Sunday Breakfast

I once shamed a man into moving out of town.

I probably shouldn't take all the credit for the move. But I like to.

When I went to school out east, I lived in a very small town. Very small doesn't really even cover it. We had to drive a half hour to another state to get to a grocery store. Or a car wash. Or a McDonald's. No wonder I lost all that weight.

Within the very small town was our very small school. Less than 500 people, all told. Some of them were married, but not very many of them. Mostly single people, in their mid to late 20's. Which led, of course, to a certain...familiarity.

We once made a chart, my friends and I. We connected everyone we knew who had...connected. It looked like those maps of internet hits. Lines everywhere, connecting the most unlikely people. The rich bitch and the pot head. The quiet girl and the guy in the band. The president of the student organization and the resident protestor against whatever cause struck his fancy. The guy and...the other guy.

No one actually "dated," whatever that means these days. I think, in three years out there, I went on one actual date with a guy I went to school with. I dated a lot of guys who weren't in school with me...that was the only way I could actually go on a date. Otherwise, you were stuck with clandestine hook-ups that you absolutely positively never admitted to during the light of day, or without having had imbibed at least a bottle of white zinfindel, the wine of choice at that time in my sad, misguided life. The only surefire way to tell if two people were together was if you saw them at breakfast together on Saturday or Sunday morning at the local pancake shack. Breakfast together was tatamount to publishing the banns.

So this guy moves to town. He's a friend of a guy in my class. He'd visited before and hooked up with a friend of mine during his brief visit. I was dating someone during that time, so I didn't pay him much attention when we met, other than ascertaining that we were both from Ohio. The second time...well, that was different.

Great eyes. Good hands. Nice body. He worked road crew somewhere, if I remember correctly. Reasonably bright. Really funny. And not someone who I'd spent every waking minute of the past two years of my life with, like every other guy in town. No baggage that lived within ten miles and no history he didn't choose to share.

We spent some quality time together. I remember hanging out with him at a Christmas party when the lights blew out because we'd overloaded the circuits. That was the year we left pints of Ben & Jerry's in the snow outside for after the Christmas potluck dinner. I had on a new dress that I don't think I ever fit into again. But we had fun.

Come to find out, I wasn't the only girl he was making time with. In fact, he was spending quality time with at least two other women who I knew fairly well. This all came out at a Super Bowl party his friend threw at their house--a party to which all three women, including myself, had been invited.

Two words: Awk. Ward.

It was rather like a Keystone Cops movie, or an old Scooby-Doo cartoon. He'd run outside to talk to one girl. Another girl would follow him. He'd come back in through another door to talk to whoever was left inside. The first girl would come back in. He'd go back outside. Eventually, he ended up inside and the three of us were outside, figuring out the entire sordid story.

At the time, I ran the student newspaper. Solicited stories. Ran the desktop publishing. Took everything to the next big town to get the thing printed. This all gave me a certain latitude. Like running anything I felt like writing.

I wrote a column about dating in town. How underground it was. How easy it was to pull the wool over people's eyes due to our inability to admit in public that we were seeing someone. How I had just gotten snookered. And it got published. And everyone read it.

He left town a few days later.

I don't know if he left because of the article or if there was other stuff going on. I just know that he left and I never saw him again and I always felt bad about the whole situation.

I didn't really mean to shame him. I was really trying to shame myself. Teach myself a lesson about seeing someone who wouldn't have the common courtesy to actually take me out in public and admit there might be something going on between the two of us. I'm worth breakfast, dammit. I just had to let myself know that, as well as him.