Alice's story, part 3

"When he left to go to West Point, I was seventeen, and I knew he'd be gone for about four years, at least, and I was going to college..."

"When did you discuss this with him?"

"Well, shortly after his parents had me over for dinner. After Joel had left they invited me over for dinner, and they sat me down, and I realized how unhealthy their affection for me was, in some ways. Literally, to boil down the conversation in a nutshell, it was like: 'You will marry our son, right?' And I was like: 'I have to go now.'"

It didn't take long, as Alice and I talked, for me to understand how eager Joel was to please his parents. What took longer to understand was how possessive Joel's parents were of Joel. At first Alice described them in rather positive terms (at least apart from her vivid commentary on the odor of Joel's father). "They were very attentive," she said. "It was a lot of fun when I was dating him in high school because they instantly felt like my other parents." It's fair to say that Joel's parents were welcoming, even getting her drunk more than once, but that wasn't the extent of it. "Looking back," Alice reflects, "his parents were asking us to do it." After dinner Joel and Alice would go to Joel's bedroom, close the door, play music, and "act like bunnies." His parents never flinched. Alice says it never even occurred to her that they had any idea what was going on in there.

If this couple felt like Alice's other parents, however, perhaps it was because they already thought of her as a daughter-in-law. "I even remember conversations his mom had with me about grandchildren," she tells me, disbelief still evident in her voice. "I'm seventeen, lady, I am seventeen!" I wondered if Joel's parents had themselves been early bloomers. Alice answers, "They did meet when they were very young; they also got married when they were very young. But their parents didn't make them do it."

No, Joel's parents didn't make Alice marry him, but listening to her you'd think they might have if they could have. The culmination of Alice's story is her two-week visit with Joel and his parents to Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, immediately before Joel entered West Point. She was uncomfortable to begin with in that fantastically wealthy borough, perhaps best known as The Sopranos' shooting site: "I did not fit in there, because I'm an artsy, independent type, I'm not the Prada-carrying, Abercrombie & Fitch-wearing type." She was there to see Joel off, and she put up with the trip for his sake. What she hadn't counted on was Joel's parents' motive for bringing her: "His parents wanted to parade him around their friends and family before he went . . . and I was really the trophy girlfriend. That was my function. Look, this is Joel, he's going to West Point, and this is the woman he's going to have babies with. That was the whole of the trip."

And her pride and shame? In spite of her discomfort, "I had so much fun, and I loved standing beside Joel and going 'My Joel.' He was My Joel. He was very dear to me, my very very best friend, he's going to West Point, and I'm so proud of him -- his parents' goal has been achieved, he's going to have his freedom... and at the same time, I felt so awkward and clumsy, this sort of feeling of -- yeah, but." But what? "I'm not a military wife! God no! This isn't going to go anywhere -- and here I am almost playing along with everyone in this sort of parade . . . and that's not who I am!"

Maybe Joel's parents sensed Alice's tension. They dialed up the pressure so far that Alice reflected even at the time that if her own parents knew the burden being laid on their daughter, they'd object to it. And as awkward as Alice felt about her own uncertainty, "the most overwhelming thing that I was really uncomfortable with was his parents were like, afraid to let me go. It made me just feel like if they didn't see me crying and Joel going through the West Point gate and me waving to him with a handkerchief it wasn't going to come true." Well, they were right. Alice didn't see Joel through the West Point gate, but instead flew home by herself from JFK. It was 2003; paranoia about flying from New York was high, Alice was coping with others' expectations and her own confusing emotions, her heart was breaking over leaving Joel, and the security guard said her photo ID didn't look like her. (Symbolism, a small part of my brain announces.) Alice burst into tears at the airport -- and while she'd had the idea for a while that this relationship would have to end, "it was kind of then, on my return flight, that I was kind of like yeah... I think... it's unwinding now."

And that was it. There was no moment of truth when Alice told Joel that they were through. They just unwound. Alice tells me that since then, Joel has been engaged three times, and each time the engagement has been broken off. He's looking for a goddess, she says, "and eventually the person he's with feels so much pressure from that, and so awkward from that, that they back away and think I can't commit to this, because eventually I'll want to shoot myself." That's speculation, though. She renewed communications with Joel recently; before that, it had been years since they talked.

There's still a little more story here. Chronologically it happened before the trip to Monmouth Beach, but narratively it belongs after you know how it all ended, and the part Joel's parents and Alice's reaction to Joel's disposition played in the ending -- because all of that foreshadows, or maybe hindshadows, what is in some ways the most poignant part of the tale. I hope you'll forgive me my literary devices. Tomorrow we'll find our closure.