Memory 1, Week 2

Backwards to Thirteen

I once answered the phone "I love you" by accident. It was a multi-tasking snafu. I'm not an "I love you" whore. I might be a little loose with "I'm sorry," but confessions of affection aren't my vice. So when I turned from consoling my daughter Emily to profess love instead to Garan Mason, our youth pastor at the time, I followed with "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! I meant hello."

I've briefly loved a few doctors. David Cummings, a balding dentist, saw me through a painful ordeal with a wisdom tooth. And Dr. David Kline, a barely thirty urologist who saved me from fourteen stones blocking the right side of my deformed horseshoe kidney, I loved best of all. The half drunken "I love yous" were helped along by narcotics and gratitude. Dr. Cummings, I still see twice a year.

Once, at the end of an exhausting telephone exchange with my ex, I unwittingly tapped the template "I love you," the one reserved for my mom, my husband, and my kids--my only regulars. And God I want to say I hate him. But I've been brought up to say instead that I hate how he makes me feel.

Hate was like a swear word at my house. Nowadays kids have the swear jar. Say a bad work, put in a quarter. Done. There was no magic glass into which I could deposit my sin. I kept my quarters and my guilt.

I once said "I hate you" to my mom. I didn't mean it. I hated what she was doing, insisting I stay home on a Saturday night where the only things to do were write love poetry in my room or watch reruns about a magical island where recurring nightmares finally get resolved. My mom eventually gave in, though, and let me spend the night at my friend Sandy's house, where Nora, Claire, and Tori practiced french kissing with mason jars. Later, Sandy's cousin Little Don, fifteen I think, would judge their progress. I didn't play. Little Don said I was acting like a girl priest. And he said I looked like one too, my white ruffled collar buttoned all the way to the top, my glittery socks reaching way past the hem of my gold knickers.