This happened a couple of times, the driver glancing back in terror to discover the flagger girl splayed across his rear windshield. This was how she met the man she dated briefly that summer, who had a convertible in whose tiny jump seat she ended up, screaming, “Look out!” because there was a mail truck approaching the other way.
“Don’t worry, I see it,” he said. After swerving around the traffic cones while the truck went past, he continued down the street.
“Are you always this hysterical?” he asked, when she finally managed to sit up. She explained to him how she had simply made an error for which she was taking the responsibility by rectifying it herself. Not hysteria but self-reliance. As in Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“We’ll go for coffee,” he said; then, “No wait a minute, you don’t want coffee. What you want is a drink.” Yes. The man was nice-enough-looking. He had one of those big mustaches like the good cop in a TV show. So the girl stashed her hard hat and orange vest in the trunk of his MG while they went for a drink in one of the seedy Chinese restaurants downtown, which were just opening for lunch. She wasn’t too worried about leaving the job site — it was a state job and the infraction process was so complex that basically she would have to commit a felony to get the boss to work up sufficient energy to fire her.
And now, after all these years, the girl can’t remember much of the dialogue that passed between them. Except that at one point she asked what he did: just filler, a substitute for an actual thought. But he used what she said as a springboard for his own interrogation: “Why is everyone so obsessed with ‘do’? Why is it assumed we all need to ‘do’ something? What exactly do you mean by ‘do’ anyway?”
She said, “Just forget it.”
Then he teased one of her legs off the stalk of the barstool and used it as a lever to spin her around. “Let’s just say I’m a househusband,” he said. “Without the wife. Without the house.” And while she found this slyly sexy, even in the dim of the bar she could tell that the man had used a blow-dryer to style his pepper-colored hair. And in those days blow-drying was a quality she distrusted in men.
But nothing happened: the man simply paid for their drinks and then drove her back to the job site, where the boss grumbled about her explanation — that she’d gone to the emergency room to be checked out after the impact — but did not contest it. “You gotta be the worst flagger girl ever,” he said.
A few days later, the man drove by again around quitting time and took her to dinner at a chic French place. They went dutch, which the girl made a big stink about, though privately she resented his not lobbying harder for the bill. But it must not have been a sufficient degree of resentment to keep her from inviting him home, which in those days was what you did after a date, which you did not call a date. The sex you called “fucking,” which was supposed to prove you were a woman who had torn the veils from her eyes. The girl called herself a woman, although the word felt like a thistle in her mouth.
As for the man, he was old enough to be one, with a thicker body than those few college boys whom she’d seen in the buff. And the sex was thicker too when it parked itself atop her like some not-quite-solid mass. She assumed this was one of natural consequences of aging, that the whitewater of sex would slow to a dribble, giving one time to get the adult work of life accomplished — like making grocery lists or calculating the number of days to the next paycheck — while the act itself took place. And when it was done he fell asleep, which the girl counted as an improvement over the college boys too, who afterward would crank up the album Aqualung and drop a couple more hits of acid and then want her to come outside with them to toss around the moon-glo Frisbee.
But later, when the darkness was rolling itself back up like a rug, she woke to find the man on top of her again. It was actually not the weight of him that woke her, for he was trying, she could tell, not to disrupt her sleep, but the fact that the room itself was shaking. All she had for a bed was a mattress under which she could feel the floorboards flex. When the square of frosted glass dropped from the fixture on the ceiling, the man flattened himself on top of her.
“Earthquake,” he muttered.
“What are you doing?”
“I was just trying to keep you from being cut.”
“No,” she said, when the trembling stopped. “I meant before that.”
“What? I didn’t want to wake you up.”
He got up to sweep then, a gesture that she knew was supposed to make her grateful while at the same time giving him an excuse not to have to meet her eyes. And if he had asked, he queried as the pile of glass clinked along the floor, wouldn’t she have gone along for one more round? Probably, she admitted, but he didn’t know that for a fact. In essence, he had raped her.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I certainly did not. That was a hundred percent consensual”
“How do you know that?”
He said that it could be inferred from her behavior earlier in the evening. He assumed she’d be willing, and what was the point in her losing sleep over something he could take care of on his own?
Well, fair question, she thought, because what did she know? The girl was not pretty, and she assumed that if she were she’d have more data when it came to men. She was merely young, and when you are young you do not realize the power your youth has, how it trumps everything, even money and smarts and looks. Sometimes (now) she looks at the one snapshot she has of herself from those weeks: there she is, a waif in a filmy Indian peasant shirt that you can see her nipples through. No wonder she couldn’t get any kind of job but flagging. In those days, she went to job interviews like that.
After the earthquake, she was uncertain how she should feel about him. The man was exceedingly cordial, he did not again mount her in her sleep, and there were no aftershocks, the fault held in its new place. Being from L.A., he was not alarmed the way she was, stockpiling a dozen gallons of water in plastic jugs. If it ever happened again, he said she was supposed to dive under a table. “Yeah, right,” she said. “If it happens again I’m running.” But he swore that she should trust him on this: go for the table.
Even though she came to understand that his ego thrived on his remaining a mystery, little by little, his story couldn’t help but leak. And when it did, she felt a few pangs of disappointment pass through her not-so-ample chest, because the story was more mundane than she had hoped. Having to do with windmills. Having to do with his engineering degree and his MBA. Turned out he was trying to start his own company, working on a business plan for putting windmills in the mountain passes. Meanwhile he was living with his baby sister, helping take care of her kids. And this part of his story appeared to be true, at least she saw them. A little boy and girl. They called him Uncle Stan.
On the first weekend they spent together — don’t worry, there are only two weekends in this story, it’ll be over with soon — he came by with both kids crammed into the jump seat, and they all went roller-skating around the lake. It made the girl happy to mother the children, and the man, she could tell, also took pleasure in her ministrations to them. But as they looped the lake, sometimes when the children weren’t looking he reached out and caressed her buttocks. Sometimes he reached farther in, past her buttocks, in between her legs.