American Innovations: Stories

WILD BERRY BLUE

This is a story about my love for Roy, though first I have to say a few words about my dad, who was there with me at the McDonald’s every Saturday, letting his little girl, I was maybe nine, swig his extra half-and-halfs, stack the shells into messy towers. My dad drank from his bottomless cup of coffee and read the paper while I dipped my McDonaldland cookies in milk and pretended to read the paper. He wore gauzy striped button-ups with pearline snaps. He had girlish wrists, a broad forehead like a Roman, a terrifying sneeze.

“How’s the coffee?” I’d ask.

“Not good, not bad. How’s the milk?”

“Terrific,” I’d say. Or maybe “Exquisite.”

My mom was at home cleaning the house; our job there at the McDonald’s was to be out of her way.

And that’s how it always was on Saturdays. We were Jews, we had our rituals. That’s how I think about it. Despite being secular Israelis living in the wilds of Oklahoma, an ineluctable part in us still indulged certain repetitions.

* * *

Many of the people who worked at the McDonald’s were former patients of my dad’s: mostly drug addicts and alcoholics in rehab programs. A few plain old depressions. An occasional paranoid. The McDonald’s hired people no one else would hire; I think it was a policy. My dad, in effect, was the McDonald’s — Psychiatric Institute liaison. The McDonald’s manager, a deeply Christian man, would regularly come over and say hello to us and thank my dad for many things. Once he thanked him for, as a Jew, having kept safe the word of God during all the dark years.

“I’m not sure I’ve done so much,” my dad had answered.

“But it’s been living there in you,” the manager said. He was a nice man, admirably tolerant of the accompanying dramas of his workforce, dramas I picked up on peripherally. Absenteeism, petty theft, once a worker ODing in the bathroom. I had no idea what that meant, to OD, but it sounded spooky. “They slip out from under their own control,” I heard the manager say, and the phrase stuck with me. I pictured the right side of a person lifting up a velvet rope and leaving the left side behind.

* * *

Sometimes, dipping my McDonaldland cookies — FryGuy, Grimace — I’d hold a cookie in the milk too long and it would saturate and crumble to the bottom of the carton. There it was something mealy, vulgar. Horrible. I’d lose my appetite. Though the surface of the milk often remained pristine, I could feel the cookie’s presence down below, lurking. Like some ancient bottom-dwelling fish with both eyes on one side of its head.

I’d tip the carton back slowly in order to see what I dreaded seeing, just to feel that queasiness, and also the pre-queasiness of knowing the main queasiness was coming, the anticipatory ill. Beautiful, Horrible: I had a running mental list. Cleaning lint from the screen of the dryer — beautiful. Bright glare on glass — horrible. Mealworms — also horrible. The stubbles of shaved hair in a woman’s armpit — beautiful.

The Saturday I was to meet Roy, after dropping a cookie in the milk, I looked over, up at my dad. “Cookie,” I squeaked, turning a sour face at the carton.

He pulled out his worn leather wallet, with its inexplicable rust stain ring on the front. He gave me a dollar. My mom never gave me money, and my dad always gave me more than I needed. (He also called me the Queen of Sheba sometimes, like when I’d stand up on a dining room chair to see how things looked from there.) The torn corner of the bill he gave me was held on with yellowed Scotch tape. Someone had written on the dollar in blue pen, over the Treasury seal, “I love Becky!!!”

I go up to the counter with the Becky dollar to buy my replacement milk, and what I see is a tattoo, most of which I can’t see. A starched white long-sleeve shirt covers most of it. But a little blue-black lattice of it I can see — a fragment like ancient elaborate metalwork, that creeps down all the way, past the wrist, to the back of the hand, kinking up and over a very plump vein. The vein is so distended I imagine laying my cheek on it in order to feel the blood pulse and flow, to maybe even hear it. Beautiful. So beautiful. I don’t know why but I’m certain this tattoo reaches all the way up to his shoulder. His skin is deeply tanned but the webbing between his fingers sooty pale.

This beautiful feeling. I haven’t had it about a person before. Not in this way.

In a trembling moment I shift my gaze up to the engraved nametag. There’s a yellow M emblem, then “Roy.”

* * *

I place my dollar down on the counter. I put it down like it’s a password I’m unsure of, one told to me by an unreliable source. “Milk,” I say, quietly.

