In the Making

It was his hands that won her heart in the beginning. His hands were not the imagined thick strong type you would think belonged to a full-fledged communist. His hands were clean and pale; the kind of hands that looked like they had come out of warm water. His hands suited him perfectly.

It was her first meeting. She dressed looking at herself in the mirror thinking there was nothing new about her to see. Her blue-green eyes were still blue-green; her pale skin was still pale; her thin lips still thin and her blonde scraggly hair still blonde and scraggly. She refocused on applying her lipstick and let her mind wonder why she was making all the extra effort to look perfectly desirable.

She was going to a meeting of the minds, where ideas and philosophies would be noticed over the average good looks of a want-to-be so she can belong communist. But since he first spoke to her at the cafeteria she had felt a desire to try harder, push a bit farther, she found a willingness within her to take the next step forward. Tonight at the meeting he would be there sitting off to the side up front in the first chair of vertical rows in a hall crammed with people standing horizontally.

Tonight she would sit closer to him. Maybe just five rows back or maybe three. No tonight she was going to sit next to him. She had planned the evening over and over in her mind. There he would be when she walked in the hall. He would feel her presence long before he saw her. He would change the direction of his walk circling back not knowing why, but just knowing he had to. Then when she couldn’t bear to watch him unknowingly search for her any longer she would step up beside him. They would smile at each other, but she would look away first. She would blush, be embarrassed by her attraction and she would be unable to lift her chin up to look at him he was so attractive to her.

He would speak to her softly, putting his arm around her waist gently guiding her forward to a seat beside him in his vertical row. She would look at the horizontal world standing around them and she would feel his passions and his convictions. She would believe this time it will be different. This time she has found the one.

The lipstick dropped out of her hand and a little gasp brought her back to the mirror and her unchanged reflection. When would it happen? When would she be different? How many meeting in halls filled with smoke and noise and cups of cold coffee? How many counted and folded brochures before she would be different?

He told her the world could change with her help that she would change if she let herself believe and act on what she believed. She recapped her lipstick, brushed her hair one last time, checked her pantyhose for runs and walked out of her tiny flat throwing her coat over her arm. Tonight would change her. She promised herself she wouldn’t come back to these four walls feeling like she was still waiting for something to happen to her. It had to be tonight. She just couldn’t come back.