Ask for Me Tomorrow

“Dear Gilly:

“You’re probably surprised to be hearing from me after all this time. I’d like to think you’re even a little bit pleased, too, but how could you be after the crazy way I ran out on you like that. Honestly I didn’t have much control over the situation. A man has to do the right thing under certain circumstances and I did it. You know Gilly I wanted to say goodbye in a civilized manner but I was just plain scared of you. I mean how you’d take it etc. And Tula kept saying hurry up, hurry up, as if the baby was going to be born any minute. (It wasn’t born for 6 months, I guess she was just anxious to get away from the immigration authorities and back to her own family.)

“Anyway here I am in this place that’s hard to describe. Do you remember that time we went to a football game at the college stadium with Dave Smedler and his wife (I forget which one). Suddenly somebody yelled Whales! and we all looked out over the ocean and there they were, 5 or 6 grey whales migrating through the channel just beyond the kelp beds. It was some sight, blowing and leaping in the air and submerging again. Well Gilly you’d never guess where they were headed. Here. Right here a few hundred yards from where I sit writing this letter. Bahía de Ballenas is on a lovely little bay (it means Bay of Whales) and the grey whales come down here from California to have their calves etc. I never knew this before I got here. In fact I never thought of whales as doing much along that line but naturally they do. They’re human just like us.

“The water in the bay is very blue, as blue as your eyes used to be, G. G. I guess they still are, why not? I keep thinking it’s such a long time since I’ve seen you but it really hasn’t been 3 years. It seems longer to me because this place is so foreign and the people live so different. I haven’t caught on to the lingo or the way they can ignore dirt and bugs and things. I often think of how you used to take 3 showers a day. You certainly were a clean person.”

“ ‘You certainly were a clean person,’ ” Gilly said. “I behold that funny, don’t you, Aragon?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a clean person with eyes as blue as the bay where a herd of whales go to copulate and calve. What a great compliment.”

“I’ve heard worse.”

She walked over to the barbecue pit and stood for a while staring down into it as if at the ashes of old forgotten fires. “I never took three showers a day. Where’d he dredge up that idea?” She turned back with a sudden explosive sound that seemed to come all the way from her bowels. “Ethel! By God, he got me mixed up with Ethel. How do you like that? He not only can’t remember which of Smedler’s wives went with us to the football stadium, he can’t even remember which of his own wives took three showers a day.”

“The letter’s been in your possession for five years. It’s a little late to fuss about it now.”

“She’s just the type to take three showers a day. And who’s fussing?”

“The evidence indicates you are.”