Roy, whose face I finally look at, is staring off, up, over past my head, like a bored lifeguard. He hasn’t heard or noticed me, little me, the only person on line. Roy is biting his lower lip and one of his teeth, one of the canines, is much whiter than the others. Along his cheekbones his skin looks dry and chalky. His eyes are blue, with bruisy, beautiful eyelids.

I try again, a little bit louder. “Milk.”

Still he doesn’t hear me; I begin to feel as if maybe I am going to cry because of these accumulated moments of being nothing. That’s what it feels like standing so close to this type of beauty — like being nothing.

Resolving to give up if I’m not noticed soon I make one last effort and, leaning over on my tiptoes, I push the dollar farther along the counter, far enough that it tickles Roy’s thigh, which is leaned up against the counter’s edge.

He looks down at me, startled, then laughs abruptly. “Hi little sexy,” he says. Then he laughs again, too loud, and the other cashier, who has one arm shrunken and paralyzed, turns and looks and then looks away again.

These few seconds seem like everything that has ever happened to me.

My milk somehow purchased, I go back to the table wondering if I am green, or emitting a high-pitched whistling sound, or dead.

* * *

It’s not actually the first time I’ve seen Roy I realize back at the table as, with great concentration, I dip my Hamburglar cookie into the cool milk. I think that maybe I’ve seen Roy— that coarse blond hair — every Saturday, for all my Saturdays. I take a bite from my cookie. I have definitely seen him before. Just somehow not in this way.

My dad appears to be safely immersed in whatever is on the other side of the crossword puzzle and bridge commentary page. I feel — a whole birch tree pressing against my inner walls, its leaves reaching to the top of my throat — the awful sense of wanting some other life. I have thought certain boys in my classes have pretty faces, but I have never before felt like laying my head down on the vein of a man’s wrist. (I still think about that vein sometimes.) Almost frantically I wonder if Roy can see me there at my table, there with my dad, where I’ve been seemingly all my Saturdays.

Attempting to rein in my anxiety I try to think: What makes me feel this way? Possessed like this? Is it a smell in the air? It just smells like beefy grease. Which is pleasant enough but nothing new. A little mustard. A small vapor of disinfectant. I wonder obscurely if actually Roy is Jewish, as if that might make normal this spiraling fated feeling. As if really what’s struck me is just an unobvious family resemblance. But I know that we’re almost the only Jews in town.

Esther married the gentile king, I think in a desperate absurd flash.

Since a part of me wants to stay forever I finish my cookies quickly.

“Let’s go,” I say.

“Already?”

“Can’t we just leave? Let’s leave.”

* * *

There’s the Medieval Fair, I think to myself in consolation all Sunday. It’s two weekends away. You’re always happy at the Medieval Fair, I say to myself, as I fail to enjoy sorting my stamps, fail to stand expectantly, joyfully, on the dining room chair. Instead I fantasize about running the french fry fryer in the back of McDonald’s. I imagine myself learning to construct Happy Meal boxes in a breath, to fold the papers around the hamburgers just so. I envision a stool set out for me to climb atop so that I can reach the apple fritter dispenser; Roy spots me, making sure I don’t fall. And I get a tattoo. Of a bird, or a fish, or a ring of birds and fish, around my ankle.

There is no happiness in these daydreams. Just an overcrowded and feverish empty.

At school on Monday I sit dejectedly in the third row of Mrs. Brown’s class because that is where we are on the weekly seating chart rotation. I suffer through exercises in long division, through bits about Magellan. Since I’m not in the front, I’m able to mark most of my time drawing a tremendous maze, one that stretches to the outer edges of the notebook paper. This while the teacher reads to us from something about a girl and her horse. Something. A horse. Who cares! Who cares about a horse! I think, filled, suddenly, with unexpected rage. That extra-white tooth. The creeping chain of the tattoo. I try so hard to be dedicated to my maze, pressing my pencil sharply into the paper as if to hold down my focus better.

All superfluous, even my sprawling maze, superfluous. A flurry of pencil shavings — they come out as if in a breath— from the sharpener distracts me. A sudden phantom pain near my elbow consumes my attention.

