"Honey, no, I don't want to talk about it."
That's the answer I've gotten for the last three months! I'd become obsessed with Daniella, my wife, telling me about her first lover. The only answer she'd give me has been, "I don't want to talk about it."
I've asked her if it was painful? Was it bad? Good? Exciting? Dull? And I get, 'I don't want to talk about it.'
And she'd cut me off, then change the subject to something else. Hell, we've been married twenty-eight years. It was a long time ago and I don't understand why she wouldn't even begin a discussion. All I know is that Dani wasn't a virgin the first time we made love. I was. I hadn't ever been with a woman before her. I'd been on dates, even had a girlfriend for a bit in college. We kissed, but that was the extent of my sexual baseball, a single, first base only.
I even tried to let it drop and then dreamed about what might have been. The next morning, I told her about my dream. She giggled a little and said it wasn't like that at all. That was the extent of her hints.
ooOoo
Dani was a cheerleader and the star point guard on our 3rd place state finalist basketball team. She was the smallest on the cheer team and was the one doing the gymnastic leaps off the other girls' hands.
And she was the homecoming queen during football her senior year. I was gone that year, my first year of college. I've seen the picture of Dani and her boyfriend, a black guy football jock; the only black guy I've ever seen in our school. He was new at our school that year. I never knew him and she'd never even told me his name. But I wasn't surprised that he'd be her boyfriend. I've learned over the last twenty-eight years that there's not a prejudiced bone in Dani's body. Besides, in the picture, he was a darn good-looking kid.
Why did it suddenly become an obsession with me? It stemmed from an evening that we were going through some old albums and I saw that picture of my beautiful wife in her gown that night of homecoming, her boyfriend kissing her on the cheek the night she was announced as the homecoming queen.
I saw the look in her eyes when we turned the album's page and that 8x10 picture was on the next, kind of a 'longing' look. Or maybe not. I wondered if I was just imagining things and just blurted out, "Was he your first?"
She smiled at me and said, "I don't want to talk about it."
"You won't tell me anything about him?" I asked her.
She giggled a little, "He was a senior, a little older than me, first year in Kennewick, receiver and defensive back." That enough?
No! I wanted to scream. Not that it would have done me any good. The question I wanted her to answer, 'was he the one?'
That was when it began. Dani was so beautiful and sexy in that picture being kissed by probably the best- looking guy in school, chocolate-brown complexion. Besides, I'd heard the rumors, you know about black guys.
After that, my obsession with knowing just grew, that picture in my brain. But she wouldn't tell me anything; was she was dating the guy or was that just a 'homecoming' kiss?
ooOoo
Now, back to the beginning of the story, about three months after I'd first seen that picture. It was a normal Friday in October. We still lived in our home town. Dani had gone out that evening to visit a couple girlfriends she's had since school and I stayed home alone. We had three kids; two in college and one married, working at the local RV manufacturing plant.
We were proud of them all, our oldest was the youngest person the plant had ever promoted to a manager. The other two, too; our daughter was going to college to be a teacher, to follow in her mom's footsteps (pretty sure Dani's been the subject of many high school boys' wet dreams), and our other son was a math whiz, majoring in mathematics.
None of that had anything to do with the strange happenings of that evening, though, except that it explains why I was home alone. After Dani left, I was pondering that little mystery of my wife and even had gotten the album out again with the picture of Dani and her 'boyfriend' to look at again. She had the little queen's crown on her head and the kid was holding her hand and politely kissing her on the cheek.
Dani was wearing a pale blue dress with a beautiful corsage over her left breast. The dress was long, flowing with a slit up one side, bare shoulders with a deep 'V' showing her cleavage. Her auburn hair was curled under, just above her shoulders. She looked like a sweet, sexy, high school girl, her face beaming with the honor of being voted homecoming queen.
I sat, just staring at the picture, almost to the point of the picture putting me in a trance, wondering about later that night, the homecoming dance... and after.
