A Round-Heeled Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

confessions, apologies, and self-recriminations from a married mess huddled on the other side of the bed.
    Sexual Affiliation
    No Kinky Sex. Whatever that was.
    I would break them all.
    I held my glass aloft and toasted myself. “To me. Long may I wave.” At the end of my first night of triumph—twelve letters, wow!—I dressed for bed: long-sleeved T-shirt, flannel pants elasticized at waist and ankle, truly a fetching sight. Oh god, what will I wear if . . . if . . . I opened my French doors to the cool, clear California air. It smelled of possibility.
    In the weeks to come, I would receive six more packets, sixty-three letters in all.

FOUR
    Oh, Danny Boy
    I will be in town the weekend of December 2 on my way to Ireland.

Could we meet for lunch?
    â€”DAN
    I stood in front of my closet. Nothing looked right. All my clothes were old; almost all of them were either black or white and none of them included a skirt. Oh well, black and white is always safe; everybody wears black and white in San Francisco all the time: summer, winter, fall. I will not iron. I will not make this into a big deal.
    But it was. I had not been on a date in forty-two years. My friends Alison and Scott, in 1983, had invited me to dinner “to meet a tennis friend of Scott’s,” who, as it happened, was single. I don’t count that a date, though. I count it as just another disaster. Alison and Scott discreetly left the dinner table, leaving me and this man—divorced, male, terribly good-looking and younger than I—alone. “What do you do?” he asked.
    â€œI am a teacher,” I said. “An English teacher.”
    â€œMy worst subject,” he said. “I’m dyslexic.”
    â€œOh,” I said, “school must have been hard for you.”
    â€œActually, no,” he said. “Some girl always helped me, stole the tests ahead of time, wrote my papers for me. I did all right.”
    Conversation turned to hobbies. “I read a lot,” I said before I could swallow it.
    â€œMy favorite thing to do,” he said, “is to go to the Financial District in San Francisco around five o’clock and watch the girls come out of the office buildings. Great sight.” He smiled, ruminating about his favorite thing. Not soon enough, in the silence that ensued, Scott and Alison returned, I said good night, and that was that. So that doesn’t count. This one counted. It was going to be a date.
    I DID NOT DATE in high school. The kids in my class, almost all thirty-two of us who would graduate, the largest class ever to finish twelfth grade, had been together since kindergarten. Many of our parents had gone to school together. In the upper-left corner of Ohio, where the earth was rich for farming, where cornfields provided the natural boundaries of town, where kids dropped out in tenth grade to help their fathers in the fields, this little town named Archbold, population 1,234, flourished during World War I, the Depression, World War II, the recession, and Ronald Reagan; it is healthy today.
    Not so sturdy myself, I avoided all physical contact with boys. When everyone began to go steady, I didn’t. My mother had a lot to do with this. In eighth grade Dick gave me his ID bracelet. That meant we were a couple, we were going steady, no matter that we never went anywhere, that we were never alone, that we never actually talked to each other. He liked me; that’s why he gave his bracelet to my best friend to give to me. I took the bracelet, which meant I liked him, which is what my best friend went back and told him. At Christmastime, during gift exchange in social studies class, I gave him a picture of me beautifully wrapped; my mom did the classiest wrapping of anyone in town. Miss Nafziger, the teacher, Old Step-and-a-Half, we called her— she wore a brace that clanked when she walked—made everybody unwrap their presents and hold them up for everyone to see. Dick