Date: Monday, 12/8/69

With each day, I pray that my finger will adjust better to the ring on it. It still feels like a foreign object that my hand wants to reject. I see no symbolic significance in this and as it turns out, when I had coffee with Eileen today, she reported the same problem with her ring.

Eileen saw the ring on my finger before I could tell her the news. We were in the Commons again. Her classes are basically over and she had some time to relax. Without Philip at her side, which is a rare event, I felt encouraged to sit down and talk. It felt like it used to feel when we didn’t know Charles or Philip. We talked for a long time so I drank more coffee than I’m used to. I may never sleep again.

We sure could talk but the content of our conversation has changed. Eileen talks about raising animals and growing crops in Mexico. I tell her we’re thinking about going to Paris during the winter break.

Eileen asked me sort of shyly if I was having any trouble adjusting to my ring. What a relief that was. I told her my finger wasn’t happy with it but I was going to tough it out because I knew eventually I wouldn’t even know it was there.

She looked at me as if I had saved her life.

“Philip wants me to believe that I don’t want to marry him because the ring is uncomfortable. I remind him that I am giving up a career as a singer to follow him to Mexico so I don’t think it’s about my ambivalence. He taught me that word in the process of explaining to me why the ring was uncomfortable.”

At that moment, I don’t think Eileen wanted me to see the inner workings of her life with Philip but there it was. Already the two of them weren’t getting along. I said not one word and let it all go by. Goldie would have been proud of me.

I guess, to resume some control over the conversation, Eileen said to me about my engagement, “I can’t believe he proposed and you accepted. I mean, you two have, well, such completely different backgrounds not to mention study habits.”

She may have wanted to jab at me but she was correct. We come from radically different backgrounds.

“Yes, true but the next semester won’t really be that different from this one. Except that I will be living with him off campus.” I left unsaid that neither she nor Philip would be on campus or in school and that she was throwing away a full scholarship to follow him to Mexico to be a farmer.

I don’t think I like myself for having said that to her or even what I left unsaid. I got up and left. I mumbled something about an appointment I forgot I had.