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short story: running before the wind
My baby, it is finished. I will probably tweak things, I'm giving it to a friend to read and I'm hoping I can get some more critiques out of her, but this is the third draft and it is now completed. It's far from perfect, and there's always room for improvement, but this story makes me happy in a way that I can't quite explain. It is the way I want it to be, and it says the things I want it to say, and I love the characters and I love what they do and I loved writing them.
Title: Running Before the Wind
Length: 7.7K
Rating: PG
Summary: "Simon, this is my girlfriend Karen, she rents from that lovely older couple, what’s the name, the ones who lives on Plattekill Avenue? Karen, this is Simon, he’s my boyfriend and he makes the best pierogis you will ever eat — there, that’s a good introduction, right? We’re all friends now?"
Keep going down on the right side of Main Street. Stop when you see the white picket fence in front of a red and white deli-looking place. If you pass the hookah bar, you’ve gone too far. Turn around. Go back and find the red buildings behind the parking lot.
I cackled when I saw where David’s directions had led me; only he would get excited about living behind an organic deli. I crossed the leaf-strewn parking lot, jumped the fence that separated it from that of the apartments, and double-checked the number he’d written down on the back of a student’s absence note. Number 117 was around the side of the L-shaped building, so I followed the porch past a couple of suspect-looking doors that clearly belonged to college students: they boasted bumper stickers in the windows telling me to make cupcakes, not war — which I did last week, thank you very much — and made-in-Mexico dream catchers. A cloud of patchouli hung around apartment 115, and the doorstep between 116 and 117 was decorated by what appeared to be a real live college student, complete with brightly colored headphones and a comic book open on his lap. I edged around him on my way to the door to knock, and hoped like hell that the smell from two doors down wouldn’t overpower the lovely perfume I’d bought the other day.
“He’s not home yet.”
I looked down. The kid on the steps had taken off his headphones, and was staring mournfully at the door to David’s apartment like it had personally offended him.
“Who?” I asked.
“David? Unless you’re looking for his neighbors, in which case … um … I can’t help you. Sorry.” He hunched his shoulders a little. In that position, he looked a little familiar. I crouched down so that he was at eye level and squinted. His eyes skittered away as he tried his hardest to not make eye contact.
“Hang on. Are you Simon?” I asked.
His expression went through a couple of configurations that started at puzzled, cleared out into comprehension, then switched right back again. “Yep.”
I stuck out my hand. “Hey! I’m Karen. David's showed me pictures of you two, that wasn't just a guess. I thought we were going to drive over and pick you up from your house.”
He took my hand gingerly, as if I was likely to crush his fingers with my steely grip. “Change of plans. The dogs found the skunk that’s been hiding under our porch for the last week and a half. I thought that showing up over here without any warning would make a better first impression than staying around the house to help clean up. I’d just end up smelling like skunk and tomato sauce.” His laugh was choppy and high-pitched, telling me more about his nerves than words could ever have conveyed.
You and me both, skipper, I thought. What I said was, “Good call. You managed to escape the flood of skunk, I can see. Smell.” Shut up, Karen.
Simon shrugged. “I was out when it happened; me and my uncle were fixing the driveway light on the neighbor’s house. My sister called and told me not to come back to the house if I was planning on not suffocating my date. Um. Dates?” His hands went to the headphones around his neck, and he tugged the padded speakers closer to his throat. “Sorry, you don’t care about that; forget that.”
“No, no, it’s fine. So where the hell is David?” I asked. He never managed to arrive any time other than fashionably late; but after the third date I learned to bank on that and started scheduling things half an hour before they were supposed to happen. The last few times we’d made plans, it worked out perfectly.
Simon tapped a few buttons on his phone, then held it up for me to see with a long-suffering expression. “I got this fifteen minutes ago.”
Unexpected homeless veteran encountered. LONG life story. Please call Karen to let her know.
I restrained myself from banging my head on the railing, but only just. “When did he give you my phone number?”
“He didn’t.”
“I see.”
“Yeah.”
After that, there didn’t seem to be anything to say. I sat down on the porch on the opposite side of the door from him, stretching out my legs. He bent his head over his comic book again, apparently with every intention of pretending I wasn’t there. It was the start of a beautiful friendship, and I scrambled to figure out how to talk to this guy before this whole thing collapsed into another shipwreck of silence to add to my name.
“What are you reading?” I asked.
Yep. Off to a great start.
He flipped up the pages so I could see the assembly of spandex-clad Adonises spread across the cover. “It’s, um, it’s kind of like — I don’t know how much you know about comic books …”
“Absolutely nothing.” I graced him with what I hoped like hell was an infectious grin. He returned it as if he was afraid I’d eat him if he didn’t.
“Well, it’s — oh, hey. The conquering hero returns.” He surged to his feet, dropping book and cell phone on the ground. I picked them up while a familiar dinged-up little car parked underneath a huge oak tree and its driver tumbled out.
“You made it,” Simon shouted across the parking lot. The difference in his demeanor between now and when I’d first seen him was astronomical: as great as that between dead flowers and those in full bloom, a ratty blouse and one freshly-pressed. Presented with the freshly-pressed-blouse version of Simon, I could see for the first time why David had been so eager for me to meet him.
“You know the man at the intersection in front of the mall? The one I always said I ought to talk to one day?” David yelled back. He danced over, arms full of vegetables and bread and granola that he passed off to me as soon as he reached the porch so that he could grab Simon and kiss him on the cheek. I rolled my eyes.
“Oh, yeah, Purple Heart Pete.” Simon laughed.
“Is that his name?” I asked, remembering the raggedy, smelly old man who hung out on the sidewalks with a bottle in a paper bag and a cardboard sign whenever I passed by.
“Yeah, him,” said David, releasing Simon. There was an awkward moment when I think he meant to kiss me too, and I wasn’t sure whether he should, but the groceries got in the way regardless, so we settled on a half-hug and left it at that. I saw the faintest of frowns on Simon’s face as I pulled away.
“Purple Heart Pete’s been around since before my parents got married,” Simon explained to me, while David fumbled with the lock on the door. “Me and my friends used to take turns asking him how he got his medal. My favorite version was the one where he got shrapnel in the leg that wasn’t amputated … It was pretty mean, now that I think about it.”
David opened the door with a flourish, retrieving his bags from my arms and dashing inside to dump them in the tiled square of floor that passed for a kitchen. He shouted out to us — “Nah, I’m sure that he appreciated the attention. Hang on a moment — there we go!” — and reappeared a moment later. “To the pumpkin patch?”
Simon took his phone and comic book back from me, and stuck them into the pockets of his jacket. This he pulled closer around himself, shivering, and nodded. “Aye aye, captain.”
I ran to the car ahead of them both and climbed into the back seat before any arguments about shotgun, frivolous or otherwise, could break out. It had been a while since I’d navigated the murky straits between newly minted relationships and longstanding ones with this kind of care, but hey, I’d moved out of Philly for a reason, right? Fresh starts! New people, new relationships. David wanted everyone in his life to like each other as much as he liked them, and I wanted people besides him and my fellow catering staff in my own life. I could totally do this. I settled in with my purse on my lap and my knees up against the back of the seat to avoid the piles of books on the floor.
The door on the other side opened, and Simon slid in next to me. He threw me a nervous glance. “Hi.”
David stuck his head in. “What am I, your chauffer?” he complained. “Cause that’s what I feel like. Someone come up front and keep me company.”
“I didn’t want to be rude,” Simon mumbled.
I flapped my hands at him. “Aw, thanks, but go on. I promise I won’t think you’re rude.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Really?”
“Positive. Don’t leave our poor driver all alone by himself.”
Simon looked at me suspiciously. “You’re not sure. You’re doing one of those … reverse psychology things.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, for the love of Pete, whatever. Exile yourself to the back seat with me. Let’s just go, shall we?”
“Yes!” David said this with the air of one madly attempting to drag the conversation back from where it hovered over a black abyss of hurt feelings. “Great idea, let’s — It’s that funny right turn after the bridge at Pencil Hill, right?”
After Simon had confirmed that this was, indeed, the direction in which we were going to go, we let the background noise take over. There was a lot of that to fill the air. The car that David drove … saying it had a lot of personality would be the kindest way to describe it. He’d met Simon while the latter was replacing bits of gearbox so the whole thing didn’t fall apart; but that was two years ago, and it still made funny noises when it went uphill. So between the car complaining, the wind whipping through the sunroof, and the crinkling of Simon rolling and unrolling his comic book, the noise was inescapable, but actual conversation was lacking. I kicked the back of David’s seat a couple of times, trying to figure out how to get the ball rolling. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried so much: by the time we were halfway down Main Street, David’s instinctive fear of silence took over and transformed him into a babbling lunatic.
“So clearly you two have met now — Simon, this is my girlfriend Karen, she rents from that lovely older couple, what’s the name, the ones who lives on Plattekill Avenue? Karen, this is Simon, he’s my boyfriend and he makes the best pierogis you will ever eat — there, that’s a good introduction, right? We’re all friends now?”
