto the porch. The bushes explode with laughter.

Five years later, here we are, sitting across from one another at lunch and discussing the plight of the English major. “That crap they feed you about it being an invaluable, all-encompassing degree,” Eric sighs. “’Major in English, everyone will hire you!’ Bullshit.”

“But at least we can write,” I say.

“Yeah. And English majors have analytical skills that other people just don’t have. I’d just like a career to apply them.” Eric had moved back to Jersey and started working at Apple, a job he had just left. Now he was back in Norfolk, trying to decide whether to apply for a job here or go back up north. “I wish I could just write screenplays all day.”

We finish at Cantina, and having a little time before I had to be at work, we go to the Starbucks next door. “What are you getting?” he asks me in line.

“Pumpkin spice latte,” I say. “I could drink seven of those a day.”

“I’ll try it,” he says, and we both order one. We seat ourselves at the stools facing Colley Avenue. For as long as I live, Colley Avenue will feel like my street. The crosswalks, the Ghent natives that I’ve never talked to but smile at because I’ve seen them every day for as long as I’ve haunted the neighborhood, the buildings that read like a map of delicate touchstones – I love them because they are me and I am them and they have become entangled in the story of my transition into adulthood. The physical finality is poignant, too: when I leave this place, it will be because I am transitioned from crosswalks to school crossings, because I can’t raise a family in an apartment building, because as much as I fight against it now the lull of suburbanity will become a Siren song and I will listen and I will want the placation of a modern-appliance kitchen.

Eric and I agree that time will be settled, easier in its way, but not nearly as electrifying. But we can think about that later, because now, our pumpkin lattes are ready. Eric tries his and grimaces. “It tastes like a pumpkin walked up and pooped in my coffee.”

We people watch for a while. A girl walks by the window, about twenty-one, and smiles when she looks at her phone. “She just got a text message from a boy,” I tell him.

Eric points out two sailors walking by and says, “You know they just met on Craigslist’s Casual Encounters and they’re trying to decide where they want to blow each other.”

“Jesus,” I laugh. We watch the two sailors. They stop on the sidewalk in front of us and are partially concealed by a tree.

“Look at that,” Eric says. “’Oh, we’ll just go behind this tree and you can blow me right here. Or that church is open. Up to you.’”

A firetruck goes by and one of the firemen recognizes me from Yorgos. He waves. Eric laughs. “Always with the men in uniform.”

“Did I tell you about the cop I dated a little while ago?” I say. “I asked him what he was most afraid of, and he told me, not even remotely joking, ‘Zombies, hands down.’ And they issued this man a gun!”

“That’s your future, Watkins.”

“I don’t know what my future is anymore.” I don’t mean to sound fatalistic. Eric doesn’t offer advice or consolation, but nods in agreement, and our over-consideration and anxiety and our mutual attraction towards complacency are probably the reason that we get along so well. Our deepest fear is of slouching towards Bethlehem paralleled by our greatest comfort, which comes in the short-term joy of coffee and people-watching and knowing that there is a person in the world equally nervous about grasping it all and making the whole fucking thing count somehow. For a moment, we don’t say anything at all. Eric’s coffee is three-quarters full and cold, and my empty cup sits on the counter. Sometimes it is all too much, but before I can open my mouth to tell him how afraid I am, Eric crows, “There are those sailors again!” I look out the window and watch as they cross their arms on their chests and look at each other, the soundtrack of Eric’s laughter and Penny Lane piping through the Starbucks speakers in the background, both of them so alert but so unaware, the universal condition, the overcast clouds rolling by, the madness and the joy.

6:36 p.m.: Labor Day Weekend. G.D. Basil & Co. (Laura – Founder; Ricky – President; Soraia – CEO; Molly – Intern.) start on their journey to Gingernuts Pub, the Greatest Bar in the History of the World Including Really Cool Taverns in Medieval England or Pubs Where Pirates Hung Out and Stuff.

Cooler than THIS.

7:03 p.m.: Even with her proven track record of getting us pants-shittingly lost during every adventure in which we embark, Laura is chosen to drive because she photographs best in sunset.

It's like I'm a model or something.

7:04 p.m.: Ricky is shotgun taking photographic evidence of our journey in case we break down and are eaten alive by whateverthefuck lives in the forests of the Eastern Shore. Soraia and Molly, less concerned, shit around in the backseat.

