Time of Leaders, Part 6 of 11

We switched partners in the parking lot and Jade and I turned on our flashlights and began to walk the few blocks home. She asked me if I believed in sharing.

            “I certainly do,” I told her. “If you don’t help me with this, I’ll waste it.”

            She giggled and grabbed the can to look.

            “I’ll eat it in one gulp otherwise,” I told her.

            “Don’t do that…” She handed the can back. I asked her if she had plans for it.

            “I do.”

            “Does it include ramen noodles?”

            “How’dya guess. Read the ingredients to me. I’ll keep watch.”

            “Ok,” I began, “Mechanically separated pork and chicken.”

“Ooh. Right down to business. You aren’t shy. Read it to me. Read it to me please.”

            I stumbled a bit on a sidewalk crack, but focused on the can.

            “Water, salt, sugar…”

            “Gimme that sugar. Mama wants more.”

            “Hm. Seasoning.”

            “Mama likes it spicy.”

            Never have I enjoyed reading to others so much.

“Mustard flour, tumeric, Polysorbate 80, Magnesium stearate..”

            Jade switched back to inquisitive mode. “Wait. Magnesium used to front for Polysorbate 80. I guess she went solo.”

            “Natural flavors.”

            “Earthy.” We turned down the alley and approached the back porch.

            “And- Sodium nitrate.”

            “No! More.”

            “There aren’t anymore.”

            She unlocked the porch door and reset the alarm with a plaintive: “No more?”

            “There aren’t any more ingredients.”

She spun toward me, grabbed my hand and towed me and the can to the kitchen. I told her that I would read her a recipe for calamari the next time.

            “In Italian?”

            “Of course.”

            “Promises, promises.” She pulled a couple of ramen packets from the cupboard, opened them and put the flavor pouches in the long drawer. I sat at the kitchen table and opened the tin. It whistled in. Jade dug in the utensil drawer.

            “I heard that. Did it inhale or exhale?”

            “Inhaled.”

            “Good. Everything copasetic.” She jiggled a leg, excited, and took a fork to the edge of a ramen cake. I asked her if I should smell what was in the tin.

            “Wish you would.”

I watched, amazed at her resourcefulness, as she split the cake into two thin ones with the fork.

“I’ve done this before. Wait.”

 She plopped the ramen project down on a plate, spun around, then back, and put my Little Mermaid on the table with an LED candle next to it. She dabbed a bit of the deviled meat product onto each of the cakes and spread it around. “We have to let it soak in a bit. Let it breathe. And from the top of our wine list: Eau. Vintage: Now.” She got us napkins and a glass of water each. Then she sat. “I think it’s ready. Wonder how it’ll taste. It’s a little scary.”

            I took a bite from a corner and it was the richest thing I’d eaten in months. It made the ramen tolerable, no- it brought out the flavor of the noodles and then some. Jade mumbled ‘score’ past a gob of crunchy noodles. I put half of the large, porous cracker back down on my plate.

            “There’s still half the spread left,” she told me. “Gotta eat it tonight.”

            “I will.”

            “And. If you’ll pardon me…” She executed a full spin out of her chair, glided on her toes the few steps to the sink, turned a kind of primitive pirouette, then floated back to her chair.

            “Ever feel like dancing when you have good food in your mouth?”

            I shook my head. “I’ll just eat and watch.”

            “Um,” she chomped. “Um. Um. You’ll have to go back there for a few Wednesdays, since you got two prizes.”

            “That’s fine. It was fun.”

            “Hang out with the Baby Boomers?”

            “They know how to make the best of things.”

            “That’s why I go. Oh my God, yum.” She chirped her teeth clean and smiled. “Some of ‘em don’t like the word ‘Boomer’.”

            “Well, I think it depends on how, when and where you say it.”

            “I guess so. I let it slip out with a teacher, though. A psychologist! They changed the test scores, I told you about that. They couldn’t decide what to do with us. She tested me for half a day…” Jade spread more for herself and indicated my empty plate.

            I panted. “…I’m pacing myself…”

            Jade finished buttering the ramen and leaned over the table.

            “She had me read the posters in the room. I was fine. She looked for other fun things to do. I used the word ‘Boomer’ and she laughed. I covered my mouth, but she laughed and shook her head.”

