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I want you to meet. This is—”
Someone had neglected to push one of the folding chairs all the way back in, and the big blonde
girl, already holding her hand out to me and composing her how-nice-to-meet-you smile, tripped over
it and went spilling forward. The chair came with her, tipping up, and I saw the potential for a nasty
accident if one of the legs speared her in the stomach.
I dropped my cup of beer in the grass, took a giant step forward, and grabbed her as she fell. My
left arm went around her waist. My right hand landed higher, grabbing something warm and round
and slightly yielding. Between my hand and her breast, the cotton of her dress slipped over the
smooth nylon or silk of whatever she was wearing beneath. It was an intimate introduction, but we
had the banging angles of the chair for a chaperone, and although I staggered a little against the
momentum of her hundred and fifty or so pounds, I kept my feet and she kept hers.
I took my hand away from the part of her that is rarely grasped when strangers are introduced and
said: “Hello, I’m—” Jake. I came within a hair of giving my twenty-first-century name, but caught it
at the very last moment. “I’m George. How nice to make your acquaintance.”
She was blushing to the roots of her hair. I probably was, too. But she had the good grace to laugh.
“Nice to make yours. I think you just saved me from a very nasty accident.”
Probably I had. Because that was it, you see? Sadie wasn’t clumsy, she was accident-prone. It was
amusing until you realized what it really was: a kind of haunting. She was the girl, she told me later,
who got the hem of her dress caught in a car door when she and her date arrived at the senior prom,
and managed to tear her skirt right off as they headed for the gym. She was the woman around whom
water fountains malfunctioned, giving her a faceful; the woman who was apt to set an entire book of
matches on fire when she lit a cigarette, burning her fingers or singeing her hair; the woman whose
bra strap broke during Parents’ Night or who discovered huge runs in her stockings before school
assemblies at which she was scheduled to speak.
She was careful to mind her head going through doors (as all sensible tall folks learn to be), but
people had a tendency to open them incautiously in her face, just as she was approaching them. She
had been stuck in elevators on three occasions, once for two hours, and the year before, in a Savannah
department store, the recently installed escalator had gobbled one of her shoes. Of course I knew none
of this then; all I knew on that July afternoon was that a good-looking woman with blonde hair and
blue eyes had fallen into my arms.
“I see you and Miss Dunhill are already getting along famously,” Mimi said. “I’ll leave you to get to
know one another.”
So, I thought, the change from Mrs. Clayton to Miss Dunhill had already been effected, legal formalities or
not. Meanwhile, the chair was stuck into the sod by one leg. When Sadie tried to tug it free, it
wouldn’t come at first. When it did, the back of the chair ran nimbly up her thigh, hiking her skirt
and revealing one stocking-top all the way to the garter. Which was as pink as the roses on her dress.
She gave a little cry of exasperation. Her blush darkened to an alarming shade of firebrick.
I took the chair and set it firmly aside. “Miss Dunhill . . . Sadie . . . if I ever saw a woman who
could use a cold beer, that woman is you. Come with me.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m so sorry. My mother told me never to throw myself at men, but I’ve
never learned.”
As I led her toward the line of kegs, pointing out various faculty members along the way (and
taking her arm to steer her around a volleyball player who looked like he was going to collide with her
as he backpedaled to return a high lob), I felt sure of one thing: we could be colleagues and we could
be friends, maybe good friends, but we’d never be any more than that, no matter what Mimi might
hope for. In a comedy starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day, our introduction would have undoubtedly
qualified as “meet cute,” but in real life, in front of an audience that was still grinning, it was just