The Same Kind of People

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Sometimes my boyfriend and I get so bored it’s like we’re sick, and then we’ll do anything. Once, when we were still living in Des Moines, we crashed a speed dating event. Neither of us had ever been to one, only seen them on TV, and we thought it’d be something to talk about, at least. The plan was to split up a block away from the venue, arrive separately and sit down with strangers for an hour or so, then meet up on the walk back and spill it all someplace. I expect a full report on my desk by blah blah blah, he said on the way there. Then we were on opposite sides of the street. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t know him anymore.

I got there after he did, I think, and signed in with the woman who greeted me, using a fake phone number but my real name. It didn’t matter. Nobody knew me anywhere. The woman told me the fun would be starting in ten minutes, and that mingling beforehand was prohibited. Then she winked and sort of ushered me in. I saw a few lonely souls hovering around the bar. They’re not here because it’s fun, I thought. I went to the bathroom and just waited.

Pretty soon they had the men seated at tables and the girls lined up waiting for the signal. We’d do three minutes at each table and move clockwise until we’d hit them all. My boyfriend was sitting at one of them but like I said I didn’t know him. I was just a young so and so here to make a friend and nice to meet you. The woman who’d greeted me was also the host, and she went over the rules and smiled with big teeth and when she was done she took out a little brass bell. This, she said, means you swap tables. She rattled the bell. It also means go. So go.

We filed into seats. At each table there was a pen and a blank form with spaces for names and boxes to check yes or no if we liked a man or didn’t like him. The men had pens and papers of their own, but you know the rules, I’m sure. This man, the first one I sat down across from, was hiding behind his form. Just a mess of hair and fingers like bones and paper where the face should be. Until he lowered it, slowly: grey eyes, enormous nose, mustache, tiny smile. 

He put a hand out. “Hi honey, I’m James.”

I shook his hand. “Hi hon, I’m Jennie.” Hon. Why not? I would give it like I got it.

“Glad to know you,” James said.

“The paper.” I held mine up. “Are you gonna do that with every girl here?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I thought it’d be suspenseful. If we’re being honest—are we being honest, Jennie?”

“Sure we are,” I said. 

“Well, if we’re being honest, this ain’t my first rodeo. There are twenty-one other bucks here. I counted. With numbers like that, and three minutes a pop, getting remembered is half the game. I’ve played it enough times to know.” He laughed.

“This is my first time,” I said. 

“I could give you some tips—tips that’ll work on both sides of the table, I mean—but something tells me you won’t need them.” 

“What tells you that?”

“For one, you’ve got a real pretty face. A real sweet face, honey. That is, if we’re being honest. Are we still being honest?”

“Sure, hon, I haven’t stopped.” 

“Good,” James said. He put a hand down the front of his denim shirt and pulled out a crucifix on a chain. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you swear on this. It was my mother’s. Real gold, too.”

“You said for one. What’s the other reason?” 

James let his grey eyes wander. “I won’t be that honest just yet. You haven’t told me anything about yourself, honey.”

“Neither have you,” I said. “Where are you from?”

“Edmond, Oklahoma,” he said. “My old man used to teach college out there.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m 45 years old, honey. But you don’t look a day over twenty.”

.

The man at the next table stood up before I could sit down. Again the handshake. “Aaron,” he said, “Aaron Reed.” Crew cut, white t-shirt, gives his last name. I started thinking military. 

“Annie,” I said, quiet so James wouldn’t hear. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“So Annie, before we get started, I have to ask. Can I buy you a drink when this is over?” He flashed his gorgeous teeth at me. 

“That’s not how you play, Mr. Aaron Reed.”

“Yeah, but what’s this?” He shook the form. “I’d buy you a drink anywhere. I don’t need to check a box.”

“Too bad,” I said, “you have to get a check from me to buy me a drink.” I wrote in the space so he could see it: Mr. Aaron Reed.

“You and your mister. Makes it sound like I’m married or a teacher. You spelled it right.”

“Are you married?” I gave him one of those looks. You figure it out.

“Shit no. Not for a long time anyways. Years. It’s not first date talk.”

“I don’t know if I’d call this a first date.”

“Right,” he leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know if I would either. That’s what the drink after is for.”

I leaned forward in mine. I wanted to make it fun at least. “If you keep talking about that drink, she’s just gonna ring her little bell and—”

“Okay,” he said. “I get it, I get it. What do you do for work?” 

