Mary Ann is going west May 14, 1985


 Mary Ann is really going. Like the heroine from Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, she goes to the Midwest with the hope for change.

But will the Bible Belt conflict too much with her liberal mind?

Will she be converted to something I won’t recognize in a few months or years?

She’s already different from the person I knew, marriage and religion boiling up out of her mid-life crisis at age 30 when she gave up the fast life in order to start a family.

During the 1970s, she was the kid I’d known in Grammar school who had made a hit in the jet set, flying around the country in the company of rich men in Lear Jets none of her blue-collar classmates could ever afford.

She went through men like chewing gum, spitting them out when they stopped having any flavor.

I remember in early 1973, when my mother told me she’d seen Mary Ann at church – after I had not seen her since our graduation ceremonies from grammar school.

This began a short but intense relationship with her, sharing poetry and talking about possibly putting out a book together.

This never happened mostly because my poetry simply wasn’t as good as hers.

After that, I met her only on occasion and by accident, partly because I knew her cousins, one of whom worked for my uncle for a few years, the other briefly lived in the same rooming house in Montclair where I lived.

Then, in June 1981, I got the urge to see her again.

I was driving west on Route 80, saw the sign for the exit for Paterson, and simply turned off, steering through the all too familiar streets until I came to the house, I remembered her family lived when we were still kids. I knew she had lived other places – including a place in Passaic some years earlier – so, my coming here made no sense.

When I pulled up, I found her brother – then still unmarried -- standing in the front yard. When I asked him about his sister, he laughed, saying he expected her at any moment, and true to his word, she pulled up into the driveway in her dirty white Chevy.

She was as surprised at seeing me as her brother had been. She took me back to her apartment, which was only a few blocks away, and a block away from where my mother had last lived before, she’d moved south to Toms River with the rest of my family.

This became a holy place for us as we became closer than we’d ever had before. We had both turned 30, and she felt its impact more than I did, needing to change her life from the way she had been living before. Her best female friends plotted against her. Insignificant men came and went from her life, none worthy of fathering a child she had become desperate to have.

For some reason, she trusted me. She showed me her latest batch of poetry. It was as if nothing had changed from nearly a decade earlier, yet everything was about to.

This was the end of her fast lane life with one short affair to cap it off with me arriving at the exact right time to serve as witness to it all.

Meanwhile the seeds of my own past began to bloom as Louise and my daughter reappeared in my life, and Mary Ann becoming my spiritual advisor during it, and I became hers, not the man to father her child, but a man to whom she could entrust her deepest secrets while she searched for the man she needed and so desperately wanted.

She had had serious relationships before and had even taken the first stumbling steps into parenthood several times before both all fell apart.

The man she found surprised me because it was not a jet setter or a rich man, but a recovering junkie sitting in a county jail, desperate for someone to save him, seeing Mary Ann as that someone.

But she wasn’t sure, and for a brief time, reverted to her old self, taking that one last fling into her old life, dressed  in skin tight clothing as she made her way back to the club scene, found another man to keep her company, and then had to shed him when she freed her jail bird, married him, and had his child, and now plans to take him away from all that, to take him to the safety of the Midwest where he won’t be tempted to go back to his old life the way she is sometimes tempted to go back to her own.

I’m not sure distance will work, but it leaves an ache in me because her going takes her away from me as well, and I will miss her.

 

1985 menu


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