Big Beautiful Dreamer
ridiculously contented
~~WG, Mutual - A historian and an English professor both find themselves moving beyond a number of stereotypes.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.* It is also a truth universally acknowledged that habits are easy to form and hard to break. I have been a shameless history wonk all my life. Bachelor’s in history, employment in a history museum for several years, master’s in modern American history, a couple of years of teaching, and finally a doctorate, my dissertation being properly published, dust jacket, author photo, and all, as Tempest in a Teapot: The Life of Albert Fall. Fall had been President Warren G. Harding’s secretary of state and was believed responsible not only for the failure of competitive bidding of oil reserves but also for a murder of a professional rival. I had followed that up with Prairies High, an examination of how Midwestern immigrant farmers had fared during the Dust Bowl.
Being a historian tends to be poorly paid, and eight years of education does not come cheaply. I had that good fortune to sustain me, however, in the form of a trust from my late grandfather (the inventor of both Band-Aids and Q-Tips)+, and had been free to spend most of my adult life to that point in dusty library stacks rather than at parties, trolling dating sites, or otherwise trafficking much with my fellow humans. I did not fish, hunt, or bowl; occupy myself with online role-player games; cook, paint, or play an instrument. In short, I was dull as dirt and content to be so. The books and papers were company enough, and at the moment I was happily engaged in a biography of Harry Emerson Fosdick, concentrating on the last half of his life, and opening with his assistance in defending the Scottsboro Boys. There was a paucity of scholarship on his later days, and I hoped to make a dent in it.
Then one Friday I was reaching for The Living of These Days, an autobiography published in 1956, and found that another hand was reaching for it at the same time.
“Oops,” we both said at the same time, and looked at each other.
Here’s what I saw: A woman in her mid-twenties, with dark chestnut hair cut in a sort of wedge-bob. Five four or so. Deep green eyes, snub nose, full lips turned up into a pleasant smile, an unremarkable – maybe slightly plump – figure dressed in a green twinset and khaki skirt.
Here’s what she saw: a man in his early thirties, with habitually rumpled dark hair usually wanting cutting. Five eleven. Hazel eyes, large, very straight nose – courtesy of very distant Celtic Roman forebears – decent chin, an unathletic figure, though not fat, only soft; dressed in a green shirt with sleeves rolled up and unpressed khaki trousers.
We both hesitated, torn between politeness and need.
“You go ahead,” she said, finally, breathlessly. “I’m just noodling around for pleasure reading.”
I felt my eyebrows lift. Not too many people would read such a book for pleasure. Unconsciously I glanced down, noticing that she cradled a history of the Nazi party and the latest Arnaldur Idriđassen novel.
“If you’re sure you don’t mind…” I said hesitantly. I paused. “Could I … um … buy you lunch?”
She laughed softly. “You don’t owe me anything… but lunch would be nice. Sure,” she said.
As I had noted, I don’t cook, and had spent the last decade nourishing myself as quickly and conveniently as possible. Supermarket deli takeout, delivery pizza and Chinese, McDonald’s, impatiently assembled sandwiches, chips, an occasional pint of ice cream. It was rare for me to take the time to enter into a well-lit restaurant, take a table, and dine at leisure with the chair across the table actually occupied.
And interestingly so, as well. We had strolled off campus to a buffet down the block, I had forked over $15 for two lunches, and we had companionably piled up our plates. I was a little rusty at basic conversational skills, but it came back to me, and we quickly found ourselves enjoying each other’s company.
It was only afterward, so sated and logy with far too much lunch that I actually dozed off in a library cubicle, that it occurred to me I had kept refilling my plate to prolong the conversation. My belly, unaccustomedly overloaded, was aching and tender and pushed heavily against my khakis. I kept distracting my already dopey self by working at suppressing belches so they would not echo among the stacks. I finally decided to call it a day around 2 o’clock and made my way home, where I stripped to my underwear and collapsed into bed, socked out before my head hit the pillow.
I woke, groggy and stiff, a couple of hours later. Revived myself with a short, scalding shower, pulled on a T shirt and jeans, and browsed over the notes I had in hand. It dawned on me that I had actually remembered to check out that book, and I spent a pleasant evening giving it a first look-through. Phoned for Chinese. Ate it absently. Watched The Great Debaters on HBO. Went to bed; tossed and turned; finally fell into a restless sleep, filled with dreams of The Library Girl.
