It was the summer of 1996. I’d just graduated from Yale, and was staying with my mother in a suburb of South Bend, Illinois, where she’d just moved for a job.
We were in the living room watching television when a thunderstorm started. A few minutes later, I heard something strange.
“Help! Help! Will somebody please help me?”
Cries for help were unusual in our suburban garden apartment complex, so I went to my bedroom window to figure out what was going on. A man in his mid-20s was standing on his second-floor balcony in the section of apartments just a few yards away from my window.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“I walked out to look at the storm and my sliding glass door closed behind me and locked!” he said, agitated.
I called apartment maintenance to let him back in, but there was no answer. We decided that rather than waiting for a call-back while this man risked getting struck by lightning, we’d contact a locksmith. My mother and I set about scouring the Yellow Pages. We finally found someone who said he could be there in about 45 minutes.
“Scott” and I chatted through the window while we waited. Turned out he was an engineer working at a local company. He’d grown up in rural Indiana not far away and graduated from Notre Dame. I told him I’d just received my degree. Eventually the locksmith came and released Scott from his watery balcony prison. He asked for my number and said he’d like to take me out to dinner to thank me.
I gave him my mom’s number. The next day he called, and we arranged to go to a chain restaurant… The Olive Garden or TGI Friday’s maybe. Our dinner conversation was pleasant, and I could tell he was starting to think of this as a date. I wasn’t interested, but had nothing better to do and knew no one other than my mother, so I said nothing to disabuse him of the unstated notion. At the end of the meal, as he was driving us home, he asked if I’d like to accompany him to his married friend’s son’s t-ball game that Friday night.
I didn’t know what t-ball was, but agreed to go. It seemed like anthropology: how do people in middle America live? My mom and I weren’t well-off financially—she worked three jobs to keep us afloat my entire childhood—but we’d lived in the intellectual bubble of the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, until I left for Yale, and I’d never hung out with “married friends.”
Friday came around and Scott drove us out along beautiful Indiana highways, far out into the country. It was July and the corn stalks were at least six feet high. We attended the game, which looked like baseball for small children. I made small talk with the wife of the couple. I don’t remember much about it, other than a feeling that these people were very nice but didn’t quite know what to make of me. Still, they had that “Maybe Scott has found a girlfriend!” look that’s universal. The hope of married friends and parents that a young man will find a suitable mate. I wouldn’t be that mate, but played along.
After the game we went back to their house for hot dogs and hamburgers. Except I’d become a vegetarian my senior year in college, at the urging of a domineering boyfriend, the same one who told me I wasn’t a feminist because I shaved my legs. When I told the wife I was a vegetarian, she seemed unfamiliar with the term, as though I’d said, “I can’t eat that, I’m a Zoroastrian!” I explained, and she offered me potato salad, green salad drenched in blue cheese dressing, and I accepted it cheerfully. They were drinking Kahlua with cream, but I didn’t drink back then, so I had a Coke.
I don’t remember what they talked about, only that I didn’t have much to add. I sat looking at the sky, listening to the crickets and watching the fireflies.
As I stared at the stars, which I could see more clearly than ever before, I felt an unusual sense of peace. This was what it was like to live out in the country, in middle America, a life I’d read about. Scott said it was time to go, and I thanked his friends. I knew I’d never be back. Scott wanted a girlfriend, but I was waiting to start my career as a union organizer, and wouldn’t be settling down for a long time, certainly not in rural Indiana.
We drove back to the apartments, and I knew the attempt at a kiss was coming. I deflected by hopping quickly out of the car and thanking him for a lovely evening. When he started to lean forward I intercepted with a hug. I didn’t want to hurt him, but didn’t want to kiss him either. I left for my assignment a week later and never saw Scott again. My life took me to Philadelphia, New York and Jersey City, not rural Indiana.
But when I drive across Pennsylvania I sometimes I remember the peace I felt in that cornfield, and wonder if I could recapture a bit of it now, almost 30 years later. I’ve lived the fast life and I’m tired. I’d like to look at the stars and hear the crickets instead of the streetlights and booming music from the cars going by, so loud it sometimes shakes my apartment walls. I’d eat the hot dogs and hamburgers now.