The Rules

I suppose it is no wonder that my family was a bit bewildered by my behavior. In my life BIBD (Before Impossibly Brilliant David), I had functioned at home and on dates and in public and in private within a completely consistent and consciously articulated system of my own devising. I had Rules for this stuff. Some people knew some of my Rules, but all anyone would ever have to do was watch me, and the list would become apparent.

• Always say yes to a first date. It takes a lot of courage to ask a girl out. That kind of courage deserves a little compassion.

• Guys worth anything are guys that appreciate straight talk. Don't dissimulate, prevaricate or avoid. Just talk. (This Rule got me into trouble during my student days in the Bible Belt, but it was appreciated out here on the west coast where plain-talking, jeans-wearing, peer relationships between the sexes existed. I suppose it's the influence of our pioneer past or our predominantly Scandinavian forebears or something. Whatever cultural thing is happening, the guys I admired were guys who appreciated a girl who could just talk. And listen.)

• Never do anything with a guy that would cause embarrassment or some fast explaining if my brothers walked in on it.

• Don't date anyone (more than once) my brothers or my dad don't like. Women know about women and men know about men. I could trust the men in my family, and I did.
  

• Don't kiss anyone I'm not planning on marrying. (This one from an informal discussion that happened out at camp one year. A guy I had a lot of respect for told us that he'd decided to draw the line there, simply because it made everything so much simpler. People told me I would never find a guy who even cared about this, but I decided to keep it anyway.)

• Generally, despite the deep and persistent ache to be loved, I didn't want to be the "girlfriend." Girlfriends become ex-girlfriends. I didn't want to be anyone's ex anything. It seemed icky to me.

Those were my Rules. They worked for me. They meant that I'd been on dates with lots of different sorts of guys, and that I had a lot of guy friends (who made a lot more sense to me than girls ever did or ever have done), and that I'd held hands on dates sometimes and been teased a lot about my Rules and goofed up once or twice (but goofing up on any of those Rules can't result in a disease or a pregnancy or being anyone's "ex" - so it's not like I'd made any disasters). In general, my family did not know me as a daughter or sister who had a boyfriend. In general, my family knew me as the daughter and sister who did creative little projects sometimes or played the piano or had her nose in a book. And, in general, guys I dated didn't spend much time with my family. I only needed to know what the family feedback was and then they'd done their part in my dating life.

My dad was a big reason for my Rules. Back in my high school days, the renowned Basic Youth Conflicts conference came to Portland, and I attended. I was fifteen, and I was not allowed to date until I turned sixteen, and so I was getting ready. I listened to everything, and I took notes in my enormous three-ring binder. I gathered up the Rules being preached to Christian Youth across the country by one of the first traveling mega-speakers of our mega-meeting era, Bill Gothard. He's still around. (You can look him up if you want to, but I'm not recommending him. Just so you know. He was a good precursor to the "dating" I did while in college in the sultry heat of the Baptist Bible Belt, with chaperones surrounding, surveying, stultifying and strangling all the fun and all the health out of the thing.)

I was eager to date. I came home from those huge "Basic Youth" gatherings in the Coliseum, ready to discuss these ideas with my parents.

"Dad, we learned something last night that you will have to help me do." I was using my most let's-get-down-to-it voice. I was certain of his cooperation. After all, he was the one who had paid my tuition to these famous conferences.

He looked up from his newspaper. I started in.

"Whenever I get asked on a date, I'm going to bring the guy to you so he can get your permission first."

His eyebrows came together in the clear expression of patient irritation. Weird. He wasn't happy about this. Maybe he didn't understand. This would be him, cooperating in my dating life. He would be a player in it. Actually, he would be in charge of it. I didn't seem to be explaining this very well.

"If I don't really like the guy, or if I don't want to go out with him, then you can tell him no for me," I explained.

He paused for a moment and took a long breath, and then he said one of the most important sentences he ever said to me. "If you can't tell a guy no, then you're not old enough to date."

