Life Goes On…
The weeks after 9-11 were pretty somber. Nobody was really doing anything but going through the motions. People generally stayed close to home. My ten year High School reunion invite had come, and was set for November, but I declined. I checked airline prices, but they were insane.
Finally, Halloween was coming, so Eric & Lucinda broke up the funk everyone was in by hosting a party. It was a good party. Everyone really needed to let loose. Lori dressed up as a ‘sexy nurse.’ She looked hot but what was funny was Lucinda was the one that seemed to pay the most attention to her. Lucinda was always a loose cannon when she was drinking. You never really knew what you were going to get. There were some parties where she would get to hair pulling. If you were the poor soul to be sitting next to her when she started tugging at hair… I remember being the victim once and Jennifer’s brother Tom, another time. When she gets to tugging something, she didn’t quit. This time it happened to be the zipper on the front of Lori’s nurse outfit. Lori was shocked, but based on her reaction and comments on the trip home, she was also turned on by it. It was one of the few times that Lori showed a more sexual side of her.
That was short lived, and our relationship problems grew apparent again. However, we were a match made in heaven compared to Alan from work and his marriage. Every once in a while things got so bad, he would stay with us for a few days.
His wife was very controlling and judgmental. Alan would get up at 5:00AM to iron her clothes for her in the morning and cater to her every whim and still she was never happy. Very rarely was Alan allowed to be social. So when he was able to, he overindulged.
One day, out of the blue, Alan invited me to their house for dinner on a Friday night. It couldn’t be Lori and myself. That was too much. So it would be just me. Everyone at work told me I had to be on my best behavior and not screw anything up or we would never see Alan outside of work again. And I was great.
I had tried to include her in everything, but after dinner, Alan wanted to play a computer game with me and she said she was fine with that. She was going to watch TV in the bedroom. We played and I didn’t overstep my welcome.
That Monday, Alan said everything went well, except for one small issue. While we played our game, Alan asked if I wanted ice cream. Well, he got in trouble for not going into the bedroom and asking her. Poor Alan.
A few weeks later, Lori and I returned the invitation and had them over for dinner. We knew it would be thin ice as Alan’s wife did not approve of Lori and I living together out of wedlock, so we already had one strike against us.
They came over, and we had a lovely dinner. Because she had recently become pregnant, we mostly made small talk and talked about our own childhood stories. They didn’t stay late which gave Lori and I less time to screw something up. Overall, we thought things went very well.
That Monday we got feedback from Alan. This time Alan’s wife was taken aback by how freely Lori and I were with personal information, and scolded Alan for joining in. Apparently, Stories about playing with my Star Wars figures at the age of 8 is way too personal for some people and Lori telling us about handing her toys out the window to local kids to play with after she had to come inside for the evening was also a taboo subject.
Alan will get kicked out of his house twice more in the years that followed and wound up staying with us. One time was for over a week. It was after she gave birth to twins. It would have only been a day or so, but he missed the cue that he was supposed to run out after her as she drove past my apartment and honked her horn on her way to take the kids to Gymboree. She quit her job to be a stay at home mom, and Alan was forced to get a second job for Fed Ex unloading packages off of planes at the airport from 2AM to 6AM along with his full time job at the bank.
I wonder how she’d feel to know I wrote about her…