Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  I had not spent a fall in Freeville since leaving for college thirty years before. Now I watched out my window as the teachers from the primary school led their students single-file through the village for their annual walk to Toads ice cream shack before Kathy shuttered it for the winter. I emptied out the leggy geraniums from my porch boxes and put my bike into the shed. As autumn slid past, I could feel myself changing seasons, too. It was like an exhale. I was settling in.

  I spent my forty-eighth birthday raking leaves into giant piles. That night I took my mother to the annual Election Day turkey dinner at the church. She was using a walker now, but so was everyone else at the dinner. I remembered a time when I was surrounded by children, messing with fold-up umbrella strollers, car seats, blankies, and binkies. My sisters’ kids and my own roamed in a pack during holidays and summers. Now I was surrounded by old people, and the dynamic was startlingly similar: driving people around, fussing with equipment, obsessing over food choices, and making sure scarves and mittens were accounted for.

  There in the basement, across steaming bowls of Methodist mashed potatoes, I saw Bruno. Now he was bald and clean shaven, with a fringe of close-cropped white-flecked gray hair along the sides.

  Women of a certain age divide our definition of handsome men into two categories: Ed Harris or Sam Shepard. If a handsome man has hair, he is Sam Shepard. Bruno was Ed Harris, with notes of Liam Neeson. He was helping his mother with her coat. He caught my eye. A wave and a nod. A look of recognition: Hi. It’s Tuesday. We Are Here with Our Mothers.

  It was not yet time for us to meet.

  I was single for most of my adult life, and during that time I pondered long and hard the universal questions every long-term singleton asks:

  Is it really like everybody says, that if I stop looking, my partner will suddenly appear?

  Is that guaranteed, or is that something people just say after the fact because they don’t want to reveal themselves to have been lonely, needy, pathetic, and searching?

  Can I stop wanting and expecting love and yet at the same time (down deep) really want and expect love?

  If I purposely and intentionally stop wanting and expecting love in order to make love appear, aren’t I just gaming the system? Will the karmic wheel in the great game show of romance land on the Kenmore side-by-side washer/dryer, or will it reward me with the Brand-New Car?

  Do I need to double down and be more intentional about everything? Be more declarative and confident about it all?

  Do I need updating or improving? Can everyone tell I bought this jacket in 1989?

  Have I become so quirky that what used to be endearing and adorable is now a spinsterish turnoff?

  Was I ever really endearing or adorable?

  If I really am such a catch, then why are the only people who tell me this my gay friends and my mom?

  Which Golden Girl am I?

  You wake up one day and realize with sudden clarity that every single professional athlete, and many of the coaches, are younger than you are. The majority of the cabinet of the United States government is younger than you are. The president of the United States was graduating from law school the same year you had a baby. You are almost old enough to be Jimmy Fallon’s mom.

  Aging makes it harder to meet appropriate people, but there is also an easing, a comfort, and a surrender to the reality of who you are and what you are about. In addition, because I both like to be alone and am frequently surrounded by family, I have never felt the urgent need for company.

  My daughter might have had other plans. The very last thing Emily had said to me after I left her at college was both an admonition and a permission. She knocked on the driver’s side window just as I was about to pull away from campus: “It’s called Match.com, Mom. You just type in your zip code, and a list of guys pops up.” In the quiet evenings that fall, I typed in Freeville’s zip code, and the available men who popped up all looked frighteningly familiar. They were guys I had gone to high school with, ex-husbands of girls I had gone to high school with, lonely adjunct professors from Cornell or Cortland State, and truckers posed next to their motorcycles. I tabled my search and decided that if I was to meet him—whoever he was—then he would have to come to me.

  Chapter Six

  Meeting Mr. Darcy

  Looking into Emily’s bedroom in the mornings on my way down to make coffee, the tiny room was just as she had left it. In the time I had owned the house on Main Street, she and I had moved three times and changed cities twice. Her other bedrooms in Washington and Chicago kept pace with the change and growth in her life. This was the only place that had been a constant for her since the age of four.

  Tacked onto the cheap sound-conducting plasterboard walls were pictures from camp, Harry Potter memorabilia, and several “newspapers” her father had hand-made to celebrate various accomplishments in her life, featuring photos and hand-lettered headlines with charming mock news stories starring her. During summers, Emily and I both had the habit of starting our mornings by reading in bed. All through high school vacations, I would peek into her room in the morning and find her awake and reading or doing sudoku puzzles in pen. Unlike my taste in books, Emily’s was both broad and deep. She had graduated from Harry Potter to Trollope, lying in her creaky spool bed in her little bedroom. I considered this to be the place where she had grown up, and now I wanted to ready it for the next phase of her—but mainly my—life.

  I don’t think I would suggest in my advice column for a middle-aged singleton to shelve her romantic yearnings to focus instead on a house renovation, and yet that is what I decided to do. My house attachments have always been almost as strong as my romances; my house-proud mother often said that while people sometimes let her down, her house never had. Like much of Jane’s wisdom, this seemed both practical and true. My fantasies about meeting a partner started to morph into a dream about making my house bigger and more beautiful.

