An actual pleasant surprise

I went to have a glass of wine at a little French bistro after work one night, and Mathilde Deffieux stepped out onto the street to hand me a menu.

I haven't seen this girl in six years, since we worked scooping ice cream at a second-rate sundae shop on Martha's Vineyard the summer of 2003.

Back then, she was at university in Bordeaux, studying languages, and I was one year into college with no idea what I wanted from school or from life. We were getting these muscles--maybe triceps?--on our right arms from digging into the giant vats and hauling up perfectly rounded, baseball-sized hunks of ice cream. We worked mainly with broad, motherly Jamaicans who were partial to rum raisin. They came over on an annual work program that took them away from their families for six or eight months and gave them a chance to earn much more money than they otherwise could by working essentially like slaves from sunrise to midnight in a series of back-to-back full-time jobs. They were all from Kingston. They were all trying to move to Montego Bay.

Mathilde and I (Mat, we called her) spent many, many hours together behind the counter that summer. We talked about boys, of which there were none, and the beach, a place we never seemed to have time to get to. She told me about Bordeaux and it sounded magnificent. I figured I could take my ice cream earnings and visit her there someday.

At the end of the summer we exchanged information and parted ways and neither of us ever kept in touch. We meant to, of course. Everyone always means to. Years passed and I suppose I forgot about her, more or less.

Two weeks ago Peter had vacation and took a solo trip to Dali, a scenic hippie town in Yunnan province. Bored one night alone in Beijing and not quite ready to succumb to TV, I started digging through old documents on my computer hard drive to see if there were any hidden treasures, or at least salvageable paragraphs amid the detritus. I came across a fairly large file that hadn't been opened since 2004. It turned out to be a collection of stories and vignettes and character portraits I'd written for a fiction class I'd taken that year, based on the people I'd met on Martha's Vineyard.

Reading it reminded me of Maxine, my take-no-bullshit Jamaican co-cashier at the supermarket I worked at by night. I remembered the whimsical children I'd babysat in the early mornings, Virgil, Mabel, and Cosmo. And of course I thought of Mat from the ice cream shop.

The next day was payday at work, when we 'foreign experts' get unseemly fat envelopes stuffed with multi-colored cash. A few of us, feeling rich and fancy, decided to meet after work for a drink at this chic French place R. used to frequent a lot back then, before he got in trouble for groping a waitress and was summarily disinvited.

The restaurant was in an alley noisy with shops and street vendors and motorcycles. I spotted R. waving from a table on the curb and went to join him, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a pretty blonde girl swinging out the front door of the restaurant with a menu in her hand. She passed it to me without really looking at me, but I caught her in profile.

I know you, I said. I'm usually not that confident, especially with people I haven't seen in years, especially when they show up in the most unexpected places, but I'd just the night before been reading stories I'd written about her and there wasn't any doubt.

You're Mat, from Martha's Vineyard, I said.

She turned and squinted at me, and then her eyes widened. Oh my God, she said, Ariel.

She's been living in China for 3 years now. At the time when I last knew her, she'd studied in Taiwan and was learning Chinese alongside English and Spanish. But China never came up as a topic of conversation between us, I suppose because at the time, it meant nothing to me. Just another place I figured I'd most likely never get to.

In the midst of our incredulous reunion, I turned to R. and said, Can you believe this!?

He was sitting back in his chair watching us with mild bemusement. Sure, he said, finishing off his wine. Happens all the time.