The conversation ended there. I could see, even at the tender age of fifteen, that he was absolutely right. Mine was the era of NOW and women's lib and power suits. The ridiculous and demeaning one-down position certain kinds of women seem to want, I didn't want. The guys I knew were my peers and friends. How could I change into a silly and simpering girl who hid behind her daddy? He was right. My dad was right. My relationships were my responsibility, and my dad's brief refusal to become the Master of My Dating Life was the the ground on which I stood when I began to assemble my Rules. (He might have been happier for the rest of my fifteenth year if he had agreed to take over. I spent the rest of the time arguing that waiting until my sixteenth birthday was stupid.)

My Rules. My dating life. My decisions. Feedback from the men in the house, and chatter with my mother and sister, and other than that, all my dates were away from home. I was standing on my own two feet with my romantic life. And that is why my family can be excused for being a little shocked and even stunned when it came to the way I acted when David's Brain (and David's height and hair and hands) entered my world. My dates had never spent much time in the house before.

One did, once. He came in ... we spent time there, sitting in the living room and talking ... listening to music ... me, breathlessly playing some bit of "classical" music for him - once it was (I blush to admit) the ubiquitous Canon in D (did you know you can sing Jolly Old Saint Nicholas to it? And Twinkle Twinkle?) ... him accusing me of having exactly the same emotional reaction as I decried his having for John Lennon (he was right). My dad asked me once if that guy ever relaxed. Apparently, when I was upstairs getting my shoes so I could go out with him, and he was alone with my parents, not so much. That he wasn't all that comfortable with my family was not a point in his favor.

But that guy, and all the others, none of them were Brainy David. Intellectual David, I noticed. And then I did a lot more than notice. I began to fall in love, for real, and for certain, and with no looking back. It was the retreat at the beach house that did it. During those three days with friends and family, my behavior (mine and his ... mine with him) unleashed what seemed like a coordinated and community effort at reining me in. I had obviously lost my mind.

One by one, they pulled me aside. One by one, they tried to snap me out of it. I wasn't following the Rules anymore. (My Rules! Those were my Rules! Wouldn't I be the one to know when to break them? Wouldn't I be the one to declare them obsolete?) No one knew what to make of it. One by one, they began to make their case. (Is there anything quite as pointed as the well-intentioned interventions of people doing a thing for your own good?)

He Was Not Exactly Unnoticed

I flew home on Saturday, the nineteenth of December. By the twenty-second, I was in the eye of the storm. Me! The same person who had been so definite about not wanting any sort of romance in her life for a long, long while. I was so sure I was done with dating and guys and all the rest of it. Irritated and frustrated and tired of being distracted. Ready to move on with my education and learn to be a teacher and forget about getting married. Enough already.

But he was waiting for me. He was at church on Sunday. He had called before that. I could almost have wished to be a bit deaf to the human voice - because I couldn't help it. I still can't help it. I hear those tiny little subterranean shifts. I know when a voice is telling me what it cannot say. This time, the "touch of a certain softness in his voice" was like the assault of armies on my fortress. He had begun to overwhelm my walls. And damn it, he knew it, too! I could see it in his eyes. He knew exactly what he was doing. It was as if someone had given him a map of all the passageways that would get him inside the walls. But he didn't need the map. He had the key.

Before he went back home on Sunday night, he stopped by our house. I had already said goodbye to him, but he came back. His large, long hand was holding something. Five somethings. He had brought us five wrapped chocolates. Liquor filled chocolates. For Christmas. They were from France. He just wanted to stop by and give them to us before he left town. We didn't even sit down to talk or anything. He just stood next to the door, and offered them to us. Me and my mom - we were there to speak to him. He was a little embarrassed. A little awkward. He told us he wouldn't "drop by unnoticed" again, and that was the moment that sealed my fate.

