Patricia

Patricia

By: Richard Zielinski

I think we all yearn for that age of innocence, before sex, before marriage, and certainly before divorce. To be on the glider with your girlfriend in the dark of the porch holding hands and gazing at a thousand stars without a care in the world. You walk home after Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, arm-in-arm with the snow crunching beneath your feet while snowflakes tickle your tongues. The high school dances when you wrap your arms around her as she nuzzles her head in your chest and your heart is palpitating away to the beat of the bass guitar. Going to a drive-in and not even watching the movie. Touching her softness and kissing her long lovely neck. The way she looks at you and sees only you. The secrets you share with trust and tenderness. The trips to Kennywood and the dark romantic ride through the Tunnel of Love; she screams frantically in your ear on the Jack Rabbit and you give her a tight squeeze around the corner just before the drop when you both scream with wide- opened mouths. The times at North Park when the police knock on your fogged up window only to discover you both still have your clothes on.

Do you miss the long kisses when you’re smashed together and your tongues search for each other and intertwine? Do you miss holding hands as you walk down the neighborhood street? Do you miss the smell of her before she discovered perfume? Is there a tall oak tree somewhere with your initials and hers carved inside a heart that you cut into the bark with a small pen knife? Does she still have your high school ring snuggled away in some private hideaway in a chest of drawers?



When I was sixteen and living in Pittsburgh, my best friend Norman asked me if I wanted to go to his uncle’s house in Lawrenceville to drop off some tools that his father had borrowed. He didn’t tell me he had a thirteen-year old female cousin. The sun beat down and the wind barely whispered. Patricia was sitting on the concrete porch steps with her girlfriend. She was shaded by a green and white awning and surrounded by a white metal railing with poles that looked like twisted licorice sticks. She frowned, but I didn’t know if it was for me or Norm. She had a cute mouth with lips as thin and pink as rose petals. She was a doll. Our eyes met with instant attraction. I had to impress her, so I took out a rubber ball and played a game of three flies with Norm. I jumped, stretched and wiggled. The sun scorched the asphalt street. My tennis shoes squeaked with every move. The frown turned into a smirk. She laughed when I banged into the parked cars or had to run frantically down the street to grab the ball before it disappeared down the sewer hole.

Then, I tried the suave approach.

“Hi,” I said.

Norm knew I was obsessed with Linda and I guess he was trying to break the spell she had put on me. When I left the seminary after two years of high school, I became mesmerized by the other sex. I fell in love with all of them, but I also struck out with all of them. We used to gather on the steps of a corner grocery store at the bottom of Taylor Street. We were Bill’s best customers, so he never bothered us or chased us away. Linda lived a few houses up the street and I would see her sitting on her front steps wearing short shorts. We both lived on the same street, so we knew each other; but we never really talked to each other. I hadn’t seen her in two years, but man, she developed into a teenage tigress. She had short black hair, an aquiline nose, luscious lips, and lovely legs. It was lust at first sight. She called me Richie. It sounded so personal because no one but my mother had ever called me that. I walked up and stood next to her. I kept licking my lips. I wanted to kiss her. We talked, but it was just gibberish. Her brown eyes devoured me and she ran her hand up my arm. We both suddenly surrendered to a sweet succulent kiss that seemed to last a lifetime. I was completely gone. From that moment on, she owned me.

Before I met Patricia, Linda had had me on her leash the last two years. But she kept my panting under control by sharing herself with other guys. She let my hands wander anywhere they wanted to, but then the next day she would be strolling down Taylor Street, holding hands with some wavy, black-haired Italian as I sat fuming on the glider behind the wooden railing of my porch.

When I saw Patricia’s young vibrant innocence that day, I experienced a pleasant reprieve from the hot steamy affair with Linda. I began to realize that sweetness and romance was once again possible. Norm was ready to leave.

“Will I see you again?” she asked.

Her eyes sparkled and a smile softened her face. My heart stuttered more than my mouth when I said, “Tomorrow?”

