Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  Bruno was no longer the rangy farm boy I remembered from childhood but was now a burly man with a receding hairline and a beard. We shook hands. His was massive and calloused. “Wow… you’re smaller than I remembered,” he said. I put the meeting into my mental file of Random Encounters and forgot about it.

  When Emily was a teenager, we ran into Bruno again. This time he was with another daughter at a local ice-skating rink. He was no longer married. I knew this because I had been single for several years and could spot a wedding ring from the International Space Station. Bruno’s ring finger was absent the telltale band. As I laced up my skates, he asked about my family, and I asked about his.

  Afterward I said to Emily, “Hubba, hubba.”

  “Mom, stop,” she replied.

  As Emily was entering ninth grade, we moved to Chicago when I was chosen by the Chicago Tribune to write the “Ask Amy” advice column. From the start, I fielded many questions from people searching for love. My advice reflected what I knew, which was to get out there and meet lots of people in order to increase your odds of finding the right one. It’s simple math, people! I suggested joining clubs and online matching. “You’ll never find someone in your living room,” I wrote.

  As I typed that line, I was sitting in my own living room, definitely not finding someone. I followed my own advice and took a swing dancing class, where I was paired with a stranger with an excessive sweat issue who talked about refinancing my mortgage. I had a few coffee dates and drinks with people I had met on dating sites. Twice I went out with men who I assume by now are happily out of the closet, and twice I was rejected by other men who told me straight up, “You’re too good for me.” This observation was not necessarily delivered like a compliment. I felt like I was being told that I was too fancy, haughty, or demanding. As if something about me wasn’t right. But now I countered with, “No, I’m not!”

  It’s a uniquely low moment when you find yourself trying to convince someone that you’re the lesser person.

  I went through very long stretches of not trying at all. In Chicago, I fell in with a crowd of five single women roughly my age, gathered from the Tribune’s newsroom. We made plans every weekend to go to the movies, out for drinks, or ice-skating in the park. My friends in Washington had all been parents, but in Chicago I knew very few other parents. Instead of me sharing in the social life of a child, Emily, now a teenager, was folded into the life of a middle-aged single woman. There was a lot of cooking, eating, talking about work, and laughing—and sometimes we all went bowling.

  There were moments riding the bus to work in downtown Chicago when I’d look out at the grand gray expanse of Lake Michigan and feel a deep well of sadness about my divorce. My ex was married to the woman he had left me for. They were living in a wealthy suburb of New York and had two children together. Well over a decade later, I still found the tears for the romance I had started but that had always felt unfinished, because it had not been my choice to end it. It’s not that I was lonely—or even that I wanted him back—but I wondered what it would be like to have an adult partner. Although Emily saw her father from time to time, I had raised her essentially by myself. She had become my perennial sidekick. As we would make our weekend plans to go on walks or to the movies or to hang out with friends, I would often think about how much fun it was, and how very uncomplicated it was, to essentially be dating my daughter.

  But furtively, I watched elderly couples holding hands in line at the movies. I watched these old people with the same intensity that, decades earlier, I had once watched young intact families frolicking at the beach—with a combination of awe and envy. For singletons of a certain age, looking at old people holding hands is relationship porn (we don’t admit we watch it). During those moments, I thought I would happily trade romance and sex, if necessary, for companionship. I just wanted to hold hands with someone again.

  Chapter Four

  Night of the Chipmunk Hands

  I should have known better than to entrust my romantic life to the mercy of comedians. Generally, people who devote their lives to making other people laugh are too maladjusted to grasp something as high-stakes as a middle-aged woman’s search for love. And yet, I willingly climbed down to the bottommost rung of the dating ladder when I involved my colleagues on NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! in what I now assume is the last blind date I will ever have.

