“He likes to argue, doesn’t he?” Julana asked.
“He was on the debate team in high school. It’s hard sometimes…” Cheryl responded.
“Hard?”
“He always has to have the last word.”
Julana looked over at Michael. We were having a farewell dinner, September 2019, before they left for another six months in Spain with their daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law. Each time we saw them, we didn’t know if it would be the last.
Michael stroked his beard, his smile lighting up the dark-paneled restaurant. “Why’d you join the debate team?” he prodded. “Trying to pick up girls?”
“Funny you should mention it…” I replied. Strobes of long buried scenes flashed up through my past, burbling out to be told. “I did meet my first girlfriend, my first real girlfriend because of that.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Really?” He looked over at Cheryl. “Did you know about this?”
She laughed. “That’s what he tells me.”
Michael turned back to me. “I bet there’s a story there, right.”
One I hadn’t thought about, much less told, in years – decades, maybe. I felt the embers re-appearing from underneath the ash pile of my history.
Two girls, Carol Downs and Susie Wise, appearing one night while the team practiced for our up-coming regional tournament. Our advisor, Miss Flory, let them in to her little apartment.
“They wanted to be our cheerleaders,” I told Michael. “They made these timecards, paisley fabric glued on to small white cardboard. They thought the football, the basketball teams were getting so much attention. But our school was college prep, they thought the intellectual competition of debate deserve equal treatment. So they wanted to be our timekeepers.”
“And where did that go?”
“Once I finally figured out that Susie was interested in me, we started going out, and kept it up throughout college, until I went to USC for medical school. Susie had one more year at Radcliffe. I stayed in LA, she stayed back east.”
Julana looked at Cheryl. “That’s where he met you, right?” The subject changed, and we shared our origin stories as couples. Cheryl and I flirting on the night shift on the LA County Hospital labor and delivery unit, Michael chasing Julana to Kentucky after getting a fleeting glimpse of her at his brother’s house.
I’d seriously reminisced of Susie only once in the previous 35 years, ever since I learned of her death at age 35 from leukemia. Memories of her drifted far below my conscious thoughts until I went to Boston to race the marathon. I visited her grave, had a good cry, wrote a story about it, heard no more from her. Until Michael asked that question. Over the next five months, she pounded on the door I had closed over her, insisting I pay attention to her story, get it out of me and into the world.