I met Sue Ellen at the library. Thrilled to find a copy of Billy Elliot in the movie stacks, she directed her enthusiasm my way: "It's great to find what you are looking for," she said before segwaying into a diatribe about her Catholic beliefs, environmental concerns, knowledge of the Inuit people, trips to Europe in the 70s, aspirations of writing short stories, and a Cuban man she once met in Miami.
Three weeks before, I had met a similar woman on the streets of Portland. Like Sue Ellen, Rebecca was also in her early 60s, was blue-eyed, was always dreaming of being a writer, was concerned about the environment, was a devout Catholic, was a self-proclaimed miser, and had also known a Cuban man in Miami.
When I first met Rebecca, I was thrilled to make a friend in Maine but quickly dismissed our potential friendship after a telephone conversation in which she repeatedly accused me of sleeping with married men, something I never said I did even though she grilled me about my relationships and twisted my words into seedy omissions. I relegated that conversation to a case of transference: In her 20s, Rebecca met a Cuban man while living in Miami who deceived her into committing adultery by not admitting he was married when he was with her. Because of her religious convictions and fear of breaking one of the ten commandments, she spiraled into a breakdown for which she was hospitalized. To this day, she refused any type of relationship, including intimate ones, with the opposite sex. When I asked if she had loved this man in Miami regardless of his omission I received no response and more attacks on my character.
Three weeks later, Sue Ellen made the same kind of personal attacks: After I mentioned my recent trip to Copenhagen where the air was crystal clear and a thrill to breathe (an observation I shared after her comment on environmental concerns), she accused me of being a "movie star" and flaunting my ability to travel while others did not have the same opportunities due to limited funds. I must stress once again that like Rebecca, Sue Ellen had also known a Cuban man in Miami, thirty years ago. They met on her vacation to Florida and he once surprised her on a solo trip she took to Germany and drove her around Europe. When she broke off their relationship she refused to ever see or speak to him again.
I gave Sue Ellen my email address with no intention of ever contacting her again. Later that day, I received a lengthy message from her summing up points from our earlier conversation and more references to the Cuban man she had once known in Miami. A "friend" she stressed repeatedly.
It was a strange coincidence running into two similar women. Interesting how both women had looked harmless enough with their pretty straw hats, reading glasses, and colorful tote bags but they were more like the protagonist's tormentor in Stephen King's Misery. Early on in our conversations, I mentioned to both women that I was Cuban-American and had recently moved to Maine from Miami. I realized later their connection to me was Miami and the Cuban men they had once loved but never admitted to for all the fears, reasons, justifications, and lies they told themselves about not being able to love men who were from a different culture, ethnicity, race, etc. Also interesting was how they both invited me to take a short trips with them to Miami.
Here I was 30 years later in remote Maine, a ghost these women quickly claimed as related to their great Cuban lovers. With no intention or awareness of their pasts, I dislodged their deep-seated lies about love and made them remember men they buried and dismissed as accidents and/or mistakes from very long ago. This enraged them, made them attack me personally, and bury their truths even deeper. They would never admit it, but these men might have been the great loves of their lives who continued haunting them in their present.
This reminded me of a narrative essay assignment based on a predominant emotion my students were required to write in my college composition class. Through the years, I received hundreds, if not thousands, of essays. For all the emotions students evoked in their experiences only four or five papers ever struck at the heart of their truth, which included the story of a young woman recalling the birth of her twin daughters. After sharing the minutest details of the antiseptic and medical aspects of labor, from stethescopes, needles, blaring lights, tugs, fears, pains, and pokes, her epiphany was not only in toiling through 48-hours of grueling labor but also in earning a part in witnessing its miraculous return, birth: two transcendental beauties, each weighing five pounds, and placed in her exhausted arms. This was her truth: that a real miracle was earned only after taxing the body, mind, and spirit.
Another unforgettable paper was about a woman who recalled having a terrible car accident on her way home from work. When she lost control of the car it rolled down an embankment and into a Florida canal. Because it was raining heavily no one witnessed the accident or came to her rescue. For what could have been hours or days, she clawed her way out of tangled steel, muddy waters, underbrush, and palm trees to get back up to the highway, arriving on the median overhead bloodied, listless, naked, and in critical condition (once discovered, passing motorists called for help, and she was medi-vac'd to the hospital where she spent months in intensive care teetering between life and death) She ended her story with the observation that life was good, especially since she had been given a second chance to live it.
But that was not the truth of her experience, and I knew it as she squirmed in her seat while discussing her work in class (I never pushed students to the admission of any deeply held and hidden truths and always recognized whatever efforts they put forward). The truth, which she omitted in necessary details and reflection, was that she had been in the jaws of a real-life swamp of a hell. Even now, 20 years later, that truth was too daunting to accept: She could have died, but even death was better than clinging to a half-life -- traumatized, alone, naked, bloodied, and critically injured in a dark Florida canal with snakes and alligators all around her. To this conservative, Catholic, and middle-aged student the truth was worse than any biblical hell she could have ever imagined, even though she would never admit it.
I've never forgotten that paper and after reading it, I realized that the truth sets you free, but when you deny it, it claws at your psyche slowly, ruthlessly, endlessly, and in ways you can never imagine.
Read my exciting memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available on http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TT5DDWO
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