The Mighty Queens of Freeville

by Amy Dickinson

  Jack was a prominent Chicago businessman. I received a charming letter from his daughter at the office. “You don’t know me, but I’m a fan of yours and I understand that you’re single,” she started. She had me, of course, at the “fan” part. She went on to say that her father, a delightful and handsome prominent businessman, had just gotten divorced after his very long marriage to her mother. The daughter was now contacting me to ask if I’d like to go out with her dad.

  The letter from the daughter fixing me up with her dad had all sorts of appealing Sleepless in Seattle overtones, though the daughter mentioned that she was a thirty-year-old registered nurse and thus a little tall for this particular pimping theme park ride. All the same, I thought that this was the ultimate “meet-cute.” I was already writing the New York Times “Vows” column in my head. I contacted her and said that her father could e-mail me at the office. He did so, and he was the right amount of charming and embarrassed. We agreed to meet.

  I need to state for the record that I’d rather date a rodeo clown than someone who describes himself as a prominent businessman. Businessmen don’t seem to go for me, either. I have already aged out of their eye-candy fantasies, and I can tell that sometimes I remind them of their ex-wives. However, one characteristic of my dating life is my ongoing desire to switch it up, to abandon what doesn’t work and try new things—unfortunately all the while falling into the same old patterns.

  We met at a hotel bar.

  Jack PowerPoint-ed me through his many accomplishments, presenting them as bullet points along the straight and narrow pathway that was his life. He was proud of the fact that he had never as much as tasted alcohol. “How come?” I asked, ordering another.

  He said he didn’t like it. “But if you’ve never tasted it, how do you know you don’t like it?” I asked.

  “I just know,” he said.

  Jack went on to describe his heartbreak at the ending of his long marriage and his surprise at the fact that he was something of a babe magnet. One of his neighbors was interested in him and they had had a fling, but he was really confused, even though she had great legs. Also—he was thinking of entering politics. Having just moved from Washington, where everybody is thinking of entering or leaving politics, I felt like this was something we could really talk about. I asked him why he was interested in politics.

  The expression on his face was just like the one Teddy Kennedy gave to Roger Mudd in 1980 when Kennedy was running for president and Roger Mudd inadvertently torpedoed the candidate’s presidential aspirations by asking the most obvious question, “Why do you want to be president?” Jack looked like he had just woken from a deep sleep in a strange hotel room. Like he’d lost his bearings.

  While he was thinking of an answer, I excused myself and went to the ladies room. I called Emily from the stall and told her that if this thing wrapped up soon, we’d be able to make it to the movies for the early show and then we could have dinner after.

  “Is it that bad?” she asked.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty bad. I mean it’s not bad bad, it’s just not good.”

  “Ugh. Boys!” she said.

  Soon after I got back to the table, my phone rang. It was Emily. I could hear her switching TV channels in a rhythmic, bored fashion.

  “Hey Mom, it’s me—your daughter. Um… I think I sprained my ankle. Ouch, it really hurts.”

  “Oh no, honey—are you OK?” I said. “Sorry, it’s my daughter…” I gestured to Jack.

  “Oh—wait. I might have swallowed some poison by accident. Do you know the number for poison control?”

  “Emily, I’m in the middle of something. I can’t—yes, that’s not good. OK. I’ll be home in a few minutes.” I sighed.

  “I’m going to take the 151 bus and I’ll meet you at the place near the theater,” she said before hanging up.

  My rendezvous with the prominent businessman had run its course. I turned to him. “Sorry, I’ve got to go. It seems that my daughter needs me to come home. It was nice meeting you and good luck!” Emily and I met at the movies and I realized yet again that I would rather be on a date with my daughter than just about anybody I could imagine.

  Later the prominent businessman did run for public office, repeatedly, giving many thousands of people the opportunity to vote for someone else.

