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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