by John Warner
“Apparently not.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I dumped her for you.”
“That doesn’t speak so well of your character, does it?” She usually smiles when she says this, but I know this Beth. This is the Beth that asks me if I love her.
Señora Nuborgen was right, we were running out of time, so the next day I no longer pretended I had a reason for staying behind to talk to her. “Looking for a woman’s advice, eh, Josh?” she said. She had all the drawers of her desk open and was removing each object, one at a time, conducting a brief inspection before placing some in a cardboard box and throwing away others.
Señora Nuborgen laughed. She held up one of those troll dolls that you stick on the end of a pencil and then twirl to make the hair stand on end. She handed it to me. On the back someone had written “Señora N.” in permanent marker. “Who did this?” I said.
“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.” I handed it back to her. She held it over the box briefly before tossing it into the trash.
“What should I do?” I said.
Señora Nuborgen paused in her sorting. “I’m going to betray my feminist sisters here, Josh, but I’m going to tell you a simple truth. Women like passion. They like romance, and above all they want you to be passionate about them. You are quite literally sick with love, my young friend, so we know you don’t lack the passion. The question is if you can express it. Do you think you could tell her how you feel?”
“Definitely not.”
“Well, can you show her then?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you can’t tell her that you love her, you should show her, make a demonstration of your love. A gesture, a grand gesture.”
“Like what?”
Señora Nuborgen fished a stack of index cards out of the desk and dumped them in the cardboard box. “When I was your age, I pooled my graduation money and went to Spain for three weeks, Andalusia… Málaga, the southern coast.”
None of these things meant anything to me. She may as well have been speaking of Mars.
“I stayed with a host family and spent my days and nights just wandering the city. My Spanish at the time was no better than yours is now, so I kept to myself, soaking it in, dreaming of the day I could come back and understand it all. It’s when I decided to major in Spanish. I figured I’d teach during the year and spend my summers in Spain.” Señora Nuborgen took a bundle of pencils bound together with a rubber band and placed them in the box. “I was pretty dumb. I’ve never been back.”
“Why not?”
“I teach high-school Spanish, Josh. Do you know how much they pay me? Do you think it’s summer-home-in-Spain money?”
“Right. But maybe someday…”
“No, not someday, Josh,” she said.
“OK.”
“Anyway,” she said, “there was a boy with a scooter. I saw him on the street outside my host family’s home the fourth or fifth day. He had the most beautiful long, dark hair, dark eyes, brown skin. It was the festival month, and no one save the street vendors did any work. They’ve got the right ideas there, Josh. He wore a short-sleeve button-up shirt that he let flap open in the breeze. He would wait outside for me, holding a helmet under the crook of his arm, and once he saw me make eye contact he’d pat his hand on the scooter seat.”
“What did you do?”
“I ignored him. I was seventeen. He must have been at least twenty. I was a virgin!”
I must have blushed.
“That’s right, an innocent young girl being pursued by a swarthy foreigner. Scandal!” She swept her arm blindly into the recesses of the desk, reaching for any straggling objects before continuing. “I even tried changing up my schedule of comings and goings, but he was always there, smiling, patient, patting the seat. I began to dream about him, not always good dreams, like him driving his scooter to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea with me on it. But finally, on my last day, my host mother was sweeping the stoop out front and she saw the boy gesturing to me and I asked who he was and she said, Él es inofensivo, he is harmless, and so I went over to the boy and put the helmet on and climbed onto the scooter.”
She was enjoying her own story. I imagine now that it was something she’d never told anyone before, but she’d been rehearsing it in her head for quite some time, waiting for the right moment. “And what happened?” I said.
