Reading: The Wars of the Roses

Moving: more

Listening: The Castle

Watching: "Christopher Strong" because I am a Katharine Hepburn maniac. News to you, I know.

Cooking: vegetable soup from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest.

12 November 2001: Details

Look, it's actually Sunday night, but I figure I might not finish this until midnight, because what's sleep, after all? Furthermore, I can only half-type with my left hand because the only spot Blake will settle is not on my leg, which I have outstretched straight so he can hide under the desk as he usually likes to do, nor on my shoulder, because apparently my breathing disturbs his preening and rest, nor on the arm of the chair (a rare choice anyway), nor on the corner of the seat next to my tush, but on my lap, and I may not lift my left forearm from my lap, because that limb is necessary to provide one of the three corners he requires--belly, thigh, and arm. He actually took the sleeve of my fleece in his beak and tugged, and while I am physically stronger than he apparently I am not mentally stronger, because I moved my arm to where he wanted it. Damn.

On Hallowe'en I called my mother from the bus on my cell phone. She told me I had received a letter that she was about to forward to me, and its return address was River Avenue in Philadelphia. "Holy shit, you're kidding," said I, "I haven't heard from Brian since freshling year." She was all concerned that it was "that weird kid" who tried to visit the house once. RHZ was an odd duck, but she didn't know the half of it: it was the possibility of his visit, and not his psilocybin habit or predilection for bagpipe music, that led her to brand him as "weird." It wasn't RHZ, I reassured her, but Brian--so minor I never found out his middle name, which is saying something--one of the many people I met at HLV and was determined to keep in touch with. I wrote to everyone I was in the slightest acquainted with that week: the first time I had made friends my own age for years. Brian was one who wrote back.

He came to visit me at UConn during his spring break from the Air Force Academy our freshling year. I really never went anywhere, it occurs to me (not for the first time)--he traveled from Philadelphia to Storrs by public transportation, though Storrs was almost completely unserviced by bus and not at all by anything else. I have no memory of how he arrived. I have no memory, I wish to have no memory, of why he arrived.

Correspondence with the girls I had met--Michelle in my philosophy class, whatshername from Parsipanny who paired up with TAB, whatshername from Wilmington who took the creative writing class with PSA and TAB and who won the uncoveted Hopwood Scholarship to Lynchburg at the end of it all but for some reason chose instead to go to Harvard, to which she'd been accepted early decision--soon dropped off. It's interesting to me that I remember where the girls were from better than I do their names. I should remember at least the Delaware girl because I saw her again. Sophomore year, when I spent my spring break in Boston with CLH as usual (my mother drove me to the train station in Saybrook and I Amtracked thither), ASZ visited me--see, again, the long trip to see no one in particular--and we looked up the creative writing-Delaware-Harvard woman at Harvard. We took the bus up? down? Mass Ave to Cambridge and she served us hot sake in tiny silver cups that impressed ASZ, a stein-hoister at Rutgers, not at all.

It's more interesting to me, and reassuring, that as I try to remember Brian all these other side stories about other people come up instead. Hold on a sec, it's going to drive me batty not to remember her name...dig dig dig...Elaine was from Wilmington and Mica from Parsipanny.

Okay, Lynchburg. Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Virginia, or, as SEM demanded of me one night freshling year, "Didn't you ever do anything else?" because a) no, I hadn't, and b) I guess I was pretty much, "And this one time? at Lynchburg?" only because I had never been to band camp. I must have mentioned the saga before in more detail than on the cast page, though far be it from me to search out where. A week-long recruitment program for prospective students who'd done decently on their PSATs. The daughter of a friend of my mother's was about to matriculate there, though otherwise I can't conceive of her wanting me to go to college so far away. In Jerry Falwell's town, a fact that did not elude me at the time.

But anyway, I went. To the south, where an allegedly edible victual called "grits" was served for breakfast and where my agemates (well, just PSA) ridiculed me for having milk at all three meals despite the absence of parents. He himself drank root beer for breakfast. Oh, yeah, PSA. My first boyfriend. He's important.

Also ASZ, currently a veterinarian in California whose large son is expecting a sibling. RHZ, whose middle initial is actually M but who went exclusively by "Hobbit" and who surfaced briefly after an absence of several years at some point in the life of Speaking Confidentially. TAB took creative writing with PSA. He was from Goshen, Connecticut (and was totally blasé about living in Madeleine L'Engle's town, I regret to say), who despite going to crunchy liberal arts haven Reed College is now a broker or realtor or other such boring (to me) profession (see? be unmoved by L'Engle and that's how you'll end up). (His profession (as of 2000) I discovered through one of my periodic searches of the web for every last human being I've ever known.Proving that I am not alone in stalking relics of my past, PSA already had found the site himself when I told him about it--almost 15 years after we last had heard from TAB.) My first choice of class was creative writing but I got my second choice, philosophy. If I had been in class with PSA, glory knows what my (our) behavior would have been. Michelle, who took philosophy with me, went on to Duke. Another classmate's name was Leigh, which I easily remember because, even for English, that's a silly way to spell the sound "Lee."