I hadn't had dinner and decided to go buy myself a Pizza Hut dinner. I stepped outside, taking about four steps and stopping to gaze at my surroundings. I was thoroughly confused, my 2015 Accord was gone and my parents' old black '63 Ford Fairlane was in the street where the Accord was supposed to be. That was the car I'd driven my first year of college, before they'd sold it the following summer and I bought a little pickup.
How the hell was it sitting in our street? In front of our house! I checked the keys in my pocket and there they were... the keys for the Ford. Now, I was really confused. I knew damn good and well that I'd just picked up the keys for the Accord from the key rack beside the door.
I turned around to go back in and see if they were still there... and my eyes widened... there was no house! I was staring at the empty lot that Dani and I had bought six years ago. What the hell? I looked down at my feet and I was standing on bare dirt, not our concrete sidewalk. When I turned back around again, the old Fairlane wasn't on a street, just the dirt road that was there before the subdivision was put in.
The first thing that went through my mind was the old TV show, 'The Twilight Zone'. I half expected to hear that mystical music and Rod Serling's voice, "This is the dimension of Imagination..." But no, it couldn't be... the only logical explanation was that I'd gone to sleep, probably while looking at the picture, and this was nothing but a dream, so I pinched the back of my hand to wake myself up.
It didn't work, so I pinched harder, so that it actually hurt. The empty lot didn't go away. The Ford was still parked on the dirt road. I didn't know whether to be afraid or just go with the damned dream. I glanced down at my Fitbit. It showed October 25, 1987. I did just a bit of mental gymnastics, in my sleep obviously, and deduced that was the year Dani had been a senior in high school. I'd graduated in May of '87.
But this was the most unbelievably real dream I'd ever had! It was a chilly evening and I was cold. Wouldn't that normally wake a guy up? Then I remembered that that day had been unseasonably warm, in the sixties and when Dani left to go with her friends, it was still almost sixty outside. So, why was it so damned cold? Thankfully, at least, I was wearing a reasonably warm shirt, but still shivering.
Up and down the 'street', there was nothing but an empty field with one, lonely, dirt road through the bare field toward the highway where a few minutes earlier it had been a housing development; streets, houses, trees, landscaping.
I got in the old Ford and started it up. It was running on seven cylinders, just like it had been when I was a freshman in college. And messy inside, just like I'd always kept it. And, there in the back seat, was my old red plaid wool jacket, the one I loved before it shrunk to about an eight-year-old size when I accidentally washed it in hot water. I'd given it to the Salvation Army long before Dani and I married then never saw it again.
When I put it on, it fit me the same as it did when my brother gave it to me for Christmas. Maybe a little tight because I'd gained a few pounds. But it did fit. I had to laugh, the 'bullet hole' was still there. It was a drop of battery acid that had burned a little hole in it right at my chest and I'd affectionately called it my bullet hole. I was one tough cookie to survive that one.
It was only about a half-mile into town and everything was like I remembered from back in the eighties: cars and pickups, eighties and earlier; the old service station that had been torn down for a new one was there; town was exactly like it had been when I graduated high school.
I had a thought... my cell phone. I got it out to call Dani to see if she was having the same experience as I was. When I looked at it, no service. Duhh!
This dream was completely out of hand!
I drove up past the high school. In the early nineties, the outside had been remodeled, adding a roof and enclosed access between the junior high and high school buildings. Naturally, the remodel wasn't there. It was still set up so that there was a driveway between the two buildings.
One thing I saw from 'High School Hill' was that the lights were on at the football field, down at the elementary school.
If this was a dream, it was more real life than anything I'd ever experienced before! I thought again about The Twilight Zone. That was more like what this seemed, like I'd stepped through a worm-hole, back in time. I know when I had been looking at Dani's picture, it was October 25th, 2019. I looked at my watch again; it still showed Oct 25, 1987.
I drove through town again to the football field. But, before I did, I looked in the rear-view mirror, at myself. I wondered, if I'd gone back in time, had my age changed? No, I was still the same fifty-year-old Robert.