First Person / Giant hearts of chocolate
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I wanted the giant heart box. Forget roses, stuffed bears, those smaller, more civilized heart-pocked boxes with their golden ribbons. I wanted chocolate in a box the size of a ham. I wanted a Super-Size-Me box that would have to be strapped into a passenger seat and protected by an air bag. I wanted a heart that could double as a soapbox my beloved would stand on as he wailed to the world, "Because I love you this much!"
And I got one on Valentine's Day years ago.
I was living in New York then, working as a flight attendant. I'd been dating D for a while. We didn't like each other much, but it worked. It worked the way things work when the person next to you on the bus doesn't smell like moldy broccoli or talk to his sandwich.
I was away a lot. D was a cop and often on duty when I was home. He looked cute in his uniform. We both liked to travel and I had flight benefits. I got a Police Benevolent Association card that helped me get out of parking tickets and someone to call when a roach cuddled my toothbrush. He had someone who could take him to Spain on the cheap and make meatballs on the toy-sized stove in his New York apartment.
"I like our arrangement," D would say, as if our lives were a bunch of carnations, tacky and bound together out of obligation or necessity, a gesture.
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I'm not sure when I became obsessed with the big Valentine's heart box, but size-wise it probably had something to do with the box of chocolates my father would bring home from work every Christmas.
My father worked in a tool shop in Wall, Pa. His bosses, like most bosses, hated workers, but every Christmas, they'd cough up a hairball of decency and give everyone a four-pound box of chocolates.
The box was huge, rectangular, with three layers inside, an office building full of chocolates, each in its own cubicle. My parents and I would huddle on the couch and watch the evening news. I'd sit in the middle with the box on my lap, and we'd fight for the red-foil-wrapped cherries or the last toffee crunch.
"It's the least the bastards can do," my father said.
That Valentine's Day, D showed up at my apartment, awkward as a salesman in the doorway. We'd had a fight the day before, something about ketchup. I was getting dressed for work. I had a three-day trip, with double layovers in Little Rock.
On the romance scale, Arkansas is not Paris, though Arkansas' official gem is the diamond and the state insect is the honeybee, and Little Rock was once home to Bill Clinton, and Arkansas' state instrument is the fiddle and nothing says sexy like a fiddle-round of "Sadie at the Back Door" or "Who Hit Nellie With the Stove Pipe."
First Published February 11, 2012 12:00 am
