Guess Who
Is your person wearing a hat? Mark asks, leaning
his metal folding chair against the cabin wall
with a creak, steepling his fingers behind his head.
I’m looking at the sunbeams streaming through
the open windows, the gauzy curtains flapping
lazily in late July breeze, terns on the wing
over the lake, my hands, the game’s plastic tiles,
the plastic rows of cartoon faces, anything at all
to avoid staring at the bulging baseballs
of his biceps, toned by years of throwing,
chasing, lifting, tackling, hitting, pinning—
No, I blurt, and he grins, all pearls and opals,
eliminating tiles, each successive snap
burying a cartoon cap. Claire’s flowery sun hat,
Bernard’s dark-furred ushanka, a dead bear
hiding his bald pate. Coming here was my idea,
this old family cabin by the lake, this last hurrah
the week before we’d both be flying away,
college on opposite coasts. Is your person
a woman? I ask meekly. He laughs.
I hope so, grin growing wider, flashing dimples
like impact craters on each cheek, twin bombs dropped
on my cities, all flash and smoke and ruin—
At least she was until she left me, he adds
after a beat that feels like twenty. She’d left him
citing too young to settle, can’t do long-distance,
growing apart, all the usual bullshit
people say when they leave you, I assume,
giving up something she had no idea
how lucky she was to have. I glance down,
and Susan with her plump lips like a strawberry
stares at me from a tile, wide-eyed and empty.
He’ll always choose me over you, I hear her say.
In my head, her voice is shrill, sing-song,
mocking like a petulant child. I snap down men
one by one, all the faces I’ve studied, imagined
lives with—David, blond-bearded and burly,
coming home from a day of cutting down trees,
sap and sunlight still lingering with the musk
on his skin, gentle enough to lie behind me
and trace calloused fingers on my bare back.
Blushing Robert, brown hair swept over
his forehead in a businessman’s side part,
strong jaw and cleft chin, nose only a trust fund
could afford to keep supplied with party favors—
but he’s different with me, he loosens his tie
as he sits on the edge of the bed, confiding in me
about the stressful work day he’s had,
the volatile market, Thompson down the hall
gunning for his office. Don’t look so sad
about it, Mark says, snapping me back
to attention. You’re already winning.
What’ve you got to be upset about?
He’d chosen Guess Who from the dusty pile
in the hall closet. No television, no phone
reception, and no inclination to talk
about his feelings. Wouldn’t this be hilarious?
Ten years of friendship. He’s never had a clue
about what’s really hilarious. He ran
his hand through his glossy brown hair
and whatever argument I was going to make
against playing it dissolved like lake fog
in summer sun. Is your person a man,
he asks, turning the tables on me.
I want to say, He’d like to think he is,
but he’s an idiot, staring down at the two-
by-three class photo of Mark I’ve wedged
in the game’s little cardholder, first as a joke,
and then once I realized, each time I heard
the phrase Is your person, is your person,
this would be the perfect way to tell him
You’re my person. But I simply answer Yes,
and he nods, flipping down tiles with sudden
interest and precision, brow furrowed as if this
were the calculus final he’d struggled to pass.
I realize we could keep this going forever,
this limbo of staying and leaving, telling him
and not telling him. These painted people,
cartoon caricatures—artist, sailor,
egghead, mobster, schoolmarm, yokel—
how did the awkward, sensitive boy
fidgeting across the green felt card table
from the handsome, charismatic jock
never make it onto a tile? Is your person
Maria? I ask, knowing exactly his type.
Knowing this will end it. He chuckles,
flipping around the card. Beneath her beret,
Maria’s perfect mouth is half-pout, half-self-
superior smirk, brows thin and arched,
nose dainty and upturned, cheekbones
sharp as a knife through my heart. Bullseye,
Mark says. But seriously, who could resist?
He waggles his eyebrows, waving the card
in the air. It’s the beret, I think. Makes her look
like she knows how to handle a baguette.
While he turns the card over, I reach out
to slip his photo into my pocket, grab a card
from the top of the pile. Who’s your person?
Mark asks when he’s finished objectifying Maria.
I flip over Susan—a cheerful, white-haired lie.
Didn’t know you liked ‘em older, he jabs.
Guess you caught me, I reply. Secret’s out.
Chad Frame
Chad Frame is the author of Little Black Book, nominated for the Lambda Literary Award, Cryptid, and Smoking Shelter, winner of the Moonstone Chapbook Contest. He is the Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program, a Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, a founding member of the No River Twice poetry/improv performance troupe, and the founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival. His work appears in Rattle, Strange Horizons, Pedestal, Barrelhouse, Rust+Moth, on iTunes from the Library of Congress, and is archived on the moon with The Lunar Codex.
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