Simon raised his eyebrows, glancing at him and back at me. “Sure.”
“Whatever you say, chief.” I mimicked his expression, puckering my lips. He lifted his eyebrows still higher.
“Good. That would be, hah, awkward. Hey, get out of the road, it’s a green light!” David honked at a couple of kids in sweatshirts eating pink ice cream as they sauntered across the street to the beginning of the bike path.
“Run ‘em over!” I urged him, shoving my knees into the back of his seat.
Simon looked at me askance. “What?”
I leaned away from him. “It was a joke. My bad.”
“You know,” David said loudly, “I’m really not looking forwards to being old, and having students coming up to me and being like, ‘Hey, Mr. Cohen, what’s cooking?’ and I’ll have no idea who they are because they’re already balding and last time I saw them they were playing — pickleball, or something, in the court outside of school.”
“Pickleball?” I asked.
“It’s sort of like playing ping-pong, except the ping pong table is the size of a badminton court,” Simon explained. “My little sister plays it.”
My mind filled with the mental image of a very tiny Simon lugging around a ping pong paddle on a countertop, chasing after an enormous plastic ball, and I had to cover my mouth to keep from smiling. “It sounds … interesting,” I said. “Do you play?”
“Not really. It only got popular at the high school a few years ago.”
“But he plays badminton! He’s fantastic, he could probably beat both of us put together. We should do that sometime.”
Simon gave him a look that said do you hear the crap leaving your mouth. “That’s because you’re crap at it, not because I’m any good.”
“He’s lying through his teeth.”
“You could still probably beat us two to one,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I was terrible at it in high school, and I’m guessing that he just runs around the court like a headless chicken.”
Simon laughed. “He does!”
I grinned, more with relief at having found something to talk about than because it was really that hilarious. “You’ve tried?”
“We were at my aunt’s house for a barbeque Fourth of July, and Marina — my cousin’s daughter — challenged him to a game.”
David reached back to swat him, and nearly missed our turn because he was too busy trying to locate the closest available body part. “You weren’t supposed to mention that!”
“Why, what happened?” I asked.
“I had to rescue him before he got butchered by a five year old.” Simon smiled down at his interlocking fingers. This, of course, led to a debate about that game and why Simon was grossly exaggerating the issue, which led to a spirited recollection about the rest of the barbeque, of which I had not been a part because I’d only been in town for two months and I hadn’t met David until a week later.
I listened to them talk back and forth and watched, trying to sort out the dynamics between them that I couldn’t figure out just from David’s descriptions. Simon leaned forward with an arm draped against the seat in front of him, body angled so that he could watch David while he spoke. David did a lot of turning around and taking his hands off the wheel to wave them around, so that for the safety of all involved — we were on a mostly straight road running through fields by that time, but what if we ran off the pavement and hit one of those eight-foot rolls of hay and it rolled over and crushed us because David couldn’t shut his yap? — I had to interrupt them to remind him that Simon wasn’t about to disappear just because he looked away, so could he please watch where he was going. It was absolutely necessary, but I still felt like a bad person afterwards, because then the silence came back and Simon shot me a bunch of these uncertain, evaluating looks like maybe I was secretly a pod person.
I ignored them in favor of looking out the window. Most of the fields were in various states of harvest: orange still gracing half the pumpkin patch, rolls of hay sitting on empty dirt except for a strip near the woods where an inefficient-looking piece of equipment labored. When we reached the beginning of the corn fields, I felt like telling David to pull over so that we could run through the rows and make crop circles. That sort of thing appealed to him, but there were probably all sorts of trespassing laws that we’d be breaking, and besides, Simon’s family probably knew the farmers.
Our destination appeared on the left around a curve in the road: a dusty gravel parking lot outside a collection of reddish, open-sided buildings whose floors were strewn with straw. Corn hung from the rafters in trios, surrounded by fake cobwebs that stretched themselves down to the heaps of pumpkins collected around the support beams. Little kids zoomed through the produce with tiny brown pears clutched in their hands, and a gang of teenagers toting bags of cider donuts meandered past us to the much nicer-looking pickup truck next to which David was trying to park.
“I’ve decided that I’m going to get a massive pumpkin, and you are going to be a gentleman and carry it for me,” I announced, climbing out of the car and stretching my limbs.
David snorted and held up his arms. “Have you seen these noodles? I think I broke a sweat carrying in the groceries.”
“I can do it,” Simon said.
I backed away from that fast. “No, no, that’s fine. I’d feel bad making you.”
He frowned. “Um … I don’t quite follow your logic, but okay.”
“Don’t bother trying; you’ll end up with a logic headache. Come on, come on, let’s go do pumpkins.” David grabbed me with one hand and Simon with the other, and towed us towards the stands. He only let go once he was satisfied that we weren’t going to run off on him. As if. We were in the middle of nowhere, so regardless of how I felt about pumpkins — which was, by the way, nothing but positive — I was stuck with them.
Upon entering the covered area, I discovered that its initial appearance had been deceptive, and the whole harvest circus stretched back a lot further than I’d realized. There were pumpkins in the front, yeah, but another huge row of them further back, piled on top of barrels of hay with fuzzy fake tarantulas perched around them; and crates, crates everywhere, big wooden crates heaped with the kind of local fruits and vegetables that sent David’s inner hippie into paroxysms of joy. I had to laugh when he looked from me to Simon, beaming, and bounced on the balls of his feet. “Pumpkins and apples and corn on the cob, oh my!” He snagged a hook-shaped gourd from one of the crates and tossed it to me.
“Pumpkins first,” Simon reminded him. “We need to carve pumpkins tonight. Everything else will still be here tomorrow.”
David nodded. He proceeded to make Simon groan and roll his eyes by picking up one of the very long pumpkins and suggesting that he could carve it into a bust of Louis XIV, and then I pointed out that the hair alone would keep him up most of the night. He proclaimed me a spoilsport, but agreed to put it back and stick to something manageable. We had to squeeze against the stacks of hay to make way for a man pushing a cart of animatronic witches, and when he had moved past, I saw it: a gorgeous, fat pumpkin twice the size of my head, sitting at the bottom of a pile against a wall near the fields at the back. Visions of great and glorious jack o’ lanterns thronged about my head as I skipped around the other people there and closed in on it. It turned out to be a bitch to pick up without throwing out my back, and after a couple of tries I had to enlist the help of a passing employee. I turned around to show David, swaying slightly from the weight. He bounded over, with a less jubilant Simon in tow.
A boy and his parents emerged from the rows of corn past the edge of the pumpkin piles, trailing dried-up leaves. The boy walked past me. When he saw David, his face lit up. “Mr. Cohen!” he shouted.
David swung around mid-stride. He dropped Simon’s hand and pulled his limbs in about him, straightening his jacket. “Toby! Hello. I wasn’t expecting to see you here — how goes it?” He held out his hand to the boy, who shook it with enough enthusiasm that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d dislocated something. The boy’s parents hung back until David leaped in at them with enthusiasm to match that of their son. Simon edged past them, giving them a brief nod that went unreturned. My stomach knotted as he came to join me.
“Student?” I asked.
He sighed. “Yep. Not current, but he hit a rough patch last year, I don’t think I’m really supposed to talk about it. The counselors at school are crap, so ...” His eyes drifted to the kid, who seemed to be trying to pull David away from his parents before any adult interaction occurred.
“So he goes to the history teacher,” I finished. “That’s kind of sweet.”
“And now we run into him sometimes. David thinks it’s sweet, too. He’ll be here for another ten minutes at least.” He leaned back against the wall, clearly getting settled in for a long wait. I settled back next to him. It felt very odd, and my skin started to prickle with the need to be doing something; standing together in silence and watching David talk to a high schooler wasn’t my idea of a quality bonding activity. Simon started to fidget with the headphones around his neck again, which only added to my paranoia. I looked away, and my gaze landed on the rows of corn planted right up against the edge of the covered area. For such a common sight around here, it was generating a quite a lot of interest from a whole lot of people. A swarm of them cleared away, and that was when I saw the sign, handpainted onto black and orange wood:
Farmer Franny’s One-of-a-Kind Corn Maze
I nudged Simon. “Want to do that while we’re waiting?” I asked.
He tore his attention away from Toby’s parents and looked down at me doubtfully. “Why?”
“Why not? You said he’d be a while, and you’re the expert on these things, right?” I pushed off the wall. David saw me coming and held up a finger to pause his conversation.
“Sorry, Karen — no, no Toby, it’s fine, you’re not interrupting — can you just give me two minutes?”
I flapped a hand at Toby to acknowledge him. “Actually, I just came over to tell you that me and Simon are going to go check out the corn maze while you’re catching up.”
David visibly relaxed, shoulders slumping with relief. “Great! Okay. I really am sorry. I’m being a terrible, whatchamacallit, host.”
