Falling

“Call me, maybe?”

I stared at her – at Jeannette – as I turned the car engine off. Or more precisely, I stared at her even harder, since I had been staring at her all evening. I said, “Did you just pull a line from that Carly Rae Jepsen song?”

She blinked, then smiled, abashed. “Oh, God, you’re right. Sorry. Emma’s been singing and playing that song nonstop. It’s all I can hear in my head nowadays.” Emma was her daughter, whom she was raising by herself. Emma was thirteen, a budding fashion designer, eco-activist, writer, archer, hip-hop dancer, social entrepreneur – she hadn’t quite decided yet which of her interests to pursue and seemed to keep adding to her growing list of passions every week. She was headstrong, mercurial, and bit of a drama princess who was absolutely certain the world had been specifically designed to torment her. She and Jeannette had taken years to come to terms with Jeannette’s divorce and had finally managed to establish a quiet truce in their relationship – only to have Emma hit her teens and have everything blow up again. Amazing how much you can learn about someone in one conversation when she lowers her guard and just decides to tell you everything.

I was dropping Jeannette off after a night of volunteering at the local food pantry, where we had both been assigned with the other adults to the back warehouse putting food bags together, while the teenage volunteers were up front handing them out to low-income families. I had seen her there before, but for some reason this night we had fallen to talking as we worked – and couldn’t stop talking. After we were done, her car wouldn’t start and AAA had to tow it to the shop, so I offered her a ride home.

She looked at me from the passenger seat while we were parked in front of her house. Her eyes narrowed impishly – and I felt myself slipping one more inch down the hole. She said, “Of course, that begs the question: how did you know that? I can’t imagine that an English Lit professor would normally be listening to teen pop songs.”

“My nieces,” I reminded her. I had told her that between the families of my brother and two sisters and various cousins, my family had enough tweens and teenage girls to form a volleyball squad. I was the doting but fuddy-duddy uncle. I had also told her how it was so strange that once my nieces and nephews started reaching puberty, the comments and the subtle pressure from my family for me to get married began to wane. Either they had finally realized that our clan had added enough human beings to the world’s population without my having to make a contribution, or else my siblings and cousins, at least, had laid off me when they finally crossed the point of total exhaustion raising their own kids. Or perhaps everyone had just given up when I passed forty and there was still no one on the horizon.

Amazing how much you end up revealing about yourself when a beautiful, thoughtful, crazy-smart woman pays attention to your every word.

She said, “The tune’s catchy. Sometimes when I’m cleaning, I dance to it with the vacuum cleaner, since you can be sure it’s blasting from her room.”

I cast my eyes down and nodded slowly, pleased with the image. I said, “And the lyrics are not half bad. It’s actually quite serviceable as poetry.”

“Do tell.”

“Sure. The imagery is fairly precise, and the turns of phrase are clever. The line ‘Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad,’ evokes the Platonic notion of soulmates, in which we long for our long-lost other halves and recognize them immediately when we find them. And this stanza…” – and I sang:

You took your time with the call,

I took no time with the fall,

You gave me nothing at all,

But still you’re in my way.

I explained, “Perfect rhyme and scansion, nice juxtaposition – indicative of the asymmetry of desire – and psychologically accurate. The boy is either indifferent or feigning indifference, which makes her want him even more.”

I was suddenly anxious that I was coming across as simultaneously frivolous and pompous – paradoxical as that may sound – but the momentum of my thoughts and an impulsive need to keep talking made me continue. “And that recurring line ‘But now you’re in my way’” – and again I sang the line – “is an exact metaphor for how love can just suddenly loom before you and block everything else, so that… so that nothing else exists.”

And with that piece of insight I stopped dead in my tracks, and a silence fell between us, and it suddenly became impossible to keep looking at each other. We both turned away. Suddenly we were both shy, after having talked nonstop for four or five hours. But our eyes found each other again and locked, and I could feel the joy coursing up in me, vibrating, from all the way down in my toes. I had to stop myself from bending towards her by force of will. In the same moment I imagined I saw a small movement in her, an ever-so-slight lean towards me.

“Oh. My. God!”

The exclamation took us both by surprise and we turned to the back of the car. Emma was scowling fiercely at us, arms folded across her chest, her face a fascinating mix of shock, consternation, fury, and – I don’t know how else to put it – grossed-outedness. A kind of expression only a young teenage girl can make.

Emma gave me a dirty look, got out of my car, slammed the door, and stomped to the porch of their house and stood there, fuming. Jeannette looked at me, brow furrowed and lips tight with embarrassment. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Well, thanks for the ride,” she said, and got out of the car and started walking to her daughter, fishing for her keys from her bag. Just before she went up the porch steps, she turned around and smiled and waved her cell phone and mouthed the words: Call me.

I grinned and nodded. I waved at Emma and collected a glare in exchange. I started my car, and drove off.

* * *

When I got to my apartment building, I went past the entrance to the parking garage and kept on driving. There was no way my apartment was going to contain my energy, I would be bouncing off the walls if I went in now. I dialed the MP3 player in my car to the Jepsen song and played it over and over, singing along as loudly as I could (“I wasn't looking for this, but now you’re in my way”), feeling foolish and giddy and alive. The bounciness of the song fed my elation in a positive feedback loop, so that it took more than an hour of driving all across town before the charge began to subside and my brain started to function again and I finally decided it was time to head back home.

As I drove home, I thought to myself that if anything was to happen between Jeannette and me, I would have to win Emma over somehow – and make it up to her. Jeannette and I had virtually ignored her half the night, and that had been extremely rude and inconsiderate. I owed her an apology. But not an explanation. I would not explain to her that when you are falling, even when you’re far along in years, you’re always blind and thoughtless and stupid and embarrassing, and you always land back at thirteen. She would learn this herself soon enough.

* * *

Turning Emma around wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. A few rather expensive gifts (strategically chosen with Jeannette’s advice) helped. What helped more was my huge family taking to her instantly, and she taking to my nieces. She quickly found a place among them as a cousin in all but name. In fact, if there was any problem, it was Emma’s tendency to try to lord it over them. As Jeannette said, she could be a little domineering. But my nieces are all good-hearted girls, and they worked it out somehow and managed to keep her exuberance somewhat in check.

She couldn’t be stopped eight months later, though, from leading them dancing down the aisle in a procession of the wedding entourage at my and Jeannette’s wedding. Her expression was priceless: she was positively beaming from all the attention. The video of her dancing and leading the way was a minor YouTube viral hit: nearly 200,000 views last time I checked. They didn’t dance to Carly Rae Jepsen, though, but to Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.” On this point, Jeannette and I put our foot down. It was our wedding, after all.

(July 2012)