AN UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER

Blooming Fantasies and Pansy Perils: A Nursery Adventure You Won’t Forget

Butterscotch Fantasies and Garden Reminiscences

Selecting pansies at a nursery in Southern New Jersey with my young daughters was the last place I expected to confront an unfulfilled sexual fantasy.

It was early spring, a warm Saturday, a day for our perennial optimism about the future, but today — it was all about the past.

Reviving the past at a local nursery

“Daddy, I want the red ones with the yellow middles,” Sarah*, six, yelled from the muddy flower beds.

Madison* wanted miniature purple and yellow ones.

“No, no, they won’t go together,” Sarah replied, wearing a purple paisley skirt with a pink and orange striped shirt and green socks.

Then — I heard a voice: a cheerful and gruff voice from too many cigarettes, asking an older guy if he needed help.

“Dad, what’s a flat?” Sarah asked.

I was too startled. I just muttered, “Huh?”

This voice asked, “Did I need anything?” In spite of the crows’ feet, with those eyes and smile, it was definitely her — an old fantasy made flesh once again.

It had been almost twenty years since I had worked with Sally at the Holiday Inn — the busboy to her waitress. I was eighteen. She, a few years older. I was in college. She wasn’t. Now Sally was talking to my girls. “What flowers do you grow in the garden?”

Did I feel like that nervous, naïve virgin again? I overheard she was a waitress in the evenings. Had a kid. The garden gig, during the day. What could I say? I should have said something. Did I not want to risk her not remembering me — especially since she still orbited a distant ring of my Libido Milky Way?

She may not have recognized me. Had I aged well? Like wine and cheese? In the end, I bought three perennials and a flat of assorted pansies.

As the girls wheeled the cart, I said, “That nice woman — we worked together when I was in college,” I said.

“Why didn’t you say anything to her?” Madison asked.

“Yeah, Dad, that’s so rude,” Sarah replied.

The moment of embarrassment

What could I say to the woman who once asked if I would lick butterscotch off of her? This was in the kitchen, while I was dressing a room service tray. Sally was making a sundae. Then bluntly, she said she needed someone “to satisfy me besides myself.”

She wielded her tray like from a circus act. “And Jason isn’t doing it for me anymore.” My buddy Tom the Cook overheard and laughed.

He dubbed her — The Butterscotch Queen. The sexual frankness stunned me. I was familiar with male vulgarity, of course, and ‘male’ urges, but this female parallel was new, frightening.

Jason was her insane boyfriend and sort of, like, a friend of mine who set-up banquets and —

Wheeled tables helter-skelter — Threw chairs if the Yankees lost — Played hockey in the kitchen — Using the busboys and waitress as defenders — Knocked over a trash can as a net — Arrived to work tipsy and bleeding while singing The Grateful Dead — Laughed at me for pining over the same woman — And invited me over to his hole-in-the-wall apartment — Covered in Yankee memorabilia, for beers and smokes.

He showed me naked photos of his girlfriends. In some, his penis made a guest appearance. “I’m as ugly as a jackal,” he would say, “but if you ask enough girls, you’ll always have someone to screw on Saturday night.”

He was a self-proclaimed dirt ball. He had no ambition to be anything more than a hotel set-up guy. This astounded me; this total lack of ambition. He was a genuine outcast. As long as he had beer, a smoke, a vagina for Saturday night, the Yankees, and the Dead, well, that was a successful life. But what about his girl hitting on me?

What was I going to do?

Well, I invited them to tennis. When Jason fetched a ball, Sally would wink at me and bend over. The flirtation was obvious.

What about Jason? After all, I drank his beers, laughed, and took notes about not putting women on a pedestal. “They’re like New York taxis,” he said. “You miss one, there’s another coming.”

Yeah, but his taxi was opening her door. I was anxious for the ride.

A week later I invited them over for a swim —at my house — along with a few other hotel buddies. While Jason played a suicide game of basketball, dribbling while smoking his Camel, Sally was playing water volleyball, asking if I liked her white swimsuit, knowing her large, pert, and purple nipples distracted my serve. Did she laugh because I had trouble swimming?

Later, as Jason continued to play basketball, Sally led me to the bathroom to change. She pulled me in, kissed me. I was quite the sweetie. She gave me her number. Meanwhile, Jason slammed against the house, calling a foul on Hank the Hat — the mild-mannered, head-banging, long-haired dishwasher.

Jason would kill me — if he ever found out. But I penciled-in butterscotch on my mom’s grocery list.

“What’s with the butterscotch?” she asked.

“I have a hankering for butterscotch! It’s been awhile, mom.”

But that week Sally left the hotel. I tried calling her a few times, and the only time I got her was almost midnight. She was drunk. The intricate details of setting up “a date” seemed a big to do — for me.

I was destined to fail. So that was it — until I saw her at the garden center.

My wife had a good chuckle. She would be suspicious if I put butterscotch on the grocery list and turned our house into Longwood Gardens.

“Honey, that was twenty years ago!” I pleaded. Maybe she knew men retain that adolescent brain.

The second visit to the nursery

Later that week my daughters and I stopped again for flowers. Honestly, it was a place we visited. This time, not wanting to be a pansy, when Sally asked if we needed anything, I said, “Aren’t you Sally? Didn’t you work at the Holiday Inn? Your boyfriend was Jason.”

The owner of the farm laughed. Leave us to reminisce. “You were my busboy, right?”

I nodded. She hadn’t seen that dirt ball in years. “He went one way. I went another.” She asked about some people who worked at the hotel.

I knew everyone: first name and last name and so many details of their life. That hotel was more than a job. It was my fraternity, my stage. My three-ring circus. I miss that camaraderie. Would she have recalled the butterscotch?

Where did I live?

“In Mullica Hill.”

“That’s a really nice area.” Did she think I lived in a mansion, especially dressed in an orange polo and tan shorts with light-brown Docksiders.

She smiled the same sly smile. “Thanks for remembering me,” she said.

Enough to remember

As I shuffled the girls into the Mazda minivan, I thought — maybe that’s all we want — to be remembered. How much did she remember? Could she have written about me? Did she tell her kid, “You know who I met today?”

And why did I remember so much about Jason?

After all, most of my friends are like me; my field of friends has narrowed. And that’s too bad.

This life — it’s not about mansions and money, but about connection and memory, especially from those who may not have been so special.

Jason was a dangerous outsider who I envied, and Sally made me feel good about myself, even momentarily, like I was desirable. That was a first.

Imagine: what would have happened if I just concentrated on smearing on the Smuckers? But I’m glad I didn’t become a hustling Hefner.

I thought about her life. It must have been rough. She was working as a waitress to pay bills. I was working to pay for my car and gas to get to college — and to travel through Europe. I never knew her dreams, but everyone knew mine.

It still must be hard for her, working at the nursery, working, again as a waitress, raising a child. Did she have anyone? What were her dreams and aspirations?

It was hard for me coming from a divorced family, and feeling cheated about commuting to college, and not having a “college experience,” but really, what did I have to complain about?

On the ride home Madison asked if I was friends with her.

“She was the girlfriend of one of my buddies,” I replied.

“Did you know her well?”

“Enough to remember.”

I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t know her well; I knew her well enough in fantasy, but I never knew her story or her reality. It’s like a page from Playboy: the image, alluring, but what is that air-brushed woman thinking? Is she just another image to color with our own brush of desires?

Perhaps that’s why she lingers, like Jason too, as so many linger, especially from childhood, in a realm of our own creation, not real, but in the preserved black and white coloring books of fantasies and fables that never really go away.

Thank you for reading. Here is more from The Masterpiece.

*All names have been changed.