Frankly, Wendy wouldn’t have been my first choice. In fact, if it had been left up to me, I doubt I would have ever gone on a date with her. Or even spoken to her.
But, then, if it’d been left to me, I might not have had a single date through college and grown old alone.
Wendy was not the prettiest girl working at Sam’s Wholesale Club running the registers while I brought in carts. That, if I could only choose one, probably would have been Deanna, although Lori and Kayla were so damn close tied for second as to make it a matter of how they were wearing their blonde, red, and brunette manes that day. Not to mention Luna who appeared in Playboy’s “Girls of the Southwest Conference” that year. Although Luna wasn’t really “pretty” so much as she had big tits and a wasp waist.
But, no. Wendy wasn’t the prettiest by a long shot. But, neither was she ugly. I could easily to this day, decades later, name ten cashiers that were uglier without even mentioning the two hairy legged guys.
Wendy was, however, the strangest.
It was the 80s, the age of “big hair”. Wendy wore her “dirty-dishwater” mane cut at shoulder length, which I guess wasn’t really all that strange even then. Or wouldn’t have been if she’d just left it alone. But, she swept it up into a topknot sticking straight up on top of her head right in the big middle like Alfalfa from the Little Rascals. Only instead of slicked or pointed, it was held in a rubber band and bushed out like paint brush.
An unfortunate choice since with her heart shaped face, narrow shoulders and modest breasts, from the waist up “paint brush” was exactly what leapt to mind the first time I saw her.
And then there were her clothing choices. Her boots were too clunky. Her jeans were…not firm like denim should be and her ass wiggled around like two pigs wrestling under a blanket when she walked away. Most of the time she wore men’s crew neck basic white t-shirts up top.
Wendy never really smiled, either. Oh, she was almost always sort of smiling, most of the time anyway. But, it looked like only the left side of her mouth worked when she smiled. The left corner would twitch up by itself, and no teeth showed. It gave her a sardonic twist and I always felt subtly ridiculed whenever she turned it on me.
Not that I was any great catch.
Yeah, okay. I had played football in high school and was a little bit of a fanatic about working out. I was pretty solid with broad shoulders and a lot of muscle and little enough fat that the team Doc had called me out to put some fat on if I wanted to stay healthy.
But, I was only five and a half feet tall, so all that bulky muscle made me look more like a fireplug than an Adonis. Useful for pushing a string of twenty-five carts at a time back in, not so much for impressing the girls.
And, lest we forget, it was fucking July or August in West-by-God-Texas when we first laid eyes on each other. And I was running around on an asphalt parking lot for six and eight hour stints right through the hottest part of the day. I was always drenched in sweat, covered in salt from previous sweat not to mention dirt, and my face was usually peeling away in chunks from sun and wind burn.