  Much time in my cowboy office was now spent imagining how great it would be to push out the back of my house, just a few feet. I wanted an upstairs sleeping porch overhanging a screened-in area off the kitchen. During our regular Wednesday morning breakfasts with my mother, aunts, and sisters at the Queen Diner, I drew my plan on a napkin. “You should call Bruno,” Rachel said. A few weeks later, Bruno’s brother Jacques came to my house one night with a group of friends from high school. When I detailed my plans to him, he also said, “You should call Bruno.”

  Given his reputation as a designer and builder, I thought Bruno was probably too good for my little renovation project. But I called him anyway. Soon after catching his eye at the Election Day turkey dinner, I left a message at his office. He didn’t call back.

  Just before Thanksgiving, Rachel and I went to Ithaca to see my nephew Jack sing with a regional children’s chorus. In our musical family, Jack was particularly talented. He had inherited Jane’s perfect pitch, and with his blond curls, he both looked and sang like an angel. Rachel and I sat next to each other in the pew at the Unitarian church wiping tears away. I nudged her. “This is why I came home,” I said.

  “I know,” she whispered.

  During the intermission, we ran into Bruno. Two of his daughters were also in the choir. I told him I had left a message about my house renovation, but he’d never called me back. He laughed. “Sorry.”

  I sidled in for a hug and noticed that I fit nicely under his armpit. He took out a mechanical pencil, wrote my cell number on the back of his business card, and put it in his pocket. When Rachel and I took our seats again, I could feel him looking down at me from the balcony. I found it hard to concentrate.

  I was at the Bright Day Laundromat doing my whites when Bruno called me. He said he was going to be in the village, and he’d like to stop by and take a look at my house. I threw my sopping sheets into a basket and raced to meet him there.

  Bruno entered my house like John Wayne darkening Maureen O’Hara’s doorway in The Quiet Man. His large silhouette was backlit again
st the open door, and a cyclone of leaves kicked up on the porch behind him. His giant red Chevy pickup truck filled the driveway.

  He came into the house and we shook hands. Tingle. I took him upstairs to show him my plan to push out the back of my house. I noticed the unmade bed and the horrible clutter of my cowboy room. I was wearing the same clothes I was wearing the day before (laundry day), and I’d forgotten to brush my hair. We descended the creaky stairs and he sat on my uncomfortable twig couch. I offered him a cup of warmed-over coffee, which he accepted.

  Bruno and I first met when I was twelve and he was sixteen. I became aware of him when I entered the orbit of his unusual and enormous family. His parents were proto-hippie Dorothy Day Catholics who farmed a ramshackle 225-acre place they called Maryhill Farm, three miles from our own falling-down farm.

  Both dairy farms—theirs and ours—were failing enterprises but for almost opposite reasons. My father white-knuckled his way through the early 1970s farming crisis by doubling down on his debt and drinking at roadside gin mills after the evening milking with men named “Speed” and “Rusty.” My old man supplemented his passion for farming by working on construction sites during the day. Bruno’s father, Norbert, was an educated and erudite World War Two test pilot, philosopher, and dreamer. Born to wealth in an illustrious family of architects and designers, Mr. Schickel built and developed apartment properties in Ithaca. He kept the dairy farm as a way to give his thirteen children character.

  The Schickels’ farming operation didn’t necessarily work out so well—though they somehow kept it going for forty years—but the character part took root. All of the children had been homeschooled by their mother until sixth grade, when they hopped the Greyhound bus for their daily commute to St. Mary’s in Cortland, fifteen miles away. By the time they entered our local high school, their legend had preceded them. The eight Schickel boys were all big, good-looking, athletic, weirdly named, and—due to their prior isolation and innocence of the communal dark knowledge of high school society—they didn’t seem to care what other people thought of them.

  Bruno and two of his older brothers, Sarto and Norbert, entered our high school as upperclassmen, when St. Mary’s shut down its upper grades. They were a sensation in their cutoff jean shorts, T-shirts, shit-kicker boots, and flowing silky Jesus hair. My older sister Rachel (also beautiful, with flowing flaxen hair) immediately started dating Bruno’s older brother. For the entire summer before I entered eighth grade, Rachel took me and Anne over the hill to Maryhill Farm almost every day. I was Rachel’s tagalong and romantic beard so she could hang out with her boyfriend. I knew this, but I didn’t care because I liked being there.

  Bruno was a blur. Though he was only sixteen, he seemed like a grown man to me. He ran the family’s farm operation—he started overseeing his elder brothers and the hired help on the farm when he was a bossy nine-year-old. As a rawboned teenager, Bruno always seemed to be leaping onto or off of a tractor, pitching apples at a wayward kid, pointing out things to do, and yelling. I remember hiding from him because I was afraid he’d find a job for me.

  I spent the summer of my twelfth year diving into the farm’s pond and trying to teach Bruno’s younger siblings (three of them were around my age) synchronized swimming moves and show tunes. Unfortunately, the only song this cloistered and very Catholic family seemed to know was “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain,” a song whose jauntiness cannot make up for the fact that it is really just a song about waiting. Even at the age of twelve, I already knew that she would never actually make it ’round the mountain driving her six white horses, but the Schickel kids had not been acculturated to anything recognizable. They seemed to exist in a bubble of perpetual curiosity about things I was born knowing, such as the lyrics to the Carole King songbook and the punch lines to Laugh-In.

