“How long?”
“Excuse me?
“How long have you loved her?”
I was almost always the last out the door of Señora Nuborgen’s Spanish class. My last name, Zimmerman, kept me pinned in back of the alphabetically ordered rows, and I also spent most of every class daydreaming, or sometimes sleeping, and was always a beat behind when it came time to leave, at least compared to my clock-watching classmates, who looked spring-loaded when the bell rang. We were in the second-to-last week of school, the last period of the day, mostly seniors, which meant we’d all had enough, Señora Nuborgen included, which meant movie week, which meant we were watching a mid-’60s West German production of Don Quixote. It was some kind of miniseries, dubbed from German into Spanish and then subtitled into English, and for most of us it was instant Sominex. The more popular versions must have been claimed by other schools out of the regional district A/V library. Señora Nuborgen often seemed a beat behind herself that semester. The circles under her eyes had darkened. Her clothes hung loose and shapeless. Sometimes she seemed to be leaning on the desk for support.
I looked at my shoes and then at the books cradled in my hand. I still carried them around as a prop, even though I had no use for them. “No sé,” I said. Señora Nuborgen insisted that we speak Spanish at all times during class.
“You don’t know?”
“What? No! I meant no comprende.”
“What don’t you understand?” Señora Nuborgen looked at me from behind her desk, both hands placed flat against her grade book. She wore what she always wore, a button-up sweater over a frilly blouse, an endless combination of argyles and creams. Her skirt, mid-calf length, must have been either gray or black or brown, and the pantyhose in that color that only teachers wear. I suppose the package would have been labeled “flesh,” though no human has that skin tone. If you asked me how old she was I’m sure my seventeen-year-old self would have said “like fifty?” but she was probably in her mid-to late thirties, or about the age I am now.
“No estas en amor,” I said, wondering why she wasn’t speaking Spanish, but I figured sticking with it gave me some plausible deni-ability as to what we were talking about.
Señora Nuborgen sighed and tapped her fingers softly over the grade book like she was picking out notes on a piano. “Estoy, not es-tas. No estoy en amor. I am not in love. You said to me, ‘You are not in love,’ which is true enough, but not what you meant.”
“No comprende?”
“No, I suppose you don’t,” she said. She lowered her head, like she was praying over the grade book. I knew you weren’t supposed to walk away from a teacher until they were done talking to you, but I eased out the door before she could look up again.
I haven’t thought of Jennifer Mecklenberg in a long time, years, not until the other night in bed, when my wife turned toward me and placed her hand on the book I was reading, lowering it from my gaze so I would look at her. Her face was sleepy, in that last moment of evening consciousness. “Do you love me?” she said.
“Of course.”
“Don’t answer that way,” she replied. Her blinks were slow and heavy.
“What way?” I said, lifting the book back up, but still looking at her.
“Unthinking, like it’s some sort of reflex.”
“Why can’t my love for you be a reflex?”
Her eyes closed fully.
“Because that’s not how love is,” she said softly, almost sighing. She breathed deeply, slowly, asleep. I turned back to my book.
“I know I’m not the only one you’ve loved,” she said. Her eyes were still closed, her voice a whisper, like she was talking to herself. I lowered my book again.
“You’re the only one I’ve ever really loved,” I said. I placed a hand on her shoulder then slid it to her rising and falling ribs.
She didn’t reply for a while, and then she spoke again. “You know that’s not true.”
She could have been talking in her sleep, for all I could figure. Her face was slack, the fine wrinkles that have started to appear around her eyes smoothed away. I went back to my book, but my eyes just ran over the words, taking nothing in. I turned off the light and settled in next to her. Beth slung a leg and arm over me and nuzzled into my neck. “You’re not off the hook,” she said, close, into my ear. “I’ll expect a better answer next time I ask.”
