I wrote to my parents and told them the good news. They were very pleased. Ted held off telling his parents. Then one Sunday we went to Tacoma for dinner. It was a happy day, but dinner passed without a word about our plans from Ted. About five o’clock, when it was almost time to head back to Seattle, he and his mom disappeared. I knew he must be discussing our marriage plans with her and wondered why I wasn’t included. When they came back in, Mrs. Bundy gave me a hug and said she wished happiness for us, but I had the feeling that she didn’t believe I was good enough for Ted. On the ride home, Ted told me she thought we should wait until he graduated. I thought that was stupid. If we got married now, I could help put Ted through law school. I liked the idea of working toward a goal together.
A few days later at Northgate Mall we passed a jewelry store. “Let’s go in and look at rings,” I suggested.
“What’s the point in looking?” he said. “We can’t afford anything but a plain band. Hell, we probably can’t even afford that.”
“It doesn’t hurt to dream,” I said. We went inside the store, but he looked at watch bands while I looked at rings. When a salesperson came over, Ted wouldn’t say anything. I was getting angry, and he was acting so nervous that I was afraid the jeweler might think we were casing the place. “Let’s go,” I said, trying to control my voice. When we were outside, I said, “Let’s stop at the liquor store and get some Scotch. I could use a drink.” I was scared. I wanted desperately for things to work out as I planned.
A few days later, Ted and I were walking from my office to the parking lot. My parents were coming soon for a visit, and I hoped we would get married while they were here. I told Ted that we should move his clothes out of my closet before they came because I didn’t want them to know that we were practically living together.
Ted thought that was childish. “You’re a grown woman, Liz. You have a daughter of your own and a life of your own. For Godsake, grow up!” When we got to the car, he put his briefcase on the hood, opened the case, took out the marriage license, and said, “If you’re that hung up on what your parents think, then you’re not ready to get married. Let’s forget the whole thing.” He tore the license up in little pieces and threw them on the ground. Then he turned and walked away.
I stared at his back, not believing what had happened. I looked at the pieces of the marriage license on the ground as if they were vomit, sick of myself for pushing and pushing until I had pushed the man I loved right out of my life.
I stopped at the liquor store before I picked Molly up, agonizing because everything I did turned to worms.
I tried to get Molly fed and into bed without her knowing how upset I was. She wanted to know where Ted was. “Busy,” was all I could get out. After she was asleep, I poured myself a drink and sat down to figure out what had happened and what the next step was. I called Angie and unloaded on her.
“Just because Ted doesn’t want to get married doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you,” she said. “The important thing is that you guys are happy together. Who is getting married these days, anyway? When he’s ready, he’ll marry you.” Angie’s words and the Scotch made me feel better.
As I was getting ready for bed, I heard Ted’s key in the lock. I was ashamed that my face was all swollen from crying. I didn’t want him to know how important marriage was to me. If I could be casual about it and act as if it was no big deal, maybe I wouldn’t drive him away.
He came into the bedroom and put his arms around me. “I don’t want to sleep alone tonight,” he said and kissed me on the forehead. “I really do love you.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Coming so close to losing Ted made me realize how very, very much I loved him. I found the idea of working and putting him through law school appealing, but I could understand that taking on family responsibilities before he even started law school might be a real drag for him.
Ted planned to start law school the winter quarter of 1970, but Temple University did not get his transcripts out in time, so he was held up for another quarter. I kept reminding him to check up on his application to be sure everything was in order, but he regarded my reminders as nagging, and whenever I tried to talk about law school, he changed the subject or brushed my questions aside with vague answers. When I began to realize the futility of nagging, I made the decision to shut up about it.
Spring quarter of 1970 started and still no word about law school. “There seems to be some problem with my transcripts from Temple,” Ted told me.
“Why didn’t you call them?” I asked.
“I guess there are other problems,” he said. “It’s too late to do anything about it now.”
I couldn’t figure it out. What other problems? I couldn’t keep from brooding about it. One day I dialed the law school telephone number a couple of times but hung up each time before anyone answered. What could I say?
Finally, I called the admissions office. I began to explain about my friend who was supposed to start law school winter quarter, when I was interrupted by the woman I was speaking to.
“All law school students start at the beginning of fall quarter,” she said. “There are no exceptions.”
There must be some mistake, I told myself. Then it dawned on me whose mistake it was. I was livid by the time Ted showed up at my office to take me home.
“How could you lie to me?” I asked him.
“I am going to start school for sure this summer,” he said, “but I still have two years of undergraduate work left. I can understand if you can’t live with it.”
His calmness made me feel like a raving maniac. He’d lied to me, but hadn’t I lied to him the night we met in the tavern and I told him about making heart valves? But this lie about law school had gone on for six months. I had told everybody I knew about my law student boyfriend. Maybe I had made such a big deal out of it that it was impossible for Ted to tell me the truth. I could understand his wanting to be someone he wasn’t. I had those feelings, too. Maybe I made him feel that he wasn’t good enough as he was. There was no doubt in my mind that he would be a successful lawyer someday; it would just take a little longer than I’d counted on. I wasn’t about to give him up over this.
