My order was always the same, an Italian hoagie with no cheese. I like cheese now but I didn't then. While they were making our sandwiches, Sam and I would walk across the street to the Wawa convenience store and buy things the pizza place didn't have, like bags of potato chips at a reasonable price and candy.
We lived in the suburbs, some miles west of Philadelphia, and I had no social life then. Sam was in college and had a social life, but not much of one during the summer, which is when we had this job. Our parents were away so we had the house to ourselves. We knew basic housekeeping things at the time like how to do laundry, use the dishwasher, mow the lawn, feed the dog and the cats and empty their kitty litter, but our diets were poor. Cereal for breakfast, baloney sandwiches on white bread for lunch, hoagies for dinner. I doubt I ate a vegetable or a fresh piece of fruit that entire summer.
Sam would buy a Mountain Dew. I never liked sodas much and would buy a pack of Peanut M&Ms. I didn't always want them all that much. A big part of the reason I was there was to see the cashier, a girl named Dee.
Dee was around my age. She had curly hair, a straight nose, gray eyes and pale, flawless skin. She was an efficient cashier, fast and all business. If she made eye contact at all it was by chance and I don't think I ever heard her say more than three words to me or anyone else. Not that I knew how to talk to girls then. I went to an all-boys school from third grade on and I never went to social gatherings, so other than a neighbor I'd known since childhood and occasional contact with family friends, I was never around girls. The neighbor and I got along but I was friends with her big brother and we never talked much. I'd go to their house and we'd watch television together and laugh at the silly things that were on then that everybody watched, situation comedies and variety shows that starred young people but seemed to be made for much older people.
Dee was a mystery to me. Maybe she read deep books and wrote stories, poems and essays. Maybe she just cared about celebrities and shopping at the mall in King of Prussia. Her voice might have been melodious or flat and harsh.
She became my ideal girl and fantasy about her was one that says much about how I felt around girls at the time and women later.
In the fantasy, much of which was derived from the science fiction I liked then, Dee and I are alone in the store at night. Suddenly, everything outside the store is surrounded by white light so powerful it blocks vision of anything beyond it, a luminescent curtain. There's a jolt, the power goes out, and we feel the store rising, tugged out of the ground like a pulled tooth, rising into the air. The store is put in the belly of an enormous spaceship, the power comes back on, and the ship exits Earth's atmosphere. The alien abductors don't tell us what's going on and Dee and I don't know how long we'll be confined. We make the most of things, eating what's in the store. During our voyage, Dee and I get to know each other well. She is everything I'd hoped she'd be. Intelligent, thoughtful, funny. She brings out the best parts of my personality. I am a hero, strong, protective, and I make Dee laugh and feel safe, considering. "If they were going to kill us, they'd have done it already," I tell her.
The aliens are benign. This is their way of getting to know other worlds. Dee and I are returned to Earth after we've taught them much about our planet and learned much about theirs. When we return to Earth, we are, because of our experience, the most fascinating people on the planet. We meet with world leaders, scientists and thinkers, are on television all the time, write books that become best sellers, and wow the world with all we've learned. We have learned the aliens' music, which is nothing like that ever heard on Earth, and our recording career makes everyone from Mozart and Beethoven to The Beatles and David Bowie minor footnotes in music history. We have formulas to cure the world's ailments, provide solutions to hunger and energy, give everyone simple knowledge that enables them to live a rich and rewarding life and die with no regrets.
Throughout, Dee and I are fun loving and witty. We are loved everywhere for our modesty.
Summer ended, I went back to school. Dee still worked there from the late afternoon until they closed at eleven. I tried once saying hello to her in a real way on a visit during the school year and she looked at me as if she'd never seen me before in her life.
I never did learn how to approach women and as I grew older my fantasies developed into common ones in which I'd be stranded on a tropical island with whatever woman I had a crush on at the time thanks to a plane crash or a shipwreck. Later, in my forties and fifties, I'd daydream about being trapped in an elevator during a power outage. Now I don't think about meeting women at all.
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