The Untitled Leap -- Chapter 4

And then there was “Love Connection.”

It was on at 4:30 weekday afternoons, early on in their friendship. One day, Laura called Mary, and said, “I have to tell you what I'm watching,” and that began the tradition of “Love Connection,” where Mary and Laura would watch it together from their different apartments and call during the commercial breaks.

They were both fond of the host, Chuck Woollery.  They would analyze what they had seen. Which of of these strangers reporting on their arranged dates would ever go out again? Who just wanted to be on television? What was the real love connection?  It was a time before Tivo. If they wanted to see the show, they had to be home, which they often were. Mary worked from her apartment. Laura was a grad student with mostly morning classes. There was no technology to forward through the commercials. This gave them time to  say what they thought very quickly and laugh before the show started again, and they would hang up and witness the action captured on the screen before reporting back to each other. It was also a time before caller ID. Sometimes just as the commercial would start, Mary would answer the phone and it would be her current boyfriend, delighted that she was home, and she would have to come up with a quick excuse. She could never say, “Excuse me. I'm watching “Love Connection” right now and talking about it with my friend. Could I call you back?” It was something, Mary thought, strangely sacred. It was something, she decided, that they would never understand.

When Mary and Laura walked around the lake, they often talked about the men they dated.  There was the brilliant James Dean of  a writer who spoke very softly in monosyllables who everyone seemed to want. There was the older folk dancer with the questionable hygiene who had a much longer social shelf life than originally imagined, because, they decided, in the end, he had been  kind. There was the Financial District man who always showed up in a suit. There was the remote Brit who Mary despised and Laura adored. And there had been the psychology grad student who said he was addicted to television, and kept his set behind a closed closet door. Mary had only once watched television with him, and that was right after the earthquake of '89, when the power came back on. He wheeled the TV set out and they had eaten ice cream in big bowls with soup spoons, while watching coverage of the event, viewing the damages as if this was something that had happened on a distant movie set, not in their neighborhood.  They watched the news,  wanting to hear that this had indeed been the Big One, that they need not worry any more. But they didn't say that at all, and in the end of the evening, he had wheeled the TV back into the closet and closed the door behind it, and they went to bed and tried to sleep.

Laura thought Mary would end up with the psychology grad student. But one night, Mary was with him, and they ran into Laura at a cafe.

“What are you doing here?” Mary said, and they hugged, and Laura joined them at the table, but the conversation lacked cadence. The grad student spoke in bullet phrases. Later, when they were alone and she asked him what was wrong, he said Laura had squirrel energy. It made him uncomfortable, he said.

“She's a dynamo,” Mary said, “A force of nature. She can move mountains. She's no squirrel.”

A month later, she broke up with him.

“For a graduate psychology student,” she told Laura, “he was surprisingly lacking in insight.”

They still went to meetings, although not as often and rarely together. At some point, Mary thought, you just carried the rooms around in your head, those tables of people, all those voices with their confessions and their rants, where another's nod or sigh was seen as an editorial, where people showed up with skin too thin to hear any sort of opinion about anything. And then later on, your skin gets a little thicker. You realize that your sponsor was a bit too rigid in her food suggestions for your innate anorexic self. You throw out the food scale where you were measuring your meals. You never buy a scale again to weigh yourself. You tell at the nurse at the hospital to keep the number to herself, and she looks at you puzzled, but agrees. You don't buy bags of sugary things. You try to live with the anxiety that lies  underneath the hypothetical bags of sugary things. And if you're lucky, Mary thought, you keep your friends as close as you can.

Comments

[Suzanna]

Wendy,

This is great.

Three parts of this chapter really stand out. Mary's choice not to tell her boyfriend that she's watching "Love Connection" because he just wouldn't understand shows an aspect of Mary's character that I really appreciate about her. Some might call her secretive, I call her discreet. Her fine sense of discretion might have first showed up in your first chapter when Mary chooses not to tell Laura about disliking the TV show, "Matlock."

Secondly, the descriptions of the women's boyfriends, particularly the kind folk dancer with the bad hygiene, and the rude grad student, because what contemporary open-hearted woman hasn't dated guys like these?

And finally, the end of the chapter because this encapsulates the 12 step experience very succinctly and truthfully. You get what you need from the meetings and hopefully you move on with your life.

Great work, Wendy!

Suzanna

[Lisa Kenney]

I really enjoyed this further plunge into the friendship between two women. There is something sacred about experiences one shares only with a friend and I can completely relate to white lies about them to avoid trying to explain. I also loved the section about the meeting with the psychology student. It rang so true to me that a person can find small things below the surface about someone she's dating that suddenly become amplified in the presence of a good friend. I also agree with the comments about the 12 step experience and especially loved "another's nod or sigh was seen as an editorial" and "skin too thin to hear any sort of opinion". This was very strong. I liked it a lot and I'm really caught up in this story.