Revision: Caricature Love

Audience: Modern Love

“Twinkies are made of whale blubber” were some of the words Matt shared with me during our first encounter freshman year. That and, “I went to The Avery Coonley School. We’re the seahorses because we only travel onward and upward—never backward.” Anxious to learn more about my first high school crush, I Googled The Avery Coonley School after class, and sure enough the site’s masthead read, “Guiding Gifted Children Onward and Upward.” Seahorse silhouettes and seahorse watermark paraded the page. It was a well-known suburban grammar school for kid geniuses, but Matt didn’t want many people to know he attended, or that he got a 36 on his ACT two years later. I liked Matt’s quirks, his playful personality and his obliviousness to the dos and don’ts of making a good first impression. So I took his word for it that the cream filling of the Twinkie was made with the blubber of a whale.

I spilled the details of my infatuation to my older girl cousins not long after. We inspected his Facebook at the next family party.

“He looks like a girl.”
“His nose is funny.”
“Does he always make that face?”
“He’s…cute, Emmy.”

We were dating by the end of freshman year. It was an anticipated pairing, in the works since I joined the rowing team that winter as much for Matt as for my innocent desire to find my niche at school.

Matt joked that his lips were bigger than Bubba Blue’s from the movie Forrest Gump, and that his stubby nose, which matched his stubby fingers, was not a nose but a Yukon Gold potato. He acknowledged the short and awkward distance between his eyes and an ass that forced him to shop at specialty clothing stores for husky boys. He looked and walked like his dad, a strong man of average height with a short stride.

He needed only his backpack to announce himself in the hallways; this highly discussed neon green and yellow North Face item was his favorite high school purchase. “He would buy that,” said my annoyed older sister. For a while I was as embarrassed to be around him with his backpack on as when he mimicked the crying babies in the movie theatre on date nights. (Voice imitation was one of his many unusual talents.) I was mortified by his indifference to the people staring at him. His silliness embarrassed me for a long time. But sometime into our second year of dating, I gave him my first gaze of real adoration at his freeness toward most things in life. I released my inhibitions right back.

Matt excelled in drawing. He aspired to be an architect but identified as a caricaturist. Hidden in my closet is a shoebox of letters, cards and ripped notebook pages coated with Matt’s hyperbolic sketches of our wacky senior-year religion teacher Mr. Thompson, of our friends, and of him and me. Also in that shoebox are the letters he wrote me from camp every high school summer we dated, one every day for three years. And the Valentine’s Day card he gave me freshman year that reads, “Roses are red, violets are blue, gee it’d be cool, if I could have you!” Matt kept his tangible memories not in a box but in a drawer next to his bed. It overflowed with the handmade holiday and birthday cards I would make him, ticket stubs of movies we watched, playbills from the shows we treated each other to, and the letters I wrote in response to his. Two framed photos of us rest on top, next to a large stack of non-required reading that alternated every month. He selected Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to lend me first. I finished it eager for his next suggestion—a book of short stories I pretended to read. Suspecting I fibbed, he playfully interrogated me one day during free period.

Matt forgave me most everything, and he was patient with me. I learned that when I didn’t return his first “I love you” just fourth months into our relationship. On the phone later that night he admitted “it sucked”, but that I should wait until I’m really sure. And then again the winter of our junior year when I told him I still liked my first boyfriend, Kevin, a neighborhood bad boy whose hard-to-get games Matt didn’t care to play with girls. I had just returned from a parish retreat that Kevin and I attend twice a year—Matt’s two least favorite weekends. It was nothing more than a physical attraction, but my relationship with Matt lacked the spontaneity that came naturally to Kevin. Matt knew this, and knew my feelings lingered for this bad boy since grade school. We were at a birthday party when I told him I needed to talk.

“I just feel like I can’t be with you when I have feelings for Kevin.”

