THE MAN IN MY MAILBOX (A Memoir)

The Man In My Mailbox


A Late-Bloom Love Story








Kathleen Clary Miller











Kathleen Clary Miller Word Count: 42,342
PO Box 460358
20945 Spotted Fawn Rd.
Huson, MT 59846
kathleencmiller@gmail.com






Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
Emily Dickinson














For Brad, who made me laugh again.



~1~



My bafflement concerning the social arts began at age seven, when my mother, Catherine Frances Roberts Clary, insisted that I accept Andy Slump’s invitation to accompany him and his family to Marineland of the Pacific, 1958’s aquarium-sized Sea World.
“It’s a perfectly nice invitation,” she announced, as if this were the irrefutable reason to say yes. The fact that I couldn’t stand to even look at him and had fully accepted the drinking fountain rumor that he played with Barbie dolls had no bearing on her supposition that I should be flattered and grateful for the attention.
“You never know who he may turn out to be,” Mama argued when I whined that I’d rather eat Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks (Every Friday I flushed them down the toilet) than go. If you were a second-grade boy who dressed Barbie in her bikini, I was fairly certain I knew who you’d become.
Even at a tender age I didn’t like to leave the comforts of home. My mother had fostered in me the impression that I couldn’t trust anything outside our front door. Whenever we left home on errands, we crossed the Colorado Street Bridge that spanned the Arroyo Canyon and separated our street from the Rose Parade route and the rest of Pasadena. I asked her again and again why it was called “Suicide Bridge.”
Each time we traversed it I rolled down the station wagon window and leaned out as far as I dared to look down into the dry gulch below while she reiterated the gory story. On a couple of occasions during the Great Depression, men who were, as Mama put it, “at their wit’s end” jumped from the unprotected railing to their death. “They could no longer support their families,” Mama added as a definition for the end of a wit.
In turn, I respected the power of such pull, just two blocks from home and touching the celebratory January 1 occasion that put my town on television. This beautiful structure must hold dark secrets, I told myself, then quickly allayed my fears by repeating what I knew to be true—my daddy would never lose his wit. I felt like I must have been sprinkled with some sort of good-fairy dust to earn such a father as William W. Clary, Jr. and whenever the grocery shopping was finished I was thrilled to ford the canyon back to our side, where I would see him, safe and sound.
I was utterly content to watch television in the evenings after I’d finished my homework, which I began promptly at 3:30 and completed in time to turn the channel to Engineer Bill, even on Friday. The last thing I wanted to do then, on Saturday, was to go with the Slumps on an hour-long car ride just to ooh and aah at trained porpoises. I’d miss seeing Mighty Mouse untie Minnie from the railroad tracks in the nick of time!
Besides, I’d never traveled so far away from the mother ship—without the mother. We lived near enough to beaches like Newport and Santa Monica, where you could watch fish jump to your heart’s content. Marineland was right on the same ocean, for pity’s sake, where anyone could stand on the sand and point at fat mammals frolicking in the waves. I didn’t get the thrill of driving forever just to sit in the bleachers under the hot sun so you could watch them bumping around the walls in a concrete pool until you had a whopping headache. I would much rather lie on the library sofa munching on Cocoa Puffs in front of Mister Magoo.
“There’s no future in that. You have to go out every time you’re asked!” Easy for my mother to say when she was already married to my father, an even better man than Sheriff John. I never had the heart to say no to mama, however, so I schemed to manufacture a ripping sore throat on the dreaded Saturday.
When I awoke that morning, my guardian angel had intervened! My throat was actually raw and throbbing. I knew I had a fever. As insurance, however, I wrapped a piping hot washcloth around my slicked back blonde hair, under my curled ponytail, and around my forehead. Right after the breakfast that I pretended was really hard to swallow I moved to the scratchy orange sofa in our formal living room, a location I visited only to empty my stocking on Christmas morning or when I felt so sick I needed to be hospitalized. When I heard the swish of Mama’s petticoats and the tap of her high heels coming through the front hall I groaned a little then, at the last second, stuffed the washcloth between the sofa cushions.
“Kathleen, are you in here?” she asked, her cry laced with the same anxiety as the time she couldn’t find me and discovered I’d ventured solo to the end of our driveway to buy a Fudgsicle from the Good Humor Man, who might have kidnapped me. Living on a street with no sidewalks made life more dangerous, she had explained. Other children weren’t roller-skating by. Young mothers weren’t pushing strollers past. Protective fathers weren’t out walking the dog. No one would see me, snatched and stuffed into the truck’s freezer. I spared her my thought that if what I got to eat during captivity was Fudgsicles, that didn’t sound so bad.
Mama gracefully pulled aside her Grace Kelly petticoats and perched on the end of my deathbed, dangerously close to a damp spot caused by the hidden washcloth. I scooched over to cover my crime and struggled to speak, all the while wondering how to sound sorer.
“I feel sick,” I rasped then acted like I was swallowing an Abba Zabba without chewing it all the way. She eyeballed the situation and administered the kiss test—the sure-fire method for obtaining infallible evidence as to the presence—or not—of a temperature. She pressed her “Really Red” lipstick mark on my forehead, rubbed it off with her thumb, and deemed me good to go.
“But my throat!” I screeched, which really did hurt me. She disappeared with a swish. I could hear the hinges on her medicine cabinet squeak. In a flash, she was back with two Bayer Aspirin and a glass of Ginger Ale.
“Take these and you’ll be fine,” she instructed. “Rise above it!” she ordered as if she were delivering inspirational self-help as to how to overcome a life-altering hurdle when what we were dealing with here was a dumb trip to Marineland that I didn’t want to take as much as I didn’t want to have ten cavities filled.
“They’ll be here any minute!” she called back to me as if the King of My Future Happiness was coming instead of stupid Andy. No pity parties allowed at 201 South San Rafael. Off she headed, back to her bathroom to reapply “Really Red” from the wooden wall hutch that housed over fifty different lipsticks with names like “Cerise,” “Cinnamon,” and “Blaze.” When I’d tried them on they all looked like red to me. How did she know which one to wear? Being attractive involved too many decisions.
My head spun when I stood. My gullet felt like it had a blown-up beach ball stuck in it. My ears popped when I thought long and hard enough to work myself up to a swallow. I really was dying and it really wasn’t going to help me! What should I have prayed for? A big fat rash like chicken pox?
One more mystery to add to the increasing layers of confusion over the whole boy-girl thing: illness didn’t stop it.
“What if I get really sicker and throw up?” I pleaded in one last-ditch effort to thwart this doomed first date. “What if...”
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof!” She cut me off midstream in my worry cycle, never failing in a fret fest to inject her favorite Sunday sermon scriptural excerpt from Matthew, where Jesus admonishes not to worry about tomorrow’s troubles; just deal with today’s. Holy Moly! In this case, my problem was today! I wasn’t worried at all about tomorrow; by tomorrow I’d be eating fudge ripple ice cream in my pajamas while peacefully watching My Friend Flicka!
The Slump’s car was some sort of Chevrolet sedan. It looked just like the “Pinkie Winkie Bus” except that had undergone an Earl Schieb bright pink paint job before it ferried me to Kindergarten and First Grade at Mayfair Junior School, called “Little Mayfair” to distinguish it from “Big Mayfair,” the high school for girls that I would attend later in life, if I lived through this day. At both Catholic institutions the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus taught classes and lived at the high school in a convent.
When mama opened the back door for me to step into the car, it occurred to me to ask God for the calling since I was already experiencing twinges of desire for it in the face of this outing into secular society. Cloistered would be right up my alley!
Much to my horror I was squished into the back seat against Andy, who was shoved next to his teenaged brother and his girlfriend. In those days there were no seatbelts, so jamming into the seat together was no big deal. Except when you were mashed up against fat slob Andy. The last thing I remember as the car pulled away was seeing my beautiful mother wearing the sort of thing she had worn in variation every single day of my life—a yellow Donna Reed dress, Dovedown nylons, and yellow spike heels. She was daintily plucking imperfect leaves from her potted daffodils as if seeing me disappear meant nothing whatsoever. I fought back the tears. I either needed a tonsillectomy or was feeling such intense love for her that I thought I might perish. Mainly, it felt like I was being abducted and I would never, ever again close my eyes to that careful “Really Red” kiss on my brow.
I have no memory whatsoever of the day. No fish jump to mind. No boxes of popcorn and no sodas. I don’t recall walking around with Andy, or anybody for that matter. Perhaps I plopped down on a bleacher in my Gene Burton navy blue shorts and stars-and-stripes tee shirt (cardigan to match) and promptly fell asleep. Either that or some post-traumatic stress syndrome has wiped the entire experience from my consciousness. Someday I might be sitting on a therapist’s couch clutching Kleenex when it becomes crystal clear that this particular afternoon was the catalyst for every poor relationship choice thereafter.
What remains as memorable as when I had four molars pulled is the dinner. The fact that we had to stay at Marineland until dinnertime was beyond my wildest nightmare. A picky eater since birth, I never understood why everyone couldn’t just eat at home or if they had to go out, go to Annandale, the country club my parents joined so that I could learn how to swim and we eat buffet. At Annandale’s Sunday smorgasboard I could get the end cut of the roast beef. I could preview side-dish offerings and then pick and choose only what I wanted instead of hiding things under my napkin.
At the Marineland restaurant my options were fried chicken or steak. I could do steak without freaking out and compromising my “devil-may-care” image—the one my mother had explained to me was appealing to boys. “As long as you don’t carry that too far,” she’d warned. I didn’t know what that meant, but I sensed it was something serious that could go wrong with agreeability so whenever I could I gingerly applied laissez-faire.
As sick as I felt, I could hardly see straight so it was easier to appear more loosey-goosey than I really was, which was not at all. Not that I cared a whit about what Andy thought of me. But compliance toward his parents would at least get me back home. Then I would never leave again.
Filet would have worked just fine had Mrs. Slump not turned out to be the Wicked Witch of the West (she had the same pointy chin, minus the green skin and black mole on her nose). When she turned to me halfway through the meal and barked like a seal, “Eat the fat!” I panicked. I was in the clutches of a madwoman!
Under optimal conditions, I carved microscopic bits of fat--even from lean turkey breast, let alone the thick slab of it on the edge of a sirloin. I shivered. My entire body was suddenly wracked with chills. Was it fever or fear? Why in the heck did they blast the air conditioning in a restaurant at the beach? I stalled by fiddling with my sweater. I removed it from the back of the chair one shoulder at a time and pulled on each sleeve with the speed of a snail. I buttoned with painstaking care, hoping WWW would be distracted as the moments passed.
She kept insisting I eat it—why, I will have to surrender to hypnosis in order to remember, if in fact she offered a viable reason. I knew only one course of action to keep from taking a bite and then throwing it up all over the table. I asked might I please be excused (nun-speak for “I need to go to the bathroom”) and made a beeline for the pay telephone, where I dialed Home, Sweet Home.
Mama had taught me as soon as I could talk how to make a collect call, just like she’d always pinned a ten-dollar bill to the elastic band of my underpants—in case. When she heard the operator announce my name, her voice accepting the charges made me feel like Dorothy when the bad dream is over and she opens her grateful eyes to Auntie Em.
Time was of the essence. One of the Slumps would come around this corner and I’d be ripped away from the receiver and force-fed the fat. I told mama of my plight. When that evoked zero empathy, I begged and pleaded. She dismissively ordered me “back to that table” to do “the best you can under the circumstances.” I felt another “rise above it” coming so I hung up on her first. Betrayed, I submitted to my fate and, much to my surprise was rewarded for bravery by finding my plate had been removed!
My night of insanity had not yet passed. No sooner had we wedged back into the car than Andy’s older brother started making out with his girlfriend. Both parents were right there in the front seat. I could see Mr. Slump’s eyes in the rearview mirror! After a few minutes of sickening smooching, Andy turned and kissed my cheek. I froze. I had never felt lips touch my skin—other than my own mother’s. No sooner had he committed this atrocity than he told me to take down my hair. Take down my hair? Whatever for I couldn’t imagine, except that Barbie sometimes wore hers down. I was grossed out beyond belief that his fat puffy mouth had touched me. What would he do to my hair?
I felt so sick and so tired and so hurt that Mama had not jumped into the car to come rescue me that I would have gladly gone to live with the Good Humor Man. Submission was my middle name so I reached up and extricated the fierce rubber band but my hair was so saturated in Bandoline hair gel that it stayed in a free-floating ponytail despite my attempt to give Andy what he wanted in order to get home alive.
Evidently unsatisfied still, he told me to give him a kiss. You had to be kidding! By this time his brother was laughing at us. The robot parents sat like stones. Were they breathing? Except for the occasional shift of Mr. Slump’s eyes in the mirror, I saw no sign of life in the front seat.
The story of my life unfolded at this crossroads. Despite my abhorrence to Andy’s request, compliance was easier than confrontation, and this decision portended the outcome of nearly every future romantic encounter. From then on I rose above uncomfortable situations so high that I felt like an angel looking down on myself. I let things slide as if they were no more disquieting than a scary movie scene. Whenever the situation didn’t make me happy, I could just look the other way until it was over and afterwards pretend it never happened.
By now you’ve figured out that Andy got his precious peck, but not until we were pulling into the driveway of the loveliest, whitest house on South San Rafael Avenue. The navy blue shutters on either side of the front windows welcomed me as if I was being reunited with my family after having been pictured “missing” on a milk carton for ten years.
As I opened the car door and blurted out “thank you” faster than you can say “rats” our navy blue front door opened and there stood my mama on the brick front porch smiling and waving to Mrs. Slump, who had apparently decided to move enough to roll down the window. Mama’s expression changed when she saw my disheveled condition. In seven years she had never styled my hair outside of a rubber band. She even washed it in one.
I stood before her, broken down and sobbing, now that I could surrender to such emotion, my hair still plastered flat against the sides of my head but flying back like Lillian Gish in the windstorm. I bounded the steps with sheer adrenaline, slapped the rubber band into her open palm, and ran through the open front door to fling myself upon the scratchy sofa, where I intended to remain until I could enter the convent. Religion had to be a lot less rigorous than romance.

