“I don’t know,” the man says. “One of them.”
At Hickman’s IGA, Earl Davis—Freddy’s brother—loads groceries, as he has for decades. I think he is wearing the same clothes he wore in high school. The last time I saw Freddy, he was standing in the parking lot behind an insurance office that he cleaned on weekends. I was in college then, lucky enough to have parents who could afford to buy me a little freedom. That summer, I had interned in D.C., where I met someone who meant something to me. Of course I would never have admitted that to anyone, him especially, though in my mind he had become my boyfriend.
. . .
“Is it wrong?” Eric asked as he reached for my hand. “No,” I said. “It’s okay. I like it.”
Eric loosened my tie and draped it over the back of the chair. He made me feel taken care of, an unfamiliar thing.
I was working with one of our senators as part of a program for college kids. Twenty years old, I was a little drunk. Eric, who helped supervise our group, was from Cape Cod and looked like a Kennedy. Assessing me, he said I should buy a dark suit. Mine was baby blue; he said I looked ready for the Easter Parade.
I said I was not taking wardrobe advice from anyone in shorts with spouting whales. After deciding I came off as too earnest, I was trying for some edge. He laughed, touched me for just a moment. In his hand, I felt everything waiting.
I had amused him; I saw that, in his opinion, this counted for something. We were suddenly complicit; I wanted to make him laugh again and reach out to me. I always want more of anything good. Immediately, I found myself craving his approval. There was something a little wicked about him. He had a bemused way of looking at people. Like me.
“You’re from Missouri,” he said. “Show me.”
It was a fun game, this exchange, but he was straight. His girlfriend, Binky, from North Carolina, changed the bands of her wristwatch—yellow, blue, pink, and green—to match her outfits. One evening, she led a delegation of southerners in a rendition of “I Like Calling North Carolina Home.”
At a cocktail hour at the Watergate, Eric hovered, brought me a drink, refills. When he touched my arm to guide me through the crowd, I wanted him to leave his hand there. Later, my friends and I went for dinner and to the bars. Eric tagged along. At every new place, I hoped that I would find him by my side. “Sit by me,” I kept thinking to myself. He did. At every stop.
Binky was gone for the weekend. Since the debacle with the doctor, I had avoided dating, studying nonstop. Huddled over textbooks, I thought of myself as an intellectual, madly highlighting pages in yellow. Sitting in an uncomfortable chair at my first Introduction to Poetry class, I had experienced an epiphany when the professor entered the room and began, with no preamble, to recite a poem by Ezra Pound about a Chinese widow who lost her love. The story begins with the two as shy children pulling flowers, sharing blue plums, “two small people, without dislike or suspicion.” As the years pass, they are drawn together, into an arranged marriage that becomes much more.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
When he departs on a fishing boat, she is filled with sorrow, an emotion that grows year after year when he does not return and her silent mourning increases as the mosses grow over the sidewalk. Finally, an old woman now, still waiting, watching the currents of the river from a widow’s walk, she offers a quiet invitation:
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you,
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
It was the holding back, the longing I recognized. Something in me connected to the widow, her sadness, to what had been lost. That day, in that class, I learned words, what happens when they are said out loud, how feelings became real when set against the silence of a clean white page. Something in me broke open, a crack.
I was a journalism major, a would-be reporter who could not bear the thought of calling up grieving widows with questions. As soon as the bell rang, I went off to see my adviser and explore a double major that would allow me to take literature classes.
. . .
Eric took me to his friend’s empty dorm room. “I like you,” he said as, tentatively, I laid my head on his chest, just where it had wanted to be all night. His smooth, soft neck smelled aftershavey and seemed, when he opened his collar, the most private of places.