Broken Places Remain Broken
Terry Donnelly
“Has it been thirty years?”
I felt someone behind me touch the sleeve of my coat.
The woman’s voice I could not place continued, “I’m not sure I would have recognized your back, but I remember that old pea coat. Wasn’t it your dad’s when he was in the Navy? I’m amazed you’re still wearing that thing.”
As I turned to her I answered her second question. “Yes. I traded him a red, flannel Boy Scout jacket for it a hundred years ago. I’ve been wearing it since I was in high school.”
The midnight blue, wool coat is the warmest winter protection I’ve ever owned. The tight knit is perfect for keeping out frigid winds and wicking away moisture. It’s even better than the modern, much lighter weight, down-filled ski jackets available today. The U.S. Navy really knew how to protect their sailors. Yet, the years had taken a toll. I still have all 10 original, Navy-issued, anchor buttons, which may actually be worth something as collector’s items. There were eight buttons on the double-breasted body of the coat and two hidden under the collar to close the open neck snugly for even more warmth and protection. Fully buttoned, with the collar turned up, that coat was a fortress against any tempest an angry ocean or revenge-seeking sea could hurl at it. Today, the sleeves, elbows, and hem are showing abraded, faded edges that were fraying. I had a tailor sew patches on the elbows several years ago to mitigate the wear and extend the coat’s utility. Only fitting it is showing its age after Dad using it for four years in World War II and then me taking over 20 years later and sporting it for the next 30-plus winters. It had become an old, trusted friend and I wasn’t interested in making any decisions about replacing it. Even though it had a long, productive life and deserved to be retired, perhaps donated to a museum, I continued to pull it from the back of the closet each fall after the first snow with no thought of getting more stylish winterwear.
Turning toward the voice and the touch my mind was racing. Searching for any hint of recognition.
It took me only another heartbeat to recognize the attractive, nearly fifty-year-old woman. The face, framed by a knitted stocking cap and a shock of beautifully disheveled, wind-blown hair, rocketed me back in time.
I was finally able to answer her original question. “Yeah, it’s been 30 years.”
Erin Matthews and I had been sweethearts for a majority of our high school years. We may have even had crushes on each other in junior high. She wasn’t my first kiss, that happened when I was in sixth grade when a traveling carnival had set up a half-dozen or so rides in the shopping center parking lot across the street from school one early August weekend. Among the crowd was a girl from my class; her cousin, who was visiting from out of town; and a boy I recognized, but didn’t know well. After a few rides with them, and after daylight had stubbornly agreed to ebb from the summer sky, the setting provided enough cover of darkness for us to sneak across the street onto the shadows of the school playground. We sat on a park bench and began a seemingly innocent game of Truth or Dare. It ended after a few rounds with my classmate kissing me and her cousin kissing the other boy. I think the game could have progressed. The other three wanted to continue with the game. There may well have been a few more “firsts” that night, but the kiss sent me into an adolescent panic attack and I made the excuse that I was late getting home and fled like a pheasant flushed from a corn field. I still wonder what may have happened if curiosity had triumphed over fear.
Through no fault of mine, Erin wasn’t my other monumental relationship first either. We were late teenagers dating for several years and I’d have been perfectly happy to progress well past the variety of experimentations we explored together. But, Erin always drew a deep line in the sand, more of a trench, when we got close to actual sex. So, my time with Erin was bookended by a sixth grade first kiss before she and I started dating and a college freshman one-night stand at a Young Democrats’ convention after our time was over.
Everything else I knew about being with a woman in those early days, I learned from or with Erin.
The drives on summer, star-lit evenings away from the city to find a rural spot where the rock-and-roll, megawatt radio station every teen attempted to tune in, WLS in Chicago, could be picked up static-free on the car radio from 150 miles away; swimming in Lake Michigan; going to school dances and proms; ice skating dates on winter Fridays; being distracted due to fawning over her on the few occasions we shared a class; worrying because her period was late, even though the closest we ever got to intercourse was rubbing each other; and all the rest of a middle-class teenager’s middle American, coming-of-age experiences and drama, including professing ever-lasting love, washed over me as I recognized her and began to realize what she still meant to me––what first love would always mean.
