Three Strikes || Maureen D. Hall

Strike 1. He dumped you in a letter

That’s right, a letter. For those born after the turn of this last century, a letter is a physical thing, like a hard copy of an email, requiring an envelope and a stamp, taking actual days to be delivered. It can’t be deleted by swiping left or right, although it may be destroyed by shredding, tearing, or burning, overall a more satisfying and permanent experience.

The relationship started with embarrassing love notes that in no way made the eventual breakup by post any less chickenshit. He waxed eloquent about the sun streaking your hair; you practically composed a sonnet on the devotion you saw in his earthy brown eyes. It lasted three years, pretty much a decade when you’re 16. Early on, alone in your room, you played Linda Ronstadt’s Heat Wave over and over, transcribing the lyrics like a prayer, lifting the needle of your record player and carefully setting it back down on the rim of the 45 each time. It was like Linda was channeling you. You lost your virginities together (if virginity was an actual thing and not merely a social construct designed by the patriarchy to subjugate women). You toyed with hyphenating your last name when—not if—the two of you married, one abstract future day after college, when careers were established and you’d maybe made a down payment on a house, possibly a cape, not far from his parents, because they’re a big Italian tribe, close and up in each other’s business, a thing you appreciated, coming from your emotionally distant Scandinavian clan. 

But a letter, really? A letter? Is anything more cowardly? 

Strike 2. He Ditched You the Night of the Abortion

Okay, you get it, he lived at home and would’ve had to lie about why he was out all night. But he could’ve said he was visiting a friend, staying at his brother’s; there were a million alibis. Or he could have grown a pair and said, Yo, Mom, I’m almost 20, I have my own damned life, thank you. I’m back when I’m back.

Instead, he left you sobbing outside your dorm, lit up by the glow of his ’72 Chevy Malibu headlights as he drove away, while you slunk back to your room alone. And you, oh my god, you, felt like a terrible person for making him feel bad. Because, after all, he came with you to the clinic, sitting in the waiting room forever, since the whole thing pretty much took up a whole day. And he coughed up half the money, although he grumbled about it tiny bit, like you should be grateful he paid his share. Like the fact that it cost $300 was your fault, and maybe he would’ve preferred it was the 1960’s, when you would’ve had to go to some back-alley butcher, because abortion was illegal and women bled out or got infections and not infrequently died.

But you didn’t say any of that. Instead, you started kissing him, like that might make him stay, which only weirded him out, because it wasn’t like you could have sex right after an abortion. Duh, you knew that. You weren’t psycho or anything, you just needed to feel close to him. I mean, just because you both desperately wanted and willingly choose an abortion, it didn’t automatically follow that it was a piece of cake.

Capiche?

Strike 3- He Left the F-ing Rubbers Down the Hall

 It takes two people to get pregnant. You were there; you opened your legs and welcomed his naked penis, both of you fully aware you weren’t on the pill. And all the other modern birth control options people take for granted nowadays hadn’t been invented yet. You’d never even heard of a morning-after pill. What a miracle that would have been.

Still, he’d mail-ordered rubbers from a catalogue, retro even for 1978, the same way today you might order condoms, or anything else on the freaking planet, from Amazon. They arrived at his house in an unmarked brown box, which his mother placed on his bed while he was at class. Thoughtful.

So why then didn’t he haul his naked butt off the living room floor where you were doing it, and jog upstairs to his room to get one? For that matter, why didn’t you clamp your vagina shut and demand that he did? Did you think it couldn’t happen to you? Were the two of you so stuck in the quicksand of denial that you believed if you didn’t acknowledge you were having sex (and using a rubber would certainly be acknowledgement), then you could keep drifting in the amniotic fluid of your love? Like you were that special. Like anyone is that special.

Not that you had any inkling that your luck was about to run out on the day in question, the day you know you got pregnant, because it wasn’t like you had the opportunity to have sex all that often. All you knew was that the two of you were teeming with hormones and desire, and you had the house to yourselves, a rare and precious thing. And, for an hour or two, that was enough.

Strike 4- He Never Came over for Dinner or Willingly Talked to Your Parents

*Note: the title erroneously states there are three strikes when clearly there are more. Relax, this isn’t baseball. What if all anyone ever got were three swings before the Umpire of Life blew their whistle and shrieked, “You’re out!” We’d be done before we reached puberty. Fortunately, life provides infinite chances to screw up. Three strikes might round up to more like ten. Or a thousand. 

