A light rain pattered on the roof. I was reading in my big chair. My wife was upstairs cleaning some of the clutter that had accumulated in the attic. We recently became empty-nesters when Maddie went off to grad school at Stanford. Matthew and his wife lived near Chicago.
I had helped move some of the old furniture we no longer needed down to the garage so my wife could get to the boxes of papers. I left her going through the boxes, happily pulling out big piles to sort and mostly put into the recycling bin.
I heard a muffled cry. "Oh my God!!!"
"Are you ok up there?"
My wife came down the attic stairs and I saw the small envelope in her hand. It had yellowed with age, but I still recognized the curves and flourishes of unmistakably feminine handwriting. She came up to me with a huge smile, wrapped her arms around my neck, and kissed me for a long time. I opened the envelope and smiled. My mind flashed back thirty years...
*******
The summer break before my sophomore year at the University of Illinois really took a toll on me. I was working swing shift at a pottery near Peoria that made liners for slow cookers. My sleep schedule was all fucked up but I needed the money for college expenses. My merit scholarship had been reduced for the fall term for reasons I was never able to discover; it couldn't have been my grades, I pulled a 4.6 my freshman year. My parents were working class people without much money so I felt obligated to contribute what I could.
At least I got to see my girlfriend Leanne when I wasn't too tired. She was a year younger and had just graduated from high school. She had come to see me at school twice during my freshman year, staying in a mutual friend's single dorm room.
I was beginning to have some doubts about where this was going though. First, Leanne was a stubborn little thing. Compromise was not her strong suit. In retrospect she was a bit of an entitled narcissist. Her stepdad liked me ok, but her mom once told me, "I've resigned myself to the fact that you'll be the father of my grandchildren." What an absolute bitch. I hoped that was not foreshadowing what Leanne would be like twenty years down the road. Leanne's younger sister Ellen was a flouncy blonde, and some unsavory rumors trailed in her wake. I had the feeling that she liked flirting with trouble, so I kind of steered clear of her.
The whole thing crashed and burned one day when I borrowed Leanne's car. I thought one of the tires looked a bit low, so I opened the glove box to look for a tire gauge. Instead I found a pile of handwritten pages. In them Leanne compared me unfavorably as a sex partner to one of her teachers, a younger guy with curly hair who I'd met, and had seen smoking pot in his apartment.
I was livid. I confronted Leanne after driving her to my house. No one else was home. Her story was that they only "made out once," but I could see from her face and from what she had written that was a steaming pile of shit. She was shaking and crying, knowing how she had fucked up. Literally. Then she went into bitch mode and said it served me right for snooping.
I told her that we were through. She left my class ring and went out the door sobbing how she had wanted to be the mother of my children. Fat chance of that, I thought, if I had to wonder if they were really mine.
*******
With the bad breakup hanging over me, I didn't exactly start the school year in a good frame of mind. I had changed roommates when I could no longer stand the sanctimonious SOB I had roomed with the previous semester. The final straw was one night when my older brother's girlfriend, one of those truly pure ones who you knew was saving herself for marriage, came to my brother's room because she couldn't sleep with the loud party going on in the girls' dorm.
I ran into my brother in the hall, but as he opened the door to his room he quickly shushed me. "Penny's on the floor." I saw she was wrapped up in a bundle of blankets and pillows. He explained about the party. I nodded and he went in and closed the door softly. I knew Tom was giving me the straight story. It would be just like Penny to not take my brother's bed. She was always considerate to a fault.
Anyway my asshole roommate cornered me the next day, saying he knew that Penny had stayed over in my brother's room and that I "needed to talk" to Tom about it. Since I already had the full story I didn't appreciate him sticking his nose into it. Even if my brother and Penny had been fucking, which they obviously weren't, it was still none of his goddamn business.
Tom got himself an apartment that fall, so his former roommate and my old roommate decided to room together. That was one problem taken care of. Now Tom could have Penny over any time without any snide comments. One of our friends had some academic trouble and had to take a semester off. He was in ROTC and had lost his scholarship for not keeping his grades up. His roommate Doug agreed to room with me. So all of that kind of worked out. It looked like this was finally my time for a clean break from events of the unpleasant past.
The girls' dorm was a separate building that shared a big lounge area and the dining hall with the guys' dorm. A couple of other girls from Penny's floor started hanging out with our little group for breakfast. That was kind of nice. Julie was a zaftig girl with curly dark hair. Her roommate Vicki was a petite thing with straight light brown hair down past her shoulders, a nice slim body, and lovely blue eyes. It turned out that Julie had a thing for Doug, but Doug was severely crushing on Vicki. It was one of those weirdly fucked up triangles that happen in college life I guess. Anyway Vicki was always pleasant to Doug, but you could tell she wasn't encouraging anything. Today we would say that Doug had been friend zoned.
With a new roommate and a bunch of friends to hang out with, I was gradually getting over the disaster with my ex. At first when people at breakfast asked me how I was doing, I would answer "Fine" in a tight-lipped way. When my mood improved over time I would sometimes make a little joke and say "Crappy," when it was obvious that I was actually in good spirits. One morning I made my little joke as I sat down. The open seat happened to be across from Vicki.
She looked over her coffee cup at me. Those blue eyes bored right into mine and I felt the pink rising in my cheeks. "I don't get it," Vicki said. "You come down here some days in a lousy mood and say you're fine. Today you seem on top of the world and say you're feeling crappy." She was talking directly to me, but not loud enough for the rest of the table to pay any attention.
I mumbled something inconsequential. Why was the hottest girl in our group doing mood checks on me, anyway, I wondered. Soon the conversation went in another direction, much to my relief.
I found myself chatting with Vicki more over breakfast in the weeks that followed. She was really a pretty smart young lady in addition to being very easy on the eyes. I didn't say that I felt crappy any more. She didn't seem to care that I wasn't that tall or that I wore nerdy wire rim glasses.
The dining hall didn't serve dinner on Sundays and our group often went out for pizza or burgers. One Sunday Vicki and Julie knocked on our door to ask if we wanted to go get pizza. Doug hadn't made it back to the room yet so we were just hanging around waiting for him. Vicki was wearing a white shirt with a loosely knitted blue sleeveless sweater over it, which looked pretty cute on her because it matched her eyes. She recounted a conversation with her mom: "I told her how much I like this sweater because if I wear it without a bra, the guys can all see my nipples!"
We all had a good laugh at that. I had never heard Vicki say anything that suggestive before, and I was acutely aware that I was the only guy there to hear it.
*******
It was getting toward the end of the term so everyone was trying to finish assignments. One night on the way out of the dining hall Vicki took me aside. "Mike, can I ask you for a favor?"
"Of course."
"I'm working on a major paper for one of my classes and I'm a bit worried about it. Do you have some time tonight to come up and look it over? I know you write well and I'd really appreciate some help."
