Ellen was, in fact, tall. But this seemed like an unnecessarily boring adjective to apply to her, with so many others available. By contrast, I could fully understand an allusion to the niceness of Ellen’s ass, which was a very apt description—in spite of my surprise at hearing a stranger direct it at me so pointedly.
“Do I know you?” I asked, peering through my glasses for a clue.
“No. Do you know her?”
“Actually,” I confessed, “I do know Ellen. Or I did.”
“Aha,” said my foil. “So, did it feel as good as it looks?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The ass, dude. In your hands. When you squeezed it.”
This dialogue, I noted, had quickly taken a surreal turn, even by my tolerant standards as a modernist literary scholar. “What makes you infer that Ms. Sanderson and I were . . . intimate?” I ventured.
The woman laughed. Her black curls fluttered around her mirthful cheeks, and her generous breasts jiggled under her striped, flour-streaked T-shirt. The laughter rippled through her with an overtly sexual sensuality, suggesting some Renaissance painter’s depiction of pleasure.
And when she turned her back on me briefly to attend to the stove, I saw that even her broad, attractive derriere appeared to be enlivened by the hilarity.
“Why are you laughing at me?”
“I’m not laughing at you,” she claimed, turning back to face me. “I’m laughing at the way you talk. You know, I’ve been to college, too, but I don’t give seminars at the deli counter.”
I decided I had nothing to lose by engaging with this personality on her own terms. “Okay, then . . . what do you give at the deli counter?”
“Point to you, professor,” she said, still chuckling. “That’s more like it.”
“I’m not a professor yet,” I replied. My obligatory humility was denatured, I feared, by my poorly concealed delight at the ad hoc promotion. “I’m still a graduate student.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I can’t imagine how stuffy you’re going to be when you’re a full-on professor, then.” Her smirk returned, bolder than before. And I had a suspicion she’d chosen the term full-on specifically so as to evoke hard-on. I was intrigued by her attitude.
“I’d like to talk to you,” I said quietly.
“You are talking to me. Or maybe you thought this was a cardboard cutout.”
“No. Not with that beauty of a behind.” I considered a wink, but elected instead to raise an eyebrow.
“I thought you said you liked Ellen Sandelman’s behind.”
“Sanderson. And I didn’t say that—you did.”
“But it’s true.”
“Yes, it’s true. But Ellen Sanderson’s behind is neither here nor there.”
“It has to be somewhere. An ass like that can’t just vanish into thin air.”
Should I vanish into thin air myself, I wondered, rather than get drawn any further into this unpredictable interaction? No, I concluded.
“What’s your name?” I demanded cordially.
“Tammy.” She shrugged as if I’d asked an irrelevant question. By my calculations, this was the first straight answer I’d had from her. And it might well be the last.
“I’d like a pancake,” I informed Tammy, playing for time.
The establishment had a special way of serving its signature pancakes: a single flapjack was lubed up with butter, then folded like a taco and stuffed into an elongated variation on the classic paper french-fry carrier, in which posture its yearning edges were drizzled with syrup. In due course, and with Tammy watching me, I brought the soft, sticky pancake to my mouth.