“Here, have a sip—for me.” Glenn tilted his beer toward my face.
“Quit already.” I pushed his glass away. “Watch the game.” The celebrated Ozzie Smith saved my day, cracking his bat against a fierce pitch for a bases-loaded home run. Glenn jumped up with the rest of the crowd, losing half his Bud. “Whoo Hoo!” he yelled, not noticing the spill. I clapped politely, out for the fresh air with Glenn, caring less who won or lost.
* * *
The Arch grounds on the St. Louis riverfront became as familiar as our own backyard. We walked the Mississippi often, strolling through Gateway Park, ending up on the landing of riverside bars for cheap burgers and a view of barges passing. These outings were breaks from the rigors of coursework, Glenn barely scraping by. If Socializing 401 was a course, Glenn would have it mastered, an A+.
On the Fourth of July, settled three feet from the Mississippi on riverfront cobblestones, we sat, lost among the masses of the VP Fair, waiting for fireworks to explode overhead. The annual Veiled Prophet Fair was so veiled that most people didn’t even know of its social-elite roots, or what the VP stood for. To most people it was a chance to publicly support the beverage industry, enjoy live music, and oooh and aaaah over state-of-the-art military aircraft performing their maneuvers—something for everyone. Red, white, and blue tents dotted the Arch grounds while sweaty hoards mingled in between.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Glenn said, giving my hand a gentle squeeze. I leaned into him, then we publicly kissed. It wasn’t a plain ole peck. It was soft, and long, and meant something. I pulled back and saw into the same eyes I had fallen into six months before. I love you was on my lips and in my eyes as I searched the depths of his. “Do you want to say something?” Glenn asked, softly.
“No,” I whispered. My oral answer was a half lie. I wanted to let my heart out, and had wanted to on many occasions. But my intuition told me he wasn’t ready to hear it. He got the unspoken message anyway, reciprocating with the same stealth sentiment. My heart knew.
We lay together on the stone beneath us and watched fireworks burst into a thousand shooting stars directly overhead. Boom. Hot color crackled, raining down on us until it was nothing. More thunder. Kaleidoscope sparks filled the sky. Oblivious to the throng of jubilants, we celebrated not Independence Day, but a day of our own.
That night, a weeknight, sleeping alone in my own apartment was not even a remote possibility. The next morning I showered at his place. The next night I stayed again. Two in a row. It was a secure place. Cuddled up with Glenn, having the enjoyment of us as a unit, I said, “I love you.”
“Is that what you wanted to say last night?” Glenn smiled warmly.
“Yeah.” I savored the openness. “Is that what you wanted to say?”
“Yeah,” Glenn said, holding me tighter.
* * *
Glenn went out of town that weekend. A long-planned fishing trip with the guys. “I’ll see you Sunday when I get home.” This time I got a lingering kiss that spelled out how much he’d miss me.
Each time I walked past his door, I looked to see if he was home, even though I knew he was not. I thought, my other half lives there. Pride swelled within. Practical reasons for missing Glenn surfaced as well, as they did every time he was gone. I needed a few things over the weekend—mixing bowl, cocoa mix, etcetera—all of which were in Glenn’s locked apartment. He had turned down my previous requests for his key, and I knew the space he had needed, but this time would be different.
“What do you want for supper?” I asked, when he came home, helping him put fishing gear away.
“Anything will be fine.” I made salad and quesadillas.
“I wanted to fix this last night,” I said between mouthfuls, “But my skillet and peeler were over here. And so were the tortillas. I ended up eating cereal for dinner.” Glenn kept eating, listening to the television with one ear and me with the other. “So, I was wondering if I could have your apartment key so when you are gone, I don’t have to go scrounging around for something to eat and something to cook it on, when my own food is right next door. Besides,” I said, twisting my hair, trying to gauge his expression, “my roommates are noisy and it’s more comfortable studying at your place where it’s quiet.” Glenn went to his top-right desk drawer and pulled out the spare key.
“It’s yours,” he said, no resistance. My happy meter registered one tick below an engagement ring. I could come and go at will. A restriction lifted. A righted path.