Onward.

Your parents hated how he’d pull up, honk the horn, and out you’d run, like Pavlov’s dog. “What? He can’t come in and say hello?” 

“It’s 1978, not 1958,” you’d snap, not about to acknowledge they even remotely had a point.

You suspected he couldn’t handle your father looking him in the eye and possibly seeing the impure thoughts lurking within, pertaining to you, your father’s daughter. Did your father fail to realize that you too harbored those same impure thoughts? Or did he direct his anger at your boyfriend to deflect his own awareness of your burgeoning and highly disturbing sexuality? 

At any rate, it pissed your parents off.

On the rare occasion your boyfriend was inadvertently forced to interact with, say, your mother, he practically charmed the pants off her, smiling, chatting, noticing she’d had her hair done. Making the fact that he couldn’t sit down for a freaking meal with the two of them once in a blue moon even more annoying. You knew what an amazing guy he was, charming, handsome, funny, overflowing with wit and integrity. Why then, when it came to your parents, couldn’t he try even a little bit?

Strike 5- He Didn’t Kiss You for Months. Literally

Early on, it took him a month to hold your hand and another two weeks to casually drape his arm around you while walking, causing you to stumble—you were that shocked—and skin your knee, ripping your jeans. Maybe you should have made the first move, but it was a different time, not quite the Dark Ages, but close to it. Regardless, your lust lay coiled like a snake, a spring, eagerly anticipating the slightest movement that might encourage you to pounce. You’d never understood the expression, to jump someone’s bones. She can’t wait to jump his bones. Now it made sense. You wanted to devour his bones. 

You fell asleep dreaming about making out, imagining what came next. No boy had so much as laid a finger on your actual skin, let alone seen you naked. The only hands to slide beneath your white cotton bra, your days-of-the-week bikini panties, had been your own. It. Was. Time.

“Maybe he’s shy because this thing is real, and you’re both actually in love?” Your best friend was similarly baffled at your lack of physical progress. She had the opposite, more common problem, of having to beat her boyfriend off with a stick, metaphorically of course. “Maybe he’s trying not to disrespect you?” Was that even a thing? To hell with that paternalistic medieval crap. Disrespect me, you wanted to whisper in his ear when the two of you embraced at the end of an evening. Disrespect the living hell out of me.

And finally, eventually, he did. In the span of two months, you went from tentative kisses and lingering hugs, to lying naked on the floor of your mother’s newly decorated sun porch after school, your parents conveniently off at work. You touched his dick, tentatively at first, then with more enthusiasm, and before long it was in your mouth. Weird for a moment, but soon the two of you were rolling around the sun porch, zealously exploring with hands and mouths, fingers and tongues. Oh, so this is what everyone’s been talking about! 

Those lost weeks, months even, when grabbing his hand or smoothing the hair from his face had seemed beyond your reach became a blur, a blip, something you would look back on with tenderness, awe even. Freezing, slip-sliding walks through ice and snow, naked hands clasped together in the pocket of his ski parka, the scent of his aftershave lingering on your unwashed palm when you held it to your face as you fell asleep. That day you’d led each other on trust walks, his idea. You went first, eyes closed, clutching his forearm as he walked you past 7-11 and the duck pond. You could smell the massive pile of dirty snow off the corner of West Main, the exhaust of buses heading to the city. Then it was his turn, you warning him, “step down, it’s a curb,” and “slow, we’re on a hill,” smiling secretly at an old lady slogging past with her cart of grocery bags. You placed his hand on the peeling bark of an old tree lining the curb, and he lifted it from the tree and kissed your fingers, his eyes still closed. If anyone saw the two of you that day they never mentioned it, not that you would have cared, cradled, insulated in your world of two.

But trust walks? Ironic, considering how things turned out. Although maybe that last strike was most bittersweet of all, mocking as it did the fleeting innocence of first love. Had one of you jumped the other’s bones sooner, is it possible the rest of it would never have happened? No post-abortion abandonment, no spineless long-distance dumping? Might you be together still, hands clasped, drifting into your twilight years in a renovated Victorian, having upgraded from the cape, the kids finally out of college, but gathering Sundays for dinner because, somewhere along the way, you shook off the emotionally distant Scandinavian thing and learned how to make a bitching lasagna?

The End