I went the next day, and many days afterward, to the library and to my preliminary research. I kept an eye out for The Library Girl, but she was nowhere to be found. Her absence distracted me more than I would have expected. One chance encounter, and poof my mind was gone. Nevertheless, I plodded onward, making notes, looking for larger, sustaining themes, filling index cards, beginning the bare bones of an outline.
I paid little mind to the soft clatter and shush of patrons coming and going. A shadow crossed my desk but did not keep going. I looked up, annoyed; someone was blocking the light.
It was The Library Girl. She set a copy of Prairies High gently but decisively on the desk.
“This is you,” she said, a smile quirking at her lips.
“Um, yes, yes it is.” Oh brilliant.
Now she was grinning. “Well written. Much more readable than The Worst Hard Time.”
I shook my head. “Just … noodling.”
“Touche.” She raised an eyebrow. I love it when I meet a girl who can do that.
“No, not really. A little clueless, but not touchy,” I said thoughtfully. She pursed her lips to keep from laughing out loud.
“And now I know your name.” She sounded pleased with herself.
I stared at her. “Did we actually enjoy an entire lunch together without exchanging names?”
“Mmmyep.”
“How did you … um, how did you … connect the book with me?”
“I was browsing,” she said simply. “This one looked interesting. I flipped it over to read the back cover blurbs and there was your photo.”
The blush started at my throat and raced upward.
“What did we … what did we talk about? I remember enjoying your company, but clearly we didn’t even exchange names or professions … so …”
She bit her lip to hold back the laugh … mmm, do that again … and when she bent her head a hint of a suggestion of a double chin peeped. I found it enchanting.
“I asked you what you’d played at when you were a child,” she said. “We talked about our childhoods. I don’t think we got past sixth grade.”
“Mmm,” I said, trying to sound disapproving. “I believe another encounter is in order, Ma’am. At the very least, I never go out with someone twice unless I’ve been properly introduced.”
She curtseyed, holding out her hand. “Miss Elizabeth de Vaund, of the Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, de Vaunds, forever deluding ourselves into believing our line to be distantly related to those other famous Dutchies, the Op Dycks, whose scion made his money with the parvenu’s patronymic of Updike.”
I finally took her hand and bowed over it.
“Call me Libby,” she concluded.
I straightened. “And I,” I said, trying and failing to match her plummy tones, “am Alexander Dickson, un-late and un-lamented author of riveting classics gathering dust on library shelves from coast to coast.” It was a poor second, to be sure, but I was still collecting myself from, um, Libby’s line about the parvenu’s patronymic.
“If you haven’t guessed,” she said, grinning, “I am an adjunct – from the Latin, meaning part-time – instructor in English at the School.” The School being a town industry, a decently regarded boarding school for grades six through twelve, routinely landing at least 40 percent of its graduates in the Ivies each year. I taught a seminar on modern American history there every year or so, when I could come up for air.
My lips twitched. “Parvenu’s patronymic?” I finally said.
“Yeah … I was pretty pleased with that, myself,” she said, blushing only a little.
By then we were on our way out of the library. I squinted against the late-afternoon sun.
We returned to the buffet, Miss de Vaund this time insisting on … you guessed it … going Dutch, and picked up the story of our lives somewhere around the hell that is middle school.
Middle school got us through a couple of platefuls each and I felt myself slowing down – but I would pay any price to watch Libby’s face, hear her voice, enjoy the play of animation of her features, the way her hands fluttered when she spoke.
I took a deep breath and drank some water, playing for time. My khakis were creaking, my stomach heavily full and pressing against the waistband, threatening to lap over. Libby got up, so I did too, and we went the rounds again.
By the time we got to high school graduation, we’d moved on to the dessert buffet. I almost groaned aloud at the thought. My gut was swollen and tender, my shirt damp with perspiration. I couldn’t help noticing that the floral sundress that Libby was wearing had become visibly snug through the middle. If my aching belly was any barometer, she was already stuffed to bursting.
Yet the desserts, as they always do, looked irresistible. I had to have just a little wedge of red velvet cake, a tiny, wicked-looking brownie, a piece of chocolate cream pie.
Slowly, slowly, we made our way through the desserts. There was no postponing it – I was going to have to stand up. I winced at the thought of putting that kind of pressure on my bloated and gorged gut. Surreptitiously I undid the hook of the khakis. Didn’t help. The grunt I let out as I hauled myself up was entirely inadvertent.
