Part 14: The Anchor

My never-ending series of disasters has now landed on Elysha, too

I find Elysha on the couch. Jack, one of our cats, is on her lap. She’s speaking on the phone. I start to gesture for her to end the conversation, but she does so before I can finish.

“I’ll talk to you later, Mom,” she says. “Bye.”

I look at the clock. I have about half an hour to explain everything that has happened before heading back to the school for the performance.

I also have something important for her to do while I’m gone.

“So what did Paul want?” she asks. She’s smiling. Lighthearted. She’s thinking about making dinner and probably correcting papers.

I know that my next words are going to crack that smile in two.

I’m keenly aware that she’s living in the before times, when our colleagues were kind-hearted and trustworthy, and when no one was trying to destroy the career that we fought so hard to attain.

She still thinks everyone who works in our school likes us and respects us. She doesn’t yet know that a teacher or teachers, waiting in the copy room beside us, sitting beside us in the lunchroom, and walking the playground together at recess are plotting to destroy our reputations and careers.

I’m about to end the before times for her forever, and I know it. I hate it.

I also feel like I’ve become an anchor to her, dragging her down to depths she’s never seen before.

Elyhsa’s family moved to West Hartford when she was ten years old. She’s working in a school district with teachers who were once her teachers.

In the 23 years she has lived in this town, she has become famous for knowing everyone. Being loved by everyone. Unable to walk down the street without bumping into at least three people who know and adore her.

We are perpetually late to everything because she can’t go anywhere without suddenly engaging in conversation with friends, acquaintances, and even strangers whom she sees in public.

She has parents, Barbara and Gerry, who love her. A sister whom she speaks to every day. So many loving, caring friends.

Yes, she’s terrible with money.
She has the worst sense of direction of anyone I’ve met.
He’s not exactly a neat and organized person.

But that’s it.

Those are her flaws. Small and insignificant. Also, I’ve taken over the handling of the finances, so that problem has been rectified. She now has an excellent credit score, and all bills are paid on time.

When I met Elysha, she was happy.

Then I arrived on the scene, or more correctly, she did. I thought she was beautiful and brilliant when I first laid eyes on her, walking into a faculty five years ago. She was engaged at the time — just months from becoming a married woman — and my short-term marriage was ending, so she was absolutely, positively unattainable in my eyes:

Young, smart, funny, brilliant, kind, and unattainable.

Our first conversation — while hiking around a lake at a YMCA camp with students — was about her upcoming wedding. I was giving her advice to make her wedding day perfect based on my experience as a wedding DJ.

Lucky for me, she called off that wedding just three months before tying the knot — not for me but because the match just wasn’t right.

My divorce went through around the same time, and so, over the next year, we slowly became friends and grew closer.

We also dated other people at the time.

I dated, among others, our school psychologist.

Elysha entered a longer-term relationship that eventually fizzled.

Then something began to shift between us, or really, in her. I sensed it, but didn’t believe it. Friendship, I thought, was becoming something more, but it was Elysha Green.

Unattainable.

I had hoped that what I was feeling was right, but I couldn’t quite believe it.

We were eating dinner with friends and colleagues in a bar called Coach’s one night in early March 2003 when I was the victim of a pickpocket. On the way to the restroom, a man bumped into me, and when I left, I discovered that my wallet was gone.

I felt so stupid, but Elysha assured me that it happened to lots of people and offered to take me wallet shopping the next day.

I was almost grateful to the thief. Time alone with Elysha Green was the best time in the world for me.

This shopping excursion led to dinner and more time together.

Someone once asked Elysha, in my presence, when she started falling in love with me, and she said four of the saddest words I’ve ever heard:

“In a Chili’s restaurant.”

Just where you want your future wife to swoon over you for the first time.

We were eating dinner at that Chili’s restaurant before a school talent show, where one of my students, battling cancer, was to pour a vat of cold oatmeal over my head in a comedy skit.

Elysha didn’t want to miss it.

Expounding on her answer about when she started falling for me, “While eating dinner in Chili’s that night, I discovered that if you ask Matt a question, he tells a story, and he says things that most won’t say. I knew that if I married him, my life would forever be interesting, and he would forever entertain me.”

I was hoping for a reference to my commanding physique, but I don’t think that has ever been my finest quality, at least in her eyes.

On March 30, 2003, Elysha and I went to dinner with friends after work. We left for the restaurant from school, so Elysha left her car at the school and drove over the restaurant with me. When we returned to the parking lot later that night, Elysha didn’t exit the car immediately. Instead, she sat in the passenger seat, for a moment, and then said five of the best words I’ve ever heard:

“You know I like you.”

I didn’t know what to say, mostly because I’m an idiot, but also because I wasn’t quite sure if she had made a clean break from her current boyfriend. I knew the official break was coming, but I didn’t know if it had happened yet, so, trying to do the right thing and find the right words, I uttered the two dumbest words I’ve ever spoken:

“I’m flattered.”

I couldn’t believe it.

What I should have said, and what I was thinking, was this:

“No, I didn’t know you liked me. Or at least I wasn’t sure. I hoped that someday, when I had become twice or three times the man I am today, you might consider liking me. But liking me now? No. Not possible. Also, hooray!”