And so I’ve been thinking about love, which brought me back to Jennifer Mecklenberg and Señora Nuborgen. I actually comprended what Señora Nuborgen was saying muy bien or mucho bien, or whatever. I had loved Jennifer Mecklenberg unrequitedly for better than two years at that point. All through high school we’d been in the same classes, parallel lines that never intersected because since even before I’d loved her she had an older boyfriend, Andrew Collins, the son of an airline CEO, the kind of kid who was loud in the hallways, tall, broad-shouldered, confident and showy. He had matured, and I had not. He would come up behind her in the halls and grab her shoulders and give her a little shake. “Jenny Meck!” he’d shout, turning her to face him, staking his claim. He was the only person I’d ever heard call her “Jenny,” and whenever he said this, I swear I saw her cringe a little. She was not a Jenny. Maybe a “Jen” to her girlfriends, but a Jennifer to the rest of us.
I remember her as beautiful, but when I dug out my senior yearbook recently, the picture I found showed a girl who was merely pretty, with brown, shoulder-length hair, a string of pearls over her navy sweater and white turtleneck. I didn’t remember the braces, but there they were. I couldn’t imagine that Jennifer Mecklenberg still had braces senior year. Even I’d managed to shed them by October. I turned to my own picture, looking sidelong at the wiry hair sculpted into a helmet just long enough for a single snap. I couldn’t bear to look long enough to decide if I really was as out of her league as I felt at the time. I ask myself why I loved her, and I honestly don’t know. I didn’t even really know her—my biggest success wooing her was in a group project in European History the previous year, when I’d made some crack and she playfully punched me in the arm, saying, “You’re so funny!” which was something, but not very much.
But as I remember her, the feeling returns, not with its full force, but stronger than I’d think it should or could, having been blunted by twenty years.
I could go to Facebook, but this requires exposure, and Beth would see, and there is something about making it a detective game that appeals to me. Class reunion websites are a treasure trove of information. Some of the profiles are free to peruse and I spent hours virtually catching up with my former classmates. Julie Vandenbosch is deceased, killed by a drunk driver. Marcy Bobcheck is now Mark Bobcheck. (Neither I nor her former softball teammates should be surprised.) Richard Pendarvis made a fortune in dot coms and apparently exclusively wears Hawaiian shirts. Most everyone is or at least has been married. Many are bald or balding. All these factoids are both surprising and not. Who would have figured that Tim Penn would be arrested for allegedly spying on his fifteen-year-old neighbor with a remote video camera planted in her room? But then again, it sort of makes sense if you knew him back in the day.
She is on one of the websites as Jennifer Mecklenberg Schmitz, but her information is labeled as “private,” and the icons next to her name indicate that she has posted a full biography and pictures available for anyone willing to pony up the $19.95 annual fee. I wouldn’t know how to explain the charge to my wife.
I googled her name and read tidbits about at least twelve different Jennifer Schmitzes, all of whom or none of whom could be her. She could be the leading real estate salesperson of Greensboro, North Carolina, or someone concerned about faulty playground equipment on the tot lots in Dowagiac, Michigan. She may not be either of these people. She’s probably not both.
There are bulletin boards on these sites where we are told to post our most memorable moments and then others can comment on them. I scroll through the list, and I remember none of those posted by others, but then again no one would remember mine, either.
The next day in Señora Nuborgen’s class I stayed alert to the clock, ready to jump into the middle of the line filing so as not to be cornered again, but a minute or so before the bell was due to ring, just as Quixote convinced Sancho Panza to be his squire, Señora Nuborgen clicked on the lights, saying, “That’s a good stopping point. Have a good weekend, everyone. We’ll finish up next week. Remember that attendance matters, and Josh Z., I need to speak to you for a moment.”
When the bell rang I stayed seated at my desk. Señora Nuborgen and I were alone inside thirty seconds, the student stampede over, leaving rows of crooked desks in its wake. She advanced from the front of the room and grabbed a nearby seat, turning it to face me.
I fumbled for the right words. “Que hice mal?”
She smiled. “Very good. You said that correctly. You haven’t done anything wrong, at least in regards to class.”
I went to my go-to phrase, “No comprende.”
“Back to that, are we? You can drop the Spanish bullshit. It’s sort of painful for us both, and you’re not going to remember any of this by the time you start college in the fall anyway.”
