The Ignored

I told David everything. Well, not everything. I left out the part about my being Ignored, but I told him how we’d begun drifting apart ever since I got this damn job, and about how I’d been too stubborn to meet her halfway and how one day I’d come home and she’d been packed and gone. I’d expected to feel better after talking about it, but in truth I felt worse. The memories were recent, the events still fresh, and dredging them up only made me relive the pain, not exorcise it.

David shook his head. “That’s cold. She just hit the road and left a note?”

I nodded.

“Well, what happened when you went after her? What did she say when you confronted her?”

I blinked. “What?”

“What happened when you tracked her down?” He looked at me, frowned. “You did go after her, didn’t you?”

Should I have? Was that what she’d wanted? Proof that I cared, that I loved her, that I needed her? Should I have gone after her like some sort of hero and tried to win her back? I had this sinking feeling that I should have, that that was what she’d wanted, that that was what she’d expected. I looked at David, slowly shaking my head. “No, I didn’t.”

“Oh, man. You blew it. Now you’ll never get her back. How long’s it been?”

“Two months.”

He shook his head. “She’s found someone else by now. Your window of opportunity’s closed, dude. Didn’t you even try to call her?”

“I didn’t know where she’d gone.”

“You should’ve called her parents. They’d know.”

“She said she just wanted to cut off all contact cold, not see each other anymore. She said it’d be easier that way.”

“They always say things like that. But what they say and what they mean are two different things.”

There was movement in the doorway. Stewart. “Hey, girls,” he said, peeking his head into the office, “stop your talking. Get back to work.”

I quickly picked up my pen, began going over the instructions.

“I’m on break,” David said, eating a Frito. “I still have five minutes to go.”

“Then you take your break in the break room where you won’t disturb — ” There was a pause as he blanked on my name. “ — Jones.”

“Fine.” David got up slowly, grinned at me as he followed Stewart out the door.

I smiled back, but I felt sick inside.

What they say and what they mean are two different things.

I had the horrible feeling that he was right.

There was traffic on the freeway, a three-car accident in the fast lane, and it was nearly six-thirty by the time I got home. I parked in the garage and trudged up the stairway to my apartment. I opened my mailbox and rifled through the envelopes as I unlocked the door. There was a bill from the gas company, this week’s Pennysaver… and something that felt like a card.

A card? Who would be sending me a card?

Jane?

My hopes soared. Maybe she’d gotten tired of waiting for me to make contact. Maybe she’d decided to contact me. Maybe she missed me as much as I missed her.

I quickly ripped open the envelope and saw the words “Happy Birthday!” above a picture of hot-air balloons sailing into a blue sky. I opened the card.

Preprinted on the white background in laser-jet perfection was the message “Happy Birthday From Your Friends at Automated Interface, Inc.”

My heart sank.

A form birthday card from work.

I crumpled up the card, threw it over the stairway railing, and watched it hit the ground.

In two days it would be my birthday.

I’d almost forgotten.

Thirteen

I spent my birthday typing and filing, filing and typing. David was sick, and I was alone in the office all day.

I spent that night watching television.

No one at work did anything for my birthday. I hadn’t expected them to, but I had half expected a call from Jane — or at least a card. She knew how important birthdays were to me. But of course there was nothing. What was even more depressing was that my parents didn’t acknowledge my birthday either. No present, no card, not even a phone call.

I tried to call them, several times, but the line was always busy and I eventually gave it up.

In five years, I thought, I would be thirty. I remembered when my mom had turned thirty. Her friends had thrown her a surprise birthday party and everyone had gotten drunk and I’d been allowed to stay up way past my bedtime. I’d been eight then, and my mom had seemed so old.

I was getting old, too, but the strange thing was that I didn’t feel it. According to the professor of a Cultural Anthropology class I’d taken, American culture has no rite of passage, no formal initiation into manhood, no clear demarcation between childhood and adulthood. Maybe that was why, in many ways, I still felt like a kid. I did not feel the way my parents had probably felt at my age, did not see myself the way my parents had probably seen themselves. I might be living an adult life, but my feelings were a child’s feelings, my attitudes and interests those of a teenager. I had not really grown up.

And my twenties were half over.

I thought about Jane all night, thought about what this birthday could have been, what it should have been, and what it wasn’t.

I went to bed hoping against hope that the phone would ring.

But it didn’t.

And sometime after midnight I fell asleep.

Fourteen

Thanksgiving came and went and I spent the holiday in my apartment by myself, watching the Twilight Zone marathon on Channel 5 and wondering what Jane was doing.

I’d tried ringing my parents the week before, calling them several times, planning to wrangle a Thanksgiving dinner invitation out of them, but no one was ever home when I called. Although they’d invited me and Jane over for the past three Thanksgivings, we had never gone, begging off because of school, work, whatever excuse we could think up. Now this year, when I finally wanted to go, when I needed to go, no invitation was offered. I wasn’t exactly surprised, but I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt. I knew my parents weren’t trying to be mean, weren’t going out of their way to purposely not invite me — they’d probably assumed that once again Jane and I had plans of our own — but I didn’t have any plans and I desperately wanted them to provide me with some.

I still hadn’t told them I’d broken up with Jane. I hadn’t even called them since the split. My parents and I had never really been close, and talking about something like this with them would have made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I knew they’d ask a million questions — How did it happen? Why did it happen? Whose fault was it? Are you guys going to patch things up? — and I didn’t want to have to talk to them about things like that. I just didn’t want to deal with it. I’d rather they find out later, secondhand.