Dear Cinnamon,
It’s been almost forty years. Do you remember me? I’m not quite sure why I remember you. Sometimes, I wake up hours before my alarm goes off, and the past visits me like Christmas ghosts and bothers me until I write it all down.
I can’t use your real name because there’s a chance people will know who you are, and that is not my purpose. I just put cinnamon in my coffee, and when I knew you, your hair was the color of cinnamon. Normally, I’m drawn to darker shades, but I punctuated that with some remarkable specimens of another hue, including you.
When we last met, I convinced myself that you were the worst thing that would ever happen to me and congratulated myself for getting past it. I was so very wrong. In the end, what happened between us wasn’t even in the top ten worst things that ever happened to me.
I talked to your father. He’s been dead for a while now. He was angry with me because he was making a point and wanted you to raise the money yourself by working. He could have done what I did to help you, but where’s the life lesson in that? The life lesson, I suppose, was my own. I never mentioned the fact that you wept uncontrollably, worried that he might find out what a mess you made of your finances–that the last thing you wanted was to disappoint him, which, I suppose, is what moved me to get involved in the first place.
I had, I think, different ideas about the nature and the future of our relationship than you did. There ought to be rules, or at least guidelines, in these matters. There may have been a time when romantic or sexual encounters were a good measure of a woman’s feelings toward a man, but if there were, I never lived during them. Some women will do more than you can imagine sexually and not care a bit about you; some are afraid even to kiss you but love you more than anyone. That’s hardly a reliable measure. I learned not to use it
In those days, my plan was always to assume that a girl had my best interests at heart, and in that way, if they see my heart heading in a way they’d rather it not, they’ll guide me back on a course they were more comfortable with. For the most part, that worked. I try only to become interested in women who are ladies, to begin with, and that helps, but there were times when that strategy failed miserably.
My grandmother told me to avoid social entanglements with girls who weren’t properly introduced to me. While that sounds like a rule from the 19th century, I followed it, and for the most part, it worked for me. I can tell you what trusted person introduced me to every girl I ever kissed. At least four were Inez, and one significant one was Maggie Nippes. I suppose that makes it sound like I mostly meet women in bars. Maybe that’s true.
I met you, Cinnamon, at Millsaps. You were one of the sorority girls I was sworn to protect. Debbie Fisher introduced us at a swap when you pledged. We never talked much after that. There were an awful lot of other people taking up my attention and my time in those days. A few months after you graduated, I saw you at Walmart with a big box of kitty litter. “Let’s go out!” you said. “I’d love to see you.” You said, and took the pen out of my pocket and wrote your phone number on the back of my hand.
There were always pretty girls I overlooked because I focused on someone else. I assumed that’s what happened here. You seemed like fun, so I called, and we went out. Then we went out again and again. You wanted to move apartments, so I moved you. There’s no sense in having a large, muscle-bound friend unless you’re going to have him move things.
Like a kitten, you sat in my lap while we watched movies. I was never very good at figuring out the exact point where someone becomes a “girlfriend,” but several days of the week, I kissed the same girl, and it was you, so forgive me if I was confused about where I stood with you.
One night, eating upstairs at Scrooges, you didn’t seem yourself. “It’s nothing.” You said. “I don’t want to talk about it.” You said. Rather than hang out at the bar, we went to my apartment to “watch TV” and feed the fish. My lionfish ate live minnows from the bait shop, and you liked to watch, so I saved it for you.
Lionfish look like a bass that became a drag queen. They eat with lighting ferocity, though, and I suppose that’s why you enjoyed the show. In a moment, all that’s left of the minnow is flecks of silver scales floating in the water. As impressive as that show was, it didn’t change your mood.
In my lap, watching the television, you fought what you were feeling with determination. When you began losing the fight, you turned your head and hid it from me. When I smoothed your hair with my hand, you couldn’t hide it anymore and buried your face in my chest and wept.
