by
Mary Heldman
Mona Haertz, a 70-year-old divorcee, is getting ready for her first plunge into online dating. Through a site for “mature” adults, she and Bob Finn have arranged to meet for coffee. From their online profiles she knows they are both originally from San Jose, but not much more.
For her first date in almost four decades, Mona has purchased a new turtle-neck pullover. As she waits for Bob at the entrance to one of West L.A.’s Starbucks, she feels slightly nauseated.
When a trim, white-haired man opens the door, she recognizes him from his picture; they manage self-conscious smiles as they shake hands, stand in line to order, then take seats next to each other on mauve faux-leather armchairs. She’s drinking coffee; he’s drinking chamomile tea. For some reason she finds his choice reassuring.
Mona breaks the silence. “So did you go to school in San Jose?” A safe topic, though rather inane, she thinks, for two people who’ve lived more than a half century since school. But she can’t ask about where he worked, or what college he went to. Maybe he didn’t go to college; and questions about careers are verboten to her since they can be seen as a way of asking how much money he has. (Mona realizes that she is sometimes circumspect to a fault.)
Bob says, yes, he did go to school in San Jose, and then asks what brought her to L.A.
“No special reason, I mean school or career or anything,” Mona says. “It’s just I married a guy who came from here, though he wasn’t a doctor, actor, lawyer, professor or blacksmith, so I didn’t get any alimony.” She covers up a little laugh with a little cough.
Bob looks at her quizzically. “Blacksmith?” A pause, then “Oh, I get it, you’re joking."
Not to be deterred, Mona leans a bit toward Bob. “So what about you? When and why did you come to be an Angelino?”
But Bob has turned slightly to stare at a display of ergonomic coffee filters. Mona taps on the arm of his chair. “I mean, for an acting career? For something else in ‘the industry’?” she teases. “Or did you move here for some family reason?”
According to the dating service, Bob is a widower—unless of course he fibbed, something Mona can’t help considering. But, then again, why would anyone cheating on his wife be looking on a site for “mature” women?
Mona immediately regrets her teasing. And her reference to “the industry” was show-offy and perhaps even mean, as she herself has nothing to do with the entertainment business. And “Angelino”? Has she unconsciously acquired a stilted style of talking for this first date? Is this maybe the first step to talking in tongues?
Bob’s still enthralled with the coffee filters, and he doesn’t answer why or how long he’s lived in L.A. Mona drops the subject and they go on to quickly exhaust the topic of the difference between San Jose and Los Angeles bagels; turns out bagels—even Starbucks’s—are a convenient ice-breaker, though only for a few minutes.
Mona continues asking seemingly innocuous questions, which Bob once in a while answers: Do you have brothers and sisters? Where have you lived? Children? Pets? Grandkids? Parents still alive? (Never mind that they’d be pushing 100 by now.) There’s a lot to “catch up” on since their San Jose days. Though, of course, they aren’t, strictly speaking, “catching up,” since they didn’t know each other back then.
They sit for a while in an uncomfortable silence. Mona fidgeting with the lid of her cardboard cup of plain coffee and Bob dunking the tea bag in his cup over and over again to the rhythm of Starbucks’s brand of muzak.
Until, that is, they somehow discover that not only were they raised in the same city but that they’d gone to the same junior high. “Oh my god,” says Mona. “Yeah, can you beat that?” says Bob, looking a bit animated for the first time, which puzzles Mona.
Now he wants to know when she was at their junior high. Trying to find out her age?
She’s been dreading this question (she’d fibbed on the dating site and he probably has figured that out), and mumbles very quickly, “Um, in the sixties.” She’s hedging—she knows exactly the years she was in junior high. But from his fit looks, she guesses he is substantially younger than she, and she’s frightened of being more precise, even though their conversation thus far isn’t going anywhere. So she reminds herself to sit up straighter, and to dispense her “truths” just a little at a time.
“Well, I’ll be damned: I was there in the sixties too.” Bob looks surprised, almost enthusiastic, or maybe he just has a nervous habit of batting his eyebrows up and down. Also in tune to the muzak?
By now Mona’s figured out that since she graduated junior high in the early sixties, at most Bob would be only eight or nine years younger than she.
Bob’s hair is thick and curly. He has a trimmed mustache and muscled arms, and a virtually unlined face. His only aesthetic imperfection, Mona notes, is a protruding belly, the kind athletic boys and beer-drinkers develop by middle age. Not bad, she thinks, at least in the physical realm.