  I have always treated my monthly appearances as a panelist on NPR’s quiz show as the realization of my lifelong fantasy to be Sally Rogers, the comedy writer played by Rose Marie on the Dick Van Dyke Show. I secretly cast myself as the wisecracking feminine presence in the male-dominated backstage writers’ room. (Like Sally, I turn up for my appearances wearing ’50s-style shirtwaist dresses and sometimes even tease my hair into her trademark style.) By offering to introduce me to a potential date, Peter Sagal, Wait Wait’s host, was Carl Reiner on this particular night, producing my imaginary sitcom’s episode: “Amy’s Last Blind Date.”

  Blind dates are like relationship Rashomon; each participant has their own version of events. Since my memory of the night itself is a little fuzzy, let me start with the ending, which is two people going their separate ways. That outcome is indisputable, while other details are mutable.

  This blind date was with a guy I’ll call Steve. I will call him Steve in the hopes that it is not his real name. Other details of this night are seared in my memory, but his name has escaped, along with, I pray, his ability to find and sue me.

  Peter told me he wanted to fix me up with Steve, who was someone he had met but didn’t know very well. This is the ideal situation for a blind date fix-up, because it lowers the octane on the event. No one party has too much skin in the game. This is a good thing because in my experience, blind dates, like my long-ago swing dancing lessons, never work out. For me, they are the triumph of hopeful enthusiasm over experience. Peter told me he would invite Steve to attend a taping of our show, and then Steve would join the cast and crew when we went out to our regular bar afterward.

  I was excited. I was excited in the way a poodle gets excited for walkies, with the dumb, raw energy of someone who suffers from blind date amnesia.

  The cast gathered backstage before the show. I was on that night with Adam Felber and Mo Rocca, two of the nicest, kindest, and funniest people I know. I briefed both men on the situation: Peter was fixing me up with a guy who was going to be sitting in the audience that night. We turned to Peter for confirmation and details. Steve was a media person of some kind. He did political PR for the hot-button Chicago market. How cool is that?! I thought. Steve sounded yummers. This time next year, Steve and I will be partying with James Carville and Mary Matalin. Maybe they’ll lend us their country house.

  Backstage before the show, Peter commenced the blind date prep: “You don’t have a problem with baldness, do you?” he asked.

  I looked at Peter, whose baldness is a weekly audience warm-up joke. “Um, no. Not at all. I don’t have a problem with that.”

  Adam (also bald) jumped in: “Oh yeah, the ladies love the bald men. Everybody knows this.” He ran his hand in a seductive waxing motion over his pate.

  Peter continued. “And you don’t mind dating someone who is short, right?” He had hit upon his second warm-up joke. I looked at Peter, who is not short, exactly, but he’s also not tall (though appreciably taller than I am). Peter is a serious athlete and marathoner who has run the Chicago and Boston marathons. And while I would definitely send Peter running to the next village to deliver an important message, I wouldn’t necessarily ask him to get a book off of a high shelf. “Um… no. I don’t have a problem with height,” I said warily.

  Mo weighed in. He was gathering data and felt he needed more information. He wanted to know just how short and how bald was Blind Date Steve. Peter’s answer was “Height appropriate” and, well, bald wasn’t a gradual state. You either were or you weren’t. Peter observed that because I was short (5’2”), I couldn’t possibly mind be
ing matched with a person who was also short. It was the physics of the thing.

  I called Emily from the ladies’ room and relayed Peter’s description. “Sweet Jesus, no,” she said.

  I need to state for the record that I myself have been judged and found wanting physically. My former husband chose a woman prettier, leggier, leaner, and several years younger than me. I couldn’t help but take this as a personal affront to my own less-pretty, less-leggy, less-lean, and older reality. In the years since this rejection, living as an aging singleton, the Pilates revolution seemed to have altered men’s expectations about what a grown woman should look like. Although I played sports through high school and college, I had not devoted myself to regular workouts. I’d never taken hot yoga or belonged to a gym and had always considered my daily early morning walks with my friend Margaret to be sufficiently vigorous. My middle-aged body had settled and become ever-so-slightly lumpy. I was not, and had never been, a babe. I paid for this when one man, an architect, dismissed me purely for structural reasons. The architect might have chosen to merely fade away after our first encounter, but instead he chose to be very specific about the parts of my body he didn’t like as he was rejecting me. I was genuinely hurt but took some comfort in the fact that while I could probably hire a trainer and tone up nicely, he would always be a jerk.

