A sluttish woman, or one that spills water and other liquids carelessly.
I remember Diana.
A college cutie of mixed heritage, she claimed not to know all the nations and cultures represented in her DNA. She knew she had Cherokee, Japanese, and Mediterranean in her bloods, but other nationalities were mostly speculation. There was talk of a British ancestor who married an Egyptian, and through that a purported connection to old, old, old money. There was also known to be Eskimo blood in the lineage but details were sketchy.
That was her story. It was her only story. She repeated it faithfully, with faith to who I do not know. She never embellished by adding other exotic nationalities or peoples. I suppose embellishments were unnecessary but to me it seemed like an inevitable temptation to lie. One must keep their lies in order, though, and I do not think Diana had the self-referential complexity for maintaining a swarm of lies.
She was beautiful, though, and at that age beauty still influenced my infatuations. In her litanies which outlined her heritage I tried to dig deeper, to find more, I listened for fresh nuance and distraction which would allow me to change the subject, to take another path. The farthest afield I got was her dreams. but her dreams were routine, the stuff of textbooks, dreams which expressed common anxieties and everyday concerns.
One night I felt a breakthrough. She stood and walked to the kitchen sink. She turned on the water. When she turned on the water it leaked from the faucet, down the length of the fixture to the Hot and Cold dials. From there the water crawled along a crack in the countertop and it somehow leaped to a table, where it splayed into a veined lightning-bolt formation, dispersing itself in several directions and eventually slowing and stopping its growth.
It did not grow wisteria-like but the water’s spontaneous sprawl was the spark of romance for which I hungered. To me it expressed Diana’s character, or the character I longed for. She let the water leak in this way, I thought, as a tacit signal of deep meaning, as a wordless representation of her winsome character. Words, I decided, were inferior tools for her.