“Yes you are,” I agreed. “It’s okay. This time.” He looked sufficiently sheepish at that, so I deposited my pumpkin at his feet, and left him and his student to talk about whatever it was that mentors and mentees talked about. Simon followed me as I plowed on over to the corn field, casting glances over his shoulder every two seconds like he was afraid we were trespassing and about to be found out.
Once we got closer, I found the entrance to the corn maze: a darker rectangle in a sea of green and gold, the ground of which the low sun couldn’t quite reach. A few pumpkins and colorful misshapen squashes loitered around the entrance at the feet of a cheerful-looking woman in red flannel. She waved in a family of five —three children under the age of eight, God bless those parents — ahead of us, then turned her attention to us.
“That’ll be two dollars each. If you want to come back after the sun goes down, it’s the same fee, and the maze will be all nice and haunted.” She wiggled her fingers at us, ruddy face split into a smile.
“No thanks. We’ll go now.” Before I could say anything, Simon took out his wallet and handed the woman a bunch of very worn dollar bills.
“Thanks,” I said. He glanced at me quickly, and looked away without saying anything.
The woman stuck them in the pocket of her jeans and bobbed her head. “All righty then. Enjoy!”
I waved at her as we went in. As soon as we were inside, the world abruptly shrank from huge fields and rioting autumn colors and people, people everywhere to a crisp, three-foot-wide corridor, the pumpkin in my arms, and Simon looming next to me. The jangly edge that I’d managed to get rid of by suggesting the corn maze — what a great idea, I’d thought; running around and getting lost in a field of kitschy decorations sounded like a good diversion, I’d thought — came crashing back over me with a vengeance.
We walked side by side between prickly rows of corn; with the breeze making the stalks slide and rustle against each other, I felt like I was being walked down the aisle in front of a particularly noisy congregation. One with a whole lot of rambunctious flower girls, and whilst carrying an enormous bouquet. Oh god, now I’d gotten onto the subject of weddings. I searched around for something, anything else to talk about. The goofy decorations draped over the stalks, the crows, the weather even. There was the problem, wasn’t it? Talking. Real conversation. It had to happen, and no one wanted to do it. I’d managed to successfully avoid it with other people’s paramours back when I lived in Philadelphia, but that had ended in a shitshow of epic proportions, so: not a good idea. I watched Simon out of the corner of my eye to see if he was going to take the initiative, but after three left turns and a solid minute of silence under our belts, I gripped the gourd more firmly in my fist and bit the metaphorical bullet.
“I don’t know if David’s told you, but I moved here from Philadelphia at the end of June,” I started off, because that was what was on my mind.
A faint frown creased his brow, but still, he watched the ground in front of us. “Yeah, I think he mentioned that.”
I steered us around a corner and straight into a dead end with a teenage couple making out in it. We backed out before they could unglue themselves to notice us, went around the other way, and I pushed on. “ I had an okay job. I was a copy editor for a paper, and it was only three days a week but it was still fun. Sometimes I got to write my own articles — I did a story about local clothing boutiques once.
“That was where I met one of my girlfriends, actually. She was all ‘ooh, you should see these hats we’re getting next week!’ and then I was like ‘I don’t actually like hats, they do weird things to my hair, but I’ll come back to see them just for you’ and then we ended up going to the movies wearing peacock hats.”
Simon looked at me with trepidation, but at least he was looking at me. “That’s, um, okay, that’s good for you.”
“Yeah, it was. Her name was Eliza.” I smiled at the memory, and then went back to watching where I was going when I nearly walked into a cute old couple coming off of a sudden right fork. “I was living with this other girl then, too, and the thing was, she was great. She was a banker — I know, right? — but I really liked her. The thing was.” I hesitated for a moment here, because this was where I needed to be careful what I said. This was where the Talking, with a capital T, came in. “The thing was, she hated Audrey Hepburn. I don’t mean the way most people hate things. This was, I don’t know, like a phobia or something. Maybe she looked too much like her mother.” I checked to make sure that he was still paying attention. He was twisted around, squinting up at the setting sun, probably trying to figure out which direction the exit to the maze was in. I bumped him with my shoulder.
“Excuse me, I’m talking.”
He looked down. “Audrey Hepburn, ex-girlfriend whose mother looked like her, maybe.”
I beamed.
“I think we need to go left at the next turn,” he added. “I saw people coming out from the right side of the field as we went in, and I’m pretty sure we’re completely turned around now.”
“Whatever you say. Lead on.” For a supposedly kid-friendly activity, this was turning out to be more of a challenge than I’d anticipated. Whatever — more time for us to get to know each other, right? “Anyway. You know those days, when sometimes, all you really need is to curl up on the couch with someone and watch Roman Holiday?”
Simon actually chuckled. “Mine’s usually disaster movies with Will Smith, but yeah.” We reached a junction in the maze, where our path ended and another cut across it at a diagonal. We turned down the hairpin bend to the left, following the growing sound of high-pitched giggling. A moment later, three small corn-haired children in puffy neon jackets zoomed around the bend ahead of us, panting for breath and stirring up a cloud of fragrant dust particles that made me sneeze.
“Wrong way!” gasped the boy to his friends.
“Mom! It’s a dead end! And there’s a scarecrow!” shrieked the little girl as she flew past. Simon winced and covered his ears with his hands.
I shook my head. Having been thus informed, we turned around, and I tried to remember what the hell I’d been saying. “My point is, when I was having one of those days, I’d go over to Eliza’s house and we’d watch Audrey Hepburn and eat massive amounts of cookies. It was fun. And then I’d go back home and my girlfriend and I would play Scrabble, and that was fun too. The end.” My pulse pounded, shaking through me from my chest out to my fingertips. I swallowed it down, squaring off my shoulders. Jubilant shouts rang out from the direction in which the little kids had gone. That seemed promising, and by means of tilting our heads and shrugging, we agreed to follow that route. The sun flared over the tops of the distant trees as the corn parted before us, and I ducked my head to keep from being blinded.
“So why did you come here?” Simon asked. He turned to me, shielding his eyes with his hand. “It sounds … nice.”
I shrugged. “The gazette got acquired, and I got laid off,” I told him. Plenty of people moved in order to find a new job. Most of them didn’t feel the need to divulge their full relationship history to someone they were meeting for the first time, but most of them weren’t also attempting to juggle polyamory directly upon reentering the dating scene. I plowed ahead in a high-pitched rush before I could talk myself out of it. “And I was bad at talking to my girlfriend about stuff so she ended up being jealous of Eliza and then there was this thing where Jeff — there was this guy named Jeff, for like six weeks — wasn’t okay with me dating other people at all so it all turned into kind of a mess. Um.” I’d been so focused on moving forwards with the words bit that I’d forgotten to pay attention to the walking, and blown straight past the path that didn’t double back to the dead end with the scarecrow. I stopped dead. “I think we should have gone down that fork just now.”
Simon kept walking for a full three steps after I’d stopped. When he noticed that I wasn’t there, he did an exaggerated turn on his heel and backtracked. “Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that’s where that family went.”
I nearly didn’t start walking again; I was afraid that if I unlocked my knees, then I’d sink into an ungraceful heap on the ground and get hay all over the only clean pair of jeans that I currently owned. Standing there indefinitely wasn’t an option, either, and would probably freak out Simon even more. I counted to three, took a deep breath to pull myself together, and ended up pulling together a lot of dust that sent me into a coughing fit instead.
When I’d gathered myself together, I followed Simon in the other direction. The new route that we went on put the sun behind us, which made it a lot easier to see. The teenagers we’d seen from earlier walked past, now adorably hand in hand instead of trying to climb into each other’s skin. It seemed simple, pleasant and uncomplicated, and I was envious of them for a few ill-advised seconds.
Simon watched them go by with a thoughtful expression. “Why was your first girlfriend jealous of the girl from the boutique?” he asked.
“Oh, you know.” I shrugged, and tried to act like it all made sense to me. “They didn’t like each other very much, so I tried not to mention one to the other, and it wasn’t really viable. There were probably — I’m oversimplifying it — but I think that was mainly it.” No need to go into the juicy details. If I’d known him a little better, and if we hadn’t been in the middle of a cornfield, I might have said something about how I’d seen that my girlfriend got put off by me talking about Eliza because she thought Eliza was an airhead who dealt pot, so I’d stopped mentioning when I spent time with her, and then she wanted to know what I was hiding; I might have gone on to talk about Jeff being okay with me dating other people as long as he never had to hear about it, then losing it when he came to pick me up and my girlfriend answered the door; but there were kids and old people around, and I got the feeling that even for the purposes of this conversation, it would have been TMI. So I left it at that.
“… Do you want a hug?” Simon asked.