She shook her bouncy blond hair up and down and I waved goodbye as Norm dragged me by the shirt tail up Fisk Street and back to earth.

The next evening I walked up Taylor Street and down Idaline Way. I made a right, past the Bloomfield Pool and the parked cars and the occasional chairs silently proclaiming “this is my spot.” Linda was sitting on a high porch with her girlfriend, taunting me.

“Going to see your girlfriend, Richie?”

I just shook my head and gave her a nonchalant wave. I walked faster trying to break the puppet strings still attaching me to Linda, but they just stretched like over-tuned guitar strings. I crossed a busy intersection. Horns blared and angry words burst from open driver-side windows. As I hurried down Fisk Street, I could see Patricia on the steps. She didn’t wave. She smiled and her blue eyes sparkled. I reached out my hand and she took it and we held each other. There were no words, but I could feel her warm breath on my neck. I will never forget how close to heaven I felt in that moment. I could hear some of those puppet strings go ping and I knew that someday I would say, “Who’s Linda?”

In the evenings we would sit side-by-side in the small dark vestibule inside her storm door: our little corner of the world. We’d whisper enticing endearments and explore each other’s lips. We’d run our hands all over each other discovering the muscles and the softness, the fragrance and smells of each other. Her long legs lay in my lap while my hand caressed her face. I kissed her languorous eyes and my hand slipped past the nipples of her tiny breasts. I felt her slim thighs and moved up to a warm moist mound of silken fur.

“Do you like that?” she asked.

I smiled and kissed her deeply.

The next two years brought us closer. We went to movies, sipped sodas on drug store swivel stools. We swiveled and looked at each other with puckered mouths with each sip. We splashed and dunked each other in the pool. I took her to high school dances where we gazed into each other’s eyes to the soothing sound of Scott English singing, “High on a Hill.”

How could it not last?

For Christmas, I gave her a silver bracelet with my name engraved on it, but she wanted something more permanent. She pulled out a silver coated comb and her face grew somber and her eyes penetrated mine.

“Cut me.”

I heard what she said but I couldn’t react. She placed the comb teeth down on her arm, put my hand over it and pushed down. Then she ran the comb sharply across her arm. Blood started oozing from the wound it left. I reached for my handkerchief to stop the bleeding and suddenly I felt the comb slicing against my arm with the same result. I still carry the scar. It’s just above my watch, and the scene plays over and over in my mind, even now.

Patricia was aware of Linda. She knew Linda was older and had a more physical hold on me than she did. She thought the only way to keep me was to give me sex. One day when Patricia’s parents weren’t home, she led me upstairs to her bedroom. She sat on the bed and started taking her clothes off. I couldn’t do it. This wasn’t what I wanted from her.

“Don’t you want me?” she asked.

“Not like this,” I said. I meant it.

“But you’d do it to her, wouldn’t you?”

She flung herself off the bed. She ran down the steps as I followed helplessly and stood on the landing wondering where this was going.

She threw the door open and glared at me.

“Get out!”

“I want your love, Patricia. That means more than sex. Haven’t I proved that to you?”

She wouldn’t even look at me. So I left.

We used to talk for hours on the phone. Sometimes she would fall asleep and I would have to whisper loudly to tell her to hang up. After that moment, she would hang up without even talking to me. She said she didn’t want to see me again.

Did I send her flowers? Did I ask her to her junior prom? No. Linda begged me to take her to her senior prom and I couldn’t resist. She spent the night flirting with other guys, while I stood by not knowing what to do with my hands and feeling like a neglected poodle. She had a pink rose bouquet on her white-gloved arm and her prom dress reminded me of a lamp shade. My arms would have had to grow another foot before I could put them around her waist. We had our picture taken and she looked like an aristocrat posing with her latest wide-eyed champion stallion. We drove home with another couple and she wouldn’t let me touch her. There’s only so much a guy can take, even if he is obsessed with the girl. I decided that was it, and I felt a cool refreshing breeze go through my heart. I was free, free to be with Patricia.