Mona ponders her own looks: She was once a brunette with large dark eyes, and very thin. But now she wears glasses and has that blonde, frosted hair so prized by “sophisticated” older women for disguising the grey. She’s also put on lots of weight, though she can’t bear to think of herself as fat. She surreptitiously tugs at the bottom of her turtle-neck to make sure it is still covering her squishy waistline.
Bob brings Mona out of her reverie: “Want to share a pastry?” he asks, leaping up and getting in line at the counter before she can answer. She’s relieved: They could both use some breathing room.
He returns and cuts the Danish into two precise halves, and gives her one. Before he takes his first bite, he proclaims: “Yeah, junior high! You’re at such an impressionable age. We were so young—“
“And didn’t know it,” she talks over him -- too quickly.
“You can say that again.” He pauses to chew, then continues. “You know, I think the best years of my life were in junior high.”
Really, she thinks, they were possibly my worst. All those cliques and oily skin. And girls had to wear full slips and oxfords, even though it was a public school. Boys had to wear belts to hold their pants up. No jeans. God, were things different now!
“What did you like about junior high?” she asks politely.
“Well, it wasn’t school so much, though I actually liked woodshop. The most fun was playing tackle football every Saturday with the guys. I guess you could call that (he makes air quotes) 'male bonding.’ ” He raises his eyebrows, and makes a moue, possibly unused to talking like this.
Mona takes another sip of her bitter coffee, thinking that it should be called Charbucks, as she stirs in another packet of artificial sweetener to take away the scorched taste. She catches herself in time to censor these thoughts before they leave her mouth.
But as though she has actually said them out loud and now needs to redeem herself, she rushes on to another safe topic: Then vs. Now.
“Wait a minute!” she says, raising her palm. “Me too. I had a date for my junior high grad night. I wore a spaghetti-strap dress and dyed-to-match high heels. We went to some pretentious restaurant on Post Street where they show you big slabs of raw steaks and you got to pick out the one you wanted them to cook for you. What voracious carnivores we were back then.” (Bob has told her he’s vegetarian.) “And,” she continues, “how did you know you got the steak you ordered? DNA?” she quips, challenging Bob to laugh. He doesn’t.
Mona keeps talking: “It was kind of surreal, you know. The waiters must have been laughing at us trying to be so grown up! I mean we were all of thirteen or fourteen!” Mona stops, sensing that she is talking too much, because Bob is squirming as if to settle more comfortably into his shirt. Has she said something wrong, or has something she’s said rubbed him the wrong way?
“You’re kidding!” Bob interrupts, suddenly coming back to life. He tells Mona that he and his junior-high grad night date had gone to a fancy restaurant with raw steaks too.
“Come to think of it,” he enunciates slowly, “her name was Mona too. That’s kind of strange, don’t you think?”
“Oh my god. Get this!” says Mona, bringing her left hand to her mouth. “I think my date was a Bob too. We’d been in homeroom together for all three years, but only had that one date. Then we went to different high schools and never saw each other again.”
“What was your maiden name?” Bob asks tepidly. What happened to his enthusiasm? Mona wonders? Bob says “1962, right? You graduated in 1962?”
Oh no, thinks Mona, her left hand now hovering over her chin. Wait a minute. It just can’t be. Her date was Bob Sturgeon, not Bob Finn, the guy sitting next to her. But now that she looks at Bob more closely, she can definitely see a resemblance to junior-high Bob. In fact, she marvels that she hadn’t seen it sooner. But why would a man change his last name?
Greatly embarrassed, she asks: “Bob, I’m confused. Was your name ever ‘Sturgeon’?” I mean . . . you aren’t him, are you?”
“Oh, you must be Mona Risling. Now I remember you! God, have I changed that much?” (Have I? thought Mona.) “Now I get it. I changed my last name to my wife’s. She had a little boy from her first marriage and we didn’t want him to have to change his last name, so I changed mine.”
Male bonding, vegetarian, and now this!
“I can’t believe it. We’ve been sitting here for almost an hour and never once realized we knew each other before. This is incredible, don’t you think?” Her voice fades out as she realizes, midway through her exclamation, that Bob is not as delighted as she is to make this discovery. And she remembers that then, as now, she doesn’t feel any real connection with Bob, and apparently, neither does he with her.
Nonetheless, Mona still thrills to the coincidence, which has turned out not to be such a coincidence after all. What, she wonders, if they’d never discovered their shared past? On the other hand, what was going to happen now that they had?
The answer comes soon. Their coffee, tea and nondescript Starbucks pastry depleted, they rise and walk out together into the Los Angeles smog. Before they turn in opposite directions, they wave quickly and say goodbye with a vague promise to keep in touch.
