Remember Me?
Angela Ball
Word Count 605
In eighth grade one of the popular girls, for so they were designated, told me that Geoffrey Rosenberg had a crush on me. I was foolish enough to believe this, and began being friendly to Geoff in ways I thought were subtly encouraging. His family was wealthy, with a house on Eden Place, while I lived four miles out of town, on a hilly field turned subdivision, not a sidewalk in sight. Geoff’s parents carried the glamor of tragedy: his mother had an inked number on her forearm, a former identity. Even the way Geoff’s name was spelled was cool. One day a piece of paper circulated through homeroom. Finally, it reached me: “Dear Angela, Roses are red, violets are blue, there are some girls I don’t care for, and that includes you. Geoff.”
I was in ninth grade when Cornelia showed up at my school. She was from a German-American doctor’s big family and lived in Albany, a small town to the west. Her parents knew mine slightly—mine sold insurance to hers--so we were automatic friends. She was tall, like me (though not as freakishly so), with long, glossy hair. She was smart and played the cello. Exotic, she became popular almost immediately—that is, she walked confidently without a particular need for anyone. I was crazy about her. She tolerated me. Soon, a boy named Brooks was flirting with her, then became the kind of tangential boyfriend girls had in those days—him like a bee in flight, bumbling glancingly against her, then hovering above her, both hands low on her back, just below her hair, during a slow song at a dance.
One Saturday, Cornelia asked me to a movie: Herbie, the Love Bug, a Disney comedy in which the main character is a VW that runs afoul of ridiculous bad people. We were watching it at the Athena, the fancier of Athens’s two movie houses, that glared at each other across Court Street. We sat next to an aisle toward the back. Not far into the movie, something touched my neck—a hand swiping my hair, a low voice saying something—crooning it—about “wouldn’t I like to,” something about “so soft, so lovely.” The voice was ghoulish, a parody of romance.
“Make him stop,” Cornelia stage-whispered, but I couldn’t move or speak. Exasperated, Cornelia rounded on the man. “Get away from her,” she hissed. And he ran up the aisle and disappeared through the black curtain. “Why didn’t you do anything?” she asked me, but I didn’t know.
When the film ended, I was more than ready to go home, but Cornelia wanted to stay and watch it again. It was torture to again follow Herbie the VW, along with his human, Dean Jones, through the many plot twists that led to triumph, but if it was the price of spending more time with Cornelia, I could do it. I worried about my mother wondering why I didn’t call to be picked up. As it turned out, my oldest sister was circling the block, looking for me. When I finally got into the car, she was livid: “What did you think you were doing?” I said I was sorry, and I was, but I had only done what I had to do. To say no to Cornelia was unthinkable.
A day or two later, my mother got a call. It was Cornelia’s mother: “Cornelia is not allowed to go to movies. Angela took her to see one and insisted she stay for the second showing. Your daughter is a bad influence; I don’t want Cornelia to spend time with her anymore.” The call was more bewildering than the apparition of the man. At some point, I realized that Cornelia had accomplished two things simultaneously: she had gotten to go to the movies, and she had gotten rid of me.
About a year after the movie fiasco, Cornelia went overseas to prep school in Germany, where she embarked on advanced study of the cello, an instrument that has always spoken to me of soulful refinement and profundity. When I looked her up on Facebook recently, there was a glamor shot and accounts of concert tours. A charmed life by the look of it, full of music and accolades. But I know that by this time, like everyone our age, she has been visited by pain, by death. Has her confidence survived? It seems so. I doubt I will ever know.
Angela’s poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Boulevard, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, The North American Review, The Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Grand Street, Field, Colorado Review, The New Republic, The Bennington Review, and elsewhere. Her sixth and most recent book of poetry is Talking Pillow (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Awards for her work include an Individual Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Sotheby’s International Poetry Prize, along with invitations to The Poetry International Festival and Chateau Lavigny Writers’ Retreat. She teaches in the Center for Writers, part of the School of Humanities at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where she lives with her dogs, Miss Bishop and Boy.