The Longest Ride(26)

I blink, trying and failing to bring her into focus. She was seventeen years old. “This is the dress you wore when I finally asked you to walk with me.”



“No,” she says to me. “This is the dress I wore when I asked you.”



I smile. This is a story we often told at dinner parties, the story of our first date. Over the years, Ruth and I have learned to tell it well. Here in the car, she begins the story in the same way she’d always done for our guests. She settles her hands in her lap and sighs, her expression alternating between feigned disappointment and confusion. “By then, I knew you were never going to say a word to me. You had been home from university for a month, and still you never approached me, so after Shabbat services had ended, I walked up to you. I looked you right in the eyes and I said, ‘I am no longer seeing David Epstein.’”



“I remember,” I say.



“Do you remember what you said to me? You said, ‘Oh,’ and then you blushed and looked at your feet.”



“I think you’re mistaken.”



“You know this happened. Then I told you that I would like you to walk me home.”



“I remember that your father wasn’t happy about it.”



“He thought David would become a fine young man. He did not know you.”



“Nor did he like me,” I interject. “I could feel him staring at the back of my head while we walked. That’s why I kept my hands in my pockets.”



She tilts her head, evaluating me. “Is that why, even when we were walking, you said nothing to me?”



“I wanted him to know my intentions were honorable.”



“When I got home, he asked if you were mute. I had to remind him again that you were an excellent student in college, that your marks were very high, and that you would graduate in only three years. Whenever I spoke with your mother, she made sure I knew that.”



My mother. The matchmaker.



“It would have been different had your parents not been following us,” I say. “If they hadn’t been acting as chaperones, I would have swept you off your feet. I would have taken your hand and serenaded you. I would have picked you a bouquet of flowers. You would have swooned.”



“Yes, I know. The young Frank Sinatra again. You have said this already.”



“I’m just trying to keep the story accurate. There was a girl at school who had her eye on me, you know. Her name was Sarah.”



Ruth nods, looking unconcerned. “Your mother told me about her, too. She also said that you had not called or written to her since you had returned. I knew it was not serious.”



“How often did you talk to my mother?”



“In the beginning, not too much, and my mother was always there. But a few months before you came home, I asked your mother if she would help me with my English and we began to meet once or twice a week. There were still many words I did not know, and she could explain their meaning in a way that I could understand. I used to say that I became a teacher because of my father, and that was true, but I also became a teacher because of your mother. She was very patient with me. She would tell me stories, and that is another way she helped me with the language. She said I must learn to do this myself, because everyone in the South tells stories.”



I smile. “What stories did she tell?”



“She told stories about you.”



I know this, of course. There are few secrets left in any long marriage.



“Which was your favorite?”



She thinks for a moment. “The one from when you were a little boy,” she finally says. “Your mother told me that you found an injured squirrel, and despite the fact that your father refused to let you keep it in the store, you hid it in a box behind her sewing machine and nursed it back to health. Once it was better, you released it in the park, and even though it ran off, you returned every day to look for it, in case it needed your help again. She would tell me that it was a sign that your heart was pure, that you formed deep attachments, and that once you loved something – or someone – you would never stop.”



Like I said, the matchmaker.



It was only after we were married that my mother admitted to me that she’d been “teaching” Ruth by telling her stories about me. At the time, I felt ambivalent about this. I wanted to believe that I’d won Ruth’s heart on my own, and I said as much to her. My mother laughed and told me she was only doing what mothers have always done for their sons. Then she told me that it was my job to prove that she hadn’t been lying, because that’s what sons were supposed to do for their mothers.