“What?” I jerked around to look at him, but it seemed to be a sincere offer. How embarrassing. “No, I’m good. It was months ago. Really.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
We followed the teenage couple around a bend that put us in sight of the roofs. Unfortunately, we were approaching them from the wrong angle for where Simon had said he saw people leaving the maze. I spun around, trying to figure out where we’d gone wrong, and nearly toppled over. Simon put a hand on my arm to steady me, pulling away as soon as I’d regained my balance.
Halfway down the next corridor, Simon cleared his throat. “David talks about you a lot,” he announced. “He’s usually pretty good at telling me things.”
I could see where he was headed. “Did he tell you about my amazing cat-whispering skills?” I asked, instead.
“He might have — wait, no. You’re trying to change the subject.” He shook his head and planted himself in the path facing me. He managed to look more serious than one might expect from a man standing in a corn maze, surrounded by a minefield of tiny smiling ghosts. “My point is …” He lowered his voice. “You’re sleeping with my boyfriend. I know about it. The not-talking-about things isn’t a problem right now.”
I stared at him, stomach sinking. “Okay…”
He looked around to make sure that no one was within earshot besides the gnats swarming around us. “If I know about you, and you know about me, well, what am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to be angry at you, or scared of you stealing my boyfriend —“
"— Oh my god, please say you're not," I said.
"No, I'm not! I mean, I was, a little. When David first brought you up. I've never done this before," he said, and turned his face to the sky.
The dried stem on the gourd in my hands started to rattle, and I noticed that my hands were shaking. The gourd rattled in my hands, and thoughts rattled around my head, which I'd been trying to keep far, far away. Jeff, it's Jeff all over again, they repeated. Moving doesn't change anything, leaving never changes anything … "Oh," I said. I clenched my hands around the stem to silence the rattling.
"But, I mean. We talked about it. I'm pretty okay with it, now. And you don't seem like the boyfriend-stealing type," Simon said.
I couldn't help but laugh. ”I try not to be."
Simon snickered and continued to study the firmament a moment longer. I watched as his chest expanded, then fell. Finally, he turned and met my eyes. "I don't know what I'm doing," he said, very quickly, words toppling over each other in their rush to get out. "I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about you, how I'm supposed to talk to you. No idea. And I feel like a lunatic trying to talk to you in the middle of a corn field. While you're holding a … a gourd." He gestured at my clasped hands.
The shaking went out of me all at once, in a great whoosh, leaving me prepared to fall over like wet clay if I'd thought that the corn could hold my weight; and his words echoed around my head, wiped it clean of anything else to say. "Oh," I repeated. I looked around to make sure that we were still alone, and no parents were going to come around berating us for letting unnatural ideas enter the heads of their children. Maybe in the next row over, but no one that I could see. Nothing that I could see. We were clean.
Simon was still watching me. "I can't even find my way out of a stupid kids' maze," I said.
He swallowed, and nodded, and twisted around to point behind himself. "We've got to be close. There haven’t been a whole lot of people coming back this way.”
I smiled at him, and off we went, kicking at clouds of gnats and trying not to step in the several piles of pungent goose poop that we encountered. I ran my hand along the rows of corn, letting the stalks scratch at my palms, as I passed them by and let my heartbeat settled down from triple-time. See, that wasn't so bad, I tried to convince myself. Two minutes of heart-stopping awkwardness and confusion, but it's all fine now. We get each other! This is going to be okay.
For a few minutes, it looked like we were about to turn the corner and reach the exit; but when that corner actually came up, and my feet had started to ache with the anticipation of being able to stop walking, the path ended up heading towards the woods again. I contemplated shoving my way through the field back to the parking lot, and was only stopped by the thought of trying to force my way through that many densely-placed stalks, all of them topped with fluff ready to go airborne and into my lungs. Instead, I turned around to find another way to go. As I did, I caught Simon watching me: not quite a deer in the headlights, but still uncomfortable, hands wedged in his pockets. So much for everything being fine.
“Back?” he asked.
I sighed. "Seems like it."
He nodded. We backtracked and took another fork, and ended up behind a pot-bellied man walking a basset hound. He wore a t-shirt whose faded back graphic had been reduced, by repeated washings, to a crinkled outline of an animal’s head and a couple of fangs in an open maw. We continued to follow him, and I continued to wrack my brains for something more to say to Simon. Something helpful. I was supposed to be the one with the hands-on experience here. Communication, Karen. Come on, you can do this. New state, new town, new people.
Communication meant talking, and talking meant feelings, all out there and exposed and ready for angry girlfriends to stomp all over them with heels you'd bought for their birthday.
Communication meant talking, and talking meant finding out that body language you thought was angry and jealous was actually confused and awkward, and not another Philadelphia type of situation.
I turned the gourd over in my hands, and pinched off the rustling stem. My heart had sped up again.
"Do you want to talk about it?" I blurted out.
Simon's mouth opened a little. His eyes darted from the back of the man in front of us to either side. “It?” he asked.
My mouth was so dry, it didn’t even take an effort to lower my voice. “You, me. How we’re going to, well, work. I talked to someone at a meetup whose boyfriends were best friends, but I’m obviously not trying to pressure you. That’d be weird. Personally, I always though it’d be fun to gossip about my boyfriend with someone else who’s not going to get sick of it, but that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.” I cut myself off and cringed. TMI, probably.
Simon looked mortified. "Are we talking about this here?" he asked.
I flushed. "We don't have to, it's probably fine," I began.
“No, I think we should,” —
— “just,” —
— “not, not here,” —
“Not now, right.” I chewed on my lower lip. My ears flamed.
"But we will?" he asked.
My stomach started to crawl up my throat. Hope flickered across Simon's face, a suggestion of a promise that things might be okay this time.
"With David," I said, and then, more to convince myself than him, “Yes.”
Simon smiled at me. “But not while we’re carving pumpkins. Before that.”
“Yeah. Good idea.” I realized I was twisting my fingers around the neck of the gourd, and stopped so I could hold out my hand instead. He shook it with a jittery laugh.
We took a right turn after that, leaving the man and his dog behind. Through the walls of the maze, I could hear people meandering along, comfortable and unhurried. The low sun illuminated new clouds of gnats and little gold-flecked particles of corn that I did my best to avoid. I tossed my gourd from hand to hand as we walked, even though every so often I had to stop to pick it up. The roof of the barn got closer, and kept getting closer this time. Simon snatched the gourd in mid-air as I tossed it. I left my hands outstretched for a moment before I realized what had happened. After a moment, he returned the vegetable to me with a sheepish look, and I laughed at him, It wasn’t an outrageously funny thing to do, but that didn’t seem to matter as much as the fact that he’d done it.
We kept walking down the row. At a hairpin bend, I thought for sure that I was going to lose my mind if we had to turn straight back around, but there, straight ahead, was the entrance. Through it, I could see a narrow strip of road, and a tractor parked in the field next to it. I grabbed at Simon’s arm like a becalmed sailor starving for land. “We made it!” I announced.
“Huzzah,” he said, pumping his fist. Together, we ran the rest of the distance, out of the dusty path and back into the real world. The noise of people browsing the farm stand and the unobstructed wind came flooding back over us both, like cutting the static on the radio and turning the volume back up to normal.
I scanned the motley crowd of people as we approached the barn for David. I didn’t see him until he was nearly on top of us, toting my pumpkin in his noodle arms despite his earlier complaints.
We met up next to a crate full of miniature pears. “You two! Where did you go? I thought you were going to hang around inside the entrance, and then I turned around and you were gone,” he huffed, chagrined.
I feigned airiness, instead of a deep and profound relief. “Oh, we did the maze.”
It would be a lie to say that David actually pouted, but he came very close. “Are you going to do it again with me?”
Simon reached out and slid his hands underneath the pumpkin, pulling it away from David to carry it himself. “Can we not? I’m all mazed out.”
David snorted. “I don’t believe you. Betrayed by my own …” He flapped his hands at us, face turning red. “People.”
I looked at Simon. Simon looked at me. He raised his eyebrows. I held out the gourd to him. “Person?” I said.
It took him a moment to respond. Mostly, he looked a little confused. “Is that for me?”
I shrugged.
“All right, then.” Simon shifted the pumpkin into one arm, took the gourd, and raised it in a toast. “Um … person.”
David beamed at us both. He flung out his arms, as though unable to contain his excitement. “I like it! Now, while you two were wandering around, I picked out some fantastic specimens of pumpkin from the ranks. What do you say we go get them, get some cider, and go back home for some quality carving time?”
He began to pull away, towards whatever prized pumpkins he had selected, and Simon cleared his throat. “Um …” he said.
David turned around, arms still held away from his sides and eyebrows raised. “Yes?”
I pushed my hair behind my ear, and immediately replaced it when the cold air hit the side of my face. “Can we talk before that? All three of us.”
“After the pumpkins, before the carving,” Simon clarified.
If I hadn’t spent the last half an hour straining to keep myself from falling victim to the exact same thing, I would have found his clear wrong-footedness funny. “Is everything all right?” he asked.
