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4
Somehow I got through the evening of window shopping at the mall and kept up my end of the conversation when Denise and I stopped for a snack. But for once, I couldn't wait to get home and be alone with my whirling memories. During all the years that Bob and I were married, I rarely thought about Michael. He never showed up at the few class reunions I attended and, because Bob and I were happy, might-have-beens had no place in my life.
After Bob's death, I was surprised one day to find myself wondering about Michael. It happened at a low point, before I started trying to pull myself together. I was sitting at the kitchen table in a housecoat, eating a cheese sandwich that I'd thrown together. No lettuce, no tomato, no mayonnaise. I hadn't even sliced the cheese—just pulled off a chunk and stuffed it between two slices of bread. Suddenly, a spasm of self pity jolted me and I was stunned to find myself thinking, if I'd married Michael, I wouldn't be alone now. But just as this idea came into my head, I realized what I was doing to myself. I remember now, my resolve to get on with life began that day. But this new determination didn't stop me from thinking occasionally of Michael.
When we first met, Michael Loring and I were both in our second year at the pharmacy school in Tucson. Only a handful of women studied pharmacy in those days, and I was asked out so often by male students, I could easily have gone to movies or college dances every night in the week. But I lived at home—most young women did in those days—and I was allowed to date only when I had no classes the next day. In our family, that meant only Saturday nights.
Fridays, when the sororities and fraternities partied, we attended synagogue services and then sat down to a sabbath dinner. My mother and father liked to invite out-of-state students to these Friday night dinners, but they reserved this traditional hospitality for Jewish students. And Michael Loring was not Jewish.
In the 1950s, rebellion might mean wearing too much lipstick or staying out until one A.M. when your parents insisted on a midnight curfew, but for most of us, it didn't include intermarriage. When Michael and I started seeing each other, parental objections surfaced.
"We're only going to a movie," I would say. "We're friends. We're in all the same classes. We study together."
But I knew it was more than that, and I'm sure they knew it, too. Michael and I saw each other every day that semester, and we spent hours walking and talking. I had stopped dating anyone else; in the language of the Fifties, we were going steady. Unofficially.
At first, I tried to keep the arguments with my parents from him. Michael called for me every Saturday night, and I was always ready to leave when he arrived at my house. I wanted to minimize the time he spent under my parents' scrutiny. They were so coldly formal, it surprised me that Michael took so long to realize something was wrong.
"Your parents don't like me," he said one evening as we left my house.
At nineteen and not very sophisticated, I didn't know what to answer. "Oh, Michael," I said and burst into tears.
"What is it? Tell me what's wrong."
Michael was only three years older than me, but he had spent two of those years in Korea. He had grown up in Boston where his dad was an attorney, and Michael also might have studied law if the army hadn't made him a medic. So, I'd always considered Michael much more cosmopolitan and mature than I was.
"Tell me," he repeated.
"It's not you; they like you." I took a deep breath and blurted, "It's your religion."
"My religion! They don't even know my religion." We had gotten into his car and were riding along Speedway. "You and I have never even discussed it."
"It doesn't matter what religion. Just that you're not a Jew."
Michael quickly pulled over to the curb and turned to look at me. "I don't understand."
"Jews have very strong feelings about intermarriage," I told him. "In some traditional families, they mourn a child who marries a non-Jew as if he or she had died."
After a long silence, Michael reached over and took me in his arms. We had never talked about marriage before, and I began to be afraid that my frankness would turn him away.
"I don't think either one of us is ready to rush into marriage," he said, caressing my hair. My hair was longer then and lighter, ginger not auburn, and I wore it curled under in a pageboy style. "We both have to graduate first," he added.
"I know that."
"But I do love you, Ruthie. I tried to be patient until you were sure, but I've known my own feelings since the day I met you."
"I am sure," I said. "But it's impossible."
"It's not impossible."
My sadness was overwhelming because I'd known it would be this way. "You don't understand."
"No, I guess I don't. Your parents seem so ... so modern."
"You mean because my father doesn't have a beard or wear a skullcap. Because mother and dad dress like anyone else."
Michael took a deep breath. "Don't link me to that kind of stereotyped thinking. You know better."
I folded my arms on the dashboard and rested my head on them. I couldn't speak. Until now, I hadn't worried about prejudices on Michael's side. I was too absorbed with those of my family.
"Look at me, Ruthie. We have to trust each other to move beyond this problem."
But even though we continued to spend time together until Michael went home that summer, we couldn't get beyond it. And in the fall, he transferred to the pharmacy college at Fordham University in New York.
* * *
I thought about Michael all weekend, between filling scripts at Food Go on Saturday and cleaning my house on Sunday. Will he be at the funeral? How does he fit into Betsy Stokes's life? And even more important, should I tell him who I am?
My mind produced a collage: the young man I'd loved in pharmacy college and the Michael I'd met in the mall Friday night, crow's feet softened at the corners of his eyes, which the harsh artificial light had revealed. I made promises to myself that I had no intention of keeping. Everything I did around the house became compulsively related to Michael: as I cleaned out the garage ... Michael recognized me; as I dusted all the miniblinds ... Michael walked up to me at the funeral home and said ...
This is sick, I told myself, and five minutes later, I was throwing everything that didn't move into the washing machine and imagining another conversation—at the funeral home: Michael walked up to me and took my hand.
"Ruthie," he said in my daydream. "I recognized you the minute I saw you at the mall, but I didn't want to say anything in front of Betsy and your friend."
His eyes were as blue as I remembered them, and in my imaginings, the graying hair I had noticed at the mall was as blond as it had been years before. "I couldn't forget you," he said. "That's why I never married."
I wanted to ask him about Betsy Stokes, but that could wait because Michael was holding my hand. He smiled gently at me, "You look exactly the same as you did in pharmacy school."
The daydream reminded me of the way I felt at my twentieth birthday party when Michael took my hand and told me he was leaving Tucson for good. That bounced me back to reality. Despite my strange state of mind since meeting Michael again, I couldn't avoid the truth of our situation. I was no longer nineteen or twenty and, romantic imaginings aside, it was nonsense to suppose Michael wouldn't know the difference. I tried to comfort myself with the undeniable fact that Michael was also thirty-five years older—but like the musings of the poet Yeats, I knew the folly of being comforted. As brief as our meeting in the mall had been, I could see the same intensity behind the blue eyes and the same energy that had attracted me to Michael all those years ago. But this Michael was seeing a beautiful young blonde, a woman whose husband had just died under suspicious circumstances.
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