Dottie Conversation (Part 1 of 3)

Dogger Gatsby was eating his same old fish sandwich as usual and staring with studied and indifferent lust at the fresh young faces of the college girls.

“They're pretty, all right. But what does that matter?” he told himself. “They're all too young for me.” That settled everything somehow.

Hardee's hadn't put enough tartar sauce on his fish again and the rest of the sandwich was pretty tasteless. He hated it when they did that. Except for that, he wasn't thinking about anything at all when Dottie came in. He'd never seen her there before, though he ate at Hardee's all the time. He kept a close eye on her, only half-believing she was there. She stopped at the condiments counter for napkins and things.

The last time he'd seen her, she'd taken him quite by surprise. It hadn't been the first time she'd done that. He suspected that she took a lot of people by surprise, but that didn't make him any cooler about it all. He'd been riding on the tractor near the Administration Building and from a distance he'd seen what he casually took to be another delicious blonde coed walking ahead of him. He'd watched her appreciatively, rather than excitedly as he used to do when he was younger, but still smiling to himself at the appealing, attractive shape of her behind. He was brought up short, though, when he drove up beside her and saw it was Dottie.

“Good grief!” he thought. “I never knew she was so—!”

He'd always studied her face and voice. As he stopped the tractor and said hello, he felt embarrassed and found it hard to talk.

“She must be a power to reckon with,” he thought, “if her face and voice had the power to keep me from noticing her body all this time! I'm not that nice!”

She was bringing her attractive body straight up the aisle toward him now and setting her tray down at the booth next to his. She smiled and nodded and started to sit down facing away from him, then turned toward him slightly, as if only for a moment.

“I was talking about you just the other day to a couple of your bosses,” she smiled.

He covered his mouth and said, “Fuwhut?”

Dogger’s voice was muffled, which made sense because his mouth was full. But as for what she'd said, he'd heard her perfectly well. He needed time to think. So he sat there nodding idiotically (he felt like an idiot, anyway), trying to grin, hoping it would give him enough time.

“Goddamn it,” he thought, “why do I always feel so awkward just when I need to say something?!”

He wanted to say something clever, something charming if at all possible, but how, with a mouthful of fish-stick mush choking him? Dottie nodded and smiled back at him brightly, then turned and sat down. His heart sank as she turned away.

“Well, that's that,” he thought.

But Dogger Gatsby couldn't quite give it up. He continued choking down the slightly burnt, otherwise tasteless, bites of fish fillet and lettuce, desperate to say something to her before it became impossible to speak again. But, even as he found his voice, she turned in her seat and repeated what she'd said.

“I was talking to a couple of your bosses, I said.”

“Really?”

“I told them I always got a chuckle when you came around,” she said, her lilting words trampling merrily on the cuffs of his stuttered one.

“Really? A chuckle? Good grief.”

“I'm really sounding intelligent now,” he thought.

He was caught between mortification and amusement. Though he didn't care any more than the next man to admit it, it was easy to embarrass him, and Dottie was better at embarrassing him than anybody he'd met in a long time. He wondered if she knew it. It seemed to him likely that she did, and did it all on purpose. The more he saw of her, the more he suspected that was it.

She seemed to be starting a conversation, but at the same time kept turning away from him toward her food. He understood both actions, but not their coexistence.

“That's the trouble with these booths,” he thought. “If you're sitting close enough to talk to somebody, you're facing the wrong direction.”

Just as he'd decided she'd finished with him, she turned around and spoke again. “Yeah, they said you'd always been a free spirit.”

My bosses, he thought? “Who in the world were you talking to?” he asked incredulously.

“Uh—I can't think who it was right now. Who all do you work for over there, anyway?”

“As far as I can tell, I work for every Indian chief mentality on campus, and there's as many too many Indian chiefs in the maintenance department as in any other department on campus. God knows how any work gets done.”

He had a bad attitude, and didn't much care who knew it sometimes either, though he realized the end result of such indifference wouldn't exactly be fun. He didn'tf want to be fired, but he didn't want to be there, either. This all seemed a little too complicated to explain to Dottie on the spur of the moment, and he only had a few minutes left of his lunch break, anyway, so he figured he shouldn't even try.

“Well, hell, it's not that complicated, though,” he thought; it was probably what everyone felt who worked for anyone anywhere.

“You work for everybody, huh?” she said, wrinkling her eyebrows.
“Every mother's son.”

“And daughter?” she rejoined.

“Bull’s-eye,” he nodded coolly, “there’s that nice young woman who’s an assistant director over there.” He smiled, but was thinking nervously: “Dottie’s eyebrows are always laughing at me!”

“Uh—yeah; for everybody, I think. Uh—hmmm... (God, I sound like an idiot, he thought.) “A free spirit, huh?” he grinned.

As he spoke, he stuck out his tongue to cover his broken tooth, then put his hand over his mouth to hide his tongue. Shyness, like subtlety, takes a great deal of maneuvering to maintain its narrow equilibrium. Dottie nodded her head at him and he shook his.

“Not that I much qualify as one any more, but I certainly can't believe that anyone I work for even knows what a free spirit is. Or was that your term for it?”

“Oh—well, it was my phrase, really, I think.”

“Ah. Now I understand. But who were you telling this to?”

“I can't think who it was right now. I'll think about it; maybe I'll remember,” she said and started to turn back to her food.

No, this wasn't right! Dogger Gatsby panicked, staring at the back of her head and realizing that the conversation would end if he didn't do something bold. Bold for him, anyway. He was a terrible candyass, deathly afraid of being rejected by women he liked, and he knew it.

“May I join you?” he blurted out.

“Why not? Come on.”

As he set his tray down on the table across from her, he smiled and said, “I didn't want you to get a crick in your neck.”

“Oh, I wouldn't have,” she smiled confidently. “I was through.”

“You mean you weren't going to talk to me anymore?”

“Probably not.”

“Oh. Jesus,” he said mildly as he sat down across from her. Now he had no idea at all where he stood. Was he intruding? Making an ass of himself, as usual? Or was it all a matter of indifference to her? God, he must be stupid; it seemed like nothing was ever simple for him.

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