1999, San Diego, California

By Sara Irene

Three months after I ended my engagement, rendering me completely unattached for the first time in more than six years, my friends simultaneously decided that it was time for me to move on and start dating again.

I quickly learned that this decision was not so much for my benefit as it was for them to satisfy their matchmaking urges. I submitted to a constant string of bad setups that left me wondering if my friends even liked me.

I grudgingly accepted these dates for their entertainment value. My friends and I would sit around café tables giggling as we appointed nicknames to each of the guys.

There was the “Tip Stealer” who had four credit cards declined while trying to pay for a $40 lunch check and subsequently swiped the $10 tip I’d left for the waitress when he thought I wasn’t looking.

Then there was “The Latin Lover,” an Ecuadorian fellow who gave a detailed description of my anatomy in Spanish while on his cell phone at the dinner table on our first date. He claimed to be talking to his sick mother, but you should have seen his face when I told him, “I hope you don’t talk to your mother like that!”

That date lasted less than an hour, a record soon broken by “Captain Nazi,” who emphatically insisted that the Holocaust never happened, just after I explained that I was converting to Judaism.

Now, six years later, most of these guys are long forgotten, but there is one guy whom my friends still remember. They frequently beg, “Please, please tell the story of the Pea Guy again!” That’s “pea” as in the green vegetable that grows in a pod, not “pee” as in urine. (If I had continued with these blind dates, there probably would have eventually been a “urine guy.”)

Things with the Pea Guy started off rather normally - OK, maybe not. On our first date, we walked back and forth on La Jolla shores for hours late one balmy September night, before deciding to strip to our underwear and run into the water. This exhilarating moment lasted for approximately 3 minutes, until my feet came into contact with something that moved, something sharp. I ran from the water as if I had been propelled out of a cannon.

Back at my apartment, we cleaned ourselves up and discovered that my foot was cut open. Pea traced his finger along the line of blood, swirling softly as he cupped my foot in his hand and kissed my toe. I knew it was one of those moments during which I should have swooned, become lost in him, locking eyes and all that la dee da, but all I could think was, Ewww! He kissed my bleeding foot!

It was an awkward moment, really, him kneeling in front of me, still wearing only the towel he had wrapped around his waist after his shower, me pretending not to be impressed by what I saw through the gape in the towel. I should have sent him home, but somehow, we got into a conversation, and I forgot that he was a half-naked stranger.

I discovered that he was brilliant - a biochemistry graduate student. He was interested in nutrition. He had developed a special computer program to help people get all of their daily nutrients from the foods they eat, as inexpensively as possible.

When he mentioned that he was a vegetarian, too, I imagined pinning a “Sold” sign to his shirt. Oh, the meatless dinners we would eat, carefully crafted in my kitchen, garnished with sprigs of herbs, beautifully plated food that no creature had given its life for. We could exchange recipes and cook together, wearing matching “Kiss the Vegetarian Cook” aprons, playfully splashing water on each other while one of us washed the dishes as the other stirred bubbling pots of vegetarian goodness.

Our courtship progressed quickly. He didn’t drive, so I would pick him up on Friday nights after work and deposit him home again Monday mornings on my way back into the office. These were glorious weekends spent almost entirely in my apartment.

I’m not going to be polite and proper here, and say we were playing Scrabble into the wee hours of the night, because let’s face it: that’s not believable, nor is it remotely true. We drew the shades, lit candles all over the apartment, and spent these devastatingly exquisite weekends entirely in bed.

But eventually, reality set in, and we had to get out of bed and actually get to know each other. We had similar music tastes. He even loved the music my former fiancé referred to as the “angry lesbian genre.” He was extremely attractive - tall with a defined stomach. He loved giving massages but was indifferent to receiving them. He was perfect. I would look at him and wonder, how the hell is he single at 28?

One night, about a month into our relationship, I decided to prepare the candlelit vegetarian dinner of my daydreams. I spent three hours sautéing eggplant, chopping vegetables and baking while he was at the zoo. When he returned, he looked at the table and said sweetly, “This isn’t going to work in my diet. I brought my own stuff.”

“What? Why not? It’s vegetarian!”

“Well, I don’t know the nutrient counts, and if I eat it, everything will be thrown off.” He reached into his bag and pulled out three cans of peas.

“You are going to eat three cans of peas? Instead of my famous eggplant parmesan?”

“I have carefully calculated all this, and I have to eat this way. If I eat something else that’s not on the list, I won’t get the RDA.”

“But I’ve never seen you eat peas before.”

“You’ve never seen me eat before. I need to get back on track. I can’t let ‘us’ get in the way of decent nutrition. It’s my thesis.”

He proceeded to open all three cans of peas and dumped them into a bowl. He ate them cold, without salt or butter, and drank the liquid when he was done.

I was disgusted, but I figured that other people had put up with my vegetarian diet, so his thing for peas shouldn’t really be a problem.

But it was. We couldn’t go out to dinner, and we could never eat the same things. He had taken over one of my cupboards and filled it with peas. I argued that eating the same thing every day was not nutritionally sound. He disagreed, and apparently, his computer program proved it.

A few weeks later, we stopped at Costco on our way home from a wedding. I was horrified to discover that they were running a rebate on peas.

“Look at this! Look! This works out to 22 cents a can! A can! I could get down to almost $3 a day for food with these. I’ll be right back. I need to go get one of those flat carts.”

He left me standing there by the peas. I was afraid of them. I knew that they were mocking me from their cans, gloating that they’d won over the perfect guy. I was dating a pea addict!

I was livid and I felt tricked. All the other guys had showed their neuroses up front, but Pea was different. He suckered me, made me believe that he was perfect. But those damned peas kept getting in the way of the perfect couple dreams I was having. It wasn’t the peas as much as the rigidity his diet brought to our life.

The peas had changed us, and not for the better.

He returned before I had a chance to flee the store. He loaded case after case of peas onto the cart. In the parking lot, we spent 30 minutes trying to configure 50 cases of peas into my Mitsubishi Coupe, and when we left, the tail end of my car scraped on the driveway.

I spent the entire drive to his house trying to figure out what I was going to say to him. How was I going to end this?

But I didn’t have the guts to say anything. He emptied my car and took the peas upstairs, and we kissed good-bye. I stopped answering my phone and tried to convince myself that it was OK to avoid him because it would be cruel to break up with him during finals week.

I was a wuss, but he eventually got the message. A few weeks later, karma found me, and I met “Stalker Guy.”

Sara Irene lives in San Diego. She is currently completing a degree in English and plans to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing. She lives in a charming old house with her boyfriend and two turtles, Buckley and Dylan. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 | Email This Post

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