Soraia will be teaching your children someday.

7:06 p.m.: We hit our first tunnel. Vagina jokes ensue.

It's like a birth canal with more traction.

7:16 p.m.: Laura hears something in the backseat. She whips around to find Soraia and Molly taking hits of salt from the shaker recently packed by Laura’s father as a house gift. Soraia’s explanation: “It’s very popular in Portugal.”

We weren't even drunk yet.

7:31 p.m.: We arrive at Gingernuts, which is packed the gills. We put our name on the waiting list under “Molly.” We are reduced to fits of giggling when Ricky spots the name above ours.

Their ancestors clearly didn't read Urbandictionary.com.

7:37 p.m.: We journey to a small pier to admire the water and to take pictures we can send our grandmothers if they ask what we did for Labor Day.

"We certainly didn't get drunk and tell men we want to have their abortions, Grams."

8:02 p.m.: The ladies are seated. They wait quasi-patiently for their beers.

Pre-Heffeweisen.

8:05 p.m.: The beers come. The Womenfolk are satiated. They manage to retain an air of respectibility while they sip their ale.

Sometimes we don't say the word "skullfuck."

8:05:32 p.m.: We start making up names for our hypothetical death metal band.

Copyrighted.

8:32 p.m.: Ricky and Laura spot hot Shoremen. They whip out a little technique they have perfected called “The Eyefuck.” They are immediately proposed to, but decline because of the $18 toll they’d have to pay to get to the rehearsal dinner in Nassawadox.

If you looked at this picture, congratulations. You're now pregnant.

Exhibit A: Effects of the Eyefuck.

No time for future husbands.

8:33 – 10:02: Drinking.

Gentlemen, start your engines.

 

10:02 p.m.: The band starts playing.

The drummer was real sweaty.

10:03 p.m.: The band performs favorites such as “Hang on Sloopy” and “9 to 5,” prompting the Whoresome Foursome, in a hops-induced haze of believing they are better singers than actually are, to sing along like drunken oil riggers.

Three pitchers of Yuengling and seven marriage proposals later.

10:04 p.m.: Then the dancing starts (see hops-induced haze).

These moves are illegal in 37 states.

CRAB DANCING (TM)

SPOON ROBOT (TM)

10:47 p.m.: We become unable to take pictures straight.

Then again, what does Molly do straight? I think that's my eye in the corner.

Seriously. Who let us have a camera.

12:13 a.m.: Drunk-dialing.

It was really more of a coke deal.

12:32 a.m.: G.D. Basil & Co. takes their company Christmas card photo.

Shit like this is why I can never run for president.

2:02 a.m.: Sobriety. Closing time. Kissing the natives goodbye. Another successful night for G.D. Basil & Co. We return home to Ghent where we fall into the loving embrace of our white knights.

In all fairness, whiskey shots sounded like a stellar idea at 1 a.m.

I am on a date with a recent transplant from England who is working at NASA studying the ozone, and though that is impressive within itself, my main intrigue in him was that he grew up next door to the former home of Lord Byron. I suspect he slipped in that detail once I mentioned my major in English, but I didn’t mind; he lived in the England I loved, the one imagined it to be: a sweeping countryside littered with manors from the Romantic poets, cliffs and hillsides. He talked about a research project he was completing, something to do with the ozone and the moon, but while he prattled on about moon phases I was already in England visiting his parents, driving through the countryside while he pointed out the haunts of Percy Shelley and asking whether I’d like to picnic on the banks of the Thames (which, admittedly, was nowhere near his home) and discuss our favorite Victorian gothic authors; so that when the time came for him to ask me out for a pint, I agreed.

We meet at Colley Cantina and we both order Woodchuck. I ask him about Lord Byron’s house between sips of cider.  

“I don’t remember much about it except an old shepherd used to graze his flock on the land,” he says. “He used to yell at us when he’d catch us hiding in the trees, ‘Quitcher worryin’ me sheep, ye bloody hellions!’ It’s been ages since I’ve been out there, Laura.” I like the way he says my name. It lingers in his mouth longer than any indigenous American dialect. He looks up at me. “Did you ever read my paper?” He had sent me a link for his research on the phases of the moon, part of the assignment he was working on with some enormous government grant. I had gotten about seven sentences in, scanned the statistical graphs, and then clicked over to Perez Hilton’s blog.

