15 April 1999: Bad Seed, part n

I am once again The Bad Seed. The phone rang innocuously enough.
"Hello?"
"Hi Lisa---"
"Sheryl?" (This I asked over her saying "this is Sheryl," because while I like Sheryl to the extent we've ever chatted when I call my dad or he me, she never calls me herself, and I was ready for News of a Bad Sort.)
"Hi hon [hon?]. I just wanted to call to tell you that your dad's surgery went fine and he's okay." My father had surgery? She's concerned enough to call me hon for the first time?

I'm the Bad Seed.

We talked for almost an hour, which was really nice, because I really do like her and think she's sweet. The man he is with her is apparently quite different from the father I knew, and while I haven't explicitly voiced my doubts as to her taste, we have laughed together a number of times over either the difference in our perceptions of him or the actual difference in him. It is a combination, I am sure. Anyway, she is so cuddly in love with him that she was feeling down about his ten-day stay in hospital, but she's not so infatuated that she couldn't laugh over his directions that she vacuum the house daily during his absence. After confirming she remembered "Kung Fu," I told her the story about his mother, and she laughed at that too.

Another thing she's bummed about is that she can't take sick time to take care of him. They're not married. I said something about how stupid that is, and she said, "I know, we've been together since forever...." The exact period I did not ask. Mostly because such a question would have been off-topic, but part of me doesn't want to know, part of me doesn't care but fears letting any certain knowledge slip, and another part wonders if I'd just get pissed at him again.

My parents got divorced in sixth grade (1980) and he moved out; he slept over a lot and spent holidays with us and mowed the lawn all along and finally officially moved back late in freshling year (1987); he moved out again five years later, in 1992 (when I didn't live there anymore so I remember it by year, instead of by my grade).

BJW had her first post-RSH boyfriend, the Dittohead, a year after that, in May 1993 and he broke up with her in June 1995, two weeks before I got married. Throughout this period she said neither of them was interested in marriage. This was one of her Zelig-nesses, man-wise, because she met BDL in October 1996 with an alleged engagement by Thanksgiving. Didn't want to get married again, ha.

In the meantime, I knew nothing about my father's love life. I visited both him and BJW one May afternoon in 1993, him first. He complained that she was acting weird and didn't want him to mow the yard anymore. That was weird for BJW, who never mowed herself. I remember being proud of her for cutting the apron strings and then the grass, though, and suggested to RSH merely that, well, he had moved out a year before and for a second time, so maybe this was a good step for them. An hour later at my mother's house, I lay prone on the deck and beat it with my fists and feet and roared with laughter as she said, coyly, that there was a man in her life and "we're very happy." I was delighted for her (I hadn't met the Dittohead yet; the initial delight would fade with my sister's stories and my own acquaintance with him).

My father said something later that summer about how, in May, he had been just about to ask her out to a movie or something. The big spender. I couldn't tell if he was shaking his head because he thought she was making a bad decision with the Dittohead or because he genuinely regretted that the Dittohead made the conquest before his own fateful movie invitation. There was some jealousy involved: he called the Dittohead "Steamboat Willie" based on the waist of the trunks he saw on the clothesline, not that he drove by the house to check out his rival's car or monitor his presence or anything.

(My sister thought he'd just made up this name: she didn't know the old Disney character. I'm not sure which she thought was funnier, his making up such a name or his remembering Mickey Mouse. The Dittohead was a right porker, though, as well as arrogant and bigoted and a fan of Rush Limbaugh and a monomaniac with his own religion whose faithful adherent BJW was.)

So anyway, his interest in BJW in the spring of 1993 meant nothing to me until later that year when either he let slip or CLH told me directly about Sheryl. The year "1992" was mentioned. See, what I want to know is what kind of relationship he had with Sheryl that he was considering getting involved with BJW a year into it. He lived on the Sound and she lived in extreme northern Vermont: did he consider making a move on my mother because nothing was yet Agreed between him and Sheryl or because three hundred or however many miles rendered her ignorant of his daily goings-on?

This is why, when Sheryl says they've been together since forever, I want to know and I want not to know just how long forever is. "Since forever" was her phrase. So was "beside of" as in "he was beside of himself."