A Woman's Survival Guide to Difficult Men: Out of Bounds
Chapter 13: Out of Bounds
Back in the ’80s in Miami, I was the youngest of four kids and had a lot of space and freedom in which to conduct my affair with Bill Jones. I remember the day my mother walked into the kitchen before I left for ninth grade, announcing her “retirement.”
“I won’t be getting up early anymore to make breakfast,” she said.
I made my own and got myself to school on time. My generation was much more independent. It’s not that my parents were inattentive – quite the opposite – they just didn’t hover.
Midway through my senior year I was accepted to Dartmouth College early admission. Bill pleaded with me to stay in Miami.
“Go to University of Miami instead,” he said.
“Are you crazy?” I replied. “It’s Dartmouth.”
I was very practical back then.
Toward the end of my senior year, my father discovered our relationship.
Bill and I had gone furniture shopping for his new condo on Brickell Avenue. As a Teen Board member at a Miami department store called Burdines, I received a discount. So, I took him to the Burdines outlet to buy a couch.
The one time we went into public together and I got busted. Several people approached Bill for autographs and sports talk. Apparently one of them knew my father, a prominent real estate developer in our community.
“A friend of mine saw you together at the Burdines Outlet,” he said.
“Yes, I helped him buy a couch.”
My parents knew Bill and I were friendly. If they suspected more, they hadn’t said anything before.
“I know you’re more than friends. It’s not OK, Pam. He’s a 32-year-old man. You’re 17!” My Dad was livid. I suddenly wondered if he’d been listening in on our phone calls. His face turned red as he confronted me in the driveway. “I’m going down to the station right now!”
“You’ll only embarrass yourself!” I yelled.
Dad never followed through on his threat, but when high school ended, he and my mom forced me to accept a job as a camp counselor, shipped off to Georgia while they spent the summer in San Francisco. They did not want me home alone cavorting with Lester the Molester.
At camp, I tried pot for the first time and further explored my sexuality in inappropriate ways. Summer in Miami would have been far tamer, maybe even boring. This kind of disciplinary banishment always tended to backfire on my parents. My brothers were once arrested for smoking pot. As punishment, they were sent to Israel “the land of milk and honey” for the summer. Or in their case, the land of MILF and hashish. My brothers did not want to come home.
Fortunately, I had my priorities straight and would not alter my college plans for a dude. I was headed for Dartmouth.
Which is when my father confused me with some well-meaning advice.
As I packed my bags and boxes, Dad wandered in to check on my progress. Tall and skinny, wearing his usual weekend uniform of short sleeve Miami Dolphins T-shirt and khaki shorts, my Dad was a man of few words. His kind, handsome face and grey-blue eyes looked on with pride at his Ivy League-to-be daughter.
I squeezed one last sweater into the already overstuffed black duffle bag in my bedroom. At one point, it had been the room that two of my three brothers shared, where one of them played Houdini and fell off the top bunk breaking his jaw.
Now they were all adulting while I claimed the top floor for myself, a four-bedroom two-bath suite. A huge space.
When the youngest of my brothers left, I inherited his room. The one he used to share with Houdini. It was the largest and now it was mine. My mother, using her interior design prowess, had decorated my room to within an inch of its life, lining two walls with built-in white Formica and installing rose pink carpeting. My bed jutted out from the far corner facing the door, topped with a rainbow quilt. A large, overcrowded bulletin board held all my Chatonette badges from the year I was on my high school’s dance line.
As the youngest child and the only girl, I was not a princess-y girl, per se, but you could say I classified as Jewish American Princess without the attitude. Never was this more evident than when I showed up at Dartmouth with what my classmates referred to as “the Great Wall of Sweaters.” In Mom’s enthusiasm to outfit her Miami girl in warm clothes for frigid New Hampshire winters, she went on a shopping spree that summer. We installed neck scarves beside the pile of sweaters. When the first snow fell, I turned to my two roommates and asked, “How do you wear this thing?”
Back in Miami, where I stuffed twenty-three pounds of designer wool into my duffel, I didn’t yet realize that all I needed were a couple pairs of Lycra running pants, some hoodie sweatshirts and an Arctic rated L.L. Bean down jacket. That’s pretty much all we wore. If one dressed up too much beyond that – or worse yet, had manicured nails – you identified as an outsider.
I left my room to procure more boxes and brushed past my dad who put his arm around me to say something.
If my Dad needed to give a toast or a speech to a crowd, this Toastmasters graduate could deliver. Sitting in the living room of our family home or at the dinner table, however, he was usually lost in his own thoughts. We teased him about this one night when he hadn’t said a word throughout dinner.
“Ninety-eight percent of what people talk about is bullshit,” he said.
We called him “Mr. Two Percent” after that.
So when Dad bothered to weigh in with his two percent, we listened with slack-jawed wonder as if he were a wizened sage emerging from a remote mountaintop.
“Pam,” he said, his arm around me as we walked down the hallway, “Try not to seem so… smart. And capable. Men don’t like that.”
My eyes darted around the hallway trying to comprehend what he was saying. “Um Dad,” I thought to myself, “you’re sending me to Dartmouth.”
His advice did not compute and I dismissed it out of hand. “Besides,” said my inner voice, “If a man can’t handle that I’m smart and capable, I don’t want him.”
My seventeen-year-old swagger probably derived from the fact that I’d been dating a grown man my entire senior year. It certainly didn’t come from my success dating in high school where I didn’t get asked out by a single boy my own age. Oh! I get it now. I was too smart and capable.
I know my father deeply admired my achievements, proud of the fact that I produced television before heading off to college. Proud that I got into an Ivy League school, though he’d have been just as happy if I’d gone to UCLA, “because they have a good basketball team.”
But my father also wanted me to find the same love and companionship he’d lucked into with my mother – who is smart and capable. What was their secret?
With a year under my belt at Dartmouth, I came home for summer break. Bill and I agreed to meet for lunch. He pulled up in a blue Corvette and I rolled my eyes. His moustache coupled with the Corvette struck me as hopelessly cheesy. The vision removed any remaining veil from my eyes. Like removing a cataract, I saw clearly that he was now in the past for me. One year at college and I was worldly-wise. I’ve always had a theory that men with moustaches (and no beard) have something to hide. Don’t ask me why the beard makes the difference. It’s just a theory.
**This is a work of fiction, based loosely on true events. Names and details have been changed.