We had a carnal dessert against a backdrop of television news. I wrapped myself in my robe and lounged the rest of the evening. “You ready for bed?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Glenn stayed in his chair a minute rather than getting up right away. “I like to sleep by myself. It’s more comfortable. More room.” He had gotten a king-sized bed two months before. Was it not big enough? How could it possibly not be big enough for two? He had reduced me from elated, key-bearing girlfriend to tramp within moments. Protective thoughts elevated me enough to scrape by with a shred of dignity. I overstepped my bounds. I’m too pushy. He’s not over his hurt. He needs space.
I went home.
* * *
Overnight stays remained for weekends only. Glenn’s unwritten rule. I was sure if I followed the rules, more of what I wanted would come. Patience. And the patience paid off.
The rest of the summer and fall carried our relationship balanced on the precipice of uttered love. I told myself he loved me. Glenn only said it once. At least, I think he said it once. Then there was the time we spent the weekend with his out-of-town friends, Jason and Lori, at their place.
“Jason is a complete idiot,” Glenn said to me. “Lori is such a nice lady, but he won’t give her a ring. He’s cheated on her before too, just because he’s scared—and I don’t agree with that. I told him he should just settle down and marry her. It’s not right that he lets her live with him, but won’t propose. She’s good for him.”
“Is he good for her?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Glenn said without conviction. Glenn and Jason hadn’t seen each other in four months, the one and only time I had met him.
“We need a guys night out,” Glenn announced. He gave me forty dollars, a loving gesture that spoke volumes for me. My video-store job didn’t make ends meet. Loans made up the difference. Glenn’s intermittent side jobs raked in more than my pittance of a regular wage. “You girls go shopping. Have a good time,” he said to Lori and me. I felt taken care of. Lori and I went out, talking girl talk like new swept-away brides.
“This is the first time Glenn’s ever given me money.”
“Jason’s done that before—for groceries, and the bills and stuff.” While happy for her and knowing there were men who still did chivalrous things, my envy sprouted.
“How long have you been dating?”
“A year,” Lori said. Maybe in another few months we’d be as far down the dating road as they were. “Glenn really likes you. He talks about you a lot.”
“He does?”
“Mmm hmm.” Lori nodded while sipping her soda. I felt like she was my new best friend. We had things in common.
“Has Jason ever made you cry?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said without elaborating.
“Glenn’s made me cry too.”
“It’s what guys do,” she said, like it was as normal as having disagreements. We walked into a mall department store, where a new jacket caught my eye. Sixty dollars. My old jacket had holes in the seams where the stuffing poked through. I bought the coat on credit, knowing I had Glenn’s forty and another twenty-three days to come up with the rest. I felt giddy, letting down my guard and splurging on something I didn’t already have money in the bank for.
The guys were waiting for us when we got home. “You buy the whole mall?” Glenn joked.
“No, I just got this!” I put on the new jacket, modeled it.
“Nice.” Glenn’s face lit up.
“Thanks. You bought it,” I sa
id. Jason handed Glenn another beer and offered already opened wine coolers to Lori and me.
We played cards until one-thirty. Jason sat close to Lori all night, playing with her hair. “You can sleep in our bed,” Jason said. “We’ll sleep out here.” He patted the sofa, which had a bed folded inside.
We settled into Jason’s bed. “You picked out a nice coat.” Glenn ran his hand down my arm, then my bare leg under the covers.
“It cost sixty dollars, but I got it anyway.”
“Good.” Glenn relished when I lived at my outer edge. He rewarded my drift out of bounds. “I’ll give you the rest.” My sense that I was cared for and loved deepened with the unexpected offer. I brought his palm back to my leg, then his hand roamed. Together with Glenn’s thoughtfulness, the excitement of being away, by ourselves, in a strange bed and in the dark, led to enticing wet kisses and passionate congress—love filled passion, not the longing or lust-fueled heat that had been our norm.
“I love you,” I said, feeling loved myself.
“I love you too.” Glenn breathed down my neck. His words excited my mind, further igniting the sheets. “Do you have a sock?” Glenn whispered, spent. I giggled, absorbing the predicament of not having ready access to a bathroom for washing up. Reaching aside the bed to the floor, I grabbed Glenn’s dirty white crew sock and my underwear.
“Here.” I handed Glenn the sock to clean himself. “Do you think they mind?” I whispered. “Think they heard anything?” I said, pulling my undies back on so I wouldn’t leak all over their bed.
“Who cares?” Glenn said, holding me tight.
* * *
Thanksgiving was the first time I met Glenn’s folks. His parents weren’t the unapproachable, out-of-touch fossils he made them out to be.
