I have a rule, never speak to a man, no matter how attracted I am to him unless he has the backbone to speak first.
I don’t speak to many men.
Two years after I invoked this rule, my loneliness astonished me. I’m not saying that men didn’t approach me and speak; they tried. Mostly married men, innocent as lambs, most of them. We had conversations about the weather, the owls at night (really) the training of dogs and all manner of things at all different occasions. Not one bachelor, however, made a move in my direction. Not one bachelor approached my friends and asked to be introduced.
Now some might think perhaps I am the female version of Quasimodo–not so. I’m no prima donna, but I’m not stooped over with a hunched back and bald–nor do I have a little black mustache.
My resolution secured me the reputation of a snob. A woman who thought too much of herself and unapproachable–frigid. Single women avoided me too; they didn’t want to be branded as frigid or unapproachable by associating with me, and all I wanted was to be spoken to first; ‘Hello I’m Bob the mechanic or Ralph the baker,’ that’s all.
Please don’t think Prince Charming showed up, swept me off my jaded feet and made me the envy of all women–he didn’t. I changed. Selling my flat screen TV and donating any book I owned which had not been published 100 years ago, then taking a deep breath, I resolved to read every novel I had lied about reading. Radical, I know but I had no one to talk to.
I compiled my liar book list.
My first attack was on all the Jane Austen novels. Next, I tackled the Bronte sister. I was aghast to realize that I hated “Wuthering Heights,” and wondered as I struggled through the novel how the hell I would continue lying about the book for I had fairly gushed over it in the past, along with all my wine drinking literary, friends. I wondered then if my friends (no longer associating with me) had read the abridged version, and I suspected that I wasn’t the only liar in the world.
Don’t think I ignored male authors out of spite, I did not. I read Robert Louis Stevenson, HG Wells, and Oscar Wilde–I laughed out loud when I read “I’ve been telling the truth all this time, can you ever forgive me?” (I know, I know, a play not a novel but it hefted and felt like a book). Wilde was a genius in being delightfully rotten.
My point of view about the world and the ‘momentous,’ moments of my life shrank compared to the literature in front of me. For example, I believe now in evil as an entity with a personality (I still believe Satan exists and is an enemy of God) after I read the books of HG Wells. I felt delightfully wicked because I don’t think that’s what the author intended being an atheist. An author can write but not dictate a mind into lemming-type thinking; that takes a book club.
I became so absorbed in the restitution of my lies that my long-lost friends wondered what had become of me. I refused invitations and my parents drove in from the suburbs one Sunday afternoon to make sure I wasn’t dead and bloated in my apartment. My father walked down to the sports bar after seeing I was okay and my mother picked up “The Invisible Man,” and read it.
“If only it were true of most men,” she said, opening the book and settling in beside me with some hot tea. She took the train in and out of the city to cook for me after I told her I was taking a week off work to do nothing but read. She even stayed with me a few nights and read “Dracula.” (She re-acclimated herself to her Catholic upbringing soon after reading that novel).
The Friday evening of my week long liar book marathon I lamented to my Mother of having to go back to work for my rent’s sake.
“What brought all this on? Why are you reading these books?” asked my mother.
“Because single men refuse to speak to me.”
She blinked at me from behind her thick reading glasses.
“What?” she asked slowly.
“No single man will talk to me. I’ve not dated a man in two years,” and explained my life in the last four years.
“Do you mean to tell me you haven’t had your heart broken?”
“No.”
“You won’t talk to a man first, so no man has spoken to you in two years?”
“Well, I’ve spoken to men, Mother…”
“Yes, yes,” she blurted “but because of this experiment you are sitting down and making restitution on the lies you’ve made regarding books you said you read but really haven’t?”
“Well, now it really wasn’t an experiment, but a sort of theory I was testing.”
“A theory?” asked my mother her voice rising.
“Yes,” I said wondering at her
“Do you mean to tell me I’ve been sitting in the suburbs wondering if you’re a lesbian and afraid to tell me, dead or heartbroken, and all along you’ve been testing a theory? A theory?”
It shocked me, her strident tone of voice.
“You idiot girl!” My mother got up from her seat on my sofa and paced my living room floor, then sat back down and looked at me. “I made you attend Sunday School in an effort to help you figure out men – they’re not complicated, dear! I read you the Genesis account of creation, for pity’s sake.” Looking at me earnestly she said, “You punish yourself because you think men egotistical, and all they are is lazy, ignorant and cowards. Where have you been? How did we miss this?”
She got up and paced a few more times across my living room floor. “Oh!” my mother moaned and collapsed back down on my old library chair, landing on Dante’s “Inferno.”
“Mother, I would hardly say I was punishing myself. I mean I’ve been lonely, but I’m better read than most people my age.” I shrugged and picked up ‘Moll Flanders.’ “And you know, most of my so-called friends are already married and wondering why they spent the time and money on the effort. Perhaps I’ll skip all that.”
My Mother was looking at me from between her fingers, her blue eyes shining out from behind her reading glasses. “Then you don’t blame me for being a terrible mother?”
“I don’t consider you a terrible mother.”
She seemed relieved and removed her glasses to dab her eyes with a tissue. “Do you see yourself ever in a relationship?”
“Oh, perhaps some older man who walks by me while I’m reading on a park bench, might stop by someday and ask me what keeps me so absorbed.”
“Have you seen him?” Asked my mother in a conspirator’s tone of voice.
“Every day on my lunch hour. After a week’s absence, I’m hoping he might have the courage to ask me what I’ve been up to.”
“Oh, darling, I’m so relieved you’re not so noble as to not try stealth.”
I smiled at her and asked if she wouldn’t make me a pot of tea.
“Oh yes certainly. And since it’s only Friday, I think I’ll read the Pickwick Papers. I always hated Charles Dickens and lied through so many of his novels. But it’s time to come clean.”