~2~


If it hadn’t been for Annandale’s hunk swimming instructor, I’d be dressed in a habit, shuffling down the convent hall in men’s black lace-up shoes and dangling rosary beads from my waistband. That summer, when my mother ushered us onto the concrete deck surrounding the pool and I beheld Paul Tremain, I cast aside invocation for a vocation.
Paul was tall, svelte, and muscular—and at least four times my age. His skin was bronzed to the degree that mama and her sister Eileen whispered about it while sitting in deck chairs at one of the umbrella tables that rested on the manicured lawn. “It isn’t natural!” one would say, while the other concurred that “no human is that tan!” Every spare moment (there seemed to be many) he was not teaching lessons he lay on a brightly striped beach towel while older girls rubbed Coppertone across his shoulders. I really wanted to be one of those girls.
Instead I was heartbreakingly seven-and-a-half. How cruel, fate! I consoled myself that at the very least my path in life was clear. I turned my back on cloistered and raced into romance. What’s more, I didn’t have to settle for some shallow little boy, now that I’d fallen off the deep end for this grown-up god. Driven, I determined that swimming like Mark Spitz would get me the notoriety I needed to be more than his mere student. He would be so impressed that he would dump those other chics for his promising protégé.
I swam as if my life depended on it (in my opinion it did). I kicked hard enough to create such a tidal storm in the water that the other kids defensively dog-paddled for the shallow end and shuddered in safety on the steps. I free styled flawlessly, twisting my neck to the left or the right to inhale a tiny breath so discreet that mama rose to her spike heels and ran along side me in the pool to be sure I was breathing. I flipped like a tuna and reached with a backstroke that nearly ripped my shoulders from their sockets. I dove like a knife that slit the water, my arms and legs in such a straight line you could measure by it, and my hands pressed together so tightly they throbbed. The day I jumped off the high dive and Paul was there, holding the pole for me to cling to, I asked myself, would there ever again be such a man?
Forget the club’s delectable turkey sandwich (all fat shaved to perfection). I stayed in the pool until Paul rolled up his towel and left for the day and my skin looked like a Shar-pei. As soon as I noticed him shifting in the sun (the signal he was getting ready to leave) I raised to my toes where I could touch, my eyes as red from chlorine as if I suffered from a raging case of conjunctivitis, my nose dripping, and my hair tinged green. I called out my fourteenth “Thank you, Mr. Tremain!” for the day. His smile and wave took me as far as I needed to go at going-on-eight. He could love me!
At the conclusion of the lessons my mother snapped a picture of him next to me. There I stand, bleary-eyed and waterlogged, a one-piece bathing suit stretched across my little-girl barrel body. I am smiling so hard my face is about to explode—either that or I have a rip-roaring wedgy. The fact that he is touching my shoulder is a more blessed event than the stigmata I’d longed for ever since the nuns had shown us that movie about the child who prayed for it and so was wounded like Christ and went straight to heaven.
Adoration took me to the next step, which was awakening to the realization that I wanted to be married like my mother. To Paul, who swam a lot, like my father. I hatched a plan on the last day of summer after asking the girl who worked behind the snack bar why they froze the Milky Ways. “Because they last forever,” she’d revealed. Chewing frozen nougat and with chocolate dribbling from the corners of my mouth, I marched right over to Mr. Tremain and offered him a proposition. Would he wait for me in the freezer until I was old enough to marry him? If the Good Humor Man could keep people that way, surely it was an option.
I remember his smile, but who wouldn’t with those teeth so shiny white you could see your reflection in them? Although unfortunately mama and Eileen heard my question, they did not hear his response and I can’t remember it. He must have given me hope, however, because I never again wanted to be a nun.
Later that summer I spent the month of August with my cousins on the Ocean Front at Newport Beach. If Mr. Tremain was a slab of ice between the Milky Ways and the Big Hunks, it might have been for naught since at the end of the sidewalk that led from our house to the shore was lifeguard tower number ten and sitting atop it was Edward. Sorry, Mr. T, I’d have to break it to him gently after he thawed, but I’ve moved on to another lifeguard (something about a rescue fantasy).
Ed was drop-dead handsome. Because he was nineteen I had to assess the needs of a teenage boy, indeed an alien creature. I’d observed my older male cousins stuffing their faces with green grapes, Fritos, and chocolate cupcakes, so every day I carried a tea tray of those and an ice-cold bottle of Coke down the strip of concrete to Ed’s perch. Once there, I presented my offering then plopped down on the dry sand, perfectly gratified just to gaze up at him and watch him eat. At first he was stunned to receive such bounty from a lovesick baby, but as August wore on I wore him down until I procured what I counted in my diary as a date, this being directions to his mother’s house so that I could see their litter of puppies.
One afternoon I hopped on my bike and pedaled the five miles as if I were working towards the Tour de France finish line. Once there I was initially bereft to discover only his mother at home, but oh well. I was in his house! I impressed her with my usual saintly charm to ensure her suggesting to her only son that he court me.
When forced to confess to my mother where I’d disappeared to (she was certain I’d been abducted) she punished me for my deception by confiscating my bike for the rest of the summer. The sacrifice was worth it. At summer’s sad end, as we packed up the car to return to Pasadena, Ed appeared at my front door, a puppy in his arms for me to take home. Turns out mama had walked the sacred sidewalk to his tower and arranged for the hand-off as a surprise. I felt like the mother of his child now that I had a part of him, so I named the puppy whose coat was exact same color as Ed’s hair Mr. Ed. Who cared if a dog wasn’t a talking horse?
The return to Pasadena brought with it the tragic news that the Annandale swimming pool had been filled in and paved over to expand golf-course parking. I asked the Sunday brunch waitress what happened to the snack bar (and its freezer) to no avail. I could only hope someone had peeled out frostbitten Paul before delivering it to St. Vincent de Paul, the God’s will Goodwill.
With the second week of September came the school year and a love life that was a vacant lot when you were in a class of twenty-two girls and four boys, all of them doofuses. That didn’t change until sixth grade, when Rick Colombino drifted in on the wings of surfer-boy angels. A shock of blond hair and a smile that could knock you over backwards, and the first day he walked in, I was in love again. Problem was, so were twenty-one other girls, not one of them still sporting baby fat around her waist so her uniform belt barely buckled on the last hole. My armpits were always damp, my cardigan a bit too snug, and I’d been one of those lucky candidates for early braces on my teeth. Every time I tried to woo Rick with a winsome smile vicious wires sliced my lips and made them bleed.
The first time we lined up alphabetically for chapel I was practically paralyzed when I realized he was right behind me and, barring some interloper, would be until eighth grade graduation. I could feel his presence as I tried to breathe normally and somehow ooze beauty through my back. I concentrated daily with all my might and willed him to kiss me on the nape of the neck. Thank the Lord the rule was for absolute silence so I didn’t have to initiate conversation. Even during Cuban crisis air raid drills when –my stars!—his elbows rested right on my shoulders as we all stood two rows deep against the wall, the only words spoken were memorized prayers. If I had to perish under a bomb drop, pinned to the stucco by Rick would definitely be the way to go.
The first serious snag in my budding plan to snare him came when Mother Concepta announced our class theme for the annual Halloween parade. We were to dress in costume depicting a street name in Los Angeles. Mama’s Martha Stewart juices bubbled with creativity as she pointed one finger heavenward, Holy Spirit inspired with the perfect solution: Flower Street. There was just one weensy problem. The costume consisted of stem-green leotard and tights, a tissue-paper blossom the size of a beach ball atop my head and secured with a skin-slicing green ribbon under my chin, and a second pink and rose bowling-ball-sized floral arrangement tethered to my wrist. My tummy pooched out like a fanny pack pulled around to the front. My thighs rubbed together so that I was sure Rick (right behind me) could hear them, and my ample rear-end enhanced by stretch nylon—well, we all know he got a load of that. I was a flower all right. One that would never be plucked.
“You’re just a late bloomer,” Mama argued when I hesitantly mentioned that I might stick out like a thorn among more popular classmates who would be wearing actual clothes. “In the meantime, being singled out in a crowd is what you want!” I knew one thing for certain: Dressing me in the equivalent of human horticulture that should stand nowhere but in a bad rendition of Alice in Wonderland was not going to make me blossom any sooner.
The parade lasted forever. We marched around the perimeter of the playground blacktop under the searing hot sun for what must have been three days. I was bowl-legged from trying to separate my thighs. By the time the music mercifully stopped my feet were locked permanently in ballet first position. When at 3:00 I fell into the back seat of the station wagon I considered this occasion a major setback. It would take many fab free-dress ensembles to recover ground.
By eighth grade, all five boys had set their sights on two girls. I was out of the running even though on non-uniform days I wore a girdle mama bought me that sucked in my tummy and garters that pinched onto overly tan stockings. White tennis shoes further enhanced the sun-kissed leg look. The hair on my legs poked through the stockings, however, even when I flattened it with Bandoline.
Between the two of them, Margie and Sandie had a bucket full of St. Christopher medals—the gifting of one meaning the boy wanted to go steady. My mother disdained the “cheap and tawdry behavior” that had warranted them easy reward, and in a huff, bought me a charm bracelet loaded with St. Chris in every position—face front, profile, carrying a child piggyback on his shoulders—to make me feel “with it.” Trust me, regardless of her loving intentions, when your steady is your mother, you don’t feel groovy.
My Magic Eight Ball offered unsatisfactory answers to questions concerning the possibility of Rick’s interest in me. “Without a doubt” or “It is certain” were fine and good but I wanted details. I consulted the Ouija Board every moment I wasn’t doing homework, never stopping to wonder how my canonically correct mother reconciled conjuring up spirits from “the other side.” But then, she was the one who created a candlestick voodoo doll to represent the opposing pitcher during Dodger games and stuck pins in its arm throughout the radio broadcast.
On the day the Ouija Board pointed to as vital, Annie’s swimming birthday party at the Huntington Hotel, I knew I stood a chance with Rick. All I had to do was show up and swim speed laps like I had for Paul Tremain and he’d be on his knees.
That very morning The Lord blessed me with “womanhood.” My mother sat me down in “the library” (most people referred to this room as “the den”). She plopped the needle down in a record groove and left the room for me to listen to the facts of life. After it was over, did I have any questions, she wondered? No, but they’d said nothing about the cramps that were cutting me in half, or what to do with this diaper thing in a bathing suit. These were the days before girls had such handy dandy little accessories during the blessed days of the month so you were simply told to “stay out of the water.” Between abdominal agony and the shock of what I’d just learned daddy must have done with mama in order to have me, I stayed home from the party. Maybe I didn’t want Rick after all.
Most of the girls moved on to Mayfair Senior Girls’ School and although the boys went to Loyola Boys’ Catholic School, we all remained friends. I still had it bad for Rick. At parties when my classmates flirted around in tent dresses that I could never wear because the crotch of my pantyhose wouldn’t stay up high enough, I decided to substitute Melba toast for a dozen Swedish butter cookies our housekeeper, Selda, pulled out of the oven every day after school. I slimmed down in no time and hacked off the ponytail in favor of a fetching pageboy. I pretended that Annie had teased me about the three hairs that stuck straight up on the top of each foot in order to breach the subject of leg shaving, another one of mama’s taboo topics. The braces came off. Still, Rick didn’t come on. One Saturday I went over to his house, where we wrote embarrassing poetry together and listened to Simon and Garfunkel. Still nothing. What was the matter with him?
On the day of my fifteenth birthday party, I watched from my bedroom window for the Colombino car and when it was the first one to come up the driveway, I raced down the stairs so fast (I avoided the grand entrance like leprosy) that I slipped on the carpet and put my head through the wall at the bottom step. My father had to hammer out a larger hole to extricate my skull after my mother had opened the door to let in Rick. Sometime during the party, as I held an ice pack to my forehead, he confessed to me that he was in love with one of the Charles twins, who were seniors.
“You’re too eager,” Mama later scolded. “You’re supposed to wait and then come down the stairs slowly, after I open the door!” I never did see the point in the fake—making a boy wait—especially when you’ve been ready for three hours. Maybe those twins did.
I struggled through sock hops and Christmas dances, being far too shy to ask for a date, let alone a dance. At a girls’ school one was expected to do both. Occasionally I was forced to invite someone to join me, like when I got tickets to Shebang, a local American Bandstand television dance program. I called one of the old pals from Little Mayfair—but not Rick—who was happy to go along. I wore a striped tube dress that rose to my thighs and white go-go boots, but instead of shaking my booty with Bill, I forced him to take part in the “Name That Tune” contest. I guessed every single hit on the Top 30 after the first note while he sat there with his mouth gaping open, unable to get a word in edgewise. Mama sat at my grandmother’s Hollywood home watching the live performance, her head in her hands. “Saints preserve us, Kathleen. You’re supposed to act helpless,” she told me later. Pfffh! Whatever for?
Whenever I was asked to go out, I was still that seven-year-old, only instead of cartoons now I really wanted to stay home for The Rockford Files. Someday I’d be old enough for men like James Garner, who didn’t care about all these etiquette tricks. My mother, however, decided it was high time I took them seriously. She enrolled me in John Robert Powers’ Charm School and coerced me into going by getting my best friend Mary Ann’s mother to sign up her daughter as well. I figured I could do anything as long as Mary Ann did it with me. Wrong.
The first day Madame Pencil Brow got hold of me after I’d tweezed a few, thinking I was groomed and gorgeous. I’ve never known such pain, even now, after looking back on labor and delivery. When I got home I had to plop bags of frozen peas on my forehead to bring down the swelling. Mama was nonplussed by agony and pointed out that beauty often required pain and it would be easier next time—as if there was going to be one.
The second day, I was supposed to learn to speak properly by recording my voice and having it played back only to discover that I sounded like a drowning man. The teacher handed me the lyrics to a Claudine Longet song from The Party and commanded me to mimic her breathy whisper. The fact that I was not French made fine-tuning the accent un peu difficile.
On the third day I was told to cross the room so that each classmate could critique “the walk.” I was so nervous that I somehow swung my right arm in tandem with my right leg and my left with my left so that I looked like one of the guards at Buckingham Palace. “Next time,” suggested the instructor when no one volunteered a comment, “try alternating limbs.” Funny, but I have no memory of the rest of the week.
I do recall lining up for the “After Photo,” the “Before” having been snapped pell-mell and with black and white film on the first day when we all looked like pimply-faced hopeless cases on parole. On the last day I was transformed via truckloads of foundation and eye shadow, not to mention those eyebrows. A hairdresser styled my hair in a frenzied backcombed fashion no earthling could duplicate. You needed four arms and three cans of Aqua Net. By the time she finished sculpting, she was sweating and I was six inches taller.
Like Dorothy when at last she arrives at the poppy field, suddenly I am in color! I am wearing the shade deemed most flattering for my green eyes that are exaggerated by mascara so thick I can only keep them from sticking together by prying them open long enough for the photographer to click the shutter.
I received the dubious honor of having both 8x10s framed and displayed in the front window on Colorado Boulevard, there for all my prospects to view. Here’s what she looks like before and after, the promise screamed—before and after a paid professional molds her into a movie star the moment she gets out of bed, any guy with any sense would see.
I thought JRP must have contributed to the following phenomenon that occurred. My peers elected me prom queen—a questionable distinction when you attend an all-girls school. One girl was nominated from each class, the only segment of the election process that was uncorrupted, and I, being the sophomore choice, never thought I’d wear the crown that technically belonged to a senior. A shoebox with a slit in the top for each of the four nominees was placed in the hall. The nuns were always hip to a fundraiser—put in your coins and whoever rakes in the most money for the dance wins! I inadvertently carried the vote by a landslide because (suspiciously) there was a folded twenty-dollar bill in my box.
To say that Pasadena was a tight-knit matriarchal suburb is putting it mildly. These mothers were as loyal to their children and their friends’ children as the Irish Republican Army gathering in O’Malley’s Pub on St. Paddy’s Day. Whether your daughter was singing in chapel that morning or your son was sitting on the bench but might get to play left field in the final game of the season during the eighth inning, these women suddenly ditched all proper protocol and surrounded the scene like a SWAT team.
The spring I sold Girl Scout cookies, Mama called Molly Murphy who buzzed Shannon Shea who rang up Kate O’Connor and before you could say “Faith and Begora” I’d sold one hundred boxes without taking the order form out of my book bag. When Mary Ann underwent an emergency appendectomy, the Wednesday bridge club slapped down their cards in the middle of a rubber to charter a school bus that drove the entire class to the hospital.
It was no great surprise then, when after the announcement that I’d made royalty Mary Ann told me her mother had wedged into my shoebox that twenty-dollar bill one late afternoon when the hall was deserted.
My failure to disclose the rigged election may have been the reason events unfolded as they did. Stunned by my accidental victory, I was ill prepared. I had no date (naturally) and everyone who could have been a contender was already taken, the pool of prospects not being exactly Olympic-sized. Girlfriends tapped every resource right up until the afternoon of the dance, when the empathetic phone calls only delivered bad tidings and then altogether stopped. There would be no Prom King.
Dressed in my baby blue floor length gown with bows on the puffy sleeves I sat sobbing in my bedroom. My dear mother found me inconsolable. My sweet father mounted the stairs and poked his head around the corner to suggest that he might escort me, this offer only engendering another lachrymal flood. Had I given up all those Swedish butter cookies to become an old maid, loved only by the man I called daddy?
Fifteen minutes before I was to leave for the country club, if I wasn’t going to run away and change my identity first, Mary Ann called. She’d dug up a friend of a friend (her mother had probably slipped him a twenty) and I could double date with her. They’d be over in a flash to pick me up.
From the moment he opened the car door (I was standing on the front porch waiting) until the second the car dropped me off, Mr. Manners uttered not a single word. A double sawbuck evidently hadn’t been enough to include conversation. Turned out he had a girlfriend and didn’t want her to discover he was out with someone else, so he determined to “lay low.” Really low.
When he was forced to stand on the stage next to Queen Kathleen for the crowning ceremony, he was careful not to so much as brush my side, let alone offer his arm. When the senior girl and her clique hurled empty beer cans at me while Mother Mary Wilfred set the cardboard bejeweled headdress atop my tastefully braided switch surrounded by subtly backcombed sideburns, he took three giant sidesteps to the left and stood like a statue. Otherwise weaponless, the nuns swung their rosaries like billy clubs during riot control as the band played on.
Coercing a boy to accompany you at the last minute, ergo appearing a tad desperate, was apparently not the best method of attraction, not that I would have wanted another night out with The Mute. But being a straight A+ student, it didn’t take long for me to figure out what was.
By chance during my junior year on our school grounds, Elvis and Mary Tyler Moore filmed A Change of Habit, the movie about a nun who falls for a hip-grinding rock-and-roller. Hollywood was always using Mayfair for a set, since it had originally been a mansion of some repute and still looked like a grand estate, not to mention the contract for a movie was another easy income source for the Holy Child Order. This particular occasion sent me into a tizzy because I’d loved Mary Tyler Moore ever since Dick van Dyke had tripped over her ottoman; so much I wanted to be her.
I grabbed a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints from our kitchen cupboard (Selda cursed them anyway) and took it to school on the first day of filming. I carried it from class to class, just waiting to spot her and hopefully manipulate an introduction by offering her a treat.
As I was finishing piano practice in the living room tall lights were rolled in, the chapel door was shut, and the open main double doors were roped off to prevent a female student body of 120 (minus one—me—who hadn’t been ushered out in time) from rushing the celebrities. Mary sat demurely on the sofa wearing a nun’s habit as Elvis strutted across the room in a tight white suit and black shirt and sat…next to me on the piano bench.
I whipped my cookie box out of my book bag, my eyes riveted to Mary, but Elvis wasn’t about to let me get away until he’d done what every male wants to do from the moment he discovers you aren’t interested—gain your attention. Just like Andy, he couldn’t bear to go unnoticed. I was tempted to pay heed to him, since once you gave him what he wanted, that might be the end of it. After I’d acquiesced to Andy, he’d never spoken to me again, thank God. But Elvis was so greasy!
“Why aren’t you screaming like all those other girls?” he asked, as my eyes lit on his coif and I wondered if he’d dyed it black with Shinola shoe polish.
“Because I’m not here to see you,” I answered uncharacteristically boldly. “I really want to meet Mary Tyler Moore.” He ignored my request when he could have easily pleased me by walking me over to the sofa and saying, “Mary, I’d like you to meet Kathleen; Kathleen, Mary.” Instead he proceeded to bug me with questions about my classes, my interests, my hopes and dreams. As if that could compete with Mary Tyler Moore. He even kissed me on the cheek.
That’s when it hit me—you have to not care. Then he’ll come running! I couldn’t wait to tell mama what I’d learned that day at school.

~3~


I may have been luckless in love, but I fell through some tunnel of fortune to win every other kind of contest.
When I filled out an entry blank at Canterbury Records I won the drawing in KRLA’s “Young Love Sweepstakes.” My young love was my first cousin, Jack, since I only felt it for Little Joe Cartwright or Bobby Hatfield, the cuter Righteous Brother. Our mothers drove each of us away from the radio station with two station wagons full of prizes that included surfboards the length of a cruise ship, Suzuki motorbikes, and a year’s supply of Pepsi.
I had the Midas touch. If Sam Riddle, the deejay on KHJ radio, was taking the seventeenth caller for the latest Crosby, Stills, and Nash album, I dialed at just the right moment. I accepted scuba diving gear, first prize for something or other, on live television one summer night, my long hair so bleached it glowed phosphorescent on camera and my skin so tan I looked barbequed.
My father really wished I were old enough to roll the dice with him in Las Vegas.
Naturally, I won the raffle for two tickets on “The Last Train to Clarksville,” an Amtrak train that would transport the winner along with The Monkees south to San Diego, where they would perform that song in concert. To this momentous occasion, I invited Tim, the box boy at El Ranchero Market who could have cared less about me. But then I didn’t care about him either so our focus could be on what mattered, adding autographs to my little leather book that already boasted of several.
Sure enough, however, by the time the train rolled back into Union Station, Tim wanted to know if he could call me, no doubt because I’d completely ignored him and salivated over Davey Jones the entire day.
My problem was that when I wasn’t interested, I really wasn’t interested. And I never would become so. If I didn’t picture myself married to a guy within ten minutes, I never spoke to him again. Why waste the time?
Even when I said yes (I still hadn’t said the word “no” to anyone on earth) to a date with Sherman, who I’d met at a Loyola dance, I knew there was no point. He’d been sweaty and breathy by the time the slow dance rolled around because he’d been furiously fruging for the previous five numbers, but it was easier to break down and give him my phone number than it was to hide out in the ladies’ room for another half hour. Every time I’d cracked the door thinking I might escape to the crowded dance floor, there he was…stalking and sweating.
When someone called you in 1967, there was no security system in place. No digital readout on the phone, no message machine to let the caller speak while you safely screened. The phone rang and it might be Rick or it could be (please God, no) Sherman. To not answer out of sheer terror would be to potentially demolish your future happiness. Of course, on October 5, it was Sherman. It had never occurred to me, Sister Mary Stupid, to do what all my girlfriends seemed to know instinctively but never occurred to me: Give him the wrong number.
He invited me to the Loyola Halloween costume dance, where we were to come dressed as a famous pair. He wanted to go as –get this—a Chinese couple (I was living in the Pre-P.C. Age) Would I never get to wear a normal costume?
Other dancing pairs represented clever duos like peanut butter and jelly or Rice Krispies and milk. There we were, dance floor central, Yin and Yang. I was jerking with an alarmingly perspiring geek wearing his mother’s bathrobe while I shimmied in the authentic garb my mother broke the Pasadena Freeway speed limit to purchase in L.A.’s Chinatown: Kimono, Chinese script earrings that dangled to my shoulders (they probably spelled “says yes to everything”), and those velvety sandals made of bamboo. She’d made me close my eyes in several of the shops so I wouldn’t be corrupted by the pornographic retail items right alongside the rock candy and fortune cookies.
Maybe those earrings said something more interesting than I thought. In China, within seconds, I might have been swamped by suitors.
On the way home when I was as quiet as a mouse, mama asked me what was the matter. “I don’t want to go to the dance,” I said weakly and looked out the window at nothing but freeway on-ramps and overpasses.
“Decorum!” she shouted like an Amen in an evangelical tent rally. When she couldn’t help but notice I hadn’t a clue, she expounded. “When a lady accepts an invitation, she doesn’t cancel—unless she is gravely ill.” With praiseworthy fortitude, I reigned in the impulse to remind her that hadn’t worked when I was seven.
“Besides,” she added, “Where else are you ever going to wear all of this?” and pointed to the bulging sacks in the back seat. True, she’d spent a fortune trying to bolster my confidence. The kimono was real silk! Nothing but the best for Catherine Clary, who never, ever kept receipts or returned merchandise. Tags still on it, anything over which this buyer felt remorse went bagged onto the back seat of the station wagon and straight to God’swill.
“Remember.” Here came the inevitable words of wisdom. “It’s not necessarily who you go with as much as who you might meet while you’re there.” Begging your pardon, not in this outfit.
When she could see I wasn’t buying what she was selling, she hit me with her best shot: “Offer it up!” She always saved this one for last, since to refuse it was tantamount to a bus ride straight to hell. When you handed your suffering to Our Lord on a silver platter in exchange for a worthy cause, it endowed the difficulty with a positive twist. It smelled of bribery to me—a sort of Catholic tit for tat— but what did I know? Mama was always offering things up, even though her hardships were not evident. Her closet door wouldn’t even close there were so many petticoats smashed in it, and she always looked like she’d stepped right out of Better Homes and Gardens.
Realistically, how much of a bargain could I expect for offering up a dance at Loyola? It wasn’t a matter of life and death (although it felt like it), chronic illness or starvation like the Biafra babies. Certainly it wasn’t equivalent to world peace or curing Mary Ann’s father who was in the hospital. Having an easier time with Algebra II would be about right, but the intention wasn’t supposed to be for me. Maybe I’d dedicate the dance to the Deity for the Algebra teacher that she’d be inspired by the Holy Spirit to give less homework!
After I dragged in on Sherman’s arm, praying heavily that there wouldn’t be a slow dance before I could excuse myself to the ladies’ room, the momentous magic moment that no fortune cookie could have presaged but my mother did, was when none other than Desi Arnaz, Jr. tapped in and asked Sherman to kindly step aside so he could dance with me. Had The Lord accepted my meager offering and in exchange, given me Lucy for a mother-in-law? Thank God I’d come to this dance!
My head throbbed from the severely tight up-do mama had molded in order that I look the part of a China doll even though I was as blonde as a toe head. But I managed to look as carefree as possible. I couldn’t help but smile with my hair pulled back so tight.
I gave Desi my best go-go. After one record he thanked me and headed off to the next blonde, but not before cryptically commenting, “Nice costume.”
Because I’d overtly wanted his attention, he didn’t want to give it, and incapable of cunning, I could not feign disinterest when I was, in fact, interested. I knew I should, but I could not exude ennui once I’d become enchanted. It was written all over me, and Desi had read me like a book. Let’s face it: I was as about as mysterious as The Cat in the Hat.
The very next week I was cast (anyone who auditioned became a star) in Mayfair’s Spring Musical, “Cinderella.” Bruce LeBond, a dancer on The Smothers Brothers’ Show was the choreographer—that he ever came to our little school from Hollywood had to be fate, and at first glance I madly loved him. A young man in his twenties, he deigned to speak to me on one or two occasions when I thought I would faint, but otherwise he only had eyes for the Charles twins. What was it about those twins?
Leftovers for me was the pimply boy from Loyola who played my husband in the opening scene. A gangly dweeb, he spoke to me the opening line, “Our daughter’s looking dreamy-eyed” to which I replied as best I could without looking at him, “The prince is giving a ball!” This repeated singsong exchange somehow endowed him with the right to follow on my heels during rehearsals. Even though I never turned around I could hear him breathing.
After I went to college, Bruce bought the house right next door to ours, and moved the Charles twins in with him. So that’s what it was about twins. Although my mother frankly admitted he did not make good marriage material (What motivation had he, shacked up with the Bobsey Babes?), Bruce sure did know how to throw a party. She and my father were always invited, and I never was.
Since Mama implored, I broke down and went to a movie (It starred Steve McQueen, another of my possible husbands) with my pediatrician’s son, Martin, who turned out to be the guy I should have married. The night we drove to a Hollywood pizza parlor the pseudo Italian dough thrower tossed one a wee bit too high and wide so that it soared over the counter and slapped me across the face before wrapping around my head three times, spewing flour all over Martin’s body. It was difficult to say which one of us was more embarrassed.
“You scare boys away,” my mother had commented after the Shebang Top-30 episode and in light of this wrinkle. “They’re afraid you’re smarter than they are.” No, mama. Between the coronation beer can assault and the projectile pizza, they feared for their lives.
In the end, after several dates that were platonic enough to have been with cousin Jack, I was too nice and Martin was too nice, and when he went off to college he wrote nice letters about Steve McQueen movies and the Dodgers. I started college under the false impression that I was certain to find someone much more exciting. We eventually drifted apart, both of us too shy to make an amorous move (I wouldn’t have known how to anyway), and I too dramatically delusional to recognize a good thing when it stared me in the face, nicely.
That summer I fell for another lifeguard—this one at least a bit closer to my own age. Typically, Lance was utterly unattainable. Girls of all ages followed him around like lemmings. When he finally asked me if I’d like to join him for dinner after I happened to appear on his stretch of beach and lie there from 7 A.M. until 7 P.M. for weeks, pretending to read a James Michener bestseller, I thought I really had a live one. Not having had that much experience, I was a bit perplexed when “out to dinner” was cold canned corn from his kitchen cupboard and “I’ll take you to a movie” was Green Acres on his black-and-white TV with rabbit ears.
Since I was certain he was starving, poor boy on a summer salary saving unfortunate souls who couldn’t swim as well as I could, I eagerly invited him to our rental house for dinner. A second date would surely prove more promising.
While I was in the kitchen refilling his plate with second helpings of my grandmother’s signature leg of lamb, he was fingering my cousin Emily’s knees under the table. I drowned his meat in what I thought was gravy and turned out to be hot fudge sauce—a fact that he did not reveal until he’d eaten every bite of it and even then, only as a compliment to the chef. That night was when I learned that eating is more important to a man than remembering who invited him in the first place.
When Emily later revealed what he’d been up to, since she didn’t give a half hoot about him, I realized that the way to win his heart was not necessarily through his stomach…unless you weren’t the one to go get him seconds. Bottom line? I’d cared so he hadn’t. Emily hadn’t cared, so he had. When it came right down to it, I was kinda sorry he hadn’t choked on that chocolate.
The next boy for whom I felt destined had a summer job in his father’s Balboa Island drug store. In one week I bought forty tubes of toothpaste, box after box of cotton balls, assorted safety pins, and every size and shape Band-aid on the market. Whenever anyone in our household needed a Bobby pin or an aspirin, I dropped my fork in the middle of dinner and hightailed it down the Marine Avenue sidewalk.
I finagled my way into being Craig’s customer, even if I had to wait ten minutes and pretend I’d forgotten something in another aisle so I could let other people cut in front of me. On his day off, when he launched his Hobie Cat into the bay, I sat on a beach chair in my most alluring bikini pretending to pour over a magazine out of which I’d cut a square in front of my eyes so I could spy his every move.
I wore out my smile and got nothing in return until, when I gave up, he showed up. Not long after I stopped hounding him he revved his motorcycle onto the sidewalk in front of our patio and wondered, did I want a ride? I’d lost interest by that time, having witnessed some of his heavy-duty brewski parties with other girls on the beach. Besides, motorcycles were way too fast for me, I who had never had the nerve to attempt roller skates, let alone, God forbid, a skateboard. I screamed like a murder victim whenever a Harley started up as I walked by it. He was stupefied to discover that after all my stalking I perfunctorily rejected him.