I looked up at Simon, resolute as he hugged the pumpkin closer to himself. I looked at David, whose face was bathed a peculiar orange in the sunlight. I looked down at my own hands, and untwisted my fingers, letting them hand empty at my sides. “Yeah. I think it’s going to be fine.”
End
Title: Running Before the Wind
Length: 7.7K
Rating: PG
Summary: "Simon, this is my girlfriend Karen, she rents from that lovely older couple, what’s the name, the ones who lives on Plattekill Avenue? Karen, this is Simon, he’s my boyfriend and he makes the best pierogis you will ever eat — there, that’s a good introduction, right? We’re all friends now?"
Keep going down on the right side of Main Street. Stop when you see the white picket fence in front of a red and white deli-looking place. If you pass the hookah bar, you’ve gone too far. Turn around. Go back and find the red buildings behind the parking lot.
I cackled when I saw where David’s directions had led me; only he would get excited about living behind an organic deli. I crossed the leaf-strewn parking lot, jumped the fence that separated it from that of the apartments, and double-checked the number he’d written down on the back of a student’s absence note. Number 117 was around the side of the L-shaped building, so I followed the porch past a couple of suspect-looking doors that clearly belonged to college students: they boasted bumper stickers in the windows telling me to make cupcakes, not war — which I did last week, thank you very much — and made-in-Mexico dream catchers. A cloud of patchouli hung around apartment 115, and the doorstep between 116 and 117 was decorated by what appeared to be a real live college student, complete with brightly colored headphones and a comic book open on his lap. I edged around him on my way to the door to knock, and hoped like hell that the smell from two doors down wouldn’t overpower the lovely perfume I’d bought the other day.
“He’s not home yet.”
I looked down. The kid on the steps had taken off his headphones, and was staring mournfully at the door to David’s apartment like it had personally offended him.
“Who?” I asked.
“David? Unless you’re looking for his neighbors, in which case … um … I can’t help you. Sorry.” He hunched his shoulders a little. In that position, he looked a little familiar. I crouched down so that he was at eye level and squinted. His eyes skittered away as he tried his hardest to not make eye contact.
“Hang on. Are you Simon?” I asked.
His expression went through a couple of configurations that started at puzzled, cleared out into comprehension, then switched right back again. “Yep.”
I stuck out my hand. “Hey! I’m Karen. David's showed me pictures of you two, that wasn't just a guess. I thought we were going to drive over and pick you up from your house.”
He took my hand gingerly, as if I was likely to crush his fingers with my steely grip. “Change of plans. The dogs found the skunk that’s been hiding under our porch for the last week and a half. I thought that showing up over here without any warning would make a better first impression than staying around the house to help clean up. I’d just end up smelling like skunk and tomato sauce.” His laugh was choppy and high-pitched, telling me more about his nerves than words could ever have conveyed.
You and me both, skipper, I thought. What I said was, “Good call. You managed to escape the flood of skunk, I can see. Smell.” Shut up, Karen.
Simon shrugged. “I was out when it happened; me and my uncle were fixing the driveway light on the neighbor’s house. My sister called and told me not to come back to the house if I was planning on not suffocating my date. Um. Dates?” His hands went to the headphones around his neck, and he tugged the padded speakers closer to his throat. “Sorry, you don’t care about that; forget that.”
“No, no, it’s fine. So where the hell is David?” I asked. He never managed to arrive any time other than fashionably late; but after the third date I learned to bank on that and started scheduling things half an hour before they were supposed to happen. The last few times we’d made plans, it worked out perfectly.
Simon tapped a few buttons on his phone, then held it up for me to see with a long-suffering expression. “I got this fifteen minutes ago.”
Unexpected homeless veteran encountered. LONG life story. Please call Karen to let her know.
I restrained myself from banging my head on the railing, but only just. “When did he give you my phone number?”
“He didn’t.”
“I see.”
“Yeah.”
After that, there didn’t seem to be anything to say. I sat down on the porch on the opposite side of the door from him, stretching out my legs. He bent his head over his comic book again, apparently with every intention of pretending I wasn’t there. It was the start of a beautiful friendship, and I scrambled to figure out how to talk to this guy before this whole thing collapsed into another shipwreck of silence to add to my name.
“What are you reading?” I asked.
Yep. Off to a great start.
He flipped up the pages so I could see the assembly of spandex-clad Adonises spread across the cover. “It’s, um, it’s kind of like — I don’t know how much you know about comic books …”
“Absolutely nothing.” I graced him with what I hoped like hell was an infectious grin. He returned it as if he was afraid I’d eat him if he didn’t.
“Well, it’s — oh, hey. The conquering hero returns.” He surged to his feet, dropping book and cell phone on the ground. I picked them up while a familiar dinged-up little car parked underneath a huge oak tree and its driver tumbled out.
“You made it,” Simon shouted across the parking lot. The difference in his demeanor between now and when I’d first seen him was astronomical: as great as that between dead flowers and those in full bloom, a ratty blouse and one freshly-pressed. Presented with the freshly-pressed-blouse version of Simon, I could see for the first time why David had been so eager for me to meet him.
“You know the man at the intersection in front of the mall? The one I always said I ought to talk to one day?” David yelled back. He danced over, arms full of vegetables and bread and granola that he passed off to me as soon as he reached the porch so that he could grab Simon and kiss him on the cheek. I rolled my eyes.
“Oh, yeah, Purple Heart Pete.” Simon laughed.
“Is that his name?” I asked, remembering the raggedy, smelly old man who hung out on the sidewalks with a bottle in a paper bag and a cardboard sign whenever I passed by.
“Yeah, him,” said David, releasing Simon. There was an awkward moment when I think he meant to kiss me too, and I wasn’t sure whether he should, but the groceries got in the way regardless, so we settled on a half-hug and left it at that. I saw the faintest of frowns on Simon’s face as I pulled away.
“Purple Heart Pete’s been around since before my parents got married,” Simon explained to me, while David fumbled with the lock on the door. “Me and my friends used to take turns asking him how he got his medal. My favorite version was the one where he got shrapnel in the leg that wasn’t amputated … It was pretty mean, now that I think about it.”
David opened the door with a flourish, retrieving his bags from my arms and dashing inside to dump them in the tiled square of floor that passed for a kitchen. He shouted out to us — “Nah, I’m sure that he appreciated the attention. Hang on a moment — there we go!” — and reappeared a moment later. “To the pumpkin patch?”
Simon took his phone and comic book back from me, and stuck them into the pockets of his jacket. This he pulled closer around himself, shivering, and nodded. “Aye aye, captain.”
I ran to the car ahead of them both and climbed into the back seat before any arguments about shotgun, frivolous or otherwise, could break out. It had been a while since I’d navigated the murky straits between newly minted relationships and longstanding ones with this kind of care, but hey, I’d moved out of Philly for a reason, right? Fresh starts! New people, new relationships. David wanted everyone in his life to like each other as much as he liked them, and I wanted people besides him and my fellow catering staff in my own life. I could totally do this. I settled in with my purse on my lap and my knees up against the back of the seat to avoid the piles of books on the floor.
The door on the other side opened, and Simon slid in next to me. He threw me a nervous glance. “Hi.”
David stuck his head in. “What am I, your chauffer?” he complained. “Cause that’s what I feel like. Someone come up front and keep me company.”
“I didn’t want to be rude,” Simon mumbled.
I flapped my hands at him. “Aw, thanks, but go on. I promise I won’t think you’re rude.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Really?”
“Positive. Don’t leave our poor driver all alone by himself.”
Simon looked at me suspiciously. “You’re not sure. You’re doing one of those … reverse psychology things.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, for the love of Pete, whatever. Exile yourself to the back seat with me. Let’s just go, shall we?”
“Yes!” David said this with the air of one madly attempting to drag the conversation back from where it hovered over a black abyss of hurt feelings. “Great idea, let’s — It’s that funny right turn after the bridge at Pencil Hill, right?”
After Simon had confirmed that this was, indeed, the direction in which we were going to go, we let the background noise take over. There was a lot of that to fill the air. The car that David drove … saying it had a lot of personality would be the kindest way to describe it. He’d met Simon while the latter was replacing bits of gearbox so the whole thing didn’t fall apart; but that was two years ago, and it still made funny noises when it went uphill. So between the car complaining, the wind whipping through the sunroof, and the crinkling of Simon rolling and unrolling his comic book, the noise was inescapable, but actual conversation was lacking. I kicked the back of David’s seat a couple of times, trying to figure out how to get the ball rolling. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried so much: by the time we were halfway down Main Street, David’s instinctive fear of silence took over and transformed him into a babbling lunatic.
“So clearly you two have met now — Simon, this is my girlfriend Karen, she rents from that lovely older couple, what’s the name, the ones who lives on Plattekill Avenue? Karen, this is Simon, he’s my boyfriend and he makes the best pierogis you will ever eat — there, that’s a good introduction, right? We’re all friends now?”
Simon raised his eyebrows, glancing at him and back at me. “Sure.”
