So I make dinner and dry out, slowly, and Nina puts on some Jimi Hendrix and we relax a little. There�s always a halcyon after one of her troubled periods. I need to work on my Dr. Phil speak.
Dinner is stew and I can practically hear my beefy mother booming that it�s stick to your ribs food! and swelling a little each time she ladles it out. My mother was stern and large, with about the same muscle-to-height proportions of a WWF wrestler. She wore shapeless, ugly dresses and pinned her hair back, but she could cook wonderfully and sang opera. My father, by contrast, was smaller and sort of soft-looking, with pale curly hair and darting eyes. He would have made a good Benedict Arnold in my fifth grade production of The Revolutionary War, but only students were allowed to participate. My mother had attended in her best shapeless black dress and wore small pearl earrings that her ears threatened to swallow with each enthusiastic burst of applause, typically timed at my entrances and exits. I was Paul Revere, and my white wig was itchy but I wasn�t allowed to take it off until right before I went home. I remember that this was my first brush with being particularly interested in baseball, because my dad�s favorite team won the World Series that night, and he defied my mother to make him come to my school play when his team was winning the Series. I came home and he was by turns euphoric, guilt-ridden, and terrified of my mother. I remember giving him a hug and telling him that my favorite team was the Mets, too, so my mother wouldn�t punch him through the wall like you see in the movies.
I had actually begun pitying my small father in the fifth grade. What a year.
The stew is thick and delicious, as all food made by me in the winter tends to be. Nina slurps and rips her meat to shreds like a wolf. We have a brief and childish messy-eating contest and she wins. She always wins.
It strikes me as sort of monstrous, there, slurping stew with her, that I don�t understand Nina, even though I guess most people don�t understand their�partners? I don�t even know what to call it�her.
Maybe I should just go through this all, see how we�ve altered ourselves. Start from the start. I met Nina in a crowded bar on 17th street. She was (and still is) three years younger than I, noisy and precocious. I remember she was wearing this crazy pair of leather boots�they were like goat�s hooves at the bottom. Her friends thought she was so cool, you could tell by the way they let her shimmer all over the place.
She ran up to me and ran her fingers through my Brillo hair, and then turned a rare shade of crimson probably not found on this planet. She explained, all in a coltish rush, that she thought I was someone else. Then she told me that my patchouli made her think of her �early days� as a hippie, and she gave me a thumbs-up. I had laughed. She was kind of goofy, with a gorgeous smile and an uninhibition, the most non-inhibited personality that I lusted after for myself. So I got her number, and I called it one week later.
I was a simple machine in those days. I dialed numbers and apologized for the wrong ones, and once spent an embarrassing twenty minutes explaining to a lonely old woman why I had dialed a wrong number and to whom I was trying to speak.
Nina had not picked up when I called. I remember that distinctly because I left half of a message and then, panicking, hung up. She still teases me about that, but what are you supposed to do? Supplement the already babbling message with a minute and a half of cringeworthy hyperventilation? No, you do not. Grown men who are, if not strapping, imposing, do not freak out when presented with an elusive girl�s beeping message machine. It�s just not done.
So I hung up, and proceeded to even further, more intense levels of panic, at one point implementing the tried and true paper bag method, which I don�t understand to this day and will probably never be able to do correctly. My then-empty house rang with unpleasant sounds of �extremely nervous man�. You see, Nina was so cool, so vibrant and so impetuous, I could never imagine her finding me amusing for more than eight or nine minutes.
But she called back. Huskily, she asked for me and then said that her answering machine had eaten half of my message and that she did like ice skating and yes, she did have her own skates, and that it was so cool that I had a frozen pond in my neighborhood. I had mumbled a lot but mentioned in a lull that I was a firefighter, and she fell over herself saying how cool I was. I remember puffing slightly, like a French pastry, and waited with the happiest and calmest sort of trepidation for the upcoming Saturday.
That sums up meeting Nina, I suppose.