Two men flirted with a woman
at a party.
I read about it in a magazine,
one of those glossy ones for women where
the clothes are overpriced, the models underfed,
so a reader feels appropriately poor and fat
while taking a quiz to calculate the condition
of her fashion sense or libido or, more likely, her man’s.
But this was not a quiz.
Two men flirted with a woman at a party
but she left that night with the one whose fingers
found a way to get caught in her hair. Such a random thing,
but intimate. All things being equal,
clumsy fingers conjured up (I’m speculating here)
his fingers finding things to do in other places.
And then there was the sailor – it was war time
and he asked a local girl out for a date, arriving early,
so I heard. Her pretty hair had caught his eye,
which raised a question in his mind. Was she one of those
who fussed with curlers, worried if she broke a nail?
He had no use or inclination for such female failings.
Arriving early was a ploy, reconnaisance that
would decide it for him, yay or nay.
She didn’t keep him waiting, as her curls were
not contrived and based on not much more than that,
he married her. A simple thing, her hair, but
in that moment he could see she’d be a worker,
capable and strong with little time for trivialities
and that, he knew, was all he needed in a wife.
And then the other day a man was sitting by woman
within earshot and I clearly heard him ask her this.
“If a bug flew in your glass,” he said, “would you
throw out your martini or just pick the bug out
of the glass and drink?” She didn’t hesitate.
“I’d just remove the bug.” He looked at her and smiled,
“And that,” he said, “is why I love you.”
Simple moments, odd and arbitrary circumstances
that can reposition paradigms and shift the balances
of time and space and even, it would seem, of love.
(c) Ellen Gillette, 2021