“We rode. In a day we saw everything it had taken me better than two weeks to experience on foot. It was the same, but faster, a blur. I hugged him tight around the middle and quickly learned to lean into the corners. My Spanish vocabulary was terrible, his English worse, so whenever he said something while smiling I laughed, and whenever his face was straight I nodded seriously. Eventually, as we made a final turn and I realized we were heading for home, I felt deeply sad. Sometimes endings are new beginnings, but this just felt like an ending. I remember leaning my head into his back, pressing my whole self against him. I remember his smell, but I couldn’t describe it to you. It is deeper in me than that. As we got closer to the host family home he drove more and more slowly, so slowly we practically tipped over. Back in front of the house, I got off the scooter and faced him as I removed the helmet. My hair was sweat-matted to my face. He took the helmet and swept the hair from my cheeks and pressed his hands to both sides of my face and he tilted my head up and pulled me toward him. I closed my eyes. I had been kissed before, badly, but I was certain this time was going to be different, and I was right.”
She looked at me, and for a moment I thought I could see that girl again, transformed by her own story. She appeared lost for a moment, gazing down at the box holding the keepsakes from her desk. She hefted it briefly before dumping everything from it into the garbage. She continued.
“He pressed his lips to my forehead, and even against my flushed skin they felt warm, but even so, I shivered in his arms. He tilted me back and looked me in the eyes before releasing me, and in an instant he was back on the scooter and gone, leaving me there wobbling in the street. He never said it, Josh, Te quiero, but I felt it.”
As I’ve made clear, my Spanish was not so good, but I knew that word, quiero. “But that means I want you, not I love you,” I said.
“Very good, Josh,” she said. “Exactly.”
When I talk to my students about writing stories, I speak of the importance of showing and telling and how they are inextricably linked, dependent on each other. This is why when my wife asks me if I love her and I say, “of course,” it is not always enough. Sometimes, but not always. It is all tell and no show. I know she would like me to show her, but I’m not sure how, worried that any expression I risk will seem inauthentic. I am simply bad at romance, but not for lack of wanting to try.
Just before Beth and I were married, we had to meet with our officiating minister and declare our intentions. Neither of us were or are churchgoers, so we picked her out of the Yellow Pages, the first one who agreed to marry two people she’d never met, provided we were acquaintances and not strangers to her by the time of the ceremony. I don’t remember her name, Reverend something, though I guess I could look it up on the marriage license, but she was a big woman, tall, and she seemed oversized for her small rectory office. She was kind, making small talk before turning to me and asking what she said was the only question that really mattered, “Why do you wish to marry this woman?”
I told her of Beth’s best traits, her beauty, her kindness, our shared values, the sense that we belonged together, all true things, but nonetheless a pretty lackluster answer. I even knew it at the time, but the Reverend smiled and nodded at each new thing that came out of my mouth. I spoke for what seemed like forever, I guess hoping that quantity would substitute for quality.
Once I finally petered out, I smiled wanly at the Reverend, then at Beth, and the Reverend turned to Beth and said, “And why do you wish to marry this man?”
Beth reached over and took my hand and looked at me while
speaking to the Reverend and said, “Because when he tells me he loves me, I believe him.”
The next day was the last day of school, and all pretense of classroom decorum was discarded completely. The final installment of Don Quixote played, but the chattering never stopped. Girls sat on their boyfriends’ laps. The kid next to me whose name I cannot conjure for the life of me slowly ripped each page out of his textbook and made paper airplanes that he sailed randomly around the room. Señora Nuborgen was at her desk, blocked by the projector screen in front of her. We were all pent up, ready to explode, and I suppose Señora Nuborgen realized that any effort to contain us was pointless. When Quixote died, disillusioned and alone, some wag went, “Awwwww, that sucks, dude.” The resulting laughter outstripped the actual humor. Everybody but me leaked out of the room before the final bell even rang.
I switched off the projector as I made my way to the front. Señora Nuborgen was busy stacking the books from her shelves into boxes.
“Why are you packing up everything?” I asked.
“I’m not going to be back next year, Josh,” she replied.
“Why not?”
She paused with her back still to me, reaching for the highest shelf with her fingertips. “Can you get these for me?” she said.
I came around the desk and began handing her the books one by one. “Where are you going?” I said.
I handed her three more books before she spoke. “I’m moving on, Josh.”
“Don’t you like it here?”
She paused again. Her chin quivered and I looked away. “I love it here.”
“Then why not stay?” I asked.
