another sign: It wasn’t that I was consciously unwilling to turn my schedule upside down for him, more that the thought never occurred to me. Although he had a younger sister who was married and a younger brother who was mentally retarded and lived with his parents on the farm, I didn’t ever meet anyone in his family. I did, however, after about three months, take him to have Sunday lunch in Riley. At the end of the visit, though the subject of Vietnam had not come up, my father—himself a veteran—shook his hand and said, “Young men like you are a credit to this country.” In the car back to Madison, Simon said, “Your father is painfully naive.”
Was I some kind of automaton? That’s what I wonder now, not just about that moment when I didn’t respond, but about all my time with Simon. But it appeared to be a relationship, it had all the contours and rituals, so who was to say it wasn’t? I made dinner for him Wednesdays, we went to a movie every Saturday night at the Majestic (he was the only person I knew besides my friend Rita Alwin, the French teacher, whom I never had to convince to see a foreign film), and following the movie, we went back to my place and had sex before he drove home around midnight. After the first few episodes, I did not climax regularly with Simon, but I attributed the erraticness more to an early abundance of excitement on my part than to a subsequent failure on his. We soon became used to each other, and if he was grumpy, then his grumpiness was a guiding force; to accommodate him was an opportunity. And I didn’t think this because of generational notions about gender, not really. I thought it because I was me, because he was him.
My parents seemed pleased. My mother wouldn’t bring herself to ask directly when we might get engaged, but she’d say, “Do you think if Daddy could help Simon get a job at the bank, would he be interested in that?” Or “Ginny Metzger told me that Arlette found a wedding dress with real lacework for seventy dollars at a bridal shop in Milwaukee.” Meanwhile, all my grandmother said was “He’s like Mr. Lloyd, isn’t he?” This was a reference to the licentious one-armed art teacher in
and I knew it meant Simon had made an unfavorable impression on my grandmother. I did not realize how unfavorable for several months.
At Christmas that year—it was 1973—I was ironing a shirt in my grandmother’s room while she sat on her bed reading when she said, “You simply can’t marry that friend of yours.” She wasn’t even looking at me as she spoke.
I turned. “You mean Simon?”
“He’s a wet blanket.”
I was taken aback. “Granny, he’s been through a lot.”
She shook her head. “I’m not saying he hasn’t known difficulty, but I’ll bet he was a wet blanket even when he was a boy.”
“Are you suggesting I end things with him?”
My grandmother considered the question, then said, “I suppose I am.”
I was silent.
“With Dena down in Kansas City, who’ll give you a piece of their mind if I don’t?” my grandmother said. “Don’t be offended. I’m only thinking of your best interest.”
“Maybe you don’t want me to get married,” I said, and the part I did not say was
My grandmother and I never discussed Gladys Wycomb, not even before or after my grandmother’s visits to Chicago. Following everything that had happened in the fall of 1963, my grandmother and I had wordlessly made peace—there was much I was indebted to her for—and over time, our interactions had returned to normal. But it was a normality that sometimes had to be attended to and guarded. I tried to be less judgmental, more deferential and considerate, than I had been as a teenager, and the very fact of my trying was evidence that things between us would never again be effortless.
“Why would I not want you to marry?” My grandmother scoffed. “That’s absurd. Marriage is no picnic, but it compares favorably to the alternative. I’ll tell you what the problems are with your beau. There are two.”
I felt torn, tempted to stop her before she could go any further, and also extremely curious to know what she thought.
“First,” she said, “he’s dull. He’s not lively. Now, plenty of women marry dull men, but your Simon isn’t kind, either, and that’s a terrible combination. Marrying a man who’s dull and nice is fine, or a man who’s cruel but fascinating—some people have an appetite for that. But marrying a man who’s ponderous
unkind is a recipe for unhappiness.”
As I listened to her, I felt my face flushing, and it wasn’t from the iron. “You scarcely know him,” I said.
“I’m a keen observer of human behavior. You dote on that young man, and he’s a cold fish. Listen—if you choose to marry him, I’ll sit in the church smiling, because I’ll know it’s a decision you made with your eyes wide open. But if I’d never said a word, I’d wonder if I could have prevented a great deal of heartache.”
“Well, you can’t be held responsible now.” I used a light tone, I meant to show I was willing to forgive her harsh remarks, but apparently, she didn’t yet wish to be forgiven.
“It’s very clear to me that this is about the Imhof boy,” she said. “You want to trade a dead boy for an injured man, and if I thought it would work, I’d let you try. It isn’t immoral. But it’s unrealistic. Misfortunes don’t cancel each other out.”
I thought, of course, that she was wrong about Simon. I thought it almost completely, then less so as days passed and her words continued to echo in my head; I remembered them one evening after dinner at an Italian restaurant, when I stood on tiptoe to kiss Simon before we climbed in the car, and he turned his head and said, “Your breath is too garlicky.”
Still, we continued to spend time together twice a week, and on a Wednesday night a month before our one- year anniversary, as I dished creamed chicken onto plates at my apartment, I said, “Do you ever think of us getting married?”
The chicken was steaming, and Simon had removed his glasses and was rubbing at the lenses with a napkin.
