he Girl

For most of her forty-eight years, Sally Hayes had, for all outward appearances, seemed to be an average person. She was right there, right in the middle. The median girl. The mean. Not high, not low, just in the middle.. Average.

Kansas City was home, even though she had long ago moved away. It fit right in with Sally, though. Middle of America. She even went to school in Missouri. Right there at the University. A Mizzou Tiger. But not Sally, oh, no, she would never, even in those early days, have ever though of herself as a tiger. Tigers have stripes, and sharp teeth, and they stand out in the jungle. Sally thought it wise to never stand out. Blend in is always better. Less trouble will come your way when you are part of the scenery. Once, one of her friends said to her that if she sat on a couch too long, she would disappear, become a part of the couch’s fabric. Inside herself, Sally agreed. "Chameleon," she thought. "What’s wrong with being a chameleon? Much safer that way."

It wasn’t that Sally was a shrinking violet. Nor was she unattractive to the point where men avoided her. In fact, in her youth she had a tight little body that attracted flies, and she was reasonably communicative. So, for those two reasons, guys liked being around her. She just wasn’t, well, "outward bound," as her live-in grandmother would say.

She dated. College guys, mostly.

In her Junior year at Missouri, she met this one guy. He had been a distant neighbor in Kansas City and they had gone to the same high school, but she really didn’t remember him.

But he was sweet to her and she liked that. Just like her, Pete was kind of part of the furniture. Moreover, Pete knew that he should find a nice partner and marry, and now was the time- to find the girl, that is.

It was a tough call, though, for Sally.

Sitting in her room that fall evening, she was visited by two spectral callers. At first she thought they were two dorm mates from the floor below. But soon enough, she realized they were no mere mortals, but water nymphs. She thought of them as drifting in from just beyond the open window, but they could just as easily have floated through the doorway. Or just sort of "came to exist," in her room, neither having drifted nor floated from anywhere.

Spectral visitor number one was a spring nymph, of the class Pegaeae. Eternally young and seductive, this nymph had come to torment Sally.

"Forget this Pete guy, Sally," the nymph warned. "I’m here to tell you. He’s a duffus."

"I know what you are thinking: this Pete’s a nice guy, and he’ll make a nice living, and he’ll make a nice home, and he’ll make nice kids for you. Terminal boredom! Let me tell you, Sally. Forget it!" she hissed.

"Go find your James Dean. Find a guy with a sports car, and a leather jacket, one who can read Shakespeare’s sonnets to you under a tree on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific at Malibu. Hell, why marry now? You haven't’ even seen Chicago, let alone Malibu?"

Sally was thunder-struck.

Spectral visitor number two offered the rebuttal.

Number two appeared to be a variant form of fountain nymph, one of the Crinaeae. Very small, very lawyerly in appearance. She even wore a black suit with a below-the-knee skirt, and very sensible shoes.

Sally related to spectral visitor number two right from the get go.

"My nymph friend here is misleading you. Go look it up in the mythology books!" she intoned, " you’ll see, they lie!"

"They lure you in with words of adventure and romance. Then, you dive into their pool - and they drown you," she said gravely, looking downward toward her spectator shoes.

"You need life, Sally. I came here to refute this lying swamp nymph and save you from death. Listen to me!"

In those days, Sally was a practical woman, and she heard the warning that spectral visitor number two had spoken. Even so, Sally’s head was spinning.. She remembered the myth of Hylas, the youthful crew member of the Argo, who, having been sent to an island pool to find water, found water nymphs instead, and was lured to his death.

During her high school years, she had a color print of John William Waterhouse’s painting of this event hanging on her bedroom wall. She remembered it well, for it portrayed the central moment of the myth: young Hylas, youthful, handsome, perhaps gullible, comes upon a forest pool containing seven remarkably tempting maidens, their doe-like eyes and delicate features proffering no hint of their murderous plans. She had never thought of herself as one of those vapid creatures in the pool, but rather as poor Hylas, at mortal risk, being tempted by the lusts of the flesh, which will assure his death.