“We were surprised when Glenn told us he was bringing a friend for Thanksgiving dinner this year,” Mrs. Conroy said. “I asked him a couple of weeks ago and he said he’d be coming alone.”
“Mom, don’t go there.” Glenn said, trying to stop her thought.
“Then a few days ago he called and said to set another plate. You’re a friend from school?” I wanted to say ‘yeah, I’ve been sleeping with him since our first semester. I’m his girlfriend.’
“Camryn lives in the apartment next door. We’ve known each other for a while,” Glenn explained. Lame. I skewered my turkey silently, carving it to bits. He turned to me. “I thought you were going home for Thanksgiving.” The fact is that I had specifically mentioned staying to work the long weekend, but refrained from saying why. Glenn never gave me the rest of the money for my coat. He must have forgotten, and I chose not to remind him.
“Oh, I’m glad you could make it. It’s no fun spending a holiday alone,” Glenn’s mom said.
“Thanks for having me,” I said, politely. I shot a bewildered glare Glenn’s way.
* * *
“Why didn’t you tell them about me?” I asked, hurting on the inside as we drove home.
“My mom asks too many questions. She pries, and I didn’t want to deal with that.” Avoidance of prying parents was something I understood, but his answer hinted a flavor of excuse. I told myself not to be so sensitive, while I swallowed his response, holding my nose.
* * *
By Christmastime I had an open invitation to holiday festivities with Glenn’s family, but I had already made plans to spend winter break with Karla. I hadn’t seen her in three years. Glenn dropped me off at the airport. My excitement at seeing Karla trumped the sadness I had with leaving Glenn.
As we pulled into the parking lot, Glenn surprised me with a velvet box tied up with a bow. “Here, I got something for you. For Christmas.” Excited, I stripped off the bow to reveal a pearl and diamond necklace.
“Thank you,” I said, putting it on. It was the type of necklace worn for special occasions now and then, not one to have with you always, day and night. The callow side of me wished it was a diamond ring. I stuffed my disappointment away, admonishing myself for not being satisfied with what I got.
“You like it?”
“It’s pretty,” I said, pulling it away from my chest to admire. I leaned over and kissed him.
“Call me when you get there,” he said, concerned for my safety.
His kiss goodbye was hungry and he purposely bulged his eyes out of his head when he said, “I’ll miss you,” as he looked down toward my necklace. I hoped he was feasting his eyes on the gold finery and not lusting the objects just below. My mind zeroed in on the adornment. He would not have given me such an expensive gift if mere lust motivated him.
“If there’s no plane crash on the news, then you’ll know I got there.” He screwed up his face and exhaled.
“Call me anyway. I’ll worry.”
“Okay,” I said, only to placate, not to please him.
* * *
“Glenn?” I spoke into the phone as soon as I settled in at Karla’s. “I’m here,” I said dutifully. “Safe and sound.”
“I miss you already, you know,” Glenn said. The same butterflies that danced in my stomach the first few weeks we had met cut loose again. “I forgot to tell you Merry Christmas before you left, so, Merry Christmas.”
I felt a new, tender sweetness that drew me in.
“Merry Christmas,” I returned softly.
“I’ll be at my folks on Christmas Day and probably won’t be able to call you.”
My gut had an uneasy reaction, but accepted his comment.
“I love you,” he said. The butterflies bounced off the walls, feasting on the new information, which cured my nausea.
“I love you too,” I said, dancing around the room, winding and unwinding myself in the telephone cord. We hung up and I bounced up and down, ecstatic over hearing his declaration of love. It had been three months since he last said it or freed me to speak the words aloud. My patience had been rewarded again.
“What’s your problem?” Karla belted out. “Someone slip you a happy pill on the plane?”
“Glenn said he loves me!”
“Duh. He wouldn’t have given you that kick-ass necklace if he didn’t.”
“But he never says it.”
“Some guys are just like that.”
I didn’t share the divorce information, or his age, or how much I helped him with school, or the fact that I lived at his place, but not really, or the detail about his idea of fun intersecting a small fraction of mine. I didn’t offer those things up to Karla’s, or anyone’s scrutiny. I threw that cargo out as soon as it hit the dock, so it wouldn’t clutter my world.
* * *
Christmas Day came and went with no phone call from Glenn.