I swallowed hard. I don’t remember being scared, more like unsettled. Teachers were not supposed to speak to students like this and the party line for four years had been that everything was important because we’d have to know it for college. Señora Nuborgen looked at me steadily, blocking my exit with her desk. I would’ve had to literally leap over her to get out. “Why am I here?” I said.
“You never answered my question from yesterday.”
“What question?”
“How long have you loved her?”
“Who?”
“Don’t play dumb, Josh,” she said, sitting heavily back in the desk. “I’ve been teaching here thirteen years and during that time I’ve seen a lot of love on the faces of you kids. I’ve seen the look someone has when they’re in love, and I see it on your face when you look at Jennifer Mecklenberg. I don’t blame you, she’s cute, but then everyone’s cute at your age.”
At the sound of her name, my heart filliped against my chest.
“Aha!” Señora Nuborgen said, sitting up straight and slapping the desk. “There it was again. I knew it. So, how long?”
There was something kind in her eyes, so I decided to tell as much truth as I could stand. “I dunno, a while.”
“A while, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s a while?”
“A couple of years, maybe?”
“I bet that feels like a long time,” she said. She angled her head a little, looking at me more closely.
I said nothing, and Señora Nuborgen looked away and then up at the ceiling, like she might find more questions there. “Have you been enjoying the movie?” she said.
“Sure.”
“Liar.” She smiled briefly at me before looking back at the ceiling. “Do you know what Don Quixote is about?”
I’d read the Cliffs Notes like everyone else. “I dunno, some crazy guy?” I said.
“You kids always phrase your answers as questions, not that I blame you. I wasn’t sure if I knew anything at your age either, but you know more than you think, believe me. Some crazy guy, huh? I suppose that’s right.” She gripped the desk and pulled herself back upright, leaning across the desk’s surface and toward me. “Do you know what I think it’s about?”
“What?”
“Doing what you think is right, even if it’s wrong.”
She gave her biggest smile of the afternoon, but I must have been looking at her like she was Don Quixote because it quickly fell. She lowered her head to the desk and rested it across her folded arms. “You can go now, if you want,” she said into the crook of her elbow. The sound of the squeaking chair echoed around the room as I stood. I moved quietly as I could to the door, holding my breath. At the threshold I glanced back to see her still with her head down, unmoving.
I’ve been doing most of my thinking about love during my “runs.” I am not a natural runner, but I have reached the age where activity is a near daily necessity if I want to live a life of a reasonable duration. The first ten or so minutes of each session involve a cataloguing of that day’s aches and pains—the creaking in my arthritic big toe, the shooting sensation down the inside of my left arm that I’ve come to ignore because it is apparently not a heart attack, the tightening cramp in the upper right abdominal. In order to escape this litany I make an effort to think about anything else, and lately I’ve been thinking about why my wife might be thinking about love.
Maybe it is because we recently acknowledged that it is very likely that we will not be having children. We are not too old, but we are getting there, and if the window of opportunity feels like it is not shut completely, it is at most cracked, and as it closes, neither of us feels any real urgency to wedge it open. We have agreed that while our home is perhaps a hospitable place for a child, the world, increasingly, is not. This seals our fates only to each other. This is a scary thought for sure, but as creaky as I feel some days, it seems distant enough that it doesn’t cause me any particular worry. It is something inevitable, and maybe not even for me since I will likely be the first to go.
To me, what we have together feels complete enough for this lifetime; at least that’s my sense of things and has been from just about the moment we met. Truthfully, I’m not sure about Beth’s. You’d have to ask her.
A couple days after the bedtime episode she asked me again after dinner as I loaded the dishwasher. “Do you love me?” she said.
“Of course,” I replied, shooing one of the dogs from the dish rack. They both liked to “preclean” whatever we left behind.
“That’s what you said last time,” she said, handing me the next rinsed plate.
Because of my preparations, I was ready for this. “It happens to be true. My love for you is like a reflex, like breathing, something you just have to do, always there, even when you’re not thinking about it.”
“Are you saying you don’t think about me?” I frowned down at the row of dirty dishes and nudged the dog away a little harder than necessary. My wife is not a lawyer, but she could play one on TV.
“That’s not what I’m saying at all. I think about you all the time.”
