Maria is a fairly tall woman. She is 5’9” and has excellent posture, so she seems to be 5’10”. Her complexion in not dark brown, but she is definitely not white, and she has a mole on her cheek that is small but noticeable. Her hair is long past her shoulders and she loves to have her hands in it; maybe the long sigh and stretch up, fingers weaving through her flowing mass of thick black hair that she sometimes colored to be lighter, and she runs her fingers up, then expertly knots her locks into a formation that is neat and youthful. She has a very pleasant face, she is beautiful but there is a seriousness at her brow that can sometimes make her seem older than late twenties.
Maria is an excellent cook and all that, she is almost a perfect woman (The narrator uses the qualifier ‘almost’ because of his religious convictions, but admits that Maria is pretty damn close to perfect). And none of that matters at all to her. Well, it matters, Maria is well aware of the importance of keeping up appearances, but even keeping up appearances is small change compared to what she is actively working towards.
In the past six years, Maria has had three different jobs. She was a flight attendant for two years and trained to be a pilot. She worked on a cruise liner the two years after that, and worked primarily with the ship’s captain where she learned a lot about navigation. And for the two years after her time at sea, Maria took a job as a custodian at Columbia University where she mostly cleaned and maintained the classrooms in Pupin Hall, where world renowned physicists bored undergrads to sleep. I misspoke before, for the sake of repetition of course, Maria is currently a custodian at Pupin Hall and she uses her amazing looks to get a free education that students paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for. She would stumble into a professor after his last class and she would flirt with him and get him talking about his lecture, and before they both know it, it’s an hour later and Maria understands physical theories that are elusive enough to most others to make them obscure.
It seems that Maria is looking for something and maybe she plans very soon to take off on a plane or a boat in search of it, but why does it seem that she is charting a course for the stars? Does she have a plane that can launch her into space? A ship that can navigate corners of the oceans into the depths of space? What is it that Maria is looking for?
Today, she is off work. She has family that lives in New York but she rarely sees them. She spends her time off at the Natural History Museum, or at any park next to a body of water. She is usually writing in a notebook that she slips into her jacket breast pocket when she is done. Today, she is at Riverside Park next to the university and she is staring at New Jersey like it knows something that she does not.
Beautiful Maria, who would make so many men, and women if you’re into that, happy as a partner, as a lover. Obviously so smart, but maybe lost too, looking for something that only you can see.
In her notebook, when she is done staring down New Jersey, she writes, “There are places everywhere that can take me anywhere, and there are also places that don’t. The combination of science and magic, my gut that tells me that I have been to an alien world, will help me find that place that I know I have traveled to before.”
It’s heady listening in on people’s thoughts. Maybe she’s writing a play. But who cares if she’s crazy? She’s so much fun to look at.
PRL Serials 