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How many times had I said to myself, it's too bad I didn't kn
ow this at age ten, if only I had learned that at twelve, what a waste to understand, twenty years late!
"Where are you headed?" she said.
"Geographically?"
"Yes."
"Away from winter," I said. "South. The middle of Florida."
"What's in Florida?"
"Not sure. I'm going to meet a friend of mine, and I don't quite know where she is." There, I thought, we have the understatement of the day.
"You'll find her."
At that I laughed and looked at her. "Do you know what you're saying, 'You'll find her'?"
"Yes."
"Explain, please."
"No," she said, and smiled mysteriously. Her eyes shone so dark they were almost black. She had smooth walnut-tan skin, no crease, not a mark to hint who she was; so young she hadn't finished building her face.
" 'No,' it is," I said, smiling back.
The bus boomed along the Interstate, farms rolling past, fall-colored palettes at the edge of the highway. The biplane could have landed in that field, I thought. Telephone-wires high at the edge, but the Fleet could have slipped right down. . . .
Who was this unknown beside me? Was she a cosmic smile at my fears, coincidence sent to melt my doubt? Could be. Anything could be. She could be Shimoda in a mask.
"Do you fly airplanes?" I asked casually.
"Would I be on this bus? Just thinking about it makes me nervous," she said. "Airplanes!" She shuddered, shook her head. "I hate flying." She opened her purse and reached inside. "Mind if I smoke?"
I shrank, cringed from reflex.
"Do I mind? A cigarette? Ma'am, please. . . !" I tried to
explain, not to hurt her feelings. "You don't mean . . . you're going to blow smoke into our little bit of air? Force me who has done you no harm to breathe smoke?" If she were Shimoda, she had just found out what I thought of cigarettes.
The words froze her stiff.
"Well, I'm sorry," she said at last. She picked up her purse, moved to a distant seat. Sorry she was, and hurt and angry.
Too bad. Such dark eyes.
I lifted the pen again, to write to the boy long ago. What could I tell him about finding a soulmate? The pen waited above the paper.
I had grown up in a house with a fence around it, and in the fence there was a white smoothwooden gate, two holes bored round and low together in the wood so the dog could see through. One night, the moon high, late for me home from the school dance, I remember that I stopped, hand on the gate, and spoke so quietly to myself and to the woman I would love that not even the dog could have heard.
"I don't know where you are, but you're living right now somewhere on this earth and one day you and I are going to touch this gate where I'm touching it now. Your hand will touch this very wood, here! Then we'll walk through and we'll be full of a future and a past and we'll be to each other like no one else has ever been. We can't meet now, I don't know why. But some day our questions will be answers and we'll be caught in something so bright . . . and every step I take is one step closer on a bridge we must cross to meet. Before too long? Please?"
So much of my childhood is forgotten, yet that moment at the gate, word for word, stayed.
What can I tell him about her? Dear Dick: What do you know, twenty years have passed and I'm still alone.
I put the notebook down and looked out the window, not seeing. Surely by now my tireless subconscious has answers for him. For me.
