| Brown-eyed Girl
By Barry Boggs, PhD Home At first it was a muffled complaint in the midst of sleep – was it mine or someone else’s? Then, it was a female‘s high-pitched complaint rising to a crescendo of panic. Then, I was awake and I realized that neither the complaint nor the panic were mine. They were Elizabeth’s. She was sitting up in bed on the heels of her feet, holding her chest, unable to breath. She had begun having panic attacks during her chemotherapy for breast cancer. But, as she struggled there was a raw terror in her voice and eyes, that I had never seen nor heard before. “Honey, Barry, call 911, I can’t breath. I can’t breath at all. I can’t breath at all. Oh, baby, I can’t breath.” I glanced at the time on my cell phone as I called 911. It was a little past four. I could hear the reassuring wail of the emergency vehicle almost as soon as I laid the phone down. I went out into the drive of the apartment complex to direct it in. There was no one about save a few die-hard joggers and a stroller or two. The air was already warm and clammy. It was July, the hottest part of the Nashville summer. The temperature could reach a hundred today. The red lights of the emergency van filled the space around me when it arrived. Three technicians bounded out and were through the front door of the apartment before I was. Elizabeth was awake and trying to instruct them on what was happening to her. They paid her polite, but cursory attention. Their real job was to get her to the hospital. They strapped her to a gurney but had difficulty getting her and the apparatus through the apartment’s narrow front door. They were finally able to squeeze her through it but it took seven or eight minutes. These moments would turn out to be critical. Since I would have to get back to the children, I had to take my car. I pulled up behind the van as they were placing Elizabeth inside. All was still quiet in the early morning. The only sound was the whir of my car’s air conditioner. I glanced at my watch. It was four-twenty. Five minutes became ten, ten became fifteen, fifteen became twenty but still the van had not moved. For reasons known only to God I began whispering the Hail Mary to myself, over and over, like an incantation. If I were a catholic, this would not have been strange, but I’m not, and it was. I do not remember ever saying it before but the words formed spontaneously on my lips -- “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” *** Elizabeth and I met on a warm Labor Day weekend in Memphis almost twenty years before the morning she was stricken. It was the weekend of the annual interstate football rivalry between our local University of Memphis boys and the University of Mississippi kids ninety miles down the road. The rivalry notwithstanding the kids on both sides of the ball were from the same towns and villages. How our kids got to be “our” kids and their kids got to be “their” kids is something that only the twin alchemies of competition and college football could explain. Our boys usually lost but they won often enough to keep things interesting so there was excitement in the air. Captain Bilbo’s was a popular downtown seafood haunt just off of Beale Street. Perched on one of Memphis’ seven river bluffs, its huge bay windows looked out over the great expanse of the Mississippi River and the Arkansas floodplain on the western side. It was from these bluffs that the intrepid Hernando De Soto wrongly concluded that he was looking at an uncharted ocean when he was merely looking at the great river’s springtime tumescence. The view is captivating. For this and other reasons, like all you can eat shrimp nights, the restaurant was a favorite of unattached downtown apartment dwellers like myself. Elizabeth and I had both gone to meet friends. Hers eventually showed up but, not surprisingly, mine never did. The bar was immediately off the waiting areas and both of us had edged through the crowd for a quick cocktail. I was wearing my naturally curly hair long in those days and running a comb through it about once a week. It was not the ideal look to pick up yuppie women who, outside of their male counterparts and few families, were the bar’s main clientele. That night I was wearing a faded denim jacket that was badly torn over the left shoulder. This would have made me as about as attractive as Quasimodo to downtown, on the way up, slick yuppie women which I immediately and wrongly took Elizabeth to be. She was wearing a tight-fitting emerald green silk dress that rose to a delicate kimono-like collar. She was seated on a stool at a bend in the bar which afforded a perfect view of her slender body and ample breasts. Her brown hair was cut stylishly short and parted in the center. Although she had gone through a hippy phase, by the time we met she was always impeccably dressed and groomed, due in no small measure, to her three years as a flight attendant for the now defunct Braniff Airways. Her skin was fair with a delicate flourish in each cheek. There was an unmistakable radiance about her that was a combination of her natural beauty and unpresupposing charm. But, the feature that most defined her, from the moment you met her, through all the days