I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia (32 page)

We traded our first messages on the morning of June 22. By that same afternoon, we were already joking around and feeling remarkably comfortable with each other. Neal declared, “I’m always here for you!” I wrote, “I don’t know if it would ever happen, but it would be nice to meet you someday :)” Neal replied, “You already have met me, but perhaps a reunion one day would be nice.”

That night, I asked my parents about Neal. My mother said, “Oh, that Neal Moore! He really straightened you out!” She recalled that I was “so much better behaved” after we started dating, and that I would often listen to Neal when I wouldn’t listen to them or to anyone else, even if he and my parents were telling me the same thing. Mom then recounted a story from the end of
my senior year as an example. Apparently, I didn’t want to go to the Conestoga High School baccalaureate service, undoubtedly because I thought I was way too cool for something as stupid as that. My parents were insisting that I go, but I kept refusing. (Most likely I was refusing simply because they were insisting.) According to Mom, Neal came in and announced that if I didn’t go to baccalaureate, he wouldn’t take me to the senior prom. He told me I would regret it later if I didn’t participate in all of the senior events with the rest of my graduating class. He even offered to go to the service with my parents and me. (For some reason my mom asked me if Neal still had his Jeep. Really, Mom? I doubt he had the same Jeep after thirty years.)

Dad mentioned that he thought he could dig up some slides of the two of us, if I was interested. I was very interested, particularly since Neal had lost all of his pictures, as well as all the letters and all the other paraphernalia from the “Su and Neal” years. The only items he still had were a pencil portrait that he had drawn of me in his sketchbook—from my senior portrait, because I would never sit still long enough to be sketched; an Ohio Wesleyan sweatshirt; the Cabbage Patch Kid I had presented him at Christmas one year, which we had playfully named Arthur Miller-Moore; and a few mix tapes hand-lettered by the teenage me.

For me, our Facebook reunion meant the recovery of another lost chapter from a forgotten life. For Neal, my very existence set off a sort of existential time bomb. “I didn’t know how to feel,” he recalls. “I had put it in my mind that you’d been gone all these years, and all of a sudden you’re here again. It tore me apart, to be honest.”

Neal’s years with me had been “one of the happiest times in my life,” he recalls. “We saw each other or at least talked to each other on the phone every day of our lives from the day we met. I had had many girlfriends in high school, but what you and I had didn’t even compare to that.”

I was needy, I was directionless, I was out of control, and Neal was my compass. He remembers me as the Jan Brady of the Miller household: “You were one of the ones in the middle. I won’t say that you were put aside or neglected—your parents would never have done that—but you felt that way. And I gave you the attention you craved. You could have had any guy in school. You had a lot of male friends. But you never attached to anybody. You were one of the guys. You were a tomboy. That’s what attracted me to you, because you weren’t the same kind or type of person I was used to dating, girlie girls who were boring. We used to go out to Valley Forge Park and get dirty and sweaty while hiking.” Our favorite bands were the Who, Pink Floyd, and Queen. Our favorite Who song, Neal remembers, was “Bargain,” from their 1971 album
Who’s Next.
With Queen it was “You’re My Best Friend” and “Fat Bottomed Girls.” And with Pink Floyd, probably the title track from
Wish You Were Here.
Neal told me I wrote
Pink Floyd
and
Neal Moore
all over my sneakers when I was in school. Later on, he would tell me how I lost my virginity with him at Valley Forge Park. “I didn’t push it,” he recalls. “One day after we had been dating for nine months or so, you just came to me and said, ‘Let’s go have a picnic.’ We went out for a walk and a little picnic, and you just turned to me, and one thing led to another. There were no words.”

Every year for almost the past thirty years, Neal has driven to Valley Forge on September 17 to mark our “first date” anniversary. He walks along old hiking trails that he and I had hiked together, and remembers what was. It is a sweet and yet heart-wrenching
tradition. I try to grasp what Neal tells me, and understand that tradition, but I never will completely appreciate his September 17 ritual simply because Valley Forge Park is just a tourist destination to me.

In a Facebook exchange on June 24, 2011, two days into our new relationship, I told Neal how nervous I had been during the
Today
show interview. I wrote, “I hate when people ask, ‘What is your first memory?’ I just want to ask them what
their
first memory is!” Neal replied, “OMG! This is the first time since we reconnected that you really sound like the girl I used to know! I love it!”

It was the first time anyone from my old life had ever told me I sounded like the old me. Was Neal saying it merely because he wanted me to be the same girl? Was he living a fantasy, imagining me as a perpetual eighteen-year-old? Or did he really think that I was the same person now as then? I have to wonder what he would have thought if we had reconnected ten years earlier. Back then, I had very little sense of humor, and I mostly just parroted things other people said. I didn’t think for myself then. I do now. Or at least more than I used to.