The last time I saw her was during the fledgling days of 1965. Attending different colleges as freshmen, we spent our winter semester break in our hometown catching up with high school friends we hadn’t seen since summer. During our time together that December, I sensed a coolness from her, but dismissed it. She had begun to assert her independence by taking up smoking, like many college freshmen, especially women. Of course, being Erin that meant being cautious. She didn’t smoke unfiltered Camels. She smoked the much milder Kool menthols. Still, a big and symbolic step. I figured her chill was just another facet of her experimenting with new-found maturity and taking advantage of freedoms––new daylight––opening up before her.
Women everywhere were engaging in a strong and long overdue push-back against a male dominated world. I rationalized that she was simply joining with millions of other women who were on the cusp of putting themselves in positions from which they were historically shunned. I believed Erin, although not overly assertive in her personal life––the big exception to that, of course, was her firmly held absolute of avoiding having sex with me––fit right in with the philosophical sea-change that was steadily gaining momentum around the globe. I was happy for her.
She had plans with her mother and sister for New Year’s Eve. Three high school friends and I were headed to a fifth friend’s apartment for a rousing, penny-ante poker game, and an evening of catching up that included some beers on a night everyone would be celebrating. By the time I finally saw Erin, a few days into the new year, we both were ready to head back to a new college semester. I walked over to her house in the morning and talked until after noon. With all the social activity of our school break, we didn’t have much time for personal, deep discussions. I sensed something she wanted to say, but she didn’t broach anything monumental. She told me she hated her math class, was glad it was only one semester, and now over. She loved Psych. 101 and was planning to make that her major. She confessed she and a bunch of friends got caught drinking beer earlier in the semester. She had to spend a week of only going out to classes and getting meals. The rest of the time, she was to be in her dorm room. I was most surprised about her drinking beer. I continued to dismissed what was clearly avoidance behavior from her as some anxiousness. We kissed good-bye with promises to see each other soon. I said I’d hitchhike the 90 miles north to see her in a month or so.
I never did that. In mid-February, after my last class of the day, I made my routine, afternoon trip to the Olivet College student center to check my mailbox. I regularly got letters from my best friends, Gene Watson, who was at Kalamazoo College in our hometown, and Aiden Croft who had chosen Oberlin College in Ohio. We all attended small, liberal arts schools for our first steps into academia. They were both good and loyal writers and the three of us each tried to win the day by keeping the others entertained with our antics and informed of our current, and often changing, views of philosophical matters. One week, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham were the cat’s meow and the next, Utilitarianism was much too plebeian. Aiden once wrote a few pages comparing the psychological equality of Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” and Kafka’s The Trial. Gene went on making a case for Existentialist philosopher and author, Albert Camus’ opening for The Stranger: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”––being the perfect lede. I convinced both to read Leon Uris’s Mila 18, a poignant novel about the Warsaw ghetto in Poland during World War II. It was Uris’s 1961, lesser known follow-up to his blockbuster best-seller of 1959, Exodus. We were having a wonderful time trying to be the first to climb to the summit of Mount Sprezzatura, laying claim to being hipper than the other two.
Gene was the friend who pitched racial equality activism to me. He spent months convincing me to overcome my ambivalence and anxiety and travel South with him during the summer of 1965 as Freedom Workers and Freedom Teachers in support of voting rights. Gene sent me news clippings and kept a running monologue about how unfair a hundred years of segregationist activity was. In March I was finally convinced to enlist with him when the nation got slapped in the face with television news coverage of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. Gene and I signed on to the cause with a group out of Chicago. After a bus trip, we met other groups for a few days in Atlanta training and hearing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. Then it was off to northern Florida for a month helping register voters and educating folks to the possibilities for a future that included voting. Capping off our efforts, on August 6, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. Our experience that summer became the focus of my first novel, First You Hear Thunder. I’ll always be grateful to Gene for his doggedly setting me on a lifelong activist’s path.
This day there was nothing posted from either. Rather, I unearthed a nerve-shattering Dear John letter from Erin. I wasn’t prepared for it and it became the focus of my being for a couple of months. I’m not an overly sentimental sort, but the proximity of her letter to St. Valentine’s Day did not go unnoticed. She had met a man while working as a waitress at a beach-front restaurant on Lake Michigan the summer before. They had fallen for each other and she had been trying to tell me since August. Suddenly her urgent need to “be with family” and not me on New Year’s Eve and the root of her anxious behavior came into focus. When she didn’t get her task done over Christmas, she penned the letter.
