First Cut - from Caligynephobia:
A Collection of Stories and Reflections by John Earp
When I was thirteen there were four of us on our Junior High Spanish Team. Our teacher, Miss Collins, coached us hard, urging our practiced declamation to near perfection. Our fluency surprised everyone. By April we had won several minor competitions, and at the first of May we won the City finals.
When the competition was over somber-looking judges with colorful sashes presented us with our shiny gold medals and crisp blue ribbons. Then we posed for pictures.
Miss Collins was recently graduated from the University of Florida. She was a bit too mature to be cute. You could tell, though, that when she was younger she was nothing short of adorable. She still wasn’t seasoned enough to be beautiful, but one day she would be a stunner. I was thirteen, so she was merely perfect.
When the photos were all taken Miss Collins called us together. Her voice was flan: creamy in the warm middle, a brown hint of scorch at the throaty edges, with the merest hint of a drawl.
She said, “Now, just to finish things off, I’d like to take you all to dinner tomorrow evening at Las Novedades. Seventh Avenue at Fifteenth Street, Ybor City. Seven, sharp, please.”
Las Novedades! A familiar Tampa landmark since 1890, home of the best paella anywhere, Cuban coffee thicker than blood, a taste of classy Old Cuba! A night with Linda!
Miss Collins’ name was Linda.
My parents refused to let me go. They were old, poor, and cranky about the course their lives had taken. Yes, the cost, however minimal, was a factor. But even then I knew it was more than the money. It was my mother’s need to protect her only child. The dark and predatory dangers of the night known to lurk in the alleyways of Ybor City frightened her. The neighbors had told tales of roving packs of Latino thugs. It was my father’s geriatric fear that this might be one of the last times he would be able to exercise his weakening control over me. They tag-teamed me. Parental cruelty at its icy finest, and I its tragic victim.
My father sat impassive in his ratty old easy chair. He wore two days of unshaved stubble. His tee-shirt was torn and stained. “No, Ronald, you can’t go.”
“But dad, it’s my team. We worked so hard.” Sure I was whiney, but with the battle lost before I fought it, adolescent sass was my only remaining weapon.
“I said, No.” His eyes never moved from the sports section.
“Mom!” As though she might dare risk the wrath of her husband.
“Now Ronnie, you know it could be dangerous down there. I’m afraid your father’s right.”
“But it’s Miss Collins’ treat!”
He folded his Tribune with a snap. “You’re not going. That’s it.”
I learned from my father how good it feels to taste just a little joy in every merciless act. I learned from my mother how comforting it is to be happily frightened.
That night I sat home alone in my little room. Stared at my phone, afraid to call her. I thought about going anyway. It would have been an act of defiance terrifying in its mere contemplation. It would have been a manly act I was incapable of performing. I hated them both. So I caved to them. Seven o’clock came and went. The evening faded away, and I slipped into and out of a dirty sleep, my mind crawling with restless dreams and clouded with swirling fears. My father’s stubbornness was a granite wall, dense and impenetrable. My mother wrapped herself in cowardice as though covering her nakedness. I hated myself.
I knuckled under to them, and that evening began to distance myself from them and their shrunken little world. I didn’t call Miss Collins, or write her a note. I wasn’t clever enough to make up an acceptable excuse for my rude behavior, and I had too much pride to tell her the embarrassing truth. I was a no-show at Las Novedades.
At school on Tuesday she tapped me on the shoulder. “I’d like a word with you. In the hall. Now.” Gone was the flan. This new voice was steel, jagged, and brittle. Never before had any teacher called me out for a meeting, alone, in the hall.
Miss Collins was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Sure, my experience was admittedly limited, but when I tried to conjure up a picture of a woman more alluring, more sensual, more naturally attractive, I couldn’t even imagine her. She was tall and regally slender. Her gentle movements were breezy shadows and subtle echoes. Blue eyes pure and round were set like jewels above high angular cheekbones. Curly black hair cascaded in loose ringlets to her shoulder blades. She held herself aloof, a mysterious distance that enticed the bold and intimidated the hesitant. She smelled like fruit and morning, fresh warm bread, and born-in-the-blood money.
She lived with her family in a glass-faced home on Davis Islands, a water-bound enclave where old wealth got older, where family mysteries and social intrigues unfolded behind heavy wooden doors. The Islands’ winding brick streets and elegant shady oaks felt like Camelot to a poor boy from Sulphur Springs. Her father was a judge, her mother a former Junior League president. Miss Collins was a Tri-Delt from Gainesville.
The class watched me stand and leave the room. They sank into silence and fear. Her name was Linda. Pretty. Impeccable. Impossible.
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I followed her into the hallway. Strange and uncomfortable feelings spurted hot into my belly. My thirteen-year-old lust for Miss Collins was a weak and confused fire. Still that ancient genetic flame seduced and claimed the upper and most available part of my awareness. I remember thinking, “So this is what a twenty-six year old woman is like.” But below, in my guts, smoldering, there glowed a coal of what the Danes call Angst: an acidic fear that despite the purity of my adolescent desire, this whole conversation might not turn out well for me.
She was enormously appealing in her teacher suit: stark black glasses, bare legs, and the purposeful click of her heels on the wooden schoolhouse floor.
I stood as close to her as I dared. I breathed her aura, an azure vapor of loveliness so thick it was impossible for me not to absorb. I breathed her, and she was all I could think of. Linda. Standing next to me.
Her eyes read me like radar. She said, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”
A bone to pick! My education into colloquialisms had not even begun, so this particular phrase rolled like olives off her tongue and landed in a place that I knew was too juvenile to contain it. I was tickled, and could not be serious. She wanted to pick my bone!
“Where were you Saturday night?”
“Sorry,” I said, grinning. “I couldn’t make it.”
“A call would have been the gentlemanly thing to do.” At that instant the angst kicked in. She was serious, and I was in trouble.
“I was too embarrassed.”
She said, “I’m disappointed in you, Ronald.” She looked away, preparing herself for her own act of cruelty.
She cocked her head and sent me a different message through her eyes, a message pitiless in its biting directness.
Her look said, “This is a brutal lesson, boy, but in all your life you will never be with a woman like me.”
I was scrawny, awkward, poor, and tongue-tied. And I knew that what her eyes told me was true.
This is how I came to be afraid of the power a beautiful woman can wield over me.
She condemned me to a life in which those of her elevated sisterhood would be forever beyond my grasp. Oh, I had relationships with pretty girls over the years, sevens and eights on the scale. But never with a nine or ten. I was intimidated then. I’m intimidated now.
At the very least I learned a lesson about why you should never be rude. An embarrassed phone call is better than no phone call at all. The ghost of Miss Collins haunted me in my relationships with authoritative women for a long time. Even today it shakes me that the waves of an adolescent faux pas could ripple unimpeded across the years.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if her prophetic words somehow destined me to live out her cruel prediction.
Like all fears, this one was an obstacle I planted in my own path, a self-sabotage so cleverly effective that for all my life I believed it without question.
Still, when I go to the depth of it, I’m appalled that a woman I had loved with such innocent purity could stiletto into my flesh words stropped like razors. What I heard in her voice were cold blades whetted with a malicious poison. What I saw in her eyes cut me, the forever wound a slow slit scored longways along the keel of a manly nerve.
John
Earp
Author of "Sweet Heavenly Daze", a lighthearted, witty, profound, and poignant glimpse at religion that is a little different from popular faith.
John's website: SweetHeavenlyDaze.com is a delight to explore.
Thanks John for the story... J.
Wolf