We began sharing more details of nearly three lost decades, and Neal ticked off an ever more impressive list of accomplishments. “We have lived in several cities all over the world,” he wrote, but “Monte Carlo is my favorite place in the world.” On his fortieth birthday, Neal and a friend went heli-skiing in New Zealand. Neal has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He knows enough of seven languages to get around. He was once head chef at a three-star restaurant.

Though he probably didn’t mean it, Neal and his stories were
starting to make me jealous. He was so successful, so well traveled, such a great father, husband, and chef, while my life had felt like one battle after another, and my kids subsisted mostly on mac and cheese. The more I heard about Neal, the more I wanted to know him, and to see him. Was he leading me on? Was this old boyfriend too good to be true? Can a person really be that sweet, successful, and smart?

If Neal wanted a reaction, he got one. On June 25, three days after our first message, I had lunch with an old friend from high school. I told her about Neal. At the mention of his name, my friend turned white, looked surprised, and just stared at me for a moment. Then she caught herself and tried to recover as she told me that, yes, she had some vague memories of him. I threw the bullshit flag, sensing there was something she wasn’t telling me. She sighed and began to confess. She proceeded to tell me a story that would change my life. Again.

In fall of 1983, I left for college very much in love with Neal Moore, much to the chagrin of my girlfriends, some of whom were still in high school at Conestoga. They didn’t like Neal, because I wasn’t nearly as “fun” or “crazy” since I had started dating him. It seemed they thought I would be missing some kind of “Total College Experience” by keeping a serious boyfriend, especially someone like Neal, back home. They took it upon themselves, if not to break us up completely, at least to drive a wedge into our relationship. One of these girls wrote to me at college and told me that Neal had been seen with an extremely attractive young woman at the King of Prussia Mall. When approached, Neal had supposedly blown off my friend and told her that if Su had gone
all the way to Ohio, he could do whatever he damn well pleased back in Pennsylvania. Upon hearing this (completely untruthful) story, I got really fired up, distraught, angry, hurt. I was totally pissed off. Seizing on my agitated state, one of my friends—my lunch date, in fact—had dared me to sleep with someone at college, anyone really, just to get back at Neal. That guy turned out to be Jim Meck.

Listening to this story and letting it sink in, I was, on the one hand, sort of amused, thinking back to how young and juvenile we all were. I really was quite the gullible innocent. On the other hand, the more I thought about it, the more I began to get angry. A week earlier, this new narrative wouldn’t have mattered, because I had no stake in my old relationship with Neal. But in my new reality, the tale took on tragic proportions. Over the course of a few days, I had learned, first, that Neal just might have been the love of my life, and, second, that our love had been stolen from us by jealous teenage girls. My so-called friends changed the course of my life with one silly, adolescent prank. That sounds overly dramatic, I know. Who really knows if Neal and I would have survived four years of a long-distance relationship in the eighties, before e-mail, cell phones, texting, Facebook, and Skype? But I guess I would prefer to know for sure, and now there is no way to know.

That evening, I wrote to Neal. “I just learned today about some very interesting facts about what REALLY happened in 1983–1984 and I am REALLY pissed off!!! It amazes me how people (my so-called best friends at the time) can lie and alter the course of someone’s life . . . and get away with it for so many years!!!” The explosion of capital letters and exclamation points caught Neal off guard. “Calm down,” he wrote. “Let’s talk.” Then he vanished from cyberspace for a full twenty-four hours; maybe I
had scared him off, or maybe he just needed time to think. When he resurfaced, he seemed to share my sense of loss.

“I’m feeling a lot of emotion as things are starting to sink in,” he wrote. “And, like you, I’m pissed off because it doesn’t seem like we even had a chance . . . And there never was anyone else but you. Ask my mother, who kept telling me to let you go and move on.” As Neal processed the new information, the end of our relationship began to make more sense. “There were sooo many questions left unanswered that have plagued me over the years,” he wrote. “Honestly, there hasn’t been a week that has gone by that I haven’t thought about you. You really set the bar for all of my relationships since . . . You weren’t just a girlfriend/lover, but my best friend, and I kept kicking myself as to what went so wrong that we were torn apart so abruptly. We were, at one time, inseparable.”

In some ways, I don’t know what happened to Neal and me, either. I wasn’t dating Jim then. I had just slept with him once to get back at Neal. Why did I not say any of that to Neal at the time? Why didn’t we talk until we got to the bottom of the situation then? Did I just feel too overwhelmingly guilty? Was I just too afraid of losing Neal altogether?