The kid that put me up to asking her out was a lineman from our football team, who'd already gone over to the dark side to date another young lady from the Cedar Grove Rockets, a young lady who'd conspired with him to get me to call her cousin, Gail, who would be--or so I was assured--most certainly assent to the big question, if I'd have the guts to ask.
One night, I called from a phone booth downtown with the lineman, my teammate, riding me like some wallflower. "Do it now, Schaap--call her. She thinks you're going to--call her! Call her now!"
It was one of those situational things--her people had been talking to my people to get the arrangements down, as if the whole thing was fearful political diplomacy. I was assured--and I believed it--that should I actually call her, she would most certainly say yes.
Which didn't mean there wasn't any drama. As I remember, we stood outside that phone booth forever, him pushing me. I was scared to death. To me, she seemed a class act, no floozy, and I'd never, ever talked to her. Her dad owned a downtown grocery store. This was serious dating. I was a junior in high school.
Bob the offensive guard wouldn't let me out of the phone booth. It was a riot really, but that didn't mean that I wasn't shaking when I finally dialed in the number he gave me, even though the outcome was never in doubt.
She said yes, and the two of us were a thing for the rest of our high school years, despite our dueling allegiances-: twice-a-week dates, Friday night after the ball games, Sunday night after church. Tight as a class ring.
She determined it was in our own best interests not to go to the same college, so we didn't. I don't remember fighting about her declaration, but I bought in, so we went to school 500 miles from each other.
I wonder, sometimes, how long she held on to the letters we wrote to each other because they went out almost daily from my dorm room. Today, I'd love to see what I wrote, not because I want to track the health of what was by then a true long-distance relationship. I'd love to read them because my first year at college was a garden of significant moments in my life.
Our relationship, by that time almost three years old, didn't weather the distance. Mostly, the breakup was her fault. She conceded that she had started to chase some guy from her school once springtime warmed things. I'd stayed relatively true. When summer came, it was awkward and often distressing, but we stayed out of each other's hair.
The lights hadn't totally gone out, however, and in a manner I don't remember exactly we started to stumble into each other's arms again later in that summer, enough so that when our junior years began, we were tacitly a thing again.
The whole relationship had become, almost without our noticing it, far more serious, even if less dramatic--engagement, marriage. Nothing solid, but fairly serious discussion.
Then, one night, I was the one unfaithful. I told her what I'd done. Some friends said I was crazy for being truthful, but I was, maybe because I wasn't altogether sure of going where we'd begun to aim ourselves--I don't know.
That was it. The relationship ended on a river bank with a discussion that darkened fast. I brought her back to her apartment that night, and I never, ever saw her again. We'd spent the better part of four years together, four years that ended with my confession. I shed no tears, but neither did I understand myself or my behavior. I called someone, I remember, and asked about seeing someone at Pine Rest. Never did.
Yesterday, Super Bowl Sunday, an old friend called to tell me his sister, who has become a good friend of the cheerleader's sister, that the girl I used to love looking at across the gym was gone. She died last week, had Alzheimer's, I knew by way of the same pipeline.
The image of my old girlfriend lying somewhere--I didn't know where--in some institutional bed, eyes open but speechless, her family visiting even when they knew nothing was registering in their mom or grandma--that image was almost paralyzing. I even wrote a story about it, just to be able to put it away.
Last week, she died. I don't know where. I have no idea how many people were mourning her death. Did she have children? I don't know.
So much of her life is so far out of my reach that it just seems wrong not to remember. I had good friends in high school, but once upon a time none of them knew me better than she did. I'm sorry she died. I'm sad for those who grieve.
My wife and I have been married for 54 years. I never once dreamed about the woman who died last week--not once; but is it wrong for me to tell this story or to feel that something of me died with her?
I wish her children--if she had some--and her husband--should he be yet alive--to be blessed with grace and peace as they walk through the scrapbooks they will share together, blessedly, throughout this week.
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