To Doris

Dear Doris,

It has been fifty-seven years since I tried to reach you. I know that we didn’t part well. But you would be surprised by how many things have made me think of you over the years; seagulls at the docks, Sunday matinees, red nail polish, poems I’m not sure I understand.

I’m a widower now, and my children are grown. In this still, empty, sighing house, I find myself wondering about you more and more.

I hope life was not hard for you, Doris. It always seemed so tough for the people in our neighbourhood, didn’t it? I hope you escaped the legacy of weary, of beaten-down, of a heart like the broken windows in that old, long-closed factory where I first unbuttoned your dress.

I, for the most part, did. I married a decent woman who was kind, and neat, and was a good mother to our three children. She never stared at horizons, she never ran her hands over magazine pages like they were spell books, she never asked me difficult questions after movies, she never wanted for more. And I loved her for that.

I think I have been a worthy father. Solid. A provider. A reliable presence for my son and two daughters. Some visits I feel my grandchildren rolling their eyes at me, or I see them sharing knowing looks with their parents, but I did my best. I did my best.

I think about how you saw something more in me than all of this, and I wonder if I could’ve lived up to that had I’d gotten on the bus with you that day. Or would I have disappointed you, Doris?

Some evenings, I’d shuffle up the little walkway (I laid the bricks myself, so that Gertrude, my wife, could plant geraniums along it), and I’d think about how if you lived here, this would be the moment my heart would knock like an angry fist against a locked door and I’d be praying your suitcase was still empty in the basement, that the last photo you had of your daddy was still sitting in its brass frame on your nightstand, that your favourite peach dress was still hanging wistfully on your side of the closet. Some nights I’d feel this as keenly as if the risk was real, and I’d open my front door to a square meal, a quietly content wife, and I never figured out if I felt relief or disappointment the sharper.

You’d come to mind at the strangest of times, Doris. When I got my first big promotion down at the Michelin plant; the first time I woke up beside my wife; the day I paid off the mortgage on this sweet old house; the way my oldest daughter looked at me when we sent her to brother to university while she took night classes at the secretarial school; Sunday mornings that smelled like shoe shine while I sat in the upstairs hallway making the worn leather gleam and Gertrude clattered full plates to the table over the competing chatter of children. Yes, Doris, I’d sit there and remember the colour the sun made your hair on summer afternoons. And I’d wonder if you swam in the Pacific like you planned. And I tried to feel myself staring at you while you read aloud at your first bookstore reading. Some of those things I wanted so badly the edges have blurred between what was and what was not; some of those made-up memories feel more real than the ones I actually lived.

I never knew why you picked me, that day when you were sixteen and I was seventeen and you walked up to me and damn it if you weren’t positively sparkling you were so alive. Your eyes were an unforgettable green, and you smiled up at me and I thought, “Nothing in life will ever matter as much as this moment.” You laughed and I blushed and for some reason you took up with me, and I was too afraid to ever ask you why. But I remember you read me that poem a few months before you left, and it talked about a boy with pages of questions in his eyes; unlined pages you were going to fill full with all the words that were falling over your edges. When you finished, you looked down at your knee for a long time; it peeked out beneath that pretty blue dress you liked to wear. Then you stood up and told me that when you were a writer you’d change your name to D. Evelyn Waters, and I said I wished you’d take my last name with you, and you told me you would. I’m kind, but I’m not a brave man, so I never looked at book spines in the shop to see if there was a D. Evelyn with my last name.

If I had gone with you, I don’t think I’d have known the funny sort of restlessness that sneaks into your chest while you watch the evening news with your wife on the couch, your kids playing loudly on the floor in front of you. I’m not sure I’d have woken up in the middle of the night to stare up at the ceiling thinking of how that flush crept up your cheek after our teenage bodies were spent.

Maybe I would never have held toddler fingers while unsteady chubby legs took their first steps. Maybe I wouldn’t have read my newspaper over morning coffee interrupted by a wife’s kiss on my temple as I tried to explain the election and she laughed saying she’d never understand. Maybe I wouldn’t have swelled with the pride of a man who satisfies his family.

If I had gone with you, maybe I’d have seen Paris. Maybe I’d have spun you around slowly by the Seine when people still did things like that. And those funny little ways I had of talking that you said were beautiful, maybe I’d have said more things like that; maybe I’d have noticed more.

Now I’m an old man, safe behind choices that cannot be undone, and my dear, my darling, I think of you. And for a moment, I remember open roads and impossible tomorrows and fifty-seven years dissolve and by God I get on that bus with you.