He Came; She Shook
Jennifer Daniel
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After pushing her five foot-two inch frame through the soused crowd huddled inside the upstairs lounge at The Central Bar, Hope Hunter aptly scores a fourth round of empty-stomach, green-apple martinis with her breasts, which are small and plump and miraculously sit squarely on an invisible shelf without the help of a bra whatsoever. Hunter lays blue eyes on one of two unavailable bartenders, and in two minutes a new toxic green concoction sits in front of her.

There are barely twelve inches for another stool at the bar, but it doesn’t stop the cute, little thing from scooting right up next to him. Ben Hooker believes in serendipity. He just doesn’t believe it happens with men and women. He does, however believe that men and women get drunk and get laid.

“Come on in, sweetheart,” Hooker says. This is all he has for the moment.

When she opens her mouth and says, “Excuse me?” Ben Hooker suddenly contracts with familiarity. He sobers up for a moment to realize this is a woman he knows. In the biblical sense. To be exact, this is the voice of the woman who took Hooker’s virginity. He turns to look, and a miniscule voice inside his head says: what the fuck?

It is Hope Hunter. She sat behind him in study hall, and now she’s sitting beside him at a bar right a few blocks away from his Big Apple brownstone. Even better, she is sporting the same short red nails she did in twelfth grade. Hooker patently remembers the rap-a tap, rap-a-tap of them on a formica desk in conjunction with the ill-timed smacking of Bazooka Joe. He hated smackers, and he hated the smell of her sugared spit when she turned around tell him those stupid jokes on the back of the wrappers. And then a bell would ring to signal that school was out and the weekend was on. Hunter would board a bus with the football team and all her bloomer-wearing, pom-pom holding friends. And now Hooker is thinking that high-school, with all its other coming of age bullshit, was really just a fifty-two car pile-up of iniquitous sexual opportunities that were mostly unavailable to him because he was a tall, skinny soccer player who thought too much. In Texas the soccer team, like the girl’s basketball team, wasn’t privy to herkies and the busty back-up of the varsity cheerleaders.

When the Long Island Cheerleading Association offered Hunter an upper-level administrative position (office manager) two years ago she took it, and now she’s their big smiles publicist and coordinates after school-cheerleading clinics for the entire state of New York’s public school system. At twenty-nine, Hunter has shaken everything the good Lord and her mama gave her, and it has paid off nicely. You can play quarters off of her ass but can’t beat her at Jeopardy. Hooker was proud to have lost his greenhorns to such a well-rounded package of brains and beauty. And ass.

“Hope Hunter,” Hooker says loudly to his beer — which he is gripping as if it would float right off the bar if he let it go. He turns again and faces her and looks her in the eyes.

“Hope? Is that you?”

Hunter gives Hooker a leisurely once-over before she clasps her hands in front of her chest and says:

“Ben Hooker.”

They lock eyes. Hooker believes in sexual serendipity again.

“How the hell are you?” Her voice is still as big as Texas. She is loaded. She has to be. Either that, or she has acquired a rare tongue disorder because the length of it is neon green. He knows this because she sticks it out to the bartender as he passes by. She sticks her tongue out at him like she knows him as a friend.

“Um, great,” he says. “How the hell are you?” he imitates, but it is as if he isn’t speaking at all. She keeps right on.

“Oh my God. I forgot how tall you were.” 

She straightens her back and smiles and tucks her curly hair behind her ear all at the same time. And then she says his name again. And again. The way she says it isn’t fair. And neither is the ring on her left hand.

“Ben Hooker. This is so fucked up, Ben Hooker. Are you still working for that computer company and traveling, like all the time?” she asks in one breath without really knowing what she is saying. God, she hasn’t seen the guy in ten years. The last she’d heard, he had one foot in New York and both hands down the pants of women from here to L.A.  And she has no time for that. She has problems of her own.

Hooker is employed by a company who, as its literature affirms, is the world’s leader in the innovative designs of software for the management and visual representation of complex information. He could be in Las Vegas or Cleveland or Chapel Hill or wherever else for weeks or months at a time, and yes, maybe he makes meaningful friendships with women along the way. But this is irrelevant. So instead, Hooker gives Hunter a B. and an S.

“No,” he lies. “I’m a celibate writer.”

“Really?”  Hunter rolls her eyes. “You write? Bullshit.”

She lets go of the gaze when some broad bumps into the back of her bar stool. Thank God, he thinks.

“You are so not celibate,” Hunter says. And then continues what seems to be the longest sentence ever: “I’m wasted. I just broke off my engagement to a guy I’ve been living with for four years. He cheated on me. And now you’re here. Grreat,” And she says great like Tony the Tiger would say in celebration of Frosted Flakes but instead of enthusiasm, she sells him on awkward disdain.

She still has the balls to call him out on a little lie. That’s hot. For fifteen minutes he is fixed on this moment and not at all on the remains of the past two years without Jen. To Hooker, it is like Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Brick’s click. Except here there is no click. There is no Maggie the Cat. And there is no Jen.  

