Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

The cute, short-haired girl behind the table at my local farmer’s market shot me a quizzical look as I perused her samples. She pointed at my shirt and sheepishly asked, “What does that mean? Lie-ko-what?”

Lycopersicum esculentum.

“Huh? What’s that?”

It’s the, um, scientific name for the tomato.

“Oh,” she said. “That’s cool. Where did you… where’d you get that shirt?”

I work at the Field Museum, and I guess we kind of get these for free, every now and then.

“Wow, that’s pretty cool.”

This would be a neat story, perhaps an illustrative moment that marked the tentative, awkward start of a lasting friendship, that she was charmed by my quirky nerdiness and I was taken by her inquisitiveness, except that as I paid for my goods and walked away I couldn’t help but be a bit unsure as to how somebody who worked for an organic tomato farm and salsa cannery could be in the slightest way confused by my shirt.

We were stretched out on her couch, her head on my shoulder, and I was awash in the bliss of feeling close, not just physically so, but in the sense that what I had wanted and hoped for was near, that maybe, just maybe, this might all work out, and this splendid misery might be… worth it. A perfect time, then, to bring up comic books.

***

Earlier this year, Susan and I had a bit of a conundrum regarding our summer league plans. The fourth member of our draft core had abruptly become unavailable and as per league guidelines we had to quickly find a second female player to round out our quartet or we would not be able to play. With only days to go before the registration deadline, we both scrambled to find a player, any player, that would fulfill our basic requirements of 1. female, 2. friendly and 3. not terrible, preferably amazing at ultimate. I settled for two out of three and solicited the interest of a friend who was still a free agent at the time—perhaps not the most coveted candidate, at least she was tolerably social (if a bit of a flake) and had an awesome dog. Susan sought out players at women’s spring league and at the last minute recruited a potential addition whom she was very high on. We traded horses over chat one morning while I was supposed to be doing work, arguing for our two candidates. It boiled down to signing somebody who while perhaps limited in skill was friendly and a reliable presence, or somebody neither of us really knew but promised to be a skillful addition to our team, if a bit of an unknown quantity socially.

Despite Susan’s insistence that the girl she had found was the better player, I couldn’t deal with the thought of a second summer in a row of playing with strangers on my core group and asked that we go with Jennie instead. Her dog is awesome, I joked. We could use him as an extra defender. Susan had no real objection, and it was done. Our little group made four, and summer league started in a week.

Susan described the her candidate as a skilled handler, an unusual and coveted quality among female league players, so from a team-building perspective made sense to pick the better player, even if we didn’t know her all that well, or at all, for that matter. Is she cute? I asked, semi-facetiously. “She’s not exactly your type, David”, Susan offered, without being too specific about it. After agreeing to our offer via email, our little group made four, and summer league started in a week.

After my sister’s wedding, I received a surprise text message from Susan, who was ecstatic that she had made Spicy Tuna, the new women’s club ultimate team. I was happy—this was a big step for her, somebody who had, has and continues to have strong misgivings about committing to ultimate; this was a big step forward for her, her growth both as a person and a player, and it was good that she had somebody she knew as a teammate, even if I hadn’t so much as met her yet.

It had become a recurring joke that she didn’t exist, or if she did, existed in such a way that only one of us could attend league at any given time. She missed the first week for reasons unknown, I missed the second week for my sister’s wedding, and in the weeks that followed I had not seen or heard anything other than rumors of her playing while I was gone. The second time we both actually both showed up for a game was well into the season, at a game way out north on an unusually overcast and wet day. We played a team that wasn’t very good, but we had some problems getting into the flow of things and on a wide pass from her I ended up diving oddly and twisting my knee when I hit the ground. It didn’t hurt much then, but in the miserable weeks to follow I would come to learn that my frisbee playing season was effectively over.

Jennie’s appeal tends to wear thin upon repetition, and while she was a good teammate, her limitations as a player are not minor. A few spectacular faceplant bids into the dirt aside, she performed as expected, which is to say, she was the third option most of the time. And as expected, she did manage to aggressively and comically flirt with most of the men on the team, save the bristly older guy, who had approximately zero fans.

On a ride home from a game where she actually showed up and played, I casually mentioned, in that off-handed way that isn’t quite off-handed, You know, I’m trying to figure out if I find her attractive or not. Susan laughed and said, “Makes sense. She’s not your type, maybe, but I can see why you’d like her.”

On a ride home from a game, I brought up our teammate George’s obvious interest in Susan. He likes you, you know, I said. “No, he’s always giving me shit and making fun of me and telling me how scared he is of me.” That’s exactly what I mean, I said. He likes you. It’s pretty obvious. I had a wide, shit-eating smile on as I said this, knowing how she would react to this. It was true, of course, he did like her, and it was obvious he liked her, at least to me, but Susan’s a tough nut to crack, at least in this area, and it would not be easy for him to win her over. She doesn’t ever go down without a fight.

The thing is, she wouldn’t actually talk to me. I was pretty sure she didn’t want anything to do with me. I did a pretty bang up job of not impressing her by means of ignoring her or being super snarky, a winning combination that landed me squarely in the ‘who the fuck are you’ column. By the time the annual mid-summer beach tournament came around, I had decided I truly was interested, and that perhaps being friendly and nice instead might make more sense. I went to the tournament party, something I usually avoid at all costs, for the sole reason that I knew she would be there, and I spent the majority of my time hovering around Susan and her friends, unsure whether to approach her or not. I bit the bullet, walked up to the group she was chatting with, and figured here goes nothing. I left the group and the party altogether shortly thereafter, tired and disappointed.

