I took a pen that did not smudge to my first speed dating event. At the time it seemed like preparation rather than a warning.
My sister signed me up without much negotiation. I was forty-six, worked as a stenographer, and since my divorce had managed to turn three ordinary dates into conversations resembling formal statements. The evening had simple rules. Five minutes, a bell, another table. On a small card we were supposed to circle the number of anyone we wanted to see again. I began adding notes because I feared forgetting a name or confusing two women who liked the same film.
My first four companions regarded the pen with varying degrees of mistrust. One asked whether I was writing a job reference. I said it was a professional habit. She did not find that funny. At the sixth table I began writing below the edge of the tablecloth, which looked even worse. Each time the bell rescued me from another sentence intended to explain the previous one. I wondered how long I had to stay before I could tell my sister I had tried.
Lea sat at the final table with her shoes neatly arranged beneath her chair. She pointed to my card. "That isn't your symbol for gardening. It's the one for a construction site," she said. Ten years earlier she had done the same work. She had read my clumsy summary of somebody's hobby as a report about rebuilding a bridge. For the first time that evening I forgot to take a note. She asked which words I still heard when I closed my eyes, and I told her I sometimes answered shopkeepers with, "Please repeat the last part."
The bell rang while she described her worst mistake, when she had turned the word for a pepper into an entirely serious discussion about paper. I did not move. The organizer reminded us that the round had ended. Lea put on her shoes and said the story had a continuation if there was somewhere nearby where they did not measure time. I put my pen into my inside pocket so carefully that she laughed again.
At the café I learned that she now made stained glass, disliked olives, and had a funny little cough when she laughed too hard. I wrote none of it down. When we stood, she handed me the card bearing her table number. On the back, in ordinary, unhurried handwriting, she had written Saturday and a time. I kept it. Later I could not reconstruct every sentence she had said, but I remembered the moments when we both fell silent and neither hurried to fill the transcript.