  My first dating experiences right after my divorce didn’t go well. Some of my later dating experiences also haven’t gone well, but for different reasons. I cried about my divorce on the very first postdivorce date—a blind date fix-up with a Washington lawyer. After I stopped crying he told me he had a great therapist who had helped him get through his own divorce. I was too embarrassed to see the guy again, though I did book an appointment with his therapist.

  My second dating experience was with an architect. Yum, I thought, an architect. I could definitely see myself with an architect. I loved the idea of being with someone who had to occasionally go out to “job sites” and wear a hard hat but who wasn’t a teamster. The architect said he was really into judo and he hated his ex-wife, who was turning his children against him. Even though I didn’t even like the architect, I had already decided to sleep with him if I got the chance. The architect eventually rejected me for structural reasons. His exact words were, “I don’t like your body.” Despite this harsh assessment, he called me a few weeks later. “I’m at my Men in Anger workshop up the street and wonder if you want to have a drink after I’m done?” he asked.

  “Well, what are the Men in Anger angry about?” I asked him, though I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.

  “Women,” he said.

  I decided to pass.

  The rejection on structural issues prompted me to pull away from dating for a long time, establishing a pattern that persists to this day: I engage in little flurries of dating, followed by long periods of happily not dating. The alone periods aren’t because I am necessarily disgusted with my choices or prospects, but more because I’m tired. Meeting and getting to know new people is exhausting, but then being alone or lonely is tiring too.

  When Emily was little, my inconsistent dating habits worked well with our family life. I got a babysitter if I wanted to go out and didn’t involve or introduce her to anyone I was interested in. The last thing I ever wanted to do was try to explain or defend my personal choices or convey my romantic disappointment to the kid. I also didn’t want her to get a glimpse into the sausage factory that is my romantic life.

  Once I’d recovered from the architect, I went through a phase of fantasizing about and then dating guys I’d known in college. This lasted for several years because I went to a pretty big school and there were several interesting candidates. A couple of these experiences actually turned into relationships of sorts. There was a lawyer (again) in New York City and a screenwriter in Los Angeles. The lawyer was a cutie-pie. For several months, I would go out with him every month or so when I took Emily to New York to see her father (my ex had married his girlfriend and moved to Manhattan). The longer I knew him, however, the more remote he became. He seemed to experience a reverse telescoping scale of affection. As we grew closer, he became fidgety and fussy. He told me we would never have sex. I liked him enough that I was considering having a forever-chaste romance with him, but finally he seemed to more or less disappear, and I didn’t have any choice but to let him vanish. He was like melting snow, gone in stages by spring.

  The experience with the screenwriter took longer to cycle through. At the beginning, it had the makings of a grand passion, but it turned out that we were both just acting in separate movie romances. Mine was a Busby Berkeley musical. His was The Bipolar Express, directed by Quentin Tarantino. He told me he had been engaged several times but couldn’t figure out why he’d never gotten married. One thing or another always went wrong.

  A clue that I was in trouble was when he asked me to marry him on our first meeting. Then he flew to Washington and asked me to marry him on our second meeting. This sort of behavior soun
ds better on paper than it is in real life. On paper it’s the sort of cute anecdote you think you’re going to tell your eventual grandchildren. In real life it’s menacing. Years later, after we had become friends again, he told me that he was a blackout drunk during that period of his life.

  Much of my dating life has been little more than a series of glancing connections and clashing agendas. He’s ready but I’m not. I’m ready but he’s not interested. He’s interested but I don’t like him. I’m crazy about him but he’s with somebody else. I don’t like his attitude toward children. He doesn’t like my career. I chase him down the street, he hides in an alley.

  Take “Sven.” Sven was five years younger. He liked adventure travel, and I liked him. He lived in New York, and on a trip there I called him and we went out to dinner. There was a lot of verbal cleverness. We kissed on the street, and I liked that very much. After many weeks of back-and-forth, we spent a romantic evening together, and then the next day he asked me to meet him for coffee. He asked what I thought of him. As in, “What do you think of me and what do you want from this relationship?” I said, “Well, I think you’re great and I’m in.” “You’re in?” he asked. “Yes, I’m in. Like in kickball when you pick sides. I’m on your side.”