  Backstage before our show, I was aware that I did not want to harshly judge someone else as I had been judged, and yet I was starting to get nervous. “Um, is Steve life-sized? Like, if I saw him from behind, walking down the street, would I assume that he was an adult, or might I think he was a ten-year-old boy?”

  Peter thought about it. He said something to the effect of, “What season is it? If it’s summer and he’s wearing shorts, sneakers, and a baseball cap, I’m not sure. Winter, you’re good because he probably carries a briefcase.”

  Mo tried to explain that Peter’s reasoning was like when people try to match gay people together with the only common quality being that both parties are gay. “Short doesn’t automatically like short!” he offered.

  “Everybody needs to stop, because I have a really good feeling about this!” I insisted. Blind Date Steve would be sitting in the front row of the audience, so we could all get a good look at him during the taping of the show.

  I was very nervous heading out onstage that night. I tried to surreptitiously scan the front row to spot my date. Basically I moved my eyeballs but tried to keep my head very still, because I didn’t want Steve to notice me looking for him. But I couldn’t see anyone matching his description.

  We started the show, which is an onstage trivia quiz show based on that week’s news. It is a completely impromptu experience, so paying attention is called for. I was seated between Adam and Mo. Adam wrote something on a piece of paper and slid it toward me. It said: I see him. He’s five people over from the left aisle. I shifted my eyeballs and counted seats.

  The fifth seat from the aisle was occupied by an eight-year-old boy, wedged between his parents. The child’s feet dangled off the edge of his seat. He was licking a giant lollypop. (Okay, he wasn’t licking a lollypop, but you get the picture.)

  Like I said, never give a comedian access to your emotional world, for he will place a PEZ dispenser on your leg during a piano recital, and you will have to feign a coughing fit to excuse yourself in order to stop laughing.

  After the show, Blind Date Steve approached the group and introductions were made. He was in fact a small bald man wearing a peacoat, which he might or might not have purchased in the boys’ department at Marshall Field’s. I shook his tiny hand; we all got our coats and headed to the bar. We sat together in a big group, as Steve and I circled one another, the way you do—stealing occasional oblique glances, in the hopes of easing into a conversation.

  Blind Date Steve was funny. He had an interesting job, and he told us all about it. I could tell he was more oriented toward impressing the impressive people we were with than me—but I’m used to that. In fact, I also find my funny fellow panelists more interesting than myself. I realized that Steve was really on a blind date with the others at the table. As I listened, I hoped I was wearing my “resting amused face,” versus the face I was trying to suppress, which was the “If-I-leave-now-I-can-catch-Storage-Wars ” face. As Steve held forth, I considered him—his hands, especially. His hands seemed proportionally smaller than they should have been. I pictured him washing his food in a nearby stream, using his tiny digits to scrub an apricot.

  The evening wound down and Steve walked me a couple of blocks to the taxi stand. Walking together, I realized that we were, in fact, proportional. The union with my tall ex-husband had yielded a daughter who had passed me in height when she was in fifth grade. Emily was now a 5’10” statuesque beauty who could rest her chin on the top of my head. Sometimes my daughter and I didn’t even seem like we were the same species. I reconsidered my previous harsh assessment of my date. If we got together, Steve and I could have tiny chipmunk babies. They would sleep in little nests in our tree house, like Keebler people.

  Steve didn’t seem all that into me (maybe he prefers tall women), but I decided to go for it anyway. I was ashamed of myself for taking the measure of this man in such a superficial way. I wanted to spend one evening with him when he wasn’t distracted by my friends’ star power. And we could take it from there.

  Walking down the street, Steve asked me how to get an editorial into the Chicago Tribune for one of his clients, and I offered my help. I said he could call me, and I asked him if he would like my number. He said, “No, that’s okay,” and I never heard from him again.

