She told my dad he was “kind of an *******” the first time we had dinner with him, at this place called The Pear Room but she was disappointed that there were not only no pear decorations, but that there was not a single dish with a pear included. She ordered a dry martini with three olives on a skewer, but she never took one sip. She gulped.
She came at me like an avalanche in jean mini skirt. I tried to run ahead of her, but she picked up speed and tossed me right into her path with scratch marks on my back to prove it. You’d never know it by the way she twirls her hair into a bun at the top of her head just to take her make-up off, how she laughs instead of getting ******, or how she sometimes orders her dessert before her meal, but she’s just a girl who puts on her toughness in the morning like a slip. She folds
her dollar bills into fourths before she puts them in her wallet, and she strings herself like paper chains against the sun every day as she drives to a job she hates. She listens to Miles Davis on her record player, asks me to dance at half past eleven on nights I need to sleep, but I get up anyway. I pour us both a glass of Coke and try to capture the reflection she doesn’t see of herself, mirror it in my eyes, just so she knows that she is not just another item on the menu.