Ernie: Part Two

When I told my friends I was going to Boston to meet a guy, they all decided to come with. Not on the date, they’d all go off and do their own thing, make a trip of it, but also then I wouldn’t be alone in a city I didn’t know with some random guy I met on the internet.

Ethel came over my house night before. We became cleavage scientists.

“I need a little cleavage, but not too much.”

“Just wear something modest.”

I sighed. Ethel was the poster child for sheltered-Christian-virgin.

“Can you pretend to be a regular human female for a second? The goal is enough cleavage to make him think about fucking me, but not enough so that it’s obvious I wanted him to see cleavage. Understand?”

“Sort of,” she said slowly. “But if I can tell you what the Bible says about modesty-“

“Please fuckin’ don’t.”

She winced. She always winced when I swore.

“Okay,” she said, looking over my the contents of my closet. “You’re gonna do this anyway. Try a few shirts on.”

Eventually we figured it out. Low cut tank with lots of cleavage BUT with a caveat.

“Put this sweatshirt over it. It’s cute on you. It makes your eyes very green. And with this, you can adjust the zipper throughout the day. Make him think the times cleavage was out was an accident.”

I laughed. “Ethel, for a Christian chick, you’re freaking devious.”

She blushed and shrugged.

“I guess so. But if I were you, I really would just wear one of your t-shirts with flowers on it.”

“Crying out loud.”

“I mean, you actually get the chance to have guys talk to you without them staring at your chest. You could keep yours completely covered if you want. No matter what I do these…” She gestured helplessly down at her massive double-d boobs. “Things are in my way and guys stare at them all the time.”

“Guys stare at my ass all the time.”

She raised her eyebrows. “They can’t do that while they’re talking to you,” she pointed out.

“True. Hey, speaking of ass, you gonna help me with my jeans. I need tight enough to show him I got a great ass, but not so tight I look slutty.”

“Why did I agree to this?”

The next morning, Chris showed up at my house with Ethel and Erica already in the car. I know what this sounds like. But no, Chris wasn’t driving this chick he was pining for over three hours to go on a date with another guy. I wasn’t the object of his affections anymore. I mean, he looked back over at me eventually. But at this point in time, he was onto Ethel. And they really would have been so cute, if she’d liked him back. They both had red hair and freckles. She was taller than him by like 5 inches. That would have been cute as hell. I love couples where the woman is taller. She was actually quieter than him and when the two of them hung out together, she let him take the lead and decide what they’d do. They were both laid-back and calm. But Ethel didn’t feel that way about him. None of us knew that yet though. So I knew Chris was going to be using his day in the city with Ethel to shoot his shot. Dave and two of his friends were coming along too, taking a different car. Chris was going to try his damndest to pawn Erica off on that group and convince Ethel to go off with him to do their own thing.

Why Ethel and not Erica? They were identical twins after all. Erica was….exhuberant. Let’s say that. She was very loud, very tom-boyish. Like to the point that her fundamentalist Christian parents were always trying to reign her in, pointing out passages in the Bible to get her to be more feminine.

The weirdest thing that Erica ever said to me was one night was I hanging out with her down in her basement. It was getting very late. Erica and I were both night owls. Everyone else in her house, including Ethel, was asleep. We got into this pretty serious conversation about Christianity and we were talking about our differences: she was Christian her whole life and I was coming into it later. I confessed the hardest part of Christianity seemed to be the no sex before marriage thing.

I said, “I’d like to be as nice and innocent as you guys are, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to do no sex before marriage AND no masturbating. Like how does everybody deal with being so horny all the time?”

And Erica sat there, looking like she was trying to figure something out, and then she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been horny.”

“Um, what?“

This woman was 21 years old. There was no way…

“Erica, do you know what the word ‘horny’ means?”

I had to double-check. This was a girl who had needed the word “slut” explained to her. Deadass needed someone to tell her what a slut was at 20 years old. When I say sheltered, I mean sheltered. Rural New Hampshire fundamentalist Christians does sheltered at a whole other level.

“It means you feel like having sex.”

“Wow, you do know what it means.”

“Right.”

“Maybe you don’t get it though. Horny doesn’t just mean have sex, it also means you want to masturbate. You never got a feeling between your legs like you had to start pressing or rubbing? Like a tickling kind of itch almost? Like a weird pressure?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Tell the truth, you’ve never played around down there?”

“No.”

“Like even as a kid. Never humped a couch cushion to a Disney movie?”

She burst out laughing. “Is that a thing people do?”

“It’s a thing I did.”

“Not me. I’ve never been horny. Maybe I’ll feel that way one day when I get married.”