Instead:

“I’m flattered.”

Elysha paused, presumably waiting for me to say something not so stupid. When I failed to do so, she said, “Okay. Good night,” and exited the car.

Then she drove away.

It wasn’t until I was pulling into the parking lot of my apartment complex a few minutes later, thrilled beyond belief that Elysha Green liked me, when it hit me like a bolt of lightning:

“I’m flattered? You said, ‘I’m flattered?’ Oh my God! What the hell were you thinking?”

I panicked. The woman whom I was already desperately in love with had been brave enough to make the first move, and my response hadn’t been “I like you, too!” or “Let’s get married!” or “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

It was, “I’m flattered.”

I immediately called Elysha. No answer, of course. This was before text messaging, and at the time, Elysha didn’t always, or ever, check her voicemails.

Nothing in that regard has really changed in 22 years.

Still, I decided to leave one. Pacing by the dumpsters in the parking lot, I left a long, pleading message urging her to forget my momentary failure of brain cells and call me back immediately.

She never did.

The next morning, I arrived at school to find a note on my desk from Elysha, asking me to forget what she had said the night before and assuring me that we could still be friends. She apologized for making things awkward.

I snatched the paper off my desk and marched — no, ran— up to her classroom. I found her sitting behind her desk, preparing for the day.

I held the paper aloft, shook it, and said something to the effect of:

“No. This cannot be. I was stupid last night. I like you, too. I really, really like you. Please forget last night. Let’s like each other and move this thing forward, And for once in your life, could you please check your voicemail?”

Then I crumpled her note into a ball and tossed it into the trash can.

I wish I hadn’t. I would love to still own that letter today.

One day later, on April 1, 2003, in the early morning hours, I crossed paths with my principal in the auditorium.

I said, “Oh, I wanted you to know I’m dating Elysha Green now. I just thought you should know.”

“Ha, ha,” he said.

“What?

“It’s April first. April Fools’ Day. Nice try.”

“No,” I said as he walked away from me. “I’m serious!”

“Right,” he said. “Like Elysha Green would ever, in a million years, date Matthew Dicks.”

It took him a week to believe us. It took others about that long, too.

Elysha Green could date a whole lot of people. Why Matthew Dicks?

Either way, the rest is history. Less than three months later, Elysha and I were living together, and I had taken over the finances.

By the end of that year, I would propose to her at the top of the steps in Grand Central Station while two dozen friends and family, hidden in the holiday crowd, watched.

My principal included.

Two years later, he would officiate at our wedding.

But I can’t help but think he might’ve been right in that auditorium four years ago. Maybe all of those doubters and disbelievers were correct.

I feel like an anchor now, dragging Elysha down. She’s hitched her wagon to a guy who seems to court ongoing, relentless disaster:

Raised in a broken home. Abandoned by his father. Dead mother. Died twice myself and had my life restored by paramedics and CPR. Pulled out of my childhood home by firefighters. Arrested, jailed, and tried for a crime he didn’t commit. Homelessness. The victim of a horrific, violent crime. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

A guy who couldn’t make it to college until he was 23. I was the only student in the history of Saint Joseph’s University to be rejected for student teaching by an assigned cooperating teacher. I’ve been hit by a car while walking three times in my life. I’ve taken more than a dozen trips to the hospital by ambulance.

Now this.

It feels like it’s always something. I spend my life waiting for the next show to drop.

I can’t help but think that had Elysha found someone with a more typcial, stable, and expected life, none of this would’ve happened.

I wouldn’t be about to turn her life upside down.

“Honey?” Elysha repeats. “What did Paul say?” She’s still petting Jack. Smiling. Living in the before times for a few more blessed moments.

I sit down and explain as best as I can. As I speak, I watch the past slip away from her. Her smile fades, and worry fills her face. She’s been thrust into these new, uncertain, awful times.

She sits up. Stops petting the cat. Her smile slides right off her face. In the span of just a few minutes, she finds herself occupying this new and terrible world alongside me.

“Can I see it?” she asks, pointing to the envelope in my hand.

“Yes,” I say, “but I need you to do something for me.”

“Okay.”

I tell her that I need to go back to school for the Macbeth performance, but while I’m gone, she needs to cut and paste every entry from my blog into a Word document. “I need those posts,” I tell her. “I told Paul that I would delete the blog after the show tonight, but I can’t lose the content. We’re going to need it. We’re going to need the context of those excerpts will stand on their own. We’ll lose the comments and all the data about who was reading and such, but at least I’ll have the words I wrote.”

Elysha nods. She understands. She’s surprisingly calm. More calm than me, I think. I wonder if the gravity of the situation has hit her.

“Okay, I’ll do that first.”

She hugs me and tells me it will be okay. I think she really believes it, too, but she hasn’t looked at the packet yet. She doesn’t know how wrong she is. I won’t be okay. She might not be okay, either. We might both be doomed, but she won’t know that until she starts reading.

Part of me is happy I won’t be here to see it happen.

I kiss her before I leave. I want to tell her that I’m sorry, but until she reads, she won’t understand why I’m apologizing. As I head out the door, she’s already cutting and pasting.

It’s almost 1,000 entries. Even with a dozen or so on a page, it’s going to take a while.