you knew her and beyond, were those large, almond-shaped, deep brown eyes. Captivating, intense, expectant – they were the eyes of Betty Davis, Laura Mars and Julia Roberts all in one. Look away and look again, they were upbeat, lively, playful, relaxed like the lost love in Van Morrison’s song with whom he hid behind the rainbow’s wall. After I had lived with her for a while, I realized that she wasn’t always feeling as intense as she looked. It was just that her eyes knew no other language. But, when she was feeling intense, say when the topic was “you” or “her and you,” the intensity was well nigh spellbinding. I struck up a conversation about the game which was being previewed on a mute TV screen at the other end of the bar. It would have been an entirely casual, throw away conversation, not even an attempt to hustle, but for those hypnotic brown eyes which seemed to follow me from whatever angle I was standing. For her part she seemed to be oblivious to their effect. One of her friends appeared at the bar and tugged at her sleeve to come and join them, everyone from Dallas having arrived it seemed. Elizabeth promised to join them but I could tell that she was blowing them off. Her friend left and came back in about ten minutes but this time she had “axe murderer” in her eyes as she took the full measure of this disheveled stranger with his hopelessly tousled hair and washed out, ragged denim jacket. Elizabeth blew her off again and I recognized the invitation. The evening was ours. I, of course, interpreted our first meeting as a wholly random event, but she, of course, saw it as the hand of fate. But, however people are brought together, at some point they make a decision to stay together and we did. “Wanna take a walk?” I asked, trying to sound as casual as possible. “Sure,” she said almost instinctively. The river front in Memphis on a late summer’s night is a clean well-lit place but as we headed for the door I could see Texas chain-saw massacre written on her friends’ faces. We shared our pasts as we strolled along the river – where we were born, what our families were like, where we worked, what we aspired to and what we were looking for in prince and princess charming. Revelers passed us on either side, some already wobbling badly. Voices echoed up and down the open expanse of the river like bargemen shouting warnings on the river. She was an earnest conversationalist. Her questions were driven by a naïve curiosity that any teacher would die for. “I was born when mother was fifteen,” she started after a few awkward moments of silence. “She and daddy were picking cotton and mother went into labor. They were picking next to each other but daddy got behind. When he caught up she just said, ‘Fred, I believe I’m ready to have that baby now.’” “Grandmother Harvey loaned them her car and ten dollars. That’s how much the hospital charged. Can you believe that, ten whole dollars?” she said incredulously. She gently laid her hand on my arm and pointed with her head to a couple necking beside a black Mercedes. She smiled. Elizabeth’s parents had come to Memphis at about the same time as mine and for the same reasons. They were the new Tom Joads, young uneducated men and women, pouring into the city looking for work. It was the mid-nineteen fifties and the city’s foundation, which up until then was basically the foundation of an ante-bellum mansion, was being shaken by another Tom Joad from the hinterland. His name was Elvis Presley. He became an icon for poor whites who had never been accepted in the city’s patrician social structures. My family worshipped the ground he walked on and so did Elizabeth’s. Her father became an over the road trucker and mine a door to door life insurance salesman. By hard work and a reputation for honesty they both rose to management positions when it was still possible for uneducated men to do so. The similarities between our families were uncanny but there was one major difference. My father had collapsed and died of a heart attack at the ripe old age of 54, felled as much by his own driving ambition as anything having to do with the muscles in his heart. I was twenty-two. His death hollowed me out spiritually. It gave me a tragic sense of life that I had never had before, but have had ever since. Elizabeth’s father lived for thirty more years after mine died and I had to admit that there were times I resented this even though I loved Fred like my own father. Elizabeth’s innocence was intact well into middle age until her breast cancer was discovered and her year-long chemotherapy ordeal relentlessly pummeled her with the news of her own mortality. We were the two faces of Greek tragedy but, as everyone knows, they are not opposites. Elizabeth got a foothold in trucking business through her father’s influence and she knew it. She was a freight marketer. She literally talked people into putting their stuff in the back of her trucks so her company could carry it to Los Angeles or Bismarck or Tucson for so many pennies a pound. She had to hit the bricks every day. Many days she had nothing on her plate so she made cold calls to anyone who would give her a few minutes. Now, she felt she had fallen into the family groove a