They never see or hear from each other again.
For her first date in almost four decades, Mona has purchased a new turtle-neck pullover. As she waits for Bob at the entrance to one of West L.A.’s Starbucks, she feels slightly nauseated.
When a trim, white-haired man opens the door, she recognizes him from his picture; they manage self-conscious smiles as they shake hands, stand in line to order, then take seats next to each other on mauve faux-leather armchairs. She’s drinking coffee; he’s drinking chamomile tea. For some reason she finds his choice reassuring.
Mona breaks the silence. “So did you go to school in San Jose?” A safe topic, though rather inane, she thinks, for two people who’ve lived more than a half century since school. But she can’t ask about where he worked, or what college he went to. Maybe he didn’t go to college; and questions about careers are verboten to her since they can be seen as a way of asking how much money he has. (Mona realizes that she is sometimes circumspect to a fault.)
Bob says, yes, he did go to school in San Jose, and then asks what brought her to L.A.
“No special reason, I mean school or career or anything,” Mona says. “It’s just I married a guy who came from here, though he wasn’t a doctor, actor, lawyer, professor or blacksmith, so I didn’t get any alimony.” She covers up a little laugh with a little cough.
Bob looks at her quizzically. “Blacksmith?” A pause, then “Oh, I get it, you’re joking."
Not to be deterred, Mona leans a bit toward Bob. “So what about you? When and why did you come to be an Angelino?”
But Bob has turned slightly to stare at a display of ergonomic coffee filters. Mona taps on the arm of his chair. “I mean, for an acting career? For something else in ‘the industry’?” she teases. “Or did you move here for some family reason?”
According to the dating service, Bob is a widower—unless of course he fibbed, something Mona can’t help considering. But, then again, why would anyone cheating on his wife be looking on a site for “mature” women?
Mona immediately regrets her teasing. And her reference to “the industry” was show-offy and perhaps even mean, as she herself has nothing to do with the entertainment business. And “Angelino”? Has she unconsciously acquired a stilted style of talking for this first date? Is this maybe the first step to talking in tongues?
Bob’s still enthralled with the coffee filters, and he doesn’t answer why or how long he’s lived in L.A. Mona drops the subject and they go on to quickly exhaust the topic of the difference between San Jose and Los Angeles bagels; turns out bagels—even Starbucks’s—are a convenient ice-breaker, though only for a few minutes.
Mona continues asking seemingly innocuous questions, which Bob once in a while answers: Do you have brothers and sisters? Where have you lived? Children? Pets? Grandkids? Parents still alive? (Never mind that they’d be pushing 100 by now.) There’s a lot to “catch up” on since their San Jose days. Though, of course, they aren’t, strictly speaking, “catching up,” since they didn’t know each other back then.
They sit for a while in an uncomfortable silence. Mona fidgeting with the lid of her cardboard cup of plain coffee and Bob dunking the tea bag in his cup over and over again to the rhythm of Starbucks’s brand of muzak.
Until, that is, they somehow discover that not only were they raised in the same city but that they’d gone to the same junior high. “Oh my god,” says Mona. “Yeah, can you beat that?” says Bob, looking a bit animated for the first time, which puzzles Mona.
Now he wants to know when she was at their junior high. Trying to find out her age?
She’s been dreading this question (she’d fibbed on the dating site and he probably has figured that out), and mumbles very quickly, “Um, in the sixties.” She’s hedging—she knows exactly the years she was in junior high. But from his fit looks, she guesses he is substantially younger than she, and she’s frightened of being more precise, even though their conversation thus far isn’t going anywhere. So she reminds herself to sit up straighter, and to dispense her “truths” just a little at a time.
“Well, I’ll be damned: I was there in the sixties too.” Bob looks surprised, almost enthusiastic, or maybe he just has a nervous habit of batting his eyebrows up and down. Also in tune to the muzak?
By now Mona’s figured out that since she graduated junior high in the early sixties, at most Bob would be only eight or nine years younger than she.
Bob’s hair is thick and curly. He has a trimmed mustache and muscled arms, and a virtually unlined face. His only aesthetic imperfection, Mona notes, is a protruding belly, the kind athletic boys and beer-drinkers develop by middle age. Not bad, she thinks, at least in the physical realm.
Mona ponders her own looks: She was once a brunette with large dark eyes, and very thin. But now she wears glasses and has that blonde, frosted hair so prized by “sophisticated” older women for disguising the grey. She’s also put on lots of weight, though she can’t bear to think of herself as fat. She surreptitiously tugs at the bottom of her turtle-neck to make sure it is still covering her squishy waistline.
