Goodbye

One day, out of the blue, Emily said she was moving. Her father, she said, had been transferred to another, bigger city an hour away. She would be at a new school with new kids. There was nothing to say, nothing to do. She would just be gone.

Our football season was nearing the end. We had two more games, but we had a two week break before we played again. Many of the kids I knew who had made the team had already quit, tough kids who were hoodlums and outcasts. Steve told me that he had gotten a job selling magazines with an outfit from Boston. Tommy was working for them too. Their office was downtown. If I wanted a job, he said, I should show up on Wednesday to talk to the fellows who ran the show. They were paying minimum wage and it was fun.

And so I told the Coach that I couldn't make it to practice on Wednesday, that I had to go for a job interview. It was no big deal, I thought, since we wouldn't be playing that week, but Coach didn't see it that way. He told me I would have to show up for practice.

I didn't. Rather, I hitch hiked downtown in the middle of the afternoon and met my friends in front of one of the taller buildings in town, an old, brick structure that was a landmark. This was the adult world, I told myself. This was working and making money and having responsibility. It was exciting. I went up the elevator to the magazine office where my friends introduced me to a man who looked like some character actor I'd seen in many old movies. He wore a white shirt and a loosened tie and sat behind a big wooden desk in front of a window that looked out over the city. I'd never been up in a building like this before, had never seen what it looked like from there. My father had never worked in such a place, I was certain. This was sophisticated, a world away from what I knew. I could start in a few weeks, I said, if that was alright.

"Sure, sure," said the man behind the desk. "We'll see you then."

When I went back to football practice the next afternoon, I wasn't the same fellow I was the day before. My countenance was elevated. I was a man with a job working for people of great class and sophistication. Coach was a guy in charge of a locker room smelling of dampness and rotten gym clothes and mold.

"Where were you yesterday," he yelled when he saw me. Chin up, I told him. "Well, you're suspended for the next game," he said.

We hadn't won a game and it didn't look as if we would. If I stayed, I would practice for three weeks to maybe play once. And so I turned my helmet and pads in. So much for heroism and victory and the warm embrace of teammates. I didn't go back.

And one day, Emily was just gone. We sat together the day before she left for a long time, just holding hands and talking about nothing. I didn't know what to say. Everything inside me hurt. I felt lonely. She was more mature than I of course, as was natural at that age, and she made her sweet, sad attempts to succor me. She would write me letters every day, she said, and she would call me whenever she could. She would come back to visit sometimes.

As I walked home from her house that last time, the landscape looked both familiar and strange as if it were a picture that had been overexposed, a touch too bright, a dreamland. Sometimes, it seemed I didn't remember which way I was to go. I noticed things I had never seen before. When I got to the large field that lay between her neighborhood and mine, I simply collapsed. Sitting with my back against a rock, I felt the cold wind that blew through what had once been my body, now without substance, a hollow vessel, empty, convulsing, the tears turning cold upon my cheeks.

"I have no place to go," I whispered weakly to the cold wind, immediately feeling foolish. I knew I was going home. But there was no comfort there.