Ted took classes in the summer quarter and got a part-time job in a medical supply house close to my work. It was a happy time. Some days he’d pick up a submarine sandwich and a quart of beer and join me for lunch on a secluded patch of campus lawn. After work I’d walk over to his job and pick him up, and we’d walk up the Ave, window-shopping. Then we’d pick up Molly at daycare and go to my place and fix dinner. On hot summer days we’d take inner tubes and go swimming at Green Lake before dinner or go wading after it got dark.
We drove to Utah at the end of summer. The Wasatch Mountains were more beautiful than ever. Ted and I went horseback riding in the foothills where I had played as a kid, went fishing in Wyoming with Molly and my parents, and drank beer in local hangouts. One night in Wyoming, Ted put on his cowboy boots and borrowed my dad’s cowboy hat and we walked down the highway to town. Ted couldn’t resist lying down in the middle of the still-warm pavement to celebrate the peace and quiet.
We went back to Seattle, leaving Molly with her grandparents. We spent two weeks going out drinking and dancing. One night, we stopped by a secondhand store run by a friend of Ted’s. The friend was just closing up and invited us into the back of the store where he lived. It was like stepping into the 1930s, with period furniture and dance band records. The pipe and the hash he pulled out brought us back to 1970.
I had smoked dope maybe three times before and had never even got a buzz on. For this people risked being arrested? But this time when I stood up, my legs felt like rubber, I fell against Ted, and we collapsed laughing into an overstuffed chair. Every time we tried to get up, we collapsed, laughing hysterically. We stumbled out the door, tripped, and fell into a big cardboard packing crate. I wanted to sleep there all night, but Ted said we had to go home to make love. Why couldn’t we make love in the pac
king crate? Every time he tried to explain, we would laugh so hard we would cry. The thought of food finally moved us. We went to the hole-in-the-wall cafe on the Ave that was noted for having the greasiest food in Seattle, possibly in the nation. We had ended up like many drunks there, gobbling up greaseburgers to soak up the alcohol.
When the high faded, Ted talked about his friend at the secondhand store. “He’s real stupid taking such chances with dope. He just got paroled from prison.” I was surprised.
“He used to have another store,” Ted explained. “He would break into houses, steal stuff, and sell it in his store. He got caught.”
“How do you know him?” I asked.
“I used to live with him and his girlfriend.”
“When?”
“Just for a couple of months. When I worked for Safeway.” I knew that Ted had stolen some of his textbooks, and soon after we met, he had shown me a new pair of ski boots that he said he had taken from an unlocked display case at the student union building. He was pleased with himself and said that if he hadn’t taken them, someone else would have. Now I wondered if he had been involved with his friend with the secondhand store. It was out of character for Ted, with his law-and-order views, even to know a convicted burglar. Stealing textbooks was so common it didn’t shock me, but I considered it a dumb risk for someone who wanted to earn fame and fortune as an attorney.
Summer gave way to autumn which gave way to winter. We passed our first anniversary; Molly and I went home to Utah for Christmas without Ted and stayed till New Year’s Day. I spent New Year’s Eve with my high school girlfriends, getting blasted and telling them about my wonderful boyfriend. At midnight, I went outside, lay in the snow, and shouted drunkenly for all the world to hear, “I’m in love!” We celebrated Christmas with Ted when we got back. He had put up the prettiest tree I had ever seen and gave Molly some wonderful presents, including two Christmas kittens.
But around March of 1971 I was getting antsy again—I thought Ted and I were so comfortable, we would never get married if I didn’t do something. “I’ve been thinking,” I told him, “that since we’re not married and we don’t have any plans, how do you feel about dating other people?”
“What have you got in mind?” he asked.
I wanted to say, “To push you off your duff, Dumbo,” but instead I told him that a guy at work had been asking me out, that I told this guy I had a boyfriend, and he asked me what kind of commitment we had, and I didn’t know what to tell him. I put the accent on “commitment.”
“I don’t want to date anyone else,” he said, “but I know it’s not fair to ask you not to. Go ahead and go.”
This wasn’t what I’d planned. Well, the hell with you, I thought. There was no guy at work, but I got Angie to line me up with one of her boyfriend’s friends. Ted didn’t seem to care when I told him I was going out on Friday night, but I was a nervous wreck by the time my date picked me up.
We went with Angie and her date to a tavern called The Walrus to drink and dance. I was having a miserable time, when Angie grabbed me and pulled my ear close to her mouth.
“You’ve got company,” she said.
I followed her eyes to the far wall and there stood Ted, glaring at me. I was furious at him for acting like he didn’t care a bit, and then following me. I marched over to him and demanded that he leave. He was shaking like a leaf and insisted that I leave with him.
“Are you crazy?” I said. “You treat me like you don’t care about me. You let our relationship drag on for over a year and a half with absolutely no kind of commitment, and now you want me to leave with you. No thanks!”
