Free The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir by Elna Baker Page A

you?” and “Have you been aroused lately?” spoken one to another in proper British accents.
    In the midst of this, Jeff turned to me. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll touch your boobs.”
    “What makes you think I want to have them touched?”
    “You do, I can tell.”
    “I hate to burst your bubble,” I said, “but I’m doing just fine without it.”
    Jeff looked directly into my eyes. “By Christmas,” he said, “I will touch your boobs,” like it was part of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” or something. On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: twelve ninnies nipping, eleven peaches peaking, ten knockers knocking, nine mammories mounting, eight maids a-milking, seven sandbags shaking, six pink-nosed puppies, five nipple rings, four fun bags, three French hills, two tittie jugs, and a partridge in a pear tree! Normally this would be considered sexual harassment, but since Jeff was average cute, I let it slide. The whole “Attractive Boy + Sexual Repression = Ethical Hypocrisy” equation.
    The group was still laughing when the bell rang, putting an end to our game. “I love the sound of that bell,” the shortest elf announced. “Every time it rings, I get so aroused .”
    After that, on slow days at work, when no one was looking, Jeff would walk by me holding two plush pumpkins pressed against his chest. Another time he stole the letters B , O , O , B , and S from an alphabet puzzle and left them outside my locker. I told him that under no circumstance would he or anyone be touching my boobs. Then I took two light sabers from the Star Wars section, held them in an X across my chest, and pranced around the store. My reaction only egged him on, of course.
    Again, I was cautious not to get caught. Losing my job for sexual misconduct would be even worse than losing it for inappropriate handling of a plastic baby.
    We sent secret messages back and forth—a topless Barbie, a plastic cow with enormous udders, a breast pump from the maternity collection—for about a month. It was actually pretty fun—seeing as it was the most male attention I’d had all year.
    After all the build-up, we both understood that there was bound to be some sort of follow-through. So one night, when Jeff and I happened to walk out of work at the same time, we didn’t go to our respective subway stops. We lingered.
    Since work was our only common bond, we talked about how we both thought that the elves were pretentious. And how we felt badly for the actor assigned to Band in a Box, because the demo kit was missing half the instruments. That’s when Jeff asked, “You hungry?”
    “Always,” I said, and then immediately regretted it because it made me sound like I was always eating. Which, when you weigh two hundred fifty pounds, isn’t the kind of impression you want to make.
    We decided to take the subway to a retro diner near my house. I thought it was a good idea until we were on the train. I live really far from work. We’d already covered all the basic information: where we were from, why we liked acting. We had five stops left and we’d already run out of things to say. You know it’s bad when you catch each other reading the subway advertisements.
    When we got to the diner we ordered milk shakes, cheesy fries, and hot dogs and sat across from each other in a cozy booth, still scrambling for conversation. That’s when I noticed, a few feet from our table, a chest full of board games.
    “Want to play?” I suggested. Jeff pulled out Monopoly, Connect Four, and Boggle, but they were all missing pieces. So we ended up choosing the game Guess Who? That was when things got weird.
    Jeff sat the Guess Who? board in the center of our table and explained the game: We both had to pick a card from the deck. This card would show us who our player was. The object of the game was to guess the other person’s “player” by asking yes-and-no questions.
    “I think I remember this,” I said, and I picked a