Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

Not Exactly What I Had in Mind by Roy Blount Page B

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Authors: Roy Blount
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painful.
You’d be hard put to say exactly where one part of her body leaves off and the next begins. You can put your hand on her waist and it feels like all of her is going to pass through there eventually.
If her name is Rita. Think about it. Rita Hayworth, Rita Moreno, Rita Gam, Lovely Rita Meter Maid, Rita in the movie Educating Rita. And, what the heck (say you’re a congressman or something), Rita Jenrette.
I’m going to skip over a few obvious ones here.
If she can make gravy.
If she appears to have a lot of sense. You know what I mean? Maybe what I mean is, if she knows what I mean. But no, it’s more than that. You look at her and before you even get to know her you feel a certain gratitude, a certain peace. You feel that she is not going to spring some kind of unfairly inexplicable notion on you that you will never make any sense out of and that will wind up being your fault. You feel that she knows where the keys are. You feel that the two of you could give each other little looks to the effect that ah, yeah, unh, that’s life.
If she appears not to have a lick of sense.
Some intriguing combination of a lot and not a lick.
If she is securely hooked up with a good friend of yours. With such a woman you can kid around and bump hips and even take a nip at each other’s neck, in plain view or not in plain view, all the while feeling very good about knowing (a) that neither of you is going to do anything disloyal to your friend, and (b) that you will never have to get in an argument with this woman over why neither of you knows where the keys are. Then too, you never know, your friend might die.
By the same token, sort of: If she is a good friend of the woman you are securely hooked up with. Here again you can bump around guiltlessly, and in this case you are favoring the woman you are securely hooked up with by showing her friend that the woman you are securely hooked up with is not securely hooked up with some schlump.
Lips.
If she is not too thin and not too rich, “You can never be too thin or too rich” is the most self-serving remark of recent times except for “That camera doesn’t lie” (Ronald Reagan). You can be so thin that you haven’t got any sugar on you. (As a southern American white man, I am resigned to accepting blame for just about anything, but not by God anorexia.) And you can be so rich that nobody ever tells you that everybody thinks you are silly.
If her attitude toward her own physical presence is, “Hey, for whatever anybody else may think it’s worth, I got it. And I can shake it. And if you’re not interested who asked you?” Why in the world do women say things like, “Oh, I’m too droopy in the hiney and got hardly any chest and my legs are just sticks”? Unless they manage to say it provocatively. Sparkle goes a long way.
If she looks shapely in shapeless clothes.
If her hair looks like it looks naturally good without thousands of dollars’ worth of treatments.
If she is naked as a jaybird. Okay, call me old-fashioned.
If she is a good sport but doesn’t take any shit. (I realize this is a fine line.)
Fine lines. I mean, fine in simultaneously the sense of “exquisite” and “she’s so fine.” Not brittle lines. Flexible fine lines. (See 3, above.)
If she’s barefooted. (“Barefoot” is cute, but “barefooted” is more down-to-earth.) It may be objected that this was covered by point 17, above, “naked as a jaybird,” but it wasn’t. “Barefooted” focuses on the whole matter of padding around. Ever listen to a woman’s bare feet padding around upstairs? (Not slapping, not stomping, not dragging, but padding. Around.)
A sweetly robust way of laughing. And of sneezing.
I am going to skip over some more obvious ones here.
If she can have a good rowdy time engaging in dialectic. Doesn’t want to be thesis continually nor indefatigably antithesis, but likes to mix it up with you and come out with something fresh.
There’s a lot in how she pets a dog.
Good

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