When I got back to the table I looked back, and Ted was gone. So was the party, and everybody wanted to go. In the car my date was all over me. When we pulled up in front of my place, there was Ted, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. I stormed in with Ted at my heels.
“Did you have a good time?” he started in. “Is that what you want, to go drinking and dancing every Friday night?”
“What’s the choice?’” I wanted to know. “Wait around for you until I’m eighty-five? I’m going to be twenty-six next month. I want to get on with my life.”
“I know, I know,” he said. I thought he might cry. “You deserve someone who can make you happy, someone who has ‘made it’ already. I love you so much. Tonight, when I saw you with someone else, I got so scared. I want to spend my whole life with you, and when we are eighty-five, we’ll laugh and tell our grandchildren about the night Grandpa followed Grandma out on her date.”
In May, Molly turned five and had her first real birthday party. Ted made a big Happy Birthday sign and hung it across the living room. He blew up balloons with his bicycle pump, and he made a chocolate cake and decorated it himself.
In July, I found a two-bedroom apartment in the University District, closer to Ted’s place. It was the main floor of an old house, dirty and cramped, but it came furnished with Oriental rugs over hardwood floors, a wonderful old mahogany dining table with velvet-cushioned chairs, a fireplace with built-in bookshelves on each side, beamed ceilings, and a built-in hutch with leaded-glass doors. It was on a tree-lined street just north of the campus where Ted and I had walked often, dreaming of how nice it would be to live there. Ted bought an old-fashioned hide-a-bed for fifty dollars. On rainy nights we would build a fire in the fireplace and fall asleep in the hide-a-bed watching the embers glowing.
But soon, the pattern of our life changed. Our places were so close that he began walking home late some nights instead of spending the whole night with me. We still ate dinner together, but sometimes he just didn’t show up. At other times, he would show up when I wasn’t expecting him. Our lives were out of sync.
He was busier at school. He would graduate in nine months and he had to take the Law School Admission Test (the LSAT) before Christmas. I knew he had a lot on his mind, so I tried to keep busy without him. I signed up for a night class in oceanography, and Ted babysat for me while I went to class.
That fall, Ted took the LSAT and worried that he hadn’t done well. When his test scores came back low, I was surprised. He was intelligent, but he couldn’t seem to produce well on tests. He took the test a second time, and when the scores came back about the same as the first time, he was devastated. He had applied to six law schools and had outstanding letters of recommendation from his professors. Maybe the LSAT scores wouldn’t stop him. His first choice was Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco; his last choice the University of Utah.
Early in 1972, my doctor advised me to give my body a rest from birth control pills. He stressed the importance of finding an alternative method of birth control before I stopped taking the pill. Ted and I discussed the alternatives, but none of them sounded very appealing, so we decided we would just be very careful. We had a good sex life, still exciting, but without the urgency of the early days, so we thought we could manage by abstaining during my fertile days. We didn’t anticipate the “forbidden fruit” aspect of abstaining that would make indulging all the more exciting. Soon I was getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and my breasts were swelling.
Both of us knew it would be impossible to have a baby now. He was going to start law school in the fall, and I needed to be able to work to put him through. I was distraught. I knew I was going to terminate the pregnancy as soon as I could. Ted, on the other hand, was pleased with himself. He had fathered a baby. I didn’t want to hear about it. I didn’t want to think about what I was going to do. I wanted to sleep most of the time, while Ted did most of the cooking and looked after Molly.
As soon as a doctor confirmed what we already knew, I made an appointment for an abortion, which had just been legalized in Washington State. It was awful. Ted took me home and put me to bed. He lay down beside me and talked about the day when I wouldn’t have to work, and we would have lots of kids. He fixed me food which I couldn’t eat and did all he could to comfort me. Within a few days I was feeling be
tter and determined never to think of it again.
When the University of Utah Law School sent Ted an acceptance letter, he was ecstatic. Feeling sure that this was only the beginning of his acceptances, he wrote and declined the offer. Then five rejections arrived in a row. Now Ted cried and it was my turn to offer comfort. It took him a couple of weeks to get back on his feet, but he decided that a year’s worth of work experience would look good on his record, and he would just have to reapply next year.
CHAPTER SIX
In June 1972, Ted graduated from the University of Washington with honors. His family came to Seattle for the celebration, the graduation ceremonies, and then a salmon dinner at my place. Ted proposed a toast to me for my help in getting him through school. His mother wanted to know what I had done to help. Had I typed his papers? Didn’t she know I was practically supporting him? As a graduation present, I gave him a yellow rubber raft.
Molly went to Utah to stay with my parents later in June, and Ted took a fulltime job for the summer at Harborview Hospital’s Mental Health Center. I spent the July 4 weekend in Utah, but Molly didn’t come back with me. I was lonely and everything seemed to make me sad. The day I got back, Ted asked me if I wanted to go out the next night, a Friday, but I was so tired I said I didn’t know. The next day I felt a lot better and called Ted at his job to tell him that I did want to go out after all.
He stammered and hemmed and hawed and finally told me that he had a date.
“What? A date? With who?”
The Phantom Prince Page 4