The breakup didn’t last long, maybe a week. The truth was that Matt and I could not assimilate high school as individuals. Worse, we couldn’t assimilate a private life that didn’t intersect with the other’s. He came to my extended family gatherings, and I ate homemade dinners with him and his parents on the weekends. His mom showed me how to make her cherry scones and her pasta with vodka sauce, two of her best recipes. If weather conditions were bad, his mom insisted I sleep over and drive home the next morning. I cried when his dog died and tried to convince his parents to get another. His dad addressed me by the nickname he created, “Memily”. In the summers, they invited my family to their log cabin in the north woods of Wisconsin. My grandma, an unobtrusive woman, questioned whenever Matt wasn’t at Easter brunch or didn’t make an appearance at Thanksgiving.

I felt like we were one of Matt’s caricatures, comical in its exaggeration of a high school romance and grotesque in its display of two humans consumed.

We lasted past graduation and into our first year of college, where we split ways for the first time. He was in Indiana and I was in Michigan. I can’t help thinking that we chose to stay together to validate our four-year absorption in each other. So we tried, but we broke up in January of freshman year, just a few days before my birthday.

I’m not proud of what happened between that January and my last encounter with Matt two summers later. For three years I took advantage of Matt and his innocence and his patience. “I’m too good to you,” he would joke. He loved walking me to class when it was out of his way, and planning how he would ask me to school dances. But too often it was an unrequited love; he loved me more than I loved him. I can only assume he woke up one morning after our January break up and realized that because he didn’t fight for me again. And he assimilated into college without me. I responded with a hysterical jealousy and neediness that pushed him away in the following months.

By the beginning of sophomore year, we cut off most communication. It took many months to step out of the role of the unrequited lover. And I thought I had, until I saw Matt again the summer before junior year. We hadn’t spoken in several months but were both leaving to study abroad in the fall so we wanted to see each other.

I walked into his house intoxicated by the promise of the night. We went to eat at a dumpy Chinese joint, Matt’s selection, then back to his house. He was distracted by his iPhone, which buzzed every few minutes, and he grinned at each new received text. I wanted to know who was sending them. I had tucked my phone into my purse, which I purposefully left upstairs out of reach. We talked about school and our families, and then Matt asked me if I still had that boyfriend at school. I didn’t. I dated him to temper the sting of Matt’s absence, but only for a couple of months then we ended things amicably. He was the last person on my mind. But then I had to ask him the same, to put my obsessive conscience to rest. Was he dating anyone?

Throughout high school, Matt garnered the attention of the cutesy and eccentric theatre girls at our high school, and the girls who were still “growing into their faces,” as parents say. Then there was Maria, the self-described guidette, clinging to Matt’s side that day I met him in the school cafeteria. Even when Matt began to mature in high school (eventually my girl cousins admitted he was good looking), he still attracted the odd types. So when Matt told me he was “sort of seeing” our 27 year-old ex rowing coach, Jenn, I was disturbed; Jenn was seven years older than him, bubbly and free spirited, and training for a dangerous rowing excursion across the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 2012. She was quirky in an attractive way.

I covered my mouth in shock and disgust. My thoughts raced back to weekend regattas: Matt, an awkward 14 year-old kid and Jenn, already a college graduate from Michigan State University. At first I thought it was a cool coincidence that her family is from the same town I attend college; now I hated the thought of her living so close to me. I hated her cool job at Groupon, her super impressive upcoming rowing adventure, and her awesome social life. I followed her on Facebook, so I knew these things. I tried to look surprised in a “good for you, Matt” way. After all, we hadn’t communicated much in almost a year so my jealousy wasn’t justified. But still my mouth trembled. I thought maybe at the end of the night he would walk me to my car and kiss me goodnight, even though he gave me no reason to hope for it. I stayed to listen to him explain why he liked Jenn, why she and their relationship was “different.” My hands trembled before my legs joined and the tears came. In the middle of Matt’s next sentence, I stood up, walked up the stairs, and marched out the door. I didn’t close it behind me. I didn’t stop. I got into my car and drove away. Matt didn’t call after me, and I didn’t want him to. I wanted to drive alone far away from him.