Bob brings Mona out of her reverie: “Want to share a pastry?” he asks, leaping up and getting in line at the counter before she can answer. She’s relieved: They could both use some breathing room.
He returns and cuts the Danish into two precise halves, and gives her one. Before he takes his first bite, he proclaims: “Yeah, junior high! You’re at such an impressionable age. We were so young—“
“And didn’t know it,” she talks over him -- too quickly.
“You can say that again.” He pauses to chew, then continues. “You know, I think the best years of my life were in junior high.”
Really, she thinks, they were possibly my worst. All those cliques and oily skin. And girls had to wear full slips and oxfords, even though it was a public school. Boys had to wear belts to hold their pants up. No jeans. God, were things different now!
“What did you like about junior high?” she asks politely.
“Well, it wasn’t school so much, though I actually liked woodshop. The most fun was playing tackle football every Saturday with the guys. I guess you could call that (he makes air quotes) 'male bonding.’ ” He raises his eyebrows, and makes a moue, possibly unused to talking like this.
Mona takes another sip of her bitter coffee, thinking that it should be called Charbucks, as she stirs in another packet of artificial sweetener to take away the scorched taste. She catches herself in time to censor these thoughts before they leave her mouth.
But as though she has actually said them out loud and now needs to redeem herself, she rushes on to another safe topic: Then vs. Now.
“Wait a minute!” she says, raising her palm. “Me too. I had a date for my junior high grad night. I wore a spaghetti-strap dress and dyed-to-match high heels. We went to some pretentious restaurant on Post Street where they show you big slabs of raw steaks and you got to pick out the one you wanted them to cook for you. What voracious carnivores we were back then.” (Bob has told her he’s vegetarian.) “And,” she continues, “how did you know you got the steak you ordered? DNA?” she quips, challenging Bob to laugh. He doesn’t.
Mona keeps talking: “It was kind of surreal, you know. The waiters must have been laughing at us trying to be so grown up! I mean we were all of thirteen or fourteen!” Mona stops, sensing that she is talking too much, because Bob is squirming as if to settle more comfortably into his shirt. Has she said something wrong, or has something she’s said rubbed him the wrong way?
“You’re kidding!” Bob interrupts, suddenly coming back to life. He tells Mona that he and his junior-high grad night date had gone to a fancy restaurant with raw steaks too.
“Come to think of it,” he enunciates slowly, “her name was Mona too. That’s kind of strange, don’t you think?”
“Oh my god. Get this!” says Mona, bringing her left hand to her mouth. “I think my date was a Bob too. We’d been in homeroom together for all three years, but only had that one date. Then we went to different high schools and never saw each other again.”
“What was your maiden name?” Bob asks tepidly. What happened to his enthusiasm? Mona wonders? Bob says “1962, right? You graduated in 1962?”
Oh no, thinks Mona, her left hand now hovering over her chin. Wait a minute. It just can’t be. Her date was Bob Sturgeon, not Bob Finn, the guy sitting next to her. But now that she looks at Bob more closely, she can definitely see a resemblance to junior-high Bob. In fact, she marvels that she hadn’t seen it sooner. But why would a man change his last name?
Greatly embarrassed, she asks: “Bob, I’m confused. Was your name ever ‘Sturgeon’?” I mean . . . you aren’t him, are you?”
“Oh, you must be Mona Risling. Now I remember you! God, have I changed that much?” (Have I? thought Mona.) “Now I get it. I changed my last name to my wife’s. She had a little boy from her first marriage and we didn’t want him to have to change his last name, so I changed mine.”
Male bonding, vegetarian, and now this!
“I can’t believe it. We’ve been sitting here for almost an hour and never once realized we knew each other before. This is incredible, don’t you think?” Her voice fades out as she realizes, midway through her exclamation, that Bob is not as delighted as she is to make this discovery. And she remembers that then, as now, she doesn’t feel any real connection with Bob, and apparently, neither does he with her.
Nonetheless, Mona still thrills to the coincidence, which has turned out not to be such a coincidence after all. What, she wonders, if they’d never discovered their shared past? On the other hand, what was going to happen now that they had?
The answer comes soon. Their coffee, tea and nondescript Starbucks pastry depleted, they rise and walk out together into the Los Angeles smog. Before they turn in opposite directions, they wave quickly and say goodbye with a vague promise to keep in touch.
They never see or hear from each other again.
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