Three hours ago. She and I were seated across from each other at a small round table really made for couples. She was paying- it was decided- although since this is my town really I should have. But you can't expect broke grad students to pay for white tablecloth with wine and a jazz band, and you can't expect visiting professors to eat at MacDonalds.
Used to be I'd find it funny, speaking to grown women as friends. My best friend and I would call them old people if they looked over 25. But it would really only apply to those who had made the emotional leap. There were forty year olds who weren't old people (musicians mostly), because they weren't yet at that transition. The one I'm in the middle of, when I can't pay for, but don't seem out of place in, this eatery. I don't feel strange in my hose and heels either, although lipstick tastes funny on my tongue still. I could always tell when the women passing in and out of my life still felt uncomfortable in their lipstick, but rubbed chic legs together habitually. They kept patent leather shoes under desks and taught in stockinged feet, then slipped them back on and waltzed to the teacher's lounge. I would laugh- I really enjoyed watching them have children, and with their bloated looking ankles work foot indents into the lining of those shoes.
It's really very hard to write in here- what is ink and what is air? I forgot what my last line was. I think I'm in the restaurant.
In tribute to the maps she had drawn me I drew an S shape (representing a winding path) in the white tablecloth with the tip of my pinky; a miniscule S, pointing to her. She didn't see, it was orange gray mood dark and her eyes sparkled because she was watching the jazz band. Three black men dressed crisply. One had on a striped fedora- the man with the upright bass.
The corners of her eyes are really very crinkly now- folded over and over like an old paperback. I held the edge of the tablecloth and wrinkled it a little to match. When we were first introduced, the wrinkles in her eyes were what gave her away to me. She didn't need lipstick and I could only immagine that meant she didn't like it yet. But her eyes caught that thought, they were just sharp enough. Just to be sure, when I went home that day I drew her on my whiteboard. Wrinkly eyes. Young wrinkly eyes? I used to hate conundrums. I couldn't do anything but her black hair and her dark eyes and the skin between them.
I guess a week afterwards, I remember going to a concert and getting rough nosebleed seats and I remember opening a notebook, but never writing anything. I just felt the edges of a page. My best friend and I had our sneakers up on the seats in front of us.
My best friend was rarely surprised by me, not then. She knew by my face I was writing a person down, thought the ink still in the well would eventually represent me, but as I started scribbling in the dark it wasn't me. I guess I still write in concerts.
This table is quite small. I suddenly was aware of distances in the room- how close we are, and to the band, how large a room. I smile in her general direction with an old person smile I am very comfortable in. Even at sixteen I laughed at who I was at sixteen like this. She smiled back at me- asking why I laughed- in a friend kind of way. A new voice. I wanted to say her new gray hair made me smile but I couldn't put the edges of that notebook out of my fingers. Yes I am in this room but my fingers are also in the dark, sixteen. I remembered crispness still. On that same corner of tablecloth from before, I rubbed my palms together. The motion hunched my shoulder forward like against wind.
Oh, I said, I took a jazz class from the trumpet player. We both stared at him for a moment, a set, a salad. Both of her toe points tapped to the beat- the song ended and lights raised by incriments. It must have been too long ago to expect him to remember me, I said. The secretly, and I appear the old person now. Was I willing to go up and shake his hand after he stopped looking so intense? with vestiges of swing in his posture. I went before the swing left the room.
He did remember me, curiously, and I thought about asking about the time... no, he wouldn't remember that. I'll still put it in my memoir because its a memoir kind of story about being new to an instrument and the jazz teacher not knowing about strings. Nobody knowing.
My friend's eyes sparkled when the trumpet player patted me on the shoulder like a friend. His hair was all black still- I remembered pepper but I don't mind him having dyed it to play better jazz. I still found the clean white tablecloth interesting when we sat down. Staring at it when I asked her questions and listened.
Then (this was very strange) a gray circle- a perfect cirlce- appeared like seeping water- out and out. it went quickly, I almost didn't have time to think Something is darkening my tablecloth! The shadow was covered by a plate of steaming food, and I brought my hands out from under the jazz club couple table, let go of the now wrinkled material, so my hands could soak in the lights. Pink steak. Broccolli. Tomatoes. The colors were inexplicably bright. I caught that eye, the young old eye again, and smiled, really smiled, for the first time that day.
After dinner I took her to a folk music concert. I paid- a guy I knew preformed and had extra tickets. That still counts as paying, right? I am writing this in the dark still. I wish you could see the colors of it though. She pulls at my shoulder when she wants to point out a player to me, like my best friend did when I was sixteen.
I had not tasted food before that dinner with her at the restaurant with a friend, jazz band, tablecloths and wine.
-Citron
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