Call me totally unevolved, but when it comes to certain traits, I think a woman should be a woman and a man should be a man.

Now, I don’t mean socially important things like, equal pay for equal work and who stays home with the kids. I mean, obvious stuff. Areas where masculine and feminine should not overlap. Like, facial Hair? Man. Tendency to cry when drunk? Woman. Yeah, I said it. I buy into gender stereotypes – especially in my romantic relationships.

Experience has taught me that I’m much more comfortable if the man I’m dating and I do not have any of the following things in common:

Dolphins
Yeah, I loved them, too. On my Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper. In the sixth grade. But you must not love them enough to tattoo them on your body. Ever. Anywhere. Even and especially on your thigh. It makes me heavily suspicious that I’m your beard.

Skintimates Glistening Pear shave gel
I prayed that it was left over from your last girlfriend. But the stubble on your chest (and the burn it left on mine) cleared that right up. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for manscaping. I once dated a man who, when shirtless, looked like he was wearing a sports bra made of fur. So I hear you on your need to keep things tidy. In fact, I applaud it. But do it with shaving cream, for the love of god! The manly kind! The kind that smells just a little bit like a hospital waiting room and bleaches the bathmat if you spill it. Nothing says virile man like Barbasol.

Making Love
Please don’t say that. Call it sex. Call it knocking boots, riding the bull, doin’ it, or getting your freak on, if you want. Any one of those is preferable to you morphing into a sweater set and labeling a sweaty, whiskey-drunk bathroom sexcapade, “making love.” Eeew. And technically, this is something we’d never have in common anyway. I would never, ever. Lord knows I prefer the pleasantly-neutral, “sleeping together.” You know, as though anyone actually does any sleeping.

There are a few more, including a couple items found in grocery carts, demonstrations of girly vanity (owning or even saying the word, “product”) and facial expressions like, The Pout. The Pout, along with back-seamed silk pantyhose, was invented by full-lipped French women, for god’s sake. And, along with those silk hose, a distinctly feminine thing you should refrain from wearing.

Though you’d think that would go without saying, wouldn’t you? You’d be so surprised.

Late one September night, as they stood together on a subway platform waiting for uptown trains, a man said to a woman,

"You know, I entertain the idea of us getting married."

A passerby wouldn’t have overheard her reply, for the sound of rattling subway cars and the hush in her voice. She might not have said anything more than, Hmmm. Really. She might have wanted to believe him. But he was drunk and when he was drunk, he said things. The same way he said things over breakfast – with fleeting conviction and a boyish sincerity meant only for the moment.

“You’re such a beautiful girl,” he’d say over omelets and juice. Then in the evening, fill her with lies about where he’d lost his wallet or why he didn’t call. Breakfast was easily forgotten.

Only an hour earlier, in a bar some blocks away, he’d stuck a camera up her short black skirt, in front of an audience of friends. The shutter had clicked and she’d clawed to press the delete button – but not before he’d eyed it and grinned.

“How could you?” She had cringed. Humiliation was a digital image of her bare thighs, imperfect and blazing white with the camera’s flash.

“What? I wouldn’t show it to anyone. It’s only for me.”

Later they stood in the heat, him wearing a ratty sweatband on his wrist and her, a vacant pout of an expression. If she was angry, she did not say as much, only withdrew into herself, half-listening as he talked. The man let his eyes rest on her chest, his thumb and forefinger lightly squeezing the top button of her shirt.

“Which train are you going to get on?”

He meant, would she be sharing his bed that night.

“The AC is on. But not because I assumed you’d be staying…” he smiled when he said this.

Just then a train roared into the station, a brightly lit number two shining on its sides. The woman kissed the man on the cheek and said,

“Your train is here.”

A few weeks later, they'd be surprised to learn that a girl they knew was in the family way. His family way. The woman would listen as the man, in his breakfast sincerity, explained his obligation to marry the mother of the child. To do right by the unborn. They would raise their voices and point fingers and spill drinks and he would say that he was sorry.

And she would want to believe him. But he would be drunk, and when he was drunk, he said things.

