Meg had charisma. I was smitten with her as soon as we met. Having run away from my clingy girlfriend Misty in California, I finally wrote Misty a letter to say I was through with her and not to write me back. Misty promptly got drunk, called all my best friends, and wanted to know what had gotten into me, since I wasn't returning calls. I was following my brother's motto for breaking up: "Sometimes, Mom, you just gotta be brutal." This was before I had ever been dumped – Meg was the first one ever to dump me – but at this point in the story, that was nine months into the future.
Misty was a firefighter in Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Park at the time I got together with Meg. I'd tried to break up with Misty before, but she had wended her way back into my life when I was very upset that my parents had put my dog Buddy to sleep without telling me when I was off on an adventure with another friend. The reason they didn't tell me was that during one of my collect calls home on that same trip, they told me about the first dog they put to sleep – his name was Rags – and I had ended up crying for probably half an hour on their dime. Ten years later, I realize my parents had probably done the right thing by putting Rags and Buddy to sleep. They were old and in pain and Mom insisted they didn't even enjoy eating anymore. But when I returned after a 4,000-mile bicycle trip and found out that not only was Rags dead, but Buddy too, I was just so stunned that no one had told me.
Misty, with whom I'd already broken up, had come along to the airport with my parents to pick me up after my trans-continental flight, and instead of the triumphant warrior returning with her fit and tanned legs under a miniskirt, I felt I had been sucker punched when I found out that Buddy was dead. Without saying much to the parents, Misty and I walked slowly to the park near my house and sat on a bench under a coast live oak while I just cried over Buddy. Misty had grown up in a very strictly Catholic household, and her pro-life position extended to pets. She agreed with my assessment that my parents had murdered both Rags and Buddy. She was very comforting and we ended up having sex right on the bench (it was nighttime). So I was stuck with Misty for another winter season. I mean, I stuck around because she was so good at making love to me that I had very little motivation to leave even though I knew she wasn't the woman I'd make my life with. She was an intellectual lightweight, and didn't know why I always had my nose in a book.
When June came the following year, Misty took the job as a firefighter in the Sierra Nevada and I returned to Girl Scout camp on the coast. We were separated by about seven hours of hard driving. We wrote letters and on extended breaks, I went up to visit her. Typical her, she did not wear sunscreen and still hadn't visited a gynecologist and occasionally drove around with too much to drink and this lack of respect for her physical self had come to embody everything I thought was wrong with her.
I saw the notice in the camp staff house for the job at an Outdoor School on the east coast while I was wondering how I was going to break up with Misty twice now and still manage to evade her feminine wiles and superior love-making. 3,000 miles would be perfect, I was sure. So I applied and got the job. As a farewell to Misty, we went backpacking over Labor Day in the Kings backcountry and had lots of sex above 10,000 feet, the sun warming our naked bodies as we stretched out over glacier-smoothed granite. She proposed marriage once we got back. I told her I needed to defer my decision and beat a quick retreat from the fire dorm. As I was approaching the park's tollbooth during my getaway, she chased me down in her Toyota mini pick-up. "You forgot your banana bread!" she wailed through our open windows. She tossed a dense, foil-wrapped packet from her truck to my Honda.
I dropped my car back at my parents' house and caught a ride to Massachusetts with someone who had just graduated from Stanford. We ate Misty's banana bread as we headed east. It was good.
So that's how I got to the Outdoor School on Cape Cod. My position was as the Health Supervisor, rather than as a teacher. At 25, I still didn't have my bachelor's degree so the central office wouldn't take me as a teacher, despite my opinion that I was smart enough to teach any subject requested by various visiting middle schools. I did have my EMT certification, and snuck around the anti-teaching dictate by giving workshops on first aid and wilderness survival. And weather. And racial tolerance and the history of the Underground Railroad. This was because of Meg, who was the site director. "Who's going to ask whether you have your BA? You're quality." I basked in her praise.
Physically Misty was more my type than Meg. Misty was 5'8", slender and athletic, with small bones and a dainty face and a vagina that smelled of cumin. She apologized for losing more weight during her summer fighting forest fires: her breasts had shrunk. I didn't care. She made my breasts feel good and was always up for a bike ride or a hike. Meg was shorter than me but many, many pounds heavier. Her breasts were huge and pendulous. She insisted that she didn't have much feeling in them and didn't like it when I played with them. She was completely unathletic, which was why I thought she was so heavy. Later I learned that she had other issues adding to her weight but it took me awhile before I figured her out.
