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Caught by His DadIt was all about sex. And it was nothing at all about
sex. I was a statistician. Does it surprise you? He was like a statue. Just taller than me, curly brown hair, big cowboy smile (his father, in fact, was Jefferson County Cattleman of the Year for several years running), barrel-chested, could pick me up and swing me around like nothin'. My mother's sex education speech (since she knew there wasn't much I hadn't figured out already) went something like, "I had sex four times, then I had you. Don't do anything stupid." Needless to say, there was no problem with notes to the doctor and the like. I am a sucker, I think, for anyone who gives me even the illusion that I'm in control of a given situation. I mean, there we were, parked on the lip of a canyon in a red 1963 Chevy Impala in the springtime with the stars above and the lake below, with us half-undressed and him all of a sudden sitting up, looking me in the eye and really calmly saying, "We don't have to do this if you don't want to." My mother took me aside months later and said, "Honey, I don't want to disappoint you, but if it hasn't happened yet, it's not going to." "You wanted me to tell you?!" ... I guess she
did. His parents were Southern Baptists, back when I was a Southern Baptist. But their kind of religion left me feeling like the whore of Babylon which, looking back, I suppose I was. It seems a sort of miracle to me anyway that they let me come stay with them on random weekends and during the summer. I mean, really. Every room in the house but theirs. The barn, the truck, the guest-house. We had to go to church with them of course, which led to the one close call. He said one morning in passing: "Tell them you can't find your socks." I yelled, "I can't find my socks!" "Well, you kids hurry up and get down there, you hear?" "We will! We'll be right along!" We weren't of course. They figured it out half a mile down the road and came back to get us. His father despised me before that, though, I swear. We worked a lot that summer -- running irrigation pipe and bucking hay. I pitched a bale (not much lighter than me) over my head once because his dad made a crack about me being eggheaded and citified. I don't think my back has been the same since, which serves me right. We read Bobsey Twins books out of a trunk in his grandparents' barn, then went in for toast and homemade huckleberry jelly. The mule and the black angus cow never stopped braying and bellowing, not ever. We saw each other through my first year of college. Then he worked for awhile fighting fires for the forest service. We lose touch and regain it with a comforting regularity. I invite him to all the momentous parties. He came to my moving-away-from-Portland party. He came to my wedding in '91. I invited his parents to the wedding -- she said she wanted to come, but there was a hazelnut-growers' convention they had to go to. We talked for 20 minutes or so -- I was finishing up the hem on my dress so I "had to go." It's one of my biggest regrets -- that I didn't talk to her longer. They were killed not long after -- victims of their own goodness and trust in their fellow man. It's in the papers, you can still read about it. I will never forget that that's how it came about. Later, he had aneurysms. I went to see him in the ICU with varicolored tubes coming out from all over. Face all swollen up, but still laughing. Still smiling that smile. He emailed me photos of his sister's new baby on Christmas. Guess it's about time to write back.
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