“Dry cleaning,” I said. “I own a dry cleaning business. What about you, were you ever in the army?”

“No. What the hell kind of a question is that?” He had this look on his face like I’d just confessed to having his family locked up somewhere. 

“So what do you do?”

“I’m a teacher. Fifth grade math and science.”

.

James had his eyes fixed on me when I got up from my seat. “Jennie, honey,” he said. I didn’t look at him. “Annie,” he said. Then he laughed. Aaron didn’t notice or didn’t care. He was ready for the next girl.

 I was the next girl for somebody else. I don’t know why but I sort of curtsied for this one by way of greeting. He was younger than the last two and wearing a big white cowboy hat that he tipped towards me as I sat. 

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. His voice was high and sweet. 

“I like your hat,” I said.

He ran his fingers along the brim. “Thank you.”

“What’s your name, cowboy? Or I can just call you cowboy.” 

“No, thank you. Brent’ll be fine.”

I wrote his name on the form. There was a long pause. “You don’t ask questions, do you Brent?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am—not ma’am. I didn’t get your name.”

“It’s Anna,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. 

“Anna,” Brent said. “My sister’s name is Anna.” 

“Sometimes I go by Annie,” I said. “Do you and your sister get along?”

“I like to think we do. I take her to the movies sometimes. What about you, do you have any siblings?”

“I’ve got three brothers, all older than me. It’s as good and as bad as it sounds.”

“Oh. Well Anna’s my younger sister. My only sibling, actually. I don’t know why I’m telling you so much about her.” His face was half in shadow beneath the hat. Just a little lap dog’s face, from what I could see of it.

“What kind of movies do you like?” 

For the first time he smiled. “You probably think I’ll say westerns, because of the hat. They don’t even make those anymore. I like horror movies and thrillers. She likes thrillers too, sometimes.”

“You mean Anna,” I said. 

He nodded.

“You’re not still in high school, are you Brent?”

“No ma’am. I turned 19 yesterday.”

.

I hardly remember the next few tables, maybe the next ten. You know how names and faces blur together. There was one who wore the same cologne I used to smell on my father and more than one whose breath stunk of booze and Altoids. We talked or didn’t talk until the bell rang and then disappeared from each other’s lives forever. Mostly they were good men. They were trying. You didn’t need more than three minutes to see that. 

I remember Armand, who had a French-sounding name but who’d been born and raised somewhere in the Catskills by parents who were definitely Scotch-Irish and probably cousins. He had this chest hair that went right up to the middle of his neck but no stubble on his face at all. That was Armand. 

There was another, we’ll call him Red because his hair was red, who kept pictures of his dogs in his wallet and took them out to show me. The photos were so cracked and faded that I knew right away his dogs were dead. I didn’t make him say it. I told him they were beautiful dogs and he thanked me and put them back into his wallet. That was where he had buried them.

To Armand I was Eileen, to Red I was Nicole. I didn’t know who I was going to be until I opened my mouth and a name came out. Everything I said to them was like that. I told lies and truths together and it wasn’t so different from the way I’d talked to people all my life. 

Eventually I hit a table facing a dirty window with a neon sign hanging in it. This one was special. Because at this table was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, a man beautiful in a way I thought only women could be beautiful, with pink lidded eyes and long hair as straight as straw but much softer. If I could show you a picture you’d know. You couldn’t top him. I never found out where he came from but it sure wasn’t Iowa.

“Elijah,” he said, “a pleasure.”

This time I put a hand out. I wanted to thank him for being so pretty. Instead I said, “Rachel.”  

“Are you having fun tonight, Rachel?” he asked. 

“I don’t know,” I said. “Not really.”

“You don’t think you’ll have fun with me?”

“I don’t think I’m going to be honest with you about anything.” 

“That’s a funny thing to say. We’re all the same kind of people here. What’s there to lie about?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“How about this,” he said. “How about you tell me something you haven’t told anybody else in this room. Just try it. Try it with me.”

“Okay,” I said, but first I just looked at him. He was lit fuzzily by the neon sign behind his head. Certain people can glow like angels in the right kind of light. 

“It was a long time ago, but if I had to point to any one thing to explain myself this would be it. When I was in the fifth grade I had two best friends at the same time. They both called themselves my best friends, and I’d known them both since kindergarten. Sometimes the three of us would get together, the two of them and me, and they’d be my best friends but not each other’s, you know? I’d take turns talking to them or one of them would braid my hair while I did something else with the other.” 

