1975

Elizabeth

Elizabeth sitting next to me at Dad’s birthday part in August ’75.
This is the only photo I have of her for she didn’t like her picture taken.
Photo was taken by Mom

My relationship with Elizabeth was on uncertain ground but she would often spend nights with me but not every night.  She never really explained where she stayed those other nights.  I would almost say she was living with me, she would be at my place for a week then disappear for a couple of days.  She kept few possessions at my place, a few clothes, a few books and little else.  I looked in her Volkswagen van on day and it seem she kept everything she owned in it, almost like so she could leave at a moment’s notice.   I worked regular hours at CIRCA, leaving around 7:30 in the morning and getting home around 5:30 so  I would sometimes see her in the morning, but she was seldom there when I got home, often arriving later in the evening.  I remember one time I was in bed when she got home late that night.  I did not get up and she came to bed.  The next morning, I got up and she was till sleeping when I went into the kitchen for breakfast, opened the refrigerator as saw a plastic bag on the bottom shelf.  Wondering what it was, I open it up and in it was a dead racoon, roadkill.  Ok, that’s a little weird, I thought, closing the bag up tightly I ate breakfast and went to work.  That evening when I got home from work, she wasn’t there but as I approached the back door to the house, there leaning on the house was a board with the racoon skin, stretched and nailed to the board.  Another time she brought home an armadillo that had been run over, a common sight on the roads in Florida.  I asked her what she was going to do with it, and she said, “Eat it”.  She proceeded to butcher it up, cutting it into pieces, and then proceeded to fry it like fried chicken.  It was one of the few times she ever made something to eat.  It actually was not bad, tasked like chicken, well sort of at least what I tried to think as I ate it.   It was a little odd though, I was used chicken pieces, legs, thighs, breast, wings, but while the armadillo pieces were about the same size, they were oddly shaped, and the bones were totally different.  

I found Elizabeth’s gathering of mushrooms interesting enough that I went to the Campus Book Store and bought the book “Exotic Mushrooms” that had beautiful pictures of mushrooms with descriptions. Page of the Cantharellus mushroom like the one Elizabeth brought home and I ate

Another time she was very into wild mushrooms, not the magic kind, but edible ones.  She would go off on walks in the surrounding fields and woods and bring back different kinds mushrooms which she would cook and eat.  She offered some to me but warned me that there was some risk for she wasn’t a mushroom expert and might had misidentified some of them.  I didn’t eat those but there were some she was sure about, I remember a bright orange mushroom that she said she new was safe to eat and she fried them up and we had them for dinner.   She was that way about things, always studying something, and having an encyclopedic knowledge of many subjects.  I had learned on the years to never question her about something she said, she was always right.

On the nights she did spend with me, she shared my bed, but we were not having sex.  I had a king sized bed and she would sleep on one side with me on the other with a distance between us.  This had been going on for a month or more when one night she came to bed and I told her if she was going to sleep in the bed with me then I wanted to have sex and she said, “Well not now, perhaps later tonight. That sometimes she liked to have sex in the middle of the night.”  So, I said okay, turned off the light, and we both retreat to our own side of the bed.  We had gone to bed around ten, well I certainly couldn’t go to sleep, she told me we would have sex later that night.  Ten became eleven, then midnight, she seemed asleep from what I could tell from the soft moonlight coming through the window.  One o’clock, I couldn’t take it anymore and I move over to her, and gently begin to caress her, moving her hair aside, kissing her on her neck, and she begins to stir.  I caresses more of her body as she awakens, and I say, “Make love to me.”  She turns to me and says, “Not tonight, I’m not in the mood.”  I return to my side of the bed in frustration where I finally fall asleep.  The next morning I was up as usual before her and wrote her a note which I left note the kitchen table. “Elizabeth, If you’re not going to make love with me then I don’t want you sleeping in my bed, I find it to frustrating.  You can use the spare bedroom if you still want to stay here.”   She wasn’t there when I came home that night and was gone for a day or two, something not that unusually for her, but I wasn’t sure she would come back when a couple days later I came home and her Volkswagen van was parked in the yard.  I enter the house uncertain what to expect where I find that she had moved her meager possessions into the spare bedroom and had got a single mattress which she put on the floor.  About the only thing she said was that she had moved into the other bedroom, and the only thing I said was okay.  After that, we saw each other less and when she was there, we hardly spoke to each other.

Simple Twist of Fate
By Bob Dylan

He woke up, the room was bare
He didn't see her anywhere
He told himself he didn't care
Pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside
To which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate