Enigma

Fifty-six years ago, almost to the day, I was sitting on the stoop of my friend Rosemary’s house on East Elmore Street in Central Islip, a working class Long Island town famous for its psychiatric hospital. We were fifteen and sixteen years old, a couple of gum-chewing, self-centered teen-aged girls beginning to be pretty, although we hadn’t yet learned to exercise the power that prettiness bestows nor could we afford the cosmetics and accoutrements that the magazines said we needed. There was a lipstick we liked called pineapple kiss that was somehow a scent, a taste, and a color all in one, and Roe was fond of a spray cologne called Emeraude, but only via sample squirts, and we would have loved to update our wardrobes in the Rainbow Shoppe next door to Woolworths, but we made do with hand-me-downs and thrift store items.

Certain tunes that were played a lot on the radio bring me straight back to those days: for example, Walk Away Renee; California Dreamin’; or Reach Out and I’ll Be There. But we were particularly fond of Bob Dylan, and incongruously, Gene Pitney. Connoisseurs of junk food, we liked Twinkies because they were shaped like little sponge-cake coffins, and Heath bars, for the sweet duet of toffee and milk chocolate, despite the hardships to our teeth. We made up nonsensical chants of poetry as we walked along the boring streets of town, and we thought we were clever and deep. We were mostly just sitting there on that particular day in August waiting for our lives to begin.

I think the memory came back to me today because the sky was flat and gray. It was a Long Island morning, at least in passing, with Long Island light––and as we know, it’s light that triggers time travel. As I walked up the road to my house, I tried to imagine the reaction of that fifteen-year-old girl if she could know that this would someday be her home.

Disbelief and befuddlement, probably…but when the glories unfolded, as they inevitably will and regularly do, sheer wonder would undoubtedly prevail.

On a day like this, though, striding on ground of dusty gravel beneath a sky of gray, there might well be a fleeting sense of loss and disappointment. It’s hard to appreciate nuance at fifteen, and the landscape would seem stark and foreign at first glance.

Anyway, when I sat with Rosemary on her front stoop that August afternoon in 1966, the entrance of a young man on a Honda 90 motorcycle transformed the day into a milestone. His name was Richie, and Rosemary knew him. He was nineteen years old and already in college, and he worked part-time in the Carvel in town, and he had a great smile and looked a little bit like Ringo Starr, and all of these were assets.

Richie offered me a ride on his Honda 90, and since I was waiting for my life to begin, how could I say no?

We rode to the 7-Eleven and brought back a bag of pistachio nuts, and the three of us sat up talking for hours, our lips and fingertips stained red. The next day, Richie arranged to pick me up and take me on his motorcycle to the beach at Smith Point. It was another gray day, with occasional spits of misty rain, and we crawled along in the traffic on William Floyd Parkway, and I smelled the black leather of his jacket and imagined that it tasted like licorice, and I leaned into him, and it was like leaning into something alien and weirdly compelling. I think what I felt was more curiosity than attraction. And I was shy and awkward and couldn’t think of what to say, and thus said almost nothing, which was my default position. He told me I was an enigma.

An enigma. I looked it up as soon as I got home. A puzzle. A mystery. A paradox. A nineteen-year-old college man had declared me an enigma, and I felt flattered.

Didn’t this mean I was interesting? Clearly he wanted to solve me.

So, pistachio nuts, a drizzly ride on a Honda 90, and one fancy new vocabulary word. That’s all it took. We called it love.

But maybe the truth of it was more transactional. I wanted to get out of the house, and I wanted some kind of shortcut to the next chapter of my life. Richie was a capable person, sometimes funny and usually kind, and before I turned twenty, I had followed him to Chicago and married him, leapfrogging over so many things I should have done instead.

So in a sense, life did come calling on that August afternoon in 1966. And who can say how much of my present would never have materialized had it not been for the mistakes and detours that were lined up like dominoes in my path?

She is safe and home at last, that teen-aged girl who used to be me and maybe still is, and fifty-six years have passed.

I embarked upon my journey in a most unlikely way, and again and again found myself at the shores of implausibility.

And it’s an enigma. All of it.