Boulders

I remember I was at the end of a long twisted phone chord in a corner of my parents’ front hall when you first asked me out the summer before we went to college. You said I’d like to take you to Houlihan’s for dinner, knowing I liked the booths in the back that were shrouded by plastic vines and noisy strands of beads. I’m sorry I can’t, I said, I have to work. Which was no lie but was a lie. I did have to work, turning shoes connected by elastic strings to face one another at K-Mart every Monday through Friday night from six to ten. But I wasn’t sorry because I did not like the way you walked, with your toes turned out and your legs too long in corduroy flares. I liked the way another boy walked. His toes pointed straight ahead and his red-tag Levi’s pulled across his thighs in a way that spoke to my thighs.

After you asked the third time, after the boy in the Levi’s ran his hands through the smooth hair of not my best friend but still a good friend, I said okay, but it had to be on a Saturday. You came to the door like your mother taught you and my brother let you in. He smirked when he passed me in the hallway, mouthing nice pants. In the booth, I could not see your pants and after we sat quiet while we waited for our sodas, you asked me questions that no one had asked me before and I started to think and then started to talk to you about my brothers, the older meaner one and the younger one who made me cinnamon toast with chunks of melting butter grabbing the sugar. Your sister was like that too, you said. Like what, I said. She makes things better, you said. Yeah, I nodded, that’s it. At the doorstep of my parents’ house, we both squinted from the glare of the porchlight that flicked on as we approached. We looked at each other with humor, as I remember it, and you did not try to kiss me. Which was a relief to me. We will just be friends, I thought.

We went away to school at opposite ends of the country, which made us less opposite. We were amongst the few who left the heartland to get acquainted with an ocean and change the way we said our vowels. We wrote letters about literary theory and applied physics and our new lives. You continued to ask me questions that made me think in ways I hadn’t before. Like if dissecting “Ode to Melancholy” enhanced or diminished its power, or whether the volume of the space that separated us depended on which direction we were facing, or about the deja vu of navigating real cities that had once seemed imaginary. When I complained about my roommate who asked me what state Wisconsin was in, you complained about your roommate who took your clothes without asking anything at all. Who would take your pants, I remember thinking but not writing, like I was so funny.

Two summers in we went to the lakefront on a soft August night when the moon outshone the stars and a westward breeze diluted the tang of yeast from the breweries downtown. We split a six pack of Old Milwaukee sitting on two boulders, which you said woolly mammoths had rolled down from Canada twenty thousand years ago. We talked about what this world and our solar system might be like in another twenty thousand years and where our progeny might live. Knowing you would know, I asked which planet would give them the best chance. You said, tonight I am betting on the moon. I had to agree — that’s how whole and welcoming it looked — and it occurred to me that we talked like thoughts flowed. After I shook out the flat warm drops from the last of the beers, I leaned across the narrow chasm between our boulders and kissed you. Your lips were grainy and you tasted of Fritos. Yes, just friends, I thought.

Then that fall you did something very brave — you changed your major. Which sounds ridiculous but you know exactly what I mean. You decided to become who you wanted to be, not who the SATs said you were. I wrote a letter to applaud you and this time I scissored off the ragged edges of the paper torn from a spiral notebook. I also wrote a letter to my best friend, telling her I was heartsick about a hockey player who did not love me. I mixed up the envelopes, so instead of reading that I was proud of you, you read that I would never come around. I began to fade for you. You wrote back to me another time or two but those last letters were like fraying string that finally disintegrates into vaporous thread.

A few years later — we both must have been back for the holidays because I can still picture twinkle lights on a concrete gray day — you crossed the street in front of my car stopped at the intersection of the movie theatre with the clock tower and the restaurant that all our parents went to for anniversaries. You were holding the elbow of a woman in a camel hair coat. You guided her over a slushy curb and then you said something that made her smile up at you. I believe you felt me watching because you turned back, searching. But the light had changed and the car behind me began to beep.

I married, neither the boy in the Levi’s nor the hockey player, but one in that vein. You married and became a child therapist and even now I smile when I think of you with your listening ears on, hunched into a miniature plastic chair or maybe with criss-cross legs on the floor as they shyly handed some of their burden to you. I wonder if you thought of me. Whether you pictured me driving to work with blown-out hair in cinched silk dresses, changing into heels before leaving the car. I suspect you did not. That at most, every now and then, an image flickered across your beautiful mind of a frizzy-haired girl perched on a giant rock who tasted of stale beer the one time she showed the good sense to kiss you.

Today I read in the high-school newsletter, still mailed in long envelopes like the ones we used to send our letters twenty years ago, that you had died, collapsing after a run on your long legs. Apparent heart attack, it said. You left behind your wife and two daughters, 8 and 10, your mother and sister, it said. I wasn’t mentioned.

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