Letting Loose. Joanne Skerrett

back to teaching and she stayed. I would have finished, but from what I’ve read in my extensive self-help book collection, I have a fear of success. Anyway, I love to teach. It may not show when I’m facing a roomful of angry ninth graders, but I really think it’s my calling to get kids to fall in love with great books the way I did when I was a kid….

      “Come in here, see what we brought you,” Kelly said.

      The smell of the chili overpowered my will to do anything but follow its scent, and my aching back was now forgotten. All I wanted was a bowl of the stuff. If I did not eat now, I would surely die. I felt like Esau at this point. I would have given up my birthright, if I’d had one, for just a taste of this chili.

      I hugged Kelly. “Welcome back, girlie. Gimme a bowl of that stuff. I’m starvin’ like Marvin.” The first time I’d used that expression, James (Kelly’s husband who is also in the same doctoral program) had asked very genuinely, “Who’s Marvin?” But then he’d started saying it himself later on. It was funny that they thought I was hip and in the know. My students could set them straight on that.

      As I settled down at our kitchen table with a bowl of almost-done chili, I listened to Kelly talk about her and James’s trip to yet another sunny hotspot. They were researching primary education in former colonies, thus the frequent exotic trips. This time it was to Dominica, a tiny Caribbean island that supposedly had a boiling lake and some great hiking trails. That was the type of thing that Kelly and James did. After the tsunami hit South Asia, they promptly booked a flight and flew down to volunteer with some relief organization. They brought back some great pictures of themselves on the beach, looking tanned and happy with some brown-skinned, black-haired children. They believed in causes and lived for big political issues, unlike me who was just willing to let things slide as long as they didn’t affect me personally.

      James and Kelly hated gas-guzzling vehicles, George Bush (father and son), consumerism, designer clothes, and rightwing Christians. They loved to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, uplift the downtrodden, extol the virtues of diversity, discuss ways to improve urban education, write poetry and smoke weed, and have noisy sex on the weekends when they thought I was asleep.

      “Oh, Ames, you really should go down there! You’d love it! Lots of cute guys, great weather, and great food! You know, when our plane landed in Boston this morning and they said how much snow was going to fall, I thought, James and I need to move to somewhere warm. Permanently!” Kelly said as she stirred the pot.

      “Ummm…mmm…mmm…” Oh, this chili was so good.

      “But, here’s what we brought you,” Kelly said turning to me.

      I looked at her hands and save for the chili-covered ladle could see no gift.

      “James, she’s ready for her, uh, souvenir!”

      James came out of their room, looking his tanned and rangy self, his long brown hair wet from the shower. I sometimes wished he were my brother, too.

      “Okay, dude,” he said. “Now keep an open mind.” James called everyone dude, even his mother.

      They both wanted to be professors, and I could see it in Kelly, but James was such a stoner…. At least he was rich, so if he failed at this it wouldn’t be the end of the party for him. He was from California. His parents were both in the movie business. Kelly, on the other hand, came from more humble beginnings in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and had been a high school teacher just like me. It was how we ended up getting along so well and being roommates for the past five years. James entered the picture later; I tolerated him at first for her sake, but he managed to grow on me after a while.

      Anyway, I agreed to keep an open mind.

      “We were hanging out with this dude, and Kelly thought you might like to talk to him…. Smart dude. I think you guys might have a lot in common.”

      I looked from James to Kelly and then back again. The last time they set me up it had been with a guy from their program at BC. The guy was the most boring person I’d ever met, and coming from me that says a lot. I mean, I may struggle with how to spell Ludacris, but at least I KNOW who Ludacris is. His name was actually Tom. No kidding. Tom. Tall, skinny, uptight, nerdy Tom. I took one look at him and thought, “This kid has never been with a sister before and I’m not going to initiate him.” The date ended after I told him that I had a headache and needed to go home and lie down. He looked so relieved my feelings were hurt.

      So who was this smart dude whom I would have something in common with?

      James handed me the picture. It was a picture of them—James, shirtless, with Kelly, camouflage tank top and khaki shorts, and a big, tall brother (my favorite type) wearing a T-shirt that said MOREHOUSE, baggy cargo shorts, and Jesus sandals. Okay. This dude was no Tom.

      “Isn’t he cute?” Kelly sang.

      “Ummm…”

      “We showed him your picture, too, and he sent you his e-mail addy,” James said, smiling.

      I sighed. This could go quite badly or quite well….

      “You gave him my e-mail address?” Did they cross a boundary? Did we have boundaries? Had I spelled out my boundaries to my roommates? And in this case, would that count? Because this guy was F-I-N-E.

      “Your work e-mail…at the school,” Kelly said, searching my face for signs of “boundaries crossed anger.”

      I shrugged. “It’s okay. I guess. What’s his name?”

      Then James walked away to answer the phone, leaving Kelly and me to chat. This was better, because with James out of the room Kelly could give me the real dirt without fear of injuring James’s fragile man-ego.

      She sat in the chair next to mine. I had already forgotten about the half-eaten bowl of chili in front of me. And I was still holding onto that picture of not-Tom and glancing at it every few seconds.

      Apparently, not-Tom had a name, a rather pedestrian one, Drew Anderson. I looked at his picture and he looked as if he should be named Ramses or Spartacus or at least after some African warrior. Am I losing my mind? Here I was building up this guy in my head to be a warrior and I hadn’t even met him yet. Was I that desperate? Well, yes I was. I think.

      “Oh, he’s so sweet,” Kelly was gushing. They’d met him while they were hiking up Mount Diablotins. (I decided not to ask why a mountain was named after the devil.) Drew was leading some high-school students on a hike, teaching them how to identify different plants and flowers, and James and Kelly decided to tag along. Once they’d stopped to eat lunch on the side of the mountain, James detected a slight American accent as Drew talked to them. Turns out that Drew had been educated in America but had moved back to his homeland after his father, who was the former prime minister of the island, died. He had lofty ideals, from what Kelly was saying. He was a sometime math teacher, a developer, and budding politician who was building schools out in remote villages with his own money. Own money, I asked? Apparently he’d worked in the U.S. during the Internet boom and had left the U.S. before the crash. Lofty ideals, rich, smart. What was wrong with him?

      “He had a lot to tell us about the education system down there. Ames, I’m thinking of focusing my dissertation on how the British system is unsuitable for educating kids in the former Caribbean colonies.”

      I looked at her. Oh. “That sounds interesting.”

      “So are you going to e-mail him?”

      “I thought you gave him my address?”

      “Well, yeah. But I think he might want you to make the first move. He seemed kind of put off by the whole matchmaking thing.”

      “Who wouldn’t be, Kelly?” I rolled my eyes. “This guy must have his pick of beautiful island girls. What would he want with someone two thousand miles away?”

      “Well, from what he said, he doesn’t really have a lot of time to date. And besides, this is the information age. Distance is all relative….”

      “Uh-huh.”