Another Kind of Nostalgia

29 haake Katharine Haake Another Kind of Nostalgia 1 : Theo and Frank Theo's husband, Frank, was a drop-in center counselor; Theo was a drop-in center bride. Now at the height of post-pseudo-radical, Liberal affectation, Frank wants to dispel all notion that their coupling was unethical. "I loved her," he tells his brother, Billy. "I still do." Billy says nothing. In retrospect, Theo's not so certain she wasn't a tiny bit taken advantage of, but Theo's had more than a decade to obscure the way she felt when they first married. Nor do I hold that against her— inclined as I am to believe that having made it to the eighties, we're all a little anxious, never mind our protestations, to forget how we were in the sixties. Take Theo, for example, who at sixteen ran away from a small town in Nebraska, sold flowers back and forth across the country, strung herself out on drugs, marched against the war and came to love both sexes before finally ending up three years later in another small town, this one in northern California, at a funky half-way house where one of the counselors had the bluest eyes and a particular way with his guitar which, taken together at once, lured Theo off the streets and into his bed in a single night. That's for northern California, which not many people know — up there where you have your red hills, you have your dams and artificial lakes. You also have your farming, your ranching, your lumber industry. I like the valley towns myself. They have a certain, almost musty, antiquated quality, a feel over things as if out of the past. More recently, there's been an exodus of urban people from the south, tired of the way they've been living. The story's an old one which never gets learned: they bring their own kind, and nothing is the same. I'm not being bitter. I'm just trying to explain why when Theo's last ride dropped her off on Interstate 5, there was someplace she could go to crash; and why when six years later Frank left social service to invest in coffee beans, his business success was guaranteed. Some time between the one event and the other, Theo and Frank were married. The wedding took place in the same room where they'd met. 30 the minnesota review Theo wore ribbons in her hair to match the rainbows on the walls, and she went barefoot, though it was February. Frank played his guitar. Theo danced. Frank said some poems. When it was over, Theo was tired, but she made love with her new husband anyway, as she did in those days every night, both pre-and post maritally, not to mention mornings, afternoons , before meals and in the middle of long talks— all the time. This physical extravagance continued, altogether, for about three years — right up to the time Theo's first pregnancy ended in abortion and abruptly, unexpectedly, their intimacies ceased. "That was not a good time for either of us," Frank tells Billy "I was level-headed and logical; Theo had nightmares." Billy, who knows all about nightmares, nods in that bobbing manner of his, face slightly turned away because of the scars. "Screw your clients if you're horny," Theo had told Frank when their troubles started. "I can't bear it." And though Frank had been discreet, Frank had done what she said. In this way, their marriage, never easy, survived to a second period of ripeness at the end of its fourth year. Frank, who delights even now in the memory, refers to this time as their "sexual renaissance." "She was different," he tells Billy. "What you might call randy —always ready, always hot." Billy, for reasons unrelated to his brother, feels himself getting hard. Frank's right about Theo: she was different then. For her, though no cause was apparent, it was as if all the grief that lay between the present and Nebraska— for now she'd come to think of so much of what had happened as fraught with...