The next day I called her but no one answered. I slammed the phone down and rushed out the door. I walked fast, I ran, then walked, then ran some more. I was sweating and out of breath when I knocked on her door.

She threw opened the door, livid as sunburn.

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

I just stood there like a mime who forgot his lines.

“We’re through. Do you hear me? Through!”

She slammed the door in my face.

For months I drifted along the neighborhood in a trance. I had lost both of my loves and I was lonely. I put all my energy into sports and joined a softball team that played under the Bloomfield Bridge on a field called Dean’s. Patricia found out where and when I was playing. I have never found out who her source was. I can only hope it wasn’t Linda. Patricia began to flaunt her new boyfriend as she waltzed past the fence of Dean’s Field while I was playing shortstop. Balls would hit me in the chest and bounce off my head every time she walked by.

Why didn’t she walk down another street? Was she trying to make me jealous? Was she trying to give me another chance to win her love? One day at the field, she called me over to the fence. I didn’t see her boyfriend.

She said, “Walt wants to fight you because of what you did to me.”

“What did I do to you?”

“He’ll tell you. He’ll be waiting inside the cemetery.”

It sounded like a set up, so I asked Norm to come with me. When we walked into the back entrance that Friday night, Walt had his own bodyguard who had to have been seven feet tall. I noticed Patricia and her girlfriend huddled together across the street. The cemetary was dark. Clouds drifted past the full moon causing the tombstones to light up like flash bulbs. I never saw Walt up close, so I was surprised when I recognized him as a friend from the seminary.

“Walt?"

"Is that you, Rich?"

“Why do you want to fight me?” I asked.

“She told me that you wanted to fight me.”

Then we both looked at her and knew that she just wanted us to fight over her.

I thought she began to cry, but they were tears of rage. This was supposed to be her retaliation on me for spurning her, and for me it was really over. I knew that I betrayed her, but she had lost her innocence to revenge, and once innocence is lost, it is gone forever. Walt and I shook hands, while Patricia and her girlfriend left without a backward glance.

For four years I had been tortured with my loving protective feelings for Patricia and my lust for Linda. It should have been an easy choice: someone who loved me or someone who flicked me away like cigarette ashes. I threw it all away. And I learned nothing, because innocence has no defense against the power of lust.

Four years later, I graduated from college and spent a semester student teaching in Tarentum. I turned on the news one summer night and I heard that the government had cancelled all occupational deferments. It was 1969, and President (Tricky Dickey) Nixon pulled my number out of a fish bowl. I traded my suit for Navy Whites. While overseas, I learned that Linda had married and Patricia was engaged to a guy named Harry. By then I couldn’t care less what Linda did, but on leave that Christmas, I walked down in dress blues to visit Patricia and her family to apologize to her and to wish her the best on her engagement. She took me outside and we talked about the pain we had caused each other and how we still had feelings for each other. She kissed me hard. The snow was coming down heavily, and she was trembling. She grabbed my arms and her eyes were pleading.

“Just say you don’t want me to marry Harry and I won’t.”

I bit my lips and ran my tongue over them. I was tempted. I couldn’t believe she still loved me, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t ruin her new life. I couldn’t give her what Harry could give her. I could only give her more pain and betrayal. I wasn’t human anymore. The War and the Navy had destroyed any teaching aspirations. They destroyed my hearing; and maybe even my soul. I was bitter and I stuffed my loneliness with one night stands that left me as empty as a dried up stream.

So I said, “I can’t.”

She pushed herself away from me and said, “Leave. Just go. Please.”

I never saw her again. And I miss her.

I think about Adam and Eve and wonder if innocence would have survived if Eve never had picked that apple. But she did, just as I did. The Patricia apple was hanging from the tree of innocence, and I picked it and took a bite. It began to turn brown and I tried to put it back on the tree, but it was too late. That was my original sin.













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