The Market Challenge

My name is Kathleen, I am fifty-two years old, and I want to tell you about the stupidest experiment I ever agreed to with a man I wasn't even dating anymore, because it started with a letter I wrote on a Thursday night while my tea went cold beside me.

Jay and I met five years back at our college reunion, back when I was forty-seven and he was forty-nine, and we dated for a few good months before it fizzled out the way warm things do, slowly and without anybody getting hurt. We stayed friends. Better friends, maybe, than we ever were as a couple, which is its own kind of joke.

The experiment was his idea originally, or mine, depending on who you ask, and it went like this. We would spend one Saturday at the Willamette Harvest Fair, that big sprawling farmers market off the highway with the hay bales and the striped tents and the midway that smells like roasted corn and old wood. We would go separately. We were each allowed to flirt with whoever we liked, openly, no sneaking, and then by Sunday we each had to report everything in writing. Every compliment, every lingering look, every stupid joke that landed.

The rules were simple, so I wrote them down simple. Here is that first letter, which I actually mailed, because Jay is the last man in Oregon who still checks his mailbox.

Dear Jay,

So here are the rules, since you'll claim later you never agreed to them. Saturday at the fair, we arrive together, we split up at the corn stand, and we don't seek each other out until five o'clock at the gate. Between now and then, we can talk to whoever we want, however we want, and Sunday we put it all in writing. Everything. No editing for dignity. If a man buys you a lemonade and touches your elbow, I want the elbow in the report.

And no, I am not jealous, before you start. I am curious. There is a difference, and I will thank you to remember it.

This is not about us getting back together. This is about finding out where the edges are. I've been wondering for a while now whether the reason we fizzled is that we never tested anything, and a thing you never test is just a theory.

Bring sunscreen. You always forget and then you complain like it's my fault.

Kathleen

He wrote back on a napkin and sent me a photo of it, because of course he did, landscapers apparently don't own stationery. His handwriting is terrible, all slanted like it's being blown by wind, but I have learned to read it the way you learn to read your doctor's prescriptions.

Kathleen,

Fine, rules accepted, though I think the elbow clause is a little much. Report as follows, day one, hour one.

I bought kettle corn from a young woman, thirty maybe, working the stand alone in this heat, and she had a laugh that came out before the joke finished, which I found charming, and I told her so. She asked if I wanted extra salt and I said sure, and then I smiled at her too long. I know I smiled too long because she looked at me the way you look at a dog that's staring at your sandwich. I paid, I left, I am reporting it anyway because the rules say everything.

The corn is good. The fair is enormous. I saw a man selling honey and I thought of you, which I am also reporting, since apparently I have to.

Jay

That one made me laugh, I'll admit. I was sitting on a hay bale near the midway when I read it, and a woman next to me asked if I was okay, and I said yes, I had received correspondence, and she looked at me like that was a medical condition.

I emailed him from my phone that afternoon, which felt like cheating somehow, modern technology intruding on our little nineteenth-century arrangement, but the rules said writing and email is writing, and I wanted to get my first report in before he built up too much of a lead.

Jay,

Reporting from a bench by the pig barn, where I have been sitting for twenty minutes because a banjo player set up nearby and I pretend I'm staying for the music. He's maybe forty, good forearms, and when he caught me watching his hands on the strings he winked at me. An actual wink, in this day and age. I laughed out loud and he took it as encouragement and played something faster, and I clapped, and that was the entire exchange, but I am reporting it in full so you can't accuse me of holding back.

Also I want it noted that I felt nothing. Not a twinge. I am amused and relaxed and completely unbothered, and if you are keeping score at home, I am winning this experiment.

Kathleen

I want you to notice that last paragraph, because it is going to matter later. I was bragging. I was so busy bragging that I didn't notice I was bragging, which should have been my first clue.

His second letter came Sunday morning, but he'd written it Saturday afternoon, back at his truck probably, judging by the grease fingerprint on the corner. This one was longer, and I read it twice, and the second time I read it slower, and I didn't like what my face was doing while I did it.

Kathleen,

Second report, and this one has a name in it, so brace yourself.

There's a vintage stall near the midway, under the striped tent with the red border, run by a woman named Veronica. She's forty-eight, sells old jewelry and tin toys and things, and we got to talking because I complimented a Bakelite brooch, a green one carved like a leaf, and she lit up and said most people can't tell Bakelite from plastic and I said my mother taught me the tap test, which is true, and after that we just talked.

She's funny. She's quick. She does an impression of the honey man that I will be reporting to you in person because it doesn't work on paper. She held the brooch up to my collar and said it matched my eyes, which are brown, so it doesn't, and I told her that, and she said that's not how flattery works, Jay, and I laughed harder than I've laughed in weeks.

I am not going to pretend I didn't enjoy it. She touched my arm twice during the conversation and I counted, and the fact that I counted is itself a reportable item, I know that.

I told her I'd come back after lunch. She said she'd hold the brooch. I have no intention of buying it, but I intend to go back, and I wanted you to hear it from me first, in writing, per the rules.

Hope the banjo man is behaving himself.

Jay

And here is where I have to be honest with you, reader, the way I couldn't be honest with him in that first email. I sat there on my couch with that letter in my hands, and I read the part about her holding the brooch up to his collar, and something in my stomach pulled tight, like a drawstring bag cinching shut.

Because I know Jay. I have known him for five years and I have watched him charm roomfuls of people, and it never once bothered me, because none of them were holding anything up to his collar. None of them were saying his name like that. I could hear it, the way she must have said it, that's not how flattery works, Jay, and I could see the whole scene in my head with terrible clarity, and my hands were not amused, and my stomach was not relaxed, and I was not, as it turned out, winning anything.

So I did what any mature fifty-two-year-old woman would do. I played back the voicemail I'd left myself on Saturday afternoon, because I hadn't trusted myself to write it down honestly yet, and transcribing it felt like reading somebody else's confession. This is what I said, word for word.

Okay. It's Saturday, about four, and I have one hour until the gate, and I am recording this because I am apparently a coward. I walked past the vintage stall about twenty minutes ago. I wasn't even going to, my feet just went there. And I saw them. She was holding something up, some little trinket on a card, and he was reaching to look at it