3.39 “Oh Yeah?”

Cathy and Bob 1966

San Francisco ~ In May, towards the end of my first year of college, Bob proposed to me. I hadn’t had a boyfriend whom I loved. Yes, in my junior year I had a crush on Forrest and in my senior year Dave had a crush on me, but with Bob, it was different. He courted me and made me special. He visited me in La Habra. When I spent my summers in San Francisco, he took me to dinner every Friday and the movies every Saturday. And on Sundays, rather than going to Mass, we snuck out to Playland to ride the bumper cars, play Skee-Ball, and share some fish & chips and an It’s-It. He wrote me cards. He bought me a ring, a white pearl ensconced in the middle of four gold leaves. He kissed me and held me close. He whispered he loved me.

Bob, 1964 Riordon High

We met the summer of 1964 just before I turned 16; he’d graduated from high school and I was going into my junior year. My step-sister Irene married his older brother Steve, and Bob and I were both in the wedding party. Irene still worked at the Hibernia Bank on 19th and Steve worked in management for the post office. He was handsome, charming, and over-educated. He spent his formative and high school years in the seminary, preparing for the priesthood. He must have never forgiven his parents for sending him there as he came out cynical and condescending. Or maybe he was like that early on, unforgiving that he wasn’t an only child. He was mean to his brothers; the three of them were each seven years apart, Bob in the middle, Mike the youngest, and he relentlessly belittled them both. Empathy was not in Steve’s make-up. My most vivid memory of him was at the house on 45th Avenue. He and Irene had recently become engaged and he’d tossed onto my step-sister’s lap what she thought was a big bouquet of flowers bundled in newspaper. Unwrapping them, she let out a terrified scream and one movement levitated and flung it away from her onto the floor. It was a giant dead fish, and she still married the guy anyway.

Dad, Marie, Irene, Steve, Velma and Lou, Aug 8, 1964, San Francisco

May 1967 • San Francisco ~ We were all at the Sevenau house on 33^rdAvenue for Bob’s twenty-first birthday party. Seated next to each other, our index fingers hooked together under the mahogany dining room table, his left foot atop my right. I said no over the JELL-O salad. I said no over the canned ham (his mother always served canned ham), and I said no again over the mashed potatoes. Then somewhere between the mashed potatoes and the carrot cake emblazoned with “Happy Birthday Bobby” (his mother always called him Bobby; actually, she called him my little Bobby), I changed my mind. I don’t want to go back to college and live in the dorm. I don’t want to live with Dad and Marie. I don’t want to move back with Chuck and Carleen. I can’t afford to live by myself, and I don’t know any friends I can live with. At that moment, marrying Bob seemed like a reasonable solution. Besides, I wanted to sleep with him and couldn’t do that as long as we weren’t married because I knew my father would know and he’d cut me out of his life and never talk to me again and I wasn’t about to risk that. Necking in the back seat of Bob’s shiny 1952 midnight blue Plymouth, a high school graduation gift from his parents, Bob said to me one night, “Look, I’m not going to tell him and you’re not going to tell him, so how would he know?”

“Trust me,” I said, “I don’t know how, but he’ll know.”

So Bob was thrilled that I finally said “yes.” He didn’t want to live at home any more either. He was also dying to get into my pants and knew that marrying me was the only way in. He stood up and chirped to the whole room, “Cathy and I are engaged!”

At those five words, my dad shot out of his chair like a newly freed upholstery spring and blurted, “OH NO!”

Cathy, June 1966

I cocked my eighteen-year-old former Summer Blonde now-dyed-brown head at him, leaned back in my chair, raised one eyebrow, and silently retorted, “oh yeah?”

It wasn’t so much that I wanted to get married. Part of what I wanted was the college ring ceremony with candles, poems, chocolate kisses, and all the girls sitting cross-legged in a circle on the second floor rec-room of Royce Hall. I’d sat through a half-dozen of those ceremonies, the lights off, the ring passing from girl to girl until it stops with the lucky one who blows out the candle and the lights come on and all the girls scream and shower her with glitter, chocolate kisses, and hugs. I wanted to see the look on Sallie’s face and have her happy for me. I wanted to feel like I fit in with the girls, like wanting so badly to be a Brownie again. 

I also wanted to feel like someone loved me.

to be continued…

© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
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