Free 14 Stories by Stephen Dixon

or in front? We part, we meet, we sit on the sculpture garden steps drinking foreign beer. Before we separated at the store I said eat lightly if you have to eat at home at all tonight as we might as well have dinner after the museum. She says I’m the first teacher she’s gone out with other than a dance instructor who’s her own age. I say I dated many students when I was a student but so far all the single agreeable teachers and college teaching aides I’ve asked have turned me down. Do I say that? We say goodnight. I say I’d like to kiss her now but sort of feel funny about it and she says I don’t see why we shouldn’t. We do. Three shorts and a long. I pick her up at home the following night, meet her mom, am offered a drink. Judy sits beside me on the couch and we want to hold hands but don’t. We have dinner out or see a film. We walk, we talk. I say if I had my own apartment would she come back to it with me now and she says why not? I say I’ve an old car and would she like to go camping next weekend and she says that sound like fun. I’ve no tents but two sleeping bags that can be zippered up into one. We make love in a big bag. Later in the summer we go abroad for two months. When we return we search for our own apartment in the old neighborhood so I can still help out with my dad and mom. We’re married by the end of the year. By the end of the next year we’ve a child. A girl or boy and it’s conceived by natural passion and delivered by natural childbirth and I’m there in the delivery room with her, clasping her hand when I’m not drawing her in labor and giving birth, and then sketches of the cord being cut and umbilicus being sewn and child held aloft and washed if they’re still held aloft and washed, and bundled up by the nurse, suckled by my wife, sleeping and weeping and caterwauling behind incubation-room glass, other fathers and grandparents making faces at the new infants, the room, window view and various objects in this room where Judy sleeps and her three roommates. And we’re both very happy. We’re considered an ideal couple. We love each other very much. I continue to draw, engrave, assist my parents and substitute teach.
    My mother knocks on my bedroom door. “I’m setting a place for dinner for you tonight, and don’t say no.”
    â€œNot hungry now, ma, thanks.” I exercise, shower, dress. It’s still light out. The folks are at the dinner table. “Sit down,” dad says. I wash the cooking utensils that are in the sink, kiss my parents on the cheek and go to the park, sit by the lake, draw an abandoned rowboat, jog for a mile, watch the carousel close and the tail end of a women’s softball game, draw a catcher’s mitt and mask on the grass, buy sweet creamy pastries for my mother, dietetic cookies for my father, go to that same grocery store for fresh green beans and a four-pack of stout. Would I speak to her if she were here now? “You wouldn’t,” a friend recently said about something else, “because you never want to see your fantasies end,” but I don’t think he’s right. I wouldn’t speak to her without her speaking to me first. She could become repulsed or afraid if I did and I could become embarrassed and suspect in the store I’ve been shopping at for three years. She’d have to drop something and I could stoop to pick it up. Or stretch for something out of reach and I could say “May I help?” After I got whatever it was she reached for or dropped she’d say thank you and I’d mention the school we’re both familiar with and maybe a conversation could then begin. It could continue in the street and that neighborhood bar where I’d invite her for a beer. If she came into the store now I’d only look at her a few times, maybe get into her aisle under the pretense of searching for an item I never do find or