A Quick Lunch

It was nothing more than a quick lunch on our last day of a summer course, hastily proposed and executed before we both went on to greater conquests — grad school for S. and a job for me.

Even that was an unexpected opportunity.  We’d made vague promises to stay in touch at graduation some months earlier but I’m not even certain we exchanged phone numbers.  We were twenty-two.  What does anyone know at twenty-two?

When we had our lunch I was seven months into the final death march out of my parents’ house.  It was set to last as long as a pregnancy and by the seven-month mark I was beyond ready to be born into my own life.  Nights I spent working in a bakery; during the day I went to school and simultaneously dealt with constant demands that I spend more time with the family.  Quite frequently sleep came in two or three hour long chunks.  Exhaustion never went away.

Loneliness also was inescapable.  Family time ruled out almost every opportunity for a social life; the few times I tried to have friends to the house I got flak for days before and afterward. No friend was good enough for their little girl or for them.  Every one they met was dissected, criticized and found lacking.  I resolved early on to put in-person socializing on the back burner.

Phone calls too were almost impossible.  The one phone sat in the kitchen and afforded its user no privacy.  My mother answered a call one day during the third month of the death march from a male friend.  “I’m so glad to hear from you,” I squealed into the phone after she handed it to me with a sharp warning glance.  “What’s up?”

“No lady asks a boy ‘what’s up,’” my mother lectured later.  “Did you want him to say ‘Eight inches just for you?’”  It took me several long moments to figure out what my mother meant and even longer to accept that she thought me prone to that kind of joking at twenty-two.  After that I resolved to stay off the phone.

The internet was but a dream then and even letters caught my parents’ careful scrutiny.  I received one from a college pal spending the semester abroad.  “Look at the stamp!” he’d hastily scrawled on the back of the envelope.  I did.  In fact all of us did.  It pictured a pair of colorful ships in an azure harbor.  My parents thought he was smuggling drugs.  I did my utmost to collect the mail after that.

Work and school required long drives as we lived in the middle of the country.  Sleepless and lonely, I’d imagine pushing pedal to floor as I rounded a corner, sending the car fast and straight into a tree.  It would have meant no more worries about having enough money to move out as scheduled.  No more nights in the bakery followed by early mornings spent with the family.  And if I were dead I could sleep.

But S. and I scheduled lunch on that last day of class and as we ate spaghetti and drank diet soda (or perhaps she was enjoying her signature drink, water), I talked.  I don’t recall her speaking a word, although politeness (and my bites of pasta) must have allowed her to offer up a few thoughts.  I’m not sure the mid-day meal without wine loosed my lips enough to admit all the ugliness of the summer, but it didn’t really matter.  It was such a relief just to talk, to talk to someone who didn’t judge me or hurt me or subtly hate me.  It might be too much to say that S. saved my life, but perhaps not.  At the very least she helped me keep hold long enough to get out of that house.

“Were we the last generation able to lose track of each other for decades at a time?” she wondered recently after I’d tracked her down on Facebook and we met for another lunch, only eighteen years after the previous one.  It’s certainly easier to avoid this fate now.  Everyone’s got a cell phone; numbers don’t go bad just because we change towns or jobs.  Everyone’s googleable.  There’s really no excuse now not to stay in touch.

I won’t make the same mistake with S. again.