The Tiniest Things

Little things -- not the biggies -- one misses: the way Sara would sneak in an extra roll at Yahtzee when she ran out of Chance, things like that, shared little secrets. He rolls these things in his mind, drinking water, picking at his meal.

As he finishes his salad, he sees at the bar a very cute girl -- or is it young woman -- staring at him. She looks like a girl. She smiles. That he has the ability to make someone smile surprises him, another sign of things lost. She makes her solitary way over.

“Mr. Adams? Ohmygod! Mr. Adams! Hi, do you remember me?”

He feels the blood in his face, the way it always rises when they come up to him after graduation -- so sincere, young, unable to hide their feelings.

“Sit, please,” he says. You’d think he’d remember. It couldn’t have been that long. Springs of curls. Olive skin. A round face with scattered freckles. Green bright eyes. That rosy glow. Ah well.

“I’m old,” he says.  “Comparatively.  I’m sorry. I don’t --”

She sits, leans forward at her desk. No. Not a desk. That adrenaline rush as the bell rings and class begins. Easy, really, to keep their interest for forty-two minutes, for less than a year, until they disappear, reappear in September as a different face in the front seat, leaning forward, all anticipation.

“I’m Robin, remember? I was in your first ninth-grade class.” Ten years ago? “I caught you and your wife making out on the porch at the prom.”

She still bounces, a big round ball of “hi how are you?” No make-up. She smiles her wide white smile.

He smiles back, more weakly, less sure, more tired.

She continues, “We all had crushes on you. You were so funny. I’m at Villanova now -- in the graduate program. English, do you believe it? You were a big influence on me, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.”

She looks at the remains of the salad, the bubbly water.

“Very ascetic.” She says it proudly, calling upon a ninth-grade vocabulary word. See, the word says, see what you did for me.

“I stopped drinking right after college. When I met Sara. My wife.”

He pushes away from the table, never knowing what to say to them, wondering what it is they want him to say, something to give meaning to the moment, but he can think of nothing.

It is she who finds something. “When I go back home, we play this drinking game where someone mentions something about a teacher -- like bad breath -- and you have to come up with the teacher.”

“That would be Mr. Richards,” he says. He sees the set-up. Goes for it. “And what do you say for me?”

“I don’t know -- supercilious, maybe.”

She pauses, again searching, the vocabulary word used as incorrectly as could be. Super-silly-us. Maybe it was a joke.

She continues. “I wish you could read this paper I wrote on The Scarlet Letter.”

“If it’s about The Scarlet Letter, it must have gotten an A, right?”

She laughs. “See? That’s what I mean. That’s so funny. Would you really read it?”

“Sure.”

As she stands up, she stops. “Aren’t you coming? My apartment’s right above the bar.”

He glimpses, because of those low-rise pants, the white of her white cotton panties, the yellow of the yellow flowers. He sees the girl in his class, arm raised, trying to get the teacher’s attention, a vocabulary word on her lips.

“My wife wants to leave me,” he tells Robin. “She’s fallen out of love. She just told me tonight.”

“That’s so mean.”

“I don’t think she meant to be mean.”

“Still.” She stands with hands in pockets, bent. “Just like that?” Robin snaps her fingers, in her pocket. What a trick. “That sounds strange. She’s probably cheating or something.”

“What would you want with me, Robin? It’s silly.”

“Do you remember that poem I wrote when you were explaining metaphor to us? About the boyfriend and girlfriend eating Rocky Road ice cream, unable to eat it without it melting on them. Nothing lasts, Mr. Adams, right? Everything ends. The tragic human condition. Blah, blah, blah.”

He’s following her around the back. He’s standing at the foot of the stairs of the fire escape. One day, Sara woke up and discovered she did not love him. Why? How? Nothing lasts. He’d gotten tiresome and ho-hum.

“I want to know what it’s like to want someone again,” Sara said.

“You were always at school,” Robin says. “Even then.”

Yes. Their air-conditioning system at home has an infinitesimal leak. No one can find it. Eventually and gradually the upstairs will be stifling and airless. That was their marriage, wasn’t it? He could generate only so much interest. Sara grew bored. He grew sad. Gave up.

“Well?” Robin stands midway between the infinite air and meager earth. She beckons with the slant of her body, the wine-tinged breath, the wide-eyed wonder of faith and hope in the world.

In one scenario, he descends onto the dim street, leaves the car, walks away from the unreality of Robin and her promise of resurrection. The feeble light of porches and lampposts brighten his spirits, a symbol of the importance of the tiniest beam of light in a dark world where nothing endures. Where ice cream melts before it can be fully tasted. Where childhood merges into Robin into Sara into that lonely walk into a world bent on endings.

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