That letter was the last I heard from Erin.
I was at sea. Immediately after I began rejecting all women as evil. A short time later I saw the folly in that and switched to superficially seeing anyone I could corral into a date. I’d get a Friday night date on Friday evening during supper. We’d kiss and pet to see how far it could go, but if there were any hint of seriousness or commitment, I’d back off in a second. This pattern lasted the rest of the year and included the one-night-stand at the political convention.
Now, 30 years later and completely out of context, here she is, on Christmas Eve, with her hand on my arm in the bakery department of the local grocery store. I was at a loss trying to figure out how she found me, dismissing any chance of a wild coincidence. I live in Boulder, Colorado––had since 1977––and was visiting in Porter, Michigan, a town of just seven thousand where I had lived and taught elementary school for a few years before moving to Boulder. Porter is over 30 miles from where we had known each other. I didn’t know where she lived, but I was quite sure this wasn’t it.
The short daylight hours of mid-winter were drifting into night. Stores were closing, freeing their employees to rush home to be with families for Christmas.
Snow was falling, lightly for now, but several inches were predicted to accumulate overnight. Perfect for Santa Claus, but not so good for night driving.
I was in the store on a mission to get Kaiser rolls that had been missed on a shopping list earlier in the day for a party with college friends still living in the area. The group hadn’t been together for several years, and I was expected back with the goods in minutes.
I was still confused about this whole encounter. “What are you doing here? How did you find me? This is really bizarre!”
“I’m so sorry, Wally!” Erin skipped all my questions and poured out her heart. Her eyes became damp from tears. “I didn’t mean to hurt you with that letter. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you about Jerry and me, even when I had the perfect chance while we were talking that morning before we went back to college. I knew, right away, that summer, I loved him and wanted to marry him. I didn’t want to hurt you, but I did. I hope it makes you feel better to know that Jerry and I have been married for these 30 years and have three kids. He was the one.”
She drew a halting breath and went on, “I knew I’d hurt you with that letter and had almost gotten over it and then your books started coming out. I was quick to read them. I read Unfinished as soon as it was published. I know that a lot of the story is about Aiden, but I also know the opening is about you and me. It broke my heart all over when I read your account. I cried for hours after reading the first chapters.” The tears staining her cheeks only made her more appealing. “Jerry kept asking what was wrong, but I couldn’t explain it to him. I can’t help fantasizing what might have been with us. I love your stories.” She wiped dry her nose and eyes with the sleeve of her coat.
I hugged her and told her it had been a long time. What she had done was surprising and hurtful at the time, but fine. We were just kids. I forgot about the Kaiser rolls and Erin didn’t get whatever she was in the store to buy either. We walked out into the darkness to find huge, white flakes falling. The streets were mostly empty, the holiday lights that adorned the main street of town were lit and the world was quiet and stunning––a stage beautifully set for two. We looked for a tavern to have a drink. There were a couple on the block. The Stagecoach Inn was an historic building in town with an old, wooden, weather-worn double door and a facade including a large picture window created by many individual panes. The building could have easily come directly from a street in a Dickens novel. The view inside was always inviting to passers-by––especially on winter nights like this when frost encircled each pane in the big window. Even though the muntins needed a fresh coat of forest green paint, they framed a warm scene. It was my favorite stop during my stint there more than 15 years earlier. Farther down was the Copper Club, Porter’s answer to a sports bar and the closest source I’ve ever found replicating a ball park hot dog. But, they had both already closed early for the night.
“Erin sounded certain. “We can’t go our own ways yet. I want to spend a little more time talking to you. I have a lot I’d like to know. I’ve got questions from your books.”
We went back into the grocery store just before it closed and bought a six-pack of beer and got into my rental car.
I opened a beer for each of us and we toasted. I’m not sure if we toasted old times, or, was it wishing each other a Merry Christmas?
“Hey, do you still smoke?”
She looked at me quizzically. “After 30 years, that’s what you want to know? The answer is ‘no.’ I quit in 1971 when I was pregnant with Denny, our second child. I had been reading how smoking was unhealthy for me, but especially bad for developing babies, so I quit.”
“Did you ever smoke Virginia Slims?”
“I know you are fishing for something here … Yes, I did.”
