Pages

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Love Street/Cassie - If They Don't Say Hello

By Liz Zuercher

1980


After the baby, I decided to find my new path in life at community college.  What I found was Patrick.
When it comes to Patrick, I should have paid more attention to Grandma Elsa’s saying, “If they don’t say hello, then you don’t have to say goodbye.”  That one always bothered me, because I thought it seemed unfriendly.  I couldn’t imagine a world where people shied away from others, just because they were afraid of caring, or rather because they were afraid they’d have to get hurt by needing to say goodbye.  That sounded to me like it would make for a lonely life.  I’d say that to Grandma and she’d come back with, “Better to be lonesome than sorry.”  Grandma had a saying for everything.  Like I said, I should have paid more attention.
Patrick Stevens was a charmer.  He wasn’t necessarily handsome, but the minute he said hello to you, you thought he was the most appealing man alive.  His looks were average, brown hair, brown eyes, medium build, medium height, and you wouldn’t notice him in a crowd.  Maybe that’s what got him through life, that you didn’t notice what he was doing until it was too late.  By the time you realized what had happened, he had slipped into a crowd and become anonymous again.  But the residual Patrick left behind was anything but ordinary, anything but innocuous or anonymous.
I met Patrick in my English Lit class.  He fancied himself a poet and the first time I took notice of him was when he raised his hand in class to read a poem out loud.  He always sat behind me, so I hadn’t seen him before that day.  I didn’t look at him even then until he started reading the poem.  His voice was so smooth, so emotional that I couldn’t help taking my eyes off of my poetry anthology to look around at the person who belonged to that voice.  Patrick’s voice said hello to me first in that poetry reading, and I felt something stir in me that I hadn’t felt since Billy.  It scared me, but it enticed me, too. 
I stared at him as he read and kept looking at him after he had spoken the final word.  The class was as enchanted as I was.  Everyone was quiet for a long moment, including the instructor, a middle aged woman who seemed to have no passion for her work or for the literature we were studying.  She broke the spell.
“Thank you, Mr. um,” she looked at her roster.
“Stevens,” he volunteered.  “Patrick Stevens.”
“Yes, well, thank you for a most heartfelt reading, Mr. Stevens,” she said.
Reluctantly, I turned back to face the instructor as we started discussing the poem Patrick had read to us.  I don’t remember a thing about that discussion.  I only remember feeling like I had to know Patrick Stevens, and I made up my mind to introduce myself after class.
We became inseparable.  We studied together, ate our meals together, and before too long we were sleeping together.  And yes, I had learned my lesson and was taking the pill.  I’d had enough of unplanned pregnancy.  But I was giddy in my infatuation with Patrick, and I was sure I had found my perfect soul mate.
Mary McCarthy, on the other hand, didn’t care for Patrick, and she made no effort to mask her displeasure whenever he entered her house or popped in at Mandala.  It started to become a sore point between us.  I felt uncomfortable having Patrick over, and I definitely didn’t feel right having him spend the night.  Patrick lived near campus in an apartment with three other guys, and I found myself spending more and more time there. 
When I’d come back to Mary’s after having spent the night with Patrick, I would get a look from Mary that clearly expressed how she felt.  But the way I felt was, what right did she have to question what I did? She wasn’t my mother, and I wasn’t accountable to her.  I paid her rent for the room and I worked at her store.  Sure, she had helped me out when I really needed help, but there was no blood tie between us.  Things got more and more tense. 
One Sunday morning we had it out.  I had come in after spending Friday and Saturday nights with Patrick, and I went into the kitchen to get a bite to eat.  Mary was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper and drinking her coffee.  She looked up at me with a smirk on her face, the one I’d seen often lately, the one that had replaced her usual beautiful broad smile.
“Well look what the cat dragged in,” she said.
“Good morning, Mary,” I said, opening the refrigerator door and staring inside for something to eat.  I thought I was being cheerful and nice, but for some reason she took offense.
“Don’t good morning me, Missy,” she said.
“I just said good morning.  What’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“If you’re not sleepin’ here, ya don’t have the right to say good morning,” she said.
That didn’t make sense to me.  I didn’t recognize this Mary, and I sure didn’t like her tone.  I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong.  I felt like I was back in Colfax and my father was raking me over the coals.  It made me squirm to have that flash of memory.
“I don’t understand,” I said.  “What did I do wrong?”
“Oh, forget it,” she said, picking up her coffee cup and her newspaper and going outside to the patio table to finish reading the paper.
I stood watching her, wondering where my Mary had gone.  I decided to go out and apologize for whatever it was I’d done, even though I wasn’t sure an apology was called for.  But as I pulled the sliding screen door behind me and approached the patio table, she beat me to the punch.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Me, too,” I replied, hoping we’d just gotten past our differences and could get our relationship back to the way it had been before Patrick.  She gave me a long searching look.