~4~



That fall, I was more than ready to start college since my mother pointed out in no uncertain terms that this is where a girl will most likely meet her future husband. I hadn’t done well searching for it, so considering the male student-body overpopulation the odds were in my favor that Mr. Right would faint into my lap. The day I moved into the dorm freshman year at USC, I felt my chances increasing by the minute. I taped a large poster to my window that faced the campus, adjacent to “The Endless Summer” one on the wall. It read “Wanted: Brave Cowboy.” And I wondered why the frat boys weren’t raiding my panties.
I wasn’t exactly a party girl. I still did all my homework. In four years I never missed a class. I even crossed a “Make Love, Not War” picket line to take my final exam—Get out of my way! I studied!
Everyone else could detect the odor of marijuana a mile away—“Do you smell that?” they’d all whisper and giggle like it was another joke about “going down on something,” another thing I couldn’t figure out to save my life. I’d pretend to smell something, of course, just like I pretended to drink the sickeningly sweet “Kamikaze” shoved into my hand at fraternity parties, until I could surreptitiously pour it into a fake indoor plant.
I turned once again to the unattainable. In my sociology class, “Education for Marriage,” I could admire Jason, the star football player, from afar, since I habitually sat in the front row and raised my hand with all the answers and he, in the back, too cool to be called on. Since he refused to notice me for my academic enthusiasm, I hoped he would someday stroll past my window and, seeing the beckoning poster, experience an unassailable magnetic trance.
I didn’t stay too afar however, and therein lay the tragedy—oozing interest but not getting any in return. Outside the classroom, I schemed with all my might to make him want me. The more I copied my notes for him, the more he asked me for them, but neglected to give the sort of gratitude I was after. The dozens of chocolate chip cookies I baked (wrapped with a red bow and hand delivered to his fraternity door) failed to light his fire. I lingered sipping at the drinking fountain outside our classroom until I nearly burst from water retention. The further I leaned over the basin in a heart-stopping posture—my skirts barely covered my bottom even when I stood straight as a soldier— the less he looked my way. . He threw passes all right, but to some tighter end.
One afternoon, he referred to me as “a girl in my sociology class” when introducing me to some dark-haired beauty he was chatting up under a shade tree. He gave me a thank you card when, because of me, he passed the midterm—necessary if he was going to remain on the football team.
When he asked me to sit next to his date at the football game, since she didn’t go to USC and so didn’t know anyone, the light bulb in my head pinged. But that didn’t mean it stayed lit. I carried the torch for him long after their engagement announcement appeared in the Society section of the paper that winter. The problem? I’d been about as illusive as the Trojan Marching Band. Had I simply flashed him at that water fountain and from that moment on bathed him with blasé, I’ll bet every mini skirt I had in my closet I’d be living on a cliff in a Newport Beach mansion and closing in on an anniversary ruby.
In the spring of my eighteenth year, my mother’s most ardent desire before she died (she wasn’t ill, just persuasive) was that I debut…to the Cardinal of the Catholic Church. I would have rather broken both my legs with a sledgehammer than walk the Cardinal’s red carpet, but I hadn’t joined a sorority like she’d wanted me to, even though she pointed out that not doing so would thwart my social opportunities. This was another puzzle, since the enormous campus housed ten thousand perfectly eligible bachelors who weren’t in fraternities. And hopefully didn’t gargle with Kamikazes.
If I “came out,” she said, my future might be salvaged. I’d much rather stay in. That, and she’d been saving her pennies since she was three in something called her “sinking fund” for emergencies such as this one, so that her daughter could make the scene at this hearty party. How could I deny the woman who bore me?
“Remember, attention is a blessing,” she told me when I mocked having to promenade the runway like a spiritual super model. “It’s the way to be noticed.” Fine advice from the woman who at my age had only to unlatch the screen door on Berendo Street to make every adorable boy in Los Angeles come running.
I made sure no one at school knew I was involved in this fluff that in 1970 was considered by radical college students unconscionable. If you partook of such frivolous opulence you were a member of the enemy establishment. When my fellow dorky confidante Carol thought it would be supportive to tack on my dorm door a picture she’d drawn of me wearing a gown, and underneath it the caption “Congratulations Cardinal Queen,” I ripped it off and considered chewing and ingesting it before any love-child flower-girl walked by.
A debutante ball was bad enough, but add to that the location of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and you’ve got the perfect formula for pariah. There was no explaining to my mother that the exact opposite of what she was trying to achieve would, in fact, occur. No one my age would speak to me until I was eighty-five.
My escort was Jack, the Young Love Cousin. A fellow Catholic, he tacitly accepted the pomp and circumstance as if it were old familiar High Mass mumbo jumbo, although even the most devout mackerel snapper would have a hard time swallowing a social event that resembled a sacrament. There is no reference in the Baltimore Catechism to strutting your stuff for the man in the red cape with the billboard hat and clerical bling on his finger. Also in my favor, Jack was the trusty safety-date who would neither kiss nor tell. No one would discover that I’d betrayed my placard carrying, sit-in protesting, bra-burning generation, in which, proven by my breaking through the picket line, I actually only pretended membership.
Mama was in her glory! We shopped in the bridal department at I. Magnin and Bullock’s Wilshire for a floor-length virginal gown unlike any I would wear to my wedding. She hired a professional photographer to come to our house, a daylong shoot that culminated in a navy blue leather 8x10 coffee-table photo album trimmed and embossed in gold.
There I stand strapped into snow-white gloves to the shoulder. My satin heels are plugged in the damp ground beneath the spreading branches of the front-yard oak tree. A single diamond dangles to my décolletage and a scapular medal is tucked discreetly inside my lace neckline. The papal tiara adorns my fiercely curled and Super-Hold Aqua-Netted long blonde hair.
I look like Saint Barbie lowered by helicopter into the Garden of Eden.
My chin is raised so that I am gazing heavenward in awe of my ending innocence, while God is no doubt saying, “You are so obedient I just might give the human race another crack at the apple!” And I was. If he’d given me to Adam, I never would have taken a single bite, not even had that slimy serpent substituted chocolate pudding.
On the night of horrors, the band played “Younger than Springtime” as my father and I paraded the interminable length of an elevated ramp that crossed the grand ballroom and led to the stage and a line-up of vestmented priests, caped super-hero Cardinal straight ahead and central. It helped that my father dreaded the exposure almost as much as I did.
I chanted to myself, Alternate limbs. But when daddy dropped my arm and I knelt to kiss the Cardinal’s ring, his hidden microphone conveyed to the audience of 500 that I had no idea how to kiss. Nerves had robbed me of all saliva, and when I puckered a sucking, screeching that sounded like microphone feedback filled the ballroom. As I rose from bended knee I was sure he would whisper, “You’d better become a nun.”
After I joined ranks with those who had performed impeccably, all I could see through the blinding stage lights was my mother’s head, facedown on the tablecloth. I saw her lips moving against her napkin and knew she was saying, “Saints preserve us.”
Mama had informed me that all the parents were “very well connected.” Now that they’d been privy to my musical interlude and I’d blown this noteworthy rite of passage, who of them would want their son to be Mr. Me?
To add further horror to humiliation, after devouring everything at dinner as if it were my last meal (mama might refuse to feed me after this), when I went to my car in the swanky hotel-parking garage every single item had been stolen out of it. Since it was semester break, I’d brought home lots of clothes to launder and closed-toe shoes to exchange for sandals along with copious notes to study for exams.
It seemed that while I was coming out, someone else had been breaking in.


~5~



Not only did I not meet anyone thrilling at USC, but thrill was a lie I bought into when I dated Aaron, whose idea of it was to lie around and kiss (I was determined to breach the bona fide kiss) until my lips were so swollen that no matter what I told the rest of the girls in the dorm cafeteria at breakfast, they all knew I’d been smacking around until two o’clock in the morning.
Boring, but yet again I rose above it rather than suggest we cool it.
I giggled and rolled my eyes with the sorority pledges and the cheerleaders about what other things he and I must have done, even though I didn’t know what those initials stood for until I was thirty. I was still the saint who pretended to be the sinner so that no one would suspect or hold it against me that I was headed straight to heaven.
The moment I knew it was over with Aaron was when we were sitting on the beach, kissing of course, and my eyes cracked open a smidge to notice just how very pale his feet were. My hard-earned tan (it took me months to work through the blistery sunburn stage) would require no less of a mate. His toes were so white, wrapped around mine, that I almost shrieked thinking they were some sort of sand creatures.
I had to put a stop to all this face-smashing folderol before he thought I actually loved him, especially since the last time we’d entwined he’d whispered that he’d “like to make love with you, but I would never do that unless you want to.” I had virtually no idea how one would do it even if one wanted to. Things were getting out of hand.
My memory of Aaron does not include conversation. Of course, there was no time with all that lip locking going on. So I sat down and wrote him a “Dear John” letter but didn’t have the nerve to tell him the reason for my change of heart (had my heart ever been in it?) was that his feet were so white they were nearly blue. Had I done so, in all likelihood he would have decided I was on drugs and he was fortunate to be free. Instead I simply said I couldn’t see him anymore.
Formerly mild-mannered Aaron cried like a girl, declared undying love, and when that didn’t work, demanded an explanation. Now I was the woman of mystery who had no reason.
What could I tell him? I just thought I might as well make out without taking a breath for four months?
He gave up and joined the Peace Corps. I was over it, primarily because I’d never been in it. I’d only been doing what I thought you did to have a boyfriend. And not feeling whatever it was you were supposed to feel as a girlfriend—something. My mother’s relationship rubric had never included feelings. She felt them. She just didn’t verbalize them.
My barometer for determining whether or not it was “meant to be” was based on the relief I felt after the breakup. When I skipped to class in thigh-high skirts and re-relished the open-ended amount of tanning time on the dormitory rooftop, I knew I’d made the right choice. That’s when I was blindsided by Josh.
Josh sprawled, propped on one elbow, on the lawn in front of Doheny Library. A contender for a look-alike John Denver, his hair was longish and dishwater blond and his build just like the popular singer who sat and passed the pipe around. He smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey from a Coke bottle but never appeared inebriated. His smile, complete with cute little gap between the front teeth, was winsome. He was never not on the lawn. He never held a book. Was he enrolled?
He grinned and glanced at my legs as I passed by. I admit I took the diagonal path across Doheny park no matter where my destination so he would. My postponed interest in anyone of the opposite sex until my lips healed did a small cartwheel.
The second he asked me a question about my classes I stopped to chat. What were his? Sociology and Psychology, and he never needed to listen to the professor of either, so he just hung out here. Hmmmm. He asked me if I would like to go to a concert and I agreed, expecting it to be on campus and related to the soft rock image he exuded. It turned out to be an expensive dinner and a classical music concert at the Music Center.
When he picked me up wearing a suit and tie I was glad I’d chosen one of my better-occasion shamefully short dresses. But afterward, when he walked me to the dormitory door (no boys allowed inside) I efficiently thanked him and climbed the stairs as if I were training for a marathon. A good night kiss was the last thing on my mind. I didn’t want to fuel that fire again, especially since like Aaron, he was shorter than I, which meant we’d have to do all that lying around to make-out. Hence, based entirely on my first-date reticence to seal it at the door, we automatically became “just friends.” Where did that leave me? Back to the dating drawing board.


~6~




The rest of my college career was equally unremarkable. I dated an astonishingly studly senior the summer before he went on a graduation-gift excursion to Europe, during which he asked if I would drive his BMW to keep it “fresh.” No problem. While he was away, I realized I enjoyed driving his car more than I did sitting beside him in it. Bad sign. By the time he returned, I had learned to ski with a new set of friends who he met but didn’t care for because they were much more fun than he was.
I’d said yes to him in the first place to be polite. Mama’s good girl. I’d taken up his hobby of body surfing since I could swim in my sleep, but hadn’t figured on getting slammed by large breakers until my eyeballs were gritty with sand. I’d worn the teeny-weeny yellow bikini (he was such eye candy that I couldn’t eat whenever I was near him and hence my tummy flattened) despite its impractical application in turbulent ocean tides.
I’d mastered the pleasing but what I’d neglected to polish was the refusal. How did one say no? Not face-to-face, that’s for sure. In my usual confront-avoidance manner, I wrote him a letter. Ba-bye.
It just wasn’t working for me. Every time I met someone who I thought might be the one, he ignored me. When I accepted dates and follow-up dates from those who asked me, I lost that lovin’ feeling because it had never been there in the first place. It was the idea of that feeling that kept me carrying on until I’d imagined a person who didn’t really exist.
My cluelessness became more crucial after graduation when the older, more experienced males came into play. I dabbled in flirtation, another one of my social shortcomings. While working at the Balboa Island market that summer I honed the art of the tease by practicing on the hunk manager, David. While I worked the register and he stocked the shelves, we tossed loaded remarks back and forth that made customers in the cereal aisle blush. All fine and good until one night he showed up at my apartment, drunk and daring. I had to fend him off with a frying pan.
I thought my husband had materialized in the dashing dude who managed the Marine Avenue ice cream shop. Bob wooed with flowers, candy, and love letters, out of nowhere since I’d never noticed him as anything other than the necessary vehicle for fudge ripple.
He got a real job in a real office and started showing up at friendly gatherings at Josh’s apartment (my John Denver pal had also moved to the Island). He’d ditched the pink-and-white-striped ice-cream parlor shirt and appeared fresh from the office in stunning suits and silk ties.
His undying affection was certainly flattering. He grew on me, although I still got sucked into saying yes to things that in my right mind I would have refused, like riding on the back of his motorcycle at 60 mph down Pacific Coast Highway. I tried so hard not to screech like a little girl the entire time that I nearly suffered a nervous breakdown and had to go to bed for three days with a blasting headache. The wounds from my fingernails are probably scars on his torso to this very day.
Soon after that he started drinking enough alcohol every night to serve at the open bar of a wedding reception. My idea of fun was not to hop on a Harley with an alcoholic hog. Josh drove me home from parties when he noticed me head out the door alone to walk there. The night he helped me shovel Bob with a metal rake from the steps of my apartment, where he’d passed out, to the sidewalk below, he discussed with me the option of calling off the relationship.
The minute he suggested it I knew he was right. And I was determined this time to do it in person. I had to. I was plumb out of Crane’s stationery with my name engraved across the top.
The next morning when he crawled off like a sand-crab and called me from the pay phone on the corner to tell me we needed to talk, I readily agreed. I hitched up my big-girl panties and vowed to bravely and boldly blurt it out—I would not be his life’s drinking partner. I couldn’t handle more than one glass of wine, and when he’d taken me to a gathering where he lit a doobie and passed it around the circle, I tried to be a good sport. I took one puff and coughed so hard I threw up on the spot. There was no future here for me.
He took me to Charlie’s Chili and before I could state my purpose, he slid over a paper napkin, whipped a pen from his pocket organizer and systematically diagrammed “the relationship.” The graph he drew indicated where we’d begun and the path we’d been following. When he was finished, the line looked like the Dow Jones Average on Black Monday. We’d “peaked” last month, our “dip” had begun two weeks ago, and then “the nosedive”…blah blah blah.
I felt oddly spared of all the drama I’d been afraid to inflict. I stopped him somewhere in the middle of “the trough” and told him I got the picture, thank you. I agreed with everything he’d said, yes we could be friends, blah blah blah. I flew out of there and onto the ocean front sidewalk like a bird set free from cupped hands. I kicked off my sandals like the Girl from Ipanema, breezing barefoot down the beach at sunset, tall and tan and young and lovely.
And ready for a real (and sober) romance with someone who didn’t obsess over which direction the bills faced in his wallet.
Six months later, when I was invited to his wedding, Bob pulled me aside at the ceremony to tell me he might have been wrong about his schematic assessment. He was moving to Texas with his new bride, but would always think of me. This was a new piece to the male puzzle—the regret. I thought only I did that.


~7~

When high-school buddy Mary Ann invited me to a party at her apartment in Manhattan Beach, I was in an exceptional que sera sera mood and drove the seventy miles to get there as if it were around the block. I needed to branch out.
That’s where I met Paul, who a week later drove down to Balboa to take me out. He also turned out to drink to the point where he was earning DUIs like they were gold stars, but not before I moved lock, stock and barrel to live as Mary Ann’s roommate solely in order to give the budding union a chance. I rationalized my impetuous relocation by telling myself that Los Angeles was a much bigger pool and anyway, I’d always wanted to work for a noteworthy newspaper.
I landed an advertising sales job at the Los Angeles Times. Paul was in television advertising sales. I thought we made the perfect pair.
He invited my parents, who sat directly in front of us, to a Kings’ hockey game and between beers never stopped shrieking the “F word” into mama’s left ear. Not only had I never heard her say it or any other swear word, but neither had I ever uttered it, since I couldn’t even say “bitchen” without it sounding like a Swedish potato dish. When I tried slowing it down it came out like I was announcing it before I spelled it in a spelling bee.
By the time Halloween rolled around Paul decided we would go to Mary Ann’s costume party dressed as a hockey player (him) and a hockey puck (me). Please. Dear Lord, I pray…let me go to just one Halloween party as something pretty!
When he enjoyed slapping me around with his hockey stick the entire evening, I knew our days were numbered. To add insult to injury, alone in the corner, was none other than my grade school unrequited love, Rick, who had served in Vietnam and now went by the name “R.”
Blinded by the serendipity that Mary Ann had invited him after all this time, and here I was as well, I attempted conversation, the reciprocating end of which was less comprehensible than his very bad poetry had been. He’d traded his Jan and Dean appearance for the wan and scrawny Illya Kuryakin.
Of course, when he looked up at me to acknowledge my greeting what he saw was, well, a hockey puck.
At The Times, married men came out of the cubicles like someone announced, “Free cocktails!” in mine. It didn’t take long to determine that there was a certain age by which if you were not taken, everyone else was—but not faithfully so.
Between twenty-five and thirty-five the disillusioned and dastardly husbands were on the prowl. Some were subtle. One was not. He perched on the side of my desk, spread his mint-green polyester trousered legs and announced, “We are going to have an affair one of these days so we might as well get to it. Where do you want to meet me this afternoon?”
With no retort for this approach in my John Robert Powers handbook, I looked at him like he had sprouted antennae. As if I would leave my desk long enough to have an affair?
I dated a few sad sacks who either cried over some lost love or teared up over how much they respected my organizational abilities. The appliance store manager I called on for a weekly ad ushered me into the back room and gestured to a floor blanketed with leather camera bags. “Here’s where I thought we could lie down and do some real business,” he suggested as if it were as ordinary a scenario as meeting across a desk. A furniture store salesman who called himself Christopher Robin proposed we skinny dip at the beach and when that didn’t work, offered me a job in a satellite store he said he planned to open in Paris—as in France—apartment rent included.
Meanwhile, back at the office, I won the top sales award of the year and was promoted to Assistant Manager of Retail Advertising. I might as well have contracted bubonic plague. All work-related dating bets were off when the enchanted evening out was with your boss, who spent the rest of the week running interference because of your idiotic mistakes.
I baked billions of cookies for the typesetting guys who worked in the basement—fair game since I had no authority over them. When one of them, Carlos, invited me to dinner and showed up on a motorcycle (What was it about guys and motorcycles?) then handed me a helmet after I’d spend $100 getting my hair done, I asked him in and ordered spicy Indian curry takeout. When he suggested spicier Kama Sutra, I re-buckled his helmet under his chin and sent him home. He determinedly pursued me and told me he loved me madly, but only until his ex-girlfriend threatened suicide. Then he dropped me like a sack of wet newsprint.
Small wonder when I was attracted to the older man, Pete, who had been my boss for a while but had since moved to a different department. Even still, he was strictly off limits since he was married with a lovely family. Their formal portrait taken at his daughter’s wedding was displayed on his desk. What a charmer and devoted family man! He admired my “people skills,” as he called them, and thought I could do no wrong. Charismatic, to be sure.
One morning I came to his office with questions and he invited me to lunch. It was an innocent business lunch so I accepted. I couldn’t help but notice that Handsome Family was absent from his desktop! Was there trouble in paradise?
When I say that in the middle of our salads he told me that he had separated from his wife of thirty-seven years because she was a hopeless alcoholic, it is important that you understand two things. First, in my entire family and circle of friends there had never been divorce. All the people I knew were in the exact same family they started with and had the exact same last name as far back as Adam and Eve.
Second, I knew nothing about men who blamed everything on their wives. My father only adored my mother and only ever blamed her for the purchase of excessive Christmas wrapping paper that he considered too elaborate..
Of course I felt sympathy for this exquisite and muscular Italian dressed in a designer navy blue suit complimented by crisp white shirt! I’d had my share with partners with drinking problems, so I empathized with his plight. His olive skin was stunning. His thick dark hair made me want to run my fingers through it. But good gravy, he was twenty-four years older! I held nothing in my maternal bag of tricks for this unexpected—and rather exciting—development.
The following Saturday we played tennis. He may have been fifty-two but he covered that court like a cat. In his white short shorts and polo shirt he didn’t look a day over forty. After the set, as we enjoyed Cobb salad and one glass of Chardonnay, he told me that he admired my “industriousness,” my “punctuality,” and my “orderliness.” He confessed he had no use for “the illusive woman.” Alleluia! At last a man who rewarded me for my Hermoine behavior and didn’t care that I was as about as mysterious as a thumbtack!
What I didn’t know was that his life alone held enough mystery for us both.
His divorce was underway, he lowered his voice and choked a little to say while a tear large enough to drown a fish ran down his cheek. He was living in an apartment and eating canned tuna for dinner. He squeezed out another oversized droplet from between his lashes. I patted him on the shoulder and handed him a Kleenex.
I was putty in his hands, having had no schooling in the wiles of the charmed snake—the manipulative male.


