Among my girlfriends, Maddie was the one most like me. Not coincidentally, she holds the John endurance record at six years. They were six crucial years of my life, too: 21 through 26. In as a boy, out as a man. In an angry ass, out a marginally less angry ass. And no one had more of an influence on that non-transformation than Maddie.
She's a genius, and she delighted in the myriad ways she was smarter than me. My mispronunciations—most famously, "the plan went AW-ree" and "they showed a lovely career MAWN-tudge at the ceremony"—became recurring jokes that spanned decades, and believe me, I'm not the one telling 'em. To this day, my serial inability to spell a-m-o-n-g without a U delights her like flowers delight other women. She was cruel as a cat. "Come on," she'd implore. "Let's play Concentration." This is exactly analagous to my challenging my dog, Ed, to thumb-wrestling. "Or let's do the Reader's Digest vocabulary test. I'll even spot you ten questions." There are only 20.
She was easily the angriest of my girlfriends. To use my favorite illustration, I must digress about a different woman:
I was telling Katrina about a date the night before, a first date with a woman for whom I had high hopes. When I got to the part about going downtown during rush-hour, she became concerned. "Tell me you weren't driving.""Yes, I was."
"Oh sweet Christ. Did you honk your horn and curse out the window at people?"
"I don't know. Why?"
"My point exactly. You should know. I don't ever ever ever want you taking a girl into gridlock on a first date again. I'd known you for a year, and I nearly soiled myself from fright."
This assessment of my conduct is the norm. Maddie, then, has the following distinction: she is the only girlfriend to react to my enraged honking, cursing and finger-flying by reaching across my chest and leaning on the horn because the rage I had expressed wasn't remotely adequate.
I owe Maddie a lot. She supported me during my interminable undergraduate years, without complaint or much hope of ever seeing that money again, and I'm not sure why. Love, sure, but still. That's a lot to ask of someone. For my part, I tried to get through school as quickly as possible, loading up on 21-25 hours for six straight quarters, a laughable amount of information to process for someone routinely spotted 10 points in the Digest vocabulary quiz. When she came home from work, Maddie would help me with my Spanish flashcards, coming up with mnemonic devices to help wedge la aspiradora in some crevice of my feeble memory. She, of course, learned the language long before I did. "Oh, come ON!" she'd plead. "This one's easy! And you knew it a hour ago!"
I knew her facial expression well. Somewhere between sobbing and bloodletting mania, it was the exact same expression my engineer father had worn at 2am when trying to push me over the long-division hump. "I really need to get a paternity test," he said in my imagination.
"I really need to get a boyfriend who can find his ass if I cement-nail his hands to it," she said in actuality.
"How's that?"
"I said, what's dolencia?"