Flirting with Danger

by Siobhan Darrow

  I was a girl who had used the chaotic and painful experiences from her own home to understand an enemy nation eight thousand miles away. I was a woman in the middle of her own personal struggle who still got through college and built a foundation for an extraordinary life. I was a woman who, no matter how many relationships she botched up, still had enough hope to try again. I was the cruel girlfriend and the loving and compassionate one. I was wise and philosophical, and I was a lost soul. I was merely human.

  I couldn’t repack the box. I left the letters and photos scattered on the table. Let them breathe for a while, I thought. Let these old wounds get some air. To heal.

  Dunkin’ Donuts

  When I was fifteen, I got a job at Dunkin’ Donuts. I served coffee to the local police force and assorted strays who would hang out at the Formica counter. I was a flirtatious teenager with attitude. I loved all the attention that my short pink-and-white uniform helped attract, even if it was just from a bunch of cops and construction workers.

  My best friends at work were Lois and her mother, Lorraine. They had been working behind that counter for years, first to help Lois’s son through college, and then to get him through law school. Lois was in her forties, although a hard life and lots of cigarettes seemed to have added a decade to her face. Lorraine was in her sixties and could have passed for eighty. They were tough, chainsmoking women who cussed and swore and acted as though they had little use for anyone, especially anyone male. But they were endlessly kind and mothering to me. Lorraine, her face hardly visible under a large colony of warts, barked and snarled at the customers as she shuffled up and down the counter, dragging her lame foot. They were terrified of her, but she always spoke gently to me. Sometimes Lois would work double shifts because Lorraine wasn’t well. The sight of Lois’s nicotine-stained fingers tugged at me. I knew her pack of Kool cigarettes helped keep her awake through the overnight shift covering for Lorraine, but I worried about her health.

  I loved the job. I gave great service, usually with a large dose of sarcasm. If anyone bugged me, anything might end up in their coffee. Lorraine and Lois had taught me how to handle the public. I loved the paycheck too, and it usually disappeared fast at the mall, where I went with my girlfriends to buy jeans, halter tops, and purple mascara, the kind of necessities that adolescent girls craved in the seventies. I looked forward to my afternoon shifts at Dunkin’ Donuts. Above all, it was a way to get out of my house. My father was dying of cancer and my parents spent so much energy fighting each other that there seemed to be little left to battle the disease. It wasn’t talked about. Confusion, instability, and pain hung silently in the air, and I could feel it permeating my body whenever I walked through our front door. The bank was in the process of foreclosing on our house, giving some solidity to the amorphous sense of doom. Dunkin’ Donuts felt like a refuge.

  I remember staring out the window, imagining myself coming back someday to this small town as a big celebrity, pulling up into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in a fancy car and being somebody famous instead of the girl behind the counter pouring coffee.

  One day while I was at work after school, a cute guy came in. He wasn’t some loser, like the usual blue-collar type I flirted with casually. He had long hair, looked earthy, and was in his thirties. He drove a van. We talked about what I was reading in my high school honors English class as he had a glazed doughnut and a cup of decaf. He started coming by occasionally. I started watching for his van to pull into the parking lot.

  One day he asked if I wanted to go for a drive with him after work. I was thrilled at the invitation. I could not believe such a cool older guy would have any interest in me. Even Lois, who didn’t trust any male, thought he seemed a step above the usual clientele. I punched my card in the time clock, put a sweater over my waitress uniform, and hopped into his van with him. We drove awhile and talked. I felt grown-up just being in a guy’s car. He headed to the woods near the university and asked if I smoked dope. “Sure, I’ve been smoking since my freshman year,” I said. He drove to the middle of nowhere and stopped the van.

  “Let’s go back here and have a beer,” he said, steering me toward the back of the van where there was a small table and a bed.

  “Do you live in here?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer; instead he started kissing me and touching my breasts through my pink uniform. I was surprised and a little nervous, but I liked the attention. I didn’t stop him.

  He unzipped my dress and pulled it up over my head. I started getting scared. Before I knew what was happening, he was pulling down my underpants. I didn’t know what to do so I lay there, paralyzed, holding my breath.

  I felt something hard and strange pushing at me, something alien. I had never even seen a penis before, having had only sisters. The texture of his pubic hair against my thigh frightened me. It came as a shock to me that a penis even came with pubic hair.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him, trying to pull away.

  “I’m balling you.”

  I was more offended somehow by the choice of word—it seemed so crude and unromantic—than by the fact that I felt I couldn’t say no. We were far from anyone. I didn’t believe I could stop him. I had willingly gone with him. I had allowed him to touch me. I was afraid to make him mad. I closed my eyes and went away, somewhere deep inside where nobody could hurt me, and let him do it to me. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t know how to stand up for myself. I had never known my feelings mattered. I told myself it didn’t matter. I wasn’t there anymore.

  He never came into Dunkin’ Donuts again. Lois asked me once whatever happened to the nice guy who used to hang around. “He seemed to like you so much,” she said. It left me deeply confused, though I was so young at the time I didn’t even understand my own confusion. I even wondered, with some hope, if he might want to be my boyfriend. But I never saw him again. I was ashamed to tell her I had somehow managed to frighten him away. I was too embarrassed to tell her or anyone else about what happened. So I said nothing. It took almost fifteen more years and more men I didn’t know how to say no to before I realized my first sexual encounter had been a rape.

