Early in my life, some seemingly important events just didn’t live up to the anticipation. My Secret Monkeys Fan Club was one, playing Barbies was another. All the dividing up the Barbie clothes and decorating Barbie’s Dream Home and deciding who actually gets to be the real Barbie and not the Barbie wanna-be, all of those things always turned out to be more fun than the actual hopping Barbie around, pretending she was walking, and having to think of what Barbie would say and do. And the whole Ken thing was just too much for our inexperienced imaginations.
Anticipation collapsing into pathetic disappointment wasn’t limited to elementary school. No sir, it spanned the great mystery of my youth: kindergarten right through to my senior year in college, when “Bob” finally asked me out. I had waited for two years, two whole years for him to ask me for a date, and I wasn’t holding out for the opera, just something, anything. Well, the big date finally came. He asked to take me to dinner to celebrate graduation. After two years of slurping up my drool over this guy, I would finally have his attention. He took me to a steak place. The in-between kind of restaurant, not too pricey, but no gum-smacking waitresses either. The truth was, I didn’t care where he took me. And there he was, across the table, so close, I could have touched him, if I had the guts. A small red candle burned among the sugar packs and finger-print laden salt and pepper shakers. This was the stuff true romance is made of. Two years of anticipated witty and charming conversation poured out of me. As I was chatting, and sawing away at my steak, sawing and sawing, I lost grip of the knife and it clattered across the bare table. I immediately reached into my lap for my napkin, delicately blotting my mouth and covering my light nervous laughter. Then, I turned my eyes from his vacant stare down to the napkin at my lips. It wasn’t my napkin. I was wiping my mouth with my skirt. I had my skirt at my mouth. I slammed my hands and skirt down to my lap. “Bob” kept staring at me, letting me sink into isolation and humiliation and every other “-ation” I could think of. No smile, no kind word. He was suddenly so, so parental-looking.