Libby indulged in a small stretch. “Ohhh,” she groaned, resting a hand on her tummy, which bulged tautly beneath the waist of her dress. That zipper was doing a job of work. Just as I reached her side, she put a hand to her mouth.
“Oop,” she said, not quite stifling a belch. “Excuse me.”
I slid my arm familiarly around her waist – somehow it felt entirely right to take such liberties – and subconsciously noted the strain of the fabric and the unyielding distention of her belly.
Silently and without consultation we left the buffet and strolled down the block, turning in at a coffee shop. She nodded assent when I ordered us both espressos. We sank into easy chairs and sipped the strong liquid, recovering.
“Sorry,” she murmured, uncharacteristically shy. “I don’t usually, um, make a pig of myself on second dates.”
“I ate way too much,” I confessed. “I just didn’t want the evening to end.”
A laugh started to bubble out of her, stopped by a loud hiccup. “Oh-hic!-me neither.” Now we were both smiling sheepishly, and I felt free to gently massage my swollen and aching midsection. It was tight as a drum and the pressure of my hand on its firm surface didn’t help much.
“Still don’t,” I confessed.
If the look on her face was anything like the look on mine, neither of us was enough of a slick mover to want to sleep together … yet … but at the same time, it would have been heavenly to get out of those clothes and get horizontal.
So that’s what we did. We went back to her apartment, I undid the zipper – zwinnng – and she took what she said was her first deep breath of the night. Once we were both naked as jaybirds, without further discussion we slid between the sheets, groaning with relief at the chance to lean back, like pythons, and enjoy the sort of logy satiation that follows such an enormous meal. We stretched and patted our bellies and slid our hands up and down our torsos, laughing at the unaccustomed bloat and the drumlike tautness of the flesh.
Later, we snuggled a little, then fell asleep. All very G-rated. Well, mostly.
__________________________________________
*Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. In the public domain.
+Band-Aids were invented by Earle Dickson, whose wife, Josephine, was accident-prone; Leo Gerstenzang invented the Q-Tip after seeing his wife wrap cotton round the end of a small stick to clean their baby’s ears.
Ancient History
by Big Beautiful DreamerIt is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.* It is also a truth universally acknowledged that habits are easy to form and hard to break. I have been a shameless history wonk all my life. Bachelor’s in history, employment in a history museum for several years, master’s in modern American history, a couple of years of teaching, and finally a doctorate, my dissertation being properly published, dust jacket, author photo, and all, as Tempest in a Teapot: The Life of Albert Fall. Fall had been President Warren G. Harding’s secretary of state and was believed responsible not only for the failure of competitive bidding of oil reserves but also for a murder of a professional rival. I had followed that up with Prairies High, an examination of how Midwestern immigrant farmers had fared during the Dust Bowl.
Being a historian tends to be poorly paid, and eight years of education does not come cheaply. I had that good fortune to sustain me, however, in the form of a trust from my late grandfather (the inventor of both Band-Aids and Q-Tips)+, and had been free to spend most of my adult life to that point in dusty library stacks rather than at parties, trolling dating sites, or otherwise trafficking much with my fellow humans. I did not fish, hunt, or bowl; occupy myself with online role-player games; cook, paint, or play an instrument. In short, I was dull as dirt and content to be so. The books and papers were company enough, and at the moment I was happily engaged in a biography of Harry Emerson Fosdick, concentrating on the last half of his life, and opening with his assistance in defending the Scottsboro Boys. There was a paucity of scholarship on his later days, and I hoped to make a dent in it.
Then one Friday I was reaching for The Living of These Days, an autobiography published in 1956, and found that another hand was reaching for it at the same time.
“Oops,” we both said at the same time, and looked at each other.
Here’s what I saw: A woman in her mid-twenties, with dark chestnut hair cut in a sort of wedge-bob. Five four or so. Deep green eyes, snub nose, full lips turned up into a pleasant smile, an unremarkable – maybe slightly plump – figure dressed in a green twinset and khaki skirt.
Here’s what she saw: a man in his early thirties, with habitually rumpled dark hair usually wanting cutting. Five eleven. Hazel eyes, large, very straight nose – courtesy of very distant Celtic Roman forebears – decent chin, an unathletic figure, though not fat, only soft; dressed in a green shirt with sleeves rolled up and unpressed khaki trousers.