  Blind Date Steve delivered the perfect comeuppance to my own hubris: flat-out rejection.

  When Emily graduated from high school, I decided to keep our apartment in Chicago but move to Freeville to spend more time with my mother, who was becoming quite frail. I had spent seventeen years as a single mother. I was tired. I was going home. “You try going on blind dates for seventeen years,” I would tell people, as if I was exhausted from all the single-lady sex I was having. What I didn’t mention was that in seventeen years, sex had happened so few times that I thought my virginity may have actually grown back. Nor had I fallen in love. I missed my sisters, nephews, nieces, cousins, and aunts. I missed my hometown. And I missed my mother.

  I dropped Emily off at college in Virginia on a 102-degree day. The most enduring and uncomplicated love affair of my life had been with my daughter, but now I was saying good-bye. I knew that aside from brief visits home and summers, we would probably never live together again—unless, of course, twenty-five years from now she decided to make a choice like the one I was making now, to return home to be with her mother.

  I drove through the rolling hills of Maryland and into Pennsylvania, past the ancient battlefields of Gettysburg, the last lovely autumn blooms of crown vetch and goldenrod lining the ditches and pastureland. I felt myself also starting to change and hoped for my own sort of late blooming. I was leaving my urban life and friendships, moving ever northward, toward the village where I was born and the people I knew best.

  Whatever I was looking for, surely I would find it there.

  Chapter Five

  Journeys End in Lovers Meeting

  For me, love has always been a cold-weather sport. Almost every important relationship I’ve ever had has commenced in the fall. Emily was born in October; we brought her home from the hospital through a shower of yellow leaves drifting down from the sycamores that lined our London square. All of my siblings were born in the fall, and my dearest and most enduring friendships all began with the start of school and college.

  Fall is a friend to this middle-aged woman, with its soft, indirect sunlight, opportunities for crispy leaf-play, and cellulite-hiding leather coats. Plus, the whole sleeveless problem is eliminated in colder weather.

  I would like to tell the story of how I fell in love with the man who is now my husband, but there is no way to do so without sounding like the pl
ot of a Lifetime movie. The elevator pitch goes like this: Withering writer meets hunky contractor. Sparks fly!

  But the thing about clichés is that sometimes they are true. And stepping into a cliché doesn’t make something any less true—or less of a cliché. It just makes it what happened.

  Moving back to my hometown after leaving Emily at college didn’t seem like a momentous decision at the time but more an extension of where my life already seemed to be headed. We were spending our summers in our house on Main Street. My employers at the Chicago Tribune were exceptionally understanding of my desire to spend more time with my mother as she became more frail. Filing a column 365 days a year can be a grind, and I assume they were hoping to avoid the Mike Royko syndrome, where the world-famous daily columnist basically moved into his office, chain-smoked, drank, and yelled at the world. Ann Landers, who set the standard for advice-giving for forty-five years, worked from her palatial Michigan Avenue apartment, sometimes in her bathtub. Her bushels of daily mail were opened by assistants at the Tribune and delivered to her home by limousine.

  I had neither their reputations to uphold nor the compensation to support such eccentricities. My employer quietly let me do what I wanted, as long as I got the work done. I returned to Chicago once a month to check in at the Trib and also appear on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! My bosses knew where to find me.

  In Freeville, I had set up the tiny back bedroom of the house as my office. It had a large window, through which I could see Fall Creek gurgle past. The walls were lined with cowboy kitsch, which I had gathered during a phase inspired by my grandfather’s amateur oil paintings of cowboys and Indians. My grandfather Albert was born in the house next door, where my aunt Millie now lives. His knowledge of cowboys and Indians was gleaned mainly through books and magazines. His small paintings betrayed his fascination with horses, dogs, men moving through nature, and the Western landscape, which I don’t think he had ever seen in person but which he captured beautifully. I had owned my house for fifteen summers before moving there full-time. It was furnished inside with uncomfortable twig porch furniture and odds and ends I’d found in my mother’s barn or left by the side of the road.