One of the Times My Boyfriend Almost Killed Me
by Deborah Cherry Mosch
When my husband Steve and I were dating back in college, there were plenty of signs that pointed to his needing to find another girlfriend. This is just one of them, and it happened within the time it takes for a traffic light to change.
I was doing my laundry at the local Lemon Tree Laundromat on a rainy Sunday afternoon, when out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Steve’s bright yellow Volkswagen Rabbit waiting at the red light right out in front of the building. I squinted through the drips of rain on the huge plate glass that fronted the building and saw it was he, so I waved at him. It was a little wave at first, a subtle wave so as not to disturb the other launderers or bring too much attention to myself.
He didn’t seem to notice, so I waved a few more times, each time with more animation. Soon I was actually hopping up and down while waving and I knew I was committed: I either had to get his attention to prove there was a person outside of the Laundromat that knew I was not insane, or I would have to find somewhere else to do my laundry.
It was a race against time since the light might turn green at any moment. Thinking quickly, I ran outside in the rain, waving wildly all the time. Since I was wearing worn flip-flops my footing was questionable. I was within reach of the Rabbit when my feet slipped from under me and I slid completely under his car.
My heart pounding, I managed to shimmy back and reach the bottom of his door with my fingertips. I dragged my body out from under enough to work my arms up the side of his door, my fingers just barely reaching his window.
I started frantically tapping on his window with my dirty wet digits. The light must surely be turning green, and one would think that I would be panicking because I was about to be killed, but instead my thoughts went immediately to the headline in the local paper: Clownish, ridiculously moronic college student run over by unsuspecting boyfriend/murderer.
Miraculously Steve saw my desperate fingers tapping on his window. I can only imagine what he thought when he saw that. Had the circumstances been reversed, I would have peed my pants, fainted and driven into the other cars in traffic. Headline: Incontinent escaped mental patient hallucinates boyfriend’s fingers tapping outside her car window while at red light, drives across traffic, causes pile-up.
And he married me anyway.
Deborah Cherry Mosch is an artist and professor living in Savannah, GA with her husband and series of animals. She has been editing a color theory textbook for eighteen years. (It has occurred to her recently that her childish sense of humor, incessant email-writing and a chain of nonstop, lifelong, unfortunate, awkward occurrences may exist not just to annoy, but to help people.) “That was fun, wasn’t it?” I asked as we hiked through the airport, exhausted. “That was fun, wasn’t it?” I asked as we hiked through the airport, exhausted.
©dcm essays
