Something said, something unsaid.

 04-13-80

I sit across the table from her in the college cafeteria trying to keep from saying anything, while knowing I should.

It is like pulling my own nails out trying not to hurt her even though people tell me the most horrible things about her.

When I turn away, I feel her angry stare stabbing me between my shoulder blades.

I just grip the Styrofoam cup, feeling the warmth of the coffee easing into my sweaty palms.

When I glance at her in the reflection of the window overlooking the Science building, I see her face, and the swell of her breasts rising and falling in her tank top as if she is crying, although we both know she’s not.

Her fingers crawl across the table towards me like something with a life of their own, crab-like, clutching, with a grip I ache to avoid.

She mumbles about writing, but she means something else.

Every conversation she has with a man is always about something else, dressed up whatever the man is interested in, like music, or art, or in my case, writing, as if she sees us as a series of Ken dolls from the Barbie collection, she dresses up the way she wants.

The stories people say about her don’t always make sense, not quite horror tales, but a mixture of bizarre requests, other men trailing behind her as if drawn on a string.

Finally, I look at her, and see her looking at me, a manic stare mixed with admiration.

I’m the older man in his crowd, the boy who came to college a decade late after having live a full if strange life of my own in that time period. She looks at me the way she and other girls look at the professors, pretending they need our guidance, when what she wants is something else.

“Maybe we can do something later?” she says in a squeaky voice that makes me want to find a can of motor oil.

“Later?”

“Oh, not today, I know you’re busy, but maybe later in the week,” she says.

Do something, I think, and curse myself for contemplating it rather than leaping in with arms, legs feet and other parts of my anatomy.

At 29, I’m as horny as I was as 17, and yet I’m not here at college to pick up children like this, regardless of how savvy people tell me she is.

I spent years working with a bar band doing just that, and after a while, that gets old.

I ask her if she knows how old I am, she tells me it doesn’t matter, and when I tell her anyway, her pupils dilate, and I realize I’ve made a mistake.

“So, can we do something?" she ask, more urgent now, she hearing some cry of distant hounds, but sees me as the hound she aches to actually catch her, perhaps just long enough for her to attach a string and I can stumble along behind her, the first or last in the line of men through whose noses the string already runs.

I tell her I’m late for class; she offers to walk with me, and won’t accept my refusal, her fingers finally clinging to my arm as we both rise and make our way through the maze of tables to the hall, and then out the door and down the stairs into the cool air where I feel anything but cool.

It takes all my strength to detach myself from those fingers, and still more from the gaze that pretends to be hurt, and from the urge I have to not detach at all, needing to give in, let it happen, to go with her to whatever place she has in mind to do whatever that something she wants me to do. And when I finally convince her that we can’t do it now, and must do it later, I feel her intense gaze against my back as I hurry down the path to a class, I know I will not be able to focus on, wondering just when later will be, and about the something said, and the something unsaid.