I thought today of a girl I hadn't seen in half a lifetime. The year is ending-- the decade, too. That may have put me in a sentimental mood.
I was at a small deli near my lakeside flat and the young girl behind the counter reminded me of someone from my own past. I took the sandwich I'd ordered and smiled and tipped her well on my debit card and walked home in the cold with a lost name and face in my mind.
The girl I'm thinking of was named Toni. She lived next to me for a while just after I'd finished university. She looked like...hmmm...a young Aubrey Plaza. Dark brown hair in a short bob, blue eyes, glasses. Yes, the girl at the deli today had the same look.
Toni was maybe nineteen when I first ran into her. She was a neo-hippie girl. I do remember that, and I remember that she almost always had a guitar with her. She was always very serious and solemn, and she'd sit out on her porch and play guitar or read. There were always boys over there at her house. She had, I discovered, a reputation as an easy armful, but somehow she always looked quiet and introspective. We'd run into each other walking places along my street, and we'd see one another at the tiny coffee shop on the corner. Lovely eyes, lovely legs. The sort of girl who always had a sketch pad and a novel in her backpack.
The first time we went out was impromptu and awkward. I asked her to join me for a drink. The place was painfully hip, back in the day when date bars were transitioning from fern bars with lots of brass to a more exposed-brick look. The place was called...either the Square Peg or the Brass Button. I can't recall which, though eventually we were at both often enough. It was late spring, and she wore a longish peasant skirt I remember that. Drinks, yes, though I can't recall what we drank. Vodka, probably. We drank, talked, and flirted. I think maybe I was the one who was flirting--- she was always too serious for flirting, even when she was deciding to sleep with someone. We walked down to one of the city parks and went out by a lake. I remember undoing her skirt and kissing my way along her legs. She wasn't talkative during sex, though she liked stroking my hair while I talked and undressed her. I do remember her wearing a small ankle bracelet she'd bought in Belize, and I remember that she was bra-less that night, with a necklace of some kind that lay between her breasts. When she rode me and leaned down, the little locket on the necklace would fall into my face and I held it in my mouth. She did have underwear on, and I tossed them at the lake and told her she should never wear any when she was out with me. She came back to my house that night and stayed over. She did make a point of never wearing underwear when she and I went out.
We saw each other sporadically; we were never really a couple. Sometimes that summer she'd call and ask for a ride to places across the city--- open mic nights, poetry readings. She always made it clear that she'd trade me sex for a ride. She made a point of being transactional. She liked my company, I think, but she disliked emotions and expectations.
I remember a photo I took of her once. She was standing by her bed with her arms crossed. Tiny, faded denim cut-offs. A cropped blue-and-white halter tee. Deliciously barefoot. That pensive expression that I did fancy.
It's not much of a story--- an affair that lasted off and on from a May through mid-autumn. She stayed over a few nights; I stayed at her place after a few parties. Around my birthday that year she moved across town to share a house with her sister. There were highlights--- Toni bent over someone's car parked by the lighthouse park while I slid her denim mini up over her hips, Toni swimming naked at a motel pool while I handed her a bottle of vodka, Toni and I in a bathroom stall at Square Peg. Highlights, but nothing I suppose that's quite as good as any of the stories I posted here over the summer and early fall. Certainly nothing as good as anything my leggy blonde friend in New Zealand may have done in her own early twenties.
I have no idea whatever became of her. It's all half a lifetime ago. I hadn't thought of her in forever, or not until I was chatting today with the girl at the deli. I need to call up more memories. Toni isn't a bad one at all. A good mid-twenties affair, simple and uncomplicated, and one I had long before sex became something baroque and fraught.