“Ok then,” he says. “You caught me. Hooker thinks about a rat running through a maze.

“I still do the software thing.”

Hunter laughs. This too brings back memories. Like ticklish spots and curves on her body that up until this moment, Hooker had not known he remembered. Before he starts in on the job description, she hops off the stool.

“Will you shave my seat while I go to the ladies room?” she slurs.

“Sure, I’ll shave your seat, he says. They both laugh at her inebriation.

He watches her walk, unnerved, into a mounting crowd of meat-market marauders like she is walking down the runway at the Miss America pageant with a tiara balanced on her head.

While she is gone, Hooker thinks about how he used to watch her. A lot. She would be doing the running man during a Friday afternoon pep-rally to the tune of “Never Gonna Get It” by En Vogue, and he thought he would die if he didn’t get inside her pleated skirt. Other than that, pep-rallies really weren’t his thing. He was a member of Greenpeace, wore Birkenstocks and believed in the power of Eddie Vedder.

Their senior year, Hunter’s boyfriend fucked another girl on the cheerleading squad, and this little act of virility pissed Hunter off enough to bounce back and pitch the juvenile-but-very-clear point called: Two can play at that game. Hooker was just the driver’s side passenger of a car crashed by a woman scorned.

It was before study hall. She was crying and had stopped. Standing in front of a small mirror inside her locker, Hunter cleared up her raccoon eyes with concealer and more eye liner. And when Hooker walked by, she shot him the same glance through her mirror she gave those bartenders. The one that says: I need something right now, and you’re going to give it to me. 

Like every Friday, Hooker ditched school to smoke weed and play guitar before rolling up newspapers and stacking them in his car to toss his afternoon neighborhood paper route. But there was no jam session that day. Hunter followed him out to his car and asked him for a ride. She skipped the game and rode his route. And then she fucked him in the driver’s seat of his 1989 Honda Prelude, the backseat still half-full of newspapers and his hands covered with ink. A Dick’s Picks tape played on the tape player, and when they were done Hunter had black ink smears all over her back, among other places. Because of this moment, Hooker has never forgotten the way newspapers smell and the song “Sugaree”.

When she comes back from the bathroom, he asks:

“How’s the world of cheerleading?”

At this, Hunter starts talking in a voice that hoists drunken thoughts keenly out into the open, but loudly. She starts rambling about their great state of Texas and how she read in The Times that some grubby lawmaker is rooting for the removal of bawdy half-time cheerleading dance numbers. She guffaws.

“What the fuck is up with that?” She says like a big redneck, even though she is a big-city girl now. “Everything in life I learned from cheerleading. The art of the deal, you know, negotiating and, like, staying on top.”

“You’re a maniac ...” he says. He doesn’t know what else to say. He is imagining her in a leotard and legwarmers. He finishes: “A maniac on the dance floor.”

 She doesn’t laugh.

“You mean you learned how to be the world’s best cocktease,” he states and immediately, earnestly wonders whether or not he has made this statement out loud or inside his head.

They share a cab on the way home. And of course, Hooker does what he does best when single at thirty-two and living in the Big Apple with no mouth to feed besides his own. He slips his arm around the back of her waist and pulls her into him. For a minute she closes her eyes and lets her body melt into his gut. Hunter had been hurt again and here this guy is, asking for another ride. At least it will be nostalgic, she thinks. He turns to her and situates his forefinger and thumb on either side of her chin, pulling her face into the stream of his breath. He kisses her, and she kisses him back, sticking her green tongue into his mouth. He sucks on it like a sour-apple Jolly Rancher. And then suddenly she draws it back, like a lizard catching a fly but not liking the taste or texture of those particular wings. She holds her hand over her mouth. And then she turns her head away from him and throws-up on the floorboard. This is not very Miss America, he thinks. There is no look to salvage this situation. Hunter is mortified and feels she must immediately exit stage left.

She had it. She lost it. And now she is out the door. Shocker.

Hunter slowly scoots to the window on her side of the cab for the four minute remainder of the ride and tries really hard not to cry. She begins rolling the tips of her nails: ra-ta-tap, ra-ta-tap -- clicking them on the arm rest until the car stops in front of her apartment. Hunter opens the door; she doesn’t say anything. She refuses to look at him, the cabbie, her mess or herself. Hooker is looking at her, and now he thinks maybe you make your own serendipity, so he grabs her arm. The clean one. And before she has her foot and her mess out the door he pulls her back.

“You know really, it’s been great,” he over exaggerates. And as if nothing has happened, he kisses her on the forehead.

And now Hunter cries and laughs at the same time. And Hooker laughs. They exit stage left. He throws money at the cabbie, more than enough for the mess and follows her inside. He wonders if she still has that uniform.

Jennifer Henley Daniel was raised as a Southern belle before she became a writer.
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