“What are ya doin’, Cassie?” she said.  She never called me by my name.  She always called me Hon or Darlin’, and hearing my name from her lips made me nervous.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“What are ya doin’ with that boy?” she said.
“I love him,” I said.  Saying this out loud surprised me a little, because up until then I’d told myself I was only having fun, the way girls in their twenties were supposed to have fun, the way they were supposed to explore life and enjoy the exploration.  Mary looked at me and shook her head.
“Do ya really?” she said.  “Or has he cast a spell on ya?  Have ya fallen for his blarney because you’re lonely?”
“We’re good together,” I said.
“What do ya think he wants from you?” she said.
“Love,” I said.  “I think he loves me, too.”
“Are ya sure?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, I hope you’re right,” she said.  “Just be careful.  Boys like that can pull the wool over your eyes.”
“Patrick would never do that to me,” I said.  “Why do you dislike him so much?”
Mary looked at me intently, studying my face as if to see if I were capable of understanding the answer she was going to give me.  I must have come up short, because she just shrugged.  I wasn’t about to let it go, though.
“No, don’t do that,” I said.  “You’ve disliked him from the minute I brought him in here.  That’s uncomfortable for all of us.  If you think he’s bad for me, then you need to tell me why you feel that way.”
She sat silent, her head down.  She stared at her hands clasped together in her lap, wringing each other.
“Please,” I said.
“It’s just that I know boys like him,” she began.  “A boy like that swept me off my feet when I was your age.  And that boy took advantage of me and left me with a one-year-old baby to take care of all by myself.  And he didn’t even look back.  He didn’t even say goodbye.  That’s not the worst of it, either.  A boy like that put a spell on my beautiful daughter, Emma, and he took her away from me and brought her here and got her on drugs and sold her body to other men, then left her to rot in the gutter.  He went on his way with another poor young girl who couldn’t resist his charms.  Both those boys, who were very much like your precious Patrick, took chunks out of my soul, and I would just die to see that happen to you.”
She was fighting back tears by then.  I didn’t know what to say.  I couldn’t see Patrick doing any of the things she warned me about, but I could understand her point of view.
“He’s not like that,” I said.
“So you think,” she said.  “Just you be careful.”
Mary and I had cleared the air a little, but our relationship was still strained, mostly because I didn’t pay attention to her warning.  I continued to see Patrick, falling more and more in love with him as the months went by.  By the time the school year was over, we were planning a future together.  I was afraid to tell Mary, but when Patrick asked me to move to Costa Mesa with him and I said yes, there was no choice but to tell Mary.
It was a gloomy Sunday morning in June when I dropped my bombshell.  Not only was I moving to Costa Mesa with Patrick, but I was giving up my job at Mandala.  I’d found a secretarial position with a homebuilder in Costa Mesa, and I was scheduled to start work in two weeks.  I couldn’t delay the inevitable.  We were having breakfast at the kitchen table when I finally found the courage to speak.
“I have something to talk to you about,” I started tentatively.
“Oh?” she said.  She looked nervous, and I suspect she had an idea this wasn’t going to be good news for her.  I decided I had to just spit it all out – all at once, like ripping a Band-Aid off as fast as you could to lessen the pain.
“Patrick and I are moving in together in Costa Mesa.  I have a new job that starts in two weeks, so I’ll be moving out next weekend.”  I held my breath waiting for the explosion from Mary.
“Oh.  Is that right?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, still anticipating fireworks.  But she surprised me.
“Fine,” she said.  “Good luck to ya.” And just like that she picked up her breakfast dishes, took them to the sink and started washing them without another word.
I was stunned.  I thought she cared about me.  I thought she would at least say she would miss me.  I thought she might try to talk me out of leaving.  But she did none of that.  She just wished me luck in an unemotional tone, like you’d use with someone who meant nothing to you.  It was more like a politeness than an actual expression of good fortune.  I couldn’t believe it.
“Is that all you have to say?” I asked.
“What else do you want from me?” she said, her back to me.
I didn’t know.  What had I wanted from her?  After everything we’d gone through together, I wanted more than what she was giving.  But maybe she thought she’d already given enough to me.  Maybe she thought she had given more than enough to me and definitely more than I seemed to willing to take.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, then,” she said, still not looking at me.
I felt like I was leaving home again and my mother was stirring the soup and drinking her rum and coke and telling me not to let the door hit me in the ass on the way out.  What had I done to make them treat me like that?
“Okay, then,” I said to her back and left the kitchen.