“It’s not important, but when they came on the market enlisting modern women a few years after we broke up, I immediately thought of you. I always envisioned you one of the first on board with the equal rights movement, and, in my mind, Virginia Slims seemed made for you. I expected to see you in one of their ads. I vowed if I ever saw you again, I’d greet you with ‘you’ve come a long way, Baby,’ but you surprised me here and I blew my chance.”
She tried to sound incredulous, “You never called me ‘Baby’ once in all the time we were together!”
“Maybe not, but I called you ‘Honey’ one time and you got mad thinking I called you another woman’s name. Do you remember that?”
“Maybe.”
“I just stuck to ‘Erin’ after that.”
“Well, I wish the amendment would finally pass. I worked hard for it and joined several rallies locally. You know me, I’m happy working on the committee but would rather stay out of the limelight––nowhere near a microphone. I’d be just as happy if they left my name off the program. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished and I’m willing to do more to get this done. But, I haven’t smoked for almost 25 years––a year or so before the ERA was even passed by Congress.
“I don’t have any deeper reason to know. I was just trying to validate my fertile imagination. Turns out you were right about not smoking. Good for you for quitting.”
“It wasn’t easy, but my kids come first, so I was determined.”
There was a pause before I finally responded to Erin’s confessions in the store. “Well, you dodged a bullet by not marrying me. I’ve been divorced twice. And, I’ve been married for the third time for ten years. I have two great kids with my first wife. She, her husband, and my kids all live here, in Porter. I also have a 17-year-old step-son in Colorado. The kids are the main reason I’m here, to spend some of Christmas with them––they’re not kids, 23 and 25, but still my kids. I lived here for a few years and still have friends––college friends, Olivet is so close quite a few still live in the area; and teacher friends from when I taught here. In fact, I’m supposed to be with some of them now. I’m having Christmas brunch with the kids tomorrow.
“I haven’t been the best father and definitely not a good husband.” Our conversation was finally turning into the deep, truthful discussion we avoided the last time we saw each other. “It has taken me a long time to settle down. Maybe a long time to grow up. I think I’m ready now, but I’ve still got a lot to prove. I’ll let you know in another 30 years if I’ve conquered that task. You are much better without me. You were settled and knew pretty much what you wanted when we were kids. I thought I did too, but I was wrong.”
Erin cut me off by leaning across the car. She put her hand over my mouth to quiet me, then cupped her hands around my face and kissed me. Finding each other in such an odd place and seemingly out of nowhere, then finding no one on the streets on the only day of the year all the stores closed early, plus the gorgeous snowfall all seemed to be conspiring to make it feel like we were the only two people in the world. The snow had begun collecting on the windshield and side windows of the car. Our freshly formed snow cocoon added to our feelings of isolation. It felt like the world had put us in a setting where we could act with impunity. Loyalties were vanquished. Responsibilities were nowhere to be found. Without another word we both got out of the front seat of the car and slid into the back where, without the center console, we could be closer. This all felt so natural and normal––as if the span of 30 years had been but a weekend apart.
Being close together, holding each other, felt sublime. We fit together seamlessly. The comfort and warmth were like a pair of old, thick woolen socks pulled on effortlessly over bare feet sitting before a glowing fire. We drank from our beer cans and sat, momentarily silent. The quiet spoke volumes. There were more caresses that somehow felt more right than wrong. Without any intent, I unbuttoned Erin’s coat and slid my arms inside, under her sweater. My hands felt the smoothness and warmth of the skin around her waist and back that had been both precious and familiar to me so many years ago.
I pulled her closer. She didn’t object in any way––as if I had done something she fully expected and of which she approved.
There was joy in holding her close. It felt warm and familiar––comforting to be so near to her. Too soon, she pulled away. Nothing was said as we both realized this was not “more right than wrong,” and tacitly acknowledged we could not go on.
Finally, I restarted our conversation. “Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms, ‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’ He didn’t actually mean that people are stronger after they break, but that interpretation is what many choose to believe. I don’t. My break has healed, but I’ll always have a vulnerable spot for you at the break. I don’t think that’s bad, or a character flaw, or any kind of human weakness. I like it. I think it is what allows me to write. It’s a real-life tribute to first love. I’ve got you to thank for that. Our time together and what we did as a couple, blindly finding our way, was perfect for me. When you were no longer there I had to change my arc, but I only regretted the break for a short time. I can always feel it and know it is what inspires me. It took a while and a few false starts go open up to a woman again, but the experience is what makes me me.”
