Penelope, as her name tag stated, was a Latina woman in her early thirties with cheekbones so high I had already imagined a cloud bank from the Andes draped around her brow.
I longed to rappel down those cheekbones on a silken line and then, with the greedy exactitude of a cartographer, map every cliff and crag.
A bronze beauty, she stood before me like a living sculpture, bearing a decorous scroll that seemed inscribed in the tongue of some ancient scripture—only turning out to be, dammit, my receipt.
If by saying she took my breath away, I’ve slashed the originality of this text to mere cliché, I stand guilty of that syntactical fire-sale.
But…THIS WOMAN TOOK MY BREATH AWAY.
By contrast, I was just a junk food addict: order number 42, a cheese quesadilla. The part of the order that was Grant Grimsly—lowly carbon-based meat sack with a credit card—soon forgotten.
My mind raced feverishly in search of an apt superlative. The usual descriptors—“She’s smokin’ hot!”—seemed woefully inadequate and stupid.
I watched Penelope continue to work—justifying her hourly wage, which was probably never enough.
She stopped briefly and smiled at me. Then her eyes, sparkling like two celestial objects, tripled in magnitude, and she laughed. She flung open the window, pointed at my chin, then back to hers, saying, “There’s, um, something running down from the corner of your mouth.”
I quickly brushed two fingers over my chin and felt something wet.
Drool.
I nodded back. My carbon-based status demoted to the consistency of primordial soup.
I retraced my loss of dignity: in those sixty-odd seconds after meeting her, I had apparently clocked out of my body for the day. All social proprieties: gone. But it was too late. The literary atrocities oozed out of me. It was all about the canvas now.
Framed in the drive-thru window, Penelope was a priceless Stradivarius—an instrument of indescribable beauty whose Sotheby’s insurance premium would easily buy five thousand tacos, a truckload of salsa, and a lifetime supply of churros.
And who wouldn’t admire such workmanship? Her surprisingly broad shoulders, strong and stately, tapered down to a soft and desirable midriff, seductively punctuated—to my ruin—by a fabulous caboose that wrestled within her jeans like alternating pistons beneath the taut denim.
It was as if she exerted her own gravitational pull, and I longed to fall into orbit around her, in elliptical adoration—or at least until the restraining order kicked in.
After watching her suitors earlier—one of them feigning Hail Marys before reaching her window, and others reciting their pickup lines in the mirror—I knew this was a woman who, through no fault of her own, gave men insomnia.
I imagined the taco fanatics freezing in place—her mere silhouette, a modern-day Medusa that turned their loins to stone.
As Penelope took more orders on the headset and helped with the food, I sat silently, pondering what I could say to a woman like this—and how I might stand out among the cars idling behind me.
I somehow wanted her to see me—not as another sex-starved suitor, but as someone worthy of belonging in her orbit.
From the way she carried herself—quietly competent, still managing a small kindness for each car, and not with a thousand-yard stare—I could tell she had depth. And I wanted to leap into the air with boundless zeal and bellyflop into the middle of it.
Perhaps as a cruel joke, a beautiful woman like Penelope was God’s biological prank on men, her sashaying curves, the breathless sway in her gait—a shiny marquee that triggered relentless gawking and mindless salivating from her Neanderthal-driven brethren. But when she gazed my way again and looked into my eyes, I suddenly knew what photosynthesis must feel like to a plant. A sensation that was impossible to articulate, but I was in awe of her light—a missing nutrient I never got from food.
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