I crumple up my maze dramatically, do a basketball throw to the wastebasket like the boys do. I miss, of course, but no one seems to notice, which is the nature of my life at school, where I am only noticed in bland, embarrassing ways, like when a substitute teacher can’t pronounce my name. The joylessness of my basketball toss, it makes me look over at my once-crush Josh Deere and feel sad for him, for the smallness of his life.

One day, I think, it will be Saturday again.

But time seemed to move so slowly. I’d lost my appetite for certain details of life.

* * *

“Do you know about that guy at McDonald’s with the one really white tooth?” I brave this question to my dad. This during a commercial break from Kojak.

“Roy’s a recovering heroin addict,” my dad says, turning to stare at me. He’s always said things to me other people wouldn’t have said to kids. He’d already told me about the Oedipus complex, and I had stared dully back at him. He would defend General Rommel to me, though I had no idea who General Rommel was. He’d make complex points about the strait of Bosporus.

So he said that to me, about Roy, which obviously he shouldn’t have said. (Here, years later, I still think about the mystery of that plump vein, which seems a contradiction. Which occasionally makes me wonder if there were two Roys.)

“I don’t know what the story with the tooth is,” my dad adds. “Maybe it’s false?” And then it’s back to the mystery of Kojak.

I wander into the kitchen feeling unfulfilled and so start interrogating my mom about my Purim costume, for the carnival that is still two Sundays, aeons, away. The Purim carnival is in Tulsa, over an hour’s driving distance; I don’t know the kids there, and my costume never measures up. “And the crown,” I remind her hollowly. I’m not quite bold enough to bring up that she could buy me one of the beautiful ribbon crowns sold at the Medieval Fair, which we’ll be at the day before. “I don’t want,” I mumble mostly to myself, “one of those paper crowns that everyone has.”

* * *

Thursday night I am at the Skaggs Alpha Beta grocery with my mom. I am lingering amid all the sugar cereals I know will never come home with me. It’s only every minute or so that I am thinking about Roy’s hand, about how he called me sexy.

Then I see Roy. He has no cart, no basket. He’s holding a gallon of milk and a supersize Twizzlers and he is reaching for, I can’t quite see — a big oversize box that looks to be Honeycomb. A beautiful assemblage. Beautiful.

I turn away from Roy. I feel my whole body, even my ears, blushing. The backs of my hands feel itchy the way they always do in spring. I touch the cool metal shelving, run my fingers up and over the plastic slipcovers, over the price labels, hearing every nothing behind me. The price labels make a sandy sliding sound when I push them. He’s a monster, Roy. Not looking at him, just feeling that power he has over me, a monster.

My mom in lace-up sandals cruises by the aisle with our shopping cart. The lighting seems to change. Able now to turn around, I see that Roy is gone. I run after my mom. When finally we’re in the car again, back door closed on the groceries — when I turn around, I see celery stalks innocently sticking out of a brown paper bag — I feel great relief.

* * *

I decide to wash my feet in the sink; this always makes me happy. On my dad’s shaving mirror in the bathroom, old Scotch tape holding it in place, is a yellowed bit of paper, torn from a magazine. For years it’s been there, inscrutable. Now I feel certain it carries a secret. About love maybe. About the possessed feeling I have because of Roy.

It says And human speech is but a cracked kettle upon which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that—

Next to the scrap is a sticker of mine, of a green apple.

I look again at the quote: the bears, the kettle.

Silly, I decide. It’s all very silly. I start to dry my feet with a towel.

For the impending McDonald’s Saturday I resolve to walk right past my tattooed crush. I’ll have nothing to do with him, with his hi little sexys. This denouncement is actually extraordinarily painful since Roy alone is now my whole world. Everything that came before— my coin collection in the Tupperware, the corrugated cardboard trim on school bulletin boards, the terror of the fire pole — now revealed supremely childish and vain. Without even deciding to, I have left all that and now must leave Roy, too. I commit to enduring the burden of the universe alone. The universe with its mysterious General Rommels, its heady strait of Bosporus. I resolve to suffer.

* * *

Saturday comes again. My mom has already taken the burner covers off the stove and set them in the sink. I’m trying the think-about-the-Medieval-Fair trick so as to not think about maybe seeing Roy. I picture the ducks at the duck pond, the way they waddle right up and snatch the bread slice right out of my hand. I focus on the fair, knowing that time will move forward in that way, eventually waddle forward to the next weekend.