I laughed at him. With him. At the situation. I was standing in the front hall of that enormous house, with the 12-foot-tall Christmas tree behind me, nestled into the bend of the wide front stairs, the lights reflecting off the glass at the front door. My mother and I were standing in that hallway, looking up - way up - at the tall curly-haired man holding out his open hand, offering us the wrapped candies he had brought. This intellectual. This educated man who had completed the university certificate in France and learned to love all things French while he was there. This man who was in grad school, studying a multilingual, multi-disciplinary, comparative literature. And he was telling us that he wouldn't drop by unnoticed? It was too delicious!

"Well," I said, "you weren't exactly 'unnoticed.'"

He blushed a little, and searched in his head for the word he'd meant to say. But he looked at me at the same time, and then he couldn't find the word. He gave up and laughed.

"And it's okay if you show up unannounced," I said.

My mother may have been standing there, witness to the situation and slightly aghast at her cheeky daughter, but in that instant, Brainy David and I looked each other in the eye as equals. Peers. Partners. Word Sharks, we. Irony was on our menu then, and it still is. Word play and the glories of the dictionary - the magic of articulated language and the nuance of poetry and the power of perfect prose - ah, yes. In that moment we recognized each other, and it did not matter who else was in the room.

With a man who loved me, I could have been safe. Tenderness, and understanding, and even adoration ... all of these things I wanted. But finding them in other guys was everything from vaguely dissatisfying to impossibly smothering. It wasn't enough. Not for me.

As I said goodnight to the man who had not exactly been "unnoticed," my life was far from safe. It was real.

Calling Me

"Stephanie! Phone call!"

Someone out in the hall, on a Saturday morning. The phones were in the stair towers at the ends of the hallways. They rang, and if someone was near, they got answered. People who called were better off if they knew the room numbers of the students they were trying to reach, because the calling could be a little more direct. There might even be a knock on the door. To bypass this system, my folks and I prearranged the time and phone so I'd be there to answer it when they called me. Most of the time, I called them. It was easier.

"Hello?"

"Stephanie? It's David."

( ?! ) "Oh! Hi!"

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah ... " (???)

"The weird stuff going on. I was worried."

(laughing - a little ) "Oh, no, it's fine."

We talked a little more - about stuff - about nothing in particular. I told him when I'd be home for Christmas break. It was the middle of November. There were only a few weeks left before I could finally be finished with the semester and have five whole weeks of time in Portland. Maybe he'd ask me out at some point, I supposed, but we didn't talk about that. He just wanted to make sure I was okay. I made sure he knew when the semester would be over.

* * * * *

I was not okay - but I did not realize it. Looking back on it now, I wonder at myself. Was the entire experience of being away, and at a school like that, in a culture like that, was it all so surreal that nothing much could happen to worry me? Were so many things already worrying that a new worry didn't make any difference?

By this first semester of my junior year, I had already adjusted to the subtly humiliating slap of a few room check demerits every once in awhile. New floor leaders seemed to feel compelled to find something to criticize, and any perfectionism I can use for creative work never seemed to come to my aid when dusting a room that didn't need to be dusted. Lights out, with a floor leader doing a bed check, had become almost comforting in its regularity and blessedly enforced silence. Wake up bells, with all freshman required to have their feet on the floor when the floor leader came in - no big deal once I was no longer a freshman. Even having a turn at making sure everyone in our row at chapel was in attendance on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays - it had all ceased to seem odd to me.

I had, in fact, become so accustomed to the rules and rhythms that I decided (perhaps for the first time in my life) to ally myself with a miscreant. Defying the rules and the powers that be, I decided to ignore the fact that A. Whitwam (often in the alphabetically arranged seat next to mine throughout the years) kept all kinds of things to do or read or look at, secreted inside his huge Bible during chapel. I had a bit of a soft spot for him. His name was always on the weekly posted list of demerits (for which one would need to appear at Discipline Council if the number exceeded 10 for the week). I could check the list, scan through the W's, find the large number of demerits next to his name (with the ominous "DC" following), and I could easily see if I was on the list.

