A human gnome in the store’s clashing colors served breakfast. The Standard. I took out my little purple book, noting the sorry state of the meaclass="underline" Sept. 21. Breakfast at the Big Box Restaurant. The Standard. Eggs too runny. Ask for them over-easy they come like snot. Ask for them over-medium they come like rock—
The buzz interrupted, startlingly loud this time, almost a voice but not quite. I pushed my plate away. I glanced around, panicked. The man in the overcoat similar to mine furrowed his brow in confusion. I fished in a pocket and left money on the table, the restaurant shrinking around me. I started to sweat, my shirt sticking to my skin. I wandered out of the restaurant’s subtle dim, back into the store’s harsh overhead fluorescents…
And I couldn’t shake the feeling someone was following me.
PEN PAL, by Milton Lesser
The best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent paths across her face, and now she needed certain remedial undergarments at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was also looking for a husband.
This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a Prince Charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and talk about it all to Matilda.
The fact that in all probability such a man did not exist disturbed Matilda not in the least. She had been known to say that there are over a billion men in the world, a goodly percentage of whom are eligible bachelors, and that the right one would come along simply because she had been waiting for him.
Matilda, you see, had patience.
She also had a fetish. Matilda had received her A. B. from exclusive Ursula Johns College, and Radcliffe had yielded her Masters degree, yet Matilda was an avid follower of the pen-pal columns. She would read them carefully and then read them again, looking for the masculine names which, through a system known only to Matilda, had an affinity to her own. To the gentlemen to whom these names were affixed, Matilda would write, and she often told her mother, the widow Penshaws, that it was in this way she would find her husband. The widow Penshaws impatiently told her to go out and get dates.
That particular night, Matilda pulled her battered old sedan into the garage and walked up the walk to the porch. The widow Penshaws was rocking on the glider, and Matilda said hello.
The first thing the widow Penshaws did was to take Matilda’s left hand in her own and examine the next-to-the-last finger.
“I thought so,” she said. “I knew this was coming when I saw that look in your eye at dinner. Where is Herman’s engagement ring?”
Matilda smiled. “It wouldn’t have worked out, Ma. He was too darned stuffy. I gave him his ring and said thanks anyway, and he smiled politely and said he wished I had told him sooner because his fifteenth college reunion was this week end and he had already turned down the invitation.
The widow Penshaws nodded regretfully. “That was thoughtful of Herman to hide his feelings.”
“Hogwash!” said her daughter. “He has no true feelings. He’s sorry that he had to miss his college reunion. That’s all he has to hide. A stuffy Victorian prude and even less of a man than the others.”
“But, Matilda, that’s your fifth broken engagement in three years. It ain’t that you ain’t popular, but you just don’t want to cooperate. You don’t fall in love, Matilda—no one does. Love osmoses into you slowly, without your even knowing, and it keeps growing all the time.”
Matilda admired her mother’s use of the word “osmoses,” but she found nothing which was not objectionable about being unaware of the impact of love. She said good night and went upstairs, climbed out of her light summer dress, and took a cold shower.
She began to hum to herself. She had not yet seen the pen-pal section of the current Literary Review, and because the subject matter of that magazine was somewhat high-brow and cosmopolitan, she could expect a gratifying selection of pen pals.
She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl’s sleeping in the nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away.
Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!). Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her postnasal drip—and took the latest issue of the Literary Review off the night table.
She flipped through the pages and came to Personals. Someone in Nebraska wanted to trade match books; someone in New York needed a Midwestern pen pal, but it was a woman; an elderly man interested in ornithology wanted a young chick correspondent interested in the same subject; a young, personable man wanted an editorial position because he thought he had something to offer the editorial world; and—
Matilda read the next one twice. Then she held it close to the light and read it again. The Literary Review was one of the few magazines that printed the name of the advertiser rather than a box number, and Matilda even liked the sound of the name. But mostly, she had to admit to herself, it was the flavor of the wording. This very well could be it. Or, that is, him.
Intelligent, somewhat egotistical male who’s really been around, whose universal experience can make the average cosmopolite look like a provincial hick, is in need of several female correspondents: must be intelligent, have gumption, be capable of listening to male who has a lot to say and wants to say it. All others need not apply. Wonderful opportunity cultural experience… Haron Gorka, Cedar Falls, Ill.
The man was egotistical, all right; Matilda could see that. But she had never minded an egotistical man, at least not when he had something about which he had a genuine reason to be egotistical. The man sounded as though he would have reason indeed. He wanted only the best because he was the best. Like calls to like.
The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda. Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had no nationality, for all intents and purposes; he was an international man, a figure among figures, a paragon…
Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town not fifty miles from her home, and she’d get there a hop, skip, and jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of—writing a letter.
Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls.
Matilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom, dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and figure-molding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger, and tiptoed downstairs.