I stopped. “Is it okay without names?”

“It’s fine,” Elijah said. He was twirling his pen. 

“So me and these two girls, we went on like that for a while. They were as big a part of my world as anything. I liked them more than my parents, and boys were still nothing. Then one day they were best friends with each other and I was out. Just like that.” I waved my hand. 

“Just like that?”

I nodded. “They told me they didn’t like me anymore and that I wasn’t going to be friends with either of them from that day forward. They didn’t hedge it a bit. I kept having to go to school with them after that, and they stayed friends, best friends, all the way through high school. I’ll bet they still are.”

“They never gave you a reason?”

“The reason was that they didn’t like me anymore.”

Elijah shook his head.  “Girls can be such rotten bitches to each other.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not it.”

“Hold on a second.” He pointed his pen at me. “Was any of that true?”

I told him that it wasn’t, and he told me I ought to be careful if I was going around telling lies like that. Then the host rang her bell and I had to say goodbye. 

There were boys there who must have been younger than Brent, the sister-lover, and men who might’ve been pushing sixty. They all wanted to be lied to.

.

I sat down in another seat, still facing the dirty window, the smeared night. There were only a couple tables left at that point. 

“Howdy,” this one started, and I thought, there must be more cowboys than people in Iowa. He had his fingers laced over his chest and was slumped in his chair like a man sedated. “I’m Dean,” he said, “but I go by DJ.”

“Hi DJ. I’m Angel, but I go by Angel.”

He sat up. “Is that really your real name?”

“Yeah,” I said. “People like to joke about it.”

“There’s nothing funny about angels. Actually they’re very serious.”

“Do you go to church?” I asked him. 

“Not since I was about this big.” He brought his hand level with his chest.

“Okay, more of a private practitioner.” 

“You got it. Hey, wait.” He gestured. “Do you know this song?”

For the first time I noticed the sad tinny music coming from a set of speakers over by the bar. It had been playing the whole night, of course. A man was singing in a stupendous drawl. You could just hear him over the sounds that human voices make when they’re speed dating. He sang things like, Why don’t you come home to me and Darling I need you, while a slide guitar moaned and whinnied in the background. 

I said, “No, do you know it?”

“I don’t, but it’s probably by someone named Chet Dusty or something like that. Listen to that twang.” Dean or DJ closed his eyes and bobbed in invisible water. That was pretty much how our conversation went until he slid his hand across the table and grabbed hold of mine. He was my boyfriend, but I don’t know that it’s very important. Any one of them might have been. 

“Baby,” he whispered. “Let’s trade while no one’s looking.” 

We swapped papers noisily, but nobody saw or cared if they did see. Whatever he was hoping for, all he got from me was a few scrawled names. His was different. He’d written down little notes to help him remember each date—pink shirt, glasses, collarbones, paralegal, things like that—and next to the notes, in boxes where a check meant yes and an X meant no, he had given a check to every girl in the building. Girls with hangdog eyes, radio voices, track marks up and down their arms. It wasn’t a bluff. He could have loved any woman in any town, and he still could, and that’s why I won’t ever leave him. 

“Nobody caught your eye?” he asked, cradling my form. You could see how excited he was.

“Give me that back,” I snapped. “The night’s not over.” 

.

But that part of it was. The last two men I sat across from were burned out and smoking like pieces of wreckage by the time I got to them. What else can you say?

After the final bell, the host took the center of the room and told us we should all give ourselves a big round of applause. I couldn’t decide if I was more embarrassed or guilty, but I clapped anyways. I clapped and my boyfriend clapped and some of the other men and women did too. They weren’t finished with love yet. They had showed up that night to pay it tribute. Being in there with them almost felt good. 

We all turned our forms in to the host, who promised over and over again that she would call and let us know how we did. There was so much promising in her voice it made me sick.

After that we filed out into the cold. My boyfriend had gone on ahead of me, and when I turned the near corner I could see him just a little ways down the street, waiting. But another man was at my heels. “Hey, Jennie-Annie-or-whatever-the-fuck,” his voice called, “I wanna talk to you for a minute.” He split the air with a long screaming whistle.  It was James. I looked back and saw him drifting along the sidewalk like a piece of blown trash. 

“I ain’t gonna hurt you, honey,” he lied. James was the reason we left Des Moines. Why don’t we leave it at that.