My mother was never in the room when he said this, which is good since her name is Louise. But I knew who he was talking about — his high school girlfriend. Sometimes he’d pull out his yearbook, and there among the Jurassic photos was a plump-faced beauty staring straight out of the sepia ’30s.
Next thing I know, I’m retired and sitting in a restaurant with — you guessed it — my former high school girlfriend.
I hadn’t seen Nancy in 35 years. My sister, who still hangs in the ’hood, ran into Nancy at a dinner party and passed along a message to “get in touch so we can catch up.” Which I did, not in hopes of rekindling an old romance, but out of curiosity.
All right, here are the facts. Nancy and I had a typical teen-age romance. Yeah, we went parking on Saturday nights, and there was some rock tune we referred to as “our song” — you know, the usual American graffiti stuff. We broke off the relationship the summer before I left for college. Nancy didn’t want to date a guy who was 350 miles away, and I was desperate to make a clean escape.
Now, for those of you who are contemplating a reunion with a former love interest, here’s how it went down:
“Well, here we are again,” Nancy said, laughing. “It’s just great to see you after all these years.” Her eyes weren’t quite as blue as I remembered, but I immediately recalled her laugh, an annoying cackle that’s anything but endearing.
The waitress doled out the menus. We ordered wine, and Nancy rattled on about her current relationship with a lawyer named Eric. “He a nice guy and he loves me to death,” she said, “but, I don’t know, he’s a little too confining.”
I pretended to commiserate — and wished I’d ordered a double Singapore Sling. By the time our sea bass arrived, we were deep into old times, and I asked if she recalled some obscure adventure we shared.
“No, I don’t remember that,” she said, laughing and shaking her head. (It’s little wonder she can’t remember; according to my sister, Nancy’s been married five times.) Then she began to describe chronologically and in horrific detail her sex life since we were last together. I’d forgotten what a chatterbox she could be, and I spent the next two hours watching as the mushroom sauce congealed on my dinner plate.
I can’t convey the particulars of Nancy’s love life in the space allotted here. Suffice it to say that when she’d concluded her description of more than three decades of failed affairs and disastrous marriages, I was certain I’d require immediate psychiatric counseling. What a life!
“You know,” Nancy said, “I remember when we broke up. It was hard for me.”
Lordy, I could feel it coming. After all this time, there was just a trace of bitterness in her voice. Instinctively, I stared out the restaurant window at the Eastport Bridge rising into the wash-water sky and wished I were elsewhere. “Things could have been a lot different, a lot better, if you hadn’t gone away,” she said.
And damn if I didn’t get downright defensive, mumbling some stupid excuse for having left Nancy out of my life. I sounded exactly like a dimwitted adolescent. For me, the final days of our relationship are so buried beneath intervening joys and despairs that I’m puzzled why Nancy would even bother to bring up our sweet parting.
Then it came to me: She was implying that I was the catalyst for her checkered life! She was ladling up the guilt, a ploy she’d no doubt learned from her late mother. I remembered the old girl waiting at the front door when I’d drop Nancy off on Saturday nights.
“Well,” she’d say, “while the two of you were out gallivanting, I’m been sitting here crying my life away.”
My God, Nancy had become her mother! And, yeah, I’d become my father!
Having clawed our way back to the present, Nancy checked her watch and said she had to hurry back to work (she’s a massage therapist).
“Give me your e-mail address,” she said. “Let’s keep in touch.”
I haven’t heard from her since. Whew!
Stephen Smith can be reached at travisses@hotmail.com.