We both hesitated, torn between politeness and need.
“You go ahead,” she said, finally, breathlessly. “I’m just noodling around for pleasure reading.”
I felt my eyebrows lift. Not too many people would read such a book for pleasure. Unconsciously I glanced down, noticing that she cradled a history of the Nazi party and the latest Arnaldur Idriđassen novel.
“If you’re sure you don’t mind…” I said hesitantly. I paused. “Could I … um … buy you lunch?”
She laughed softly. “You don’t owe me anything… but lunch would be nice. Sure,” she said.
As I had noted, I don’t cook, and had spent the last decade nourishing myself as quickly and conveniently as possible. Supermarket deli takeout, delivery pizza and Chinese, McDonald’s, impatiently assembled sandwiches, chips, an occasional pint of ice cream. It was rare for me to take the time to enter into a well-lit restaurant, take a table, and dine at leisure with the chair across the table actually occupied.
And interestingly so, as well. We had strolled off campus to a buffet down the block, I had forked over $15 for two lunches, and we had companionably piled up our plates. I was a little rusty at basic conversational skills, but it came back to me, and we quickly found ourselves enjoying each other’s company.
It was only afterward, so sated and logy with far too much lunch that I actually dozed off in a library cubicle, that it occurred to me I had kept refilling my plate to prolong the conversation. My belly, unaccustomedly overloaded, was aching and tender and pushed heavily against my khakis. I kept distracting my already dopey self by working at suppressing belches so they would not echo among the stacks. I finally decided to call it a day around 2 o’clock and made my way home, where I stripped to my underwear and collapsed into bed, socked out before my head hit the pillow.
I woke, groggy and stiff, a couple of hours later. Revived myself with a short, scalding shower, pulled on a T shirt and jeans, and browsed over the notes I had in hand. It dawned on me that I had actually remembered to check out that book, and I spent a pleasant evening giving it a first look-through. Phoned for Chinese. Ate it absently. Watched The Great Debaters on HBO. Went to bed; tossed and turned; finally fell into a restless sleep, filled with dreams of The Library Girl.
I went the next day, and many days afterward, to the library and to my preliminary research. I kept an eye out for The Library Girl, but she was nowhere to be found. Her absence distracted me more than I would have expected. One chance encounter, and poof my mind was gone. Nevertheless, I plodded onward, making notes, looking for larger, sustaining themes, filling index cards, beginning the bare bones of an outline.
I paid little mind to the soft clatter and shush of patrons coming and going. A shadow crossed my desk but did not keep going. I looked up, annoyed; someone was blocking the light.
It was The Library Girl. She set a copy of Prairies High gently but decisively on the desk.
“This is you,” she said, a smile quirking at her lips.
“Um, yes, yes it is.” Oh brilliant.
Now she was grinning. “Well written. Much more readable than The Worst Hard Time.”
I shook my head. “Just … noodling.”
“Touche.” She raised an eyebrow. I love it when I meet a girl who can do that.
“No, not really. A little clueless, but not touchy,” I said thoughtfully. She pursed her lips to keep from laughing out loud.
“And now I know your name.” She sounded pleased with herself.
I stared at her. “Did we actually enjoy an entire lunch together without exchanging names?”
“Mmmyep.”
“How did you … um, how did you … connect the book with me?”
“I was browsing,” she said simply. “This one looked interesting. I flipped it over to read the back cover blurbs and there was your photo.”
The blush started at my throat and raced upward.
“What did we … what did we talk about? I remember enjoying your company, but clearly we didn’t even exchange names or professions … so …”
She bit her lip to hold back the laugh … mmm, do that again … and when she bent her head a hint of a suggestion of a double chin peeped. I found it enchanting.
“I asked you what you’d played at when you were a child,” she said. “We talked about our childhoods. I don’t think we got past sixth grade.”
“Mmm,” I said, trying to sound disapproving. “I believe another encounter is in order, Ma’am. At the very least, I never go out with someone twice unless I’ve been properly introduced.”
She curtseyed, holding out her hand. “Miss Elizabeth de Vaund, of the Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, de Vaunds, forever deluding ourselves into believing our line to be distantly related to those other famous Dutchies, the Op Dycks, whose scion made his money with the parvenu’s patronymic of Updike.”