~9~


There were enough red flags in this relationship to stop a speeding train, but that didn’t slow me down. To my credit, however, I did react to a few of the danger signals. Once I saw him in my rear view mirror crouching behind the bushes in a restaurant parking lot to see if I would come out of a management dinner meeting on the arm of another man. When I ignored what I saw because I didn’t want to confront it, and started the engine, he leapt the hedge like a mountain lion. That one rattled me enough to call the whole thing off.
I cut short the courtship twice, to my credit, and the second time I almost made it stick. But when he told me he’d sought counseling during the six months we were apart I believed him. I thought two-time separation that nevertheless left me feeling unstoppable desire when I so much as glanced at his wrist as he checked the time meant that he must be the one. Fast forward, and his would be the same wrist that, years later, I would find apish, hairy and disgusting.
For now he was the raw material I could work with. I had dated during our time apart, but every guy my age either wanted to drink himself into a coma or go to bed before we’d even paid the dinner bill. See? Everyone had his problems!
At least he never went to Halloween parties (I didn’t know he never went to parties, period) and didn’t own a motorcycle. Besides, there was something about the suffering older man that brought out the St. Catherine of Laboure in me (mama named me after the woman who cared for the forsaken elderly). A tragic figure needed me, and just like in my favorite Joni Mitchell songs, I was doomed to seek drama in a life larger than my own small one.
Besides, happy males didn’t try! They didn’t give it all up for me like Pete did. They didn’t care if I left the room for a minute or follow me to make sure no other man seduced me between the kitchen and the bathroom in my own house. They played with Barbie dolls, but didn’t call me “doll.” They wrote letters about my crush on a movie star but never said I was one. Pete told everyone who would listen or not that diamonds lined the street where I lived.
Kissing Aaron had been the only one to evidence rare romantic promise, back when he joined the Peace Corps to escape any memory of me, and for this (with a new box of Chapsticks) I’d almost taken him back. But even he went on with his life because he had one, separate and apart from me. I couldn’t save the man who liked himself, and therefore, I could not be the very center of his entire existence. I wanted a man who couldn’t breathe without me. Be careful what you wish for.
“Your day will come,” my mother encouraged when every female friend I’d ever known was already married and buying a playpen. Eligible bachelors my age were hopelessly immature so naturally I was sucked like skin against the hose of a vacuum cleaner back into the arms of the older man, who turned out to be the biggest baby of them all.
I should have known better the day I marched into Pete’s office to tell him I wanted to be together forever—again—and he told me he had moved back home with his wife but would leave her—again—tomorrow. He’d only returned to make her feel like he was trying, he said. He knew the marriage wouldn’t last—again.
“Give it up,” friends and family urged, as if I would ever do that. I was as goal- driven as a hockey forward during the Stanley Cup Finals.
“Saints preserve us!” my mother groaned when I announced that we wanted to get married, “I will pay for you to get professional counseling!”
I couldn’t really blame her. I’d made the tactical error of showing her the letter Pete had written me during our second breakup, wherein he urged me to believe that only he looked out for my best interests, not my parents. During that reading mother and daughter agreed, good riddance to very bad rubbish. All over the city of Pasadena the information was as well known as were the rules on how to apply for Rose Queen: Mama’s devotion to family was something fierce.
The warning flags were still flapping in the breeze when the day before his divorce was final he proposed, and at age 31, I said yes.
I brushed all portent of disaster aside as if it were a dust bunny. I would make him a better man with my love and understanding. I had to. I was running out of time to be my mother! His mafia temper and possessiveness would abate just as soon as I slipped on his wedding ring and carried his child—a girl just like me would be perfect. Meanwhile, during our engagement period and before I quit my job to marry and become a mother in no time flat, he paced back and forth like a panther outside any conference room I was seated in, afraid I might so much as smile at a male colleague. Look how much he cared!
Should I have been concerned that although he told me he was living in a rental apartment I had yet to see, he changed into his nuptial suit in the back seat of his car?
In front of the Justice of the Peace I looked like young Tzeitel marrying a Latin Lazar Wolf. As the band played “Theme from The Godfather” for our first dance (Pete’s choice) I was certain I could will this man happy. I would prove my faithfulness to alleviate his insecurity.
My day still had not come when we moved seventy miles south to San Clemente and I was pregnant with our first child. In fact, I’d made such a colossal mistake that it was tantamount to the Greatest Error on Earth and could have been featured in the center ring of Barnum & Bailey’s Circus.
I’d thought Pete would be just like my father—a successful businessman whose idea of a good time was not hanging out in bars but spending evenings at home with his cherished family. In my quest for the man as wonderful as daddy I’d come within ten years of the right age, but light years away from the right person.
He preferred to spend evenings at home all right. When he wasn’t dripping the fake charm of a used car salesman he was so mouthy and rude that before long we had neither social outings nor friends. Restaurant managers evicted him halfway through the entrée. Babysitters stopped answering their phones. Even the Ford dealership service manager refused to tune his engine. Every single solitary moment he was at home we were deadbolt-locked inside. I was not permitted to pick up eggs at the market without him. “For you,” he barked, “going to the store is a social occasion.” No kidding.
This was not the May-December delightful coupling, where the adoring man shows off his cherished younger wife. This older husband with every passing year became more and more paranoid about the comparative youth of his bride to the point that one night he pulled into a drug store parking lot on the way to a party and ordered her to buy something to secure her long locks into a matronly bun or she won’t be attending. In those pictures I look like an Amish recluse, wide-eyed in terror that someone might speak to me.
What does a goody-goody girl do when she wakes up one morning and like hypnosis breakthrough it is suddenly crystal clear that what she couldn’t live without was not this husband but the idea of a husband?
This time, ensnared in the old familiar fairy-tale boyfriend daydream, she has taken it all the way to the altar and fallen into the classic trap all her Cosmopolitan articles warned against. In the interest of silencing a biological clock that was ticking like a time bomb and in an attempt to recreate from scratch the blissful union of June and Ward Cleaver, she wakes up to find herself married to Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon.
I was unable to convince my accusative husband that I didn’t need to sew the Scarlet Letter on the bust of my sweater. I bounced like a pinball off the ranting, raving moody behavior of an insane Sicilian who made Sonny Corleone look like a wuss. For this scenario I held no precedent, since neither of my parents even raised their voices let alone harbored a flick of jealousy toward each other.
At the birth of my first daughter, Clary, Pete was tossed out of the labor room because when my doctor offered me a Dramamine (I refused medication, of course) to help ease the pain and hurry up the process he had such a holy cow the vein in his forehead bulged and nearly hemorrhaged.
After the umbilical cord was severed, my hormones were assuaged and the tick-tock silenced. Too late , however, I could hear the deafening death knell that gongs, “You are in deep doo-doo.”
How the devil did I survive with “The Don” til-death-do-us-part? I kept pretending.

~9~



Fifteen months later, as soon as I could lift the second daughter, Kate, out of her crib both girls were in the double stroller and I was huffing and puffing up and down the hills of our neighborhood—a sanctioned activity. My guess is that Pete couldn’t imagine me hitting on another man from behind the handles of a baby doublewide. I bent down to pluck and then blow every dried dandelion, each time asking “How many months/weeks/days until he dies?” When I didn’t like the answer, I chucked the stem into the bushes. Stupid superstition.
I hurled myself into daily activities that I created for Clary and Kate, even if that meant orchestrating every Mommy and Me class nationwide. By day I was the smiling mother of two adorable cherubs. By night, after I’d prayed the garage door wouldn’t open but it always did, I was as nervous as a gnat trying to interpret their incoming father’s dark demeanor.
I ineffectually strived to anticipate and avert what might catapult him into another hateful raging storm of verbal abuse—it could be over anything—but just when I thought I had it figured out, his rules changed. When I came home from an annual physical examination, he refused to touch me “ever again” based on the fact that the doctor had “been there—and enjoyed it!” Not that I wanted him, or anyone else for that matter, to touch me ever again.
Often he simply glared at me as if he wanted to kill me. Whenever he got wind of some other couple going through divorce proceedings he would pace and threaten, “NO ONE is going to take MY children from ME—DO YOU HEAR ME?”
If I took the mail from the postman and said, “Thank you,” he spat a string of derogatory word combinations using the “F” one together with the “B” one and adding “in heat.” I had to diagram the sentence in my head in order to understand it.
Pretty soon I spoke not a word, but then it would be the way I looked or didn’t look or wanted to look that would get me in trouble. If I looked at him first, before doing anything, however, sometimes—not always—I earned a short reprieve.
Self-doubt crept into my subconscious: Unintentionally might I be “asking for it” when I was suddenly on the receiving end of a welcome greeting from a box boy or a waiter? Did I fall short of the mark because I could not subdue my husband’s fear?
“You don’t have to do this,” Terry, Pete’s adult daughter (my age), told me one night, when she was over at our house and witnessed another of her father’s familiar and unfounded furies. I don’t?
Decorum! I’d accepted. There was no reneging.
One afternoon while Pete was working and the babies and I were visiting Grandma (permissible because he didn’t want her onto his game) my mobile phone rang. To my shock the voice on the other end belonged to Martin, the kind boy I should have married. I’d kept secret from everyone, especially my mother, that I was verbally and emotionally abused and miserable. If she sensed anything was awry, she never asked. But then, she wouldn’t have because then we’d have to talk about it. I don’t think they made a record about this fact of life.
She’d always been the first to “rise above it” whenever things weren’t going exactly as she’d planned. Besides, if I uttered the words that I wanted to, it would be out there, buzzing like mosquitoes. I would be officially married to a maniac. I’d have to do something about it, and I’d never been good at doing something about it. By keeping it quiet, I could still make believe. I’d fabricated girlfriend. I could fake wife. I might be living in the middle of a circus, but for the sake of the children, I would cement the broken pieces of my heart together and keep the show on the road.
Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof.
I vowed from this moment forward that with regard to my own daughters, I would never steer conversations about boys toward how to get their attention or how to attract and win them. Rather, I would encourage nitty-gritty discussion about the mysterious male. God forbid my mistake should ever happen to them. Someday, after their father passed away (which I counted on since he was so much older), I’d use my own words to describe the pitfalls a woman is prone to. Although, I might have to record my voice saying, “Your father passed away” and play it for them on cassette to keep from laughing if I was ever lucky enough to deliver those tidings.
Martin told me he’d gotten my number from Mary Ann and was in the area—could I have lunch? I panicked as if Pete were right behind me in the room, then shook it off and got a grip long enough to tell him I’d call back shortly.
In a wildly insane moment, I asked mama if she would watch the girls where she was staying at the beach house while bashful Martin, who had married years before, met me for lunch. I’d remembered her once meeting an old school chum for a sandwich in Beverly Hills and daddy hadn’t minded one bit. For normal people this must be normal, I thought, since I’d lost all track of what that was. I felt safe asking her since she adored Martin’s father, the doctor who had gotten us through all those childhood diseases. Deep down, I knew she had always hoped I’d walk down the aisle to take Martin’s arm.
Now he was married. I was married. It was harmless. Of course she would tend her granddaughters while I joined him for a midday meal, she said. And implicit in our plan was that she would never mention it.
I hopped back in the car after dropping off the babies, and could hardly breathe on the way to the outdoor restaurant we’d agreed upon. Pete would find out. He was working sixty miles from here, but somehow he would know. I checked the rear view mirror fifty times and chuckled at the irony that after all the days he’d tailed me for no reason, today he would consider he had one. That I was doing nothing wrong had no bearing on the outcome since to Pete, everything was wrong or if it wasn’t, you wanted it to be.
I cannot say what unbridled emotion propelled me to proceed. You know your marriage is in trouble when the desire to reconnect with your former self is so strong that you risk it all for a chicken salad with a former boyfriend who was never official because he never touched you. That there is a former self—and you miss her—is also an indication.
Martin and I ate a lovely lunch (He did. I couldn’t swallow). He said he regretted that we hadn’t communicated better after he’d gone off to college. Had we not been “ships passing in the night,” he said, I might have been Mrs. Parsegian.
Another clue that your connubial devotion is a bit dicey is when you consider strapping your babies in their car seats and running away with the boy who thirty years ago wrote you letters about Sandy Koufax. I knew mama would be giddy, but practically speaking, just how would I pull it off? More importantly, would Pete murder us? Not to discount there was Martin’s marriage. Why was he telling me all this now?
As I looked at the curly haired boy-of-my-youth who had grown into a plain-vanilla middle-aged man, I experienced an epiphany. What made the memory of our time together so attractive was that he’d never presumed to lie around and kiss until my lips until they looked like they’d been shot full of Novocain. He hadn’t pushed or wept or whined or needed—not anything from me, or about me to be different. And it was precisely the absence of neediness and the presence of vanilla, not to mention total acceptance of me as I was, that was now more appealing than being raptured and seated at the right hand of God.
Back in the day, Martin would have fallen in love had I only met him there. He was my good and true friend. And whereas erroneously I’d considered friendship counterproductive to romance, I knew now it was just the opposite. On top of that, here was the real man who accepted his age gracefully and didn’t perform a ritual of daily calisthenics in order to bulge out of his polo shirts like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Looking at him now in his extraordinary ordinariness, he would have hands down won my vote for People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” Sitting across from him felt like home.
I couldn’t confess how seriously skewed my life had become, so I merely smiled while my eyes darted around the café to be sure no spy who knew me would report to “The Don.” When Martin hugged me goodbye (after all these years, the first time our bodies met) I seized up like a cadaver and waved my arms like a flapping seagull to dismiss him. Somewhere in there I mentioned that he should never, ever try to speak to me again or I would be in big trouble, as if that wouldn’t tip him off that I’d married a mobster?
I cried all the way back to the beach house, dried my eyes, blew my nose, and fanned my face before going inside to manufacture an easy-peasy-breezy attitude as if I’d eaten salad with a girlfriend. Hours later, I was still unnerved. After all of Pete’s unjust accusations that had driven me to deceive rather than tell the innocent truth and be punished for it, now I actually felt guilty. Tonight when he asked me, as he always did, exactly why was it that I really wanted to run off with “anyone who can unzip a fly” I would know that today, for a moment, I almost had.
The past haunted me no matter how hard I tried to avoid it. Nude bather Christopher Robin contacted my former Times secretary for my home address and sent me a letter, ruing the day he’d let me slip through his fingers “like grains of sand at the shore.” I sped-read then burned his poetic meanderings in the sink before I heard the garage door opening.
Frying-pan David from the Island market bumped into Mary Ann on vacation and asked her for my number to say hello. When he called, I altered my voice and told him whoever he was trying to reach didn’t live here. Actually, that was true.
While Christmas shopping in a toy store, I bumped into Jason, the college quarterback for whom I would have uniformed up and run for Rose Bowl passes. Now that he realized all along I’d been the one for him he wondered, would I consider having an affair? I rolled my eyes like a disapproving one-hundred-and-ten-year-old grandmother, laughed out loud (although he was still ten feet tall with gargantuan muscles that hadn’t slacked one single bit), and handed Clary an animal cracker in her stroller seat to distract her. Clearly, “Education for Marriage” hadn’t helped either one of us. I got out of there as fast as I could, grateful that Clary was too young to repeat to daddy anything she’d heard.
Did it only happen to me, who feared the repercussions of male contact like a certain death sentence, or did regretful sorry suitors such as these pursue other women as well? Couldn’t they just leave me alone in my misery? I’m sure they would have if they’d met my husband. As it was, I felt uncontrollable danger wending its way to me, as one by one old flames rose out of the ashes of faint memory like a phoenix. One by one I either lit a match to them like incriminating evidence or dodged them like speeding bullets.

~10~


Don’t ask me how the years flew by, since I spent all my free time sitting on the tile floor behind our locked bathroom door, crying, praying, and offering up my pain for world peace (This one qualified). It helped to fill each day to overflowing with Clary and Kate.
I was room mother for both classes—every year. I volunteered at Pizza Lunch on Mondays. I was Chapel Monitor on Tuesdays, after-school Drama Club Mom on Wednesdays, and Brownie Mom on Thursdays. I signed up to accompany both girls’ classes on every single field trip, even though I loathed large groups of overactive other women’s children.
“The Don” readily approved my doing anything that contributed to our daughters’ academic experience. He demanded perfect homework assignments, straight A+ grades, and “stellar performance across the board.” My buttering up the teachers on their behalf gave him chills.
I made friends with other mothers—also permissible as long as he didn’t have to associate with any of them or their husbands. While they all regularly got together for dinner or Bunko, I begged off, waving my hand. Pffft! Pete was just so anti-social I couldn’t do a thing with that silly man! I knew they didn’t buy it for a second, but for my sake they let it slide.
We women continued to power walk together every morning after dropping the kids at school. We worked St. Brigid’s fundraisers together through the years. It didn’t take long for them to stop asking whenever it came to a couples’ gathering or a girls’ night out. I consoled myself by thinking it was easier for me this way. I didn’t have to keep sweating and declining invitations.
During one of my “social outings” to the market, I couldn’t help but notice the dapper elderly gentleman behind me in line at the check stand. With the appearance of an ex-professional athlete, he was tall, tan, and despite his age, his white hair was thick and full. Holy cryogenics! I did a double take to affirm that I was standing in line at the San Clemente Von’s, sixty-five miles and a million years from Annandale’s swimming pool, in front of none other than Paul Tremain. What were the odds of that?
He had thawed remarkably! He was so well preserved, in fact, that whereas I hesitated to even look lest Pete be lurking behind the canned vegetable aisle, after I eyeballed the area and saw no traces of him, my heart beat as fast as a jackhammer. In a moment of sheer madness I took the chance.
“Paul Tremain!” I exclaimed. His eyes were clear and bright, and I realized why shouldn’t they be? He was only as elderly as my own husband. I helped him avoid embarrassing confusion by identifying myself by my maiden name, a reckless act that made me ache to be a maiden again.
“Remember when I made you promise you would get into the freezer and wait for me?” I unabashedly threw it out there. He studied me as the wheels in his brain spun to lock onto the memory of our deep-freeze pact.
“I wish I had!” he said sweetly. I wished he had too (or I’d gladly take him as is), but I suddenly panicked at the thought of any further conversation. I quickly paid for my groceries and told him how nice it was to see him again and that I was happily married now and had to dash.
“Have a good…life!” I quipped with a chuckle and breezed out of the store only to instantly feel the stone of profound sadness roll over me. What a waste of life that I wasn’t able to invite him to dinner or coffee and talk old times. Instead, as soon as I’d left the market I knew that every time Pete and I were out and about, which was so seldom I didn’t have much to fear, I would worry that Preserved Paul might approach and act familiar.

One morning when I dropped the girls at school the principal came dashing out to my car to tell me she’d just gotten a phone call that my mother had suffered a stroke. “There but for the grace of God go I,” mama had always made the sign of the cross and said like a quick prayer whenever we passed a wheelchair victim in the chandeliered hallway of Bullock’s cosmetic department.
I feverishly prayed God would grant her enough grace to live through this.
My aunt Suzanne had called looking for me and Pete had given her the school phone number so she could catch me there. He was home all the time, now that he’d persisted in verbally assaulting a female advertising sales representative despite three warnings and company counseling. Unable to keep his mob mouth shut, he’d finally been fired for sexual harassment.
From then on I took the girls with me and spent every other weekend in Pasadena. Ostensibly I was there to assist my father in his care for my mother, who was paralyzed on one side and in a wheelchair. Only I knew the underlying truth: I used the nursing excuse to escape from the man I really wished would perish in a six-car pileup on the 405.
Every night I added another pat of butter to his potato. I made him quesadillas for lunch until cheddar cheese should have leaked from his pores. I baked pecan cream pie, heavy on the cream. Anything to nudge that heart attack. When he clutched his chest and gasped for breath, I would finish vacuuming for the Paramedics and then dial 911.
I was dabbling in very bad karma, but I couldn’t stop.
No matter how many sugar and fat calories I added to homemade donuts, every morning he rose before dawn, hit the carpet, and pumped one hundred push-ups like Jack LaLanne. When I discovered a pair of Speedos in the trunk of his car, he explained that he sometimes changed clothes at lunch so he could power walk on the beach. I was afraid to wonder why the need for skin-tight bikini bottoms and why, since there was no longer a “work lunch” he didn’t simply change at home—not that I wanted to witness the transformation.
His failure to keep his job caused him to dislike himself more. He grew angrier. I’d long ago surrendered my ability to mend his brokenness, so I mechanically did my chores, cooked our food, and remained silent as a mouse as he lashed out at me more than ever.
I lived for the weekends when I could drive to my childhood home, sleep in my childhood bed alone, and take long walks on the streets I wished I’d never left. I didn’t want to be married anymore—not even to Andy Williams. Not even if he sang “Moon River” to me every night. I just wanted to go back to being…me. Every Sunday afternoon I drove back to San Clemente. After the girls dozed off in the back seat, I wept.
I started to fantasize how it would feel to leave him. One of these weekends I would just stay where he couldn’t check the closet to ensure the toes of my shoes were in a straight line and berate my character if they weren’t. I’d throw extra clothes in the car on Friday and buy whatever else we needed on Monday, after my father changed the locks on the doors. I’d enroll the girls at Mayfair. I’d refuse to answer the phone.
I’d be on the brink of doing it, knowing my parents would fully support my decision, but when I watched my little girls blindly worship their dad I lost my nerve. Home from Pasadena they would run to his hairy arms where he stood waiting for us in the driveway, having timed our travel to determine whether or not I’d stopped at a public restroom to do you-know-what-all with you-know-who-all. Every night they fell to their knees and pointed their fingers heavenward to thank God for St. Brigid’s School. How could I make them pay for my mistake?
Worse than that, in their innocent eyes, I would be the bad guy, a role for which I had zero experience.
Six years later, on the day my mother died, I called “The Don” from Pasadena to report the traumatic news. His biggest concern about “all this” was that while I’d been at the hospital our daughters had eaten “unhealthy pizza two days in a row” at “the hands of” a family friend.
When he reluctantly drove to Pasadena and walked into the kitchen to witness my tall, male cousin offering me an empathetic embrace, he turned tail and headed back to San Clemente rather than watch me “wrap like aluminum foil around everyone at the funeral.”
When we buried her ashes in Ireland, alongside her ancestors in a small Tubbercurry churchyard, he whispered in my ear during the blessing, “How long do we have to stay here?” I felt the earth rumble as mama shuddered under the sod. When a gust of wind interrupted my prayer that I could find some way to forgive him, I swear I heard her voice. “Forrrgggettt profffesssionnnalll counnnsssellling.” As if I already hadn’t.
How would I go on from here? Without my mother as an anchor and married to the Mad Man from Mars who hated me but would never leave me, I questioned my ability to cope.
But cope I did. My stamina bolstered when Pete suggested we convince my father to sell the family home. We’d put our San Clemente house on the market, consolidate resources, and all live happily ever after, together in a larger home in San Juan Capistrano. There was hope! My father was the only person on the planet earth who Pete respected. Surely living under the same roof he would can the insanity and measure up to his potential!
Less than a year later he opened fire on daddy like a hit man and accused him of sleeping with me. Father and daughter were stunned into silence until a moment later I came to as if someone had slapped me out of a lifelong trance. 5,110 days, five hours and twenty-three minutes after I said, “I do” (no one could say I didn’t give it that Catholic school-girl try) I said, “No more!”
My day had, in fact, arrived, if not the one my mother had in mind. Nevertheless, it was mine—that glorious day I booted out the bad man. And for the first time in my entire life, I did it face-to-face, while his absolutely dropped in disbelief. Never in a bajillion years did he think I’d go through with it.
After all of “The Don’s” gangster threats, he was utterly complacent—and sooooo busted. With sunglasses on (he always wore them indoors), he packed the essentials, speedo already in the car, and slinked out the door. Had I known he would tuck the jewels between his legs and slither out instead of strangling me then stuffing my children into his car trunk, I would have thrown him out years ago!
A few days after he left, I learned about his secret life. In the past I’d pooh-poohed reports from those who said they’d seen him driving my father’s cleaning lady home or sitting in a parked car with a woman riding shotgun. They must have been mistaken. Daddy’s housekeeper took the bus, and Pete was way too paranoid about me fooling around to be fooling around.
Turned out the sightings had been accurate. The housekeeper reported that the serial infidel had invited many passengers into his car for reasons none of us need to visualize. Two neighbors had seen him bidding amorous adieus to a very neighborly redhead as she stepped from his car in Von’s parking lot. Now I knew who’d been looking forward to the social grocery outings.
He’d justified being a gigolo by pointing his fickle finger at me. No wonder he’d left so peacefully, doubtless relieved to no longer have to mimic monogamy.
As usual, I hadn’t excelled in analysis of the male species, but then Pete (my father henceforth referred to him as “The Aberration”) was not exactly your average male.
After he closed the door behind him, the instant feeling of freedom was headier than when, at four years old, I’d dressed in my fringed cowgirl skirt to ride my hobbyhorse around the family room.
Just like then, I whooped and hollered like Rowdy Yates rounding up cattle. When I came back from the grocery store, I parked in the driveway, something that had been theretofore strictly forbidden. I stripped the bed sheets and threw them in the trashcan. I moved half my clothes into his gloriously empty closet and spread out the hangers so they looked like one of those organizer ads.
I tried to flush my tiny wedding band (that I’d paid for) down the toilet, but daddy’s housekeeper reported that although “this is definitely where this belongs,” it kept resurfacing just like in that movie Sleeping with the Enemy. One Saturday I opted to discreetly hurl it off the Dana Point jetty but just as it reached its apex, it caught the sun and glittered so brightly that a small boy fishing with his father pointed at it and exclaimed, “Look Dad! A star!” Dad nodded at me knowingly.
Every night I jumped for joy into bed and slept smack dab in the middle of the mattress, as giddily alone as I’d never dreamed I could ever be again. I may have lost a decade and a half of my life, but I had two darling daughters to show for it, who someday would understand why their mother could not stop grinning in the face of such tragedy. From this day forward I would take care of my father, the only man worth paying a speck of attention to.
I suppose you might say I’d become my mother, after all.

