My first lover’s name was Elmer. He’d taken a lot of abuse for it when he was young. He was Elmer Fudd or Elmer’s Glue-All. He even got stung by his last name, Doyp, which was the result of some inspired bureaucratic error inflicted at Ellis Island when his grandfather’s family had arrived from Poland. He had a wonderful attitude about it all.
Somehow, his having lived through the childhood nightmare of the taunting and teasing and the ostracism did him a good turn rather than ruined him. I have yet to meet anyone so essentially and deeply silly, so saved by his own delight in absurdities, so able to tickle himself. It was not that he saw life as a joke or a farce, or as any one thing. He peered at it, and eyed it from all angles. Whatever was important had its pomposity. And he adored playing bombast, poking tiny holes in the big balloon.
I met him over the phone on a fluke. He was the result of a dazzling snafu at Ma Bell central. After I settled in the area to go to school, I took an apartment on the east side of campus, and the phone company twisted me up in the worst way. They assigned me my private number, but were moved, by magical incompetence, to link me to countless others. Somehow they could not recognize my name, except of course for the billing. I was not listed in the phone book, and no one could find me by calling Information. It was a nascent form of identity theft. I was no one, paying for everyone else on the line. It was nearly worth being my epitaph.
“Thus, poor Emily we enshrine,
Anonymous, lost in a party line.”
I wouldn’t have figured it out, but I kept getting calls for Craig and Elmer. Sometimes I’d pick up the phone to call out, and hear someone else’s conversation. Thinking it an electronic epiphany, I’d hang up immediately. When I was in the midst of conversations, there were strange clicks on the line or, worse, ghostlike breathing. Finally, I wearied enough of this to pry into a stranger’s life.
“I’m not Elmer, but I’m getting his calls and Craig’s calls and God knows how many others.”
“There is something very weird going on,” I told him. “What number are you calling?”
We exchanged information briefly. And while we were doing so, Elmer came on the line to call out. He must have heard no dial tone, just conversation.
“Hello?” he asked.
A chorus answered—not just Elmer and the stranger and myself, but at least three others, a chorus of total strangers. Suddenly everyone but Elmer and I hung up. That’s the first time I heard Elmer laugh. I was less amused.
“Who is this?” I asked, exasperated.
“I asked you first,” he said.
“No, you didn’t.”
“Okay, I didn’t. This is Elmer Doyp.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Oh no, I’m not,” he said.
This was thirty-eight years ago, and I cannot remember, not if I squeeze my brain, not if I wring it out like a washrag, how it was that we actually met and fell in love. So much has happened to me and to the world since. Life is short, but mine has been like a child’s scribbling rather than an orderly line. I was not even the one holding the crayon. It is hard to make sense of it. So the events and their chronology are muddled and elusive. Yet, the flavor of it all, the distinct mood, every detail of the brief shock, the sweet, sleepy scare of love, stays with me.
Like an old friend you have not seen in forty years who suddenly reappears, you stand facing each other. You are sixty; he is still twenty-four. That is how I remember him, how he comes back to me, now and then. And I am touched. The sight of him touches me with regret and a stupid longing. I couldn’t have known at the time. I was so fresh. Fresh from my parents’ living room. And I was unopened, like an infant rat, with its pink eyes swollen and shut. I had no idea—no idea what to do, who he was, who I was, how the language fails us, how the Tower of Babel’s most unforgiving relic is “I love you.”
When I said, “I love you,” I meant dizziness and romance, being swept away. And when he said, “I love you,” he meant business. He meant fitting lives together, the practical and spiritual, psychological health of the voluntary union, the committing of four feet to the same path, to a mutually beneficial plan.
That is one of the things I liked about Elmer, what drew me to him. He had the pen in his hand. He drew his own life and made his own way. He made sense or nonsense where and when he wanted. Seemingly at will, he charmed his private epoch from its coil in the basket.
So it was easy for me to harbor suspicions that he was controlling me, designing me, shaping me. And, therefore, it followed that he was obviously dissatisfied with me the way I was.
“What do you want for your life?” he would ask, expansively, as if he were prepared to provide it instantly on demand.
And of course I’d take that as a criticism. What he really said was “Why haven’t you figured this out in detail and set about going after it like I can?”
My mother was a sullen and pouting woman. This was not her fault. It was mine—unless it was my sister’s or my father’s. She’d either be speaking to me or not speaking to me. If she wasn’t speaking to me, the noise could be unbearable. For giving her a funny Mother’s Day card instead of one with flowers and poems, she didn’t talk to me or look at me for three days. For speaking to my father privately about a problem she felt was for mothers and daughters, her silence lasted a week. But she referred to my betrayal for years. I never knew what the trouble was.
“What have you done to your mother, Emily?” my father would ask, his bushy eyebrows arching and furrowing to meet in the middle.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you must have done something. Or not done something. Go ask her. Make nice,” he’d plead.
I’d ask her. She’d turn away from me. “If you don’t already know, you wouldn’t understand.”
“I’m sorry,” I’d bleat.
“For what?” she’d sniff.
And if I cried to my father, his answer was always:
“People can’t change. People don’t change.”
I do remember that Elmer laughed about my mother when I repeated these stories.
“Of course people can change!” he’d say. “Watch!” And he went into the next room and came out wearing one of my skirts. “I can change. Your mother can change.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant.” I laughed.