By the first semester of my junior year, all the shock had worn off. Some of my own experience helped, of course, but I now think that I was much more dependent on my Elf than I knew. I used her like a compact little weather station, upon which I could do the maintenance and from which I could get a forecast. She was a native of the culture. I needed her.

She needed me, too. And not just for rescue from the cascade of things threatening to fall on her head from the top shelves in the closet. She always had a date (I usually didn't), but she loathed dressing up to slog across campus. Not only was formal dressing something she'd rather do without, because it made no sense to her, she also resented ruining her good shoes in the rainwater. But dressing up, I understood. I could help her. I knew how to use a curling iron, and I had a ladylike sense for jewelry and flowers. I could also keep pesky people from bothering her while she was studying. I have older sisters. I knew how to be the (taller) little sister. She wanted everything put "where it lives," including the rolls of postage stamps we bought together and owned in common so that we would not be "borrowing". Borrowing was against the rules. It made me happy to defer to her extreme need for order. One spring, we even took a picture of our ordered arrangement. We took her mattress off the lower bunk and took a picture of the way in which we had arranged all of "our" things under the bed so we could put everything back in the same place when we came back to school the next fall. Elf and I got along just fine. We had a well-run system.

Crazy Faye messed with the system.

Elf lost sleep and started to get near to a break down, never able to establish her equilibrium for wondering when the next scrawled death threat would appear in lipstick on the mirror above the dresser or in the bathroom. She was worried and for this worry, there was nothing in her playbook to use as a counter measure. She was the one who took the situation to the dean of women. She was the one who felt responsible and threatened. I now suspect that her worry and distress gave me a sense of security. By the end of November, I had written that I found Faye's behavior around the older guys "a little disgusting," and I never felt really sorry for her, not even when she received death threats. Perhaps I could sense that she was not as scared as she wanted us to believe, and perhaps I lived all of my school days there in an altered state of near dreamlike detachment, but probably I felt protected by a worried Elf.

Besides, my reality was on the other side of the continent. Over the semester, the letters I got from Wildly Brilliant David had begun to change. Beside them, the letters from others had started to look less interesting. It's true that I was still sure the man was overestimating my ability to keep up with his brain. He had even made copies of pages out of a commentary he was using and asked me to respond! In his last letter of the semester, he wrote one sentence that really did scare me. He said he wanted to go Christmas shopping with me when I got home.

Once, during that semester, I had written to him on notepaper that I had been storing in the same box with some scented stationery. (Who on earth would I have been sending scented letters to?) We had both thought that my letter arriving for him in Seattle, scented like that, was a hilarious and "mystifying" thing to have happened. Our relationship was not like that. We had an intellectual relationship. We discussed things. Ideas. Theology. That the altar calls on Wednesday nights at Campus Church (attendance required, dorms locked, no assigned seating) got longer and longer right before vacations was no accident. That it was theologically goofy to say to weeping students, as the piano played yet another verse of All for Jesus, "You take the first step and God will take the rest." These things, we had discussed. Analyzed. Observed.

People who discuss things don't go shopping together. Shopping is personal.

In December, he wrote that he and some friends had gone out for coffee and chocolate after they had been to a choir concert at a catholic church up in chilly, wet Seattle. As far as I knew, I had never been inside a catholic church in my life, and it would not have occurred to me to go to a concert held in one. Don't they have statues of Mary and things like that in a catholic church? And yet, I wished I had been there. I wished I had been in his group of friends, all of whom I imagined were just as brainy as he was. There is a universe of difference between monthly Artist Series and metal folding chairs in a gym, and a Christmas choir concert inside a church. People who discuss things could go to concerts together, I thought. They could discuss it afterward. They just might even go for coffee and chocolate together. People can discuss things over coffee and chocolate.

I wondered how long he'd wait to call me after I got home.