Waffles and Milkshakes

I've been working on this story progressively, and have added a bit more. it's a project that is near and dear to my heart, so any constructive criticism is welcome. ((PLEASE???)) also, please note some of this has been posted previously, but in a different order. title is also negotiable, this is just the working one. On another note, I'm returning to the site... frankly I missed having my OWN voice.-Li

I.
September was vaguely the colour of summer, and his hair was always shining in the sun, and things were easy and different. It was almost perfect. It was be one of those things that old women tell their grand-children it was so perfect, and I wasn’t going to be one to deny myself that. We walked in parks and laughed at the streams who watched us. We knew they would keep our secrets and couldn't see any reason not to skinny dip into their cold, dark puddles. They were really very refreshing, those streams. For a while, we picked up rocks to take home and remember every day, but that was pointless, and we both knew it, so we put them back and waited for them to turn into sand. It was blonde sand like his hair. It was just as dirty too.

II.
I’d never told anyone about the way that I couldn’t love before. He was the first. We were standing outside that large brick building, staring up at the night sky. I told him I couldn’t love him. He looked sad. I thought for a minute he was going to tell me I should leave. He looked vaguely like a single corn stalk in an empty field, skinny and pale and golden and bending back and forth with the wind. I was almost afraid to breath on him. Then he told me it didn’t matter, and that he would love me. I almost thought he was telling the truth. Then fireworks went off, and I knew this was just another romance. I let him kiss me. I’ve never seen him happier. I still don’t love him.

III.
I once told him that the sky reminded me of time, because it was grey and went on forever and no one could ever change that. I guess it struck him as funny because he told me the sky could fit into my eyes and I had to disagree. Time could never be trapped like a fly stuck to a flypaper strip hung from the ceiling of a horse barn. It wasn't that ignorant. It knew it had to keep going. If I could talk to time I would ask him to tell me what's happening. I'm sure he'd have an interesting story to tell. Maybe about Rommel. Maybe about the prime minister. I've heard things about that man, but only time will tell. But time is generally quiet. He's really very good at slipping by without being noticed.

IV.
The restaurant looked at us like we didn't really belong there, not with the educated lawyers and the other people filling its upholstered booths. We knew what it was thinking and sat down anyway. We had money. We were hungry. We always ordered waffles and a milkshake wherever we went. It was like a tradition. The waitress watched us build statues out of the napkin dispensers and stayed out of our way. We really did want those waffles and that milkshake, but the waitress just wouldn't come close enough for us to get them. We were sorely disappointed. It was just another day, but the restaurant didn't like us and it knew the waitress wouldn't make it mad. We left without the waffles. We had a saltshaker instead.

V.
He used to tell me about the way that rotting worms smell when they reach the top of the soil, crawling out across the pavement into puddles to squirm and wiggle with discontent at how they'd never make it across the road and how they would soon die there without friends or loved ones around to hold a funeral. It rained on Tuesday, and as I walked to the taxi, I put my feet in the empty spaces between the worms, trying hard not to step on them and put them out of misery. The school kids, in their rain-boots and rain-hats and rain-coats stomp into the puddles and trickling streams of water across the sidewalk. They step on the worms. I apologize for them. I'm sorry worms. You look so funny when you squiggle and squirm into a tiny wormy ball of pink flesh spewing guts full of dirt and rain water. The worms salute me as I walk by. They like that I don't step on them.

VI.
He lived in the basement of one of those houses that they put in bad gang movies, one where the trim on the garage matches the trim of the house, but only around the doorway, because the windows don't have painted trim at all. The house was sort of a forest green, like the pine trees that we used to dream about in Montana while fishing in the little stream behind our wigwam. It was a nice wigwam, and we watched sunsets from its doorway, stuck halfway between the Indians and Oregon or the new neon signs in Vegas, where we swore we'd go someday, even if we had to hitch hike. The sky was as pink as the trim on that house. Sometimes we'd go into the basement where he lived and watch films. Not good films. The kind of films that you get bored with half-way through and make you wish you had something better to do or to talk about. I once asked him why we watched them. He said because I couldn't keep him entertained. I knew this was a lie, but I let him carry on anyway. He enjoyed being right. I let him think so.