Remembering her bedroom wall, Sally spoke up, with a tone of decision: "I choose the safe path for my future. You, nymph, be gone, back to your pool with your James Dean thoughts!"

Sally married Pete, and together, they mapped out the perfect life. A lawyer.. A teacher. Two girls. A home in Oxford, Mississippi. Oh, and that summer place in Destin, Florida, on the Panhandle. Very nice, all together. All very practical.

The Guy

New Jersey is as about as far away from Missouri as you can get.

Sammy never saw much of any other place, growing up, except for the Shore in the summers, and occasional day trips to the City. That would be New York City, by the way, lest there be any misunderstanding that any other lesser city might be confused with the Big Apple.

Sammy lived in a part of Jersey that seemed to be a time warp to most outsiders. It was as if, in the nineteen sixties, North Jersey has somehow dropped behind in time, and was still lagging back in the Depression times of the nineteen thirties.

It was a place of big cities, one lined up next to the other. You had to be a native to tell where Linden ended, and Rozelle Park started, or where Elizabeth’s industrial zone oozed into Newark’s factories. Immigrants everywhere. Languages everywhere. In fact, the summer of his Junior year, Sammy remembered visiting the old, outdoor, Second Avenue Market in Elizabeth, and counting five, no, six different languages being spoken and yelled and hawked. He loved it. He drank it in. No talk of "Cultural Diversity" in those days. Diversity just was. Germans. Irish. Poles. Italians. Russian Jews and Sephardic Jews, they were all at the market.

For Sammy, life was a smorgasbord. You reached out and tasted everything. You took chances. Risk was everywhere. While disaster lurked nearby, reward shone out bright, like the Star of Bethlehem.

So! It was off to college for Sammy at Seton Hall. A great school, one that could light the fires of a lifetime of exploration and learning if you let it.

It took Sammy all the way to his thirty-second year to slow down enough to find a bride, and start a three- kid family.

His wife might as well have been his sister, the two looked so much alike. Black hair, short, a little chubby. She led her life, and Sammy settled into his life with the travel agency. He got to travel some with his work, and he liked that. It wasn’t that he needed to be away from home and the wife-and-kids. They were good kids, and she was a good wife. But, there was trouble:

Sammy had his spectral visitors, too.

His sailed into view, during his predictable vacations at Belmar, on the Jersey Shore.

He never expected them to appear, they just did. They usually appeared in late afternoon, while he was sitting under a rented umbrella on the beach at 18th Avenue, where he liked to sit - because that’s the part of Belmar where the college girls liked to camp out, so girl watching was good there.

His wife was content with that stretch of beach, so everybody was happy. Sort of happy, anyway.

The first of several specters appeared to him while his wife and kids were off to Sideroff’s to buy hot dogs and fries.

Like the other spectral visitors who would follow, the first one to approach Sammy looked for all the world like one of the bikini clad honeys who paraded up and down the shoreline.

But she wasn’t human. She was a naiad, a nymph of the ocean, an Oceanid.

"Yo! Sammy!" she yelled to him as she walked up to his umbrella. "You can’t be doing this to yourself. How long are you going to let yourself sink into this tar pit?"

Tar pit? Sammy knew exactly what she meant. And over time, the second, and the third, and the fourth naiad said more or less the same thing to him.

At first, as the summer wore on, Sammy listened to these ocean nymphs. But he knew he had made choices, and commitments, and he could no longer just jump on his Harley and head out to the Poconos, like when he was single.

By the third summer at 18th Avenue, his spectral visitors just stopped approaching him. He could see them parading up and down the water’s edge from time to time, but they just looked up at him, staring mournfully at him and shaking their heads. They no longer spoke.

Eventually, the naiads just drifted off to some other beach, never to be seen by Sammy again.

