I saw Lucille in May of 1998, for the first time in thirteen years. The phone rang at my office that day, and suddenly my ear was filled with the soft hum of her eerily familiar sing-song voice, going on and on about how she was now living in Houston, freshly divorced, and working at an area medical clinic. There was something unhinged in her voice, a note of chumminess that sought to belie the obvious fact that it had been a very long time. The forced attempt at the casual made the whole conversation a little impossible. After all these years, and out of the clear blue, she was wondering if maybe we could get together for dinner and drinks.
With my workday effectively arrested, I frittered away the remains of the afternoon drawing doodles on the numbered squares of my desk calendar, marking a grid of rows and columns of time, mentally organizing the past, wrapping my mind around thirteen years’ worth of questions. In this way, I prepared myself for the sight of Lucille.
And it was a necessary exercise. To look at her across the table that night was to gaze backward across the chasm of adult life to the last gasp of a shared adolescence. We had been boyfriend and girlfriend in high school, lost our virginity together, got drunk for the first time together, and skinny-dipped. Since then, she’d become a physician’s assistant, while I had gotten rich in the recent technology boom. She was now a single mom, while I’d spent the same period bouncing from one brief and absurd relationship to another. The intervening years, however, appeared to have weighed more heavily on Lucille: not too long ago, a friend of hers in the medical profession had killed herself, and another had, just days before, lost her medical license for writing fraudulent prescriptions. Adulthood had shown itself to be a bit lonely for me, but edging toward the ominous for her.
To my mind past and present are oddly difficult to distinguish when it comes to Lucille. Memories drift and run together, and reality becomes blurred by illusion. Perhaps this is because I never really stopped thinking of her during our thirteen-year hiatus, or perhaps because what she was and what she became are not all that far apart. The first time I ever laid eyes on her was in gym class during our junior year of high school. She was off by herself near the half-court line, dancing with her eyes closed while the other girls in her class played badminton. She was a lithe and nimble gymnast and dancer, shimmying to music only she could hear. She was self-assured, but had very few girlfriends, and was, by all accounts, unusual except with respect to her interest in boys.
Our first date was an attempted escape from innocence – banana splits at Tastee Freeze, followed by a secret foray over an oil tycoon’s pool fence, where we skinny-dipped without really touching. As we tread water, however, our noses inches apart and a ponderous moon overhead, I secured another date where something more was promised. Dustin, my best friend in high school, was house-sitting a sprawling mansion the following weekend, and I could get the keys. Lucille thought this a fine idea, as it would be her birthday, and she’d promised herself that the occasion would be marked by “significant events” throughout her life.
This second date involved a bottle of Chardonnay consumed in the master bedroom of this palatial home, coupled with a fumbling attempt at intercourse. But I was heartened by what seemed to be her native enthusiasm for all things sexual, and by the fact that she agreed to a third date that involved her sneaking through my bedroom window. Many dates followed, which gradually came to instill in me the crude and naïve belief that all women were multi-orgasmic. Later I would come to realize that Lucille was different from most women in many ways.
A few days later, I dropped by her house, where I met her parents. I was raised with typical bourgeois Texas values, but Lucille, I could see from the outset, was brought up in very different circumstances, among very different people. The first thing I took note of as I stepped from the car was her stepfather leaning against the sprung jamb of the screen door to their shabby ranch-style house, a bottle of Olympia resting upon the crown of a bulbous belly; a living caricature of the malevolent stepfather. After the introductions, he began telling me how he’d been out of work for twelve years, unable to get another job with the railroads. Lucille’s mother wore a pillar of orange hair and smoked a Winston out on the stoop, rolling her hooded eyes, the lids caked with blue eye shadow, as this man, her fourth husband, recited his tale of economic misfortune. Bad vibes hung all about them and their place, and my business, as I saw it, was at home in my bedroom with Lucille. Guided by simple but true teenage instinct, I made a point of keeping a distance from that unhappy home.
We dated through what remained of high school, and then one day Lucille told me of her plans to attend college in San Diego. I would be staying at home in College Station because I liked the Aggies, and I really couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. After eighteen months of going steady – it had been a good go by high school standards – we had both become distracted by our blossoming classmates. Prom was followed by graduation, which was followed by a summer of mutual but mild discontent, and by August, Lucille was gone. What I didn’t know at the time was that she was escaping a ruined childhood.
About a week after she left, her former neighbor stopped by my house to ask after Lucille. I’d seen him a few times before, but only in passing. He said he was happy to hear that she’d “gotten out of that house and away from that man,” meaning, I assumed, any one of her many stepfathers. His words made sense intuitively, even to my eighteen-year-old mind. On several occasions, Lucille had made vague comments about slimy behavior by one of the “dirty old men” in her life. I never pressed her about what she meant by this, and she never offered an explanation. Whatever happened, I figured it had something to do with what made her different from other girls our age. Our whole time together, her every thought seemed bent on the idea of escape – both psychological and physical. Now that she was gone, I could only assume she was happy.
We exchanged letters through our college careers, propelled, I suppose, by habit and simple curiosity, but we rarely saw each other . She transferred to another school, and I pledged a fraternity. But there were happy surprises. In 1984, she called just before the Christmas holiday to say she was free for a few days and wanted to come up to College Station for a quick visit.
She arrived just as the town was getting laid low by a freakishly heavy snowstorm. The stately frat house, aglow in the snowy darkness, was completely empty save for myself, and that night we carried on in bed and then called out for delivery. Her quick visit extended itself to three days of splendid solitude, but our relationship was in its final stage of evanescence. Once more, she had to be going. Little did I know how many desk calendars I would scribble upon and discard before I saw her again.
In the wake of this final reunion, all the letters I sent Lucille came back, unopened. Return to sender. No forwarding address. The letters I once received with regularity mysteriously stopped. And that was that. No more phone calls, no more contact. Total escape. Lucille became an elusive hologram, a vivid memory that lingered on and on. I always wondered what had become of her.
I was about to find out.