I
look across the table at her, and she smiles at me. I smile back, and
drop a too slow, overly suggestive wink. She cracks up, kicking my
foot under the table. We finish our lunch in companionable silence
and order dessert. A large sundae that practically swims in chocolate
fudge is brought to the table, and we grin at each other like the
children we are.
There
is nothing between us for many minutes but the slow savoring of cheap
ice cream in large quantities. Finally, I push back from the speckled
Formica table with an appreciative belly pat. I close my eyes as the
sugar races through my blood, enjoying the warmth of it. I feel her
watching me. I enjoy that too.
When
I open my eyes again, hers are on me. She looks around carefully and
places one hand on the corner of her mouth. With a final circumspect
glance, her pink tongue peeks out. I lean forward and cross my arms,
bumping her elbow on purpose. Her spoon clinks against the now empty
bowl of ice cream, the sound a tiny chime. She gives me mock
disapproval under lowered eyebrows.
Our
waitress appears then, and asks, “How was it all?”
My
wife’s expression clears up like a sudden Florida rain. “A-mazing,”
she says with a smile like a flashbulb, giving the first vowel a
lingering hard pronunciation.
“Yeah,”
I concur. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I trail off into the silence. I
feel another kick under the table, almost a nudge.
“You
two,” the waitress says with a smirk and a gentle shake of her
head. She places the check on the table and points at the front
counter. “When you’re ready.”
All
of this is lost on the people around us at the little roadside diner;
all of this is lost on us.
I
will never learn that my wife picked up the surreptitious raspberry
from a boyfriend she had in high school; I've long forgotten that the
telegraphed wink came from a college girlfriend. Faux anger she
learned from her mother; the amiable elbow bump I absorbed from my
father.
As
we get up to leave with the slight delirium that accompanies the
feeling beyond satiety, I hold her coat. She shimmies into it, giving
a delicate little hop to let me know she’s situated. When she was
in third grade, she saw another little girl do this when her mother
held a purple parka open for her. I grab the check from the table and
head for the register.
When
the credit card receipt prints out, I sign it with a flourish copied
from a man I saw when I was seventeen. The door jingles as I hold it
open for her with one hand and make a doorman's sweep with the other,
like my father's business partner used to do for clients.
Once
inside the car, I fail to realize our marks on one another are as
indelible as they are subtle. The idea that we are pieces of one
another slips by me like the miles of lonely desert highway outside.
Our
someday children might poke their tongues out in restaurants,
imitating a man they've never met that used to kiss their mother. The
suggestion that discrete segments of our personalities enjoy a
faceless immortality, even after the initial actor is removed, never
occurs to me.
I
go through the rest of my life blind to the fact that these cadences
and gestures and pieces are like social DNA, easily propagated. I
never even dream that I and we and us together are repeatedly
transmuted by the incidental alchemy of casual human contact.
Instead,
I am always too busy looking at my wife’s face to discern the
provenance of the motions animating it. Even now, I steal glances
away from the road to watch her laugh. It is music, and in my blessed
ignorance, I am the only one it plays for.