We still sat touching. Her head was on my shoulder as we talked. She occasionally lifted it so we could look at each other, but always returned to rest on my shoulder in perfect harmony. I had unbuttoned my old, frayed pea coat and Erin left her coat open as it had been earlier. I could still see the soft, smooth skin around her waist where I had lifted her sweater. Nothing seemed out of place or in need of correction.
“I want to be a chronicler of our times. I’d like to be able to explain our normalcy right along with finding and exhibiting our uniqueness. Aiden was a chronicler with his photography. I only wish he had lived long enough for us to compare what we created. I think Aiden won the race to the top of the mountain. The photojournalism he left is likely more inspiring to more people than my writing, but I’m still seeking the words to expose who we are. I want to challenge Hemingway and say the broken places stay broken, but are not disabling.
“Aiden got cut short. That’s the only explanation I can conjure for his vanishing act. We kept in contact for a long time and then nothing. I know he was in Beirut and I know he was using drugs. I pieced together what I could and wrote Unfinished for him. But, not just for him––it’s for me too. I’m not 100% sure he’s dead, but writing that story, no matter if my ending is right or wrong, gave me the closure I needed to make sense out of what must have happened in real life.
“It’s like you said, Aiden’s character is twined with me––with us. Those first chapters are from our story. Aiden, Gene, you, and me. You three are the backbone of my quest in writing. You three represent all that is normal and all that is unique in my books. If you hadn’t written that letter, Kitt, Becky, and the other women characters I use wouldn’t have been available to help the chronicler.
“I hated giving Kitt and Becky to Aiden in Unfinished. I really wanted them for myself. That is just me being selfish, but they are wonderful characters who help reveal my desire to explain the commonality and uniqueness coexisting in all of us.”
“Wally, you need to write more. I’d love to read about your three wives and your kids and how you describe your life. Tell me. Please. I’m interested.”
“You know, I’ve tried to write about my being a crappy husband and a mostly absent father, but it’s really hard to write about yourself as the bad guy in a story. It all comes out in undeveloped, weakly apologetic spurts of consciousness echoing the treachery of misplaced affection. I’ll keep trying. I think I make pretty good fodder for a bad guy, and I’d hate to admit that someone else needs to write it.
“Mavis Gallant is a prolific writer for The New Yorker magazine. Do you know of her? She was a journalist in Montreal, left to see the world, living in, what she titled one of her books, Varieties of Exile. She’s been an expat in Paris for many years. She’s in her mid-seventies now, and still writes. She’s probably a little dark for your liking. The City of Light holds no light for her. She writes that Parisian food is dull and commercial. She laments the lack of ‘elegant and expensive-looking women’ in a place we all hold as a beacon of couture. Anyway, her greatest fear is ‘artistic fakery’. She had a bust of Michelangelo and one day, looking at it, thought, ‘Would he have liked me?’ Her answer to herself was, he would have tolerated her. That feeling keeps writers awake at night. My take is I have no hope of pleasing Michelangelo. I only want to be tolerated by Mavis Gallant. When I try to write about my greatest flaw, I see only ‘artistic fakery.”
“I don’t think you could be the bad guy in a story.” Erin spoke quietly, lifting her head off my shoulder and looking into my eyes. “I believe we all are sinners, but that doesn’t mean we are fundamentally bad. If we continue to do what we believe in we’ll be accepted in the end.
“If you write the stories, they will, undoubtedly, help someone else.”
Time had passed. The snow kept falling. We both were late for Christmas Eve celebrations––I guessed, her with family, and me with friends. Now, we both were without the goods we were dispatched to bring back. My friends were without Kaiser rolls and Erin’s absence was surely troubling. But, there was still much to say before we parted.
Erin was profoundly religious. She believed in human purpose to serve her God and be a good person in that God’s honor.
I tried to explain my take. “We are all a perfect definition of our times. We reflect, not just who we are as individuals, but we’re also the key into what our time on Earth means. We have a spirit that influences and can drive those who know and appreciate us after we are gone. That’s our everlasting life––our lasting influence on our loved ones. I can’t get it right, so I keep trying. I know there is a perfect combination of words out there that can explain us. I’m convinced the answer is simple, yet elusive. I hope the answer is a little more complicated than a corporate slogan, like Vonnegut’s ‘Progress is our most important product’ for G.E. or a bit like ‘Where’s the beef?’ from a Wendy’s ad about ten years ago. But, I’m not sure it is. That’s what makes art so compelling.”