I finally took her hand and bowed over it.
“Call me Libby,” she concluded.
I straightened. “And I,” I said, trying and failing to match her plummy tones, “am Alexander Dickson, un-late and un-lamented author of riveting classics gathering dust on library shelves from coast to coast.” It was a poor second, to be sure, but I was still collecting myself from, um, Libby’s line about the parvenu’s patronymic.
“If you haven’t guessed,” she said, grinning, “I am an adjunct – from the Latin, meaning part-time – instructor in English at the School.” The School being a town industry, a decently regarded boarding school for grades six through twelve, routinely landing at least 40 percent of its graduates in the Ivies each year. I taught a seminar on modern American history there every year or so, when I could come up for air.
My lips twitched. “Parvenu’s patronymic?” I finally said.
“Yeah … I was pretty pleased with that, myself,” she said, blushing only a little.
By then we were on our way out of the library. I squinted against the late-afternoon sun.
We returned to the buffet, Miss de Vaund this time insisting on … you guessed it … going Dutch, and picked up the story of our lives somewhere around the hell that is middle school.
Middle school got us through a couple of platefuls each and I felt myself slowing down – but I would pay any price to watch Libby’s face, hear her voice, enjoy the play of animation of her features, the way her hands fluttered when she spoke.
I took a deep breath and drank some water, playing for time. My khakis were creaking, my stomach heavily full and pressing against the waistband, threatening to lap over. Libby got up, so I did too, and we went the rounds again.
By the time we got to high school graduation, we’d moved on to the dessert buffet. I almost groaned aloud at the thought. My gut was swollen and tender, my shirt damp with perspiration. I couldn’t help noticing that the floral sundress that Libby was wearing had become visibly snug through the middle. If my aching belly was any barometer, she was already stuffed to bursting.
Yet the desserts, as they always do, looked irresistible. I had to have just a little wedge of red velvet cake, a tiny, wicked-looking brownie, a piece of chocolate cream pie.
Slowly, slowly, we made our way through the desserts. There was no postponing it – I was going to have to stand up. I winced at the thought of putting that kind of pressure on my bloated and gorged gut. Surreptitiously I undid the hook of the khakis. Didn’t help. The grunt I let out as I hauled myself up was entirely inadvertent.
Libby indulged in a small stretch. “Ohhh,” she groaned, resting a hand on her tummy, which bulged tautly beneath the waist of her dress. That zipper was doing a job of work. Just as I reached her side, she put a hand to her mouth.
“Oop,” she said, not quite stifling a belch. “Excuse me.”
I slid my arm familiarly around her waist – somehow it felt entirely right to take such liberties – and subconsciously noted the strain of the fabric and the unyielding distention of her belly.
Silently and without consultation we left the buffet and strolled down the block, turning in at a coffee shop. She nodded assent when I ordered us both espressos. We sank into easy chairs and sipped the strong liquid, recovering.
“Sorry,” she murmured, uncharacteristically shy. “I don’t usually, um, make a pig of myself on second dates.”
“I ate way too much,” I confessed. “I just didn’t want the evening to end.”
A laugh started to bubble out of her, stopped by a loud hiccup. “Oh-hic!-me neither.” Now we were both smiling sheepishly, and I felt free to gently massage my swollen and aching midsection. It was tight as a drum and the pressure of my hand on its firm surface didn’t help much.
“Still don’t,” I confessed.
If the look on her face was anything like the look on mine, neither of us was enough of a slick mover to want to sleep together … yet … but at the same time, it would have been heavenly to get out of those clothes and get horizontal.
So that’s what we did. We went back to her apartment, I undid the zipper – zwinnng – and she took what she said was her first deep breath of the night. Once we were both naked as jaybirds, without further discussion we slid between the sheets, groaning with relief at the chance to lean back, like pythons, and enjoy the sort of logy satiation that follows such an enormous meal. We stretched and patted our bellies and slid our hands up and down our torsos, laughing at the unaccustomed bloat and the drumlike tautness of the flesh.
Later, we snuggled a little, then fell asleep. All very G-rated. Well, mostly.
__________________________________________
*Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. In the public domain.
+Band-Aids were invented by Earle Dickson, whose wife, Josephine, was accident-prone; Leo Gerstenzang invented the Q-Tip after seeing his wife wrap cotton round the end of a small stick to clean their baby’s ears.