~11~


Clary and Kate were not experiencing the blissful childhood I had. My maternal goal to provide them with the secure feelings I’d known hadn’t worked out as planned. Instead they suffered the slings and arrows of severed parents.
I could have beaten Meryl Streep for the best actress Oscar whenever I saw them off to spend time with their father. I stood at the back door smiling and often handed them homemade brownies to take to dinner at the condominium my father helped me purchase (in my name). Pete lived there so that the girls would have someplace to visit him—a proposal he’d made while threatening that otherwise they never would. Since he made the proposition in front of them, they were reduced to traumatic tears at the thought of never seeing their daddy again.
I decided to look at the expense as a real estate investment rather than the bribe that it was. I couldn’t bear to have them anywhere near him, but what I couldn’t stand even more would be their blaming me for throwing out poor old dad, who without my assistance would be sure to rent some dive on the railroad tracks so they would pity him.
After escrow closed and he moved in he called the girls and sniffled. “I’m having tuna salad for dinner,” (the tuna again?) he barely got out between nose blowing sessions into the phone that rested atop a table with an ocean view, as if that were synonymous with hardship.
I wasn’t about to inform thirteen and twelve-year-old girls about what dad had really been up to in a Speedo. I knew that as they grew to become young women and he refused to let them speak to any boy in their class they would uncover his secret identity for themselves. Once they did, they’d contact the Pope to not only canonize me early but also to add me to the latest list of Holy Martyrs.
Meanwhile, at home they didn’t know what lucky star had struck them. Suddenly their mother smiled and giggled and spoke. They were allowed to go willy nilly to sleepovers—and to host them! Mom took them for ice cream on Saturday and let them eat pizza every Thursday in front of Friends on television, even if they still had homework to finish. After a school dance, they could get in the car and talk about the boys they had a crush on. Slowly but surely the feeling that they were always doing something wrong dissipated. One evening about four months after the divorce, I heard them singing in their room. I’d just come out of mine, where I’d been humming.
No one had to be perfect any more.
But no laughter was allowed at the condo. It didn’t take long for “The Don” to unleash his nasty temper and consequently turn them away from him. In high school, they grew busier and busier, while he became more and more frantic that he would lose control of the situation and someday be forced to let them grow up. The more desperately he clung, the more they balked and when the word “slut” made its way into his insulting diatribes about their social lives, it occurred to them that he must have driven mom to the end of this same rope, and so they too untied it. That day they walked into my closet, where I was hanging laundered clothes on hangers three inches apart, and demanded to know the whole truth. Yikes.
I’d been taking them to a counselor who was helping them wrestle with the mixture of guilt and grief they’d been feeling ever since the marriage had ended. After their first session she’d called me in alone—to talk about me.
“I’m fine!” I chirped. I hadn’t felt this fine since I’d gone to the Beach Boys concert at The Greek Theatre on a warm summer night with my tenth-grade best friends. Predictably she was concerned that we needed to discuss what in the blazes had possessed me to marry such a monster. Just as predictably, I had absolutely no clue. I’d approached marriage like a fifteen-page term paper that with enough work I could edit to perfection.
After we touched on the fact that I needed to investigate this further, if I were ever to discern the difference between love and effort, I pointed out to her that the only discernment I’d be doing from now on would involve red wine, chocolate and Blockbuster rental movies.
She advised that if the girls should ever ask me directly what their father had really been all about, I should answer honestly. Questions would mean they were ready for answers.
Now that they were asking me, I felt empowered. I held the information that would turn them away from him forever. This was what I’d wanted—for them to love me and blame him. But now that they stood there waiting, and my mouth opened, ready to sock it to them, my tongue would not cooperate. I’d done such a stellar job protecting them from the truth that telling even a segment of it would shock them to the core.
I couldn’t hurl it at my children any more than the rest of the world, when they all wanted to know, “what happened?”
Newly divorced, I visited the familiar Ford car dealership for service. I stepped up to the counter and told my friend and ally, Fernando, that he should change the name on the account from Pete to Kathleen.
“Does that mean what I think it means?” he asked, his eyes wide with anticipation. All six heads of all six service operators lifted from their desk duties and swiveled in my direction like perfect choreography in some corny musical. When I simply responded, “yes,” all seven of them stood in unison and applauded me.
“What happened?” Fernando asked. Let’s see: Where should I start and how would I get to the end in less time than it took to rebuild an engine? Who in the world needed to hear the story that resembled the hackneyed script of Desperate Housewives?
Whereas I could spare other inquiring minds I had to offer some sort of explanation to my own daughters that would serve to guide them in their future choice of mate. Tricky business. Should I say don’t pick someone who makes you wear dowdy long skirts and flats because he can’t survive your being an inch taller than he is? Just say no to the man who spits, “When you shave your legs you’re just doing it so other men will want to touch them?”
After much deliberation, I cracked Pandora’s box and let a few buggy truths buzz out. A little dab’ll do ya; they were horrified. Further inquisition would come in time, and time was what they needed. And distance—as if he would allow such a thing. In the meantime, I suggested they ask him some of these questions. As if he would answer.
I may have decided like my mother had that my father was the only real man left in the world, but unlike her, in the arena of motherhood, I couldn’t have been any less concerned about prim and proper than if I’d been Madonna. Instead of advocating that my girls accept every single invitation and teaching them that strategic discretion was advantageous in order to keep a boy guessing, I portrayed dudes as dangerous enterprises and advocated total transparency. Whenever Halloween rolled around, I let them wear whatever raggedy costume they wanted.
I told my girls, “If he has to comb his hair before he can get out of the car, that’s a bad sign.” I warned them, “If his only friend is Freddy, who he knew in the eighth grade and has never spoken to since, just get rid.” I preached to them, “When a guy tells you he’s not worthy of you, believe him.”
Whereas mama spoke only of strategy and never feelings, I sermonized about total candor, and freely discussed emotions. This led my girls to uninhibitedly ask me questions that would make Lady Gaga blush.
I did my best to feign casual when Clary wondered, “What’s a blow job, Mom?” I tried to behave like Dr. Laura when Kate wanted to discuss what she’d seen some eighth grade girls doing with boys in the back of cars in the school parking lot. They were so impressed with my superior wisdom that they made me pinky swear when the time came to interview their potential suitors for any telltale signals—sort of a mating red light, green light. How ironic that after all my mama’s efforts to educate me in easy charm, I’d become a street-smart expert—the hard way!
They were adjusting while I stumbled on as girlfriends insisted on educating me in the art of looking young forever so that I could remarry. How many times did I have to tell them that growing old—alone—was the very thing I looked forward to? Surrounded by boob jobs, eyelid lifts, and tummy tucks, I was losing the old cronies who had promised we would retire together to a ranch in Montana. We’d vowed that once there we would wear flannel pajamas and eat chocolate cake and ripple ice cream. We’d drink margaritas and watch The Thorn Birds, even though we already had it memorized. Instead, now they were wearing cowboy hats to lunch in the middle of the city and changing husbands until I didn’t know who was who on Christmas cards.
I began teaching high school English at St. Brigid’s so that my father’s bank account wouldn’t be my only support. I wanted to offer my daughters the example that when life rolls you over like a pill bug, you find your feet and crawl again.
They weren’t entirely convinced of my inner strength, however, when night after night I suffered a severe crying jag because I couldn’t figure out how to input grades on the computer. I was without skills, other than an English degree and a mother’s intuition. On the other hand, my technological crisis caused them to step up to the plate and teach me. We were helping each other climb out of the hole we’d been buried alive in for the past fourteen years.
The only male presence under our roof was their grandfather, who was far too benevolent to ever question my judgment. That, and he kept to his own affairs—woodworking and card playing.
When I was growing up, daddy had always been hands-off when it came to the daily routine. He’d jumped in when I’d needed a prom escort or ready cash, but otherwise the female remained a mystery—by choice. Now living with an adult daughter and two teenaged granddaughters, he spent a lot of time in his woodshop.
He didn’t interfere when Kate fell hard for Brandon, a boy who didn’t even speak to her when she said hello despite her working hard to change that (I warned her). Helpless to affect her heart, I decided to turn her attention from him to something warm and fuzzy and affectionate. Ever since her four-year-old yen to be Alice in Wonderland, she’d always wanted a rabbit. That’s when I enlisted daddy’s aid and he readily cooperated, to build the five-star-hotel cage while I ran to Petco and purchased the bunny.
She loved little Flopsy! It worked like a charm to woo her from heartbreak for the few days it took to discover she was allergic. Her eyes watered and her nostrils filled until her only oxygen option was to mouth-breathe, and her entire face itched until it drove her to the brink of madness. When the adorable and rather large rabbit then hauled off and bit her hard, she and I sadly agreed that Flopsy had to go.
I guess I should have asked for my father’s advice, since I no longer had Practical Pig Pete to tell me what to do. But I was hell-bent on handling situations without a man—for the rest of my life.
I called Petco. They refused to take back Flopsy, even for no monetary reimbursement whatsoever. I told Kate I would have to turn her pet over to the Humane Society for adoption, and she agreed that it would be best I do this while she was at school. The next morning she shed a final tear (among overflowing allergic ones) to say goodbye. After I dropped the girls off at school, I rushed home and plopped Flopsy into a cardboard box I found in daddy’s shop.
The Humane Society informed me that my home address was out of their jurisdiction and that I would have to drive ninety minutes in traffic to Orange to deliver my precious package—and ninety back, in time to pick up the girls. I seriously considered letting Flopsy run wild and free over the hills of San Juan Capistrano, but when I pictured her as coyote kill, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought about leaving her boxed and on the doorstep of Petco, but the store was open and there would be witnesses.
It dawned on me—the vet! I pulled up to the curb and waited patiently until the coast was clear. I ducked down alongside the passenger door, opened it, and pulled out the box in which I’d poked plenty of breathing holes. I dashed up to the sidewalk and down alongside the veterinary clinic building where I crouched in the bushes until I was certain no car had entered the parking lot during my stealthy approach. All clear.
Quickly, I ran to the front door, set down the box, and ran back to the bushes. From there I was able to bend over and lurch a la Groucho Marx safely back to my car. I watched in the rear view mirror (I was adept at spotting surveillance having watched Pete track me) as the box skidded across the stoop. If someone didn’t hurry, boxed Flopsy would successfully move herself into the parking lot!
At last, a woman pulled in and took her little dog to the front door. She couldn’t help but notice the mysterious moving surprise package, and as I observed her hailing the nurse from her desk to come see, I discreetly pulled away from the curb and casually merged into the moving traffic. In the rearview mirror I could see them looking to the right and the left (“Are we on Candid Camera?”). The deed was done.
When I got home and my father asked what I’d done with the rabbit, I told him. I puffed up with pride over my scathingly brilliant solution. Daddy couldn’t have been less impressed if I’d told him I was frying crabgrass for his dinner. Does no man think a woman’s ideas are genius?
“What?” I asked him wondering what was his problem.
“Where did you get the box?” he asked. What difference did that make? He needed a rum and Coke. When I told him, he shook his head and spoke to me rather harshly, considering he’d never scolded me over anything in my entire life. He told me I had to call the vet and tell the truth—that the truth was always the best course of action. This coming from the man who’d cheated my mother at double solitaire and wired the damaged bumper back onto his car before slyly trying to trade it in. When I resisted, he asked me if I’d looked at the bottom of the box. Was he ill? Why would I look at the bottom of the box?
“That box you used had a UPS label on it with my name and address,” he barked.
So, just like the man I’d been married to, the only thing he’d been worried about was getting caught.
Even my blessed father had provided me with a good enough reason to hold the thought of another man at arm’s length.

~12~


As you might imagine, well-meaning girlfriends thought I would be lonely were I to live forever solo. “Right now,” Dianne said, “it feels good.” “But your father won’t live much longer,” Jan pointed out, “and your girls will go off to college.” And since I’d refused cosmetic surgery and therefore cut short my marriageable window, they insisted I consider a second husband sooner rather than later.
“No man wants a woman who looks fifty!” Sharon barked at me on my forty-ninth birthday. I figured if I stalled long enough, they’d eventually let me be the grandma knitting in her rocking chair that I wanted to be.
They tried to invite me to parties (I knew what they were up to). They cajoled me to go along on “girls’ night out.” Sorry, I was grading papers. Once I got home from school and into my jammies, I would pull sweats over them only to go back out for frozen yogurt and bring it straight home again. On Friday and Saturday night I could hardly wait to rent another movie.
One of my dear friends, Barbara, thought she’d found the man for me in the single father of one of my students. “He has the reputation of a playboy,” she said, “but he just needs a good woman to set him on the right path.” Nope. I refused to be good for somebody. How about somebody being good for me?
I’d met Barbara while chaperoning a pre-school field trip to the hands-on Discovery Museum in downtown Los Angeles. When Kate and Melinda, her daughter, reached for the astronaut helmet to try it on, we simultaneously lunged to snatch such head lice breeding ground from their grasp. While taking turns throwing back Extra-Strength Tylenol with bottled water only, we discussed the act of pure insanity that was the faculty’s educational inspiration to transport forty three-year-olds on the Amtrak train to a public facility that housed every childhood disease in both Americas. The only thing our girls were going to discover that day was how many antiseptic wipes it takes to obliterate all bacteria. We were two peas in a pod.
Several years later, her desire to hitch me to a husband was from the goodness of her heart, but I’d definitely lost that lovin’ feelin’. A few weeks after her plea that I entertain the idea of bettering the playboy, his son ran out of my classroom crying. When I followed and asked what was the matter he told me he’d seen “lots of ladies” the night before in his dad’s bedroom—naked. I told Barbara, “I rest my case.”
Another student’s father caught me off guard when he came into the classroom at 3:15 one afternoon to inquire about his son’s progress on his thesis paper. There wasn’t much to discuss, but nevertheless, he lingered nervously while I gathered up reams of papers to grade. Was there something else, I asked him?
“Do you ever have time for a cup of coffee?” he asked. Not happening. I nearly knocked him flat as I rushed past him to the door, calling over my shoulder, “I never have time for anything.”
I wasn’t going to be anybody for anyone else ever again—even friendly.
Just then I glanced to my left to see Ted Riley, the Latin teacher and a good friend of mine, chuckling.
“You took care of him,” Ted said.

“Do you ever wish you had someone?” Clary asked me one night while the credits rolled at the end of You’ve Got Mail. Oh, I might shed a tear all right at the end of a chick flick when the guy races down the sidewalk to tell the girl he really does need her and want her and love her. But now that I’d overdosed on romance reality and been on that really bad trip I recognized a movie plot for what it was—a scheme to seduce me into thinking life could actually be like that.
“Honey, if Jesus Christ dropped the perfect man down from heaven into the middle of my kitchen, I wouldn’t date him.”
My statement soothed her fear that if the answer to that question had been yes another man like her father might someday pop up at the dinner table demanding to know who got a higher grade than she did (she always earned A+). What didn’t occur to me was that my definitive response signaled to a teenaged girl that true love was a disaster to be avoided at all cost.
Why would I ever go out again? I’d known from the moment the Slumps dropped me off when I was seven that the only surefire way to achieve eternal peace was to hunker down at home. Granted, it might sound a tad solitary, but it was better than being in solitary with a maniac who wouldn’t let me leave the house without tailing me to be sure I was really going to the dry cleaners, and once there, wasn’t taking my clothes off.
If I’d never traded my cozy bathrobe and slippers for a nautical-themed bikini and Topsiders to go sailing (with anyone but my beloved father) I never would have wasted that entire summer hanging from the trapeze of a Catamaran because the dope I thought I couldn’t live without strapped me in, and I thought risking my life would prove commitment. If only I’d lived at home and commuted to college instead of moving into the dorm, I wouldn’t have been squeezed into the back of a cattle truck with the whole membership of a drunken fraternity just to go to the football game with one really cute one who forgot my name ten minutes after kickoff.
Had I never left the front porch, where I was peacefully reading “The Thorn Birds” for the third time to play tennis with Pete, I wouldn’t be in this fix. I could go on and on.
Why would I willingly unlock the front door to just another lunatic (the record indicates I attracted them like mosquitoes in a Florida swamp) with a sack full of miseries I would naturally try to ameliorate but of course never could? I had daughters for that! More importantly, why would I ever again want anyone to see me naked?
What I didn’t tell Clary (or admit to myself for more than two seconds) was that I had my moments. Not ones about permanence, God forbid, but fleetingly, those when I would astonishingly feel attraction.
One such encounter sideswiped me when and where I least expected it— in the student gymnasium during the prayer before convocation. When Father Bob, the on-campus priest, asked us all to join hands, Mr. Movie Star, Clary’s very married chorale director, a dashing former magazine model ten years younger than I, reached for mine and tightly wrapped his around it. 120 volts shot through my arm and across my chest. There the jolt took a sharp ninety-degree turn and plunged straight down to what mama’s hospital nurses had fondly referred to as “the peri area” (perineum), an anatomical zone that until that magic moment might as well have been cordoned off with crime scene tape. I barely made it through the “Our Father” without fainting.
“Your hand is so warm,” he whispered at lead us not into temptation, “I’m sorry mine is so cold.” But deliver us from evil. I forced myself to concentrate on the fires of hell licking at my feet to keep from closing in and kissing him. My face was so flushed he asked me if I was feeling well.
I was feeling something all right.
From that day on, I couldn’t resist ambling into chapel while the chorale was rehearsing. I volunteered to make certain that the hymnals were placed in each pew so that I might linger to watch him pack up. When the dreadful annual faculty retreat rolled around, I was hopeful that I might be sent to the same campground as he. But St. Chaperone intervened to save me from myself. I was assigned to the more elderly teacher group. I heard later that his group gathered around the fire every night to bond-talk about their regrets and relationships. My group whined about back surgery and hip replacements. He confided to his peers that he felt he’d missed out on life by marrying so young. My peers shared their “bucket lists” then debated the pros and cons of assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
What made my mental affair so attractive was exactly that—it was a mind game, and it could never be fulfilled. Perfect. It had all of the perks with none of the pain.
Just like any unfounded intrigue, it burned itself out—on the day I witnessed Mr. Wonderful With Children puddle into a complete meltdown after a wild and sudden temper tantrum in front of them during which he actually picked up and threw a folding chair across the chapel. Poof! Out flew the amorous reverie, right through the stained glass window.
Far from despairing, I laughed out loud at his coming unhinged because this time I could observe it from the sidelines instead of being at the center of it. My little dalliance had all been in my head, out of harm’s way and right where I’d wanted it. Imaginarily was the only way I would ever allow myself to become infatuated.
I certainly didn’t permit any passion flames to flicker the evening Barbara called, just home from her trip to Texas with Melinda, where they’d toured a university that she wanted to attend.
“I met the man you are going to marry!” she tittered when I picked up the phone in the middle of correcting Melinda’s grammar on a journalism assignment. By this time, on top of a full load of English classes I’d been asked by the administration to teach all four high-school grades how to craft and publish a monthly school newspaper. Now I’d added another stack of nightly papers to be graded to the four foot tall one. I was not in the mood for this conversation (I was never in the mood for this conversation).
“I sat next to him on the airplane,” Barbara proceeded to tell this tale as if I were actually going to take it seriously. “He lives in San Juan Capistrano!”
“Big whoop,” I yawned.
“He was tall!” I understood her enthusiasm over the height of any prospect. Pete was an inch shorter than I and reeked of the “short-man complex.” Still, I didn’t care if she’d been seated next to Shaquille O’Neal. “When I couldn’t get the air vent to open, he just reached over and like that! One twist of the wrist and he had it open!” Wow. What a wizard.
“I’m going to go grade papers now,” I flatly responded.
“But wait! Let me tell you about how he was dressed!” She insisted on continuing this ridiculous conversation. “He had on nice jeans, just like you wear!” Now there’s a reason to marry—our jeans matched. “And his shirt was one of those button down Faconnable ones.” Arguably the perfect husband. “He’s really handsome, in a not too slick kind of way,” she kept right on going. “Like Kevin Kline!”
I didn’t care if he looked like Kevin Kline or Patsy Cline.
“I have to go now, Barbara,” I said, offering no response whatsoever.
“I told him all about you—that you are tall and blonde and smart and thin. “She even eats really healthy!’ I said.” How sexy, I thought, as I moved the red pen over Melinda’s paper and paid her mother no mind at all.
I hadn’t been interested in sexy for so long I had to stop and think how to spell it.
“He was reading Sherlock Holmes!” This was her final offering, in her mind the clincher, since she knew I’d been a rabid devotee from the age of twelve.
“In that case,” I said with as much sarcasm as a voice could muster, “bring him on! Of course I’ll marry him!” I barely skipped a beat before bidding her farewell and as I lowered the receiver to hang it up I heard her voice calling out.
“I’ll bet you lunch at the Ritz in Newport Beach that you marry him!”
I brought the mouthpiece close enough to accept the challenge.
“You’ll be paying for an expensive lunch then!” And with that, I hung up.
The next day in Journalism, Melinda cornered me. “You have to go out with the man on the plane!” she pleaded until I threatened her with an additional homework assignment. Silly face. What do kids know?
That night Barbara called again. Saints preserve us, was there no stopping her?
“His name is Brad Miller,” she blurted out before I said hello. “Isn’t that a nice, normal name?” I’d told her about Pete’s claim to Italian heritage, how, at seventeen, he’d changed his name from Prasalaqua to Marino, the trumped up surname that belonged to a tiny town in Northern California. It still had a ring of Italiano, he said, but not quite so Mafioso.
Yes, Miller was nice and plain. Even though I desperately wanted an excuse to trash the name of a one-horse town with nothing but a used car garage and an AM/PM market (kept for the sake of the children), Brad’s being all-American was not enough rationale to make it mine.
“Barbara.” I spoke seriously and slowly, “Stop it.”
“But I gave him my phone number and he gave me his card and I told him all about you and he wants to meet you,” she entreated. “He called this morning to see if I’d mentioned it to you and to hear if you’re willing to meet him.”
“Too bad,” I told her. “He’ll just have to somehow survive.”
“Well, as a matter of fact I told him you’d been married to Satan (I pictured her seat mate receiving this detail) and would never agree to meet.” Good girl. “Then I said that maybe I could have a Christmas party and invite both of you!” Bad girl.
“Now that I know your motive and even if I didn’t” (since I never went out), I quipped, “I’m RSVP-ing right now. I decline.”
“He already called to see what you said,” she sheepishly admitted.
“Sorry to burst your Yenta bubble, but I refuse,” I snapped. “Honestly. Think about it. You sat next to a total stranger for two hours on an airplane. You talked about dogs and mystery novels. He could be another Pete, who at first glance seems charming and attractive but once you know him is the Anti-Christ!”
Silence.
“Now please, LEAVE ME ALONE!” I said slowly and firmly.
In the six years since the divorce, any night I was tempted to entertain the notion of the comfort of a lifelong companion, I’d crawl under the covers and remember what it had felt like to be in prison for fourteen years. I’d remind myself, that too had begun as the innocent longing to be loved. Alone, even if sometimes lonely, was less risky.
“I’ll explain it to him,” she lowered her voice in despair. “But you listen to me, Kathleen. You’re going to be the one to buy my lunch! You need to get married again for those girls of yours. You have to set an example of a happy marriage or they will never have one!”
“That’s just a bunch of foo-foo lah-lah!” My voice was really raised now. “What do you know about divorce and what those girls need to make them happy? You’ve been married to the same prince for a billion years! You still hold hands! You break down laughing in the middle of an argument! Your children have both their parents, who are both NICE! What do you know? These girls are caught between seeing a father who is so hard on them they can’t bear to be with him, but if they don’t see him, feeling so guilty they want to DIE! The wife gets to divorce the husband, but the children have him in their blood. No matter how unbearable he is, he’s never their ex-father; he’s forever their father. How could bringing another man into the equation make them HAPPY? You don’t have the SIGHTEST idea what you’re TALKING about! NOW LEAVE US ALONE!”
She did.