I didn’t want to get into any discussion with her that included her faith versus my atheism and take on human spiritualism. We had that discussion many times as 17 and 18-year-olds when I was deep in the process of making that weighty decision. A decision I’ve kept and with which I am thoroughly comfortable. But, I added, “I think it is up to us alone. We’re the ones who get to determine whether our lives were successful of a bust.”
It seemed like Erin didn’t want any extended debate about religion either. She sat mum and waited for me to continue.
“Stories with me as a bad guy could fill volumes. To start, I have to relay a complement to you that came from one of my girlfriends a long time ago. Of course, you never met, but she appreciated how you trained me.”
“Is it that I made you put the toilet seat down?”
“Not exactly––but, I still do that.
“I first noticed her in a political science class, maybe a year after we broke up. I was a sophomore and she was a year older, a junior. She was a knockout blonde who seemed to be in perpetual motion, tightly wound with, what seemed like, saccadic movements. She was French. Her name was Reine. It means queen and she filled the part exquisitely. She was dating a deployed soldier. I didn’t know about him and asked her out. She was fine with a few dates on weekends or a vodka gimlet mixed and consumed in my car after studying during the week, but she made it clear she wasn’t interested in any commitment. That was perfect for me. I don’t think she ever broke up with her soldier boyfriend, but we ended up being a couple for more than a year. After the spring semester ended and we were on school break I drove over to her hometown 50 miles away to see her nearly every weekend. I was staying at a lake cottage south of Kalamazoo, rented for the summer with Aiden and Gene, but was smitten enough with her to make the trip often. Our relationship was like a hurricane coming. There were gentle winds at first, but in the end the gale was too much to bear. Our torch was slow to light, but lightning fast to extinguish.
“Anyway, her family owned a farm and she always preferred going back and parking in an opening on the farmland to end our evenings. She said it was safe and private and she was right. We were never discovered. What she wanted me to tell you, even though she didn’t know exactly who you are, came in the wee hours one Saturday morning as we parked after our Friday-night date. Clothes were strewn around the car and we were in the midst of breathlessly pleasuring each other. It was almost like she sat up and took a time-out in one of her cat-like moves. She said, ‘You need to tell whomever taught you how to touch a woman, she did a terrific job.’ So, there. You should be proud of your skills.”
Erin blushed, but did not respond.
“I’m the bad guy here because I always felt bad about having this affair with a woman a deployed soldier thought was his, and I was only after a conquest.”
“You felt badly about the affair. That shows you are really good.” Erin was being ameliorative.
“You don’t have to defend me. There are so many more. My redemption may come from the fact that I didn’t sexually cheat on my wives while we were married.
“No, that’s not true. There were one or two exceptions––there always are. I had gotten a job as a claim adjuster with State Farm Insurance. That job turned into a disaster. I was charged with representing the company, which meant I was supposed to pay out the minimum possible amount of money in claims against our insureds. I was terrible. I always ended up feeling sorry for, and siding with the claimants who were injured, incurred real expenses, and were inconvenienced without their car. I negotiated in favor of the claimants over the interests of the company. I was always asking for more money to give them rather than pay the bare bones. The bosses soon caught on and I was looking for a new job in short order. Part of my original training was three weeks at Claim School. The training took place at the State Farm home office in Bloomington, Illinois, a mostly rural setting. We were about two dozen, young, new employees, all men with the exception of one, lone woman, away from home. We went to classes during the day to learn everything about an insurance contract, small print and all, and the legal connections it had to the rights of those involved in accidents. We were supposed to study the contract and claims book procedures in the evening, but we mostly spent our evenings free to explore the bars and taverns––and women––of Bloomington. One dive bar was a particularly fun hang-out. The bar itself was built on a big, oval fish tank––it was like a NASCAR race track for goldfish. We’d sit at the bar, pick a fish with some distinguishing mark, and make bets on how long it would take the fish to complete the circuit. Another bet was for each of us to pick a different fish and see whose was fastest around the track. That was fun, but even more so was the cache of State Farm groupies who came out to tempt each class. On a couple of evenings, I joined in that game and drove my company car out into a corn field to enjoy the favors of a bored, young, Bloomington woman looking for anything to do.
