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When she lived near by we used to hang out in Barnes & Noble at Rittenhouse Square. We would sit in the coffee shop on the second floor and look out the window at the snow coverd square, marveling at the argile patterns the sidewalks cut through the winter.
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We would sit and drink too many raspberry mochas and read to each other, in full voice, passages we found interesting or funny or touching. Our antics were occasionally disturbing to the other patrons, but as often as not we would have people eaves dropping on what we had to say. Occasionally patrons would turn to face us while we read, a make shift coffee shop audience.
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I should also add that April is quite lovely. Beautiful in an intimidating kind of way. Beautifully wicked. Even when she's not perfectly put together she's still someone who turns heads.
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She's kind of the Mary Tyler Moore of my life. Beautiful, brilliant, and prone to prat falls and graceless conduct that make it appear she moves from place to place being supported by invisible wires attached to very random portions of her anatomy. The fluid movement of a marionette combined with the top heavy instability of weeble wobble. A sort of whiffle ball with legs.
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I remember one night we got overly dressed up to see Robert Sean Leonard in a play. It had just snowed and there were probably nine inches on the ground. We had gone shopping for the perfect clothing and she decided, snow or not, she was going to wear the heals on our fifteen block walk to the theater.
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We set out and within 3 steps her fingers were clamped onto my arm and her nails were digging in. The sidewalks had about an inch of tightly packed and very slippery snow. I should add parenthetically that April's bones snap like match sticks. Some kind of calcium something. A slip on the ice has a real potential to culminate in an emergency room visit. She defied gravity the whole way there. We even stopped for a drink on the way to give ourselves a moment of respite.
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Neither of us had ever been to this particular theater beofre. We rounded the final corner and down a perfectly quaint, tiny, colonial, cobble stone, completely unplowed road was the marquee. Her shoes were just not going to make it, there was too much ice between us and the door. So, in her beautiful dress, she got down on her hands and knees and crawled the final block through the snow to the box office, where she collected herself in front of all the onlookers and asked for our tickets.
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She had to ask for them because I was worthless. Between the spectacle and the interesting commentary provided by the residents of the homes she crawled past, I could barely stand myself. I can't remember ever having laughed so hard.
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Anyway, back at Barnes & Noble, one day we were all hopped up on espresso and frothy milk and April turned to the man sitting at the table behind her and yelled, "JIHAD!" When he looked up at her, she smiled demurely and turned back around resuming reading a volume of E.E. Cummings.
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I looked up at the clearly unnerved man who had, in all fairness, not done anything to deserve a declaration of holy war, and gave him an experssion designed to communicate that his curious stare was a clear invasion of our privacy.
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He got up and left.
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From that point on, from time to time April would yell "JIHAD!" at strangers in department stores, subway cars, funerals, whatever.
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I wonder if she still does that.
Posted at 2:11 p.m.
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