It’s Fine

There was a woman I knew, Eliza. She did everything she could to avoid leaving her DNA behind. I had to travel with her for work a few times. She was a real nice lady in her 50s. She grew up in a normal home with a normal family in a normal town. For some reason she had this crippling fear that she would leave pieces of herself behind. She brought her own towels and sheets and pillow cases whenever she spent the night away from home. When she cleaned her hairbrush she took every last strand and would set them on fire. That is until the time the smoke alarm went off at the Day’s Inn Schenectady. She stopped lighting crap on fire and started to flush the hair down the toilet. Only then she worried that not all of it would flush away and she'd spent an hour in the can flushing the toilet over and over again, pouring in 2 cups of bleach before every push of the lever.

I was surprised when she met a man. He was one of those guys who was neither hideous nor good looking which suited her just fine. I don’t know where they met but I came to find out that he had this thing where he refused to leave his trash outside the building like everyone else. He would get on the train and go 2 or 3 stops away and toss it in public waste bins. He thought his neighbors might go through his trash and know his business. Not that there was any business to know. He spent most of his time figuring out where to toss his trash and dealing with Eliza’s DNA hysteria. I got used to it after a while and we became close friends before they disappeared back in 2004. I miss them a lot. They were good people.

I went on a few dates with this sexy little man with a mustache and great dance moves. His name was Edgar. I liked him well enough. He was a serious guy but when we danced it was like magic. He just knew how to boogie. On the 3rd or 4th date I got all gussied up because we were going to a supper club to rumba. When he picked me up he slapped me across the face because I was wearing lipstick. After he recovered from my pushing him down the stairs he told me that covering my lips with vulgar paint hides the true color of the lips. The lips on a woman’s face is a mirror image of her downstairs parts (he used the word “pussy,” but I am a lady and don’t use such language). He told me painting my lips meant I was ashamed of my pink palace and he could not be with someone who was that uptight. Well, I was happy to part ways with him. And for the record, my hooha does not look the same as my face lips; it’s way prettier and I am glad he never had the chance to see it.

Strange folks have come and gone over the years. I guess we are all a little strange in our own ways. That’s what makes us interesting. Me? I’m pretty normal. I eat raw ground beef from time to time. And instead of saying “um” I do a scale of “la la la la la la la.” That puts people off sometimes but I've learned to control that compulsion for the most part unless I am really nervous. I also never wear matching socks. I figure one of the pair will inevitably be lost so I am just being proactive. Other than that, I am pretty ordinary.

The day I met Nate was a day I will never forget. All friends start out as strangers. My 3rd grade teacher said that to me when I was shy and didn’t want to talk to anyone. It stuck with me all these years. I was sitting in Union Square Park, minding my business eating rice cakes with almond butter and watching the people when this enormous creature plopped down next to me. He was at least 6 foot 7 and about 600 lbs. A big bloop of a guy, as my dad would have said. He had a kind, round, hairless face. He started talking to me right off the bat. I remember giving him the side-eye at first but was soon drawn into a lively conversation about the color blue and the various shades and how blue can also be an emotion and we just sat there for hours talking about the color blue. Later that night I walked home and I thought about Nate. I thought about him a lot and how he would never slap me for wearing lipstick. I know, I set my standards high but that was the bar I had to measure against.

We met the next day and talked about kitchen utensils. All the different kinds and what they are used for and debated whether wooden spoons were better than a metal ladle or a silicone spatula. I was fascinated with his knowledge of different kitchen tools and his enthusiasm was contagious. He was very orderly with the topics he chose to talk about and he rarely deviated from the theme, but when we did, he would hold up one finger and say “hold just one minute” and switch gears. When he was ready to go back to the original topic he’d say “resume.” It was easy to follow his transitions and he had a laugh like a bird in a gully.

Every day we met up and talked for hours about various things. Squares, how they can be so many things to so many people and that people used to call nerds squares. We talked about olives and the varieties from the ones stuffed with almonds to tapenades and oils and beauty products made with olive oil, but also that olive was used to describe skin tones. On Wednesdays we talked about specific body parts.

Nate was the kindest, funniest man I ever met. We fell in love. Ain’t that something? And while it’s true that every friend starts off a stranger, it is also true you can never really know anyone. You only know what they let you know. I found out on our wedding night that he cried after sex. Not just tears of release but weeping and wailing cries. This really worried me the first few times but then I got used to it. It still made me uncomfortable, just like it made him uneasy when I ate raw meat, but we learned to live with it.

A year after we were married I caught him in the park talking to a pretty little thing. I hid in the bushes behind them and listened as they spoke about the color blue. She was just as captivated as I had been not so long ago. Reality was a blur. Was it really happening or was I seeing a memory from outside of myself? How could my gentle giant run the same scam on another woman? Why was I not enough? My heart thumped inside my chest with irregular hammering beats against my ribs; my face flushed hot and my eyes filled with water.

When Nate got home that night I told him what I’d seen and he didn’t deny it. The girl he was talking to, a blond of all things, was named Rose. And she understood him. And he wanted to be with her. So I left.

You find out someone is a stranger but they are really just like everyone else. Clichéd assholes. I did some sleuthing on Rose. Turns out she had webbed feet and an elongated coccyx bone which looked like a little tail. She was a frog-rabbit. She did freaky webcam sex stuff. There's a market out there for everything, I suppose. A tail and webbed feet? I could never compete with that. And I’m not sure I want to.

It's fine. Now I just stick to myself. Life is complicated enough with the people you know, or think you know. My sister likes to watch those YouTube videos of women whispering nonsense and scratching their scalp. Strange, but she’s no stranger. After Nate, there were no more strangers for me. I’m happy this way. I can't help but think about Eliza's obsession with leaving some of herself behind. She took it to a literal level with the DNA part, but the truth is, as we gather more of ourselves we inevitably lose bits too.