you don’t hate somebody as sweet as Ted. I didn’t even hate the girl. I was too numb to feel anything; I didn’t even cry. I just lay there listening to the rain and thinking, he was The One—we were right—we fitted—we were perfect. Now he is gone and he was The One, and he will never come again.
I was still lying there when Mother came in. She did not knock, she just opened the door and came in and stood by the bed looking down at me. Before she said it, I knew what she was going to say.
“There will be other boys,” she said. “You may not believe it now, but there will be.”
“Yes,” I replied. “I suppose so.” There was no use arguing about something like that. “Ted was The One,” I said. “There will be other boys, sure, but he was The One.”
Mother was silent a moment. Then she said, “Do you still have the locket?”
“The locket?” I was surprised at the question. “Yes, of course. It’s in my top drawer.”
Mother went over to the bureau and opened the drawer. She took out the locket and brought it over to the bed.
“Put it on,” she said.
“Now?” I was more surprised. “But, why? Why now?”
“Because,” Mother said quietly, “this is why I gave it to you.” She put the locket in my hands and sat down on the edge of the bed, watching me as I raised it and put the chain around my neck and fumbled the tiny clasp into place. “You see,” she said when I had finished, “that locket was given to me by The One on the evening of our engagement. We were very young, and he couldn’t afford a ring yet. The locket had been in his family for a very long time.”
“Oh.” I reached up and touched the locket, feeling a new reverence for it. I thought of Daddy drawing it from his pocket, nervous, excited, watching Mother’s face as he did so, hoping desperately that she would like it. Mother and Daddy—young and newly in love, two people I had never known and would never know.
“He was everything,” Mother continued, “that I ever wanted in a husband. He was good and strong and honest, he was tender, he was fun to be with, and he loved me with all his heart. He was without doubt written for me in the stars.” She paused and then said, “He was killed in a train wreck three weeks later.”
“He what!” I regarded her with bewilderment. “But you said—I thought—” I realized suddenly what she was telling me. “You mean it wasn’t Daddy? You loved somebody before Daddy, somebody you thought was The One, and then—”
“I didn’t just think it,” Mother interrupted. “If I had married him I’m sure I would have been a happy woman and loved him all my life. As it worked out, three years later I married your father, and I have been a happy woman and loved him all my life. What I am trying to tell you, honey”—she leaned forward, searching for just the right words—“There is no One. There are men and there are women. There are many fine men who can give you love and happiness. Ted was probably one of those, but Ted came into your life too soon.”
“But,” I protested weakly, “that’s so cold-blooded, so sort of—of—” I felt as though I were losing the prince on the snow-white horse, the dream that was bright with the wonder of childhood.
“I’m saying,” Mother said gently, “that there are many men worthy of loving. And the one of those who comes along at the right time—he is the One who is written for you in the stars.”
She went out then and closed the door and left me alone, listening to the rain and fingering the locket. I stared at the door that Mother had just closed behind her.
And then I began thinking of the other door, the one she had just opened.
(written at the age of 20)
I was married two days after my nineteenth birthday, at the end of my freshman year of college. During that year I had fallen in love with a senior, who now was graduating and joining the Air Force. I was frightened that being apart might mean the end of our relationship, so when he proposed, I said yes.
It was an unwise marriage and lasted only nine years.
I wrote this story one year after our wedding, at a time when I still was telling myself I was happy.
When writing it, I drew upon fragments of past experiences: my gentle romance with a sweet, shy boy in high school; a story my mother had told me about her first fiancé who was killed in a train wreck; an experience one of my friends had had when she and her high school boyfriend attended different colleges.
That was all this story was supposed to be.
When I read it now, however, I find something in it that I do not think I meant to put there. Was it possible that already I was starting to question, without allowing myself to realize it, the rightness of that step I had taken so hastily? If I had waited until I was wiser, more experienced, more mature, might I have chosen differently?
Was this handsome young man, with whom I was starting to discover I had little in common, truly The One who was written for me in the stars?
The curtains were crisp and ruffled at the windows. Outside it was still not quite dark, still just on the edge of twilight when fireflies were beginning to twinkle in the hedge by the walk.
Inside, the kitchen was warm and bright, and the biscuits were baked a little too long, and the woman was smiling across the table while the little boy was feeding a chicken wing to the cat.
Bill looked at them and thought, Well, I’m here.
He thought it in an odd, detached way, as though he were not really there at all.
Last night on the train he had buried his face in the hard Pullman pillow and thought, Just seventeen more hours! Just seventeen more hours and I’ll be home! He had seen himself crossing the yard, opening the front door, going into the hall; he had smelled the cedar wood chest and heard the tick of the hall clock. Then he had gone through the living room into the kitchen, and they had all been there—the woman and the little boy and a serious man with graying hair—and they had hugged each other and laughed and eaten supper together in the kitchen with the twilight outside.
Last night he had been terribly excited.
Now he was here, and he was not excited at all.
“What’s the matter, dear?” asked his mother anxiously. “Are the biscuits too brown for you?”
“No,” Bill said quickly. “Of course not. They’re just the way I like them.”
“You’re not eating very much, dear.”
“Yes, I am,” Bill said. “You just haven’t been noticing.”
He helped himself to another biscuit and buttered it industriously.
“Do they feed you biscuits in the army, Billy?” the little boy asked with interest.
“Sure,