That conversation fucked me up so much. Who doesn’t feel horny? I’m told even asexual people feel horny. What sort of human just doesn’t know what horny feels like? That conversation happened 10 years ago and I’m still fucked up about it. Wherever Erica is I hope she became a scientist like she wanted. She’s sure to get a fuckload done if she never ever feels horny.

Did her twin sister ever feel horny? I have no idea. Because Ethel was incredibly demure and ladylike. Erica was as close to being crass as a sheltered Christian girl could be. Ethel would never have been caught dead talking about something as intimate as that. They were super different women.

Well, the four of us drove to Boston. We got Dunkin Donuts on the way. We played music. We laughed and talked. It was one of many road trips I took when I was part of that clique. We drove to a Christian music festival called ‘SoulFest.’ We drove hours up north to visit lakes and camp sites. We drove all the way to keene and danced to live music in ‘The Starving Artist.’

I miss having friends. Irl friends. I miss having adventures like that.

But then when people try to make friends with me, I panic and push them away. I have a cousin who lives barely 20 minutes away. Here I am, now living in an entirely different state than the one I grew up in, and one of my paternal cousins ended up moving to the same exact city. Everyone else on the paternal side of my family still lives n New Jersey. But not her. She sends me a Christmas card every year. She texts me sometimes. She asks me to hang out, meet up for dinner, come over to see her pet rabbits.

I make excuses. Or I ignore her completely.

Why do I keep doing that?

I am so fucking lonely and sad so much of the time.

And then people want to get close to me and I feel incredibly uncomfortable and I won’t let it happen.

I hang out with coworkers. I hang out with casual acquaintances. The people who try to actually connect, I don’t let them, and I wasn’t always like this.

Back then, with Chris and Erica and Ethel, I wasn’t like this. I cared about them. I loved them. I let myself relax around them. I miss that feeling a lot.

I don’t know what I think is going to happen if I ease up and try to make friends again. I feel like something bad will happen. I have no idea what that something bad is. I feel like everything will fall apart. I don’t know why I feel like this.

Well, I had a group back then. And my group went with me to meet Ernie for the first time.

Ernie said he would meet me outside of the red line station. Chris knew his way around Boston, because he and his brother went to anime Boston every year. Chris found parking and showed us how to navigate the train system.

We waited outside the train station. It was warm out. I’d worn my leopard print jacket over my cute sweatshirt, because I knew it would make me easy to spot. “I’ll be wearing my leopard print jacket,” I told Ernie. “And I’ll have dinosaur barrettes in my hair.”

It had been a fun morning. I was in a big city. We’d driven for hours, but the drive had been fun. When you live in rural New Hampshire, a drive into Boston is a big deal. I lived on a dirt road. There was a cliff twenty yards from my back door and if I parked in the patch of lawn that was my parking spot (my grandparents only had a two car garage) and there was a bear outside, I’d have to honk the horn so my Nan could turn the floodlights on. Almost every time it snowed, the power went out for at least a couple of days and when the well water ran out, Nan would would drive me down the road to the pond and send me out onto the ice with a Home Depot bucket, so that we could get enough to flush the toilet.

Fucking hell, rural New Hampshire be ruinin’ my vibe. Every time I try to explain why something was a certain way because rural New Hampshire, I end up on some as-I-lay-dying other shit. Let me just throw in a PeePaw and call it a day. I don’t know what to tell you. I promise I ain’t trying to be Faulkner. I didn’t mean for this to be so damn folksy. But I lived on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere from mid-high school until I was 24. This is why a day in Boston might as well have been a trip to the moon.

I was already feeling really happy. I knew I looked cute. My friends were with me.

And then there was this guy standing not too far away and when I looked at him, he waved. He hurried over.

He handed me a bunch of books. It was so weird. I liked it so much.

“These are for you. I thought you’d like to read them.”

I said goodbye to my friends and left with Ernie for the date he’d planned.

Er…about it being a date.

He took me to the Science Museum. He’d asked me to hang out. That was a date right? Why was I suddenly a complete social retard.

I felt incredibly shy with him. I never had that reaction to a guy before. I still talked a lot. Like I said, I never shut up. Happy, mad, sad, nervous: just a constant stream of pointless chatter.

I talked to Ernie a lot. He took me to the museum and I was still trying to figure out if it was a date (duh, it was a date, wtf you idiot). He bought both tickets. I didn’t like guys paying on dates and even it was one, I wanted to pay for myself. But our day had just started and I wasn’t going to tell him to knock something off and make him feel bad. Also, I had a clue now. This was a date.

We walked around the museum. There were these musical steps and I ran up and down them a bunch of times. I did a weird little dance and spun around. Ernie just stood there and laughed. Some guys like you more if you act really silly. Ernie is one of those guys. I like acting silly to make him laugh.