By his fifteenth summer at Belmar, his life had become a slow rhythm, as predictable as a sunrise. In his forty-eighth year, he had almost forgotten that the Oceanids patrolled the 18th Avenue beach.

Lightning

Nobody has ever claimed that these gods were perfect creatures. Far from it. They make mistakes as well. Unintentioned mistakes, but mistakes nevertheless.

The mistake this time was that after all these years of guarding Sally Hayes from above, and assuring her practical life, the lawyer-nymph let her guard down for an hour when one of the bikini-clad Oceanids offered to buy her a drink of nectar in the bar at the Hyatt Inner Harbor Hotel, in Baltimore.

That would be the same hotel where Sally was in the third day of attending a teacher’s conference on "Diversity in the Classroom."

That would also be the same time that Sammy was in his second day of interminable visits to Baltimore area "destination" hotels.

It was the spring nymph’s idea, but it was the ocean nymph who threw the bolt of lightning. The lawyer-nymph, for once, was not around to stop it. It made all the difference.

Ten o’clock in the evening is an excellent time to take a walk along Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. It’s so full of life at that hour, electric with music, perhaps, from a small band playing on the deck at "City Lights."

Walking in a westward direction, Sam had just inspected the submarine tied up permanently next to the Aquarium. At the same time, Sally was walking eastward, she from the west where her hotel loomed over the harbor. Their paths would cross directly in front of the USS Constitution - just as the nymph had planned.

Two strangers, their eyes met for the first time.

Then, just as it’s ever been, the lightning bolt of the gods strikes them both of the top of their heads.

The fountain nymph was furious, but helpless, as she finished her nectar and saw what had happened. She knew the sadness that would follow: it always had..

Sally could never remember a moment like this one. First, she was walking, looking at that old sailing ship, and this guy is passing her, she had hardly noticed him.

Then, a flash, perhaps the headlight of a passing car on Eastern Avenue. Maybe it was a tourist’s camera, who knows? But what’s this? Her legs, they seem not to be able to move! And this guy, he’s talking to her:

"Such a nice night, and what a wonderful place, this harbor. You live in Baltimore?"

Never. Never. Never had she wanted a stranger, let alone a guy stranger, to come up to her and start a conversation. But suddenly, her legs, they are made of marble. And it’s his eyes, too. Hazel eyes, very troubling. And guess what? She wants to this guy to talk to her.

For his part, Sammy could only describe it as a compulsion.

He hadn’t thought of himself as a flirt, much less a womanizer, but here he was, approaching this pretty dark-haired stranger, one side of his mind wondering what that flash he had just seen was, and with the other side of his brain, he was mustering up all of the courage he could find to actually speak to this stranger. But speak to her he would, he found. He had to: he was under a command, a requirement, he had no choice in the matter.

Suddenly, Sally seemed to have a sense of detachment. It was as if a body double had replaced her as this man spoke to her, and that she could see this scene as if she were floating above the harbor, looking down.

The body double seemed to be doing a mighty good job of it, too, chatting about the weather in Baltimore, the harbor night life, the food at Harborplace.

"Do they drink beer in Kansas City?" Sammy jabbered at her, hoping that the obvious invitation to join him for one who be accepted.

Fusing with her body double, Sally finds herself happily seated at an outdoor table, a glass of very yuppie local brew half drunk in front of her.

Looking across the glass, Sally cannot believe her own words:

"Might your name be James Dean? Do you have a leather jacket? Do you drive a little sports car?"

"Me? Do I look like I should be a Dean?" Sammy chuckled. "My name is Fiore, Sammy Fiore- there’s nothing WASPy about me!"

"Fiore, huh? A flower for me," she found herself saying.

All the nymphs watched as one beer turned to three, and years of lassitude on the part of both Sammy and Sally washed away.

"I knew they’d find their way to her room, they always do," said nymph one to nymph two. "Just you watch," she continued. " they’ll be in orbit about the moon - or so they shall think - in just a few minutes!"