  One afternoon many years later, when I was in my late twenties, Lori and I were recounting our sexual escapades to each other. I told her that I had often felt as though I was not a willing participant in sex. It was always something I thought I had to do to earn love. I told her about that day in Dunkin’ Donuts. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, and it was only as I started telling her that I understood the weight of what I was saying.

  It took another decade to understand that the place I had disappeared to that day in the woods was the same place I went whenever I was sent to a war zone as a correspondent. And I came to realize that it still happens; it is where I go when anyone gets too close to me. I disappear into that numb place where I can be safe and untouched. A very old part of me resides in that place, hunkered down and buttressed by defenses. Locked away, this part of me taunts and torments, casting stones in the shadows of my mind. In the light, it gives me knowledge and strength. It is as though there is another person who emerges from that place. She is my original, true self. She went into hiding for a few decades because her first experiences with the world were frightening. But it feels safe to come out now.

  The Blind Date

  When I arrived in California, at thirty-eight years old, I called everyone I knew and told them I was interviewing husbands. Lori offered her usual practical advice: “You need to treat this like a job,” she said. “Use all your sources. Be a reporter. Research their pasts. Be methodical. Slash and burn.”

  I had a profile in my mind of the kind of man I wanted to meet: a Rhodes scholar, well-off, worldly, gorgeous, and a hunk, with a great sense of humor and lots of heart, and no ex-wives, children, or mother. But my screening process was still faulty enough that I’d also consider the guy pouring coffee at Starbucks. Anyone who showed any interest tapped into my hunger for love. It was a hunger t
hat I was beginning to nourish on my own. Now that I was spending much of my days writing, the memories I retrieved and wrote about were my new companions as I walked the beach with Max. But the quiet let me realize how much I wanted a human companion as well.

  Friends introduced me to all types. I met a few on my own. I figured that regular dating would be a whole new experience compared with the madness of meeting men on the road. Things could go forward at a more normal pace. It didn’t have to happen all at once. I knew I would be in the same place the next week and even the next month. I could get to know someone in real time, instead of just meeting once or twice, then filling in the rest with my own fantasy. I could be more discerning. I had time to breathe in all the love I had in my life. I had my sisters, my friends, and Max. I finally felt comfortable with myself.

  I had assumed that when I quit working, ready to stay still and make room for a man in my life, that he would suddenly, magically appear. I felt so ready—ready to sip coffee together on Sunday morning, to go food shopping as a pair, all that normal kind of stuff. Of course, that’s not the way it happened. Lots of men showed up, but none of them was quite right. Was I just being too fussy? Or not fussy enough? Anyone who showed even remote interest, I considered, although the real possibilities I found a way to discredit.

  “No more blind dates,” I announced to Francesca during one of our morning marathon conversations.

  “What was wrong with this one?”

  “He had to get permission from his parole officer to take me out.”

  “Child molester?” asked Francesca, with characteristic nonchalance.

  “No, fraud.” This guy was a gambling addict who had stolen, cheated, and lied to feed his habit. Bad checks, embezzling, stealing from his girlfriend. He had gotten out of jail six weeks previously. I was his first date in three years.

  “Poor thing,” said Francesca. She has a soft spot for losers.

  Not that he didn’t make an interesting dinner companion. As usual, when in an uncomfortable situation, I shifted into reporter mode and questioned him closely about what life was like in prison, how the food was, all the while keeping a close eye on my handbag.

  “Am I asking for too much?” I asked Francesca. I wanted someone who could make me laugh, who could earn a decent living, who wanted to make love with me, and whom I couldn’t keep my hands off. And who didn’t have a prison record. Why was this so hard?

  “It only takes one,” Francesca counseled. “You haven’t been really looking that long. Be patient; the right one will come along.”

  Easy for her to say, I thought, living in her comfortable world with her new baby and devoted husband. When Hadi was dying, Francesca met a man at work. He came up to her in the hallway at the bank where they worked and asked if she would have dinner with him. She looked at him as if he were insane. “I barely get home to bathe,” she told him. “I go right from work to the hospital every day, where my boyfriend is dying of cancer, and then I get home at eleven every night to feed my cat and fall into bed to get up and get here to work. No, I don’t think I can have dinner with you.” She walked off after her tirade, thinking that must have been the most dramatic rejection that that guy ever got.

  The next day she apologized for being so abrupt. He smiled. His name was David. They became friends. David could tell she wasn’t eating, and made her food and brought it in to work. He kept a respectful distance, but took care of her the best he could. After Hadi died, David asked Francesca out again.

  A year later they were married and expecting a baby. David was completely different from the men Francesca had been out with in the past. He was a redhead with freckles, not the swarthy, Middle Eastern type she usually went for. He was all-American. He wanted the same things she did: a life partner, a baby, a dog.