The car that you drove to work, the car you were so proud of having, needed over two thousand dollars worth of repairs. You had some of the money but not enough. You’d gone to your father about it, and he helped lay out ways you could solve the problem, but you couldn’t make any of them work, and the thought of returning to him and admitting you failed is what brought on the tears. More than anything, you wanted him to be proud of you, and having failed to get the money, you didn’t know how he would be.
“Why not get a bank loan?” I asked. You said you tried, but without credit, nobody was willing to loan you anywhere near the amount you needed, so I gave you the name of a loan manager I knew at Highland Village and said, “Call this guy. I’ll vouch for you.”
The guy I sent you to passed you down to another loan officer under him. You called at lunch to tell me that the lady at the bank asked if I would co-sign the note. I had to think about that pretty clearly. If you didn’t pay the note, then I would have to. We’d been seeing each other a few times a week for a couple of months at this point, and we had a lot of friends in common. I felt like I could trust you, and it was unlikely you’d stiff me on the loan, but, at the end of the day, if I gambled two thousand dollars on a girl and lost, I wouldn’t be bankrupt. I wouldn’t be very happy, but I could afford to lose the money.
When I got to the bank to put my name down as co-signer, I noticed that my name was listed first on the note. I pointed that out, and the loan officer said it was the only way she could get the loan approved. “So, basically, it’s my loan, and she’s co-signer,” I said. The loan officer assured me that was the case. “Would paying the loan off build her credit?” I asked. She assured me that was so. I made sure the bank understood that she’d be making the payments, and the loan officer said it didn’t really matter as long as the payments were made.
“Can I go outside for a minute? I just want to check something.” You and the loan officer excused me. I leaned against my car and smoked. This isn’t at all what I had in mind. I thought pretty intently about how you might react if I pulled out now. If this worked the way you wanted, you’d get your car fixed, and you’d be able to tell your daddy you solved your own problems like he wanted, and if you made the note payments on time, then both of us get a positive note on our credit history.
I stamped out my cigarette and lit another one. There was no commitment in our relationship. We ate together. We drank together. Sometimes, we made out like rabid teenagers on the sofa together, but none of that really spelled commitment. In the parlance of the day, we were basically just screwing around, another summer romance at a time of life when I had a different one almost every summer.
There were the tears, though. Deep, meaningful tears. Helping you make your father believe in you would probably be the nicest thing I did all year. “It’s only money,” I thought. A girl’s heart is worth twenty times that. I went back in and signed the note.
The first payment went by great. You were happy, and we were happy together. The time came for the second payment, and I got a call. You’d been talking to your old boyfriend, you said. He wanted to come back. You wanted him to come back. Would I please understand?
The first thing I felt was anger. Tremendous anger. I drove to your apartment with the idea that if I could talk to you, then I could change the outcome of this. I knocked on the door, and when you answered it, the old but new boyfriend was beside you. He was half my size. I grabbed his shirt. “I want two thousand dollars now, and you’ll never see me again,” I said.
“We had an agreement!” You shouted.
“That agreement didn’t include you dumping me before making the second payment,” I growled.
“Look, we don’t have that kind of money.” The boyfriend said. I don’t think he ever fully understood how lucky he was that I keep pretty tight control over my temper.
“Call your father,” I said. “Get him to write me a check!”
And with that, you sank to your knees, weeping. “Don’t call my father!” You pleaded. “Don’t. Please don’t.”
The boyfriend wasn’t expecting that. I wasn’t either. The waves of anger tearing through me crashed on the unrelenting, impenetrable shores of a woman’s tears.
I really wanted to hit something, but there was nothing I could hit that wouldn’t make things worse, so I paced back and forth under the porchlight.
“If you ever miss a payment. If you’re ever late, it’s gonna be bad.” I said.
“I won’t.” You said. “I promise.”
“Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?” The boyfriend said.
I gave myself one last chance to knock his head off but didn’t. I slammed shut your door so hard that something fell off the wall inside. I could hear you crying inside as I walked to my car.