Buckling myself into the front seat of our yellow Pinto, I put an imitation Life Savers under my tongue, a blue one. When my dad walks in front of the car on the way to the driver’s side, I notice that he has slouchy shoulders. Horrible. Not his shoulders. But my noticing them.

“I love you,” I say to my dad. He laughs and says that’s good. I sit there hating myself a little.

I concentrate on my candy, on letting it be there, letting it do its exquisitely slow melt under my tongue. Beautiful. I keep that same candy the whole car ride over, through stop signs, waiting for a kid on a bigwheel to cross, past the Conoco, with patience during the long wait for the final left turn. In my pocket I have more candies. Most of a roll of wild berry. When I move my tongue just a tiny bit, the flavor, the sugary slur, assaults my sensations. I choke on a little bit of saliva.

* * *

When we enter I sense Roy at our left; I walk on the far side of my dad, hoping to hide in his shadow. In a hush I inform him that I’ll go save our table and that he should order me the milk and the cookies.

“OK,” he whispers back, as if this were just some game.

At the table I stare straight ahead at the molded plastic bench, summoning all my meagernesses together so as to keep from looking feverishly around. I think I sense Roy’s blond hair off in the distance to my left. In weakness I glimpse sideways; I see a potted plant.

“How’s the coffee?” I ask after my dad has settled in across from me.

He shrugs his ritual shrug, but no words except the question of how is your milk. Is he mad at me? As I begin dipping my cookies in anguish I answer that the milk is delicious.

Why do we say these little things? I wonder. Why do I always want the McDonaldland butter cookies and never the chocolate chip? It seems creepy to me now for the first time, all the habits and ways of the heart I have that I didn’t choose for myself.

I throw back three half-and-halfs.

“Will you get me some more half-and-halfs?” my dad asks.

He asks nicely. And he is really reading the paper while I am not. Of course I’m going to go get creamers. I’m a kid, I remember.

“I don’t feel well,” I try.

“Really?”

“I mean I feel fine,” I say, getting out of the chair.

* * *

Roy. Taking a wild berry candy from my pocket, I resolve again to focus on a candy under my tongue instead of on him. I head first toward the back wall, darting betwixt and between the tables with their attached swiveling chairs. This is the shiniest, cleanest place in town; that’s what McDonald’s was like back then. Even the corners and crevices are clean. Our house: even after my mom cleans, it’s all still in disarray. I’ll unfold a blanket and find a stray sock inside. Behind the toilet there’s blue lint. Maybe that’s what makes a home, I think, its special type of mess.

And then I’m at the front counter. I don’t look up.

I stand off to the side since I’m not really ordering anything, just asking for a favor, not paying for milk but asking for creamers. Waiting to be noticed, I stare down at the brushed steel counter with its flattering hazy reflection, and then it appears, he appears. I see first his palm, reflected in the steel. Then I see his knuckles, the hairs on the back of his hand, the lattice tattoo, the starched shirt cuff that is the beginning of hiding all the rest of the tattoo that I can’t see.

Beautiful.

A part of me decides I am taking him back into my heart. Even if no room will be left for anything else.

Roy notices me. He leans down, eyes level with my sweaty curls stuck against my forehead, at the place where I know I have my birthmark, a dark brown mole there above my left eyebrow, and he says, his teeth showing, his strange glowing white canine showing: “Need something, sweets?’ He taps my nose with his finger.

That candy, I had forgotten about it, and I move my tongue and the flavor — it all comes rushing out, overwhelming, and I drool a little bit as I blurt out, “I’m going to the Medieval Fair next weekend.” I wipe my wet lips with the back of my hand and see the wild berry blue saliva staining.

“Cool,” he says, straightening up. He interlaces his fingers and pushes them outward, and they crack deliciously, and I think about macadamias. I think I see him noticing the blue smeared on my right hand. He says then: “I love those puppets they sell there — those real plain wood ones.”

I just stare at Roy’s blue eyes. I love blue eyes. Still to this day I am always telling myself that I don’t like them, that I find them lifeless and dull and that I prefer brown eyes, like mine, like my parents’, but it’s a lie. It’s a whole other wilder type of love that I feel for these blue-eyed people of the world. So I look up at him, at those blue eyes, and I’m thinking about those plain wooden puppets — this is all half a second — then the doors open behind me and that invasive heat enters and the world sinks down, mud and mush and the paste left behind by cookies.