“What is it that you think about me?” Beth shut off the faucet and snapped the dishtowel over the sink before hanging it across the rack on the counter. The other dog immediately tugged it free and ran with it to his bed.
“This sounds like a quiz,” I said. I shut the dishwasher door and hit the start button. It whirred into life.
“Maybe it is,” she replied. “Maybe it is.”
That next Monday in class I lingered purposefully behind, hovering at Señora Nuborgen’s desk, pretending to make sure I had everything I needed in my stack of books. The movie continued to run behind me. She hadn’t bothered to turn it off, sitting silently at her desk as the post-bell rush blew past her. She seemed to be staring down at her hands in her lap. I cleared my throat.
“What can I do for you, Josh?” she said without looking up.
“Last week…” I’ve always been at a loss for words, not able to find the right ones without significant planning and preparation. Even with the weekend to ponder everything she’d been saying to me, I still couldn’t figure out what to say.
“Yes?” Her eyes were red-rimmed, like she’d been crying.
“Last week when I said, estas en amor instead of estoy en amor, you said that was true, that you weren’t in love…”
“Yes?”
“Well, what I was wondering is, what about Señor Nuborgen?”
“What about Señor Nuborgen?” Her eyes sparkled. I wondered if I was being teased.
“Don’t you love him?”
“Señor Nuborgen,” she said, “is a very nice, thoroughly boring man who was eminently available, and given the current situation, I’m infinitely grateful that I met him.”
“What current situation?”
“I’m not talking about that,” she said.
Not knowing what to say, I lapsed into Spanish, maybe hoping that whatever came out was nonsense. “Esta guapo?”
“No, Señor Nuborgen is not handsome, but then I’m not particularly bonita, am I?”
I shrugged. She wasn’t. What teacher was? But I wasn’t going to say so.
“No,” she said. “I’m no Jennifer Mecklenberg. I guess I never was, but there was a time when I wasn’t so bad, if you can believe that.”
I remember trying to really look at her, at who she might’ve been, but all I saw was what we saw in just about every teacher. Someone old. Someone tired, someone weary. They were like a different species. To us they all looked beaten, defeated, bags under the eyes, living on endless cups of break-room coffee, dragging themselves toward the summer break when they could recharge at least a little, and Señora Nuborgen was no different, though she’d declined more than most over the year.
I tried to look her in the eye. “I can,” I said. Just then the film ran out; the end slapped against the uptake reel. Señora Nuborgen came out from behind her desk and went to the projector. “You’re a sweet boy, Josh. Jennifer Mecklenberg would be lucky to have you, particularly compared to that braying ass Andrew Collins.” Switching off the projector, she quickly threaded the end back through the sprocket on the original reel and switched the machine to reverse.
“You know,” she continued, “she and Andrew are having problems.”
“Huh?”
“I heard her crying about it to one of her friends in the bathroom. Seems like he’s been stepping out on her at college.”
“Stepping out?”
“He’s having sex with other girls.”
It took me a moment to digest the implications of this, the multiple meanings. Andrew Collins and Jennifer Mecklenberg were having problems. Andrew Collins was having sex with other girls. Other girls. Jennifer Mecklenberg had had sex. With Andrew Collins.
“Don’t look so surprised,” Señora Nuborgen said. “Lots of you are having sex.”
I suppose this was true, but I was not among them, and during class periods as I gazed one row over and two seats ahead at Jennifer Mecklenberg’s lovely legs, at the small bones of her wrist, and I imagined gaining the privilege of touching her in those places, my thoughts about her never turned to actual sex. Kissing, of course, maybe a hand on the outside of her cheerleading sweater (maybe even inside), but sex? Ridiculous. Jennifer Mecklenberg was not someone you had sex with. Unless you were Andrew Collins, apparently.
Señora Nuborgen placed a hand on her hip and cocked her head at me. “Not you, though. That seems clear enough.” The movie finished rewinding, and Señora Nuborgen snapped the projector off. She came toward me and rested a hand on my cheek. There was a faint wisp of rubbing alcohol at her wrist.
“We’re running out of time, son,” she said.
