Yellow Mama E zine

IF YOU LIVE LONG ENOUGH

 

By Elizabeth Zelvin

 

      Flying from California back to my husband in New York, I wrote a song about our time in Yosemite: the only pain was parting/ nothing else went wrong.  He'd crossed the country from Tennessee in a bright red Jeep with his friends. I'd hitchhiked from Berkeley with mine. We were stoned and giggling when the park ranger told us to stay on the trail, hang our food high in trees, and look out for bears. We didn't need instruction to get naked and fall a little bit in love. He had a girlfriend back home, but he said it wasn't a problem. I was on a marital sabbatical with my husband's blessing. I'd been depressed. After three idyllic days, we said goodbye with tears and kisses.

       "We'll write," he said.

       "What if you don't?" I'd been kicked in the gut by a man's silence before.

       "Then we'll meet in Yosemite when we're eighty," he said.

        "When I'm eighty. You'll be only seventy-one," I reminded him. "I'll put an ad in the Village Voice."  

        The anonymous letter came as a shock. It was worse than the familiar agony of waiting and hearing nothing.

        "I never gave him your letters. It would hurt too many people if he knew you cared."

        I cried and cried. Wrote a song about it. Told my husband, who was kind. We divorced when I realized he was only kind when I hurt.

        I looked for him when I turned eighty. I found the guy who must be him on Facebook. He still looked good. But Tennessee's a red state. The Stars and Stripes and rifle in his profile pic said we wouldn't fall in love in Yosemite all over again. If you live long enough, reality sets in.

 

 

Elizabeth Zelvin writes the Bruce Kohler Mysteries and the Mendoza Family Saga. Her stories appear in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and Black Cat Mystery Magazine, as well as Yellow Mama.

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Bernice Holtzman’s paintings and collages have appeared in shows at various venues in Manhattan, including the Back Fence in Greenwich Village, the Producer’s Club, the Black Door Gallery on W. 26th St., and one other place she can’t remember, but it was in a basement, and she was well received. She is the Assistant Art Director for Yellow Mama.