Ben the Bird
The restaurant was very busy, and I squeezed past the line for tables to fit between two couples at the bar. One remarked on my ice cream phone case, and I extended the interaction for a minute or two in the hopes that my date would arrive to find me wittily entertaining strangers.
My date turned out to be my height, with the kind of face that looked like it had been sheared down at the bottom - slightly bulging eyes, a hooked birdlike nose, and a tiny, pointed mouth and chin with an unappetizing tuft of hair nestled below his lower lip. Either he was cuter in the pictures or I should have looked at them more closely. It's a testament to the power of physical appearance that even though my rational mind is dedicated to body positivity and I insist that everyone is beautiful, even though my attraction is rarely initial and mostly emotional, even though I've loved far uglier, I wrote him off pretty much immediately.
I rushed through the initial exchanging of questions, the stakes rising as I tried to calculate when it would be appropriate to risk the silence as we figured out what we wanted to order. Procrastinating on this could lead to us being unprepared for the bartender's attention and an unnecessary prolonging of the date. This wasn't because he looked like a bird - this was a pretty typical concern for me. Perhaps, next time, a perusal of the menu in advance was in order.
There were several awkward silences as the bartender asked for our IDs and then abandoned us, leaving us both holding the cards in our extended hands to an empty space for far too long as I pleaded mentally for her rescue. I talked to him about beer, knowing men love to explain beer to women, and pretended I lamented slightly more than I did my dearth of beer knowledge. I picked the cheapest beer while acting like it wasn't because it was the cheapest. Beer isn't supposed to taste good - it's supposed to do its basic job of getting you tipsy enough to facilitate conversation, and a relatively tolerable taste is a high achievement.
This beer performed its duties admirably, and we slipped into an easy enough conversational flow, discussing his housing situation (garage next to his brother in Freeport), his job (Spanish teacher, Spanish major - I harbored a suspicion Spanish was his best grade in high school and he just rolled with it, all the way to the ripe old age of thirty-one), California, the election, and my career. I discovered to my pleasure that people ask far less questions about the novelist thing if I quickly segueway into my social worker aspirations.
I had spent the entire day at volunteer training for the Center for Grieving Children, an emotional freedive of an experience where tears had trickled down my face at the story of a woman whose twelve-year-old son had hung himself, and I'd wondered if that climate would lead to any particularly meaningful sharing on my date. Turns out: not really. The training had reminded me that everyone has their own painful story, their strengths and inspiring qualities, and I'm sure this guy did too. But he looked like a bird and he'd moved from Portland to Freeport instead of the other way around and while he was perfectly nice, like every other online date I've had, I was content with the idea of never seeing him again. His rich internal depths would remain a mystery to me. It was both a relief and a frustration that this date had turned out like every other one, and I had my usual ten-minute internal struggle that maybe I was doing something wrong, maybe I should just get to know him better, maybe online dating was inherently inimical to my purpose, etc etc.
I tossed down some cash when the check came, nodding at his after-the-fact mumble of splitting it. He said something about another date and I affirmed vaguely enough that he'd question if I actually did when I rejected him over text. We headed off to our cars, where we must have been fairly close on the road, both of us driving separately back to Freeport.