“Whatever you say, chief.” I mimicked his expression, puckering my lips. He lifted his eyebrows still higher.
“Good. That would be, hah, awkward. Hey, get out of the road, it’s a green light!” David honked at a couple of kids in sweatshirts eating pink ice cream as they sauntered across the street to the beginning of the bike path.
“Run ‘em over!” I urged him, shoving my knees into the back of his seat.
Simon looked at me askance. “What?”
I leaned away from him. “It was a joke. My bad.”
“You know,” David said loudly, “I’m really not looking forwards to being old, and having students coming up to me and being like, ‘Hey, Mr. Cohen, what’s cooking?’ and I’ll have no idea who they are because they’re already balding and last time I saw them they were playing — pickleball, or something, in the court outside of school.”
“Pickleball?” I asked.
“It’s sort of like playing ping-pong, except the ping pong table is the size of a badminton court,” Simon explained. “My little sister plays it.”
My mind filled with the mental image of a very tiny Simon lugging around a ping pong paddle on a countertop, chasing after an enormous plastic ball, and I had to cover my mouth to keep from smiling. “It sounds … interesting,” I said. “Do you play?”
“Not really. It only got popular at the high school a few years ago.”
“But he plays badminton! He’s fantastic, he could probably beat both of us put together. We should do that sometime.”
Simon gave him a look that said do you hear the crap leaving your mouth. “That’s because you’re crap at it, not because I’m any good.”
“He’s lying through his teeth.”
“You could still probably beat us two to one,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I was terrible at it in high school, and I’m guessing that he just runs around the court like a headless chicken.”
Simon laughed. “He does!”
I grinned, more with relief at having found something to talk about than because it was really that hilarious. “You’ve tried?”
“We were at my aunt’s house for a barbeque Fourth of July, and Marina — my cousin’s daughter — challenged him to a game.”
David reached back to swat him, and nearly missed our turn because he was too busy trying to locate the closest available body part. “You weren’t supposed to mention that!”
“Why, what happened?” I asked.
“I had to rescue him before he got butchered by a five year old.” Simon smiled down at his interlocking fingers. This, of course, led to a debate about that game and why Simon was grossly exaggerating the issue, which led to a spirited recollection about the rest of the barbeque, of which I had not been a part because I’d only been in town for two months and I hadn’t met David until a week later.
I listened to them talk back and forth and watched, trying to sort out the dynamics between them that I couldn’t figure out just from David’s descriptions. Simon leaned forward with an arm draped against the seat in front of him, body angled so that he could watch David while he spoke. David did a lot of turning around and taking his hands off the wheel to wave them around, so that for the safety of all involved — we were on a mostly straight road running through fields by that time, but what if we ran off the pavement and hit one of those eight-foot rolls of hay and it rolled over and crushed us because David couldn’t shut his yap? — I had to interrupt them to remind him that Simon wasn’t about to disappear just because he looked away, so could he please watch where he was going. It was absolutely necessary, but I still felt like a bad person afterwards, because then the silence came back and Simon shot me a bunch of these uncertain, evaluating looks like maybe I was secretly a pod person.
I ignored them in favor of looking out the window. Most of the fields were in various states of harvest: orange still gracing half the pumpkin patch, rolls of hay sitting on empty dirt except for a strip near the woods where an inefficient-looking piece of equipment labored. When we reached the beginning of the corn fields, I felt like telling David to pull over so that we could run through the rows and make crop circles. That sort of thing appealed to him, but there were probably all sorts of trespassing laws that we’d be breaking, and besides, Simon’s family probably knew the farmers.
Our destination appeared on the left around a curve in the road: a dusty gravel parking lot outside a collection of reddish, open-sided buildings whose floors were strewn with straw. Corn hung from the rafters in trios, surrounded by fake cobwebs that stretched themselves down to the heaps of pumpkins collected around the support beams. Little kids zoomed through the produce with tiny brown pears clutched in their hands, and a gang of teenagers toting bags of cider donuts meandered past us to the much nicer-looking pickup truck next to which David was trying to park.
“I’ve decided that I’m going to get a massive pumpkin, and you are going to be a gentleman and carry it for me,” I announced, climbing out of the car and stretching my limbs.
David snorted and held up his arms. “Have you seen these noodles? I think I broke a sweat carrying in the groceries.”
“I can do it,” Simon said.
I backed away from that fast. “No, no, that’s fine. I’d feel bad making you.”
He frowned. “Um … I don’t quite follow your logic, but okay.”
“Don’t bother trying; you’ll end up with a logic headache. Come on, come on, let’s go do pumpkins.” David grabbed me with one hand and Simon with the other, and towed us towards the stands. He only let go once he was satisfied that we weren’t going to run off on him. As if. We were in the middle of nowhere, so regardless of how I felt about pumpkins — which was, by the way, nothing but positive — I was stuck with them.
Upon entering the covered area, I discovered that its initial appearance had been deceptive, and the whole harvest circus stretched back a lot further than I’d realized. There were pumpkins in the front, yeah, but another huge row of them further back, piled on top of barrels of hay with fuzzy fake tarantulas perched around them; and crates, crates everywhere, big wooden crates heaped with the kind of local fruits and vegetables that sent David’s inner hippie into paroxysms of joy. I had to laugh when he looked from me to Simon, beaming, and bounced on the balls of his feet. “Pumpkins and apples and corn on the cob, oh my!” He snagged a hook-shaped gourd from one of the crates and tossed it to me.
“Pumpkins first,” Simon reminded him. “We need to carve pumpkins tonight. Everything else will still be here tomorrow.”
David nodded. He proceeded to make Simon groan and roll his eyes by picking up one of the very long pumpkins and suggesting that he could carve it into a bust of Louis XIV, and then I pointed out that the hair alone would keep him up most of the night. He proclaimed me a spoilsport, but agreed to put it back and stick to something manageable. We had to squeeze against the stacks of hay to make way for a man pushing a cart of animatronic witches, and when he had moved past, I saw it: a gorgeous, fat pumpkin twice the size of my head, sitting at the bottom of a pile against a wall near the fields at the back. Visions of great and glorious jack o’ lanterns thronged about my head as I skipped around the other people there and closed in on it. It turned out to be a bitch to pick up without throwing out my back, and after a couple of tries I had to enlist the help of a passing employee. I turned around to show David, swaying slightly from the weight. He bounded over, with a less jubilant Simon in tow.
A boy and his parents emerged from the rows of corn past the edge of the pumpkin piles, trailing dried-up leaves. The boy walked past me. When he saw David, his face lit up. “Mr. Cohen!” he shouted.
David swung around mid-stride. He dropped Simon’s hand and pulled his limbs in about him, straightening his jacket. “Toby! Hello. I wasn’t expecting to see you here — how goes it?” He held out his hand to the boy, who shook it with enough enthusiasm that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d dislocated something. The boy’s parents hung back until David leaped in at them with enthusiasm to match that of their son. Simon edged past them, giving them a brief nod that went unreturned. My stomach knotted as he came to join me.
“Student?” I asked.
He sighed. “Yep. Not current, but he hit a rough patch last year, I don’t think I’m really supposed to talk about it. The counselors at school are crap, so ...” His eyes drifted to the kid, who seemed to be trying to pull David away from his parents before any adult interaction occurred.
“So he goes to the history teacher,” I finished. “That’s kind of sweet.”
“And now we run into him sometimes. David thinks it’s sweet, too. He’ll be here for another ten minutes at least.” He leaned back against the wall, clearly getting settled in for a long wait. I settled back next to him. It felt very odd, and my skin started to prickle with the need to be doing something; standing together in silence and watching David talk to a high schooler wasn’t my idea of a quality bonding activity. Simon started to fidget with the headphones around his neck again, which only added to my paranoia. I looked away, and my gaze landed on the rows of corn planted right up against the edge of the covered area. For such a common sight around here, it was generating a quite a lot of interest from a whole lot of people. A swarm of them cleared away, and that was when I saw the sign, handpainted onto black and orange wood:
Farmer Franny’s One-of-a-Kind Corn Maze
I nudged Simon. “Want to do that while we’re waiting?” I asked.
He tore his attention away from Toby’s parents and looked down at me doubtfully. “Why?”
“Why not? You said he’d be a while, and you’re the expert on these things, right?” I pushed off the wall. David saw me coming and held up a finger to pause his conversation.
“Sorry, Karen — no, no Toby, it’s fine, you’re not interrupting — can you just give me two minutes?”
I flapped a hand at Toby to acknowledge him. “Actually, I just came over to tell you that me and Simon are going to go check out the corn maze while you’re catching up.”
David visibly relaxed, shoulders slumping with relief. “Great! Okay. I really am sorry. I’m being a terrible, whatchamacallit, host.”
“Yes you are,” I agreed. “It’s okay. This time.” He looked sufficiently sheepish at that, so I deposited my pumpkin at his feet, and left him and his student to talk about whatever it was that mentors and mentees talked about. Simon followed me as I plowed on over to the corn field, casting glances over his shoulder every two seconds like he was afraid we were trespassing and about to be found out.
