I’ve lived in Seattle for nearly nine years now, long enough to know that the stereotype of the grungy, forgetful vegan pot-head Pacific Northwesterner is only sometimes apt. But when my husband mentioned last week that his New-York loving brother was considering a job at Reed College in Portland, I blurted, “But he’d hate it there!,” my impression of Reed being that it’s comprised entirely of people fitting this stereotype and my impression of my hip, snappy-dressing brother-in-law being that he has little tolerance for forgetful pot-heads or vegans—though I could be wrong.
My wildly oversimplified notions of Reed are based on stories from a polyamorous, Utilikilt-wearing Seattleite I went out with once (before I knew he was polyamorous or owned a Utilikilt or that The Polyamorous Utilikilt-Wearer was yet another Pacific Northwest type) and from a guy I went to college with back East who had transferred to Swarthmore from Reed at the beginning of his junior year. “Jake Anderson”—a blond, Canadian hockey-player who I met in biology lab—had made the switch from the tiny West Coast college to the tiny East Coast one, he said, because his sartorial style—worn-out vintagey tweed blazers over worn-out old shapeless t-shirts—was “too preppy” by Pacific Northwest standards. This solidified my impression of the region as terrifyingly grungy. Jake didn’t feel like he fit in Portland, so he graced us with his soothing Northern vowels. He was good at biology and paid attention to me and could run really fast, and for the two years of college we overlapped, I suffered a massive crush on the guy.
I grew up in Iowa, and to my Midwestern eyes, Jake’s style seemed the exact right amount of preppy—which I figured made me the perfect match for him. Eventually we would fall (mutually) in love, get married, move to Toronto, and have two or three blond babies—one of which I would grudgingly allow to play hockey. The fact that Jake had a serious girlfriend didn’t phase me. He never introduced her to me, so how serious could she really be?
My deeply unrealistic sense of how the whole dating thing worked was mostly because I’d never done it. Even my attempts at flirtation were flimsy—angling to spend extra time with Jake working on our lab reports and inviting him to monthly dinners on “pasta bar night” at the college dining hall. In my mind, I was offering myself up as a clearly superior alternative to his current girlfriend. In his mind I was probably a mildly amusing younger-sister-type with a decent head for science. I would sneak frequent glances at him during class, and when he caught me he’d smile and give a little wave—all the encouragement I needed to start imagining how “Anderson” would sound as my last name.
I was by any measure a late bloomer—no sign of my period until 10th grade, no real signs of interest from the opposite sex until, oh, graduate school. While my peers were reading Sweet Valley High books and getting their first kisses at summer camp, I was busy becoming a certified Super Sitter and learning to sew hair scrunchies to sell at my Mennonite hairdresser’s salon. I read every book in the young adult section of the public library starring a misunderstood female protagonist and was especially fond of the stories in which the protagonist dies—but only after her family realizes that she was their greatest blessing and the popular kids come to visit her in the hospital and realize that she actually was super cool—they’d just never noticed.
Throughout middle- and high school and well into college I saw no action. I was—and am—an observer. From my corner vantage point I did, however, develop scores of crushes. In as much as someone who doesn’t date can have a “type,” Jake wasn’t actually mine. I gravitated—in the privacy of my own mind—towards skinny, brown-haired, atheist Jews. Jake was buff and blond and decidedly WASPy, but I loved him anyway.
He volunteered for the tiny local fire department, and seemingly every time the two of us dined together the alarm would sound from the station at the base of campus and Jake would run off mid-bite, leaving me to clear his tray and throw away his uneaten food and pine, pine, pine. The fact that he had a girlfriend wasn’t the problem—the volunteer firefighting was the problem.
Every guy who had ever expressed a lick of interest in me had been unavailable. The guy who cheered when we were paired as dance partners in chorus in 9th grade turned out to be gay. (Surprise!) The guy who occasionally held my hand in art class in 11th grade was practically married to a much older girl. The guy who taught me calculus in 12th grade would have been violating any number of social norms—and laws—had I gotten my way. I felt entirely unnoticed by boys, so when one wanted to hold my hand or write me a hall pass so I could stay after class or eat dinner with me for five minutes before being called off to wield a giant fire hose—obviously they were sort of interested, right? Otherwise, wouldn’t they ignore me like all the other boys?
For two years Jake and I met up for the occasional dinner and exchanged pleasantries whenever our paths crossed—which on a campus of 1,200 students happens at least once a day. After he graduated, I had two years of school left. I thought of him every time the town fire alarm sounded and wondered if something in his new, post-college life reminded him of me.