To Meg's credit, she had luminous green eyes and a voice like an angel. When you work at camp with kids, you sing a lot. She was the first person who matched my ability singing. Ok, to be honest, she surpassed my ability to sing. We sang together frequently, even when the kids had gone home after their week at Outdoor School. Meg was witty and constantly teasing us (me and the other teachers and the students). She always had the upper hand. She was always making a joke. One evening we were leaving the laundromat on the way to pizza, as was our staff ritual after a group of kids left Friday afternoon. In the parking lot was a car with a sleek racing bike on its roof rack. Before we could blink, Meg was on top of the car and on that bicycle, giving a running commentary as if she were in the Tour de France. We almost wet our pants laughing at her.
I was not the only staff member completely crushed out on her. She and I shared a cabin, so I had an advantage over the other teachers. We never stopped talking. We'd fall asleep in our separate twin beds talking to each other. We talked about people and their psychology and books we had read that we thought illuminated human truths. We talked about geology and biology, our majors. We talked about the best way to handle the kids and their issues while preserving everyone's dignity. "This is what I want," I thought. Meg was stimulating.
The first time she touched me, I was setting out the kids' prescribed meds on the counter right before the lunch rush. Her office and my office were in the front part of our small, shared cabin. She got up after having made a phone call to order some buses for a field trip to Plymouth Rock. My back was to her but I could tell where she was. She came up to me and hugged me from behind, our heavy wool sweaters and stiff army surplus pants obscuring our bodies to each other. "You're so huggable," she told me. I could feel her arms gripping mine long after she let go.
One of Meg's jobs was to travel and represent our site to schools all over the northeast. So some weeks she would be gone for a day or two. We mourned her absence. Nothing was as funny. Late night games of Hearts after the kids went to bed weren't as engaging. Our ability to keep the kids under a dull roar was not as acute.
The traveling was stressful, she said. She had a backache from driving to upstate New York and then back to Cape Cod. That's how I made my first move, of course. I offered her a massage. "EMT's orders," I said, and slid over to her bed.
We kept our relationship a secret. That was her doing. She'd been with at least two other women before but was so extremely closeted she couldn't even say "lesbian". I just thought that Massachusetts was not quite Santa Cruz, and had it her way.
Nevertheless (a word I picked up from Misty and haven't lost, even twelve years later), our relationship was intense. We continued talking at every spare moment. We sang and tried out new harmonies. Even if my back was to her in the little cabin or in the crowded dining hall, I could feel her, as if between us there was a magnetic energy pulling at us. I felt that energy to the day that she betrayed me, and I knew it as soon as it was gone. I remember how it felt even now at the age of thirty-six, married to a man and pregnant: the pull of my skin in her direction, the warmth between my shoulder blades, the lift of my hair at the nape of my neck when she must have been looking at me. I did eventually get a Bachelor of Science in biology, and followed that up with a Master in Education; therefore, I consider myself a fairly scientifically skeptical person with respect to "energy" and auras and levitation and all that woo-woo stuff (as my friend Judith puts it). But Meg had an electromagnetic pull. She did.
In early December, the season at the Outdoor School was ending. We made secret plans to drive back to California together. I was re-entering college and she had a few months off before the spring season started back on Cape Cod. I caught a ride to New York City with one of the other teachers, John, who dropped me at my friend Bridget's house. Supposedly I was going to catch a bus back to California. Meg left several days later and we reconnoitered. While Bridget and her husband Eric worked, Meg and I had planned to do about three days of sightseeing around New York, but we never got very far because we never got out of bed. Sex with Meg was entirely dreamy, lasting hours, dipping from sharp wakefulness into somnolence and then back up again. We washed the sheets on the hide-a-bed daily to mask our activity and joint musky smell from Bridget and Eric.
From New York, we headed south. Meg was from Kentucky, and wanted to take me home to meet her parents, and from there we planned to drive through Texas. Both of us had friends in Texas.
We arrived at her friend's house in Austin first. Chris had worked maintenance at the Outdoor School, although at a different site. Meg had slept with him before. She had some wild stories about being high on coke with him at the site in the Berkshires, and as someone who was such a straight Girl Scout that I'd never even been drunk (never mind my predilection for sleeping with the same sex), I was worried that he was going to offer us drugs. I needn't have worried; he didn't.
He greeted us at the door and offered us showers, which we gratefully accepted. Traveling had made me feel completely begrimed. It was warm enough to wear shorts there, even in December, so I did. Nothing sexy – just knee-length Levi's denim turned up twice, with a crewneck white t-shirt. I usually dress like a boy. Meg wore jeans and a flattering long-sleeve indigo blue blouse.