little too quickly and she wanted to do something different. She had lived in Aspen for three years but had been persuaded to come home by her parents. She never told me this and, of course, if she had stayed in Aspen, we would never have met (Not according to her – fate would require us to meet. We would have met in Times Square on New Year’s Eve or outside Buckingham Palace or on Pont Neuf but we would have met. Fate can be delayed but not denied.) but I believe she regretted caving into her parents and leaving Aspen and the life it represented. “I don’t like to talk about myself, it bores me,” I said, realizing that it was time to share a little of my own bio. I said, “Well, I am an almost psychologist.” Her face wrinkled in confusion. “I’m still writing my dissertation. I’m dawdling. I can’t let go of it,” I said. She didn’t understand the mechanics of a graduate education but she did understand the dawdling part. “Right now, I’m working as a counselor in a private drug rehab,” I said. “It’s good money and I like the people I work with. I didn’t go on to say that one of those people that I so liked to work with was a lover. As an afterthought I added, “But, I need to get back to Nashville and get the damn thing done before they throw me out.” People never seemed to know how to respond to the revelation that you are a “shrink”. They become disarmed and defensive. On more than one occasion I have told people that I was a bank teller to avoid this reaction. This time I told the truth and Elizabeth seemed to thoughtfully ponder what being a psychologist meant in my life. It was a source of curiosity to her. I told about my years in Chicago in seminary, about my son Darian who lived with his mother in Nashville, about my love of travel, about my favorite thinkers and writers but the boredom set in as I knew it would and, seeing an out, I suddenly asked, “There are fireworks tonight, want to watch them from my roof?” I wondered momentarily if I had gone too far, but, she was game. The deck on the roof of my swinging singles apartment building was about ten stories up. The building was no more than a hundred yards off the river. Whatever was happening on the riverfront was visible from the roof including the acts at a venue just offshore called the Mud Island Amphitheater. We found a place at the railing as the tenants began to wander over with their gin and tonics and chardonnays. Standing beside her I could not fail to notice the contours of her body – her full, impossible to conceal breasts, her narrow hips, and her even narrower waistline. When I was finally treated to the full expanse of her nakedness, I was dazzled by her body’s soft fullness and delicate proportion. We became great lovers over the years. Each year brought more excitement in our bedroom not less. Our lovemaking was uninhibited and intense. We came to know each other’s bodies perfectly. Neither of us ever strayed. On this festive night when everything was lit up, the river looked like a river of tiny mirrors instead of water, a sacred, celebrative presence overseeing all the merrymaking. She was in awe of the site. The fireworks were customarily set off somewhere on the Arkansas side of the river which was now asleep in darkness. There was no commerce or dwelling on the floodplain so the rockets, when they finally came, seemed to come from nowhere. The blackness was suddenly alive with wild ripping sounds that paused for an indeterminate moment and, then, exploded into a profusion of color that electrified the river. The first array was a sunburst of deep orange. This was followed by another sunburst, this one emerald green, the colors bleeding into one another. They were both accompanied by rapid fire rhythmic explosions that rocked the river from one side to the other like dueling artillery batteries. There was a chorus of “oohs” and “aahs” all up and down the river, Elizabeth’s among them. There was an innocence about her love of life, particularly at full moments like these and it would stay with her until the day she woke up gasping for breath twenty years later. The show ended with great patriotic clusters of red, white and blue accompanied by more explosions that sounded like artillery barrages. Then, I saw one of the most remarkable things I had ever seen – cascades of red, white and blue were reflected, stream for stream, color for color in the deep expanse of her dark brown eyes. *** Elizabeth had perished in the back of the van even as I was repeating the Hail Mary softly to myself. The paramedics had resuscitated her but she had suffered massive, irreversible brain damage and never regained consciousness. We discontinued life support two weeks later. In death we have many more choices than we dare to consider. The final two weeks of Elizabeth’s life were filled with unspeakable anguish but, now, four years later, I only vaguely remember those dark days. What I remember as if it were yesterday is the brown-eyed girl in the emerald green dress in whose eyes the colors of the night sky were reflected. Dr. Barry Boggs lives in Point Clear. Alabama. “Brown-eyed Girl” is excerpted from his book, Through a Glass Darkly. Home |
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