The Girl Who Got Away

I just remembered this kid a few days ago. I thought my encounter with her might serve as a metaphor for my relationships with women.

Somehow, in my junior or senior year of high school, I posed as Professor Henry Higgins in some hideously shortened version of “Pygmalion.” I don’t remember anything about it except that I hammed it up horribly. It must have been a part of an English class requirement; I never had any interest in the theatre once I realized what overly-dramatic nerds they all were, and I’m an overly-dramatic nerd.

Anyway, I only recall one of my lines in the shortened play. I was sitting on the edge of a desk, stroking my chin. I looked puzzled and intoned wistfully, “Covent Garden. What a damned thing!”

Quite apart from getting to say “damned” in high school, I had the thrill of acting the most important part. I’m sorry to say that I have no other memory of the production, except that it was in front of a large number of children, some of them younger. In those days, I actually attended a school that included grades 7-12, and you can imagine how the seventh graders suffered.

When I was in the 7th grade, at a junior high football game, someone actually played the trick on me of holding out a yard marker to me and saying, “Here, hold this for a second,” and then he disappeared forever. Of course a few plays later, despite understanding the rudiments of the game, I moved the yard marker too soon, and all hell broke loose. “Seventh year trick,” some older kid sneered.

Never again, in any context, have I volunteered to hold anything for anyone. The rule has served me well.

Anyway, I was a junior or senior now, and immune to those pranks. I played my part with my fake English accent, and soon enough it was over.

Out in the hallway, I was fighting through the inevitable gang of kids to access my locker, when a girl I’d never seen before and would never see again tapped me on the arm. “You were very good,” she said firmly. And then she walked away.

She was probably a year younger, and, after 50 years, I still recall her after that one meeting. In point of fact, she looked like Gloria from the post of December 6, 2019: short, dark hair, big glasses, in short, my type, and, in those days, with the clear lovely skin of a 15 year old. I loved her immediately. But she turned and was lost in the crowd.

I had no clue who she was or how to find her. As stupid as I was, I suspected even then that she might have been interested in me, despite my hamming things up—maybe, being young, she liked it. But I’ve never had a clue about women. It is a tribute to Nancy’s kindness, willingness to put up with anything, off-the-charts emotional intelligence, and wisdom that we’re still married at all.

As I wrote about Gloria, I still have no idea why she broke up with me. I’m tempted to write her, have even drafted an email asking what happened but can’t bring myself to send it. I’m afraid.

There are hints about this. My mother was horribly reserved, cold, and mean. She told me, as you may recall, that I wouldn’t work hard enough to justify the expense of Duke or UNC, so I had to go to Auburn, where my dad was teaching and where, to this day, in-state tuition is $9600. In my day, in today’s dollars, it was $6600. And this after she had said that I could attend any college that I wanted because my brother’s and sister’s college educations had been expensive.

I just never could figure out how to please that woman. I was also afraid of her; she slapped me across the face a couple of times, but that was nothing compared to the cold regard. Once, she caught me masturbating. When my dad came home, she met him in the carport and said, “See if you can keep his hands busy.” Dad looked crestfallen. She knew I heard her.

In high school in Ft. Lauderdale, she said if I wanted to make out with a girl or engage in any other such activity, she preferred that I bring the girl home rather than park somewhere that wasn’t safe. I brought Cary Brown home and made us a pizza; Mom went into her bedroom and left the door opened and yawned loudly. She was maybe fifty feet away. Why, I wondered, didn’t she get the point, which was her point to begin with?

Later, in college, Dad and I shared his house when he was teaching at Auburn and of course I was an undergraduate there. A girl and I were engaged in some sexual hijinks in the living room and Dad came home unexpectedly. I can still see him rushing back out the front door. Beth went home, shame-faced, but Dad couldn’t have been nicer about it. As I wrote in a previous blog, his only concern was that we were being safe.

Later that week, Mom, on the phone from Ft. Lauderdale, said, “I hear you’re having a lot of fun up there.”

Meekly I said, “Well, I’m working pretty hard, too.”

“Yes but I hear you’re having a lot of fun.”

There was no winning that conversation.

When I taught English at Auburn, I wasn’t so much afraid. What’s to be scared of in a freshman? At that, I had reason to be afraid; I heard of at least two students who were fabricating romances with me and talking about it, and another who disliked me so intensely that she told people that I didn’t grade my finals. But somehow, I didn’t feel so threatened. A word in the ear of my supervisor on each of these occasions protected me. At that, the third girl’s prevarications alarmed me so much that I took the nine floors of steps to our offices two at a time and arrived in the department head’s office breathless.

I was not only afraid of my mother, I was afraid of all women, including, for instance, the woman partner in my first law firm for whom I had to do a lot of work. That was a tough assignment, as she was obsessive, staying till 2:30 on Saturday nights and smoking cigarettes constantly. She died of a brain aneurysm after I left the firm. To make partner at a law firm in the South, she had to be tough, cold, and unemotional. She was all of that, and it was only on the day that I resigned that I was able to sit across from her at her desk and feel like her equal.

So the pattern was settled. I’m afraid of Nancy. I’m afraid of Kate. I’m afraid of my formidable female cousins and Nancy’s sister Peggy and my brother Pete’s wife Penny. I’m utterly lost with the M.D. who injects stuff into my back despite how nice she is, and of course I’m afraid of the sleep disorder doctor with her brisk manner. If you’re a woman out there, I’m afraid of you too. I’m afraid to publish this post. I would probably have been afraid of that cute little girl in high school, so it was probably for the best that I never saw her again.

I guess, actually, that she isn’t a good metaphor; I never got to know her enough to be afraid of her. But that confident tap on the arm and the authoritative comment did not augur well.

I’m tired of being afraid of women, but I don’t know how to fix it. There’s probably no breaking the pattern now. Our old dog Roscoe never comprehended the dog door that we installed late in his life. I probably wouldn’t recognize the right dog door if it presented itself to me anyway. What a way to have lived.