Also I met Brian, whose total disappearance from my conscious mind is proven by the fact that his name never ever occurred to me as someone to look up on the web, but the familiarity of whose return address indicates my freakish memory for trivial detail.

So anyway, last night when I returned from a highly successful, thank you, shopping jaunt and checked the mail, there was the letter. A paltry paragraph on a sheet of paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook. An uninteresting paragraph, what's more. He was going through a box of stuff and came across my letters, which prompted him to write. I say I save everyone's letters, but once when I was absolutely crushed for storage and feeling ruthless, I tossed both his and the other Brian's. Also Cathy's. I had lunch with her throughout seventh grade and then her military father was transferred to Ohio or somewhere. (Immediately before HLV, I used her father's next transfer, this time to Berlin, Germany, as the basis of my lie about moving to Berlin, Connecticut, to the hapless Bill.)

I am unmoved. Of course I will respond, because I am incapable of letting the dead bury the dead, Mr. Finch. But I really would rather not. I would be thrilled to hear from him if I had known him only in that week at Lynchburg and subsequent correspondence. Brian, however, is a reminder I don't need. Freshling year, I kissed a lot of boys. It has occurred to me in later, ever so much more mature days that if PSA and I had done It, my freshling year promiscuity probably would have involved a lot more than the necking it actually did. I remember reckoning them all up with MEM, my next-door hallmate pal freshling year, possibly comparing--we had two neckees [snort] in common [snort]. I racked up as many boys that schoolyear as I have cumulatively since. One person on my list was Brian.

It was a post-KFC (yes, I dated an unfortunate who had those initials; PLT referred to him as K-K-Keh-Ken, à la "A Fish Called Wanda"), pre-NCS thoughtless fling. It's the thoughtlessness that bothers me. The thoughtlessness has since suggested itself to me as a reason the correspondents from HLV who lasted were male, or at least why females dropped me. ASZ had a crush on me, I knew, for a while; possibly Hobbit wanted to visit because he thought the nature of our relationship had changed through the medium of our letters (which were such fun--we wrote to each other in code, in puzzles, on balloons to be blown up, in ransom notes). So it's the thoughtlessness that I would rather not remember and that his letter, after fourteen years, has reminded me of.

Bah.

---

I recently wrote something that hasn't yet landed in these pages about how my mother's and my hearts leapt in our throats when we first beheld the door to my freshling room. Its construction paper, yellow (five-pointed) star was labeled with the names Lisa and Rebecca. We both hoped--for a split second before reason returned--that my roommate would be my long-lost childhood friend REBD, who abandoned me for private school in sixth grade and in seventh grade moved away. (It wasn't.) Thinking of Lynchburg reminds me of another story from the very first days of freshling year. It also involves Lynchburg and a kiss and is an unfortunate tale, but not nearly as unfortunate as it might have been.

As soon as I learned that there was such a thing, I consulted the student directory that listed every student registered at UConn. In that 1986 excuse for web-searching, I looked up names of people I'd met at orientation and HLV people, those being the only ones not associated with Old Lyme that I might know. I found a familiar name, one John Joyce from M---, Massachusetts. The John I had known at Lynchburg hailed from another M-town, maybe Medford, in Massachusetts, but maybe I didn't have my HLV roster with me or hoped he might have moved. Anyway, I wondered and hoped that this John Joyce, who lived up in Hilltop (two nine-storey dorms at the top of, guess what, a hill), might be the one I had met over a year before.

So up the hill I trekked one midsummer morning. Actually, it was a late-summer evening. I knocked and was told to come in. I went in, and there in the room were two men who would turn out to be the not-John roommate and the roommate's friend from another floor. Neither was a freshling, and John hadn't arrived yet (and wasn't the John I knew anyway). Let me recap my situation: I was completely naïve in that dangerous way that I had at 18 when I thought I could handle myself; I was away from home for effectively the first time; I was away from my hometown where my agemates were indifferent to me; and I was beginning to understand I was attractive enough to interest men.

Although I just dug out my 1985 journals to find Mica's and Elaine's names, I am not going to dig out my 1986 journals to see if I recorded that incident for posterity. I remember unaided all I need to remember: that after what I'm sure was not sophisticated flirting, I agreed to "go out" with the friend and for some reason went with him to his room on the next floor, presumably so he could write down his phone number for me (the original place, being a college dorm room, apparently lacking paper and pens). I suppose he invited me to sit down, so I did, on the side of his bed. He sat down next to me and lo and behold, kissed me. This was agreeable to me, though odd, I thought, before a date. At some point when I found myself lying crossways on the bed, legs dangling, I realized that this is not what I wanted to happen. I sat up and extricated myself. He said, and I remember this clearly, "But I thought we were going out," in a rather confused tone.

I didn't realize until much later--"much later " being here defined as "any time before I voluntarily entered his bedroom"--how very, very easily I might have been raped. Not because he was necessarily of a violent bent, but because I might have been compliant up to a point after which stopping him from continuing would have been difficult. Socially awkward at the least, physically unmatched at the worst.

So, so naïve.

Which is another piece of freshling year I would rather forget, but which yesterday's letter brings up.