An Embarrassment

The first time Randy Banks got lucky in his car it left an indelible imprint. It lingered there on the ceiling and proved a constant embarrassment to him. You could look at it and tell right away what had happened. It was worse when you were in the passenger seat because then you had the uncomfortable knowledge it had happened right where you were sitting.

It was with a girl named Leslie, who was in his evening statistics class. They had studied together a few times already, but learning formulas was really just a reason to meet up without having to acknowledge the attraction they each felt for the other.

It was an odd tryst, as trysts go. He was driving her back to her place after taking her to Java Cabana, where they’d sipped tall coffees and gone over the chapter on calculating percentiles. At a stop light he had quietly asked himself whether he should go for it. When the light turned green, he took it as a sign from the universe that he should.

Interpreting a green light as a “yes” from the universe made no sense, though, given that red lights always turn green. In any case, it gave him just the prompting he needed to overcome his shyness and pull off into a nearby park.

Unbuckling his seatbelt, he leaned across and asked Leslie for permission to kiss her. When she consented, he did. Before long they were fumbling at each other’s clothes and doing what adults the world over are fond of doing.

Leslie had worn a skirt that evening in the unacknowledged hopes that this very thing would happen. And as Randy ground himself into her, she pressed her feet into the ceiling, pushing with all the strength her thighs could muster, stabilizing herself against his constant bucking and thrusting.

It didn’t work out long-term. Leslie ended up dropping the class, but Randy was okay with that. It was college, after all, and college is not the time to be developing serious relationships. College was all about fun. Or, at least, it seemed that way to him. But the encounter did help with his self-confidence. He had to admit that.

And anyway, he wasn’t sure he could even be in a relationship with the woman who had left her foot imprints in the ceiling of his car. The car was a Toyota Corolla from the 70s. It was a standard transmission that got incredible gas milage. The ceiling was a vinyl material that hadn’t been designed with intercourse in mind. As for the footprints, they turned out to be permanent, a constant embarrassment to him.

His college buddies gave him constant grief about it too, the way young men always do when one among them has made a sexual conquest. “What happened here?” they might say, pointing upwards, before deep, belly-quivering guffaws overtook them.

At one point he gave his mother a ride to a doctor’s appointment, forgetting about the footprints altogether. They had been deep in conversation about something trivial when suddenly she went quiet. When he looked over she was staring upwards, pale and speechless.

“Are those espadrilles?” she finally asked.

“I think so,” he answered her. “I wasn’t exactly paying attention to her shoes, though.”

His mother laughed at that but never asked him for a ride anywhere else. The footprints were never mentioned either, but he felt a lingering embarrassment, a permanent residue of shame, any time he was around her.

Then he thought he might be able to disguise the footprints if he covered the ceiling with glow-in-the dark stars. But that never really worked, either. The problem was that Leslie had had dirt on the bottom of her shoes. So the stars he pressed into her footprints refused to stick. They fell to the floor, their adhesive backing worn away by the grime from Leslie’s shoes.

The ceiling of his car became a glorious constellation of light, interrupted by two prominent foot-shaped depressions just above the front passenger seat. So now the footprints were even more prominent. Whereas before some passengers had missed them, now everyone noticed the impressions right away. They couldn’t help it. Once they saw the glowing stars, their eyes naturally journeyed across the entirety of the ceiling, trying to take it all in. Pretty quickly, they spotted the foot marks and understood what had happened.

So the stars came down.

Next Randy tried using an eraser to get the scuffs out. He did meet with a little luck here, at least. Some of the markings came away, but not the feet-shaped impressions themselves. The overall coloring was more consistent, though, which meant not everyone noticed the embarrassing reminder of his sexual escapade.

Eventually, he stopped worrying about the footprints and came to accept them. “Everyone else will stop noticing them in time,” he told himself. And that, essentially, is what happened.

Then Beth came along. Right away he was smitten with her. She was lovely. Her strawberry blonde hair curtained a face delicately sprinkled with tiny freckles. Her button nose and heart-shaped lips were the perfect complement to eyes the color of Mediterranean water.

Several weeks went by without her noticing the imprints, let alone even looking at the ceiling. Then, one evening after an especially enjoyable outing, he again asked himself whether he should try with her. Another green light once more gave him the impression that he should.

So, pulling to the side of a wooded area, he looked across at her and told her how much he liked her and that he really wanted to be alone with her, right here, right now.

Crawling across the stick shift, he planted his knees firmly on the floor in front of her, sliding her seat back to give himself more room. At the same time, she wrapped one arm around him while deftly using the other hand to lower the seat back.

The mood was set; they were ready.

Then Beth’s eyes traveled upwards, and she noticed something she had never noticed before.

“What’s that?” she asked, interrupting Randy’s amorous adventure.

“What’s what?”

“That,” she said, pointing to the footprints. “Are those from somebody else?”

“Eh, think of them as footholds,” he told her, “Somewhere to plant your feet while I take care of you. Now just relax,” he went on, “This is my car. So why don’t you get comfortable and let me do the driving for a while?”