We meet at a fifteen-year-old’s birthday party. You’re attractive in an offhand way. Girls dressed as pop stars with weaponized fingernails giggle as you pass.
You catch my eye and smile. We are two in an army of waiters careening under blossoming trees with silver trays held aloft like skewed halos. At the kitchen counter, Chef Lisa lines up canapes and mini tacos. My elbow touches yours as we refill our trays. You say on my fifteenth birthday, we didn’t have a caterer. We had Spam sandwiches. I reply, did you know there is an actual museum? To Spam? You didn’t. I’ve never been, I say. We should go sometime, you say.
I offer napkins to girls who seem ashamed of their sloppiness. I’ve been thinking, you say as you pass. About what? But you are the sudden stamen inside a petal circle of young girls. They point at things on your tray. Some hold pale hands on their stomachs to say, No, I’m too full. You know they’re not full. You get them to eat.
I am by the swimming pool, cucumber slices with crème fraiche and seaweed caviar dotting the doily on my tray. What were you thinking? I ask when you approach, your tray empty. You say, let’s go. I say, where? I follow you to the kitchen. Chef Lisa has her back turned. You grab my wrist and say you have a convertible. I’m awestruck. Who drives a convertible in Providence?
To the Museum!
Yes, yes! I say. Our eyes so wide.
We drop our trays and run to the parking lot, looking behind us like two escaped prisoners, leaving others to finish and clean up.
The roads shake out into straight lines. I am committed to the adventure, but you are still a stranger. At my knees, a stranger’s glove box. I can’t offer money for gas, but I buy you a Pez while you pump. When the candy is finished, you mount Miss Piggy on a base of chewed gum on the dashboard.
How lucky that we arrive on a Tuesday, the only day of the week the museum opens. Maybe not luck, I think. Maybe a smiling universe. The universe loves love, encourages it. We are twenty-two! I have enough to pay the admission fee for us both. You thank me with a stranger’s kiss.
Before we have seen all the exhibits, lights flicker and dim.
It is my idea to hide atop two toilets until the museum empties and closes.
Spam, Spam, Spam! we sing in Monty Python accents, huddled together behind the empty cash register. We wonder why Monty’s last name is a snake, our shoulders touching, your hand halfway under my thigh. The sun setting blood orange through the plate glass window and we nibble at each other like grazing animals, but with more curiosity, more intention.
Later, we are surprised that the front door cannot open from the inside. You throw yourself at it in a drama of claustrophobia. I hold your head to my chest and calm you, remind you there is soda, there is Spam. There are sporks. We will survive! You won’t say out loud that it is my fault. It was my idea.
I have seen something you didn’t want me to see. Are you ashamed to be the one who worried?
The next days are a cycle of moods, some retaliatory, some born of honest weakness.
Day after day, you sleep on a red upholstered bench in the Spam Shack while I take in exhibits for the hundredth time: the Spam Can race cars and handwritten letters from World War II praising Spam as indispensable to the fight against fascism. Surrendering to insomnia, I settle on a bench near you and hum to the rhythm of your snoring. When you wake, we lie together in silence, our bodies reaching for each other despite everything. We tumble onto the floor from the narrow bench and laugh.
It is eerie how much we’re starting to resemble what we’re eating. We gaze at ourselves and each other in the women’s room mirror. It’s true. We are pink, though maybe we started that way from the drive in the sun with the top down. I say, you are what you— and you raise a hand to hush me. Rule number one, you say. Did you forget? We are anti-adage.
You grab a pen from behind the register and make a list of the rules. No adages. No past. No future. No whistling. We’d agreed on them before, but you need to remind me. To put our pact on paper. This paper gives you some kind of protection, though I’m not sure what from.
On Friday, I dare to ask about your family, despite the rules. Where did you get a convertible? I see longing in your eyes, but you turn away, disappointed, and spend several hours locked alone behind a piggie diorama.
Our bodies have their own ideas, and you emerge, take me in silence, our eyes closed. I bring you tins of Spam, and you sit up, eat. But you don’t like i,t and your tongue moves around your mouth with resigned anger.
By Tuesday, even my body rejects you, and we sit on separate benches, waiting to be set free.
When the door is unlocked, we limp, pink and withered, past the confused face of the man with the keys. You go to your car and wait for me. I see you there, but I look in the other direction, consider my options.