Of All The Garages

Once upon a time…

That’s the way the fairy tales traditionally start…. “Once upon a time.” (They don't all end with happily ever afters. But some do.)

Their meet was cute. But unexpected. Trixie had always thought she’d ultimately run into someone who would match her style, and maybe she was single at 29 because her style was sort of… well… that is to say… avant-garde. “It’s not avant-garde,” her mother liked to groan. “It’s bat sh—.”

“Sh. Avant-garde.” She had curls that you could boing, or you might want to if she were standing in line in front of you at the grocery store, buying coffee and a small flan. But you know better than to boing a stranger’s curls, right? She wore glittery eyeshadow and peony-hued lipstick, and her overalls—always overalls—were covered in multicolored paint splatter. Even the good ones. Her mother didn’t believe there was a difference between “good” overalls and worn-in overalls. Overalls were overalls, and her mother hated them over all.

“Want to meet a nice guy?” her ma would query in between pursing her wet lips around a Marlboro Red and sipping Jack Daniels through a straw. “Put on a pretty dress. Straighten your hair. Stop sticking your tongue out at me.”

Trixie believed in love, but she didn’t believe in dressing for it.

“This is why you’re single,” her mom said, letting the light hit her quarter-sized cubic zirconium ring so rainbows shot around the sunroom.

“You’re on your eighth,” Trixie would say under her breath. Her mom was great at the once upon a’s, but less good at the ever afters. It was why Trixie took no romantic advice from her. She couldn’t even remember all of her step-fathers’ names.

And yet, there were evenings when Trixie was drinking her coffee for one and eating her flan in solitude at the formica kitchen table she’d found discarded behind a beauty store that had gone out of business… there were nmoments when she felt lonely. She would imagine what her future mate might look like as she did her art late into the night. Would he be an artist, too? Could two artists cohabit sanely in a single work/live space? Or would they drive each other bat sh—

“Sh,” her mother would say. “I’ve got the guy for you. His name is Andy, short for Andromeda, and I met him at Bingo.”

For her mother, it wasn’t necessary to find the right guy. Any man would work. When she got tired of one, she’d simply take him out of the picture frames on the mantel. But Trixie only wanted one. And she’d wait. She had the feeling she’d know him when she met him. Over time, her friends married up, married off, spoke about her behind her back and sometimes in back of her front. The counseled her not to wait too long. Always the this and never the that. Something, something old Christmas cake. They told her “the good ones will be taken.” They said “lower your standards,” as if that meant she should go out with the latest guy her mom had met, this one who was selling weed behind the Bingo.

Trixie decided that she’d rather be single than settle, yet would flan for two taste better than flan for one?

Her mother couldn’t remember her anniversary anymore because there had been eight of them. She said that if she reached 12, she’d have a set. Trixie’s clothes rack contained more bridesmaids dresses than overalls, and that was saying something. Her mama said, “Don’t you dare get married in overalls,” but Trixie secretly thought she might. Somewhere in her fantasies, there was a buttercream-frosted triple-tier with a tiny version of herself in her white overalls standing next to a man, whom she hadn’t met yet, in coveralls of his own.

She would go to gallery openings with her fancy friends. There would be cheap lukewarm white wine and day-glo orange cheese squares on toothpicks, and the sound you could hear was the drone of disdain and the echo on ennui. You had to push the envelope to make this crowd sit up and beg. Why, that one artist had covered himself in petroleum jelly thirty years ago, hadn’t he, and filmed himself scaling the gallery walls like a greased-up superhero? And in the 1960s, another had literally canned his own sh—

“Sh, look at that one,” her mother said, pointing to a dude on stilts with a pinwheel tucked behind his ear.

“I think he’s the one selling weed to your friend who sells weed behind Bingo,” Trixie quipped, watching her mom hold a toothpick like a cigarette because she couldn’t smoke in the gallery.

Her artist friends stopped making art. They got “real” jobs and lived “real” lives as if thirty was the unofficial cut-off date. If you hadn’t made it yet, you needed to move to the suburbs. There, they painted friezes on the walls and spent hours choosing which type of pansies to put in their window boxes, and they forgot the scent of hot glue and the sensation of seeing your very own creations on display in a dark studio in Soho.