Even if I’d believed her, I wasn’t about to trust my own ability to ascertain a man who was interested in making other people happy. If someone as familiar as family, from my past—like Martin—were to re-emerge and propose, and I had no children, then maybe…but the only way any future companionship was going to flourish was without daughters (who I wouldn’t trade for Little Joe Cartwright) and with someone as proven and trustworthy as my childhood dog.
Meanwhile, I could smell unhappy a mile away. All it took was a quick glance in the direction of any woman who was trying to hide it but, to my eyes, had it etched all over her face: My husband is killing me. I recognized a quiet life of desperation whenever I saw one and I was never going to put myself in that place again.
Every time I detected a damsel in distress I wanted to walk over to her and whisper what Pete’s daughter Terry had told me, “You don’t have to do this.” But I knew that she thought she did.
There but for the grace of God go I.

~12~


Up until she moved into her college dorm Clary had been busy with AP courses, Student Council, Advisory Committee, and everything under the sun that got high school seniors into a big-whoop-dee-do university. Kate was not so overachiever inclined, but nonetheless neither girl had time to devote to boys. Whenever they did, like when Prom was around the corner, the intimacy of their small private-school classes ensured that every guy in Kate’s grade was like a brother. Every guy in Clary’s class had treated her like a sister.
Clary hadn’t seemed to mind since she was rather afraid of relationship, the mysterious formula for its success being understandably illusive to her. Like me as a young girl, the guys who were interested in her weren’t the ones whose attention she wanted to reciprocate. But when Kate wasn’t drooling over Leo in Titanic for the seventeenth time, she yearned to be somebody’s girlfriend, to the degree that she tried a tad too hard for my taste. Based on my past experience I hated to see her chase after those who were impossible to please.
A mother cannot stop a daughter from working herself into a broken heart. It pained me to watch her throw herself at Brandon, who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the pimply-faced dweebette that followed him around like a panting puppy, even though he dabbled in dweeb himself. His favorite hobby was discovering uses for flashlight batteries and his favorite subject was Latin.
I’d tried to explain the Elvis Theory to Kate but when you’re on the Elvis end of the equation you never get it. I could almost hear the whirly wheels in her head go round and round while she figured out the next best formula for nabbing him before I got to the part about not caring being in your favor. You had to have been there, and she hadn’t—yet.
I’d exhausted all attempts to dissuade her when Brandon called her up and invited her to a movie, so I dropped the lectures and tried to join in her celebratory mood. I saw myself in her when she announced, “He could love me!” Every time I started to pop her maybe-I-have-a-boyfriend balloon, she barked, “Can’t you just be happy for me?” No. But I’ll pretend.
It was the middle of the night when she burst into my bedroom and awakened me from deep slumber. Brandon had dropped her off without even walking her to the door, she told me in a rush to get to what I sensed must be the real story. Her words came so rapidly that I thought she was over-excited and about to deliver good news. I sat up and rubbed my eyes just as I heard, “whipped it out of his pants.”
“What?” I must have been dreaming.
“We were watching the movie and when I reached over to take some popcorn he offered to share and was holding in his lap, his pants where unzipped and it was just there! I’ve never seen one before—it’s so big and so gross!”
Was what had been there what I thought must have been there? What else would be there…and be gross? The situation screamed for a normal father, but there were none of those around.
Don’t over-react, I told myself while struggling to rouse to coherence from a sleepy stupor. Remain calm and don’t treat it like it’s a big deal or you will scar her for life. As if the sight of Brandon’s Bomb hadn’t already.
“First of all, this is normal,” I said, still in some sort of denial. “This is a very normal urge that a boy has,” I added as if—what—now I am a clinical psychologist discussing male sexual behavior? With my little girl, who I should be hysterical to protect from such deviance? Of course what made knowledge of the unveiling even more awkward was that Brandon was one of my students.
“What did you say? What did you do? Are you all right?” Okay, now I was waking up and smelling the coffee. I did consider that I might need to get out of bed and brew a pot in order to continue this conversation. Or better yet, toss back two shots of tequila.
“I told him I was not comfortable with him doing that,” Kate confidently reported. Wow. Impressive. I wished “I’m not comfortable with” had been a psychobabble buzz phrase when I’d been young. I might not have gotten my lips chewed to pulp in college. Could I have simply said, “I’m not comfortable taking down my ponytail” or “I’m not comfortable with being a hockey puck?” How about “I’m not comfortable being your wife?” Born into a different generation and with the proper lingo, my whole life might have been different.
“I’m proud of you!” I reassured. “How did he react to that?”
“He put it away and told me he was sorry and admired my judgment and would take me home,” she said.
“Good for you!” I averred. “And good for him.” Even though I was more than a little concerned for the next girl he took to the movies. Even though on Monday in class I couldn’t look at him for fear my usual inability to conceal would flourish and he would know I knew.
My penchant to leave well enough alone was rewarded, however, when Kate stopped following him around like a geek groupie and decided Leo was the safer option. When Prom rolled around, Brandon invited a boy. Although the administration nixed the controversial mix, it was safe to say I needn’t worry about the next girl who unwittingly reached for whatever he was sharing.
I couldn’t have been more surprised if Brandon had dropped his pants in the middle of chapel service than I was the morning Of November 7, one week after Barbara’s final attempt to persuade me to trust her inane instincts. That was the morning I opened my classroom computer e-mail to find the name “Brad Miller” with the subject line “Hi.” I was floored. Was he a foreigner who didn’t understand the word no? Had Barbara put him up to this? I was appalled at both of them.
“What’s this?” I exclaimed as Kate and a few of her girlfriends gathered at my back to look at the screen. I’d told her and her sister that Barbara was up to some tricks, not to mention Barbara’s daughter, Melinda, had reported to everyone in class about the airplane incident while insisting I change my tune.
I opened the e-mail and read quickly as the bevy of young girls behind me giggled and cooed.




Kathleen,
I am the “strange man” who sat next to Barbara and Melinda on their recent flight to Dallas. I also spoke to Barbara today and understand (and believe me I do understand) that you aren’t comfortable meeting me for a glass of wine. That was to be expected.
I thought I would send this email as a friendly greeting and, hopefully, as a non-threatening icebreaker. Barbara did not give me your email address; I obtained it from St. Brigid’s website (on a lark, I did a Google search on your name and immediately found and followed a link to the St. Brigid’s Faculty and Staff Directory). I debated whether to send this; you get one guess to figure out how the debate turned out. If this feels like an intrusion, I am sorry—ignore it and I will go away.
The real reason I am sending this is that I am intrigued. The nature of my intrigue is twofold: first, the way Barbara described you and, second, how naturally excited both Barbara and Melinda were at the thought of you and me meeting. I have been dating, on and off, for a couple of years, and have had many friends want to introduce me to someone. Each time they provided a description of one sort or another of the “meetee.” But never was anyone described in such laudatory terms as Barbara described you. She said many nice things about you and one very negative thing—USC (again, one guess at where I went to school—that’s right, GO BRUINS!!).
Anyway, back to the business at hand. Barbara had no trouble describing how fun, bright, and intelligent you are, how attractive you are, and what a great mother you are (the “perfect mother”). Barbara really struggled, however, in her effort to describe you in one specific way and it was clear that Barbara really wanted me to understand her on this point. She ultimately settled for saying you were truly a “quality person.” That hit a chord with me. You would have to know a little about how my marriage ended, but when I started dating, my number one goal was to find a “quality person.” That is exactly how I thought about it and how I described it to my friends. So when Barbara made it clear that to really appreciate who you were, I had to first and foremost appreciate that you set new standards in quality, I was, naturally, intrigued.
It was late in our flight, after the three of us talked for a couple of hours, when it slipped out that I was not married. Barbara immediately and excitedly exclaimed that she had someone she would really like me to meet. Melinda said, “Who?” and Barbara said “Kathleen.” Melinda, just as excited as her mother, exclaimed, “Oh, they would be perfect!” Add to my intrigue.
Barbara did not give the impression that you were some hopeless cause for whom she traveled the country, trying to find a match. Rather, I got the impression that she was very real and natural in her feelings that you and I might truly enjoy getting to know each other. I have never had anyone get that excited about introducing me to someone.
I don’t want to bore you with a description of who I am (“Bachelor number one, tell me your best quality”, my likes (many) and dislikes (few), or my life story (boring). Let me just say that I am a combination of silliness and seriousness, wit and stupidity, competence and bumblingness (I know that’s not a word, but this is email, not a novel). I am far from perfect in God’s eyes, but I believe He loves me and is proud of me. My goal is to constantly grow and refine my character to be more pleasing to Him.
When Barbara initially shared her notion about inviting us both to a holiday party, my first thought was of a similar arrangement I had experienced wherein I felt that the lady I was meeting and I were in a fishbowl the entire time with everybody looking and wondering, “How are they getting along? Do they like each other? Is this working?” My preference would be to try to get to know you one on one, before jumping into the fishbowl. That is why I suggested we get together for a glass of wine. I am quite flexible on how to proceed, and will go along with whatever feels comfortable to you, if anything.
This email is certainly long enough at this point, so I will sign off. As I said, if I have intruded, I apologize. Don’t respond to this email and I will just go away (unless, of course, Barbara invites me to a holiday party and you just happen to be there). If the mood strikes you, however, drop me a note in return and maybe we can comfortably start to get to know each other.
Take care,
Brad

“Moh-om!” Kate sang just as the bell rang.
“Well, he made it easy for me to do exactly what he suggested—ignore this!” I huffed as she headed for the door to get to her first class and I turned to greet mine. Question: What fifty-one-year old man pursues a fifty-year old woman (instead of some babe of thirty-five) and writes a letter after he’s been told in no uncertain terms (woops, I forgot it was Barbara telling him) she won’t meet him? Answer: the desperate kind. Now I really got why desperation is not appealing.
Knock yourself out! I muttered under my breath, feeling like I was right back on the piano bench rounding my shoulders against an egotist too insecure to gracefully accept polite disinterest. But instead of moving his letter to the trash, I hesitated while the cursor lingered, then slid the document into the file marked “Parent Emails.”
During my break, when the room was empty, I read it again. Aside from the fact that he might be making himself up like my first husband had, what he wrote seemed uncannily familiar. Just like that I flashed back and realized his letter sounded exactly like Martin had written it!
Was Patrick, the Patron Saint of Second Chances, granting this shrinking violet in prom queen clothing another stab at plain old ordinary? St. Pat had driven the snakes from Ireland; perhaps he’d shooed the snake from my house too!
The possibility was there, but the probability that I would be able to distinguish between normal and deranged—ah, there was the rub. Other than my own father, I hadn’t been around a man who was naturally nice for so long, I didn’t trust myself to see through what might be a bad guy’s disguise.
Brad didn’t sound deranged. Aside from the question that if he was dating why didn’t he just keep on dating instead of writing to someone who wouldn’t go out if it were the last way on earth to eat a meal, he sounded nice, not desperate—and fairly normal. Or he could write it.
Except for the God-speak. Was Brad Miller a member of some uber-religious sect? The reserved Catholic in me never could get the hang of flinging around God’s name except while singing hymns or reciting the “Act of Contrition” behind the confessional screen. Even holding hands to pray (with the exception of my infamous “Our Father” affair) required a giant leap of faith on my part that I wouldn’t either contract my gripper’s cold or die in a fever of embarrassment.
On the other hand, perhaps I could learn to mention God a bit more in my daily conversation instead of praying in silence that Pete painlessly perish. Far better was it for a man to invoke God’s name for improvement (Exactly what character trait did he need to refine?) than to scream the “F” word at hockey games or combine all the four-letter words in the Asshole Dictionary to describe his “quality” wife.
Shame on me! I was already rating a prospect according to who had been worse! I’d promised myself that not only would I never ever again allow the word “prospect” into my vocabulary but also that I’d definitely never ever again settle, not even when it came to a pen pal. Been there, done that.
This time, not that there was going to be a this time, he would need to be oodles better than just what could be worse. He would have to be perfect—in a most imperfect way.

~13~


I am not one to leave loose ends. As we all know, I never keep anyone waiting. After sleeping on the situation, I went into my classroom the next morning and looked at the letter. I had to admit I felt undeniably intrigued by Brad’s “intrigue.” I was such a run-of-the-mill hermit that I couldn’t imagine anyone other than a psycho would be curious to learn more about me—which would begin with, what? There would need to be some sort of explanation for my marriage to the big fat liar. Talk about humiliating; I wasn’t sure I needed to do that to myself.
All morning I felt oddly edgy, as if I’d added two shots of espresso to my already strong, black coffee. To arrest my unease, during morning break I gave myself a long, hard look into the mirror in the girls’ lavatory. Side by side with squirrely teens applying extra eyeliner and brushing their hair then wrapping it in a rubber band so that it looked slept on instead of coiffed, I considered my appearance. Not too terrible for fifty! I’d managed to stave off excess wrinkles, although sunspots and freckles indicated my day in the sun had passed. The full-length mirror on the back of the door reflected a slim figure still fit from all the walking I did, even if my legs were so embellished with pre-cancerous moles the dermatologist could save time by simply dipping me in liquid nitrogen each time I visited him. When Clary’s pre-school assignment had been to “Draw Your Mother,” her classmates asked, “Does your mom have the measles?”
After mulling things over, I decided I looked decent enough to follow mama’s advice and RSVP. But not with the “yes” she would have prescribed (then there’d be no backing out) and in keeping with my new resolve, withholding no truth. This wasn’t going anywhere, after all. It was just a letter explaining why it wouldn’t. A nice man deserved that much, Catherine would have said. You never know who he might turn out to be.
With a flair for sexual sabotage, I slapped out six pages of a “Dear Brad” letter that spared him nothing. Okay, so it was an over-share to tell him the long, black hair on my ex-husband’s back rose up like a dog whenever he barked at me. But I needed him to understand where I was coming from. It was important that he feel no false hope. Or desire to reply.
He should know in no uncertain terms that I would never be one of those mothers of teenage daughters who dates. We were not The Gilmore Girls. In closing, I likened my current condition to that of a recovering patient who needs to lie on a lounge chair in the sun, covered by a blanket, for another year or two—even though it already been six. Then maybe I’d be ready to have a conversation with a nice man.
The weekend passed, during which I did not hear from him and decided that my test had proved him unworthy. HA! Telling the brutal truth had frightened him away, just as I’d suspected it would.
While preparing my father’s lunch on Sunday, I paused at the kitchen sink and smiled with smug satisfaction, feeling triumphant in my correct assessment of the typical male. What a man wanted was a simple glass of wine, not to shoulder a family of abuse victims. Brad Miller was a normal divorced person (maybe) thinking he’d written to another normal divorced person (not), for whom a Merlot and a bit of friendly conversation would be normal. Excuse me! Scarred!
Much to my surprise, Monday morning the man in my mailbox, undaunted, had struck again! He said he waited until Monday because he assumed I couldn’t access my work email at home. I certainly hadn’t volunteered a personal email address.

Dear Kathleen,
I have struggled with what to say in response to your email. There are many things I would like to say. I’m just not sure I can do an adequate job of expressing them.
First, let me simply say thank you. Thank you for being so honest with a perfect stranger. I really value honesty and I appreciate yours.
Second, my intrigue about you is not as noticeable in light of my new admiration for you. My first reaction to your email when you talk about concern for your daughters being foremost in your mind was to think “Yes! Way to go, Kathleen!” I have not had any real tough times or challenges involving my two boys, but I can only hope that I would be there for them like you are for your two daughters. I believe that when we elect to bring a new life into this world, we need to accept all the responsibility that comes with that child. You certainly have and the bond you have created with your girls by doing so will be a thing of joy to you and them in the years to come.
My heart and prayers go out to you as you deal with the difficulty, pain, fear, and feelings of hopelessness that I am sure you have over what your girls continue to deal with in terms of their father. I am certain that your love and uncompromised support of them will go a long way to seeing them through to better days.
Kathleen…Clary…Let’s see, do I detect a bit of an Irish influence here? I assume Marino wasn’t your maiden name. I’ll bet it began with an O’, or was something like Shaunghnessy, Cleary, or Killian. The two attorneys I started my firm with were Irish. Naturally, we started throwing a St. Patrick’s Day party every year for our clients. Sure, and wasn’t I Brad O’Miller one day a year and wasn’t I bursting with pride! “Tis true, ‘tis true. (The last part works better by imagining a good Irish brogue.) Actually, that last part came rather easily since I am currently reading a good novel full of Irish dialogue.
I mentioned my two boys—Ryan Hudson and Mark Mackenzie (my ancestors hail from the northern part of that other British Isle). They are the best part of my life and (don’t all parents say this) I love them dearly and could not be more proud of them.
Ryan is 25, out of school and gainfully employed (yes, it actually does happen). In fact, when I met Barbara, I was on my way to Austin, where Ryan lives, to visit him for the weekend. He ended up taking me out to a big party at the home of a friend and got me to bed at 3:30 A.M. I had forgotten there even was a 3:30 A.M.! Fortunately, that was ONLY 1:30 A.M. body time. I recovered completely in less than 2 weeks. In any event, I had a great visit with him and got to see his new house (he’s the first-born type, serious, drive, practical, etc.—figured he could do better by buying and collecting rent from a couple of roommates than by just paying out rent for his own place). When I eventually become a burden to my kids, Ryan is the one I’m counting on.
Mark will be 21 at the end of this month, is a “Junior” (I don’t know what you call a third year student who is never going to reach the finish line in less than five years) at the University of Colorado in Boulder (where he is following his older brother’s footsteps, but with a different major).
Well, enough babbling (if you can do that in an email). I know this is going to you at work and I hope it wasn’t too long. I was very pleased when you chose not to ignore my first email, but I want you to know the invitation to do just that is always open. I hope you don’t, but please make any response at your absolute convenience. By the way, I think I will take a pass on your invitation to ask Barbara for any elaboration on your unhappy marriage and its consequences. I’ll be quite happy with the extent of what you choose to share.
Take care,
Brad

Whoa. This was an unexpected bend in the road! Not only had he responded calmly to a letter that essentially described my life as if it were a train wreck with no survivors, but actually complimented me for putting my daughters first. Not even my adoring father approved of my sacrificing a future for the sake of maintaining secure boundaries for Clary and Kate’s comfort zone! Expect the unexpected, as the saying goes—and Brad Miller’s reaction definitely qualified. What kept him coming?
That’s when I realized I was not just playing hard to get, I was hard to get—even to get to talk to, let alone meet. No wonder he was still interested.
I couldn’t leave it at that, not to mention that the chivalrous offer to ignore him or to answer only at my convenience made me want to answer as quickly as possible, during my first free period, which I made certain was free by assigning my students a “reading hour.”
And so it began.
I revealed more. He revealed more. I scrambled to write to him when curious students weren’t watching, ever afraid to take the giant step to meet him. He respected my aversion and in fact, dropped his original proposal. Whew. No pressure.
Comfortable in anonymity, I held nothing back. What did I have to lose? At any given moment I could walk away or he could, and no hearts would snap in two. No one would be the wiser since I’d not confessed the correspondence to a solitary soul, not even Barbara (why open myself up for that brand of harassment?), and especially not my daughters (might they leap from the school clock tower at the thought of Mom keyboarding with a new man?)
Meanwhile, during the weeks of secrecy that ensued, I noticed I was jollier, perkier, up like a shot in the morning and typing into the wee hours after the girls had gone to bed. Little did I know that Brad had confided in a couple of his friends about our cyber friendship, such as it was. They’d advised him that he was “wasting time—this woman is never going to leave her house.” He brushed off their advice.
Ryan read my first letter to his dad. “You actually responded to this?” he asked.
“I saw hope,” Brad told him. “She didn’t ignore me.”
With the patience and faith of Job, not to mention the legal skill to sift through evidence for what matters, he read the details of my life, and I mean all the way back to the fat on the steak at Marineland. His childhood had also been like the Cleavers’. And most importantly, he remembered seeing me when I appeared on live television to accept the scuba diving gear from Sam Riddle! It didn’t hurt his cause that he referred to me as “a babe.” At seventeen.
Then, in his third letter, it popped out: His second marriage to a woman who was not the mother of his boys had ended when she’d left him for someone else. He was still good friends with his first wife; they’d simply grown apart after fourteen years and he took full responsibility for entering into the union immaturely. Second marriage? I read it again. And again. That’s when I broke down and called Barbara.
“Okay…he’s been married twice!” I announced sassily as if everything I’d initially suspected were verified, because obviously it was. “Something is really the matter with him!”
She had to agree that this was a rather disquieting revelation while at the same time trying to shake off the excitement that we’d actually connected.
“I’m not doing this,” I concluded.
Even though, I thought to myself, the story of his second marriage sounds eerily similar to mine—how someone having an affair blames you in order to get rid of their own guilt, how your partner’s false accusations rob you of your self-esteem, how you haven’t a clue that the deception has been going on forever. Even though on the heels of his frank admission that he was a “two-time divorcee” he asked me, “Doesn’t that sound terrible?”
His discussion of his therapist’s take on the situation was solace for me as well. The words rang true as a valid explanation for Pete’s illogical accusations.

While the information about her affair hurt, my overwhelming reaction was one of relief. Things that had not made any sense suddenly did. My counselor’s feelings that my shortcomings couldn’t have been severe enough for her to flee from suddenly felt validated. He explained that in carrying on an affair for that long, she would have built up tremendous guilt and the only way to lessen the guilt was to validate her actions by thinking of me as a bad husband. He then explained to me that if the pattern goes on long enough, it starts to become that person’s reality.

Who was I to point fingers? How could I explain the problems with Pete to anyone who hadn’t been through what he had? Any time I’d tried, the listener’s eyes grew glassy as she checked her watch and suddenly had a hair appointment.
He’d gone on to say that he hated the sound of his label and found it very hard to believe he was the owner of it, but that, as many good friends had told him, every label has a story behind it. Now I had his. He wanted me to “have the story, not just the label.”
I focused on the words “many good friends.” At least I was chatting with a man who had some. At least they hadn’t nicknamed his ex “Satan.” My friends were tempted to pin the nametag Flawed on my lapel for having chosen Pete despite my misgivings. Hadn’t Brad Miller barred his soul only to reassure because I’d posed the question after describing my life with Pete, “What does it say about me, that I chose him?”
Not long after I’d hung up the phone, I re-thought my pronouncement to Barbara. Brad Miller was just a friend, for Pete’s sake (no pun intended). I didn’t need to turn my back on someone I wasn’t going to marry. I called Barbara and offered my thinking. She must have strapped duct tape across her mouth to keep from encouraging me too much. Wisely, she simply agreed that friendship was my best bet.
I waited a few days to reply. Having decided to remain non-judgmental in the manner in which I naively wished people could be about me (Barbara informed me the rumor mill had it that I’d tossed out Pete because he was old and had no money, now that I had my father with me) I told Brad, Hey look! We were both made to feel less about ourselves in order to pay for their sins! I congratulated him on his positive attitude and approach to the future.
At least he embraced the positive. His relationship demise caused him to “dissect and reexamine my life so that I have a good understanding today of who I am and what makes me tick.” I regularly said out loud to anyone who would listen that I wished my ex-husband was lying face down under the sod and I never wanted to sleep next to a man again. Who was healthier?
The next several emails were breezy, both of us sensing we needed a break from all the downer talk. Lightheartedly we listed our favorite movies, television shows, and songwriters. We exchanged family stories, hopes and dreams and passions and interests (I’d forgotten what mine, unless getting into PJs at 5 PM and watching Seinfeld counted). He started it, noting that he’d “never become acquainted with someone solely through corresponding,” so was “not sure how to do this.” For not knowing how, he was doing pretty dang well.
Fly-fishing was at the top of his list, which was very okay with me since one of my favorite books and movies was A River Runs Through It. Not surprisingly, so was his. I’d been attracted to the sport ever since I’d watched Brad Pitt cast and run through the river to keep up with the trout he’d snagged. Norman MacLean’s writing was pure poetry.
Buried in the middle of a long paragraph about the visit to Missoula that had hooked him, came the sentence that might as well have been in red ink and all caps, the way it snapped me to attention.