In the last year, his beard has lost all of its color and become shock white against his pale skin. His face is broader, cheeks hang flattened and deeply creased. His hands shake noticeably – a fact he seems to try to showcase, rather than conceal. I watch as he plays it up and then scans the table for a reaction.

I look quickly back at my own plate. I do not want to play this game. With this man I hardly recognize.

When he accuses his children of selling him out – amid rants about the government, his ex wife and the gun he keeps beneath his pillow – he grows stranger and stranger. From his mouth pours paranoia and self-pity and from his eyes, nothing. At times, the color grays out of them, leaving them pale and cloudy, like those of newborns and the dying.

I sit, pressing the tips of my fingernails into the flesh of my palm, trying not to feel the sickness that is ripping through my gut. Who are you… I think, searching for the familiar. And where did my father go?

Had we never met, I wouldn’t have found him alarming. Only unbalanced and odd, a statistic of an earlier war. But now he’s frightening and foreign.

One moment, he is calm and sentimental and the next, irrational and angry. His children – who were a sentence before, his heartbeat – are now cruel traitors in a plot to undermine and hurt him. I do not know whether to be furious or distraught. I do not make up my mind. Instead, I hiccup for the next several hours, my body unable to suppress the upset.

A year has made him a stranger. There are very few remnants of the man I knew in this man with the wiry mane and distant stare. In this profound absence, I feel as though there’s been a death. With so much loss to contend with, each new encounter becomes a small funeral. I find myself wearing sackcloth and ashes, and my emotions so close to the surface I’m sweating grief. And lacking a corpse, I’m forced instead to bury my expectations and my need for the way things were.

When it comes to casual dating, I am pretty low maintenance.

I don't own a copy of The Rules. I don't make ridiculous, impossible checklists for things like height, education or profession. And I don't have unreasonable expectations for perfection or mind-reading capabilities.

This is real life, not a Cameron Crowe flick.

I do, however, make a few basic assumptions when I decide to go out with a guy. I assume that by his late twenties, a man should know three things: how to dress, how to kiss, and how treat me like a girl.

Notice I didn't say "treat me like lady." Because the obvious is that a man should always be respectful of his date. But what may be less obvious is that he should also be aware of the distinct differences between his date... and one of his buddies.

Allow me to illustrate.

Example 1: The A-Game

Sometime late last summer, I went on a couple of dates with an attractive, well-spoken, and charming entrepreneur we’ll call Drew. Drew tended to ask me out for Thursday evenings, and yet, still be a little miffed when I wanted to be home by midnight. Not to be my mother, but it’s a school night! After a full day in the office, a full evening on the town can be a lot of effort.

For what would have been our third date, and as an invitation to meet his friends, Drew left me a voicemail one afternoon.

“… Thursday night, if you can bring your A-game. Peace out.”

Peace out? Were we on the same paintball team? It wasn’t even the goofy signoff that got me. I remember being most taken aback by the bit about bringing my A-game. I have never been accused of being a bad time or bringing down the group fun quotient. Was insulting me really meant to woo me? Maybe. At the very least it was thoughtless and ultimately, a deal breaker.

Example 2: U just don’t get it

More recently, I started seeing Mark, a wise-cracking, Peter Pan type. After exactly two dates, I received the following text message, late one Friday night (incidentally, the same Friday night we didn’t make plans because he was busy):

Can I reserve u for a make-out session tonite?

Reserve me? What am I, a library book? I replied, no, and with a click!, closed my phone and the window on that potential relationship. Had we been dating for a few months, a message like that might have been not only acceptable, but probably even funny and cute. But in the early stages of dating, it’s cringe-worthy. It’s icky and it’s lazy. I honestly appreciate when men at least go to the pretense of making a date if they’re after some nookie. And frankly, if he can’t be bothered to make a proper drunk dial (or fucking spell out the word y-o-u), he’s likely to be lazy about a whole bunch of other stuff.

If you catch my drift.