He took me around to see all the dinosaurs and fossils.

“Oh, look at what I bought for today.”

I zipped my sweatshirt down enough for him to see the massive dinosaur necklace I’d bought at Hot Topic.

“Neat,” he said. “It looks good on you.”

I couldn’t tell if he checked out my boobs or not, but-if you couldn’t tell by my subtlety-that was the point of that move.

After we were done looking at the exhibits, we went to get lunch at the food court. We hadn’t been sitting there long when I asked, “Hey, is this a date?”

And he said, “If you want it to be.”

I didn’t look at him. He made me feel really shy that first date.

“I want it to be.”

“Okay,” he said. “Cool.”

He was quiet and nice and when he did talk the stuff he said was really interesting. He already had his Bachelor’s degree. He worked in a museum and wanted to one day do something important for a history museum. He was 24. Only a couple of years older than me. He’d just come back from Europe where he and his sister did all kinds of interesting things in Germany.

He was short. I don’t know why I expected him to be taller, and I guess I was at a point in my life where I was in the mood for a tall dude. I was a little disappointed by his height. But then, as we were walking to the next place, a plaza not far from the museum, he stepped down off the curb before I did and I was looking down at the top of his head, and my gosh, was it cute. I decided I liked that he was short. But of course, I didn’t say that. You can’t really compliment a guy for being short, not on the first date anyway.

We sat in a courtyard outside. It was very sunny and warm outside. The more we talked, the more impressed I was by him. He knew a lot of stuff. He was very smart and worldly. He spoke another language. He knew a lot about history and politics. He had plans for his life. And the more I learned about him, the more I felt like, what is he doing here with me?

I had a weird panicking feeling. This guy was too good for me and there was no point getting attached to him.

I’d dated a good man before. I’d dated Dennis and our relationship ending was really hard. I spent so long angry at him for not loving me enough to grow up, not while he was with me at least. Then I spent so long missing him and wondering if I’d ever have that feeling again.

I didn’t want to have it again. In that moment, I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to lose it again.

Holy fuck, that sounds cliche. Look, all I can say is I was okay in my life then…okay, not really. I was constantly dizzy and tired from how little I was eating and my grandfather kept trying to pick fights with me and I wanted to be out of his house and out on my own, but couldn’t figure out how to make that happen. Still, believe it or not, I was better off than I’d been in a long time. That judge had shot my grandfather down for trying to have me declared permanently disabled. I was doing well in school. I was close to getting my associate’s degree. It sure took me long enough. I deadass got a two year degree on a five year plan. I felt hopeful. I wasn’t sad all the time. I was stressed and anxious a lot of the time. But I wasn’t sad or angry, and whatever the thing with the food was, I’d get past it. I didn’t know why I couldn’t eat. I didn’t know why I never felt hungry. I knew I could get past it though. I was struggling still, but I didn’t feel out of control for once. I didn’t feel like I was spinning around and around waiting for somebody to catch me, spiraling further out of control if anyone nudged me even a little. I didn’t feel that way.

I had recovered from losing Dennis. But I couldn’t stand the thought of trying to recover from something like that again.

I know he was silly. But he was a good man. I know I said I can’t always tell the difference between good men and bad men; I know for sure with him: he was a pain in the ass, he was immature, he was irresponsible, he was stubborn. And he was good. He was as good as he could have been at that point in his life. And losing somebody really good is hard. Losing somebody who sees you is hard.

So I felt all of this on my first date with Ernie. I thought: this is exactly what I wanted, a good man like Dennis, but one who is mature and responsible and I can rely on.

And I was terrified. He would figure out I wasn’t worth anything and he would leave and I’d have go through all of what I’d felt with losing Dennis all over again. But maybe worse. Because this would be something different. I knew that right away. This would be a more adult sort of love. This would be more steady and mature than what I’d had with Dennis. And that meant it would hurt more when me being me ruined it.

I launched into destruct mode.

I started spouting off every awful thing about me I could think of. I know I didn’t tell him about my mental health struggles, but I definitely divulged many other unflattering things.

And he sat there and watched me laundry list my faults and sins and every few minutes, I’d stop and go, “You probably don’t like me now” or “You must be done with this date, huh?”

And he kept just slightly shaking his head and saying stuff like, “No, I still like you” and “I’m not done. I like you a lot.”

He’s still not done and I’ve never figured out why.

And these are cute things he texted me while I was at work today and he was reading about himself on this blog.

And that’s the man who was silly enough to marry me and I don’t deserve him even a little. But maybe I can be a little better, so this guy can finally have some peace and quiet