I have been looking for these love looks on the faces of my students, but I do not see them there. Maybe it’s because I teach college instead of high school and these kids are already skilled at masking these things from the likes of me, or maybe my influency at expressing love makes me equally poor at reading it in others.
It’s strange even to think of them being in love, real love, because they do seem like children to me, especially now that I’ve realized I’m old enough, biologically anyway, to be their fathers. Of course, some of them must be in real love, since they’re about the age I was when I met Beth. Maybe it’s different for them because these kids do not date; they “hang out” until “hanging out” turns into a relationship. If you ask them, these are their stories. We were just hanging out and then one day we hooked up.
In our time there was no “hanging out.” There was predator and prey, pursuer and pursued, and while sometimes women were the pursuers and men the pursued, it was usually the traditional way around. Beth likes to tell people how I was dating someone else at the time I started pursuing her, which is shamefully enough true, though I haven’t felt any shame over it in a long time. It depends on her mood how she tells it. One version is meant as flattery, a confirmation of our shared destiny together. The other is offered as evidence of my theoretical inconstancy, a floating of the possibility that because I’ve jumped ship once, I may do it again. She has quizzed me about this other girl, asking me if I loved her.
“Apparently not.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I dumped her for you.”
“That doesn’t speak so well of your character, does it?” She usually smiles when she says this, but I know this Beth. This is the Beth that asks me if I love her.
Señora Nuborgen was right, we were running out of time, so the next day I no longer pretended I had a reason for staying behind to talk to her. “Looking for a woman’s advice, eh, Josh?” she said. She had all the drawers of her desk open and was removing each object, one at a time, conducting a brief inspection before placing some in a cardboard box and throwing away others.
Señora Nuborgen laughed. She held up one of those troll dolls that you stick on the end of a pencil and then twirl to make the hair stand on end. She handed it to me. On the back someone had written “Señora N.” in permanent marker. “Who did this?” I said.
“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.” I handed it back to her. She held it over the box briefly before tossing it into the trash.
“What should I do?” I said.
Señora Nuborgen paused in her sorting. “I’m going to betray my feminist sisters here, Josh, but I’m going to tell you a simple truth. Women like passion. They like romance, and above all they want you to be passionate about them. You are quite literally sick with love, my young friend, so we know you don’t lack the passion. The question is if you can express it. Do you think you could tell her how you feel?”
“Definitely not.”
“Well, can you show her then?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you can’t tell her that you love her, you should show her, make a demonstration of your love. A gesture, a grand gesture.”
“Like what?”
Señora Nuborgen fished a stack of index cards out of the desk and dumped them in the cardboard box. “When I was your age, I pooled my graduation money and went to Spain for three weeks, Andalusia… Málaga, the southern coast.”
None of these things meant anything to me. She may as well have been speaking of Mars.
“I stayed with a host family and spent my days and nights just wandering the city. My Spanish at the time was no better than yours is now, so I kept to myself, soaking it in, dreaming of the day I could come back and understand it all. It’s when I decided to major in Spanish. I figured I’d teach during the year and spend my summers in Spain.” Señora Nuborgen took a bundle of pencils bound together with a rubber band and placed them in the box. “I was pretty dumb. I’ve never been back.”
“Why not?”
“I teach high-school Spanish, Josh. Do you know how much they pay me? Do you think it’s summer-home-in-Spain money?”
“Right. But maybe someday…”
“No, not someday, Josh,” she said.
“OK.”
“Anyway,” she said, “there was a boy with a scooter. I saw him on the street outside my host family’s home the fourth or fifth day. He had the most beautiful long, dark hair, dark eyes, brown skin. It was the festival month, and no one save the street vendors did any work. They’ve got the right ideas there, Josh. He wore a short-sleeve button-up shirt that he let flap open in the breeze. He would wait outside for me, holding a helmet under the crook of his arm, and once he saw me make eye contact he’d pat his hand on the scooter seat.”
“What did you do?”
“I ignored him. I was seventeen. He must have been at least twenty. I was a virgin!”
I must have blushed.