            I was suddenly hungry, and took the rest that was left for me as Jade continued.

            “She made me feel comfortable about all that, and she told me about the televisions when she was little. When she was young, when they turned the television on, they had to wait five minutes for the tube to warm up enough to even show a picture!”

 Jade was so excited about this information from the olden days, that she popped up and put my dish and utensils in the sink. She was now a whirlwind of folk-trivia.

“While they warmed up, the TVs would make these weird sounds that may or may not have anything to do with the show.”

            “Sounds entertaining itself.”

            “That’s what I was thinking!” She leant back to the table again, snapped a corner off her ramen cake and downed it. “Wish I were there. She said that you could actually feel when a TV was on in the other room. Sometimes the tubes would pop…”

            Jade smiled, sharing this story with me. I realized that we were going to another level, and that the way she operated was completely natural.

            “She told me about when they first showed California. California! And London. They were all fluffed out and sparkly over it. No color. If there was trouble in the studio they’d turn-the-camera-to-a-card that said: ‘Please Stand By’.”

            “Stand by?”

            “Wait.”

            “Hm.”

            “So one time when they did that her sister got up and stood by the television with this look, like she was waiting for the ice cream truck or something. The other kids joined in.”

            “That’s better than corn-cob dolls.”

            “Better than any of that stuff way before. Quilting bees, hoedowns…”

            By now I’d finished and she took the candle into the living room.

            “…She said they named their TV. When it went off line, you could yell at it, it didn’t care. Or cheer it on. You’d turn it on and these waves would hit you.” Jade sat down and chuckled. “Or it’d explode! By the end of the day, I loved that shrink.”

            An expression came to her face like she’d forgotten something. Then she remembered that she had it with her. Later, I realized that it was me.

            “Oh. And the slang,” she said. “She said that she hoped all that had happened hadn’t turned me off reading. I was shocked. I didn’t know that it could be fatal!”

            “Turn off?”

            “It just means ‘discourage’.”

            “Oh,” I said. “But you’re pretty verbal.”

            Jade laughed. “Oh, I’m verbal alright. If it weren’t for math and verbal literacy, I wouldn’t have got out of high school.”

            “Something to be said for verbal literacy.”

            “Verbal schmerble.”

            “Sometimes,” I told her- and she was open to feedback- “Sometimes someone’s better at math than reading or visa-versa.”

            “And then there’s Carl Sagan. I think that I can do both. I’m glad you’re here, ‘cause you might help me crack this thing.”

Once again, her eyes came with a surprise. The more vulnerable she was, the longer they became, with a ‘falling into’ quality, which can initiate less-than-helpful impulses. She told me that anyone can excel at anything. I mumbled that it was a pretty general statement to make. She smiled, leaned over and took my forearm.

            “You have potential too.”

            Then she leaned back, and I couldn’t fill that pause. That soft hum.

            “You don’t like me grabbing you.”

            Then the eyes waited. I blurted that I wasn’t sure how much I should like it. Those eyes danced for a second and she popped off an exasperated ‘Ssermp!’ which bled into a chuckle. So I told her that the sky was the limit.

            “Well, get ready for take-off, Perfessor!”

            That part I remember. She had me laughing. We kissed, and my memory of that is misty, like the memory of how the first bite of the first watermelon of the season tastes. For a while it was her tucking her hair aback an ear, telling me that she felt that she knew me when she first saw me in the funnel, but that she couldn’t take chances on such intuition. That I wasn’t clean-clean, but I was clean, which was nice to hear. That I’d gained weight, so she was no longer afraid that she would physically hurt me.

            And can you believe that I had things to say, once I caught my breath, also on the issue of compatibility. It’s good that such issues were raised, but considering what Jade and I were in for over the next few months, being what was a pair from a threatened species, we were lucky that we turned out to be compatible to any degree. But that night things seemed to call for definition. I told her that I had also been interested in her from the start, but in a distant sort of way, since I was sick. Then she, concerned, and me, clarifying: ‘…The food. No food…’ I told her that I didn’t know her entirely, and that I thought I never could. I started to lean back, and she snapped her arm out and held my forearm in a pinch before it could follow the rest of me back.

            “You’re so busy with answers you don’t know when you’re right.”