Letters to Girls: Past Perfect

Dear Ellen:

Each morning in the shower I allow myself the luxury of thinking about that time standing in your kitchen, the remains of a plate of oysters tossed in the sink with the empty beer bottles, and me pressing you against the counter, clutching, touching, grabbing…. all that.  Since when did you start wearing short brown khaki skirts?  Where are the denims… your work garb… which, with their coarse, hard fabric, have always seemed like armor to me?  Black underwear (which I can see because your two buttons from the neck down have been left undone)?  

And me; what am I doing here, all grabbing, feeling your underwear beneath that khaki skirt, tongues all knotted up, yours a delicate pointed thing, fluttering?  

I feel the skin of your back under that half-buttoned shirt and am met with an array of tactile questions in the form of seams and creases and folds, some flesh, some not.

Still I press on and we move toward the couch in your tilting living room in your tilting house (one of the reasons, one presumes, the price was more affordable, but gives me yet another reason to lose equilibrium each time I come here), adorned with antique-ish furniture and a landscape painting of some skill.  A former boyfriend?  A current one?  In the half-light of the late afternoon in that room, I utter that which plagues me (yet saves me) to this day: Look.... let's pause a moment.

Did you know from that first day five years earlier when we were introduced by our mutual friend and benefactor that I had pushed us in this direction, through project meetings, restaurant dinners, conferences, counseling, relentlessly for five years to the half-light of your couch?  That I had plotted and fantasized, cajoled and what if we had not paused, if I had hiked that khaki a little higher, had touched the significance in your underwear, affirming (or not) your changed cadence of breath… had removed your black halter, revealing the secret of your breasts, carefully concealed these past five years with a dizzying assortment of scarves, or sweaters, jackets and jewelry?

What if?

The intake of your breath was a portent.  I should have been thrilled that you were thrilled (or even that you pretended to be thrilled) but I was not.  What I felt was more akin to panic.  It had never, not once in those five years--that long, patient pursuit--occurred to me that you might actually like this.... maybe like it too much?  What then?  Or perhaps it was the inverse: was I up to this?  You are expecting thrill... can I deliver?  I am, you know, a bit older than you with my best behind me.......way behind.  Either scenario, you have to admit, would not produce a nice outcome.

So we finish up, as it were, back in the kitchen, each of us knowing that a tectonic shift has taken place in the relationship--the term itself becoming a bit of a parody.  We finish up with perfunctory caresses to the apt soundtrack of a drip coffee maker spewing out the last of its water reservoir in the form of hissing steam.  

That is what I think about each morning.

2012

Reviews

[Emily B]

oh, the plague of the what-ifs, we've all been there a time or ten, it brings comfort knowing that others suffer at fate as well