The day after she left me, I tried to sit down and count all the girls I had ever felt for. Beer in hand, I took out my address book and counted their numbers, every one of them in that curiously elegant hand all girls seem to write with—every one of them different, and yet somehow the same, fluid as the blue Danube. There were seventeen numbers on seventeen different pages and I remembered them all.
The seventeenth one—the one I was trying to forget by trying to remember—slapped me, called me a lecher, took her purse and bag and left. We had been steadily dating for a few months now but we had never really gotten along. She smoked, and I didn't. Granted, the sixteenth one blew smoke rings around my head when I tried to kiss her, but at least she put her cigarette out before sex. The fifteenth one was soft, all curves, print cotton dresses every day of the week and straw hats when the weather permitted. The fourteenth one drank strawberry vodkas with every meal and the thirteenth one was a freewheeling vegan. She could do wonderful things with soy. Soy, as I recalled, could also do wonderful things with her, and she was the reason I finally got around to learning how to cook.
The twelfth one was a smooth, pretty Greek girl whose little sister tagged along on all our dates and functioned as the most effective birth control ever invented—I never got farther than a chaste kiss on the lips before the little brat squalled for attention and my lovely Hellenic sylph was dragged back to babysitting. The eleventh one was a literature major who taught me what "Hellenic" and "sylph" meant. I bought her books the way I bought the others flowers, and she accepted them from me the way the others accepted me into their beds. She left me for a poet. I have never liked poets.
The tenth one threw me out in the middle of necking for still having the ninth one's name written behind my ear in gray-green felt-tip pen. I have never much liked markers either.
The eighth one looked just like the seventh one, and the sixth one was the seventh one's cousin, and the fifth one was her childhood friend and the fourth one lived just across the street from them all. I ran into all of them in quick succession at the carnivale once, but none of us could think of what to say to each other.
The third one was my big sister's friend's little sister who sat in the row in front of me during biology; I fell for her hard when she cut open the frog and then, without missing a beat, threw the frog's liver at the back of Davy's head before pretending that he had done it himself. We broke up three classes later when she tried to pull the same thing on me. It took a few days for the smell to wash out, and Davy and I commiserated during those godawful lunches when the rest of the kids would not come near us.
The second one wore her hair in stiff plaits and fell on her knees every time she tried to cartwheel, but I loved her for always trying, for never letting the band-aids get in the way of her gymnast's dreams.
And the first one—? The first one... I couldn't remember her. I tried and I tried and I couldn't remember her. All that remained of the first girl I ever truly felt for was that sloppily fluid string of numbers which might or might not have been made up on the spot, because I only ever saw her once. I remember being utterly, absolutely heartbroken when she left, and yet now I couldn't remember a thing about her. Nothing but her telephone number. Nothing but her handwriting
which was fluid as the blue Danube
like that of every other girl who would follow her, silent and graceful, these girls whom I did not yet know but hoped for, longed for, with every fiber of my being in those tense cold days right after she disappeared.
There would be other girls, but I did not yet know that for sure.
And there will be other girls, and I do know that for sure.
(WC 734)
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