  After returning to America, I started speaking to Francesca twice a day on the phone. I told her about every date I went on, recounting the dialogue, analyzing each one in excruciating detail, and assessing each man’s potential as a husband. In return, I heard about her baby’s every new facial expression or utterance. We never tired of the minutiae of each other’s lives. I didn’t care how many times she told me she was fat; I always told her I was fatter. I must have asked her a thousand times if I’d end up alone; she always reassured me that I wouldn’t.

  While Francesca listened endlessly to my dating sagas, my older sister, Alexandra, was more pragmatic. Instead of listening to me whine, she hunted around for suitable men for me, sizing up fellow lawyers and scouring her husband’s architectural firm for any interesting, unattached men. When I visited her and her family in Chicago, some stray male would often appear casually, but despite her best intentions, nothing ever took.

  I eventually met my cybersurgeon, Larry, in the flesh. He was in the midst of a messy divorce. He was almost perfect-looking, and, I quickly realized, too perfect for my taste. Nips and tucks had rendered him younger-looking than I, even though he was ten years older. And he was way too nice to feel real. But “nice” was not applicable to his eighty-one-year-old Jewish mother. I met her at a party at his house. I said to her that it was strange how so many people looked alike at the party, and she said many of the guests were products of her son’s handiwork.

  “My son does the best nose in town,” she announced proudly, pointing across the room at some peaked-looking creature who looked as though she hadn’t had a meal in weeks. “He fixed half the noses here.”

  Once I let her know gently that her son was not the man for me, she gave me the rundown on all the bachelors at the party. She might have been surprised that anyone could pass Larry up, but I’m sure she was relieved that a half-breed like me wasn’t going to steal away her nice Jewish doctor of a son.

  “That one is a dentist, cute, and nice as can be, but you should have seen him before Larry worked on him,” she whispered after pointing out a man across the room.

  “God knows what the kids might look like,” I whispered back.

  She nodded conspiratorially. She had free time on her hands, and knew all the doctors in Beverly Hills, so I figured I should put her to work. Plus she knew the before and after, important information in a town where you can never be sure what you are getting, genetically speaking. Once they’ve had their nose jobs, eye tucks, face-lifts, and laser peels, the original is completely transformed. I did go out a few times with the cybersurgeon, but ultimately I was too busy overhauling my interior to understand his world of exteriors. He was fine for cyberspace, but I wanted the real thing.

  Sperm Bank and Beyond

  On my endless stream of blind dates, I felt like I was just wading through leftovers or defective models. I wondered whether Francesca was right when she said that all the good ones were taken by the time they reached thirty. I still felt pangs of hope and excitement when a friend mentioned that they wanted to introduce me to someone, imagining that this time it would be different, that as soon as I opened the door to him I would feel it, see something in his eyes, in the way he smelled, musky and male. I’d want to brush against him to catch a better whiff. I wouldn’t even remember our conversation, it would flow so easily, but mostly I’d be wishing he would just touch my hand, and when he did I’d picture us in bed together. And later we’d make love for hours and then light candles and soak in my bathtub, and before I knew it, it would be dawn. And waking up to him padding around my apartment would feel as though he had always been there. And then I really opened the door and felt the inevitable disappointment. A friend suggested I stop looking for a man, and wait for him to find me.

  The problem with waiting was that I wanted a baby. In magazines and newspapers I often read about actresses or other celebrities who gave birth into their late forties, so I had managed to block out a sense of urgency. Then I met a woman who told me she decided to have a baby at age thirty-eight, and was told by her doctor that she could not. When I looked into it, I discovered that a woman’s chances of being able to give birth to a child naturally starts to di
minish sharply at age thirty-eight, and that after forty her fertile years might as well be counted in canine years.

  It was a shock, a real wake-up call. Suddenly I felt compelled to consider having a baby on my own. It seemed like a drastic step. I replayed my recent blind dates in my mind. Would hooking up with any of those men be preferable to being a single mother? The unfortunate answer was: No. Maybe I was just destined to be alone. Or maybe I would meet someone later in life, after I already had a child. But once I turned thirty-nine, I decided that there was no more time to lose.

  I got the sperm-bank catalog in the mail. The donors were listed by race, height, coloring, and college major. There was an Irish-Italian one with curly blond hair and hazel eyes who studied religion and music. He was my top choice. And then number 3166, a philosophy major. He was six feet tall and of Portuguese-Hawaiian stock. I liked the idea of a good hybrid. I was avoiding German blood, a prejudice I’ve inherited from my mother. I thought it would depress me to pick out a man from a catalog, but I actually loved perusing the pages. No fuss and no muss. It was easy. We are living in a time when I could buy anything, including a father for my child. Every spare moment I flipped through the catalog, imagining my baby made practically all by myself, and savoring the freedom of not depending on one of those blind dates to be the man of my dreams. I could give myself a family. I’d have my techno-baby and then adopt a second one from Russia to complete my millennium-style family. I lay on the sofa and listened to the audio-tapes I had ordered of several men who caught my fancy. I listened as they spoke of their goals, hobbies, families, and desire to travel. I listened carefully to the timbre of their voices to see who sounded kind and warm, and whittled the choice down. I called in to order longer profiles with information on their favorite pets, the type of music they liked, and medical histories for my top six choices.