“Before I got axed at State Farm, I hung around a couple guys I worked with in Kentucky in 1970 and ’71 who were real players. One of the guys actually had an alias and fake ID. He used that persona when he was out chasing women. We were supposed to remember to use his pseudonym when we were together at a bar. Naturally, after a few beers, one of us always slipped up and used his real name. He looked a lot like Warner Oland, the guy who played detective Charlie Chan in the movies, so we started calling him ‘Chan’ all the time, at work and everywhere else. His wife even started calling him ‘Chan.’ She didn’t stay his wife for long after his womanizing escalated.
We could schedule evening meetings with people who had been injured in car accidents with whom we needed to settle claims. That would get us out of the house. We’d meet up after our appointments, if we actually had one at all, and go to bars. They most always picked up women who would take them home. I didn’t, but I did participate in drinking and dancing with women as if I were available and interested. Occasionally, I’d find someone to take outside and get into some heavy making-out in one of our cars. One of our favorite stops was a weekly meeting of a group called Parents Without Partners. It was exactly what it sounds like: a body exchange with the clubhouse being a local nightclub. We didn’t belong there because we all had kids and partners. You can’t spin any good guy scenario out of that.”
I pulled away from Erin so she had to turn her head to look directly at me. “Do you see what I mean about telling these stories? They always come out short and incomplete because they lack depth. No depth in feelings, no future, no sincerity, and no reason beyond self-gratification to tell them.
“When I started feeling my wanderlust, I divorced my wives before I took much action. They both were pretty surprised.
“Erin, what’s your story? You’ve read a lot of mine and I’m interested in what you’ve experienced. If I know more about you, I can write more about us––not necessarily you and me, but ‘us’ collectively––the phenomenon of first love.”
She returned her head to my shoulder and snuggled closer. “Oh Wally, I’m just me. I haven’t changed. You know exactly who I am because I’m who I’ve always been. I love my life. I love my family. I’ve never had lofty goals. I liked most of the jobs I’ve had, but none consumed me. I’m completely filled with being Mom and a partner to Jerry. My entire bucket list is to be Grandma.
“Quite obviously, I have a soft spot for you. Being in this backseat with you is the craziest thing I’ve ever done.” She became coy and looked away. “That doesn’t mean I’d like to change my life. I think you are on to something real with your ‘first love is special’ theory.
“I’m really happy and really late. I hate to, but I need to go. Do you remember how we had such a hard time saying ‘good night’ at my back door when we were kids? Well, nothing seems to have changed.”
I pulled her back close in a warm embrace. She wrapped her arms around my neck for one more kiss.
“I really don’t want this to end, but it just has to.”
Erin sat back away from me and we simply looked at each other at arm’s length, soaking in what we hadn’t seen for 30 years.
She opened her door and snow fell from the car.
“I find this all extremely personal and difficult to put into words. I’ll leave that to you.”
Erin finally straightened her sweater and buttoned her coat. During our closeness, at one point, I pulled her on top of me to hold her. She straddled my lap for several minutes and then slid off the other side. When we switched to the back seat, she got in the passenger-side door, but was now sitting behind the driver’s side, so, when she stepped out, she stepped into the street.
“You really are better off without me,” I assured her once again through the open car door.
I watched as snow fell away to the curb when I opened my door, just like it did on Erin’s side. I stepped out into the night. The quiet had only intensified during our time in the car. The snow was still falling and I, alone, watched Erin’s blurred form walk away.
I whispered in an attempt not to disturb the stillness, “Maybe your aura will help me write this next chapter. Maybe this will be the defining one.”
I watched every step she took and admired her presence in this misty, made-for-a-photograph scene. I wished our friend, Aiden Croft, could be here to take the picture. The festive holiday decorations were no competition to overshadow the spirit of loneliness created by a woman walking away in this dimly lit, now brumal, setting. Aiden and I could have argued for hours whether his photo or my commentary caught the essence. I longed for the chance to have that debate.
She finally disappeared from sight and I resigned myself to the fact that I would, once again, be without her.
“I still don’t know why you’re in Porter.”