“Oh,” I say. “Half-and-half.”

He reaches into a tray of much melted ice and bobbing creamers and he hands three to me. My palm burns where he touched me and my vision is blurry; only the grooves on the half-and-half container keep me from vanishing.

“Are you going to the fair?” I brave. Heat in my face again, the feeling just before a terrible rash. I’m already leaving the counter so as not to see those awful blue eyes, and I hear, “Ah, I’m working,” and I don’t even turn around.

I read the back of my dad’s newspaper. They have found more fossils at the Spiro Mounds. There’s no explanation for how I feel.

* * *

How can I describe the days of the next week? I’d hope to see Roy when I ran out to check the mail. I’d go drink from the hose in our front yard thinking he might walk or drive by, even though I had no reason to believe he might ever come to our neighborhood. I got detention for not turning in my book report of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” I found myself rummaging around in my father’s briefcase, as if Roy’s files — I imagined the yellow “Confidential” envelope from Clue — might somehow be there. Maybe I don’t need to explain because who hasn’t been overtaken by this shade of love? I remember walking home from school very slowly, anxiously, as if through foreign, unpredictable terrain. I wanted to buy Roy a puppet at the Medieval Fair. One of the wooden ones like he’d mentioned. Only in that thought could I rest. All the clutter of my mind was waiting to come closer to that moment of purchasing a puppet.

So I did manage to wake up in the mornings. I did try to go to sleep at night. Though my heart seemed to be racing to its own obscure rhythm, private even from me.

Friday night before the fair, my bedroom alien and lurksome, I was hopeless for rest. After pulling my maze workbook down from the shelf, I went into the brightly lit bathroom. I turned on the overhead fan so that it would become noisy enough to overwhelm the sound in my mind of Roy cracking his knuckles. The whirring fan noise: it was like a quiet. Sitting in the empty tub, I set the maze book on the rounded ledge and purposely began on a difficult page. I worked cautiously, tracing ahead with my finger before setting pen to paper. This was pleasing, though out of the corner of my eye I saw the yellowed magazine fragment—cracked kettle—and it was like a ghost in the room with me, though its message, I felt sure — almost too sure, considering that I didn’t understand it — had nothing to do with me.

In the morning my mom found me there in the tub, like some passed-out drunk, my maze book open on my small chest. I must have fallen asleep. I felt like crying, didn’t even know why. I reached up to my face, wondering if something had gone wrong with it.

“Do you have a fever?” my mom asked.

When she left, assured, somewhat, I tried out those words—Human speech is like a cracked kettle—as if they were the coded answer to a riddle.

I was always that kind of kid who crawled into bed with her parents, who felt safe only with them. If my mom came into my classroom because I had forgotten my lunch at home, I wasn’t ashamed, like other kids were, but proud. For a few years of my life, up until then, my desires hadn’t chased away from me. I wanted to fall asleep on the sofa while my dad watched The Rockford Files, and so I did. I wanted couscous with butter, and so I had some. Yes sometimes shopping with my mom I coveted a pair of overalls, or a frosted cookie, but the want would be faint, and fade as soon as we’d walked away.

* * *

We had left the house uncleaned when we went to the fair that Saturday. I was thinking about the wooden puppet, but I felt obligated to hope for a crown; that’s what I was supposed to be pining for. I imagined that my mom would think to buy me a crown for my Queen Esther costume. But maybe, I hoped, she would forget all about the crown. It wasn’t unlikely. What seemed like the world to me often revealed itself, through her eyes, to be nothing.

I had always loved the Medieval Fair. A woman dressed up in an elaborate mermaid costume would sit under the bridge that spanned the artificial pond. People tossed quarters down at her. I thought she was beautiful. She’d flap her tail, wave coyly. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that she was considered trashy. Farther on there was a stacked hay maze that had already become too easy by late elementary school, but I liked looking at it from a distance, from up on the small knoll. I think every turn you might take was fine. Whichever way you went you still made it out. It was upsetting, being spat out so soon.

