A slap in the face June 21, 1985

  

Mary Ann hasn’t written back. I should have suspected she might not.

She went west not to forget the war back east like some Zane Grey character, but to seal away that part of her life she considered frivolous and wrong.

And here I went and sent her a story I wrote that will dredge up all that she is desperate to forget, a judgmental story, no less, which no doubt struck her hard in the sole plex.

When I first told her about the story, she assumed it would be something romantic, even comic. It is romantic after a fashion, but also tragic – the depiction of which touched to close to a nerve.

I can easily envision the enraged look on her face as she started to read it and hear her muttering, “After all we’ve done for that man how can he do a thing like this?”

She might even have set the story on fire. I might have done so in her place. She might even have done the same to one of her own had it recalled too vividly that time – as Johnny had demanded before they left.

“I’m having the dreams again,” she told me the day before she left for the west, by which she meant dreams about the other man she could have chosen over Johnny, when she chose Johnny instead, she and Johnny desperate to put some distance between this part of the planet and where they ended up, not understanding the fundamental concept about what distance does, how it paints something ugly sometimes into something sweet, and may well make her ache more for what she hopes to forget.

And what about my part in this little conspiracy, how I served as her chief accomplice, listening to her as an advisor, but never telling her what I actually think, keeping silent partly not to take blame later for the disaster I knew would happen, did happen, is happening now.

I even sent them letters to ease their passage across the continent, innocent mail full of my problems not hers – right up until I sent the offending piece, she responding at first, and then dead silence, a story too truthful in expressing what I thought and how I felt, even after I toned it down from the original draft.

It was a slap in the face I hadn’t meant.

And what about the latest issue of Scrap Paper Review, which poked fun at the Bible and her faith, was this not also another slight? She clings to her faith as if a life preserver after the ship she sailed on has sunk or on the verge of it.

I hadn’t thought about the implications of that until too late, after I had mailed the paper as a follow up to the story she was bound to hate or at best be offended by.

Eventually, she will respond. Eventually, the sting of those two blows will evolve into serious anger and she will need to contact me.

All I have to do is wait.

 

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