Perhaps I’m being fussy. But I’m a sucker for some finesse and a little bit of sweet talk. I mean, is it really so much to ask to be treated like a girl? To be handled with just a little more care than say, the guys in his Fantasy Football league?

God, I hope not.

And to the guy who says, “I didn’t clean up my apartment because I didn’t want to put up a front and make you think I was cleaner than I am.” I say, put up a front! Be cleaner, be nicer! Allow me at least a few good months of ignorant bliss.

Because by then, you’ll probably be farting in bed and a little mess will be the least of my grumbles.

The wind was in my favor last night. Walking up Second Avenue, the breeze caught my skirt just enough to produce the Donna Reid effect – a perfect halo of pale pink cotton and silk as my heels clicked uptown toward home.

Girl, I think as I consider maybe doing a pirouette under the street light.

At dinner, though, it was different. The gazpacho was served and as I slid my spoon in backwards to take a bite, a pair of eyes lit up across the table.

“You just… did you see how she eats her soup?” Chris turned to Mike. He was beaming at me, one hand to his chest, almost in reverence. And I knew, right then, that was how he thinks Julie Andrews eats her soup. “It’s just so… refined!”

Woman, I think as I consider maybe sending my mother a thank-you for years of etiquette dinners.

When a friend asked me the other day whether I was a girl or a woman, I questioned first his reason for asking and second, my reason for answering, both. Some days, to be honest, I just don’t know.

When I’m at work, I’d tell you woman, for sure. There’s no room for girl at that conference room table on Monday mornings. Likewise, when I’m paying bills, I am woman.

I am girl when it’s late, and I am lonely and the only person I want to talk to is my mother and the only place I want to be is home, even though neither exists the way I remember them anymore. And I am girl when I smile and say nothing even though my brain is screaming. I am girl about texture and color and touch.

I am woman about how I budget, who I love and what I decide to keep. I am woman when I ask hard questions and refuse to accept easy answers.

Girl when I cry. Woman when I kiss. Both when I laugh.

It’s one of the more difficult things about growing up – fitting into one or the other, and I actually get nervous about one day defining myself completely as woman. Will there be no more pirouettes and pink? More responsibility and resolution?

I don’t know. For right now though, I’m wont to think that both is a good fit, and that maybe, just maybe there was something insightful about that Britney Spears song.

I kid about the song. Mostly.

“Your friend doesn’t know how to take a compliment”
“She sure doesn’t,” Sarah said, spinning a straw in her cocktail. Sex on the beach, it was. She’d wanted something sweet.

I sat there, still blushing. I hadn’t meant to blush; he’d only said I was cute. But he stood there, with a hand on my back, leaning over the bar, smiling in a way that does things to a girl’s stomach. It didn’t hurt that he was movie-star handsome. Will Smith but Hitch or I Robot Will Smith. Not Fresh Prince.

I offered to move so that he could collect the half-dozen cocktails he’d ordered. No, thanks. He’d rather lean over me. It was his way of flirting -- innocuous flirting. I smiled when he said innocuous.

“Good word.”
“You like that?” His hat tapped against my forehead as he made a final pass for drinks. He leaned close, a free hand sliding down my back. “I like smart girls.”

He disappeared into the crowd and Sarah, Caryn and I went back to our drinks and chatter. Ripple had been nearly empty when we arrived, but now it was pulsing and grinding with music and bodies, and we were glad to have seats. Later, as I made my way to the bathroom, a woman bobbed through the crowd wearing the familiar tan derby.

“Hi. Again.”

There he was, behind me in line, bareheaded.

“Someone’s got your hat.”
“That would be my girlfriend.”
“I assumed.”

The line shifted and we stepped forward. Introductions were made. Rob. Heather.

“She’s actually pretty into girls.”
“What?”
“Listen, you’re intelligent, curvy -- just what she likes. What we like.”

I laughed. A dry, Bette Davis kind of laugh. His hand went to my lower back.

“I’m tempted to push you in there right now,” he said, motioning to the now empty bathroom. “But she’d feel left out.” He pulled me close, quickly.