Montana got into my blood, and I try to get up there at least once every year. I have some property (nothing on it but trees, deer, and assorted other wildlife) about 30 miles outside of Missoula and some day I hope to build a log home on it.

Holy Ponderosa! Perhaps I should just meet this man for one weensy glass of wine. One itty-bitty cup of coffee. Life in a log home in Western Montana…after my girls are long gone?
Next he mentioned skiing. My favorite part of that paragraph was when he said I like skiing but it won’t kill me when it comes to an end. Amen. In my attempts to learn I’d landed in tree branches and knocked flat more skiers than I could count, miraculously without injury to any body parts.
Reading, he wrote. Lest you think I am some sort of a jock (I am not—I just enjoy the outdoors), I also truly enjoy reading. I certainly was no jockette. My idea of outdoor sport was to lie prone on a beach towel covered with Bain de Soleil.
But whether or not I shared things in common with Brad Miller was a moot point, since I didn’t have to care.
I liked the sound of all his other interests, not that it mattered. Photography, movies, woodworking (was he like my father? Never mind…), faith and church (what man is secure enough to say that his church “has been a great source of comfort, support, inspiration, and instruction over the past two years?”).
Humor: I love to laugh, make others laugh, and I have even gotten pretty good in my advancing years at accepting being laughed at! I’d spent my entire married life with someone who never smiled. Laughing and watching movies and reading would be my dream life. So what? I could do that perfectly well on my own.
Horseback riding was right up there, however. He even owned his own horse, Rio, and kept him stabled right down the road from St. Brigid’s and around the corner from where he lived. I passed that stable and Brad’s street every morning when I walked before classes. Had I seen him? More to the point, he me?

~15~


The next day I re-read the email I’d sent in return. Did I really say my favorite part of A River Runs Through It was Robert Redford’s voice? Had I actually told Brad that when I was ten (and twenty and thirty), I’d wanted to marry Michael Landon? Since he referred to the “combination” being “rather daunting,” I must have. Yup! There it was.
When he admitted that he was curious about what I looked like, I offered my walking route (what was I doing?) and suggested he might do a drive-by to sneak a peek. I confess I kept my extra-carefully made-up eyes wide open for the blue jeep he’d described, until his return letter said he’d rather wait to meet rather than feel like a stalker. The problem with this solution was that we were never going to meet.
Rather than bore you with the details of 160 pages of typewritten correspondence, I will cut to the chase. As the days passed, I grew curiouser and curiouser. I reached the point where the only thing stopping me from meeting Brad was fear of my daughters’ fallout. I considered joining him for a cup of coffee during a break between classes, in secret—for about two minutes. If I thought I was going to have trouble getting through “the meeting” I knew I would never survive clandestine.
Who was I kidding, anyway? I could never even have a platonic male friend! My life was so different from most people. A bad man had damaged me and my children. I had to let go of any hope of a normal life and get back to reality. I wrote to Brad and told him my thoughts. Then I decided to let Clary and Kate in on a little bit about him.
Once I casually divulged that I had a pen pal, to my surprise they were fascinated and rather tickled to hear that Barbara’s nudge had progressed into a scripted friendship.
“Are you going to meet him?” Clary asked. My heart was pounding. Was I?
“Yeah, Mom, are you going to or are you scared he might be a criminal?” Kate, who was afraid to enter the garage alone with the door gaping open in broad daylight, wondered.
Before I could open my mouth to respond, Clary piped in with a voice laced in “duh.” “She would meet him in public, Kate. Like for a cup of coffee at Starbuck’s. Do you want to, Mom? Aren’t you curious?” I’d told them about our uncanny commonalities. I even slipped in the part about his property in Montana.
“Montana!” Clary exclaimed. “You’ve always loved Montana!” Or the idea of it, I thought, since I’d never set foot over the state line and knew about it only from Bonanza and Lonesome Dove. “Did you tell him about your song?” We’d sung along in the car for years to one of my all-time favorites that I had on tape, John Denver’s Montana Skies. No, come to think of it, I hadn’t told him that—but I should!
“I think you should just meet him, like as a friend. What could it hurt? People who are divorced have friends, after all.”
“Yeah, Mom. Teresa-at-school’s mom goes to the movies with a man-friend sometimes…or out to dinner.” Kate’s point was well taken. Clary’s logic was legit.
“It might be nice to have a friend to go to a party with or to a movie sometimes,” I mused, as if the thought had just occurred to me. “I don’t have to marry him, after all!” And I meant it.
“No! Of course not!” They eagerly concurred.
“I don’t know,” I played the hesitant card well. “If I did, everyone would make such a big deal about it. I hate that!”
“Well, who’s going to know but us?” Clary offered.
“Yeah, Mom. We just won’t tell anybody,” Kate said.
“I’ll think about it,” I concluded, feigning reluctance. “Don’t you girls have homework to do?”
No sooner had they closed the doors to their rooms than I was on the computer like my dog on a crumb under the dining room table. Out of the blue, having refused twice more Brad’s gentle urgings to meet that were then followed by his gracious, albeit frustrated acceptances of my reticence, I wrote to him and reiterated for the zillionth time the prior misgivings I’d had before this time taking the plunge and telling the girls. I reported my success in garnering their permission to meet for coffee and offered several options. A latte at Starbuck’s? A walk on the trail near his house? Lunch at a nearby Italian wine bar? Moments later his reply appeared.

Dear Kathleen,
You have no idea how my heart goes out to you as you try to care for and protect your daughters, while still having your own wants and needs. Your email also affected my stomach—as I read, it went all the way up to my throat, before somewhat settling back down again.
Meet you? There is nothing you could say now to keep me away, as long as you are willing. You know what is daunting now? At the moment, several somewhat conflicting things.


He was shocked on two levels. First of all, he couldn’t believe I’d confided in anyone, least of all my daughters who I protected like a mama bear. Secondly, that with such a small token of permission granted, I was ready to rumble.
“How soon?” I asked him.
We were “chatting” on a Friday night, six weeks of emails behind us. I felt like I knew him as well as I did anyone. What would all that mean when I saw him face to face? I’d told myself that appearance didn’t matter, but come on! Who was I kidding? What if he looked like that man (tight shorts and white shoes) who’d invited me out for coffee?
He too was concerned as he wrote:

You have somewhat gotten under my skin. I have no idea how we will be in person and that is a little anxiety producing. Here goes some cards on the table: I can’t help but daydream sometimes that this could turn into something more than just friends. I doubt our meeting could ever end in friendship, but it could end that figment of my imagination.
What happens if we meet, it goes spectacularly, and then reality sets in and “friends” is all we can ever be, even if we both might desire something more? Sorry about this—as you can see my daydreaming can really build up steam at times. But it hasn’t just materialized out of then air—it’s been based on some great communication between us. So…the idea of meeting you is daunting. I know the worst that can come of it is that we will still be friends, and that’s not half bad. You would be a great friend to have. Daunting or not, I can’t wait.


I told him I felt the same but had been too timid to say so first. “Let’s just go one step at a time,” I sanely suggested while I secretly considered what one wears to be a bride at fifty. “Maybe if we both want more, we can do that slowly and quietly until the girls are off to college,” I wisely added as I checked the calendar to see when was the very next time Clary and Kate were both occupied for more than ten minutes.
During the next week, there was the possibility of lunch hours, free periods, and a couple of after-school afternoons when Kate was involved in play practice and Clary, student council meetings. One such opening was Monday, which he nabbed, admitting that he might not have the patience to wait any longer. Now that the light had turned green, it would be difficult to proceed with caution.
After we’d agreed on Monday at 3:30 for coffee at Starbuck’s, he asked would I mind changing the beverage to a glass of wine and the venue to one that served it. “Wine will be better for my anxiety,” he wrote. The only problem for me would be to conceal it from my daughters, when one glass of vino, especially on the empty stomach I would have by 3:30, made it difficult for me to walk to the car.
At last we exchanged physical descriptions. I had the edge here since I’d already asked Melinda for verification, knowing full well her mother had a tendency to exaggerate. Barbara was so anxious to get me coupled she would have raved about Quasimodo as tall, dark, and handsome.
I gave him the basic rundown: 5’7”, blonde hair that waves all over the place if I so much as step outside, and green eyes. I confessed that at the moment I felt like seventeen but looked about one hundred since I hadn’t slept a wink.
The moment I sent the email I threw back a big swig of water and sent it straight down my windpipe, choking and gagging to the degree that it brought my alarmed father down the hall to see if I needed the Heimlich.

I look exactly like Robert Redford except in the face and physique, Brad replied. And if this not being able to sleep keeps up, I am going to look like Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones by Monday (Wasn’t he the guy they made the movie “Dead Man Walking” about?). I think we should promise each other to meet at least one more time after Monday, so that we can spend time together at least once without all this stress.
I don’t recall being a teenager quite like this.

I agreed to a second chance encounter no matter what, and informed him that the woman with lipstick smeared all over her face ala Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” would be me—too nervous for its proper application.
I sprinted to my closet and shut myself in it so no one could witness my adolescent behavior as I ransacked hangars, cursed, and broke down in tears in search of the right outfit to wear on a date. A date? The right outfit? Crying? This is precisely why I was never going to do this again!
I’d broken into a sweat in an effort to combine the appropriate teacher skirt with one that would allure. Fiddlesticks! I’ll just wear what I would wear to the classroom. If he doesn’t like it, he can lump it! I was not about to alter my resolve to simply be myself…despite myself.
Isn’t there a movie titled Lost Weekend? Saturday alone lasted a year. I baked Daddy an apple pie and oatmeal raisin cookies to pass the time, but found myself back on the computer. Brad was experiencing the same interminable passage of time, and so we wrote to each other about it like fifteen-year-olds waiting for the last day of school in order to break out to the beach for summer.
I was such a wreck with anticipation that every nerve ending tingled. When Clary came up behind me to ask me a homework question, I screamed. When I intended to extend the cookie jar at arm’s length to offer my family some of my freshly baked cookies (another time-passer), I simply let go. The ancestral Portmerion container and lid sailed across the breakfast nook, hit the wall, and shattered into a million pieces of mixed china and chocolate chips.
“Cookies, anyone?” I asked in such a high-pitched shrill that six eyes simply stared at me in horror.
“Are you okay, Mom?” Clary asked.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I threw innuendo right back at her while I scurried across the floorboards like a centipede collecting shards of china in one hand and nibbling chips with the other.
Sunday morning I checked my mail to find he’d written at 1:23 AM and again at 7:22 AM.

If you compare the time of this email with last night’s you can tell that my Keith Richards transformation is well underway. I feel like I am in a constant state of aerobic activity (heart rate), with the flu (no appetite), and mentally ill (I forget which disease, but it’s the one where you get one thing on your mind and you can’t seem to think of anything else, no matter how hard you try [of course, how hard am I trying?]) These email relationships are hard on your health—especially as “Meeting Day” draws near.
The problem is obvious—if we were to have been introduced without the email relationship, how much pressure could we have possibly felt? Sure, a little. But this is ridiculous. And it’s all because we hit it off so well in cyberspace. Maybe we should just exchange digital photos, and then in time move on to digital video, follow that up with chat rooms, and eventually video conferencing. But noooooooooooooooooo, we’re going right for the big enchilada…TOMORROW.

“Let’s just send each other pictures of movie stars, say they are us, keep writing, and call it a day,” I responded after empathizing with his condition and claiming it as my own. “Seriously,” I concluded, “I too am looking forward to our meeting, but I do think I should see if there is any place open on Sunday for some drive-thru plastic surgery, since my eye bags are overflowing and my eyelids have drooped to the degree that I won’t be able to see you. Maybe the bar at Cedar Creek will be dark. I’ll be the one with the shopping bag over my head.”
After six more letters apiece, Sunday finally came to an end, although Monday morning, when I couldn’t swallow cereal and so checked the computer, it hadn’t ended until even later for Brad.
1:15 AM
I just won a game of computer solitaire.
14 ¾ hours and counting.
Maybe I will try and knock myself out by hitting my head against the wall (black and blue are colors on my color chart).

5:48 AM
INHALE. EXHALE. BLINK. SWALLOW. Repeat each as needed.
SEE you in about 10 ½ hours.

After my first class, I wrote back, “It’s a good thing green is in my color palette, because that’s the color of my complexion today. Boy, I am too old for this! Can we get a booth at Cedar Creek so I can go to sleep? Put a rose in your teeth. I’ll be the one shaking like a leaf.
See you (yikes) soon.”

~16~


For the big day, I finally settled on a knee-length skirt, sweater, and flat shoes (Pete’s short man complex had forbidden heels, and post divorce I simply hadn’t bothered). Into the car trunk I tossed a bag with blow dryer and hairbrush in case of the frizzies by 3:00. Extra eye shadow, mascara, and lipstick were ensconced in my purse. I, who was not caring.
All day long I felt like I was going to throw up. I lost five pounds between the first morning bell and the last one of the day. During journalism class, Kate told Melinda I was going to meet Brad Miller after school. When Melinda gave me the all-too-knowing eye (her experience with the opposite sex far surpassed my clueless daughter’s) I motioned to her to approach my desk.
“Does he really look like Kevin Kline? Not that it matters.” My voice trembled.
“Well…”she hesitated. “He’s the same type.” Really? I honestly didn’t see how I was going to make it through this without having either a complete nervous breakdown or a heart attack.
When at last the 3:00 bell sounded, I bolted from my classroom as if the principal had ordered a fire drill. The kids who habitually “hung out” in my room hoping for candy from my file cabinet were shoved aside in my attempt to exit without conversation. I could feel their faces follow me to my car.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?” Michael Monroe called out snidely.
“Dentist appointment!” I yelled over my shoulder just as Kate appeared from around the corner, stood next to Michael and hollered, “Good luck, Mom! Have fun!” Darn her! Forget the bag in the trunk. Never mind the primping. I’d been made!
I realized as I whipped through traffic like a Le Mans driver that I’d be early. Good. I’d be able to park the car, check my lipstick, and Yoga-breathe for a few minutes while I secretly scanned for incoming suspects.
In record time I was across town and parked behind Cedar Creek. Okay. You can do this.
After checking my smile in the rearview mirror. I opened the car door to step out. That’s when I saw the tallest, most stunning male specimen this side of a movie screen come striding across the parking lot wearing jeans, a Faconnable button-down shirt—and clenching a long-stemmed rose between his shiny white, ruler-straight teeth. People on the sidewalk stared. Passengers in parked cars gawked. He was exquisite! Glued to my seat, I lowered my shaking head into my hands. Kevin Kline wishes he looked like Brad Miller!
Not fair! Had I known this, I would have paid a visit to Victoria’s Secret for the bra that offers the illusion of breasts—that stand up. As it was, I was way out of my league.
I willed myself to rise as he stepped forward, extricated the rose, and smiling a smile brighter than the Pepsodent ad that shows stars shooting from front teeth, handed it to me.
“For you,” he said and added, “assuming you are Kathleen.” Easy assumption, since I was the only one for blocks blushing like a wallflower at her first sock hop. “Shall we go inside and sit down?” If I can walk.
I still hadn’t uttered a sound when we slid into a booth and he ordered us each a glass of wine. When I did, all I could do was giggle. After six weeks and 160 pages on which I’d poured out my heart and soul I was speechless.
Gradually, I was able to look him in his gorgeous eyes and at least pretend to listen as he showed me his pictures—of Montana, of his sons Ryan and Mark, and of his dog Jake. We’d agreed to bring them, so I had photos of my girls too. Words finally came to me, although to this day I have no idea what in the heck I said.
I knew it. He knew it. Within ten minutes time I was doomed to a love so deep I thought I’d drown in it. I loved this man before I was born. Some part of me had known forever that he was out there somewhere, and so I had tried to make him out of all the losers I’d stumbled upon instead.
Conversation became natural, and natural in a way impossible to describe. It was like being in the company of my “Young Love” cousin and good friend Martin, adding unimaginable magnetic attraction! I really, unbearably wanted Brad Miller. And I was really, seriously in trouble.
When I checked my watch and three hours had passed I panicked. I had to go! I dialed Kate’s cell phone to let her know I would bring her some dinner from Cedar Creek and leapt from my reverie like Cinderella. But not before we’d agreed that it was time to exchange phone numbers and yes, we would most definitely meet again—as soon as was humanly possible.
“I have to shop for a Christmas tree for when my boys come home,” Brad said.
“I can help you! I can help decorate it!” I blurted out, dashing my resolve to never again volunteer assistance to a grown male. We planned it for two days later, again while Kate would be practicing for the Christmas concert to be held that same night at 7:00.
“I could come with you after we decorate—to the concert!” he suggested. “If it wouldn’t be too much for Kate, that is.” I’d ask her. If I could speak.
Outdoors in the parking lot, before I jumped into my car and headed the short distance home, he reached out and hugged me. Zzzzing! When I put my hands on his back I felt like all ten fingers were plugged into a wall socket. His shoulders were huge! I had to stand on tiptoe! His hold was so firm! He smelled so good. Normally, I didn’t care for men’s cologne, but then, this wasn’t normally. This was his pores exuding not some gagging bottled scent, but the ever-so-faintest trace of crisp, clean, shower soap: Irish Spring or Old Spice. I hung on for another second, just to name it. This made joining hands during “The Lord’s Prayer” seem like “Ring Around the Rosy.” My heart jolted as if the doctors had just jump-started it with cardiac paddles. Clear! Seems I still had a little life left in me.
I thought I would faint as I stumbled backwards and turned to go. From the car my fingers quivered as I misdialed twice before reaching Barbara, who answered in the middle of the first ring.
“How was it?” she asked levelly. I knew she had to be gagging herself with a tea towel to keep from shrieking it.
“He’s very nice.” I checked my breathing and steadied my response. Downplay, downplay. I told myself to avert her overreaction while I wanted to scream, “I’ll make a reservation for lunch at the Ritz!”
After I hung up the phone my entire body zapped into some uncontrollable love tremor. I hadn’t shaken this hard since a few moments after I’d given birth to Clary and the doctor reassured me that such uncontrollable muscle spasms post childbirth were common. In Southern California you can’t blame shivering like an undressed Eskimo on the cold, so when I walked into the kitchen jiggling Kate’s chicken salad I had no credible answer for her concern.
“Mom! Are you okay? Was everything all right? Was he nice? Why are you shaking so hard?”
“I must have gotten a chill in Cedar Creek’s air conditioning,” I babbled then dashed down to my bedroom to cover my clothes with a floor-length terrycloth bathrobe.
“Tell me about it!” she demanded while my teeth involuntarily chattered until I thought they’d break. I tried to put the teakettle on the stove but splashed water from its spout as my arm continued to spasm. How in God’s name am I going to tell her I’m in love?
“He was va…va…va…very na…na…na…nice,” I stuttered, poured the hot water successfully, then clung to my warm mug like a life preserver. Just when I thought my nerves had calmed, I jumped in my seat as if I were sitting on the electric chair when the executioner pulled the switch. “It’s na…na…nice to ha…ha…have a fr….fr…friend.” Shudder. Luckily, she didn’t ask me what he looked like.
By the time she told me all about her practice, I’d stopped quivering enough to coherently inform her that Brad Miller had been interested to come see her Christmas concert. Would she like that? Amazingly, she was curious to see him and, ever the starlet, flattered that he wanted to see her perform.
I got rid of her as fast as I could so I could hustle to the computer and confess my feelings. What was the point in dilly-dallying? If I knew this was it, then I knew this was it. There was no reason to hesitate. Well, there were actually several plausible reasons, but I ignored them. There were my girls to consider, so we’d have to act out this romance discreetly and sensibly, but I might as well fess up to the fact that I wanted to act it out. How could I have gone from zero (years and years of contented solitude) to ninety (love struck) in no time at all?
At 8:29 P.M. I typed an email while at 8:27 P.M. so did Brad. The two crossed in cyberspace. I thought better of telling the whole truth and merely thanked him for the lovely time and the flower. Emboldened, I signed it “Definitely in like and growing?”
When I sent my note and opened his I was encouraged, to say the least.

Dear Kathleen,
I have had a perpetual grin on my face since we parted. I assumed I would be impressed with you in person, but I never had the nerve to hope for someone as great as you are in reality. You are more enjoyable live than you were in email—and that’s really saying something. And I have no idea how you could possibly have been worried about how you look. I think you’re an absolute knockout—and I’m not just saying that.
I called my best friend, Lou—a member of the “dying to know how it all turns out” club and when he realized it was me on the phone, all he said was ‘Well?’ And all I said was, ‘Wow!’
Thanks for making my day, week, month…
Looking forward to Wednesday.
Brad

Slumber was impossible. After reading that and feeling what I hadn’t felt for years and didn’t think I’d feel ever again, I was a wreck. After I listened to the grandfather clock dismiss peaceful slumber in fifteen-minute increments, I surrendered and arose at 3:30 in the morning. You know where I was headed.
3:38 A.M.

Dear Brad,
OK. Look at the time. So here goes with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If I did not have children I would charge headfirst into this relationship like I have never done before. Am I crazy?
I have to tell you this now so you can back out before I am in too deep, and I think I already am. I’ve never felt this way so quickly before. I’ve been lying in bed thinking about kissing you. Then I think, but what about the girls? I’m scared.
So now you know the truth. I’ll probably regret saying this later but we agreed no secrets, right? I know I sound forward, and I am really not. I am not brave. See you Wednesday.
Kathleen


At 3:42 Brad was typing instead of reading. Meanwhile, I’d shut down my computer and gone back to bed so did not read his letter until the next day.

Dear Kathleen,
The stress is gone—the excitement remains and has intensified. I slept fitfully “all night” (not a term you can accurately use when sending an email to one’s “friend” at this ungodly hour). I am not complaining about sacrificing sleep for you, I just don’t want to make a habit out of doing it alone.
I feel bad that I held back a little in my email to you last night. I really struggled. I was so jazzed over you and, while I thought our time together went well, I really had no idea how excited you were about me. I just didn’t want to come on too strong and risk scaring you off. But let me say, I definitely do not want to be just your friend. I will always want to remain your friend and will strive to achieve “best friend” status but I want more. [He wants MORE?] Not just in the abstract, but with you. I knew through our emails that you had many of the things I want—intelligence, humor, good character, a real sense of family, similar likes, etc. But I sat there last night almost mesmerized by you. [MESMERIZED?] I could get lost in those green eyes. Your smile is terrific. I love the way you run your hands through your hair. [Did I REALLY run my hands through my hair? I HATE women who run their hands through their hair!] And you are so pretty. I could also say some things about how desirable you are, but I will leave it at that. [DESIRABLE? My whole life I’d felt about as desirable at Mother St. Joseph (a.k.a. “Jowls”), my tenth grade math teacher who suffered mysterious “headaches,” grew four-inch black chin hairs, and in fits of temper threw pencils at anyone with the wrong answer!]
While I have had a stupid grin on my face ever since, I am at the same time worried that I made a less-than-great impression on you. I was seriously stunned by how attractive I found you, and didn’t think I was on my “A” game. I’ll be better tomorrow (he said confidently). Tomorrow…seems so far away.
My “in like” is definitely growing,
Your special “friend,”
Brad

He didn’t turn off his computer right away, however, and so then, at 3:44 opened the letter from me.
Call me, he sent to my sleeping computer.
When I read his letter before I ate breakfast, I wrote back to him that I was relieved to hear he wanted to be more than friends—could we do that right now? If that hadn’t been his “A” game, when it was, I’d drop dead. I signed it “Sleepless in San Juan.”
“Do I run my hands through my hair?” I casually asked Kate while we munched on cereal. She thought for a moment while chewing, then swallowed and replied, “No, I don’t think so. You hate it when girls run their hands through their hair! Remember the time you swatted my hand when I was doing that to my bangs?”
Maybe I really had turned into a teenager. Or, could be? After all this time, had I been feeling a little sexy?
When I got to school, in came the last email Brad sent me before we started talking on the phone. It was his love letter.