Her loneliness got lonelier.

The mobiles she made took on a surreal form of flowers. Large cut-outs in goldenrod and daffodil. They dangled over her head in her loft. The whispered when she slept.

And then she met him, on a day when she had a smear of bright pink paint on one cheek and glue sticks in her pockets. She touched her hair to see if there were any paintbrushes snuck in her bun, and she felt herself go a little weak in the knees. She hadn’t known that sensation was for real. Or if she did know that, she’d forgotten.

When she saw him, something in Trixie wished he would grab her in his arms and embrace her so tightly she could feel the warmth to her bones. But that is an even less traditionally acceptable form of greeting than boinging a stranger’s curls. That doesn’t happen in the real world. Not during a routine stop at a garage for an oil change.

At least, that’s what she was hoping it was.

Trixie realized she couldn’t just sashay into this stranger’s arms and say, “Hold me.” She had to say, “This light came on over here, and I’m not actually sure which light, or what it means, but it looks kind of like a genie’s lamp.”

She wanted to add, “I’m not dumb. I know a lot about physics. I just don’t know a lot about engines.” Except she didn’t know anything about physics. What she knew about was how to build mobiles from string and wire and sheer sheets of multicolored cellophane, so that the branches balanced and turned and twirled just right, catching the light, and yeah, that is physics, but she did it naturally, without numbers or math. She did it because she had an innate sense of balance.

And then he knocked her off balance.

Tall and dark with the type of eyes that poets write poesies about. Tall and dark with a little gleam there, tossed in for good measure, like the light that had flickered to life on her dash. Someone who could repeat the words “genie’s lamp,” and leave her reeling as if he’d spoken her deepest fantasies. And then he said her name, and she checked the cursive on his shirt, and this wasn’t a meet cute after all because they’d met before.

This was Rick from school, a guy whose name she’d traced on her binder, his name and hers, initials entwined. But he’d rarely looked her way. Never asked her out. Now, he asked how she’d been, and she stammered, “I didn’t think you'd remember me.”

And he said, "How could I forget you?”

For a second, she recalled the one dance when they’d found each other. The one dance when they’d stood beneath a saffron-yellow light, color of a genie’s lamp, and moved to the beat of a song she could still sing all the words to. The gymnasium had been adorned with paper flowers, dangling overhead like an upside-down garden.

Now, there were all the garage noises around them. There were engines revving and a kind of cadence of yelling and almost catcalling between the other workers, and there were street sounds and snippets of conversation, and was someone playing a sax on a nearby balcony? It almost reminded her of a gallery opening. But different.

He pulled her off to a corner. Maybe it wasn’t actually much quieter here, but it was secluded.

Ten plus years had passed since graduation, and she knew she should have continued with that silly small talk people often resort to. Did you hear that Melissa is working as a stunt double. And Marcus scooped up the head cheerleader and moved to Daytona…

In her head, they were dancing. Why had it only been the one time? So instead of small talk, she said, “Why didn’t you ever.…”

“You were a brain. Brains didn’t hang with the motor-heads.”

She said, “I wasn’t a brain. I was quiet. There’s a difference.”

All those study halls, tracing his initials. All those glances gone unanswered. She felt something between them, as she had felt something when every so often his eyes would meet hers in the hall. He didn’t say anything about the paint on her cheek or the glue sticks in her pocket. But he did keep smiling at her, and she kept smiling back.

He fixed the glitch while she waited. Shut off the light. And after a little additional reminiscing, that should have been that. Except when he handed her what she thought was the receipt, it was his number. He squeezed her hand and let go.

She spent the night the day thinking about him. Painting him in her mind as if she needed to immortalize him. There was no back to this story. There was just a slip of paper with his name and a number.

Of all the garages in all the world, she had to walk into his.