The previous year, I had devoted myself to photography, and given up the idea of playing on a club team in the summer/fall. This year, after chewing on it a bit, I caved and went out to play with Salvage; might as well, didn’t have anything else going on at the time, especially with so many of my friends on the team. It was the first club team in a long while that I had actually devoted myself to, and it felt strangely satisfying to commit to ultimate again, even if it wasn’t at a particularly high level. It proved to be the cornerstone of my most active summer in a very long time, and I felt more fit and confident than any time since college.

I’d long known my best friends would be moving away, but it wasn’t until it happened that I understood what huge changes that would mean. Months earlier I had joked with Kim that with the rails of our easy, decade-long friendship suddenly removed from my life, who knows what I’ll do? I’ll probably ask a frisbee girl out or quit my job, I joked.

For the summer league tournament, I contrived a ridiculous ploy and offered to carpool with her to the fields and back. At that point, I had figured it was my absolute last chance, and if I didn’t make some move to be friends, we would never be. Amazingly enough, she agreed to ride together. Our trip to the fields began in utter silence, and it wasn’t until “El Scorcho” came on the radio that we had something to talk about, some sort of vague common ground for conversation, meagre as it was. On the ride back, we made a pit stop at Chipotle (another patent ruse to extend the time I had with her), and I asked her flat out what one has to do to get a conversation out of her. Oddly, that sparked a fairly lengthy talk that spilled over to the hour-long ride home and into her apartment, which I got to see on the way back. I surprised myself and asked her if she would like to hang out sometime, now that summer league was over. Again to my surprise, she said yes. Two days later, on a Monday night, I asked her out.

By the time the first local club tournament rolled around, George was a fixture at the Spicy Tuna sidelines. On my bye, I’d stopped by to check on how the girls were doing, and I found him alternating between patrolling the sidelines or sitting sprawled in Susan’s folding chair, eating some sort of granola bar, cheering and heckling our mutual summer league teammate. The girls seemed to genuinely like him there, and he’d charmed most of them with his good natured humor as the season had progressed. After a very rough point, Susan walked over with a face I’d seen many times: angry, disappointed at self and others, eyes downcast. As she trudged her way to her bag, something I had never seen before—George walked over to meet her, put his hand on her back, and said something soft and encouraging. Instead of blowing it off and sloughing into her chair, head in her hands, as I’ve seen her do dozens of times before, she stopped walking, turned to face him, and simply said, “Thanks.”

It wasn’t long before reality crashed into the early rush of surprising and strong feelings, and with it my zeal collided with her fear, my optimism with her doubt, my desire to love and be loved against her nagging feeling that there was neither room or ability for either in her life; how to smoothly incorporate two fully-developed everyday lives, how to communicate, how to make this work, confusion and mixed signals and hurt feelings and missed chances, a giant list of things to do and fix and work on when I had barely gotten past the ‘You are so awesome; I really, really like you’ part. Mixed within that, periods of quiet togetherness, moments of cheesy awkwardness in front of her teammates, surprisingly candid and lengthy conversations, the kind I could not have ever imagined having with her, a subtle, difficult-to-define chemistry, and private, ephemeral happiness.

By the time September had rolled around, I had been playing ultimate pretty continuously for nearly 4 months straight. I was increasingly frustrated playing with Salvage, and frequently wondered if I should’ve stuck with being a photographer instead. Our season nearly over, I was not sure what I was going to do once I didn’t have ultimate 2, 3 times a week to fill my life up with. Ryan had been prodding me to ask out any number of girls at the museum, but with the majority of interns now gone that window seemed pretty closed. At CHC, I watched teams play during my byes and missed the feeling of having a camera in my hand. Standing at sidelines during one of Susan’s games, I chatted with George and a couple other Salvage guys who were dating her teammates. I gave in the urge to heckle their game, a low scoring, turnover ridden affair, when one of my teammates leaned in and told me to relax and dial it back, you’re not helping. You ought to support the team, not hinder them. Embarrassed, I shut up quickly and sat down on a cooler, looking for something to fidget with. One of my former fall league teammates walked by and smiled, and I nodded back. After the game, I made sure to tell Susan I was sorry if I was out of line, as the rest of the team sang happy birthday for one of the girls.

***

One of the first actual conversations I could remember having with her dealt with Watchmen, back during the last week of league. Months later, on her couch, I had my Laurie-on-Mars moment, and asked her if she ever thought about how things ever got to this point. We almost never met, I said. It was blind, random luck that I even know who you are. She propped her head on her elbow, looked at me, and then off to the side. “Okay,” she said. Doesn’t it seem seem incredibly random to you, that this all happened? “Sure.” Are you happy? “I’m happy now, yes,” she said, planting a small kiss. Doesn’t it seem just staggering to think, but for random circumstance, you wouldn’t be right here, right now, being happy? “That’s how it is. It’s always totally random,” she said, with a face that seemed more firm than I was used to. It took me by surprise, and struck me. I don’t choose to believe that, I said. There has to be more to happiness than random chance. She looked away again, unwilling to pursue it further.

He’s never quite sure what to make of it or what to say whenever she brings it up. Maybe something snarky or witty, he thinks—no, that would kill the mood and turn her off. Maybe something disarmingly charming, though it is always difficult when put on the spot. Maybe something erudite, a quotation or anecdote with subtle profundity.

Maybe nothing at all, a blank slate to reflect her opacity.

Or maybe just something like, “Well, yours are always cold.”