Once we got closer, I found the entrance to the corn maze: a darker rectangle in a sea of green and gold, the ground of which the low sun couldn’t quite reach. A few pumpkins and colorful misshapen squashes loitered around the entrance at the feet of a cheerful-looking woman in red flannel. She waved in a family of five —three children under the age of eight, God bless those parents — ahead of us, then turned her attention to us.
“That’ll be two dollars each. If you want to come back after the sun goes down, it’s the same fee, and the maze will be all nice and haunted.” She wiggled her fingers at us, ruddy face split into a smile.
“No thanks. We’ll go now.” Before I could say anything, Simon took out his wallet and handed the woman a bunch of very worn dollar bills.
“Thanks,” I said. He glanced at me quickly, and looked away without saying anything.
The woman stuck them in the pocket of her jeans and bobbed her head. “All righty then. Enjoy!”
I waved at her as we went in. As soon as we were inside, the world abruptly shrank from huge fields and rioting autumn colors and people, people everywhere to a crisp, three-foot-wide corridor, the pumpkin in my arms, and Simon looming next to me. The jangly edge that I’d managed to get rid of by suggesting the corn maze — what a great idea, I’d thought; running around and getting lost in a field of kitschy decorations sounded like a good diversion, I’d thought — came crashing back over me with a vengeance.
We walked side by side between prickly rows of corn; with the breeze making the stalks slide and rustle against each other, I felt like I was being walked down the aisle in front of a particularly noisy congregation. One with a whole lot of rambunctious flower girls, and whilst carrying an enormous bouquet. Oh god, now I’d gotten onto the subject of weddings. I searched around for something, anything else to talk about. The goofy decorations draped over the stalks, the crows, the weather even. There was the problem, wasn’t it? Talking. Real conversation. It had to happen, and no one wanted to do it. I’d managed to successfully avoid it with other people’s paramours back when I lived in Philadelphia, but that had ended in a shitshow of epic proportions, so: not a good idea. I watched Simon out of the corner of my eye to see if he was going to take the initiative, but after three left turns and a solid minute of silence under our belts, I gripped the gourd more firmly in my fist and bit the metaphorical bullet.
“I don’t know if David’s told you, but I moved here from Philadelphia at the end of June,” I started off, because that was what was on my mind.
A faint frown creased his brow, but still, he watched the ground in front of us. “Yeah, I think he mentioned that.”
I steered us around a corner and straight into a dead end with a teenage couple making out in it. We backed out before they could unglue themselves to notice us, went around the other way, and I pushed on. “ I had an okay job. I was a copy editor for a paper, and it was only three days a week but it was still fun. Sometimes I got to write my own articles — I did a story about local clothing boutiques once.
“That was where I met one of my girlfriends, actually. She was all ‘ooh, you should see these hats we’re getting next week!’ and then I was like ‘I don’t actually like hats, they do weird things to my hair, but I’ll come back to see them just for you’ and then we ended up going to the movies wearing peacock hats.”
Simon looked at me with trepidation, but at least he was looking at me. “That’s, um, okay, that’s good for you.”
“Yeah, it was. Her name was Eliza.” I smiled at the memory, and then went back to watching where I was going when I nearly walked into a cute old couple coming off of a sudden right fork. “I was living with this other girl then, too, and the thing was, she was great. She was a banker — I know, right? — but I really liked her. The thing was.” I hesitated for a moment here, because this was where I needed to be careful what I said. This was where the Talking, with a capital T, came in. “The thing was, she hated Audrey Hepburn. I don’t mean the way most people hate things. This was, I don’t know, like a phobia or something. Maybe she looked too much like her mother.” I checked to make sure that he was still paying attention. He was twisted around, squinting up at the setting sun, probably trying to figure out which direction the exit to the maze was in. I bumped him with my shoulder.
“Excuse me, I’m talking.”
He looked down. “Audrey Hepburn, ex-girlfriend whose mother looked like her, maybe.”
I beamed.
“I think we need to go left at the next turn,” he added. “I saw people coming out from the right side of the field as we went in, and I’m pretty sure we’re completely turned around now.”
“Whatever you say. Lead on.” For a supposedly kid-friendly activity, this was turning out to be more of a challenge than I’d anticipated. Whatever — more time for us to get to know each other, right? “Anyway. You know those days, when sometimes, all you really need is to curl up on the couch with someone and watch Roman Holiday?”
Simon actually chuckled. “Mine’s usually disaster movies with Will Smith, but yeah.” We reached a junction in the maze, where our path ended and another cut across it at a diagonal. We turned down the hairpin bend to the left, following the growing sound of high-pitched giggling. A moment later, three small corn-haired children in puffy neon jackets zoomed around the bend ahead of us, panting for breath and stirring up a cloud of fragrant dust particles that made me sneeze.
“Wrong way!” gasped the boy to his friends.
“Mom! It’s a dead end! And there’s a scarecrow!” shrieked the little girl as she flew past. Simon winced and covered his ears with his hands.
I shook my head. Having been thus informed, we turned around, and I tried to remember what the hell I’d been saying. “My point is, when I was having one of those days, I’d go over to Eliza’s house and we’d watch Audrey Hepburn and eat massive amounts of cookies. It was fun. And then I’d go back home and my girlfriend and I would play Scrabble, and that was fun too. The end.” My pulse pounded, shaking through me from my chest out to my fingertips. I swallowed it down, squaring off my shoulders. Jubilant shouts rang out from the direction in which the little kids had gone. That seemed promising, and by means of tilting our heads and shrugging, we agreed to follow that route. The sun flared over the tops of the distant trees as the corn parted before us, and I ducked my head to keep from being blinded.
“So why did you come here?” Simon asked. He turned to me, shielding his eyes with his hand. “It sounds … nice.”
I shrugged. “The gazette got acquired, and I got laid off,” I told him. Plenty of people moved in order to find a new job. Most of them didn’t feel the need to divulge their full relationship history to someone they were meeting for the first time, but most of them weren’t also attempting to juggle polyamory directly upon reentering the dating scene. I plowed ahead in a high-pitched rush before I could talk myself out of it. “And I was bad at talking to my girlfriend about stuff so she ended up being jealous of Eliza and then there was this thing where Jeff — there was this guy named Jeff, for like six weeks — wasn’t okay with me dating other people at all so it all turned into kind of a mess. Um.” I’d been so focused on moving forwards with the words bit that I’d forgotten to pay attention to the walking, and blown straight past the path that didn’t double back to the dead end with the scarecrow. I stopped dead. “I think we should have gone down that fork just now.”
Simon kept walking for a full three steps after I’d stopped. When he noticed that I wasn’t there, he did an exaggerated turn on his heel and backtracked. “Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that’s where that family went.”
I nearly didn’t start walking again; I was afraid that if I unlocked my knees, then I’d sink into an ungraceful heap on the ground and get hay all over the only clean pair of jeans that I currently owned. Standing there indefinitely wasn’t an option, either, and would probably freak out Simon even more. I counted to three, took a deep breath to pull myself together, and ended up pulling together a lot of dust that sent me into a coughing fit instead.
When I’d gathered myself together, I followed Simon in the other direction. The new route that we went on put the sun behind us, which made it a lot easier to see. The teenagers we’d seen from earlier walked past, now adorably hand in hand instead of trying to climb into each other’s skin. It seemed simple, pleasant and uncomplicated, and I was envious of them for a few ill-advised seconds.
Simon watched them go by with a thoughtful expression. “Why was your first girlfriend jealous of the girl from the boutique?” he asked.
“Oh, you know.” I shrugged, and tried to act like it all made sense to me. “They didn’t like each other very much, so I tried not to mention one to the other, and it wasn’t really viable. There were probably — I’m oversimplifying it — but I think that was mainly it.” No need to go into the juicy details. If I’d known him a little better, and if we hadn’t been in the middle of a cornfield, I might have said something about how I’d seen that my girlfriend got put off by me talking about Eliza because she thought Eliza was an airhead who dealt pot, so I’d stopped mentioning when I spent time with her, and then she wanted to know what I was hiding; I might have gone on to talk about Jeff being okay with me dating other people as long as he never had to hear about it, then losing it when he came to pick me up and my girlfriend answered the door; but there were kids and old people around, and I got the feeling that even for the purposes of this conversation, it would have been TMI. So I left it at that.
“… Do you want a hug?” Simon asked.
“What?” I jerked around to look at him, but it seemed to be a sincere offer. How embarrassing. “No, I’m good. It was months ago. Really.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
We followed the teenage couple around a bend that put us in sight of the roofs. Unfortunately, we were approaching them from the wrong angle for where Simon had said he saw people leaving the maze. I spun around, trying to figure out where we’d gone wrong, and nearly toppled over. Simon put a hand on my arm to steady me, pulling away as soon as I’d regained my balance.