I silently passed down more books until she wiped her arm across her eyes and said, “So have you figured out what you’re going to do?”
I had, sort of. There would be an end-of-year party at someone’s house whose parents believed it was safer to let the kids drink under some adult supervision. I’d never gone to any of these, but I’d go to this one, and once there I’d figure out how to show Jennifer Mecklen-berg I loved her.
“Good,” Señora Nuborgen said. “It’s important to remember that whatever happens, it’s the right thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Trust me, Josh,” she said. “I know what I’m talking about. The worst thing is to wonder.”
I handed her the last book, and she dropped it in the box without looking. Then she reached up and placed her hands on my cheeks and pulled my forehead down to her lips and kissed me there. Her lips were dry and cracked against my skin. “Good luck, Josh,” she said. When I looked at her again, she was crying.
I also talk to my students about the necessity of suspense in their stories, of the need for tension, even for surprise that is built in, that is organic to the story, unexpected, yet also right.
But I will spare you any attempt to build suspense over what happened at the party. There is nothing to show. There were no surprises. Jennifer Mecklenberg was there, Andrew Collins was not, the seemingly perfect scenario. But if she was Saturn, her friends were her rings, while I was some kind of moon in a very distant orbit. I hugged the perimeter of the party, circling for a chance to get closer, hoping I would do the right thing when the time came. She had signed my yearbook that last week, “You’re awesome!!!!!! Let’s hang out this summer xoxo, Jennifer.” I took it as encouragement even as I knew that Jennifer Mecklenberg’s name was in a lot of yearbooks and that “awesome” was probably her most frequently used word.
At one point during the party she saw me and waved with the tips of her fingers, and I tilted my warm cup of beer back in salute. Even from a distance her eyes looked glazed over from the alcohol, and who even knows if she knew who she was waving to. It soon became apparent to me that if this was the time, it was not the place, or vice versa. At some point, while playing a drinking game, she sprinted from the room to go vomit in the bushes. I don’t think I stopped loving her then, but I at least stopped wondering about whether or not it was possible for me to show her this. The chance that Jennifer Mecklen-berg might also love me seemed vanishingly small.
Later that summer, just a few days before I was to leave for college, I sat at the breakfast table, shoveling cereal into my mouth, and my mother handed me an open page of our tabloid-format local weekly. It was turned to the obituaries. “Wasn’t she one of yours?” she said, tapping the page.
The heading just said “Nuborgen” in bold type. The text said that Sylvia Nuborgen, longtime teacher at Greenbrook High School, had passed away the previous week after a several-month battle with ovarian cancer. She was survived by her husband, Jameson P. Nuborgen, and her parents, Theodore and Beverly Portnoy. The couple had no children. Donations to the American Cancer Society were requested in lieu of flowers. The service was to be held the day after I was scheduled to leave for school.
When I looked up, I could not see my mother for the tears in my eyes.
Is that surprising? I don’t know. At the time, I should’ve seen it coming, but I didn’t.
And so, because I am not capable of telling Beth how I love her and why I love her, I will have to show her. I will show her by writing a story. I will show her by writing these stories.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is dedicated to my teachers, of which there are too many to name them all, but special thanks to Philip Graham, Robert Olen Butler, and John Wood. Thanks as well to friends and colleagues from whom I’ve had the pleasure to learn much along the way, including, but not limited to Nick Johnson, John Griswold, and Marlene Preston.
Thanks to Michael Griffith for his brilliant editorial touch, Susan Murray for her careful copyediting that saved me from more than one embarrassment, Michelle Neustrom for the elegant design, and to Rand Dotson and Lee Sioles at LSU Press for shepherding the book into the world. It takes a village.
College of Charleston has been good enough to provide a secure place from which to do my work, and I’m grateful for the kindness and care of my colleagues.
The title and one of the book’s epigraphs belong to my friend Mark Brookstein, lead singer and drummer for Chicago’s legendary band The Rolls. I’ve borrowed them without permission, but he’ll understand.
As always, this would be impossible without the support of my loved ones: the families Warner and Sennello.
Finally, thanks and love to Kathy. My love is like a reflex.
