Wishing for a Bridge

She is beautiful.

I am not.

I am, however, a coward.

That’s how I assessed the situation. The pale woman stood a full foot shorter than I, and was at least 200 pounds lighter. She was dressed in a very simple white T-shirt tucked into blue jeans. I was dressed in my work uniform – a garish crimson shirt with the “Regal Entertainment” logo emblazoned over my right breast, my nametag slanted to a large degree due to the hasty pin job I had done earlier as I rushed from my apartment to get to work on time.

Her jet-black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, mine was coated in a thin layer of grease. Her skin was smooth; mine covered with thin patches of hair that made me look like Wolverine’s fat cousin. She carried a red bucket, a simple tool that Chance gave her to take ticket stubs.

While I’m referencing comic book characters, Chance – the woman in charge of the Battery City Regal 11 during the Tribeca Film Festival - could have been the Joker’s mother. She had a wide grin, frighteningly sickly epidermal covering, large white teeth, and the penchant to just not understand anything at all. She gave out orders in a way that only a completely insane authoritarian with a laptop could.

After a few seconds of looking over at the tiny, pale woman, she glanced up and caught me staring. I nodded, and after a second muttered something under my breath. It had taken the utmost courage to get that in the air.

“Vaat?” she asked, her voice thick with an accent that I, as an uneducated American, could not place. Instead, I found it utterly charming.

“I said, ‘I’m probably the coolest person you’re going to meet.’”

She smiled, which broke into a laugh. I was smiling, too. The words were the furthest from the truth that I could have spoken. Overweight, dirty shirt, unwashed hair, patchy beard – if I had been slightly cleaner, I would have looked homeless. I felt something surge over me. I wouldn’t call it confidence, but I could feel my cowardice slipping away.

“I’m Richard,” I offered.

She accepted. “Helen.”

I turned to look at Zehner, the odd man also been assigned, by Chance, to my floor. He was better looking than I was by leaps and bounds, but had a few strange ticks. He counted his steps. He walked back and forth in a straight line... and he had the incessant habit of talking about his brilliant idea, as poet laureate of Scranton, to use his fame to shoot off a successful side story to The Chronicles of Narnia, featuring Clovis the lion, Cousin to Aslan.

Zehner was staring at me. Before I had even worked up the nerve to say anything to the tiny, foreign Helen, Zehner had been eyeing her – and counting his steps – and eyeing her, and then counting his steps again. If his pupils hadn’t been bouncing around his eyes like marbles in a washing machine, I’m sure he would have been glaring daggers.

“So, Helen, I detect a hint of an accent. Where might you be from?”

Helen half-smiled, her eyes sparkling. “Gvuess.”

“Oh, no. I’ll just embarrass myself. Don’t want to do that.”

“Come on,” she urged. “Gvuess.”

“If I’m going to make an ass out of myself... London.”

“No.”

“France.”

“You’re just being silly.”

“I know I am. I can’t place your accent.”

“I’m from the Ukraine.”

“Ah! That was my next guess.”

She looked nonplussed, and placed her hands on her hips, giving me an accusatory look.

“No, seriously. That’s the order I always guess in. London, France, Ukraine. Now, guess where I’m from.”

Helen set the bucket on the ground and raised one eyebrow.

“Germany?”

“No.”

“Norway?”

“Closer...”

“Oh, I don’t know... Perhaps the United States of Amewica?”

I shook my head. “Now you’re just getting colder.”

Puzzled, she picked the bucket back up. “Really?”

“No, you’re right.”

If you asked me what we ended up actually talking about over the next three hours, I would only be able to give you a rough summary. We covered certain formalities – favorite movie (my “Igby Goes Down” vs. her “Leaving Las Vegas”), to bands (“The Format” vs. “Velvet Revolver”), to foods (“Anything, look at me,” and she didn’t answer, just laughed at response). She had a bridal magazine, which alarmed me, but she seemed to sense this – assuaging my fears by telling me she was a maid of honor in her friend’s wedding.

“Always a bridesmaid?”

“Too young to marry,” she said. “You?”

“I’m always a bridesmaid, too.”

We made fun of Zehner, who was in earshot, and I was taken in all over again by her sardonic sense of humor. When it came down to brass tacks, she matched me step for step when I made fun of her height, when I made fun of several new releases, made fun of the Tribeca Film Festival – Tom Cruise included.

Color me impressed. She could have knocked me over with a feather.

As we rounded the noon marker, Chance came upstairs.

“Hey, guys, uh – Zehner, looking sharp.”

He had, since the last time I looked at him, donned a nwentoma cloth.

“Michael, you look gross.”

I acknowledged this and said something under my breath about her resembling Jack Nicholson, which Helen agreed with by giving me a shove.

“Helen, we have to move you back downstairs. No other showings up here today. Get your stuff together, move it downstairs. You’ll be working the information table. Got that movie about the Golden Gate Bridge and all those suicides. I think Henry Winkler is coming.” Chance had said that last part to no one in particular, as she had turned and began the descent on the escalator when she mentioned Henry Winkler.

“Only known you three hours, Helen, and they’re already taking you away. The rest of my shift is going to suck.”

“When do you get off?”