It one of those kisses that curls your toes and flutters something very low in your stomach. My mind was blank, paused, as he lingered on my bottom lip. “Think about it,“ he said. And with a quick slap to my ass, he moved back into the crowd.

I did. I thought about it as I giggled with Sarah and Caryn. It was really a shame that I don’t share well with others. That’s the kind of experience that collectors, like myself, would have stick-pinned to Styrofoam with great pleasure.

I thought about it again, later as we moved through the bar, heading for the door.

“It was nice to meet you, Rob.” I stuck out a hand.
“Heather, this is Joy.”

Joy was exotic. Gorgeous. But we were on our way out. And I had never really learned to share.

(See follow up here!)

When my sister Audrey was born, I was there in the delivery room.

At seven years old, having been taught the fundamentals of birds, bees and birth by my parents and PBS, I was allowed to skip school and watch her come into the world. I stood by my mother’s head, expectant and – strangely enough – not one bit afraid. And when the baby came out, wriggling, squawking, and covered stem to stern in white greasy film, I fell in love. In helpless, complete and utterly fixated love.

I walked home from school during recess the next day to be near her. I wanted to hold, touch, smell and protect her. I thought, as you do when you first encounter love, that I would never feel that way about another person as long as I lived.

I was wrong.

Fifteen months later, Joyce was born. I loved her as fiercely as I did her older sister. My parents were under a great deal of stress in those years (my father’s disease, my mother working and going to school full time) and so, even as young as I was, care-giving duties often fell to me. I changed diapers, mixed formula, taught nursery rhymes and made child-size choo-choo trains of discarded appliance boxes. I band-aided, potty trained and lullabyed. And loved. So much so that sometimes, it was as if a fist were wrapped around my insides – around my heart – and that their unhappiness, or their delight could cause the fist to squeeze.

I felt how much I loved them.

They grew up as different as two people can. One went off to Future Leaders of the World Camp at Yale; the other, to a rehabilitation facility in Dallas after she'd dragged razor blades through her own flesh. One had very little need for my protection, and with her being away at college, our conversations were limited to short bursts over the phone (she was always on her way out) and brief email exchanges about classes and boys. For the other, however, I would leave my cell phone on at night and remain in near-constant Instant Messenger contact. One night, a message I sent to her was answered by her friend, Anne who informed me that my baby sister was unconscious and bleeding. It took my instructions and Anne’s compact mirror to tell if she was even breathing.

Breath will fog glass. Waiting for glass to fog will stop time.

There are kinds of love that are freeing, and there are loves that are frightening. This, uniquely, is both. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a parent. The thought of ever feeling this heavy, unbreakable love for another person is tremendous. But every time I feel my heart get squeezed, I am grateful that it has been. I am more alive and more real as a result. And so I imagine, that should the time come when I have a wriggling, squawking absolutely mystifying creature of my own, I will gladly enter into complete and utterly fixated love all over again.

I will band-aid and potty train and make choo-choo trains. I will lullaby. And I will lock her in her room until she is twenty-three.

We lounge around the living room on the hand-me-down white leather couches, the five of us in various states of vegetation and the newest PS2 game blaring on the TV. The lights are off. My back is to the arched entrance of the front hall where I sit cross-legged in the center of the long sofa watching Billy kill gang members.

“Use the firebombs,” Jonathan tells him. “They’re better in a crowd.”

The doorbell rings and index fingers fly to noses. Cece’s fingers are busy moving through a copy of Maxim, and for the second time tonight, she’s lost a game of One-Two-Three Not It. Annoyed, she flips us off, takes the pile of bills from the coffee table and comes back a minute or two later with our food.

“I hope I tipped him.” Cece is a little stoned.
“Thanks, Cheech.” Bryan tugs playfully at one of his girlfriend’s long blond curls, and swats her on the butt as she bends over the coffee table for her calzone. She’s wearing a thin white tank top and I can see every bone in her back. She’s too thin.
“Bry! Stop!” She says something about her fat ass and we all get quiet. Jonathan rolls his eyes and whispers something about hoping that calzone tastes as good coming up as it does going down. Billy doesn’t even look away from the 52-inch screen.