"How sad, really," offered the Oceanid, "such a short time of love for them, and an eternity of loss, and separation - they’ll see that, soon enough!"

"You would think that, my friend," offered the nymph. "We shall see. We always see the ending."

Sally rode the elevator to her room tangled in the arms of Sammy. She needed this support, since she knew she could not stand up alone any longer. At first, she thought that she was ill, that it must be the beer. Then, she thought it was much more than beer, it must be a stroke of some kind, a transient one, the kind where you cannot remember things, or breathe right, or speak well.

Sammy, for himself, thought he must be having a heart attack.

"I’m glad she is here to lean on, this Sally," he thought. "I need her here."

"Need, in more ways than one," thought the nymph when she heard Sammy think this. Nymphs read minds, you know.

Of course, neither of them were sick. The launch of their hearts into orbit about the moon, into weightlessness, made them feel the way they did.

Weightlessness was what Sammy and Sally felt that evening in her bed, as their clothes fell away and orbiting the moon began.

There was no sleep for these two that evening.

It was more talk than anything else. Tangled together, arms enfolded, legs interlocked, they discovered in one night more than they could imagine. Family histories. Past loves. Children. Spouses. Dreams. They were two open books, for the first time ever in each one’s life.

Morning and breakfast arrived, and after the meal, a nap. And then, the orbit continued. There was no discussion of Classroom Diversity or Destination Hotels. Just talk of Sally. And talk of Sammy.

And of returning to their homes on the next day.

Sally, the practical one, was the first one to speak such a thought: "Responsibility," was the dirty word she uttered.

Sammy knew she was right, of course. They could stay together in orbit forever, the two of them. Or, the earth’s gravity could pull them down to the surface again. Down to jobs, and kids, and spouses, and everyday.

And with such thoughts, they broke orbit, and began circling back to the home planet. Or was it two planets? One on the east coast, the other in the Midwest.

Parting was painful, just as the nymph said it would be. It happened on an overlook, with a view of the harbor below them. Like a Hollywood movie, it was rainy-misty that afternoon.

Details are not important. They both remembered the parting as one remembers the death of a parent. It has never really gone away for either of them.

Perhaps it was the closeness to the moon, or perhaps it was orbiting in the airlessness of outer space that changed them both. Afterwards, and for many years, they both saw themselves Phoenixes, risen from burning ashes. Risen not so much from the fire of their meeting, but from the ashes of their previous lives. From the Tar Pit, as it were.

They still speak to each other, not very often, but from time to time. Once, they even met in Boston, briefly, for a few hours, changing planes.

She told him during the layover in Boston that she is different now, because of it all.

"Who wouldn’t be changed? Sally offered. "Orbiting the moon would change anyone."

"Changed, indeed, Sally, and because of you, well, it’s all different now. You know, after we were together, crazy, but I started painting. Still lifes, mostly. Who would know you are the bowl of fruit, or the flowers? But you are."

Walking to her plane, Sammy and Sally remembered back to that night in Baltimore, now a defining moment in both their lives.

"I can’t explain it, Sam, try as I might, I can’t," Sally whispered to him as they kissed goodbye.

We know each other very well now, after these years. We are not ones to fall into a bed with someone after a few hours and a few beers. So why?

I don’t know, Sally," Sammy answered. "it’s a mystery."

A few minutes later, as Sammy turns to leave the terminal, he is struck by what he thinks can only called a "hot flash." With a bright light passing before his eyes, literal thunder rolling in his inner ears, and weakness in his limbs, he wobbles, unnerved, into a seat.

"Really, this is just like when I first saw her," he thought to himself. "What can it be?"

Sally’s plane arched skyward, rising in the afternoon sun westward, on it’s way back to Mississippi. From her window seat, Boston harbor looked like a painting below. It was then that she saw the lightning bolt fall upon her from the heavens above. She saw it coming, straight at her.

Breaking over her, the nymph’s lightning bolt - the same one that moments before had just struck Sammy, energized Sally.