* * * * *

Patrick and I found a tiny little apartment close to Orange Coast College, where I took some classes, still working toward my AA and trying to find my passion, like Mary had suggested.  Patrick already knew what his passion was and he was hard at work pursuing it.  He had been accepted at University of California Irvine and was studying creative writing.  He was a poet, yes, but mostly he wanted to be a screenwriter.  He already had six screenplays completed and was shopping them around.  He worked at a bookstore near campus and I had my new job as an escrow secretary for Monterey Homes.  We settled into a routine, and for a while it was good.
Once again I discovered I was good at my job, something that always seemed to surprise me about myself.  I don’t know why I doubted that I could excel at whatever I tried, but I did.  I worked hard to learn all the ins and outs of escrow, and I found out I was good with numbers.  That was another revelation, because I had thought I was hopeless with math.  It turns out I just hadn’t tried very hard before.  I gained confidence in my abilities and before long I was a star in the Monterey Homes escrow department.  I put in long hours and my paycheck got fatter because of it.
When Patrick said he needed to spend more time working on his screenplays and his homework, I suggested he quit his job.  By then I was making a good salary for someone my age, and I could cover the expenses, if we didn’t go overboard with the spending.  I figured it would be good for us both in the long run if Patrick could concentrate on his writing and his college degree.  I didn’t have to twist Patrick’s arm to get him to agree, which in retrospect should have been a red flag for me.  But it wasn’t.  He quit his job the next day and I became the sole provider for us.
I can’t put my finger on when exactly it all started to go wrong.  There were little things that started happening, things I’d see as an annoyance, as petty and wouldn’t think much about – like thinking I had sixty dollars in my wallet instead of the forty that were there, or like having a mysterious fifty dollar charge on my credit card from a place I’d never heard of, like getting phone calls at all hours of the night and having the person hang up when I answered.  I didn’t add it all up.  I wasn’t careful, like Mary had suggested I be.
And Patrick was becoming less interested in sex.  That alone should have alerted me that something was wrong.  He’d never been able to get enough of me.  I told myself he was under pressure to get his script completed for his screenwriting class.  I made excuses for him that finals were only a couple of weeks away and he had to spend all his energy on studying.  I was so full of excuses for him that he didn’t ever have to make any for himself.
It all hit at once, just before Christmas.  I wrote a check for one hundred dollars to pay for Patrick’s Christmas present and it bounced.  I had never come up short in my checking account, so I was beside myself.  I hated to make mistakes, especially with money.  When I called the bank from work, a condescending woman told me that I never should have written that check when I’d written one for five hundred fifty dollars the day before that had left me with only ten dollars.
“What?” I said.  “I never wrote a check for five hundred fifty dollars.”
“Well, I have it right here,” she said.  “You wrote it to a Patrick Stevens and he cashed it here at the bank.”
My heart stopped.
“I wrote a check to Patrick?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.  “It’s your preprinted check and your signature.”
I felt like I was going to throw up.  My cheeks were hot and people in the office were staring at me.  The world started spinning.
“I didn’t write that check,” I said.
“Well, it’s been cashed, so there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said.  “If you think someone forged your signature, you can file a complaint, but the money is gone.”
I hung up and sat at my desk, cheeks and eyes burning, my heart racing, bile in my throat.  It was three in the afternoon, but I made an excuse to my boss that I didn’t feel well and I left the office.  When I got home, the apartment was unusually quiet.  I’d gotten used to Patrick’s noises, the clack of the typewriter and the jazz music he always played, so without those sounds the place seemed empty.  And it was empty – of Patrick’s belongings.  He’d cleared out everything he owned and half of my things, too, along with my bank account.  The television was gone, as was the stereo system, the diamond necklace Mary had given me after the baby was born and every small appliance we owned.  I assumed he’d pawned all of that to get cash for whatever he needed it for.  I later discovered he’d used my credit card to pay for a plane ticket to New York and dinner at an expensive restaurant two weeks before.  He left without any explanation, without even a goodbye.  So, Grandma, I didn’t have to say goodbye after all.
Mary was right about Patrick.  I hadn’t been able to see him through her eyes, and it had cost me dearly.  Not only had I lost a good deal of money, but I’d lost my heart and I’d lost Mary.  The price of hearing Patrick say hello had been very high indeed.


