If I had to choose specific people with whom to be friends, as if from a catalog, I think I'd want the variety of people that Maureen and Jenny and Mary-Therese represent. For the four of us to have come in contact with us pretty randomly is surprising.
At rehearsal today, we spent part of the afternoon playing, and part of it looking through a publisher's catalog for quintet music. We need more Mozart, whether we like playing it or not, and nobody feels like writing out the parts, so we're just going to buy it and have done with it.
As I said, Maureen said that she was going to be busy in the evening, and Daniel is playing with a brass ensemble somewhere tonight, so after rehearsal Jenny and Mary-Therese and I got coordinated as to what we'd be doing later. I confirmed that the place I went skating a few weeks ago has an open skating time tonight. Jenny and I decided to go have something to eat, and Mary-Therese wanted to go work out and take a shower, so we split up and decided to meet at my building at 7:00.
This was the first time I'd gotten a chance to spend some time with just Jenny, and I took the opportunity not to talk, but mostly to listen.
Listening to Jenny is actually a little difficult. She's from Hanover, Pennsylvania and they have an accent down there that is very difficult to understand in some ways. After these few months, I've gradually been able to tune to what she's saying, but it's a very strange accent all in all. One thing that she says that sometimes drives me crazy is that she leaves the verb "to be" out of certain phrases. Where I'd say, "this page needs to be copied," Jenny says "this page needs copied." Mentally filling in those two words, "to be" helps the writer in me stay sane when listening to her.
She talked about her fiancee, Joel. He's at Penn State, he's in his senior year, and apparently as soon as they both graduate this spring, they're getting married. June wedding, the whole works. I got the strong impression they've decided to live in Pennsylvania after the wedding, which I suppose means that after May we'll have to find another bassoonist.
Jenny's not a fool, by any means, but sometimes things she says just get me. There seem to be a lot of things she's "programmed" for, despite how forward-thinking and independent she seems, things that reveal a lot about how she must have been brought up and where. Things like "I'm not sure how long I'll work after we get married." What does that mean? How long before she has a bunch of children, and it's assumed she'll be the one to "stay home and take care of the little ones?" Or is it one of those things where her fiancee thinks of himself as "sensitive" and figures he'll approve of his wife working for a while instead of having children at once?
I didn't ask. I just listened. He sounds like a perfectly nice, stable sort of guy. They went to high school with each other, and it was some big trauma that she decided to come out here to Northwestern (where she got a scholarship) instead of Penn State (where she hadn't). They had some sort of falling out in their sophomore year, and spent a year apart, during which time he dated someone else and she didn't. Then they got back together the next summer and now she's up to her neck (which isn't very far, she's probably 4'11") in wedding plans. Her mother is ecstatic.
We got done eating and went back to my house to wait for Mary-Therese after her workout. She got there about 7:30 and off we went. I immediately realized Mary-Therese knew what she was doing, because she has her own skates and, yes, a skating outfit. She has enviable legs, probably from working out.
We got up there and Jenny and got skates and got onto the ice. Mary-Therese was already out there, making large slow circles, both forward and backward. There weren't many people out there, so she had plenty of space. Mary-Therese went off toward one of the corners and then suddenly turned a perfect jump. From watching a lot of skating lately on television, it looked like a double toe-loop. Jenny and I were on the ice by then and we both almost fell down from surprise. Mary-Therese took another half a lap and then came over to us, skating backwards and slowing down. She apologized for rushing ahead.
We told her it was no problem, and I asked her where she learned to do that. She said she'd been a pretty good skater when she was growing up in Canada, but she got really tired of it just before she finished her last year and gave it up. She also said that when she was 12 or 13 she used to fill in as a forward on her brother's neighborhood hockey team but gave that up after cutting her knee badly. She was wearing heavy black tights, so I took her word for it and didn't ask to see the scars or anything.
It constantly surprises me, the lives people have before you meet them.
The three of us circled around, talking. It was a little disconcerting having Mary-Therese skate backwards, facing us, so that we could talk. The ease with which she did that was amazing. Jenny was a good but not graceful skater. In other words, no double-toe-loops or anything. She has a knit hat with a moose on it which she was wearing.
We started talking about what we all thought was going on between Maureen and Daniel, and what might or might not have happened at New Year's at Will and Alice's. We pretty much agreed that they'd either had massive sex or something pretty close to it, but when Mary-Therese said that the only thing she was surprised about was that Maureen had stopped to take her shoes off (the shoe I'd tripped over in the dark room upstairs), I started laughing and immediately fell on my behind. I flailed when I went down, Jenny went down too, and the two of us barely missed being run over by an older guy.
Mary-Therese said she'd reserve any other comments for after we got off the ice.
After a while my legs got tired, and I went over and sat down. I watched Mary-Therese and Jenny continue to circle around. A couple of times Mary-Therese would break out into the center of the whirlpool and do a spin or something, and then rejoin Jenny as if nothing had happened. Watching the contrast between the two of them, Jenny trudging along purposefully but gracelessly, with effort, and Mary-Therese gliding as if she was moved by magnets or some invisible wind, was impressive.
While I was watching them, around quarter to ten Audra, the girl who helped me the first tiem I was there, recognized me as she came off the ice and said hi. She said I was doing pretty well.
At ten, the hockey players chased us from the ice (Mary-Therese said she considered volunteering to keep goal, but she wasn't really dressed for it) and we handed in our skates and made for the Mercedes. We stopped at Wendy's on the way back and they filled me in on some "history." Remember, they've known each other longer than I've been part of this group. Apparently Maureen has something of a history of throwing herself at attractive young men, more than a few of whom are very agreeable to this. Daniel and Elsa, his girlfriend in California, apparently have an arrangement where they can, if they want, see other people as long as things don't get too serious. He hasn't taken advantage of that deal (or hadn't) and she had, and I guess right before Christmas she called him and said that she'd been spending some time with someone from one of her classes, and he thought things were a little too serious-sounding.
All of that adds up to Maureen and Daniel probably doing the nasty on New Year's Eve.
I just went back and read all this, and I cannot now believe how much energy I've wasted wondering about this. Here, I barely have a social life of my own and I'm getting all high-school-confidential about Daniel and Maureen. I've said it before, but I am pathetic sometimes.
I don't question their taste, though. They're both quite attractive people.