She slipped her arm around my waist, which represented a certain milestone in our relationship. We hadn’t known each other long and hadn’t slept together or anything like that. I didn’t even know her last name. Her beauty could have been of eastern European origin. Cheekbones, almond-shaped dark eyes, wide face, air-brushed olive skin, compact ass. She had long, straight, dark brown hair which she was still wearing up after getting off work from her waitress job. I imagined her hair down, fanned against a pillow, healthy round tits jutting straight up at me. I could see that without any trouble.
We were having a drink at an outdoor bar on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. It wasn’t yet summer and the night air was cool. There was a group of slightly menacing frat boys from the University of Delaware, getting drunk, to our left. To our right was a male foursome in their thirties wearing business suits insisting that they knew me—an assertion which struck them as hilarious and me as a bad joke. I don’t much care for self-satisfied, clean-cut types, and here I was surrounded by them. I have long hair myself, although I’m not what you call a hippy.
Earlier we had sat down to a newspaper-covered table and a couple dozen steamed crabs at a crab house. I raised a fuss when I saw that half the crabs were female. I grew up crabbing the bay here and nobody back then—nobody—kept female blue crabs. We threw them back, for obvious reasons. I told the waitress with the pierced nose and tattoos that eating female crabs was against my religion. She consulted with the cook, a big, fat black guy wearing a football jersey underneath his white apron and a Navy watch cap, before making the switch. She made a point of letting me know she was not impressed with my sermonizing, although Allie was amused by my indignation. We drank a pitcher of beer with the crabs.
Unmarried and unattached (like myself), Allie had a three-and-a-half-year-old son named Taylor who I had yet to meet. She wasn’t what you call a happy person. Despite her beauty she rarely smiled. Waiting tables, for her, was a soul-killing job. She did smile whenever she talked about her son. But daycare was eating up her money and her relatives were becoming a bit put out at having to babysit so much. She was a rock-steady cigarette smoker, Winston Lights.
I asked her about the boy’s father.
“A story not worth telling. Not tonight, anyway.”
“Has having a baby made you wary of having sex with men?”
“Careful is a better word. And please—with a man, not men.”
I guess I was trying to figure out if she was crazy or not. I’ve stumbled on my share of crazy women in my time. It’s amazing how they can impersonate normal up to a certain point. Usually it’s soon after the first ceremonial peeling off of the clothes when the rabbit jumps out of the hat. Who was it who first said, Never go to bed with a woman who has more problems than you do? It could have been Shakespeare as far as I’m concerned. But Allie struck me as wise beyond her years. She was young, in her twenties, a lot younger than me. Not that I’m one of those guys hung up on the idea of young women. I’m not. I much prefer a woman my age, whose looks have blurred, gone slightly out of focus. Looks that have fallen like a cake the oven door has been slammed on. I love that in a woman. Lord knows my looks have gone south with the summer sun. The first time we met I told her although I may be too old for her, she wasn’t too young for me. She had said, Fair enough. I guessed that having a child had been a sobering experience, a maturing experience for her.
She took a big swallow of her drink before saying, “I checked out of rehab two months ago—drugs, not alcohol.”
“Are you staying clean?”
“So far, so good.”
We clinked our glasses together in a toast.
She said, “I haven’t even asked what you do for a living.”
“I work for an engineering outfit down the road in Berlin. I’m a land surveyor. A hired hand.”
She looked at me with a slightly perplexed expression. “Oh,” she said, “you’re one of those guys by the side of the road looking through the little telescope thingy.” Her expression had resolved itself into one of satisfaction at having solved the mystery of my occupation.
I said, “Do you know the difference between God and an engineer? God doesn’t think he’s an engineer.”
The sound of the surf crashing the beach struck me as both timeless and romantic. Breathing the ocean air seemed medicinal in a good way. The boardwalk’s incense of cotton candy and saltwater taffy and pizza-sold-by-the-slice mingled with it. I loosely surrounded her with an arm, the cool of the evening somehow permitting a reciprocal touch.
Before we left, she went to the bathroom. I flagged the bartender to settle up. He handed me a bill for forty-one dollars, which made no sense. He looked like a skinhead to me with malevolent eyes. God only knows how many and what kind of tattoos he wore on his arms beneath the long-sleeved white dress shirt. He told me the four guys who said they knew me—long gone—had been drinking on my tab, they said I had okayed it. This was pure bullshit and I told him so. I didn’t even know if I had forty-one dollars on me. The bartender got in my face. The drunk frat boys, who seemed to be in league with him, were backing him up and egging him on. I smelled trouble. Frat boys will get you down on the ground and kick your head in. I went for my wallet. I had the money. I gave it to him, exactly forty-one dollars. I chalked it up as one more defeat.
I walked into the lobby of the venerable old hotel where the restrooms were located. I stood next to the vacant front desk across from the ornate elevator. The gilt hands of the grandfather clock in the lobby seemed not to be moving.
Giving in to impatience I walked to the women’s restroom and opened the door. I called Allie’s name. But there was no sign of her and no answer. I let the door close and walked outside, past the bar, onto the boardwalk. The constellation Orion was low in the southern sky. I looked up and down the boardwalk and scanned the empty beach. I sat down on a boardwalk bench for half an hour before giving up. I found it hard to believe she would walk off like that. But, like I said, I didn’t really know her. A year later when I learned she had died from a prescription drug overdose, I was never tempted for a moment to think of her as crazy. 
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This article was originally printed in The Local Voice #224 (published March 5, 2015.)
To download a PDF of this issue, click here.