“That’s right, an innocent young girl being pursued by a swarthy foreigner. Scandal!” She swept her arm blindly into the recesses of the desk, reaching for any straggling objects before continuing. “I even tried changing up my schedule of comings and goings, but he was always there, smiling, patient, patting the seat. I began to dream about him, not always good dreams, like him driving his scooter to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea with me on it. But finally, on my last day, my host mother was sweeping the stoop out front and she saw the boy gesturing to me and I asked who he was and she said, Él es inofensivo, he is harmless, and so I went over to the boy and put the helmet on and climbed onto the scooter.”
She was enjoying her own story. I imagine now that it was something she’d never told anyone before, but she’d been rehearsing it in her head for quite some time, waiting for the right moment. “And what happened?” I said.
“We rode. In a day we saw everything it had taken me better than two weeks to experience on foot. It was the same, but faster, a blur. I hugged him tight around the middle and quickly learned to lean into the corners. My Spanish vocabulary was terrible, his English worse, so whenever he said something while smiling I laughed, and whenever his face was straight I nodded seriously. Eventually, as we made a final turn and I realized we were heading for home, I felt deeply sad. Sometimes endings are new beginnings, but this just felt like an ending. I remember leaning my head into his back, pressing my whole self against him. I remember his smell, but I couldn’t describe it to you. It is deeper in me than that. As we got closer to the host family home he drove more and more slowly, so slowly we practically tipped over. Back in front of the house, I got off the scooter and faced him as I removed the helmet. My hair was sweat-matted to my face. He took the helmet and swept the hair from my cheeks and pressed his hands to both sides of my face and he tilted my head up and pulled me toward him. I closed my eyes. I had been kissed before, badly, but I was certain this time was going to be different, and I was right.”
She looked at me, and for a moment I thought I could see that girl again, transformed by her own story. She appeared lost for a moment, gazing down at the box holding the keepsakes from her desk. She hefted it briefly before dumping everything from it into the garbage. She continued.
“He pressed his lips to my forehead, and even against my flushed skin they felt warm, but even so, I shivered in his arms. He tilted me back and looked me in the eyes before releasing me, and in an instant he was back on the scooter and gone, leaving me there wobbling in the street. He never said it, Josh, Te quiero, but I felt it.”
As I’ve made clear, my Spanish was not so good, but I knew that word, quiero. “But that means I want you, not I love you,” I said.
“Very good, Josh,” she said. “Exactly.”
When I talk to my students about writing stories, I speak of the importance of showing and telling and how they are inextricably linked, dependent on each other. This is why when my wife asks me if I love her and I say, “of course,” it is not always enough. Sometimes, but not always. It is all tell and no show. I know she would like me to show her, but I’m not sure how, worried that any expression I risk will seem inauthentic. I am simply bad at romance, but not for lack of wanting to try.
Just before Beth and I were married, we had to meet with our officiating minister and declare our intentions. Neither of us were or are churchgoers, so we picked her out of the Yellow Pages, the first one who agreed to marry two people she’d never met, provided we were acquaintances and not strangers to her by the time of the ceremony. I don’t remember her name, Reverend something, though I guess I could look it up on the marriage license, but she was a big woman, tall, and she seemed oversized for her small rectory office. She was kind, making small talk before turning to me and asking what she said was the only question that really mattered, “Why do you wish to marry this woman?”
I told her of Beth’s best traits, her beauty, her kindness, our shared values, the sense that we belonged together, all true things, but nonetheless a pretty lackluster answer. I even knew it at the time, but the Reverend smiled and nodded at each new thing that came out of my mouth. I spoke for what seemed like forever, I guess hoping that quantity would substitute for quality.
Once I finally petered out, I smiled wanly at the Reverend, then at Beth, and the Reverend turned to Beth and said, “And why do you wish to marry this man?”
Beth reached over and took my hand and looked at me while speaking to the Reverend and said, “Because when he tells me he loves me, I believe him.”
