Today, on my way home from my booster shot on the other side of town, I drove by a sushi restaurant where I used to pick up food for a man I dated. I would get food for his family on my way over to his house. It was their favorite place, and the order was always the same: hibachi chicken or steak with lots of noodles. They used to like the “white sauce” on their marinated meats and noodles. They used it until everything was drowning in it.
The man was nice enough, but he had issues, like the kind where humor escaped him, but he tried out comedic material he had observed from television: comedy trope-type bits. It never went well. And all I felt was pain. Inside. Like, what am I doing? My therapist used to tell me in my midlife dating, I seemed to pick men I could feel superior to. What exactly was she saying? I think I knew, but I don’t really want to know: I was a bitch.
He was fairly successful as in having a job only someone with a master’s could have. So who was I? And he drove a big red Chrysler. And he supported and raised two daughters. And he took me to New York. Still, all those cups of white sauce. All those poor jokes. (Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week.)
It was the beginning of the end when he started snubbing me, failing to invite me to his office Christmas party. It was also the beginning of the end when I saw him observing his daughter once. I couldn’t quite make out the nature of the gaze. I had my limitations too. I found it unsettling, but I was also prone to an overactive imagination. So I have been told.
He took me with his daughters to help the oldest pick out a dress for her prom. She admitted to me in the dressing room that her father had never provided her with the means to buy a bra. At the department store, I had her father buy her one. And I had her father buy her a beautiful dress, maybe more “adult” than he had planned to, but it was totally appropriate given her age. The next day, I gave her a purse and dress sandals from my closet. For Christmas, I gave her younger sister a flattening iron, hair products, and lessons from my hairdresser. If this was going downhill, I was going all out.
A fatal blow came when he told me his daughter had pretended to be a “gangster” and had laid the Chrysler passenger seatback to almost fully reclined. Something odd. What female had been sitting/lying there? What had happened in the driveway in the car? The rushed, unsolicited explanation was suspect.
I don’t remember how it ended exactly. But I burned my bridge when it was over, making use of some of my suspicions and questions in a thinly disguised fiction which I posted on an obscure place online. Still, we were social media followers of each other and so he shot me an angry email. I replied that no one would know who I was talking about if anyone even read it in the first place. I had not used names. And none of my friends had even met him, not to mention family. But for sure I had been a bitch. I told him that for him, I would do something I never do for someone else: take down a story. I was still being a bitch. Apparently, it never ends.
It pained me to drive over to that end of town tonight, a place of such reminders. But I needed a booster shot to stay ahead of a mutating virus. So much of my licentious, post-divorce-angry-bad-decision-life lies to the north of me where white sauce is slathered on dishes for obese Americans.
For a while, I had thought I liked being with his family. With everyone I dated, I tried hard to figure out the picture with me in it. How would I feel? What role would I play? Would I be happy? In the long run, I could never form a picture. Maybe I was just play-acting. I was lost.
He probably knew I patronized him. He was smart enough to know that.
I hope those girls are ok.
Last night I had a dream of a man who caught me observing wedding preparations I wasn’t invited to. Somehow, the washing of long strands of hair to be woven into a horse’s mane was a ritual that was involved. If everyone in the preparation party participated, the mane would have been washed a thousand times, some sort of symbolic number. We were seated in a kind of a rotunda, a place of worship. The man was about to “turn me in” for being an interloper but said to me I seemed to be so curious, I might as well have been a part of the ritual. He invited me to go with him and his two boys to lunch. Although I was supposed to meet my sister, I said yes. I figured that somehow, it would all play out.
When I woke, I felt rested. But I don’t know what it is supposed to mean. I am still in a dark wood in the middle of my life.
Within A Forest Dark 
Oy, but that was a dream! And the reality sounds very intense, as well.
I was dating a guy very intensely, and I got the clearest sense it wouldn’t work out, because I could never imagine his family and mine sitting happily down together, over a meal. Like, they’d all be very polite & rip each other vfc to shreds once they parted.
So, trust that guy, for joy as well as tears.
We have to use that intuition, even if we don’t have all the info. It’s the only thing we have. And it sounds like you made the right call. Yes, joy and tears, it is all mixed in, isn’t it. I find sometimes my mind provides me with wonderful dreams, maybe when I need them most.