He, who made her feel off balance. He who made her question everything she’d been taught about who she was supposed to be with and how she was supposed to live. Her mother said to give up her studio and get a real gig. Be a banker, her mom said. Surround yourself with money. Her friends said marry a patron of the arts and you can do whatever you want.

They met for a drink at a corner pub, and it was like every song she’d ever memorized, every lyric she’d ever held in her mouth like a hard candy. He laced his fingers with hers, and she felt the sparks and the fireflies, the fairy lights and the firecrackers.

She put their song—it was their song, right?—on the jukebox, and they danced. They moved to it. As if they were still in a gymnasium adorned with paper flowers. Being judged by his peers and hers. One dance. That’s all they’d shared, and she’d never really gotten over it.

She knew that prince charming didn’t exist. But she thought maybe the rogue and the rebel would work for her. A man who somehow erased every bad date, every wrinkled nose, every time she’d been passed over and stood like a flower on the wall. What’s a flower on the wall, anyway, but a climbing rose?

This was her favorite bar, her corner bar, and the bartender, Billy, gave her a look that said “get a room” when Rick started kissing her against the jukebox.

So they kissed in the hallway that led to the bathrooms. Rick cradled her face in his hands, and he said, “I did want to, you know. I did know who you were. I thought you were out of my league.”

He wasn’t a knight in shining armor. He was a prince in oily coveralls.

“He’s got grease under his fingernails,” her friend said the next day, when she swooned about their night together.

“I’ve got glue under mine.”

The characters in romances might be imperfectly perfect. A chipped tooth. A cowlick. A tendency to be late. They have charming glitches. They have a misunderstanding in the second act, resolved with fanfare and a “you had me at” by the third.

Sometimes that happens in real life, too.

“You won’t be able to take him to a gallery opening.”

“I hate gallery openings.”

“Take him to one and see what happens.” That’s what her friends advised. The snooty ones. The ones who had married up and gotten their convertible BMWs, ticking the boxes. The ones who couldn’t raise their eyebrows any longer because of all the filler in their foreheads. Had it managed to freeze their brains?

He said he’d go with her. He said he’d go anywhere with her.

When you move in the art circles with the people who judge every item of clothing, every tiny detail, asymmetrical hair this season, one earring the next, showing up with a guy with his name on his shirt felt iconic. People thought he was making a statement. When the statement was simply: My name is Rick.

Someone asked him what he did, and he said he worked with his hands, mostly, and they said doing what? And he said gears and pistons and crankshafts. He said he liked the intricacies of engineering, and they thought he meant installations. He didn’t fit in, but he didn’t exactly fit out. And it turned out, she didn’t care. That was the wild part. She. Didn’t. Care.

Her mom said she’d found the perfect guy for Trixie. He sold worms for compote, and Trixie said, “Compost,” and her mom said, “compote. Compost. What’s the difference?” And Trixie couldn’t stop laughing. “You date him,” she told her mom, thinking that step-dad number nine was going to build worm boxes in the backyard and probably wear rainbow sandals and toe socks. Maybe Andromeda would grow his weed back there.

Rick came to her studio and stood marveling at her mobiles. He said they were magnificent. He said that she was a magician. He asked if he could take her out again, and she told him that she liked to drink coffee late at night and eat flan at the formica table, and he said that sounded even better.

They made love on her mattress on the center of the studio floor, and when the breeze stirred the mobiles, the papers whispered, “shhhhh.”

Her friends thinks she’s crazy, but she has decided maybe they weren’t her friends after all. Because friends want what’s good for you. Not what looks good on paper.

Now an adult, and not a novice, neophyte, waif, princess wanna be, she sits at a corner of the bar, and she eavesdrops to the ebb and flow of the conversation, every so often chiming in. When it’s appropriate.

So when Billy the bartender says, “Did you ever have a second chance at a happily ever after?” she can look at her reflection in the mirror behind the bottles, her curls bouncing, paintbrush behind her ear. And she can think about that very first dance, so many years ago, under a field of upside flowers.

Then she can turn around and watch as Rick comes through the door, grinning as soon as he sees her, his eyes lighting up like a genie’s lamp, before she says:

“Once.”