The next day was the last day of school, and all pretense of classroom decorum was discarded completely. The final installment of Don Quixote played, but the chattering never stopped. Girls sat on their boyfriends’ laps. The kid next to me whose name I cannot conjure for the life of me slowly ripped each page out of his textbook and made paper airplanes that he sailed randomly around the room. Señora Nuborgen was at her desk, blocked by the projector screen in front of her. We were all pent up, ready to explode, and I suppose Señora Nuborgen realized that any effort to contain us was pointless. When Quixote died, disillusioned and alone, some wag went, “Awwwww, that sucks, dude.” The resulting laughter outstripped the actual humor. Everybody but me leaked out of the room before the final bell even rang.
I switched off the projector as I made my way to the front. Señora Nuborgen was busy stacking the books from her shelves into boxes.
“Why are you packing up everything?” I asked.
“I’m not going to be back next year, Josh,” she replied.
“Why not?”
She paused with her back still to me, reaching for the highest shelf with her fingertips. “Can you get these for me?” she said.
I came around the desk and began handing her the books one by one. “Where are you going?” I said.
I handed her three more books before she spoke. “I’m moving on, Josh.”
“Don’t you like it here?”
She paused again. Her chin quivered and I looked away. “I love it here.”
“Then why not stay?” I asked.
I silently passed down more books until she wiped her arm across her eyes and said, “So have you figured out what you’re going to do?”
I had, sort of. There would be an end-of-year party at someone’s house whose parents believed it was safer to let the kids drink under some adult supervision. I’d never gone to any of these, but I’d go to this one, and once there I’d figure out how to show Jennifer Mecklen-berg I loved her.
“Good,” Señora Nuborgen said. “It’s important to remember that whatever happens, it’s the right thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Trust me, Josh,” she said. “I know what I’m talking about. The worst thing is to wonder.”
I handed her the last book, and she dropped it in the box without looking. Then she reached up and placed her hands on my cheeks and pulled my forehead down to her lips and kissed me there. Her lips were dry and cracked against my skin. “Good luck, Josh,” she said. When I looked at her again, she was crying.
I also talk to my students about the necessity of suspense in their stories, of the need for tension, even for surprise that is built in, that is organic to the story, unexpected, yet also right.
But I will spare you any attempt to build suspense over what happened at the party. There is nothing to show. There were no surprises. Jennifer Mecklenberg was there, Andrew Collins was not, the seemingly perfect scenario. But if she was Saturn, her friends were her rings, while I was some kind of moon in a very distant orbit. I hugged the perimeter of the party, circling for a chance to get closer, hoping I would do the right thing when the time came. She had signed my yearbook that last week, “You’re awesome!!!!!! Let’s hang out this summer xoxo, Jennifer.” I took it as encouragement even as I knew that Jennifer Mecklenberg’s name was in a lot of yearbooks and that “awesome” was probably her most frequently used word.
At one point during the party she saw me and waved with the tips of her fingers, and I tilted my warm cup of beer back in salute. Even from a distance her eyes looked glazed over from the alcohol, and who even knows if she knew who she was waving to. It soon became apparent to me that if this was the time, it was not the place, or vice versa. At some point, while playing a drinking game, she sprinted from the room to go vomit in the bushes. I don’t think I stopped loving her then, but I at least stopped wondering about whether or not it was possible for me to show her this. The chance that Jennifer Mecklen-berg might also love me seemed vanishingly small.
Later that summer, just a few days before I was to leave for college, I sat at the breakfast table, shoveling cereal into my mouth, and my mother handed me an open page of our tabloid-format local weekly. It was turned to the obituaries. “Wasn’t she one of yours?” she said, tapping the page.
The heading just said “Nuborgen” in bold type. The text said that Sylvia Nuborgen, longtime teacher at Greenbrook High School, had passed away the previous week after a several-month battle with ovarian cancer. She was survived by her husband, Jameson P. Nuborgen, and her parents, Theodore and Beverly Portnoy. The couple had no children. Donations to the American Cancer Society were requested in lieu of flowers. The service was to be held the day after I was scheduled to leave for school.
When I looked up, I could not see my mother for the tears in my eyes.
Is that surprising? I don’t know. At the time, I should’ve seen it coming, but I didn’t.
And so, because I am not capable of telling Beth how I love her and why I love her, I will have to show her. I will show her by writing a story. I will show her by writing these stories.