  The family had no radio but did have a tiny black-and-white television, purchased just before John Glenn orbited the earth. It lived in a closet and was brought out only for momentous occasions, such as papal visits and Richard Nixon’s resignation. Their only discernible technology was an old record player that played two records: an old Spike Jones 78 and a Bob Dylan album. One teenage sister eventually smashed the Spike Jones record in a fit of cultural rage (and I stand with her on this). After that, they were left with only Dylan, the indestructible troubadour. At Maryhill Farm, the answer always seemed to be blowing in the wind.

  Mrs. Schickel ran an open household. Every night after chores, around twenty people crowded on benches around their long table. Dinners resembled a cross between a food riot during the French Revolution and a current-events seminar. They prayed before eating and hollered at each other throughout. Their house was a haven for neighbors (the closest also had thirteen kids), cousins, long-term visitors from other states, hippies passing through, and runaways with nowhere else to go. Although I was none of these things, I was also harboring my own secret: My father had just left our family, our cows had been sold, and the contents of our barn auctioned off; our way of life was gone, my mother was sad and searching, and I was completely at sea.

  In the evenings at dusk, my mother would pick us up at Maryhill Farm. I would find her waiting in the Schickels’ driveway with the engine running in her brown Duster. Then we would return to our newly quiet house and hollowed-out world.

  Bruno played football in the fall and basketball in the winter. He once refused to play a whole season of basketball when the coach told him to cut his hair. He wasn’t the only teen I knew who seemed to feel the secret to his power resided Samson-like in his tresses, but his stance was notable—there weren’t many boys who stood up to Coach Smith. The Schickels were on the vanguard of the hair wars. Their parents seemed not to care in the slightest how long their sons’ hair grew, while my father would roll down the window in his pickup truck and wolf-whistle at any boy he saw sporting hair below his ears (including my own brother). “Hey there, princess!” he’d call.

  Throughout high school, Bruno and I circulated in our own orbits, only occasionally intersecting. I was a cheerleader on the sidelines during the legendary undefeated 1973 football season, when Bruno shoved his football helmet over his Comanche braids (he wore the coach down) and knocked a lot of opposing players over. Bruno and I had a nodding acquaintance in the high school hallway as I came into my own, stuffing down my own sadness and running myself ragged as I raced through high school—always on my way to a meeting, practice, rehearsal, or game. With no cows in the barn and no evening chores to go home to, I devoted myself to every after-school activity I could find: field hockey and cheerleading through the fall and winter, and band, chorus, and the school musical in the spring.

  The year Bruno graduated, Rachel did as well and headed to college. Anne left for Europe as an exchange student, and Charlie went into the Navy. Practically overnight, Jane and I were left alone. She would come home after her job as a typist at Cornell University’s College of Engineering and lie down on her bed, still wearing her coat and holding her purse. After about a half hour she would get up, take off her coat, and make dinner for the two of us.

  My mother and I rattled around in our old house. I couldn’t bring myself to pull open the heavy doors leading to our now-empty barn, a place I had always loved. Our enormous and beautiful barn stood just at the edge of my periphery. It was a worn wooden palace to a faraway life. The only livestock we had left was a small tribe of barn cats, who with their black-and-white markings were a mocking reminder of the Holsteins we had surrendered. By day, our big red barn merely looked massive and forlorn, but at night it loomed like a leviathan outside my bedroom window. Its dark and brooding outline interrupted the passage of the stars against the night sky. I couldn’t wait to get myself to college.

  Bruno stayed home. After high school, he stopped running the family farm and turned the job over to a succession of younger brothers and then on to his sister Ruth. Bruno took a job as a carpenter and laborer for a local construction company and continued to live w
ith his parents, siblings, and assorted others in their rambling farmhouse. Mrs. Schickel got up at six o’clock each morning to make Bruno’s coffee and braid his hair before he headed to the job site.

  These worn memories came flooding back to me as Bruno sat in my living room, reviewing my renovation and sipping his coffee. Bruno’s braid was long gone. He was starting to resemble his father. He now owned his own construction company. I had seen his signs in front of handsome houses and construction sites around the county. As I pondered my house’s prospects, I wondered if I could afford him.

  Bruno drew a diagram of my renovation plan on the back of my utility bill, which he had lifted from the coffee table. He pointed out that my house was old and small. He said the renovation would cost more than the house was worth. He didn’t think it would be a good idea to renovate a house with so little promise. He said if I wanted a bigger house, I should probably just move. He earnestly made eye contact. I tried to think of a word for the blue of his eyes. I decided their unique hue was somewhere between that of a Tiffany box and a June sky. I remembered how he looked in his shiny tiny nylon basketball shorts in high school, back in the ’70s before basketball shorts started looking like knee-length culottes. This was what I was thinking about while Bruno was describing why he was turning down my renovation.