Finding Love At Walmart - Closing In On Spinsterhood, Any Venue Will Do, The Romance On Aisle 19

Alicia Robertson was pushing fifty and she still had not found the man of her dreams by a long shot.  There was Bartleby, owner of The Second Read, an independent used book store on Dupont Circle, in the family for years.  Bart had shown her the classics, squirreled away in the back, guided her through Faraday, Bleecker, and Ochre.  

‘Nothing doing', she said when he asked her if she needed help, but was pleased at the attention.  The day had been long, dreary, and somehow always behind schedule, so the kindness of strangers was much appreciated. 

She was not looking for anything but old books, but there was an interesting peculiarity about the man, something hidden, literary, even romantic and she smiled warmly at him as he took her to the more straightforward classics of Thackery, Dickens, and Hugo. 

And that was how it began, but it wasn't long before that hidden peculiarity became full blown, obsessive, and off-putting.  He was a treacherous bore - the worst kind - and his lovemaking in particular became kinky and demanding.

‘Let's', he said, codeword for any one of ten Kama Sutra-like sexual games, more suited to the Folsom Street leather-and-thong S&M crowd, to which she first demurred coyly, then insistently, then with a finally slamming of the front door onto a baking hot August afternoon. 

And then there was Francis, an accountant, the perfect anodyne for her somewhat dangerous dalliance with Bartleby.  Francis was quiet, demure, reserved, and a gentleman.  

Still waters run deep she thought when his tentativeness began to become irritating, but there was no still or flowing water of any kind in this timid, shapeless man.  She took the lead, but his 'May I's?' and 'Would it be OK's' once they got started was an importuning, childish game; and so it was that he too was shown the door. 

There were many others...well, not that many. 'I'm not a slattern', she said, 'nor a tart'. 

She wondered if she was doing things right, in the right venues to catch a desirable man. Used bookstores and the Accounting Department were obviously blind alleys.  She needed to brighten up her search, go upscale; and so it was that she was often found by the Sargents at the Phillips, the Calder mobile in the East Wing of the National Gallery, and at intimate art seances in Bethesda. 

These last were arranged by a Vassar classmate Vicki Barnes, a woman who had also been unlucky in love but shelved the whole idea and turned to social justice.  There wasn't a progressive cause that Vicki did not embrace, and she was scene at every climate conference, gender seminar, and socialist workers councils.  

Such advocacy displaced - to use the Freudian term - her sexual desires, and while never entirely happy or satisfied, it took away the heartbeat, the flame of romance. 

This month it was to celebrate a local poet, a native Marylander who had written verse since she was ten, but never progressed much beyond her little girl's fantasies  - moonlight, sunsets, a summer breeze - but Vicki found her endearing and hoped that her 'Tea And Poems With Adela' evening gathering would do wonders for the poet, who was finally flagging after so many years of garden variety verse.  It would also be a chance to meet some fascinating people, she told Alicia. 

It was the most painful, penitential evening she had ever spent, two hours of puerile, insipid, treacly nonsense, and only out of respect for her friend and classmate did she hold out until the very end. 

Worst of all, there was no truth in advertising - there were not only no interesting men there, but those who did attend were as colorless and dull as sheet rock and without an ounce of charm.  

Barking up the wrong tree again, Alicia said to herself as she drove home.  'I must vet, suss, and choose more carefully', but for all her planning, all her GPS precision, and her AI reach, she struck out time and time again. 'I don't want to die an old maid', she said dismally. 

Serendipity, that was what did it. Unplanned, out of sequence, totally random and out of the blue came a chance encounter with Avery Phelps on Aisle 19 of Walmart where both were looking for lightbulbs.  'I am not a Walmart person', she explained as they both picked up and tried to rearrange the 100w incandescent bulbs that had come toppling down when they both reached for the top shelf. 

'Neither am I', said Avery, and that pride in dissimilitude did the trick, and soon the two were an item. 

Now, anyone who has been to a Walmart knows right off that it is not the place for romance.  It is a desperate, low-end junk store.  The poor shop there, the ones with two jobs of their own, straitened circumstances, and no time for affairs.  Overweight, dour, plodding, and determined, not a one gets a second glance, and admiring look; so the stars must have been aligned just right for Alicia, or a shooting star over the shopping mall, for there he was, and there he would be in her life. 

Mirabile dictu! the affair lasted into the Fall and the following Spring.  Neither his two ex-wives and four children rained on their parade, and they were seen everywhere together.  

Yet, there is a reason why there are spinsters - old maids, single older women - and that's because they are picky to a fault.  There were plenty of Yale men who came a-courting while she was at Vassar, men with pedigrees, promise, and hefty bank accounts; but Alicia always found fault - fibs became lies and the lies became congenital issues.  

Honesty became a cause celebre in her life and all things were judged according to it; but of course honesty like every other moral principle has a lot of give in it, and most tend to accept variability as a given not a game changer. 

Such judgmental attitude in such proportions exhibited by Alicia suggested something deeper.  Men were the problem.  Men by nature were irremediable liars, cheats, and brigands.  Untrustworthy, morally groundless, and not worth having.  This absolute denial had been neatly covered in pretty dress.  It surely seemed that she liked men, but nothing doing.  She was as misandrous as they come, an old maid for life and proud of it. 

Once this realization hit her, she was again a happy woman.  No more cruising the East Wing, no more brutally pretentious seances at Vicki Barnes, no more men. Why had it taken her so long?  So many tedious hours wasted, so much faux male idolatry, so much...bullshit.  Now she could retire gracefully from sexual pursuit, and do whatever pleased her, happy as a clam.