I didn’t sleep. As the sun began to rise, I wrote you a letter. I explained that I was concerned that you used my obvious affection for you to secure this money you needed without ever having any real concern for my feelings in return. We had a legal and honorable agreement about the money, though, and I would be willing to overlook any misgivings I had about what got me into that agreement as long as you held up your end of the bargain. I was sorry for shouting, and I was sorry for slamming the door. I felt like I entered our time together honestly with honorable intentions, but since I no longer believed you did the same, I didn’t think we should try to be friends in the future. And I said goodbye.
The note was for two years and six months. By the spring, you said you were moving to another state with the boyfriend and gave me the address where you would be. You promised to continue making the payments, but one or two may be late while you set up in your new home and job.
Everything happened as you said. I didn’t hear any more about it for well more than a year. With just a few months left in the term of the note, I got a call from the bank that you missed the last two payments. I called the number you left me, and it was disconnected. I called your father to see where you were, and that’s when he cussed me for getting involved in his plan to teach you a lesson. When I persisted in asking for your new phone number, he told me to fuck off that it wasn’t his problem and hung up.
I called the bank to find out how much it would take to pay off the note. A little less than five hundred dollars, they said. Without any way to contact you, I calculated my losses and decided if I could get out of this and only lose less than five hundred dollars, I should be grateful, so I paid the note and went on with my life.
There was a time when I thought what you did was about the worst thing a woman could ever do to me. That was a miscalculation. Ultimately, your plot to defraud me, if it was indeed a plot, was somewhere in the middle in terms of the wounds I’d take aboard, trying to be a lover.
It’s been quite a long while now, and I have no idea where you are, so I suppose I’ll never know if you intended to mislead me so you could get the money or if it just worked out that way. When I found out that you’d been talking to your new/old boyfriend the entire time you were talking to me about getting a loan to solve your financial predicament, it sure seemed like a plot, one that maybe he was in on. I felt like he should have been the one to stick his neck out and get you the money, not me. I still feel that way.
There might be circumstances at the time that I didn’t see. There might still be circumstances that I don’t see. I’d hate to have believed you did something evil for almost forty years when really it was just a misunderstanding, or maybe there just wasn’t any understanding at all. Maybe you’re just not the kind of girl who considers what a man thinks or feels because you don’t understand us and don’t feel obligated to learn.
It could have been much worse, so I’m grateful for that. I hope you’ve had a good life. I saw, a few years ago, that your father died. I hope he was proud of you and satisfied with your life when he did. If you had a child, if you had a son, I hope that gave you insight into what men are and what we’re about. If not, there’s really very little I can do about it.
I’ve never been in a position where I was willing to say with certainty what you did was wrong. I’m not your judge. What I can say is that you made me feel overlooked. You had your problems, your new/old boyfriend who came up out of the blue had his problems, the loan officer had her problems, your father had his problems, and the guy fixing your car had his problems, too. I did my best to satisfy everyone and make a happy ending, but nobody really was looking out for me. The guy fixing your car got paid. The bank got paid. Your new/old boyfriend got his girl back. You got your car back. Your father got to see you solve your problems without him getting involved. What did I get?
Like I said, you were hardly the worst thing that ever happened to me, but do you ever think about it? Do you ever think I deserved better? Do you think I deserved worse? Do you wish you’d found a way to solve your problems without getting me involved? I don’t think I learned anything from this story. People in trouble sometimes have flexible morals, and you believed you were in trouble, even if the worst of it was just the fear of disappointing your father.
I thought then that life would balance out. With you, I lost, but surely I’d win the next time. That’s not what happened, though. If you’re willing to take a beating for someone else’s benefit, then that’s what will always happen. I never learned that lesson because the lesson I did learn was that if I didn’t take the beating intended for someone else, they would take it, and there would always be times when I wasn’t willing to do that.
I hope you’re happy. I hope you were always happy. I hope you don’t remember me. I hope that if you ever had a moment where you thought what you did was wrong, you forgot it long ago.
I thought I had forgotten about you long ago. I guess I hadn’t. I remain,
Faithfully yours,
Boyd
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