I met one of the most fascinating women I’ve ever known during my sophomore year in college. She shared my major and was extremely intelligent, so it was natural that I’d have been drawn to her. But the more I knew, the more intrigued I became.
I can say without hesitation that she was like no one else on the planet. One day I was to meet her at her dorm room, and when I went in she was sitting at her desk, doing her homework, stark naked. Her roommate was dithering awkwardly on the other side of the room. I didn’t know where to look, and yet we were carrying on a conversation as if nothing was amiss. This was nothing that my New England Protestant upbringing had prepared me for. When it was time to go, she got up, got dressed and off we went.
Another time we had gone out for pizza and we were in her car, waiting to turn left on a divided highway. When she pulled out, she didn’t see the old woman crossing in front of her car from the right. The next thing I knew, the woman was splayed across the hood of her car, cursing us vigorously through the windshield. The woman rolled off the car and walked away, still cursing. My friend drove off. I sat there with my hand over my mouth, and she said, “Well, dammit, she shouldn’t have walked in front of my car!” And that was that.
Another time she asked if I would be willing to do a threesome with her and her boyfriend. “Uh, no thank you.” This was the same week she told me she had made out with a particularly unattractive girl in our dorm just to see what it was like. It wasn’t the fact that she kissed a girl that bothered me. It was that she kissed one that never seemed to wash her hair, and all while having a steady boyfriend. I know, it was a strange reaction, but she brought out a lot of strange reactions in me.
She studied abroad in Mexico the year after I did, and several years later she mentioned quite casually that while she was there she was drugged, kidnapped, and woke up in a Mexico City hotel room, tied to a bed, where she was then repeatedly raped. I asked her how she got away. “Oh, he got bored and let me go.” I asked her if she reported it, and she said it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Er… what?
I can’t say that I agreed with, or even approved of, the decisions she made in her life, but by God I admired how decisive she was! Once she made a choice, she stuck to it. And those choices seemed to be influenced not at all by societal norms. I sort of envied her freedom, even if it brought her to places I wouldn’t have wanted to go.
After college we sort of drifted apart. She got married to Mr. threesome, had two children, and then, decisive woman that she was, she became a born again, charismatic Christian and was therefore almost impossible to talk to. Then one day it became a moot point because she couldn’t talk anymore.
She had a brain tumor. They were able to remove it, but somehow it affected her ability to speak. The doctors were certain this was permanent. She could type and write, and her cognitive skills seemed to be as sharp as ever before, but she was rendered mute. One of her last e-mails to me mentioned her understandable frustration at this development.
A few days later she was dead. Her church announced that she “died mysteriously” and that was all I was able to find out. But I could easily imagine what this decisive woman had done. And as usual, I didn’t approve of her decision. But she certainly made one.
Rest in peace, my friend.
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