MEMOIRIST IDOL

Love Letters

Straight from the heart

“Richard was nine years old. His mother was crazy. Not crazy in the way that all kids think of their parents as crazy, but truly sick. I couldn’t define it at the time, but I suspect now that Richard’s mother had a severe personality disorder. Possibly even schizophrenia, or bipolar on top of that. Who knows? It doesn’t matter at this point. She is merely another cocktail of destabilized human consciousness and I have seen more than I can take” (Peter Connors, Merchandise Blues, 10).

I wrote a letter to a woman I once loved. She loved me, too, I believe. In that letter, I confessed my love and told her I’d like to see if we could be together. This was problematic on many fronts.

First, I lived in Tennessee, and she was in Minnesota.

Second, I was quite poor, living the life of a Ph.D. candidate in English. She wasn’t well-off either, having left our Ph.D. program to follow her husband to his new job in the Twin Cities. She had that newborn, too.

Third, well I guess I spilled the third part in the chronicle of the second.

Her marriage had been one of convenience, she had said. She cared for the guy but didn’t love him, she had said. She was thinking of breaking with him, she had said, and then she called me one day before they moved to Minnesota:

“I think I’m pregnant,”

which is really a strange way to begin the process of leaving one’s husband. And yes, I should have and did know better, but love — or the belief in love — has been the source of too many dark sonnets, pop songs, and yes, letters, for anyone to be so greatly surprised that one person would take a chance on another when all logic, not to mention all morality, screams,

“DON’T!”

Maybe another — is this the fourth or twelfth? — problem was the gap in our ages. I didn’t care that she was seven years older than me, because when a guy is 25, his frontal lobes have barely joined and he thinks or feels whatever he wants, or at least I did then.

So it’s a given that this relationship was misguided, very poorly planned, and bound for doom — both mine and hers and hers and her husband’s. I can at least say that we never consummated anything or even got close to doing so, though she confessed that she once started the five-mile walk at midnight to my place when we all lived in Tennessee, got halfway down a very dark path, and then turned back.

I am thankful to whatever voice cautioned her on that walk.

I don’t remember all that I said in the letter, except that my love confession was real and strong and quite explicit (not sexually explicit), but some days later, she called and told me this:

“When your letter arrived, I was tending to the baby, so I asked my husband to read it to me. He did, and at some point we both got quiet, and then he looked at me and said, ‘He must love you very much.’”

I’ll jump in now to say that after they divorced, she moved to Mississippi and married another person in our original grad school cohort. That guy had a few secrets, too, but those are not mine to share.

Amongst the many questions that you, and certainly I, might have, is this number one?:

“Why the hell do you ask your spouse to read your personal letters, especially before you’ve read them?”

Maybe that isn’t your first question, but it’s mine, and so the first part of this lettered story ends right here, after I say that all in all, I’m so selfishly glad she did have him read the letter, for it saved me. And yes I know it hurt him, though how he thought they could really make it, I don’t know, especially if all she told me, or even half of it, was true.

Maybe we were all crazy, but nothing certifiable or even that strange in our American culture. And maybe this next letter is only another “destabilized cocktail,” too.

My mother had a friend who visited us often when I was a little boy. I remember her so well, mainly because her name — which I won’t print here — was unusual in my admittedly limited experience then. In the Bible Belt of my youth, people were often named for Biblical characters: Mary, Miriam, Martha, and so on. Some names were literary, theatrical. My grandmother was Ellen, and when she married a man whose last name was Terry, she became a famous name.

I didn’t know that people also named children after objects of precious significance, like Ruby or Sapphire. So, this friend of my mother’s kind of stuck out to me in that she wasn’t a Margaret, a Joy, a Jane, or a Fran.

She used to accompany us to divey barbecue and hamburger cafes, commodities spread all over Bessemer. She called my mother often and dropped by even more often. She was also very nice to me, and in the days when I was four and five, I thought she was happy in the same way as all the other housewives whom my mother counted in her circle of friends.

It might have occurred to me then that this lady had no children for me to play with. I might have even found that strange because, unlike my grandmother’s friends who also dropped by all the time, this lady wasn’t old. It’s only today, though, as I researched her, that I discovered that she was actually ten years older than my mother.

It seems she’s still alive — 99 years old — and so you might understand why I’m keeping her privacy.

Writers start by being observers, I think, and I observed more than most. I noticed all of this woman’s comings/goings, and I noticed at one point that she quit calling, quit dropping by.

Being an observer, though, often means being quiet about what you’re noticing and not asking the questions you most want to ask. Doing so will get you noticed, and observers like me badly want to recede into the background, or hang out under breakfast tables, blending in with the linoleum so as to better catch what these adults think, say, and maybe mean.

Maybe after a year of not seeing this woman, I asked what had happened to her:

“That’s none of your business,” my mother said.

True.

But then shortly after, that conversation, the woman actually called. I remember answering the phone, hearing her voice again, as she asked if my mother was there.

I put the phone down and walked into the kitchen where Mom was preparing tuna fish sandwiches for our lunch.

“Miz…wants to talk to you!”

I thought my mother would be excited and welcome this news from an almost forgotten friend. Instead…

“Oh no…tell her I’m in the backyard and will call her later.”

And so I did, though I didn’t understand.

I imagine such calls happened several more times over the next weeks, all with the same result, and so finally I had to ask:

“Momma, why don’t you want to talk to her?”

It’s hard being an adult, a mother who must respond to a child’s simple-not-so-simple question:

“Because she’s crazy!!!”

And that was it, because even I knew enough then not to ask “what kind of crazy?” Wasn’t it enough in the adult world to know that someone you knew and spent time with was now consigned, committed, to crazy?

Some time later, a letter arrived, and here is what I don’t understand, again, about letters:

Why, after reading them, do you leave them lying around on the breakfast table for your five or six year-old son to find and also read?

My sensation upon reading this one has stayed with me all these decades, even though I remember only the letter’s closing words:

“…won’t you forgive me and be my friend?”

And then she signed it with that name that shines still.

This time, I asked my mother what had happened:

“Oh, she’s crazy. She had to go to the insane asylum. I just don’t want to have anything to do with her.”

A kid remembers these moments, or at least I do.

I think I saw this woman once more when my mother finally agreed that she could drop over. I had never stared at someone who had been in an insane asylum before. My memory says she looked a bit darker, kind of sweaty or oily. She certainly seemed more distant and didn’t smile at me anymore. I tried to be nice, as my mother instructed, and I hope I didn’t stare too long.

My mother soon shooed me away, so my impression is only of her sitting at our breakfast table, looking somewhere between lost and sad. To my knowledge, after this day I never saw her again.

Maybe my mother was right to break with her and not let her stay in this circle. Other people can certainly drown you in their fears and troubles. And when you have a new family and young children, aren’t you, or shouldn’t you be in protection mode almost all the time?

I know nothing more, or rather, what I do know isn’t knowledge — because my mother never spoke of this woman again except to roll her eyes and pronounce her “crazy.” No, all I have is speculation, and the words in a woman’s script on a card etched in my mind. So I’ll leave it here, with this final note:

That lady signed her card, “with love.”

Have you played Memoirist Idol yet? Here’s one from Barbara Carter that might serve as motivation. I don’t know about Barbara’s husband, but as I read I felt maybe too in the moment as her dialogue crackles with humor and evokes that certain queasiness that operations “down there” always raise. Man, Barbara, you manage to work in the serious commentary of what men refuse to see or do with all that humor! So well done!!!

And here’s another story from my Memoirist Idol vault:

Thank you KiKi Walter for bringing us all together!