From: al677@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jerry Cosyn)
Newsgroups: alt.prose
Subject: re: Sandy
Date: 3 Sep 1992 13:36:51 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (USA)
NNTP-Posting-Host: slc10.ins.cwru.edu


There is, on my home system at least, a range of missing posts,
including one I posted yesterday.  If it shows up twice on your
system: sorry about that.  Anyway, here's a repost:


                                 SANDY
 
 
     I got a call from an old college friend the other day.  We're not
real close anymore, but we keep in touch once or twice a year and
remember the good times and catch up on who's been doing what.
Sometimes he'll pass through this part of the state and drop in for an
evening, and we'll hit the bar or the pool hall to shoot straight pool
for hours while we drink cheap scotch and test each other's memories
of the old days and laugh about what big plans we had and how much we
thought we knew.  So I wasn't too surprised when I answered the phone
and heard a mean voice say, "Don't you ever order a pizza from here
again," in reference to the time I got into a fight with the pizza
delivery guy from the Bear Trap our sophomore year, and I told him I'd
order a damn pizza from any damn place I liked and we started in on
our annual catching up.
 
     There was nothing much new going on in his life, or in mine, and
I knew he really wasn't all that interested in hearing about my kids'
report cards and illnesses, or how my job was going, so it wasn't a
long conversation.  Then about the time it was winding down he said
"Hey, you remember Sandy Coleman?"  Yeah, I remembered Sandy.
 
     It's been what, about sixteen years now since I first saw her,
walking into Introduction to Logic our first day as freshman (before I
knew she was fifty-percent of the female population of our electrical
engineering class) but I remember her clearly.  Long blonde hair and a
fairly ordinary face, nose just a bit too large and hawkish to let her
ever really be considered pretty, tight jeans and a black Aerosmith T-
shirt.  But her eyes got my attention: strong and solemn and piercing,
somehow hiding secrets and knowledge and pain and wisdom that an
eighteen-year-old smart-ass right out of high-school wasn't supposed
to know about yet.
 
     She was quiet and solitary and I don't think many people got to
know her very well.  She didn't seem to date much, and showed up at
the Bear Trap or the student lounge only occasionally, usually sitting
huddled in a corner of a booth, alone with a pile of books.  I read
quite a lot myself, and was always interested in what other people
were reading, but she didn't seem to have any particular specific
taste: Kerouac and Wolfe, Dickens and Poe, Sartre and Hesse and Shaw
and Shakespeare, Michener and Uris and Phillip Roth.  She seemed
rather embarrassed the time I tugged a book from her hands and saw
that it was some dime-store romance with lurid cover art showing a
pantingly desperate woman, nostrils flaring, breasts half exposed in a
racy negligee, and a brawny comic-book hero of a man with his shirt
torn open, pushing his square-jawed face against her alabaster neck.
I think Sandy read anything that crossed her path.
 
     The only real conversation I ever had with Sandy was about books.
I snuck up behind her in the cafeteria line while her hands were full
carrying her tray and her books were clamped to her side by one elbow,
and I slid the stack out to see the title of the paperback that was
carefully sandwiched between two textbooks.  Nobody ever stacks books
with a smaller one between two larger ones, so it was a dead giveaway
that she was hiding something awful, and while she stood there being
indignant with her hands full, I looked down to see the exact same
edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "The Beasts of Tarzan" that had
graced my own collection since I was eleven, with Tarzan astride a
sixteen foot crocodile, killing it with a knife.
 
     We spent the next three hours drinking coffee and eating bagels
(hers with cream cheese, mine with butter and raspberry jam) and
confessing to each other all the literary transgressions we had each
committed over the years.  She was the only girl I ever knew who read
Hardy Boys books (she had more of them than I did) and I admitted to
her that I'd read the entire Little House On The Prairie series.  We
laughed a lot during those three hours, and afterward hovered for
maybe two weeks in that odd gray area that feels as if it might
blossom into friendship but never quite makes it, and then we were
once again at the "greeting acquaintances" level, having lacked
whatever energy or inertia it would have taken to maintain contact.
 
    As the classes plodded on it became apparent that Sandy was one of
the brightest out of the thirty or so of us double-E's.  She handled
the standard physics and chemistry and math courses without even
blinking, and when we started getting into the real engineering
courses, she zipped through vector calculus and information
transmission theory and partial differential equations like they were
ho-hum, while most of us sweated and struggled and pleaded with the
instructors to go over it just one more time, please, in English.  I
suppose she was even a little intimidating to us, which may be why I
don't remember her ever being a part of the various roving groups of
us who would catch a ride to Bowling Green for the weekend, trading
the tiny college town of Ada, Ohio for a slightly larger college town
that had more bars and more people.
 
     Though it was a small campus there were a lot of people you just
never got around to knowing very well, and Sandy was certainly nobody
I was close to, but for three years we shared the kind of eye contact
that people share who know each other a little bit, and like what
they've seen.
 
     I never saw her after graduation, and never heard anything more
about her until the other day, twelve years later, but I remember her,
and I've thought about her from time to time.  And when I heard that
Sandy had spent the past twelve years in Cincinnati, single, working a
variety of jobs that had little or nothing to do with engineering, and
died six months ago when her car hit an abutment on I-75, I spent the
rest of the afternoon reading Tarzan and the Hardy Boys and eating
bagels.  With cream cheese.