VII.
He used to write songs that were supposed to be about me, or about his life, or about whatever, and sometimes he would play them for me on his father’s guitar. It was a nice guitar, and the father was dead, so he couldn't have minded that my friend used to play it. He still does sometimes, but its less and less now. He's getting addicted to the keyboard-synthesizer things. He says they're much easier to use. Sometimes I wonder if he ever wrote down those songs for his guitar. They was very pretty, and it would be a shame if he hadn't. Somehow, I think he never did. He didn't seem like the type to start something and finish it the way it should be. He was always indecisive like that. It made me wonder if he ever knew what he was going to do five minutes from now, or five years, or five decades, and if he really knew his father was dead, or maybe he was his father, but was just too ashamed to admit he was living vicariously through his own son. It made me sad for him, and I would have liked to tell him this, but he was very indecisive, and he wouldn't have known what to say to me.

VIII.
He liked to tell me that I was bad at acting, but I was better than he thought when he asked me what I thought about things. He really was always asking questions about himself, and I didn't know the answer, and he didn't know the answer, so I made one up. I really was very good at that. Pretty soon I was able to pull the question off his lips and answer it before he even knew what he was asking. That's how good I got at acting. It's really too bad he couldn't see it for himself, you know. He was almost blind in one eye, but I always thought that was no excuse. He knew I couldn't act like someone prettier so I know he saw what I did too.

IX.
We used to talk about The Baby as if it were some inevitable sickness that would fall on us sooner or later. At one point, it almost sounded like he wanted one. He talked about names for it and I laughed, thinking it was all a joke. He was really very serious, and thought he'd tell me so. I didn't like it. It was too awkward. What would I want with a Baby? They all seemed like dolls to me anyway. Crying, pooping, puking dolls to me. It just was not a good idea. Then one day I thought I might be pregnant. He changed his mind about Babies. I'm glad he did. No one loves a girl who wants to be little and pretty and adorable and has a Baby.

X.
We used to talk about things that we could laugh about, like the weather or our neighbors or old people and silverware. It was always interesting, or racial, or unimportant, but we got along fine enough. I always liked the way that I could listen to him tell stories about baked beans and Mexicans and fancy cars and Gypsies and how I was always the beautiful princess. I never asked him to listen to me, and when a friend of mine died, I listened to his stories. When I was sad, I listened to his stories. When I was bursting like a firework or a teenage boy's hormones with some great news of how well something or other had gone or was covered in pencil and paint and ink and developer, I would listen to him. I always listened to him talk. My voice just seemed so fragile inside of his hands. Maybe someday he would break it and I would lose it forever. At least, thats what I thought. But somehow I was wrong and I listened to him and the spoons talk over soup and finally realized we didn’t have anything to talk about and I was wrong and he was right and this was going to be over soon. He was leaving for California and I was That Girl that just wasn't good enough to leave an address.

XI.
He does what everyone else does these days. He lives like a child with something to hide. Maybe he does have something to hide in that pretty little head of his. But we both know he’s not stupid. Sometimes he would tell me he was stupid just to feel better about something. If he were stupid he wouldn’t have to learn or be or remember. He really did want to be forgetful. I understood it and so I let him. We were the invincible two, the two with no goals, not doubts, stoic imaginations and no regrets. That’s we wanted. Sometimes you get what you want and find out you don’t really want it anymore. That’s the way we were. We knew we wanted something more. We just never knew how to get there without getting hurt.

XII.
We used to watch movies in the cheap theater downtown, where we could buy a ticket for the same price as an adult-sized popcorn. The first movie we saw was in a foreign language and I could understand it, but he couldn’t. I guess that was the first time I saw that I could understand things he didn’t. I remember handing the cashier the dollar bills, scrunched from being hidden so closely to my body in my girl-pants pockets. He looked at me as if I was crazy, an older woman with a younger man. His eyes were a fantastic shade of empty-aquarium blue and I knew he was asking me questions in them. Funny thing is, I didn’t understand them. I could speak another language, but not read another person. I felt as compact as an 8-track tape. It was an odd way to feel antiquated.