Dear Kathleen,
I think I have waited my entire life for you and I will wait further, be discreet, climb Mt. Everest, or whatever it takes as long as you are the prize waiting for me at the end. As much as someone could love someone else after spending 3 hours in her presence, I do. You have no idea how connected I feel with you—emotionally, physically, whathaveyou. My premonition was dead-on. You are everything I want in a woman.
There, I’ve said it. The entire deck is on the table. Anybody would say this is foolish—you can’t feel this way about somebody this early, of if you do, you shouldn’t tell them, but it’s what I feel and I feel safe communicating that to you. My daydreaming is all about the future—spending it with you.
I can’t wait to see you again, kiss you, hold you, and just be with you.
I don’t know what combination of accidents, machinations, interventions resulted in us coming together, but I thank God for the end result. This is so special that I’ve decided I want to get the most out of it and the only way to do that is to embrace this fully, without caution, care, or reservation. Hang on; it’s going to be a great ride.

Love,
Brad

~16~



Kiss me? I really needed something better to wear before Wednesday!
Brad saved me by calling on Tuesday evening to reaffirm the plan to decorate the
Christmas tree. “Wear jeans,” he said.
I called Clary to tell her that I had, in fact, made a friend of Brad Miller and I was going to his house to help decorate his Christmas tree. She took the news in stride, although I could hear wariness in her acceptance. Kate was far too wrapped up in the notion that he would be in the audience during her concert to express any concern.
On the short drive to his house I reviewed my options—before I saw this fine specimen of the species again and all common sense flew out the window like gum wrappers.
If he kissed me, my pre-planned life would change in a moment. My careful world would spin out of its orderly orbit. Or…I could leave his house the way I’d come and go right back to the life I’d settled into, with nothing to lose. But was Brad Miller something to keep? If so, did I have the right to take what I wanted when my daughters could never have what they did?
“What made you persist and send an email after Barbara told you I said no?” I asked him after we’d kissed for the first time and I thought I might melt into a puddle on his couch.
“Promise you won’t think I’m crazy?” he asked sheepishly. I nodded, unable to make my lips move normally. Maybe another sip of wine would help.
“I was being set up with lots of people, right and left—had a lot of first dates.” Looking into those eyes, I could well imagine, as I barely managed to slurp back the drop of drool that was about to dribble out of the corner of my mouth. Brad Miller was not the desperate sort I’d first judged him, obviously. So what was he doing sipping Merlot with a confirmed schoolmarm?
“Then, when Barbara started to describe you,” he paused, “I heard an audible voice in my left ear. It said, ‘Brad, listen to this. It may be the most important conversation of your life.’ Because of that voice, even after you said no, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I could not let you go until I’d tried every avenue to convince you.” He’d either been hearing voices or had been inspired. Right now, nestled against his chest with his arm around my shoulder, I didn’t give a holy hoot.
“On top of that,” he added, “when she described you in terms of setting the standard for quality…”
Fortunately, in a moment of girl-talk weakness I hadn’t disclosed to her last spring’s recurring daydream that involved me and Mr. Movie Star/Wonderful With Children smashed up against the wall in the choir loft.
“Let’s every so often, still…send each other an email,” he said and drew my hand up to his lips to kiss it. “How do you like that idea?”
Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Two hours after I arrived at his house and it was time to collect our wits and drive four blocks to St. Brigid’s Christmas concert, neither one of us had touched the tree. Oops! Passion! Miller’s full-body massage had left me as limp as an overcooked spaghetti noodle.
“Will your daughter suspect we’ve been…ah…a little more than friends?” he wondered. I looked over at him with moony eyes. What daughter?
Being that my response to physical stimulation is to flush from my chest clear up to my eyebrows, I had a hard time disguising my feelings for the man who sat in the auditorium folding chair next to mine. When Sister Ruth, St. Brigid’s chaplain, introduced the evening’s program, I coveted her clerical collar. Why hadn’t I thought of a turtleneck for evening? Kate peered out from behind the curtain, put her hand to her mouth and whispered to a girlfriend, who also sneaked a peek, then giggled and waved. So far so good.
After the concert, we three grabbed a bite to eat. “He’s so dishy!” Kate, shocked that anyone over fifty could be more appealing than her bald and portly science teacher, grabbed my arm and whispered in my ear right after we separated from Brad and headed to our car to go home.
“He is nice-looking, isn’t he?” I asked as my knees buckled and I blamed the curb.
But the next day, when Brad wondered if he might come over and watch a movie with us on Friday night, Kate collapsed. The tears streamed down her face and her fears rose to the surface. “What if he’s really like Dad?” she cried. “Can’t it just be us, like always?” she begged. “Do we have to see him again so soon?” she pleaded. “I thought I could do this, but I’m not ready!” she blurted out before running down the hall and slamming her bedroom door.
I called Brad back to explain, and he understood. We’d wait a week, maybe ‘til Clary got home from college for vacation, he suggested, and then see how she felt with her sister there too. He and I could meet for lunch on Friday instead, he proposed.
I loved this man—have I already said that?
At lunch, I was the one in tears. Kate’s reaction hit me hard. I realized I’d been acting like some silly princess in a fairy tale. Who did I think I was? I could never again have a relationship with a man—not without hurting my children, something I would never, ever do. I had to tell him I could go no further but instead, walked into the café around the corner from school crying. He consoled me, reassured me, and told me it didn’t matter.
“You don’t need this,” I whimpered while the pasta I hadn’t touched grew colder, “You could be lolling around with some 35-year-old who isn’t burdening you with children who have issues!”
“This is precisely what I need,” he spoke softly and assuredly. “I need you. I’ve always needed you, and everything that comes with you. And by the way, it’s precisely your age that I love most about you!”
He would wait, he went on to say, however long it took. We would see each other however we could and not interfere with Clary and Kate’s lives. He reached across the table and held my hands until I had to get back to teach afternoon classes.
Before I stood to go, he handed me a book—a bound compilation of all the letters we’d written. “Beginnings,” the cover read, “by Kathleen and Brad.” I sobbed all the harder.
“I made a few corrections to your emails,” he said to make me laugh. I’d been in such a hurry to type so that students wouldn’t tease, “Are you writing Mr. Miller again?” that I’d neglected to proofread and had zapped off typo after typo—this from the English teacher. Meanwhile, somewhat intimidated by the fact that he was writing to an English teacher, he’d taken great care to ensure his grammar and spelling were accurate.
I dried my tears and chuckled. But when I held the collection of his and my heart’s hurts and hopes, teardrops spilled from my eyes once again.
“I love you,” I said.
We kissed lightly and I settled into the driver’s seat as he gently closed the door. Numb, I drove back to my classroom where I went through the motions for the rest of the day.
There were only a couple of teaching days left before Christmas break, and so during those days we talked on the phone and consoled each other. Brad’s boys were coming home and so was Clary. Why not have them all meet?
“We’ll take it slow,” we said in unison, while secretly I could hardly contain myself. I felt like I was suffering a mild case of sex addiction after dabbling in it again for the first time in a coon’s age.
I lowered my guard and confided in Barbara who valiantly controlled any ebullient response to my confession about the Christmas tree tryst.
“You need to proceed with this relationship precisely for your girls’ sake,” she reiterated her earlier admonition, “or they will never know what happy love is!”
Easier said than done, when their hearts were still so raw, even six years after the divorce. Some children long for another father; these children never wanted another one again, let alone the one they had. They just wanted me—all to themselves, so they wouldn’t have to be afraid again.
But when our front door opened on December 23 and through it waltzed three tall, handsome gods sent straight from Eddie Bauer Catalog heaven, everything changed.
“Oh my GOD!” Clary exclaimed, breathed in, held it, and started to turn blue as she watched them approach from the kitchen.
“Look at them!” Kate’s mouth dropped open and just hung there. I reached over and gently lifted her chin to close it.
“For you. Merry Christmas!” Brad said and handed me a brand new butterscotch leather jacket on a hanger.
“Wow, Mom!” Clary admired.
“I told him a leather jacket was fairly risky,” Ryan said while shaking his head—he being the son who thought his father was crazy to respond to my first email giving him all the reasons I would never date. Never mind spending all the money for a leather jacket for someone you’ve just met. Clary’s common sense approach to life had found its twin.
The entire evening was pure magic, from meal to dessert, to a midnight game of charades. It was after 1:00 A.M. when Brad broke the spell and said they should be heading home. Mark and Ryan admitted and the girls agreed, “It’s as if we’ve been related all our lives.”
No sooner were they out the door than both girls announced they needed new clothes. “We can’t lounge around the house in these any more—if we see a lot of them, I mean,” Kate said.
“Will we see them a lot, Mom?” asked Clary.
“They are so great!” Kate exclaimed. “And so hot!”
“They smell so good!” Clary effused. Those Miller boys with their Old-Spice soap did indeed intoxicate, I thought, but didn’t comment.
“Are you guys…sorta serious?” Clary wondered. Was that a little hope I heard? I shrugged in an effort to act nonplused.
While they got ready for bed I took a load of laundry out of the dryer. For a moment, I stood in front of the window that overlooked a full moon broken by the rustling branches of our liquidambar trees. Just like that, revelation hit me as if I were one of those people seeing the Virgin Mary’s face in a bowl of oatmeal. The truth of the matter was suddenly as sharp as the reality that if I didn’t get this laundry folded soon, I’d have to iron it, and who has time for ironing when they’re in love?
The lightning bolt flashed. What if Barbara was right. Look at the healing! Don’t protect your girls from a kind, gentle man. He’s exactly what they need. This is your now or never. Take happiness with both hands and they will feel it too.
Lord knows they’d not seen happy before, all those years I’d drifted from room to room in a coma.
I turned my back on the rumpled pile of daddy’s boxer shorts. Even if it meant he had to go commando when he dressed in the morning, I had to act now. I ambled over to the intersecting corner of the girls’ Jack-and-Jill bedroom doors, screwed my courage and cleared my throat. Thy will be done.
“As a matter of fact, Brad and I do feel very strongly about each other,” I gulped, “but I don’t want to upset you. I would never do anything that makes you unhappy.” They looked at each other, then back to me.
“Go for it, Mom,” Kate said.
“If anyone deserves to be happy,” said Clary, “it’s you.”
I’d never been prouder of my wounded children, willing to risk it all for my sake…and maybe theirs too.
I kissed them goodnight and sprinted to the computer. As I zoomed through the family room I noticed Brad’s sweatshirt that he had left behind. I lifted it to my nose and breathed in a long, deep inhale. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Lovely. After I sent him a goodnight love message, I carried the sweatshirt downstairs with me and considered sleeping with it, the lingering after-aroma smelled that good. I had it bad.
Don’t be ridiculous! I said out loud before setting it on my reading chair and crawling under the covers, where for some time I tossed and turned.
Oh, what the hell. I reached over to the chair cushion and hugged the scented cotton fleece to my chest. Nothing like taking eau de Brad to bed with me. Sweet dreams.

~15~


While my daughters were off to a holiday party with friends, I snatched the opportunity to go over to Brad’s house to “watch a movie.”
“Don’t wait up for me,” I told my father as I set Joe’s special, his favorite dinner, on the table, my entire body vibrating at the thought of the evening ahead.
“Stop acting so immature!” I said out loud to no one as I strapped on my seat belt and ripped out of the garage at 90 miles an hour before the automatic door was fully open. My neighbor, out walking the dog, looked like he’d seen a ghost as I stomped on the clutch, slammed the gear shift through second and into third, and left rubber tracks on the asphalt after I screeched around him flashing a rabid smile.
Hours later, feeling loose as a goose, I unlocked the back door. I could hear Daddy snoring as I walked up to Clary and Kate’s bathroom door, where they were brushing their teeth before bed.
“How was the party?” I asked Clary with a hug.
“You smell like Brad,” she said slyly, ignoring my question. Caught. “Ahhh,” she stood back and closed her eyes, “it smells sooo good!” Saved by the makers of Old Spice.

Brad was brilliant. No sooner had I let him in on the success of the family gathering than he was conniving with my girls about an engagement ring. He’d come over to take a walk the day after the kids had all met. We walked all right, and he proposed that we marry—what did I think? Think? I hadn’t thought for days! Would I someday like to retire to his land in Montana or did I want to stay here, close to my adult children? I pictured a log home in Montana.
Was he moving too fast? he wondered. Not for me. But realistically, what about Clary and Kate? I knew they would leave the nest permanently, but where would they land? I told Brad I was game to someday go, but we’d see first where my daughters roosted.
My father enjoyed playing cards whenever Brad stopped by in the evening, almost every evening. The girls learned that having him around was not as strange as they’d expected. Especially if Mark and Ryan tagged along.
There were phone calls to Clary and whispers to Kate, and then on a late morning after walking together, Brad marched into the woodshop and asked my father for my hand.
“What took you so long?” daddy chuckled, and, touched to have been asked at this late date in life, granted his permission. “We’ll sell this house and I’ll get out of your way.”
“Oh no!” Brad burst forth with the chivalry of Mr. Knightly in Jane Austen’s Emma. “There’s no need to displace this family! I’ll sell my house and, with your permission, Bill, move in here with you. That way, you can have your woodshop and none of you have to leave.” Was this man human?
What I didn’t know was that after daddy gratefully agreed, he promptly marched inside to his office and called one of my cousins, a renowned L.A. attorney, to run Brad’s name by him—just in case his reputation was questionable. “I didn’t want another Pete in the house,” he told me months later when he confessed to sleuthing. Fortunately, my cousin had not only heard of Brad, but also offered a stellar report.
On January 4, two days before school was to resume, Brad arrived to ostensibly take me to a Mighty Duck’s hockey game—this would be a deal breaker, if he acted in the same manner as the last guy who took me to a hockey game.
Clary and Kate were in on every step of the plan (Brad is a genius). What young girl doesn’t want to peek through the curtains to watch a dashing hero go down on one knee (Brad bowed, afraid a genuflect might be permanent) and dedicate his life to Fair Maiden (I was certainly no maiden)?
Shrieks of joy erupted from the living room when I kissed him and tittered like a Valley-Girl teenybopper, “Yes!” Hugs all around and off we drove to Anaheim Stadium. I went to the game all right, but with a diamond ring on my left fourth finger. So much for taking it slow.
This was my idea of the perfect way to celebrate with, at last, a normal guy. I hoped.
Sure enough, Brad proved himself worthy. He cheered appropriately, ate a hot dog, and toasted a beer to my glass of red wine. We sat close to the ice and snuggled, I clad in my warm fleece-lined butterscotch leather jacket and adorned with the glittering symbol of impending marriage. How did I get here—to the opposite pole from where I’d stood such a short time ago?
Meanwhile, back at home Clary took a phone call from my good friend Dianne.
“Mom’s not available right now,” she pronounced with discretion, since still no one but Barbara knew I’d met Brad, and even Barbara didn’t know yet that I was engaged.
“Is she in the shower?” Dianne naturally assumed.
“Well, no. She’s…out.” Clary stammered.
“OUT? WHERE IS SHE?” She knew that the only reason I’d stepped out at night for the last six years was to oversee our dog do her business.
“At a hockey game,” Clary sighed. The girl never could lie.
“A HOCKEY GAME? WITH WHO?” Clary knew she was in trouble now, since Dianne was the nucleus of my friendship cell. Dianne possessed full knowledge, at this very moment, of all my known associates’ exact whereabouts.
“With a man.” That was all she would say. She wouldn’t provide the mystery gentleman’s identity regardless of Dianne’s threats.
“Well, I’ll just have to wait ‘til morning to get to the bottom of THIS!” she huffed and reluctantly surrendered. Clary wouldn’t talk if the enemy captured her and pulled all of her fingernails out.
On the way home from the Duck’s game, we called Barbara from the car.
“I’m ENGAGED!” I sang into the speaker as soon as she picked up the phone and said hello.
“PRAISE THE LORD!” Barbara effused and then burst into tears so overpowering she had to pass the phone to her husband, Robert, who had chastised her in the first place not to meddle. “It’s a miracle,” I heard her sniffle and cough in the background.
“There’ll be no living with her,” Robert said.
The next day all hell broke loose. In no time, everyone already knew. Dianne called to remind me that I’d enlisted my tight buddies to interview any man I ever so much as spoke to before it ever went any further.
“We’re down at the harbor having coffee. Bring him now!”
My orders were clear. I called Brad and put it to him, knowing full well he’d be all over it. No attorney worth his salt would refuse such a challenge.
Over steaming hot cup after cup, as hard as they tried to scrutinize, they simply enjoyed Brad’s company. No questions asked. He won them over just being Brad.
“How else would this be happening?” I asked them.
“I wish I could meet Pete Marino so I could thank him. He set the bar so low,” Brad humbly said. “It’s so easy for me to seem normal!”
Quite the opposite, we all corrected his theory. Ironically I’d actually be the one who should express gratitude to my ex-husband. Because of his abominable behavior, he’d raised the bar astronomically high. I was never going settle for anything less than as-easy-as-pie. I would never settle, period.
Dianne offered to host the reception in her ample and sylvan back yard. “I know the perfect caterer,” she chirped. “Have you thought of a date?”
“Can we just get married now?” Brad asked, turning to the group for approval. I agreed there was no point in waiting… but my girls…I needed to be sensitive to their ability to digest all this.
Dianne whipped out her calendar. Considering St. Brigid’s Easter break, we arrived at April 12. I would call the Episcopal priest and we would gather for a small wedding at the chapel on campus—that way my students could attend.
By the time we left the harbor, all the plans were set in motion.
At school the next day, the principal called for Kate to come to his office.
“Would you kindly take care of your mother the next time we break for vacation?” he teased. None of the teachers or staff members had an inkling of my secret admirer. “She leaves before Christmas avidly single, and in two weeks comes back with a diamond ring!”
I’d gone from “I won’t” to “I do” in as long as it took to refresh my lipstick.
When I passed Ted Riley’s Latin classroom, he stuck his head out the door. “Guess you had time for that cup of coffee with someone!”


When April 12 finally rolled around, Barbara and Robert witnessed the union and in the church office signed the marriage documents.
“You owe me lunch!” Barbara needled.
“I owe you life,” I replied, rolling my eyes and reaching out to hug her for the four thousandth time since she’d arrived.
They took their seats inside, and I stood at the entrance to the chapel fighting back tears of immeasurable joy. I thanked God with everything in me for changing my life with one little letter on one ordinary morning when I thought all that lay ahead of me were more papers to grade and more laundry to fold. For bringing me the man who brought me home.
And what had it taken me fifty-one years to learn? When it’s right, it doesn’t have to be so hard.
With stars in their eyes, Clary and Kate had earlier helped me into a simple long dress. Now, as I stepped up to the threshold to begin my walk down the aisle, one by one they kissed me on the cheek and then processed forward. I watched them glide as gracefully as swans, heralded their courage. Beginnings.
I stood still, poised to hear the organ signal my entrance, and thought about how even the most predictable little life can completely alter in the blink of an eye. I mean, really turn…in some direction you never even knew was there.
“You were right, Mama,” I whispered heavenward to the one woman who for my entire life knew I’d had it in me. Just as she always had been, she was with me here today, watching me take my 87-year-old father’s arm and stride the length of the chapel, its sanctuary brimming with family and friends overwhelmed by the sheer marvel of it all.
“This is the happiest day of my life,” daddy had whispered to Barbara when he’d hugged her in the courtyard before the ceremony.
“You inspire me,” my 55-year-old cousin had told me. His wife had recently abandoned him for her personal trainer. He’d met the woman of his dreams but, badly burned, hesitated to approach that flame again. “If you can do it, so can I,” he said. “There is redemption for us all.”
My day—oh yes, the one my mother had been thinking of— was here, and Brad was standing right there, waiting for me at the altar, tall and steady, like a bright beacon of hope.
“It’s an absolute miracle,” I overheard one friend whisper to another as I passed by the pew where they were standing.
“Just look at all the happy,” Dianne said with tears in her eyes as she watched our blended family pose for a picture.
I said I didn’t date, and I didn’t. I married.
After I moved alongside Brad, Kate rose and sang our favorite hymn with the voice of an angel.

In this very room there's quite enough love for one like me,
And in this very room there's quite enough joy for one like me,
And there's quite enough hope and quite enough power to chase away any gloom,
For Jesus, Lord Jesus ... is in this very room.

…and he must have interpreted my dare to drop the perfect man into my kitchen as a request.
When it was time to kiss the bride, I pressed Brad close while the congregation whopped and whistled. The fact that in his arms I felt all the unconditional comfort I’d pined for since childhood was nothing short of inconceivable.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Father Bob lifted his arms, our signal to turn and face the future, “It is my pleasure to introduce to you… Mr. and Mrs. Miller!”
It’s never too late to bloom.
~ Epilogue~


April 28
Subject: You, Us, Etc.
My dear Mrs. Miller,
I love being married to you.
Love,
B

After eight years of marriage, it is more than safe to say I still feel that from him every single day.
Our first Father’s Day as man and wife, Clary sent Brad a card that read on the inside, “Thank you for saving me.” Kate has called Brad “daddy” ever since our wedding day, the day she says is the only one from her past that she chooses to remember. “I started from there,” she says whenever anyone asks her about her childhood.
As I type these words, I watch through the picture window of our log home in the Ninemile Valley my devoted husband. He is dressed in his Missoula fly-fishing tee shirt and reading in a rocker on the back patio that overlooks nothing but Ponderosa Pine woods. A buck with four-point antlers lounges on the grass near him. It is so quiet I can hear an elk bugling down below in the valley.
How I came here was not without setbacks and second guesses. I am, after all, still a work in progress.
But that, my friends, is another story.


~My Thank You Note~

I work with words all day everyday and yet am hopeless to come up with adequate ones to extol my mother and father. If I hadn’t been a Clary first and foremost, I’d never made it through Marino to get to Miller.
In fact, had events not unfolded precisely as they did—the unfortunate hand in hand with the fortunate—this isn’t the story I would tell.
To all the women who saw me through what I now refer to as my “dark days.” Kristie, Denise, Debbie, Coleen, Sue, Shari, and Stephanie, without you there to cheer me, my mental faculties would have given out long before I was able to pen the letters that led to my second chance at marrying “so normal!” as Denise, you so aptly described Brad.
My children? Good Lord above! I know He’s up there because the prize I got for making the wrong choice the first time around was you, the single thing that ironically made it right. Clary and Kate, you are my champions and my heroines. I would do it all over again to give birth to you again. I love you unstoppably and instinctively, from my very marrow.
Brad, thank you for your belief, persistence, and for reading between my lines to register hope there. Honestly, I don’t know how you saw it, but I am eternally grateful that you did.


Last but never least, for the friend who despite all her comings and goings with a daughter getting ready to choose a college, sat down on the airplane to Texas, set everything else aside, and thought of me.