  “I know a secret about you. You’re actually nice,” he said.

  I remember telling him that I felt that life was too short to spend it wondering what people think of us. “So yes, I do like you. And yes, I am actually nice. But don’t tell anybody and please don’t screw this up,” I said.

  Two weeks later I learned that Sven was going on an adventure vacation with his former girlfriend. “I don’t really know what it means,” he said to me on the phone. But I knew what it meant, and I was out.

  Girlfriends and sisters are the best part of dating. They will spend hours decoding dates, reviewing them in a moment-by-moment timeline. They will ask you what you wore and if you were having a good hair date. They will ask for a verbatim account of what he said and what you said. They will ask if you kissed, pecked, hugged, shook hands, or ran off screaming in the night at the end of the date. They will listen in as you replay his cell phone message twenty times, and they will comment on the attractive timbre of his voice. “Oh, he sounds cute, play it again!” they’ll say. They will fret with you as you decide whether or not the message was merely a polite check-in call or an invitation to call back. They will help you to decide to call him back and then five minutes later they will say, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it, I don’t think you should call. Let him make another move.”

  After a strange little spate of going out with three men in a row I was fairly certain were gay, I brought my mother into the conversation. I had just told her about my most recent date, attending a stage production of Kiss of the Spider Woman with a guy from my church. From the opening curtain I knew he was gay, but I couldn’t tell if he knew it; I certainly didn’t want to be the one to tell him.

  I was standing in my mother’s kitchen. “But why on earth would a gay man want to date me?” I asked her.

  “Think about it, Amy. You’re pleasant, you’re presentable, and you love musical theater. What’s not to like? You’re a catch!” she said.

  As Emily has gotten older, she’s also entered my dating team as a consultant. Her willing participation in some of my various minifiascos is proof that if you wait long enough, even your children will try to get you out of the house. Emily’s specialty, she likes to think, is gauging suitability. And if she’s not sure, she has been known to pull out a Ouiji board or Magic 8 Ball for confirmation. “Sorry, Mom—it says, ‘Outlook not so good.’”

  The women in my life say things like, “Well, I think if you really wanted a guy, you’d probably have one.” This is provocative. It sounds true, but it’s not. They will also say, “As soon as you stop looking, he’ll appear.” Then they say, “You just have to get out there. Take a polka class. You’re never going to meet someone in your living room.” After that they say, “You’ll find someone when you least expect it.”

  I have taken all of this to heart, and I have spent years looking, not looking, expecting, not expecting, being proactive, making phone calls, admitting to crushes, denying attractions, and leaving it up to the Universe. None of this works. But it all works. The search for connection is the most basic and beautiful impulse I have. I try to enjoy my efforts—even when they are misguided, not reciprocated, or doofus in the extreme. I try to remember this when my romantic pursuits make me sob over the sink or—even worse—when they lead to a series of Match.com coffee dates that blend together like a giant decaffeinated mochacino mess.

  Several years ago, Emily and I were in Freeville over Christmas. It was a Saturday night, and my mother and aunties were gathering next door at my Aunt Millie’s house. We were going to play hearts. Emily headed over to Aunt Millie’s house a little ahead of me—I stayed behind to feed the cat.

  It was a beautiful night—inky and cold. Several inches of snow had fallen during the day, and when I looked up at the streetlights along Main Street, snowflakes seemed suspended—frozen in place in the cold air. As I walked along the sidewalk toward Millie’s house, a man walked toward me. As we passed, I said, “Hello,” and he looked up.

  It was unmistakably Brian, the love of my young life. I hadn’t seen him in twenty-five years, but except for his silver hair, he looked exactly the same.

  “Oh my God, what are you doing here?” I asked him.