Bryan simply belches in response.

“Lacked bass,” I say. “I give it a six.”

***

“Tell us a story, Wendy Lady,” Bryan says.

It’s late now, and we’ve gone back into the ‘chill out room’ to lounge some more and get high in the blue glow of the saltwater tank. The pipe is passed my way and I wave it off. I’ve lost interest in pot. I’m the youngest one in the house; everyone else will be turning thirty within the year. But being the sober one makes me something of a mother hen. Or to Bryan, a Wendy to these lost boys.

I tell them about being arrested in Spain. No one believes I’ve ever done anything remotely subversive and they’re intrigued. When I get to the part about the public nudity, Jonathan announces that he is going to bed. He gets to the door and looks my way.

“You coming?”

I nod, and climb out of my warm spot on the sofa, but Billy protests. The story has just gotten good! Jonathan has now become The Big Ruiner. The nickname will stick.

***

“Which season?” Jonathan asks, sliding a wife beater over his head as he shuffles through CDs. He can’t fall asleep if it’s too quiet, a habit I’ll be left with for some time after we stop seeing each other.

“Fall.”

I step over piles of laundry and crawl into his bed. As I pull my long dark hair into a ponytail, I notice several blonde strands on the navy pillowcase. I say nothing. The most very lost of the Lost Boys. Not classy enough to be Peter Pan, though. The others feel sorry for me, I know, and wonder why I put up with it. But it’s like Bryan said, I’ll leave when I’ve had enough. Even Wendy finally abandoned Neverland when she got tired of the games.

Vivaldi fills the corners of the dark bedroom. Jonathan slips his hand around my stomach and crooks his leg over my hip. He breathes into my hair.

It’s January. I’ll be gone by mid-February.

He’ll force my hand with the strawberry blonde we meet in New Hampshire on Valentine's Day, never bothering to lie about it. Then I’ll leave, resenting growing up less, because Neverland is a place that requires a certain amount of naiveté to sustain its charm.

And it will be a very long time before I’m able to play make-believe again.

There are some moments that might seem as though they never happened in the first place. A minute, an hour, a day – a span of time – where you wish you could have stepped out of yourself to view it from the outset. It was just that beautiful.

If you pay close enough attention, sometimes you actually realize, just know, in the middle of one of those beautiful moments that you’re part of a solitary occurrence, mitigated by time, place and coincidence. By fate. A first breath, a first kiss, a first time you realize the world actually can be beautiful and perfect, if only for that one moment. And you also know it’s not going to happen just that way ever again.

So your heart takes a snapshot, if you give pause to let it. And then you will always remember exactly the way the sunlight fell, or a specific shade of blue, or the hum of the refrigerator or the smell of clean cotton. Or the details of someone else’s skin.

The picture, the details are yours to keep, for when you’re immersed in darkness and blues are blacks, and the refrigerator drives you crazy with its constant buzzing, and it seems you’ve lost your sense of smell. And you miss the details of someone else’s skin.

What is most intriguing about these snapshots is how easily they can provide a measure of comfort as well as one of regret -- of lost opportunities, broken connections and irretrievable time.

Years ago, I witnessed the birth of my sister and my heart froze the moment she inhaled her first breath and exhaled her first cry. But it could not freeze time altogether. She’s now in college. And years later, I unexpectedly fell in love and recognized it the very moment that I inhaled a single kiss and exhaled a sigh – one that was somehow left with my heart attached to it. And I remember stopping to take a picture, knowing all too well that it was not to happen exactly that way ever again. It was overwhelming and tender and mournful.

If I had to explain, even to myself, how I felt at those moments, it could take a thousand words (as is the going exchange rate between such commodities), or it could take very few. A name. A date. A song. The color azure. The word inevitable.

Life may not be replete with the moments that pause your soul, the vivid memories of which cause your heart beat differently, or make it hard to swallow. And all the better. Much of the beauty of those moments lies in their rarity -- in the awe of being in the right place, at the right time, a partaker in coincidence. And in finding a reason to believe in fate.