We saw the dress-up beggar with the prosthetic nose and warts. We crossed the bridge, saw the mermaid. A pale teenage boy in stonewashed jeans and a tank top leaned against the bridge’s railing, smoking and looking down at her. Two corseted women farther along sang bawdy ballads in the shade of a willow and while we listened a slouchy man went by with a gigantic foam mallet. The whole world, it seemed, was laughing or fighting or crying or unfolding chairs or blending smoothies and this would go on eternally. Vendors sold wooden flutes, Jacob’s ladders, feathered mobiles. In an open field two ponies and three sheep were there for the petting and the overseer held a baby pig in his hands. We ate fresh ears of boiled corn, smothered with butter and cracked pepper. My mom didn’t mention the price. That really did make it feel like a day in some other me’s life.

But I felt so unsettled. Roy’s tooth in my mind as I bit into the corn, Roy’s fingers on my palm as I thrummed my hand along a low wooden fence. I had so little of Roy and yet he had all of me and the feeling ran deep to the most ancient parts of me. So much so that I felt that my love for Roy shamed my people, whoever my people were, whoever I was queen of, people I had never met, nervous people and sad people and dead people, all clambering for air and space inside me. I didn’t even know what I wanted from Roy. I still don’t. All my life love has felt like a croquet mallet to the head. Something absurd, ready for violence. Love.

I remember once years later, in a love fit, stealing cherry Luden’s cough drops from a convenience store. I had the money to pay for them but I instead stole them. I wanted a cheap childish cherry flavor on my tongue when I saw my love, who of course isn’t my love anymore. That unrelenting pathetic euphoria. Low-quality cough drops. That’s how I felt looking around anxiously for the wooden puppet stand, how I felt looking twice at every blond man who passed, wondering if he might somehow be Roy, there for me, even though he’d said he wouldn’t be there. Thinking about that puppet for Roy eclipsed all other thoughts. Put a slithery veil over the whole day. How much would the puppet cost? I didn’t have my own pocket money, an allowance or savings or anything like that. I wasn’t in the habit of asking for things. I never asked for toys. I never asked for sugar cereals. I felt to do so was wrong. I had almost cried that one day just whispering to myself about the crown. But all I wanted was that puppet because that puppet was going to solve everything.

* * *

At the puppet stand I lingered. I was hoping that one of my parents would take notice of the puppets, pick one up. My dad, standing a few paces away, stood out from the crowd in his button-up shirt. He looked weak, sunbeaten. My mom was at my side, her arms folded across a tank top that was emergency orange. It struck me, maybe for the first time, that they came to this fair just for me.

“I’ve never wanted anything this much in my whole life,” I confessed in a rush, my hand on the unfinished wood of one of the puppets. “I want this more than a crown.”

My mom laughed at me, or at the puppet. “It’s so ugly,” she said, in Hebrew.

“That’s not true,” I whispered furiously, feeling as if everything had fallen silent, as if the ground beneath me were shifting. The vendor must surely have understood my mom, by her tone alone. I looked over at him: a fat bearded man talking to a long-haired barefoot princess. He held an end of her dusty hair distractedly; his other hand he had inside the collar of his shirt. He was sweating.

“It’s junk,” my mom said.

“You don’t like anything,” I said, nearly screaming, there in the bright sun. “You never like anything at all.” My mother turned her back to me. I sensed the vendor turn our way.

“I’ll get it for you,” my dad said, suddenly right with us. There followed an awkward argument between my parents, which seemed only to heighten my dad’s pleasure in taking out his rust-stained wallet, in standing his ground, in being irrevocably on my side.

His alliance struck me as misguided, pathetic, even childish; I felt like a villain; we bought the puppet.

That dumb puppet — I carried it around in its wrinkly green plastic bag. For some reason I found myself haunted by the word “leprosy.” When we watched the minstrel show in the little outdoor amphitheater, I tried to forget the green bag under the bench. We only made it a few steps before my mom noticed it was gone. She went back and fetched it.

At home I noticed that the wood of one of the hands of the puppet was cracked. That wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t give the puppet to Roy. Looking at that mute piece of wood, I saw something. A part of me that I’d never chosen, that I would never control. I went to the bathroom, turned on the loud fan, and cried. An image of Roy came to my mind, particularly of that tooth. I felt my love falling off, dissolving.

He was my first love, my first love in the way that first loves are usually second or third or fourth loves. I still think about a stranger in a green jacket across from me in the waiting room at the DMV. About a blue-eyed man with a singed earlobe that I saw at a Baskin-Robbins with his daughter. My first that kind of love. I never got over him. I never get over anyone.