Halfway down the next corridor, Simon cleared his throat. “David talks about you a lot,” he announced. “He’s usually pretty good at telling me things.”
I could see where he was headed. “Did he tell you about my amazing cat-whispering skills?” I asked, instead.
“He might have — wait, no. You’re trying to change the subject.” He shook his head and planted himself in the path facing me. He managed to look more serious than one might expect from a man standing in a corn maze, surrounded by a minefield of tiny smiling ghosts. “My point is …” He lowered his voice. “You’re sleeping with my boyfriend. I know about it. The not-talking-about things isn’t a problem right now.”
I stared at him, stomach sinking. “Okay…”
He looked around to make sure that no one was within earshot besides the gnats swarming around us. “If I know about you, and you know about me, well, what am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to be angry at you, or scared of you stealing my boyfriend —“
"— Oh my god, please say you're not," I said.
"No, I'm not! I mean, I was, a little. When David first brought you up. I've never done this before," he said, and turned his face to the sky.
The dried stem on the gourd in my hands started to rattle, and I noticed that my hands were shaking. The gourd rattled in my hands, and thoughts rattled around my head, which I'd been trying to keep far, far away. Jeff, it's Jeff all over again, they repeated. Moving doesn't change anything, leaving never changes anything … "Oh," I said. I clenched my hands around the stem to silence the rattling.
"But, I mean. We talked about it. I'm pretty okay with it, now. And you don't seem like the boyfriend-stealing type," Simon said.
I couldn't help but laugh. ”I try not to be."
Simon snickered and continued to study the firmament a moment longer. I watched as his chest expanded, then fell. Finally, he turned and met my eyes. "I don't know what I'm doing," he said, very quickly, words toppling over each other in their rush to get out. "I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about you, how I'm supposed to talk to you. No idea. And I feel like a lunatic trying to talk to you in the middle of a corn field. While you're holding a … a gourd." He gestured at my clasped hands.
The shaking went out of me all at once, in a great whoosh, leaving me prepared to fall over like wet clay if I'd thought that the corn could hold my weight; and his words echoed around my head, wiped it clean of anything else to say. "Oh," I repeated. I looked around to make sure that we were still alone, and no parents were going to come around berating us for letting unnatural ideas enter the heads of their children. Maybe in the next row over, but no one that I could see. Nothing that I could see. We were clean.
Simon was still watching me. "I can't even find my way out of a stupid kids' maze," I said.
He swallowed, and nodded, and twisted around to point behind himself. "We've got to be close. There haven’t been a whole lot of people coming back this way.”
I smiled at him, and off we went, kicking at clouds of gnats and trying not to step in the several piles of pungent goose poop that we encountered. I ran my hand along the rows of corn, letting the stalks scratch at my palms, as I passed them by and let my heartbeat settled down from triple-time. See, that wasn't so bad, I tried to convince myself. Two minutes of heart-stopping awkwardness and confusion, but it's all fine now. We get each other! This is going to be okay.
For a few minutes, it looked like we were about to turn the corner and reach the exit; but when that corner actually came up, and my feet had started to ache with the anticipation of being able to stop walking, the path ended up heading towards the woods again. I contemplated shoving my way through the field back to the parking lot, and was only stopped by the thought of trying to force my way through that many densely-placed stalks, all of them topped with fluff ready to go airborne and into my lungs. Instead, I turned around to find another way to go. As I did, I caught Simon watching me: not quite a deer in the headlights, but still uncomfortable, hands wedged in his pockets. So much for everything being fine.
“Back?” he asked.
I sighed. "Seems like it."
He nodded. We backtracked and took another fork, and ended up behind a pot-bellied man walking a basset hound. He wore a t-shirt whose faded back graphic had been reduced, by repeated washings, to a crinkled outline of an animal’s head and a couple of fangs in an open maw. We continued to follow him, and I continued to wrack my brains for something more to say to Simon. Something helpful. I was supposed to be the one with the hands-on experience here. Communication, Karen. Come on, you can do this. New state, new town, new people.
Communication meant talking, and talking meant feelings, all out there and exposed and ready for angry girlfriends to stomp all over them with heels you'd bought for their birthday.
Communication meant talking, and talking meant finding out that body language you thought was angry and jealous was actually confused and awkward, and not another Philadelphia type of situation.
I turned the gourd over in my hands, and pinched off the rustling stem. My heart had sped up again.
"Do you want to talk about it?" I blurted out.
Simon's mouth opened a little. His eyes darted from the back of the man in front of us to either side. “It?” he asked.
My mouth was so dry, it didn’t even take an effort to lower my voice. “You, me. How we’re going to, well, work. I talked to someone at a meetup whose boyfriends were best friends, but I’m obviously not trying to pressure you. That’d be weird. Personally, I always though it’d be fun to gossip about my boyfriend with someone else who’s not going to get sick of it, but that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.” I cut myself off and cringed. TMI, probably.
Simon looked mortified. "Are we talking about this here?" he asked.
I flushed. "We don't have to, it's probably fine," I began.
“No, I think we should,” —
— “just,” —
— “not, not here,” —
“Not now, right.” I chewed on my lower lip. My ears flamed.
"But we will?" he asked.
My stomach started to crawl up my throat. Hope flickered across Simon's face, a suggestion of a promise that things might be okay this time.
"With David," I said, and then, more to convince myself than him, “Yes.”
Simon smiled at me. “But not while we’re carving pumpkins. Before that.”
“Yeah. Good idea.” I realized I was twisting my fingers around the neck of the gourd, and stopped so I could hold out my hand instead. He shook it with a jittery laugh.
We took a right turn after that, leaving the man and his dog behind. Through the walls of the maze, I could hear people meandering along, comfortable and unhurried. The low sun illuminated new clouds of gnats and little gold-flecked particles of corn that I did my best to avoid. I tossed my gourd from hand to hand as we walked, even though every so often I had to stop to pick it up. The roof of the barn got closer, and kept getting closer this time. Simon snatched the gourd in mid-air as I tossed it. I left my hands outstretched for a moment before I realized what had happened. After a moment, he returned the vegetable to me with a sheepish look, and I laughed at him, It wasn’t an outrageously funny thing to do, but that didn’t seem to matter as much as the fact that he’d done it.
We kept walking down the row. At a hairpin bend, I thought for sure that I was going to lose my mind if we had to turn straight back around, but there, straight ahead, was the entrance. Through it, I could see a narrow strip of road, and a tractor parked in the field next to it. I grabbed at Simon’s arm like a becalmed sailor starving for land. “We made it!” I announced.
“Huzzah,” he said, pumping his fist. Together, we ran the rest of the distance, out of the dusty path and back into the real world. The noise of people browsing the farm stand and the unobstructed wind came flooding back over us both, like cutting the static on the radio and turning the volume back up to normal.
I scanned the motley crowd of people as we approached the barn for David. I didn’t see him until he was nearly on top of us, toting my pumpkin in his noodle arms despite his earlier complaints.
We met up next to a crate full of miniature pears. “You two! Where did you go? I thought you were going to hang around inside the entrance, and then I turned around and you were gone,” he huffed, chagrined.
I feigned airiness, instead of a deep and profound relief. “Oh, we did the maze.”
It would be a lie to say that David actually pouted, but he came very close. “Are you going to do it again with me?”
Simon reached out and slid his hands underneath the pumpkin, pulling it away from David to carry it himself. “Can we not? I’m all mazed out.”
David snorted. “I don’t believe you. Betrayed by my own …” He flapped his hands at us, face turning red. “People.”
I looked at Simon. Simon looked at me. He raised his eyebrows. I held out the gourd to him. “Person?” I said.
It took him a moment to respond. Mostly, he looked a little confused. “Is that for me?”
I shrugged.
“All right, then.” Simon shifted the pumpkin into one arm, took the gourd, and raised it in a toast. “Um … person.”
David beamed at us both. He flung out his arms, as though unable to contain his excitement. “I like it! Now, while you two were wandering around, I picked out some fantastic specimens of pumpkin from the ranks. What do you say we go get them, get some cider, and go back home for some quality carving time?”
He began to pull away, towards whatever prized pumpkins he had selected, and Simon cleared his throat. “Um …” he said.
David turned around, arms still held away from his sides and eyebrows raised. “Yes?”
I pushed my hair behind my ear, and immediately replaced it when the cold air hit the side of my face. “Can we talk before that? All three of us.”
“After the pumpkins, before the carving,” Simon clarified.
If I hadn’t spent the last half an hour straining to keep myself from falling victim to the exact same thing, I would have found his clear wrong-footedness funny. “Is everything all right?” he asked.
I looked up at Simon, resolute as he hugged the pumpkin closer to himself. I looked at David, whose face was bathed a peculiar orange in the sunlight. I looked down at my own hands, and untwisted my fingers, letting them hand empty at my sides. “Yeah. I think it’s going to be fine.”
End