“I read a bit of it,” I tell him.

“Did you get anything out of it or was it all a bunch of rubbish to you?”

“No, I think I got the gist,” I lie, and then, as a disclaimer, “It might be easier for me to understand if I had a background in that sort of thing.” I am trying to retain a bit of intellectual dignity. Being a devoted reader, it bothered me to have someone think of me as something as repugnant as a skimmer, even on a scientific thesis about the moon written by people who could touch a rocket at work if they really wanted to. 

“Well, it’s a bloody thick little thing to get through,” he says, taking a swig of his Woodchuck. “I applaud your efforts, ma’am.” He pauses. I know I am about to get a scientific lecture on moon phases. “There’s so much we have yet to understand about the moon…” he starts, and I settle back into the green plastic patio chair, holding my sweating pub glass. I can’t say I blame him for starting up. People who are passionate about their interests, no matter what level – science, art, hunting slugs with crossbows – are rarely able to indulge themselves explaining in the fine tuning of the respective craft, and a first date is the perfect setting, because rarely will someone not be polite enough to, or at least pretend to, listen.

While he explains the moon to me using sweeping hand gestures and pointing to the heavens, I add whatever baubles I can catch of his celestial sermon to my cerebral archive. I have collected bits of knowledge from past lovers like postcards, storing them away in a shoebox under the bed until the day comes that I need to dust one off and share it with whomever’s company I am keeping at the moment. While my parents made every effort to make sure I was well-rounded, there were a few things they glossed over that I had to learn elsewhere: how to cuss someone out in Korean, for instance. I have no memory of my mother showing me how to make a bottle rocket, or how to fart on command. It’s like she wanted to keep me sheltered forever. 

While most of my past relationships have ended amicably – the kind where you run into one another one the sidewalk outside of Starbucks and have a seven-minute conversation about where your apartment is now, graduate school, pending job offers - even the few men whose names I say like they are curdled milk in my mouth have taught me something. My past romantic partners are, in this case, a collective. From them, I have learned how to shoot a 9mm Glock (a surprising amount of kickback); the proper way to order a steak (medium rare); and the correlation between the Chinese economy and Sino-Russia (I admittedly haven’t quite figured this one out). I have learned the finer points of rugby, playing the xylophone, keg stands, and how to double over the sides of a paper bag into a “Jersey fold” so, barring a stampede of rabid bison, the chances of it coming open are nil; I have learned why sheep were taken along on the Crusades (hint: not for wool), the difference between structural functionalism and functional structuralism, how to adjust a telescope; the best gas stations in North Carolina, how to drive in snow, the going rate for cannabis, the easiest way to tie a Windsor knot, where to purchase a human skull; and all the major Jewish holidays.

Some bits of information I share: men are fascinated by my seemingly extensive knowledge of the social history of the blowjob, a little something I picked up from a landscape architect I dated a few years back. Some things I keep to myself: the inner-workings of the Norfolk Police Department, the points on the neck that break most easily, and interesting uses for menthol, as those can be a bit too flashy.

I have probably doled out my fair share of knowledge to the men I have seen: the proper way to cook a soy sausage, the faux-impromptu presentation I have prepared on my retrospective of Joni Mitchel albums, and the format of an obituary. Once I mentioned to a Naval officer I was seeing that I liked the music of Kate Bush, and he downloaded every song she had ever done, including some avant guarde selections that sound more like mating calls of sperm whales than actual songs. They played on his computer while he was in the shower and as I brushed my hair in the mirror, and when I heard the “OoooOOOOoooOOOoooo,” of Kate Bush’s voice echo throughout his room, the reflection of my face turned to a morbid shame. My postcard to him was Kate Bush whale music. I was this music and this music was me. He would never be able to separate the two. I still see him out sometimes. He always makes gracious conversation, but I know he’s thinking of sperm whales.

The Englishman walks me home. We pause on the corner for the traffic to whiz by, and while I’m watching the line that the after-stream of red tail lights has just made in the bulky darkness, he leans down to kiss me. “You are a fit bird,” he whispers, and I giggle, storing it in my memory, a piece of him that will be mine long after we decide that drinks are as far as we care to take it. We cross the intersection. He points at the sky at the twinkling above us, what is and what could be, the moon overhead, what is laid at our feet and what we have yet to discover, the infinite possibilities.