When I was in college, I had that boyfriend. The one who says, as if he memorized it and says it to all the girls, because he does, “I’m not promiscuous but I’m not monogamous. I’m going to see other women,” and this on the first date, pretty much as a how-do-you-do.
But because you are 19 and you are already insanely turned on, you don’t care and you go ahead and sleep with him anyway. Lots of times. Wheeeee! Sexy fun times galore!
And then the day comes when you are at a friend’s dorm one Sunday morning, and you see him emerge bleary-eyed but perky-tailed from some (other) tramp’s room, and you suddenly remember than you were warned, and further that you said that this was going to be completely and totally OK with you.
And yet it is not OK, as it turns out.
It is not OK with you, you discover that morning, to see your boyfriend (for lack of a better word), all adorably rumpled and wearing your favorite plaid flannel shirt (it is 1990, let’s remember) with sex-smell waves visibly wafting off of his body just before Sunday brunch, not when the sex-smell is not mingled with your own, goddammit.
And so you break up with him. After one last romp, of course, during which you stuff that favorite flannel shirt of his into your backpack as a memento, or perhaps a trophy.
Yeah, definitely as a trophy.
And then it rains for three weeks, and it sucks, and you cry.
And then you start vigorously sleeping around again, because hey, you are 19! And crying and self-pity are only a satisfying substitute for sex for so long.
Time passes, the semester ends, and you return home to Cape Cod for one last summer at home before your mother finally and for good drives you crazy and you can’t DO THAT anymore. But that hasn’t happened yet, or you haven’t noticed it yet, and you are on Cape Cod for the summer and you are reasonably attractive and 19. Worse things have happened.
Your birthday is in the summer, and you decide you want to celebrate it by taking the ferry over to Nantucket and then steaming back into Hyannis harbor under a shower of fireworks, and the 4th of July (and the Town of Barnstable’s annual fireworks display over Hyannis harbor) offers a relatively convenient and inexpensive way of doing this.
So you call up Mr. Flannel and invite him down for the weekend.
You think, he’ll be good for a little birthday romp in the dunes! He’s a total tramp! And so am I! Yahoo! Let’s screw!
And he obligingly comes over and is obligingly funny and smart and cute and adorable just like you remember him
but not
obligingly
randy.
And when you propose a little bouncybouncy with the lad, he purses his lips and says don’t you remember you broke up with me?
Crap. Why did he have to be like that?
And yes, you had kind of forgotten. Or at least, you had completely forgotten that it might matter.
***
the shirt in question
***
For some reason, in all the moves since that summer, from college to California to grad school to debauched club girl to reformed upstanding professional and back again to grad school (sigh), I have been entirely unable to rid myself of that shirt. I have long since stopped fitting into it, sized as it was to fit a scrawny (but surprisingly strong!) little English lit MFA student from UMass. But I cannot, it seems, throw it out.
It has long since stopped smelling like him.
That has long since stopped being the point.
I used to look at it and think about being 19 and hot and ready to rumble and really alarmingly trusting and naive. But with a great ass that sort of made it all OK.
These days it reminds me more to remember that other people are likely to have different memories of shared events than I am, and that their versions of events don’t always flatter me to the same extent as my own do.
If at all.
But the shirt, when I look at it, represents my version of events. It is my glass slipper, my souvenir from the fairy tale of having been young and sexy and cool enough to run with guys like that for a while.
No, guys like that are not at all what they are cracked up to be. I know that by now.
But I still retell myself my favorite stories sometimes, late at night, and they get better with each retelling.
OMG, it’s just like Brokeback Mountain! Only, not.
Ah, yoot. I remember a similar young lady playing similar head games with me, in re: her wild unrestrictable freedom and my moony besotted obsession; and yes, now that we have gone and become old ladies she has a Completely Different Version.
And yes I still have the ring she gave me (but why did she?) and no I cannot satisfactorily explain to myself its presence buried deep in the little tin buried deep within my closet.