people in the midwest really are just different

The insurance agent. His name is Lance. He is gregarious. He fields multiple phone calls during our talk and refers to me on the phone each time as a "young lady." Once he makes a joke about how he's not supposed to refer to the estimate as a "quote" but as a "proposal," and how he wouldn't want to tell his wife he'd had an attractive woman in the office and he'd made her a proposal. But the thing is, and here's the midwestern thing, it's not gross. He's so effusive about the online arts and music course he's taking, about maybe going to law school and about how much insurance he sells compared to the old guys in the office, that it's just part of this whole "earnestness" thing he's got going on. And it works. I like him in spite of myself.

The woman at the DMV. Like Lance, she asks what I'm doing here in Bloomington. You'd think what with the university they'd all just default. When I tell her I'm studying creative writing, she tells me how she got kicked out of her creative writing class because she got mad when the instructor criticized one of her characters. She was pregnant. She threw something at him. I know the teacher, it turns out, he's just graduated. He's a tornado chaser. Someone in a Vuarnet t-shirt walks by, and I think about 1989. Later the DMV worker tells me about how she got pulled over for speeding once but got off with a warning because of her big boobs. And you know, as much as I try, it's impossible to picture a Massachusetts DMV agent discussing her big boobs.