“Yeah.” Karla droned into the phone, answering it as though the incoming call was a nuisance. “It’s for you.” She handed me the receiver. My internal giddiness barely contained itself. I was sure Glenn finally had called.
“Hello,” I said with a playful smile.
“Hi, Camryn. It’s Louisa from work.” Confusion set in. Why would work be calling me on Christmas vacation? “I needed to let you know that we’ve had a few problems and we’ve closed the store.”
“What?” I said, stunned and unsure of the implications.
“I thought you’d need to know so you can start looking for another job.”
“You mean I have no job to go back to?” What am I going to do? raced all through my mind. It felt like punishment for splurging on a Christmas trip to visit my sister when I should have saved the money for this rainy day. No, I should have saved the money for this torrential downpour of total job loss, which made my paycheck-to-paycheck existence, seem like a mere sprinkle.
While Karla did her best to cheer me, my first thought was to turn to Glenn for solace. I called, telling him the news.
“Yeah, they called here, but I didn’t know what they wanted. I gave them Karla’s number.”
“Oh, so that’s how they got it. I wondered.”
“How was your Christmas?” Glenn asked, as if
the urgent news wasn’t so urgent.
“Sucks now,” I said, fiddling with the phone cord.
“You’ll find another job.”
“Where?”
“You could wait tables at PT’s.” His voice didn’t let on whether he was serious or joking. “I’d come to your table at work. You could wait on me. I’d cum at home too.”
“You’re so funny.” Sarcasm and hurt feelings pushed out the words.
“I’m serious. I miss you,” he said, longing in his voice.
“I’ll see you when I get home. Pick me up?” I asked.
“Your flight gets in at two-thirty, right?”
“Right.”
“I’ll be there—with a surprise,” Glenn teased.
“What kind of surprise?”
“You’ll see,” he said, mischief in his voice.
CHAPTER 16
“Waiting for marriage isn’t the most important, it’s waiting for the person who loves you just the way you are, the person who loves who you are, not the person they want you to be or the person they have pressured you to become.”
—Megan’s Grandma
Dear Megan,
How were your holidays? Mine started out pretty good. Glenn gave me a necklace just before I left to spend Christmas with my sister in Savannah, Georgia. He told me he loved me, thrilling me to no end.
After the initial positive start to the holiday, it quickly turned into the Christmas from hell. I had a great time with Karla, but while there, I got a call from my boss telling me they had gone out of business and I had no job to come back to. Talk about disrupting my life. I turned to Glenn for support, but he kind of acted like my not having a job was a non-issue and if I needed a job bad enough I could work at the local strip club as a waitress. He thought it would be more fun to visit me at work there than in a store. Give me a break. He told me he’d have a surprise for me when I got home from my vacation. I was imagining flowers or a nice dinner or even a respectable job lined up for me. Know what his surprise was? A negligee. He had it with him in the car when he picked me up from the airport and wanted me to put it on as we drove down I-70. I refused and then he told me that I should loosen up and live a little, that I was being boring. So then I felt bad, and well . . . he whisked me up the stairs when we got home so he could give me my ‘real’ Christmas present. He couldn’t even wait to get to the bedroom. ‘Brutalize’ is what he calls it and seems to think it is all fun and games. Sometimes I wonder if he really does love me. In any case, he had been buying most of the groceries, so he helped me out that way. If he’d only let me live with him, it would save us a lot of money. I still haven’t found a new job. It’s been a month. Instead of succumbing to waiting tables at PT’s, I went down to public aid and applied for the food stamps Jo’s friend, Charmaine, clued me in on. Shortly after I got my first book of stamps, Glenn and I were at a happy hour. I sat there waiting for Glenn to pay and he had this annoyed look on his face, so I asked him what the deal was. He says he’s been paying for everything for the last month and now that I got food stamps, I should be paying and also buy the groceries for a while. I explained to him right there at the bar, tears streaming down my face, that he’s the one who buys three beers to my one soda every time we go out, that we used to alternate paying when I had a job, that he still has income, AND that he doesn’t have to pay his own way through college. He felt bad after that, paid the bill and was very nice the whole rest of the evening. But the next time we went shopping together and he loaded the cart with chips and steak rather than PB&J, he expected me to whip out the food stamps because it was ‘free money.’ Ugh! I just let it go and paid. I didn’t want to get into it in the middle of the grocery store.
Love, Carry My Bags Page 21