Linda Neal

Mulligan

I play the scenes over.  And over. 
           
We walk along La Jolla Shores beach, bright sun shining off the buoy at the Beach and Tennis Club, water washing against the sea wall.  Young. Together.  Strolling barefoot, holding hands  (like we never did). 
I say, I know how important your career is.   
Phil says, I’m sorry for saying the boys come first.
I’ve expected too much from you.
 I haven’t  meant to be so distant —  I don’t understand it myself.
The surprise:  I shouldn’t have made fun of your looks.  I didn’t really need you to look like Raquel Welch.  Let’s go see “A Man and A Woman” again.
Maybe this time I won’t cry.
I promise not to walk out ahead of you.

•   •   •

On the beach by the lifeguard tower at 4th Street.  A boy  builds a sand castle. Phil has put his newspaper aside.  We sit in canvas beach chairs; he’s lost the paunch he had in middle age and his thinning silky silver hair is dark and thick again.  I don’t need a tankini to cover up my middle.

He asks me to bake cheese cake with the strawberries for dessert tonight.  He’ll barbeque one of those giant porterhouses he loves.

I don’t judge his red meat habit.

•   •   •

 I can still hear his voice — smooth, deep.  A baritone if he’d been able to sing.  The voice I loved to hear on the telephone; the other day when a friend called, he sounded like Phil — just for that “Hello” moment; I sat silent, unable to register that it was Bob, not Phil.  Stunned, I not only experienced the lost seconds with Bob, but remembered a raft of phone moments with Phil as Now disappeared down a long tunnel.

Leaving Phil began in that way, in momentary disconnects.  “Spacey” he called me.  Accused me of not making eye contact.   His going away was more tangible.  Hiding out in the garage napping in the back of the station wagon.  Going silent behind his newspaper. Leaving me behind when we crossed the street.  

I awaited his phone calls, glad he missed me, and I would fall in love all over again with his voice and tell him, “You give good phone.”  We laughed — the phone was our best connection, over hundreds or thousands of miles in our separate rooms. 

In the beginning there were letters while we were together and not together the summer I got pregnant.  He was with his mother in La Jolla, and I was with my Dad and step-mom in Manhattan Beach.  We poured our future onto the pages.  On weekends when we were together there wasn’t much to talk about.  Wedding plans?  I did that with Dad and my girlfriends while Phil worked on the new freeway in San Diego, walking across narrow ledges far above ground, earning money we would need at Stanford.  The scholarship didn’t account for me or a baby. 

Meanwhile, I was riding to North American Aviation with Dad every day, having morning sickness, hiding my pregnancy under pleated skirts.  Only vaguely aware that this was no longer a summer job between my sophomore and junior years at Pomona, saving my money for whatever was going to happen up north.

In the letters, Phil said he’d take care of me.  I promised to iron his shirts.  I didn’t ask if he was taking me on like another job.  Like the freeway.  Like his mother.  We never talked about love, only about plans. 

Talking about plans became a way of life, as the years passed and we passed each other in the long windowed hallway between the kitchen and the family room.  We slept upstairs in the same bed, had sex and sometimes I’d say we even made love.

“I’m a pragmatist,” was the line that shut down conversation about philosophy or feelings.  Or, “Oh, so you want to talk about god again?”  The disdain penetrated my “thin skin.”  as I became more and more, the “sensitive flower”  he called me.

I heard the condescension.

•   •   •

Your practicality provided the solid foundation I never got from my parents.

•   •   •

Two moments pregnant with possibility come years after the divorce, first when we talk about renegotiating the settlement: 

“You should have come to me instead of that the hot-shot mediator-attorney.”
Then a blur of words about caring.  I don’t remember who says what, but we both stumble close to saying “love, then fall back into talking about money and his plans for me in his will. 

The other moment comes one afternoon, not long before he dies. I go to my jewelry drawer to get the “save the marriage” emerald (recently reset in white gold for my right hand) out of its box and there sits the empty setting. 

I stand over the open drawer and the empty box, crying, when the phone rings.  It’s Phil.  He’s talked with our son Kevin about his lack of a plan.  Through the familiar tunnel, I pull myself together to tell him about the emerald.

“On, I’m so sorry.”

We talk about Kevin.

Linda Neal was a rock, a tree, an ocean wave,
before she entered the Sargasso Sea of daughter sister, mother, lover. 
Her grandmother taught her the truth of purple hydrangeas,
cursive wriitng and buddhist philosophy. Now she balances
on the edge of dreams and good deeds.  While she’s neither
saint nor prostitute, she’s been called both. She is most content
playing Scrabble, worshipping at the shrines of modern architecture,
desert cactus, the beach and the sea to which she will return.

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