Time Machine

by Donna Schoenkopf

I am standing in the living room. Cody’s living room. Which is comfortable and graceful. Deep, soft sofas and chairs, rich colors, a sylvan glen outside paints itself in the room through tall windows. People are mingling, eating hors d’oeuvres, talking politics.

Nice.

We are here for a fundraiser for a local Democrat. It’s his very first political race.

This is juuuuust my cup of tea.

The chances are remote that any of my Democratic candidates will win. But being a bit of an iconoclast, I like the underdog position.

(Oklahoma elects some doozies. There’s Senator James (there are no homosexuals or divorces in MY family) Inhofe. And there’s Senator Tom (DOCTOR, to YOU, buddy!) Coburn. He loves to single-handedly stop Congress in its tracks in order to push his banty rooster weight around.)

And just like a tiny group of Davids in Goliath country, a hearty coterie of progressive people fight the good fight year after year and sometimes, if Oklahoma is very, very lucky, we get a win.

So I’m standing in Cody’s living room, wandering here and there, some delicious hors d’oeuvres and red wine under my belt and I turn to talk to a man about my age—tall, lean—and his wife (?), girlfriend (?) who is friendly and tall, too, and we’re making each other’s acquaintance and the tall guy asks my name and I say, “Donna.” And he asks my last name and I say, “Schoenkopf,” and I ask his name and he says, “Allen,” and I ask his last name and he says, “Cowen,” and I burst out “Allen Cowen!?” and immediately say, “I’m Donna Behlen!”

Which is my high school name.

I mention this because Allen Cowen is an old high school acquaintance of mine. We didn’t really run around a lot together, but we knew each other and were in each other’s company every day at school. I always liked Allen.

The experience of looking into the face of a person you don’t know, and in the blink of an eye that face is the face of someone you DO know but is weirdly 45 years older, is like see that person emerging from a time machine. Just try it sometime. Go back to a place you lived more than 40 years ago and just drop in from the sky and start living there and see what happens when you run into people you haven’t seen since you’ve left.

When I heard the name Allen Cowen, it seemed that no time whatsoever had passed since I had last seen him. My experience with him had ceased all those years ago and now, there he stood before me, 45 years older.

Yeah. Just like a Time Machine.

This has happened to me before.

I had been teaching at 61st Street School for about 15 years. That summer I went back to school early to set up my classroom and went to the local McDonald’s for a hamburger and was standing in line when a young woman said, “Mrs. Schoenkopf?” I looked at her and was all flattered that someone knew me, which is not easy in the Big City, and I said, “Yes?” and she said, as she looked deeply into my eyes, “I’m Luisa.”

I looked at her face. And then went deeper and deeper into her face, past her age, into her child face, and there, THERE was Luisa.

Eight years old.

And I said, “Oh, Luisa!”

It was as though I had found a long lost child and I hugged her close and we laughed and talked a little, but the etiquette of the line dictated that we not take up everybody’s time, so we parted.

Back to Allen.

As the conversation went on he said he had spoken to another old classmate, Janice, with whom I have been keeping company lately, and she had told him that I was back in Oklahoma and that I was an “independent woman.”

Never, in all my born days, have I thought of myself as an independent woman.

My first reaction to this description was that it sounded wrong. For one thing, it sounded like a strong woman. And I’m not particularly. Well, I guess I am, sort of. And I’m sort of not. I’m like the girl in Bob Dylan’s song with the words, “and she breaks just like a little girl.”

I think of independent as not needing anything. But I do need things.

Like right now.

I could really use some company.

what she wants, when she wants it

An independent woman sounds like a well-dressed career woman with her act together. All her ducks in a row.

Well, I dress in ratty jeans and half the time no makeup, and I have been told that I have Earth Mother style.

An independent woman sounds like a woman who knows what she’s doing.

I guess I do, sort of, know what I’m doing. I do know what I want. And I usually figure out how to get it.

For instance, I do all, and I mean ALL, the work around here. But I’m pretty lazy, so that’s not a whole lot. But, now that I think of it, if you look around you’ll see that every single thing here is either from Peewee and his guys who built my house or Mother Nature or ... me.

Nobody else.

This piece of land was virgin land when I got it. Every single human imprint here is because I put it here. Every sprig of grass, every rock, every dog and cat.

And I paid for everything myself. Every single thing. Every board, every drop of paint, every nail, every ounce of concrete, every THING. (Except for the fruit trees Carole and Judy bought me.)

And when I walk about my place, inside and out, and I see that rock I put over there, or that patch of grass I mowed, or the deck, or the tools leaning against the wall, or the kitchen cabinets placed right there, or the painted table, I feel really, really comfortable.

Hey. I DID do that, didn’t I? Whaddaya know.

And I support myself. Thanks to being a teacher, I made a decent (if you don’t mind scrimping) living. Of course, I couldn’t save anything for retirement, but I do have my teacher’s retirement benefits, thank you very much.

I guess I am sort of an independent woman.

I do like being on my own, but as I’ve said earlier, sometimes I could use a little company.

That’s when I think about a husband or its equivalent, and I start to feel trapped. I know I would miss my alone time and being able to put something right THERE and getting no argument from anybody, and eating what I want when I want to eat it, and watching MY favorite TV shows, and not having to be anywhere that I don’t want to be.

the daughter

I guess my independence stems from my desire for freedom.

Freedom. No strings attached.

I shall end this piece by saying that in thinking about my own independence, I can much more readily see it in two very important women in my life, rather than my own. Those women are my daughter and my daughter-in-law.

My daughter is unmarried, a writer and editor, raises her son on her own, pays her own rent, buys her own clothes, figures out life’s problems with confidence. She has a wonderful boyfriend who suits her. He keeps her company, makes her proud because he is creative, and they are sympatico. She has made her life her own.

the daughter-in-law

And my daughter-in-law is the same way. She married my son in her mid-thirties after her life of independence. Before she married, she worked, was very successful in the business world, paid her own way, figured out how to be an adult, was a person in her own right. And when she married she married my son, who turned out to be a great husband and father. She has made her life her own, too.

Both of these wonderful women are strong-willed. They both have their own distinct, and very cool style. They both have power. They both know what they want and how to get it. They both are smart and self-assured and beautiful.

Independent women.

Politics.

Time machines.

And Cody’s beautiful living room.

Now ... what the hell should I call this thing I just wrote?

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