Monday, July 7, 2014

Letting Go by Nancy Grossman-Samuel

“So what’s so friggin important that you had to come over during Oprah?” said Alethia looking quite miffed and unhappy.

Linda just stood there for a second and then said, “Sorry, I just had to come over now. This is really really hard for me but I have to tell you something and I think maybe you should go sit down.”

Alethia sighed and hands on hips said, “No. Just tell me what you have to say.”

“Okay,” she said, resigned. “I can’t be your friend anymore. There was a long silence where the two women just looked at each other. "I wanted to say it in person and not on the phone, and I just had to get this off my mind. I don’t want you calling any more, I don’t want to go to lunch, I don’t want to hang out with you any more. I just can’t.”

Alethia stared at Linda, twisting her head from side to side, beginning to open her mouth to say something and then closing it because nothing was coming out. Her forehead furrowed and her eyebrows began to protrude as her closed mouth puckered. She looked to the left and right as if she were trying to get some help from someone or somewhere. She shook her head as if trying to shake off water from a shower, but when she finally looked at Linda, hoping for a joking smile and wanting her to say something more, nothing happened. She just stood there. Alethia turned to the TV and pointed the clicker at it. She pushed the off button hard with both hands as Oprah was telling her audience that they were all going to be getting copies of the author’s new book. She then sagged onto the couch as tears spilled from her eyes.

“You hate me?” she said softly to the room.

“No. I don’t hate you. I don’t hate you at all. I just… Alethia, please look at me, she said walking in front of her, and blocking the view of the now darkened TV.”

Alethia looked from her lap to Linda and blinked more tears down her cheeks.

“I get it. I get that you’re shocked, but you’re only shocked because you never really listen. You just talk and talk and complain and complain and I can’t do it any more. I want more positive people in my life. I just can’t spend any more hours on the phone with you talking about the things that aren’t working in your life and listening to your rebuff of every suggestion I make. It’s okay if you want to be miserable, and if you want to complain about every little thing, but I can’t do that any more. It’s making me angry and irritable and I don’t want to just avoid you or not answer your calls or block your calls. We’ve known each other forever, and I’m just exhausted.”

Linda dropped to the floor in front of the CD cabinet and under the 38 inch TV.

Alethia looked up at the television and down at Linda. “I kind of wish we had an earthquake right now and the TV would fall on your head,” said Alethia in a monotone.

“Yeah. I hear you. I think that if someone did this to me, I’d probably wish the same thing on them, and actually, they did. George left, and that was enough of a wake up call for me. So I just want…”

“Wait, you’re dumping me because George dumped you?”

“No. That’s just an analogy. It got me looking at what I’d been doing that would make him not want to be around me and I realized I was being so negative that... I get it. I get didn't want to be around that. I wasn't always that way. Truthfully, I didn’t like being around me, and so I’ve taken stock of my life and I am just letting go of everyone and everything that is holding me to my old patterns.”

“You sound like your shrink,” Alethia said, disgusted. And you're just blaming everyone in the world for your problems. You think that by not hanging out with me you're gonna be a better person? A happier person? Really? You're not that happy a person Linda, and I don't think this is gonna make a damned bit of difference."

Linda shrugged her shoulders. "I’m sorry if this hurts you, but I have to let go. I have to do what I think is going to help me. You know, I was thinking about moving. I was thinking it would be easier to leave town, you know, just start over. But I decided that it would be better for me to just be brave and stand up…"

“You’re so full of shit.”

Linda sat there looking up at her now ex-best friend.

“I want you to leave.”

“Okay. Okay,” she said getting up. “I am sorry. I just didn't know what else to do. I need a change, I need to change, and it’s just too hard…”

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Yeah.” Said Alethia, pushing her toward the door.

“Go, just go, just get out of here.”

“I am sorry,” said Linda. “I wish there was something else I could do. I wish I were stronger and more able to maybe help, but I’m not, and so, that’s it. We’re done. I really do wish you well,” said Linda as the door slammed in her face. Linda stared at the door and waved. She knew that Alethia would be looking through the peep hole.


She turned from the door, took a deep breath and walked to her car. She felt lighter than she had in ages. No more late night phone calls complaining about her husband or her sister. No more conversations about how she was really going to lose those 20 pounds this time. There was a little bit of sadness, but mostly, Linda felt joy. She felt like she did when she’d cleaned out her closet of all the old clothes and underwear that no longer fit or felt good or looked good.

But the next visit, she knew, would be harder, because the next visit was to her mother.