I shrugged. “6:00. But I go on break at 2:00.”

Helen nodded. “I leave at 2:15.”

“Ah, I’m going to miss you. They don’t like me hanging around the building while I’m on my break.”

“Well, why don’t you come say goodbye to me before?”

I smiled, and nodded. She turned, and disappeared downstairs.

I wish I could say I played it cool. I wish I could say that even though I was disgusting, I still was able to retain some semblance of charm – but there would be no story if I did.

In the two hours before I went on break, I stood at the ticket booth, and thought several things. The first was, “We hit it off. I’m going to ask for her number.”

A few minutes later, “I misjudged this. No, no, we did hit it off.”

After half an hour, “I did misjudge this. She was being polite to you.”

An hour after, “She’s not going to remember you.”

Two hours after – as I was making my way down the escalator trodden by both Chance and Helen earlier – the thought had turned into a mission directive: Avoid her at all costs.

I saw her sitting down at the information table, flipping through her bridal magazine. I had managed to hide myself in a group of people who were exiting a movie en masse. She was none the wiser as I slipped by and made my way to the locker room. I grabbed my sweater, tossing it carelessly over my head, and stepped back into the hall.

My plan – my brilliant, brilliant, courageous plan – had been to flee to the drug store across the street and hide until Helen was gone and my break was over.

On my way down the hall, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned, expecting to meet someone on my eye line – my manager, an angry patron, anyone other than the small woman. I had to look down to meet her eyes.

“Oh, hey,” I said. I could feel myself blushing – had she seen my excellent avoidance, hiding with the flock of people down the escalator?

Looking back, I probably looked like a polar bear trying to blend in with a group of penguins.

“Hey,” she said, smiling, arms behind her back as if she was dancing. She looked up at me as if she was expecting me to say something – as if she was expecting me to ask her out, ask for her number, or ask her anything at all.

Come on, do it, big guy. She likes you. She’s into you. Look at the way she’s wiggling around.

I cleared my throat. “Oh, hey,” I repeated. “Well...” This is it, big guy, this is your moment. “... Bye.”

I turned and walked away. As soon as I was around the corner, I smacked myself in the head. Real cool, Richard. Real cool. What’s cooler than being cool? Being Richard.

I clocked out, and went back upstairs, hiding out in a theatre. When I went to clock in, I thought, maybe I should apologize. Maybe I actually hurt her feelings – I don’t think she knew how out of character it was for me to actually try talking to her in the first place, but she was nowhere to be found.

Later that day, someone told me that she had been in one of the theatres I had been cleaning – the movie about the Golden Gate Bridge and all those people that just couldn’t take it any more and were too poor to afford a rope or gun or something, but I told them I hadn’t seen her.

It was a lie. I did see her sitting there. My chance at redemption was palpable, within my grasp. But I said nothing. I kept my head down, pretending I couldn’t feel her stare.

When I was halfway through cleaning the auditorium, she left without saying a word.

I regaled the story to Mark the next day. He was one of the few people I worked with that had a firm grasp on the English language.

“You’re an embarrassment to the male gender.”

I conceded this point.

“You’re an embarrassment to the human race.”

I also conceded this point, remembering fondly back to when I was a child, and all I wanted to be when I grew up was a bat.

“If you were any kind of man, you would leave right now, job be damned, and find out what theatre she’s at today.”

I pointed out that I was already an embarrassment to the male gender and the human race, and at this point, I would only serve to hurt her feelings again.

I worked my full shift under the contempt-laden gaze of Mark.

Zehner, however, relished my lament as if it was a sweet candy or one of those pills he took to stop being crazy.

The last proactive step I took to finding out anything about Helen was with Chance. I asked her who Helen was.

Chance answered by asking me if it was legal to steal someone’s internet. When I pressed her for an actual answer, she said she had been working with too many volunteers to remember names or faces – and I scoffed at her aloud. A face like Helen’s? A personality to match?

She was beautiful.

I am not.

I am, however, a coward.

That is how I will forever remember the situation.

I mmmmay have given you this same feedback before, but my only real issue with any of your work is that it's always your voice I'm hearing, never your character's. Your narrative voice is a lot cleverer and you-er than I feel like your narrator actually is.

I only mention it because, well, if you're not going to modify your voice for different narrative characters (I don't know if you're trying for that, if you haven't thought of it or if you just don't care about it as an issue), then why do you write in first person? If you don't want to change your narrative voice, adopt the position of third-person narrator and wryly comment on your action. It'll read as much more... honest, I guess. This reads as disingenuous.

But the actual content is still good.

It's actually a semi-autographical piece, probably why I chose to write it in the first person. And I do have problems changing my voice up. No idea why that is, though.

EDIT: I also find it easier to express ideas if I'm writing in the first person, as well. Tangents are easier to qualify, as well.

A third person narrator can still have a first persony voice. Think "Princess Bride". It can be the voice of the author, or the voice of the guy reading the book to someone, if you like.

I don't know why you have a problem changing your voice up, but I suggest finding another voice, as far from this one as your can get (eg. redneck, stuffy English guy, awkward nerdy girl) and getting as deep in it as possible. Don't write it for the jokes, it's just work-out for your voice muscles.