MLH HYPE PROSE 2 : How a Pizza Boy Falls in Love

-- Here's Lee Hunnewell who four summers ago met Anne Milton at a five/ten poker game on Owl's Head with the diggers and the fishermen.  She was a pretty monkey perched in the kitchen with the females satellites to her skirt, dungaree bridesmaids waiting for their dates to go broke.

-- She made Lee eighty dollars that night as he watched her clippings in the shifts and grooves of the kitchen activity and folded Ace Jack, as he watched her for cues to which man in the game was hers, and folded Ace Three.
-- It took four cigarettes to meet her on the porch to look at her thick yet tidy nose and make it Germans breeding with Frenchmen; to look at her nose while she looked at the ocean, and have it naturally happenstance.  She smoked a Camel.  He smoked a menthol Camel.  He says to her the path to the water looks like a trail the house made.
-- It is a trail, she said.
-- A leak.  He says.  Doesn't the house look like a turtle?  He says, and says: From down there I bet it does.  And he points the path to the sea.
-- When a woman smiles politely she's not smiling; especially when she is also prematurely stubbing her cigarette, and folding the filter up.  And avoiding eye contact.  And.. Well:
-- I'm sure from your boat it looks like a dragon.  She says.
-- I don't have a boat.
-- And here finally she looked at him, and he took the opportunity to play a trick he called, Blitz Interview - enlisting the woman on womans' subjects, like herself, herself, and food; he asked for her name, where she was from, did she grow up here, had she been to the Thai Place on Main Street, did she like breakfast for dinner; this, that, her name again, but not about a boyfriend.  Not yet.
-- She asked him, What did he do?
-- What question else?  By what do you do she meant not answers of the kind: read, write, watch old movies; beer, tequila, the boog-shoog; women who let me, fantasies of women who don't, dreams of choking, dreams of imprisonment; one tear for a little fat kid walking home with no friends; she meant, by what do you do, what is your employment.  Again, what question else?
-- I play poker with lobstermen.  You?
-- I'm a student.
-- At Rockland High?
-- Funny.
-- Orono?  Thomaston?  Are you a student of human fallibility?  Is this conversation independent study?
-- It's business courses.  Online, not actually face to face school.  My mother has a design company called True Vinal, spelled like Vinalhaven; I work there right now.  It's interior design --
-- Where is this?
-- I like it, maybe as the company grows -- Where is the company?  Not on Vinalhaven.
-- In Camden?  Lee asked.
-- Why would it be in Camden?
-- Rockland doesn't need interior designs, we have a Walmart.  Interior design in, like, Warren, is how high to hang the moose head.
-- The jokes died.  She said, You are rather unformed.
-- Rather Un IN formed, rather.  Dropping syllables.  She was pissed.
-- He said, I wasn't putting it down.  I deliver pizza:  How could I?  Online classes are, you know, classes.  I'm a twenty-seven year old pizza boy, I mean, what's this online you speak of?
-- Her laugh was as good as her frog-kraut nose.
-- She said, the place on Route One you work?
-- That's it.
-- The Pizza Star, right?
-- Right.
-- I don't eat pizza, she said, laughing.
-- That's outrageous, He said.
-- He thought: I am unformed.  You've un'd what form I have; scoop me up, lay me under your chin, I'll have your name the password to  my e-mail; I'll have your eighth grade portrait hidden in my trapper-keeper; I'll steal toy jewelry from that Walmart and leave it on your windowsill, all of this while waiting for you to rebuild me!