And he answered, “Well, I know that. But, Emily, your mother did change! She wasn’t always like that.”
And this was Elmer’s allure. Even his silliness touched me, touched my bones, echoed in my head. The fact is just as he said, grinning, wearing my skirt, his socks rolled up above his ankles, that we all start out as someone else.
Why do kids fall in love? After everything we’ve seen, by eighteen, why do we wriggle, even eagerly, into the belly of the monster and then reproduce the scene of the crimes upon us? And how do we choose the people we choose? What is this dank and sneaky selection process?
I could see why I loved Elmer, though I see more of it now. Simply put, I thought he would save my life. He would give it direction, meaning, self-respect. I could imagine us laughing into the future, the top down on our flying carpet, the wind in our hair, the earth, the real down-to-earth, far below us as we soared above. But at the time, his reasons for loving me were a total mystery. Now I see it. I cared about him. I had no artifice. I listened to him seriously. I thought he was a seer, not a clown. And I could call out that name of his in bed.
At spring break, Elmer came home with me to meet my parents, and he made the Will Rogers bet that he could make my mother laugh within the first minute after they were introduced.
“Elmer, these are my parents, Bernard and Estelle Kaplowitz, and my sister, Sharon. Mother, Father, Sharon, this is my good friend Elmer Doyp.”
Sharon covered her mouth with her hand and giggled. Elmer gave a little respectful bow and said that he was delighted to meet them all.
“Doyp?” my mother asked. “What kind of name is Doyp?”
“I’m sorry,” Elmer said pitifully, letting his head hang down.
My father laughed. I laughed. Sharon laughed.
My mother shot a quizzical, concerned glance at him. “What are you sorry about? You don’t have to be sorry.”
“I like being sorry.” Elmer smiled. And my mother allowed a laugh.
This did not mean that she liked Elmer. In fact, she told me that he had been rude, not humorous; he was too old for me; he was not religious enough; he was too short—our children would be dwarves; he was not groomed properly. She didn’t like his statement about being a corporate philosopher, and his alternate selection of astronaut was unrealistic.
“Mother. He was joking with Sharon. You know he’s in medical school.”
Nothing was good enough. And I gathered it was my fault. My mother shut her mouth for weeks.
“People can’t change.”
Yet, Elmer was always wonderful to her. It was he who insisted and bought our tickets so we could rush up the coast to take care of her after the cancer was diagnosed. He got her the best specialists and ran errands. He sat with her the last night, trying respectfully at her eyes for an invitation. She never showed him a moment’s appreciation, begrudging him every attempt. She told him to call Emily in. She wanted to speak to me alone.
This I remember with a dark and cold clarity. All she said to me was “Promise me you won’t marry that man.”
“Mother, what could you possibly have against him? He’s being a prince to you.”
“Ask yourself why!” she demanded. “Just promise me you won’t. I’m dying.”
I thought in my 22-year-old head, and I couldn’t twist the truth. The lie of acquiescence stuck in my throat. I shook my head. “I can’t promise you that, Mother. I can’t.”
It was Elmer who cried the most at the funeral. As my father, my sister, and I stood, motionless, thinking black thoughts and dry as bones, Elmer’s cheeks were streaked with tears. And when we were alone, in my old bedroom, he sobbed.
“Help me, sweetheart,” I said. “I don’t understand. My mother hated you openly. She was miserable to you. She made me miserable. She made everyone unhappy. She wasted her life on bitterness and hoped to pass it on. Why are you crying like this?”
“Because she was a miserable, loveless human being. She wasn’t what she was supposed to be. She squandered her life, and she hurt you. She hurt you.”
All of this, from phone call to funeral, sped by, compressed into half a year. Very shortly after my mother’s death, I left Elmer. I said I wasn’t right for him. I said he didn’t like me as is. I said it all unclearly, and I just wandered off.
Maybe I was right. I didn’t plan my life. I was not ambitious. I felt like no match.
Or maybe I was just too young. It could have been the timing.
It wasn’t that I was bound somehow to obey my mother’s last wish. To the contrary, I think sometimes, if only I’d lied and promised her, I could have made my peace, and I would have stayed with him.
My life has scribbled by. Like a storm. Like a day and night of dreaming at the window. Full of splashes of color and noise and peace, and the passage of silence.
I never saw Elmer Doyp again, though he wrote to me twice in the first month after we parted.
My husband, Gerald, had a first lover too. Her name was Gail. He saw her again after thirty years. They met for lunch. He found it strange but settling. When we took a vacation recently, I came down with a terrible dizziness. We looked in the local phone book for a physician, and I found a listing for Dr. Elmer Doyp, neurologist. Gerald encouraged me to call him. I did.
He was not the same Elmer. He was not even related.
Tobie Shapiro is a composer and cellist who has also worked as a visual artist, cartoonist, graphologist, and professional chef. She was a columnist for the East Bay Phoenix and has been published or is forthcoming in American Writer’s Review, Bluestem, Santa Fe Writers Project, Entropy, Songwriter Magazine, The Monthly, The Penmen Review, Pisgah Review, The Coachella Review, and in the anthology Fire in the Hills: A Collective Remembrance (1992). She has attended numerous writing conferences with The Opening and studied with Andy Couturier. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her family.
