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sets, moons wax and wane, seasons change. A century passes. The world does its thing, the ozone thins, the globe warms, a billion species become extinct, the planet whirls through space, and the whole time the two of us are still staring at each other without knowing what comes next.
    “So do you want to join the club?”
    “Yeah. I mean, I guess so. I dunno. Sure. Yes,” I say, trying to disguise the unexpected panic that was creeping into my voice. “Oh. But wait. Hold on. Question: do you have to, y’know,
be
a virgin in order to join the club?”
    Once again, she throws her head back and laughs. Her hair flies wild, and she grabs her sides as though they actually might split. She doesn’t hit her head on the wall this time.
    “What?” I say. “What’d I say? What’s funny?”

    Angela and I are touring the grounds of the golf course. She wants to know the ins and outs and ups and downs of my workplace, because as she says, “You never know when useless information will come in handy.” I’m talking like a big know-it-all who owns the place while she gazes out across the long stretches of mowed grass and clipped hedges. I can see her trying to make sense of what I’m saying. At the first green, shepeers over the tops of her sunglasses, points into the near distance, and asks me, “What’s the story with that?” I explain the pin with the fluttering flag, the sloping fairway, and the tricky sand trap. Then just as I’m telling her the difference between a bogey and birdie, she kneels down, brushes the short, spiky grass with her open palm, and says: “This doesn’t feel like grass. What is it?”
    I give a short lecture on how the grass was developed by some laboratory about twenty years ago because they needed a more rugged type of grass to survive the hot Florida summers with its searing sunlight and lack of rainfall. I’m making the whole thing up. She listens inattentively, and then when I’m finished, she looks at me again, but it seems as though she’s seeing right through me while straining hard to pick up radio waves from another dimension.
    “A child said, What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full hands,”
she recites.
    “How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he
.
    “I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven
.
    “Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord
,
    A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped
,
    Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that
we may see and remark, and say Whose?”
    She laughs. I guess she’s surprised by her own ability to remember the words. And then she collapses with her outstretched arms flung to either side of her and her face looking up to the sky. I can’t help noticing that her breasts are perfectly shaped.
    “Wow,” is all I can think to say.
    “Walt Whitman,” she replies. “Once when my father was in jail, he passed the time by reciting the poems he remembered. The prisoners loved him. So I thought, I’d better learn a few poems. Y’know, just in case.”
    “You planning on going to jail?” I ask her, taking my place beside her on the grass.
    “Definitely,” she says. “I just haven’t decided what for.”
    Angela and I sit for a long time on the grass without saying anything. I can feel “the hopeful green stuff” digging into the undersides of my arms and legs. It hurts, but I don’t care. This is heaven.
    “My mother was a poet,” I tell her.
    “Lucky you,” she says, and maybe that’s a cue for me to change the subject, but I can’t stop. I want her to know everything about me, and I want to know everything about her.
    “Do you know Bob Dylan, the singer?” I ask her.
    “No,” she says, shaking her head and giving it a tilt. “Should I?”
    “I’m named after him. My mother named me after the guybecause he was such a good poet and all. He wrote a ton of songs. When I was a kid, my mother used to sing his songs to me.