My expectations from boys remained exceptionally low until sometime after graduate school when I moved to Seattle (despite, not because of, the hippie stereotype) and finally realized I was a massively late bloomer. I invested in a pair of cat-eye glasses, started taking filmmaking classes, and suddenly I was getting actual dates. The cool boys of Seattle thought I was cool, and most of them weren’t even vegan. More importantly, some of them wanted to sleep with me—at least until their moms caught wind of the fact that their 23-year-old guitarist/bassist/composer/filmmaker sons were dating a 31-year-old woman with a quickly growing collection of newborn-sized hats and onesies.
Eventually I found a moderately skinny, brown-haired, atheist Jew who thought (and to the best of my knowledge still thinks) I’m sexy and was old enough to also want babies (and his mother was old enough to want grandbabies). Here I am at thirty-five, married to an emergency medicine doctor with a fondness for t-shirts advertising the firefighting companies of his search and rescue buddies. When I hear the wail of a siren these days, I do not think of Jake. Instead I wonder whether they’re taking burn victims to my husband’s hospital. He likes dealing with that sort of thing.
When I heard a dozen or so fire trucks coming down our street yesterday, though, my first thought was the same as anyone else’s: I hope our house doesn’t catch on fire. I grabbed the baby and went to survey the scene. Apparently a neighbor had left a pot on the stove a while she was away. By the time we arrived, the flames had been doused and the few firefighters left were giving neighborhood kids tours of the one lingering engine.
“Look,” I said to the baby, pointing to the big red truck. “That’s a fire engine—like in your book.” She started blowing at the truck because that’s what you do to a candle on a birthday cake and to a one-year-old birthday candle = fire = fire engine. “And that,” I said, pointing at one of the guys in full regalia, “is a firefighter. They’re our friends and help keep us safe.”
The baby started blowing at the firefighter, who glanced our way. I peered at his face under his helmet and found myself gazing once again into the eyes of Jake Anderson—and I don’t mean metaphorically.
Standing before me, two doors down from my house in Seattle was a slightly older, slightly beefier version of the blond, Canadian, hockey-playing object of my unrequited affection 3,000 miles away from where we’d last seen each other fifteen years ago.
“Holy shit,” I said. I stared at Jake Anderson. Jake Anderson stared at me.
The only thing different about our stares was that Jake Anderson’s could only be described as blank. He had no idea who I was. I gave a little wave and reminded him my name. Nothing registered on his face. “Swarthmore College?” I added. “Biology lab?”
“We went to college together,” I announced to the various neighbors and firemen who were beginning to stare at me instead of the recently burning house. “He was a volunteer firefighter and every time we had dinner together the alarm would go off and he’d have to leave me stranded,” I laughed—implying that if it had been up to Jake, he would have lingered over his baked ziti and over-steamed broccoli for hours, just to be with me.
“I thought of you the other day,” I told him, explaining about my brother-in-law and the Reed job and why I thought it wouldn’t be a good match.
“I went to Reed!” he said with surprise.
“Yeah,” I stammered… “I remember. That’s my point… The whole preppy thing…” I trailed off in defeat. Here I am, a published writer and award-winning filmmaker married to a cute doctor, raising a cute baby and looking pretty damn cute myself. I’d finally figured out how to forge my own kind of sexy and my own kind of flirty and NOW I was invisible to this guy? Not just “I’ll have dinner with you once a month because you’re good at biology and you’re my lab partner”–invisible but -invisible. One hundred percent nonexistent. No lab reports had ever been co-authored, no rudely interrupted five-minute dinners had ever been had, no ceaseless pining on my part had ever penetrated his consciousness. Jake Anderson had no memory of me whatsoever.
He stepped forward and extended his hand, polite Canadian that he is. “Jake Anderson,” he said, looking me in the eye. Like I wouldn’t know. Like I was some kind of forgetful pot-head or something.
Wilson Diehl | Contributor
Wilson Diehl lives in Seattle where she writes, teaches, and cuts food into very small pieces for her child to eat. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa and has published pieces in Salon, The Iowa Review, Mudfish, The Paterson Literary Review, Seattle Metropolitan, and on buses around Seattle. Her short, sassy film “How to Go on a Man Date” made the rounds on the national film festival circuit and is anthologized in the Seattle Women in Film DVD. She’s currently working on a book of essays about bra shopping, being a reader in a runner’s world, and all the things they don’t tell you about pregnancy or marriage until it’s too late.
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