At age sixteen I began writing in a journal. The
first entry tells of going to the Rose Parade on New Years Eve in 1969, with
Jimmy, we were juniors in high school. It felt brazen to cuddle all night in a
sleeping bag on the street corner, waiting. But what we found together was friendship, both of us, not romance.
On March 24 I wrote, “Yippee, Luke came over.” That night Jimmy came over too and my friend Sherry was with him, they had begun going out. We double dated, finishing at Houdini’s Castle in the Hollywood hills. The caretaker’s hot breathed dogs met us ten feet from the mansion, snarling. Luke grabbed my hand, we ran fast, my fingernails gripping into his palm.
Luke thought I was special, it showed in his eyes, but he kept me guessing. He’d arrive at my house unannounced; we fell into a long day lasting into the night. Then for the next few days or a week he stayed away, never calling, and then he’d drop by again. Thrilled and demoralized, to keep my heart locked away from him I dated others, lots of others. Luke didn’t date anyone.
March 12, 1971, I wrote, “Had a
wreck.” It means Jimmy and I ditched school to go skiing, got into a car wreck,
rolled his VW. Almost getting killed together gave us a sturdy bond. In
friendship I was kind of hoping he would ask me to the Senior Prom. He didn’t, he
asked my friend Peggy. So I asked my friend Michael to go with me.
In the fall Luke began film school at Cal Arts. I
left for college and began perfecting my dating career until I met Richard. He
had shoulder length black hair and smelled of Patchouli. We slept together for
my first time. July 8 is the day I got pregnant. Code words record this in my journal.
Jump cut. July 1973 tells of moving to a cabin in the
mountains where I lived alone all summer. Luke visited once. The day is logged
only by a drawing of a yellow sun. I remember my brown bikini, my darker brown
skin. Luke’s eyes, skimming my stomach, his hands, never
touching me. By now we both resisted a romance together, biting down hard,
refusing attraction or despair and became “best friends” in a minefield of
platonic love.
My last journal entry is dated December 1973. It
says my parents divorce was final. Our family home was sold. My dog went to live
with the neighbors. I got a full time job and moved into a crummy apartment. Couldn't manage full time work and school, dropped out of college. I was twenty years old.
The following year I met Glenn. Glossy, springy
hair, deepening chestnut in winter, brown-gold in summer, changeable like his
personality. He opened his life to me, a fixation of love soaring high, crashing low. Three years later we married.
I read my journal for the first time in 1991. My husband and I had been married for fifteen years, and our seven-year-old son had a
brain tumor. Luke was still one of my best friends and I still had to reach into
that field of mysterious distance to find him.
The morning I sat in the sun, reading my old
journal, it was as if my skull cracked open, spilling out my memories. They
stuck to me like lint on a black dress.
I let the incredible twisting ropes untie in my mind, my heart blared open and for hours I cried. Everyone thought the undertow dragging me down, scrapping me along the bottom, was my son’s brain tumor and most of it was. Yet the years between 1970 and 1973 had stopped around me, like a scene held in a snowy globe.
This is a true story. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
I let the incredible twisting ropes untie in my mind, my heart blared open and for hours I cried. Everyone thought the undertow dragging me down, scrapping me along the bottom, was my son’s brain tumor and most of it was. Yet the years between 1970 and 1973 had stopped around me, like a scene held in a snowy globe.
This is a true story. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