  “I was looking for you,” he said.

  Brian told me that he had parked his car at the end of Main Street and had decided to walk down the street and see if he could find me. He had no idea that I had a house in Freeville—the last he knew, I was in Washington. But he remembered where Aunt Millie lived and said he had decided to walk past.

  I asked Brian to come with me to Millie’s. When I walked in with him, everyone was thrilled. Of any of the men in my life, including the one I eventually married, Brian was my family’s sentimental favorite. He was good, he was kind, and he loved me. We were high school sweethearts, and even though we went to different colleges and agreed to see other people, we stayed in touch and would occasionally see each other on our school vacations. Brian went into the Peace Corps after college, and we exchanged sweet and sentimental letters. When he got out of the Peace Corps, he flew directly to Washington and came to see me. At that point I hadn’t seen him in two years.

  Twenty-five years ago, we stood on a street corner in Washington and I told Brian that I had someone else in my life. This was the man who, after a tempestuous relationship of many years, would marry and then leave me. That day. Brian got into a cab. I was so relieved to be rid of him that I didn’t even invest the time necessary to watch him ride away, and to this day, I don’t think I’ve ever been more cruel.

  Brian sat with us in Aunt Millie’s living room and told us about his wife and their two children. He was a school-teacher, and they lived in Florida. Both of his children played the violin for the youth orchestra. Their family had just come back from a trip to Ireland on a Celtic music tour. He showed us pictures, and they were lovely. He asked Emily questions about school and wondered whether she liked to ski and ice-skate. He was only in town for the weekend because he was moving his mother into a nursing home in Florida and he had come to get her.

  I walked Brian to his car and sat in the front seat with him while it warmed up. I asked if he had heard about my divorce, and he said he had. “I know that all those years ago, I took five minutes out of my day to break up with you, but I want you to know that that’s exactly what my husband did to me. Trust me, I can imagine how that must have felt and I feel like the least I can do is apologize to you now. You’re too nice a person to enjoy that, but I wanted you to know.”

  “I can enjoy it a little bit, Amy,” he said. We hugged, I sniffled, and we said good-bye. This time I watched him until he was out of sight.

  I walked back down Main Street, retracing the snow trail our boo
ts had left, and went to my aunt’s house to retrieve Emily and tell her the story. I wanted her to know about the karmic wheel of romance, about how the things you say and do now will revisit you over and over again. I told her that the feelings she has when she is young will be the same feelings when she’s old, and that she should try not to be afraid of them. I wanted her to be bold with her choices but careful in her actions. I told her never to be mean to someone who loved her, because regret is the only true casualty of love.

  Last year Emily told me that she wanted to invite a boy to the prom. My heart sank. I was afraid that in the super-charged atmosphere of high school at prom time, she would see her crush crushed. I wasn’t ready for her to face the rejection that often follows when you make your desires known. But the boy said yes. He came to our house beforehand and gave her a corsage and cheerfully submitted to photographs. I was delighted to see that Emily evidently had excellent taste in the opposite sex. Then I took to my bed with anxiety. The phone rang at 2 A.M. I could barely hear my daughter’s voice over the music.

  “I’m having a great time!” she shouted, and I thought, Well, here we go.

  NINE

  The Apex of Dorkitude

  Dork, Like Me

  AS EMILY SLID into her teen years I was made aware—almost daily—of how easy she was. Some of my friends who had teenagers had all but given up on actually raising them. Their goal was to survive, to shut their eyes and simply wait it out. I couldn’t blame them—given even the normal developmental teenage trials (lying, drinking, ramming around in cars), I would have done exactly the same thing.

  Emily wasn’t like these teenagers or the ones we saw on television, however. She was the kid who got a cell phone but rarely used it. She wasn’t overly interested in fashion, driving, or dating. Overall, she was pretty nice to me.

  I could only take credit for this much—I had done my best. I had raised her to care about my welfare just as I cared about hers.