My girlfriend for all of senior year played tenor sax in a polka band. If you picture her in a certain way or think that’s funny, you haven’t heard the whole story.
She was first chair flute in the high school band. That’s another picture. I was second chair trombone. You think “nerds,” right? But you’d be wrong.
Well, maybe there’s a bit of shade on me, but she was on local television every other Saturday at seven p.m. with that band. “Polka Party” has been on Channel 6 since before I was born. That same band the whole time, twenty-seven years. They were big among the old and even older crowd. Best of all, she got paid and received fan emails through the band’s web site.
Her fans were over sixty, I’ll give you that, but back then we were both eighteen and senior prom was coming up and a seventy-year-old fan named Abel was something no one else in our class possessed. All I needed to do was find the money for the tux and a shared limo ride, something I’d managed to accomplish early because my mother subsidized me. She said she wanted to see me in a tux and standing beside a girl she called a “knockout” in a voice that signaled she thought I’d won a lottery.
Not so lucky, that ticket was. It turned out that my mother was stuck with half a share in failure because my girlfriend went to prom with the polka band’s drummer. A grown man, according to my mother, a spot-on observation. He was twenty-four. “If that girl was three months younger, that fellow would be treading on thin ice over a lake of felony,” my mother pointed out.
My girlfriend didn’t apologize. She said she’d had enough of boys her age who were technically, but barely men. In particular, me. At least, that’s what I heard when she said, “I needed a change.”
My mother, who was nineteen when I was born, was just beginning to show at her high school graduation, said, “She did you a favor,” but I could tell she was projecting, especially with my as yet unidentified Dad still living in Parts Unknown.
Trust me, this isn’t a sob story. I hadn’t picked up the tux yet, so I only got stiffed for half the limo. When my mother turned on “Polka Party,” it was the other band’s Saturday, so everything about that was normal. My girlfriend was in the prom court, but not, at least, the queen, so there was that small blessing, too.
But here’s the thing. Just after graduation, my girlfriend’s Mom ran off with that drummer. Not far, as it turned out, because he lived in a rental less than a mile from her house. But for good, because she didn’t come back except to pack up a few things she couldn’t fit in the two suitcases she filled before she left my now former girlfriend and her tenor sax and flute, too, for a drummer 60% her age. Trust me, I did the math. Nerdish, yes, but so what. The math is easy. You can figure her age yourself if you’re ten years old.
My ex quit that band. She sold the saxophone but kept the flute. The next time I watched that show, the drummer was right there keeping time for the prancing seniors, but the sax player was fat and bald (no fan email for him, I’d wager), more or less like the one in the other polka band that shared the tv spot.
No matter what you’re thinking, I’m not jealous anymore. I went off to college and my ex did, too. Separate schools. Me, for computer science. Yes, I know. She was pre-med.
And now? It’s been four years since then, college graduation in a week. At my school, it falls on Mother’s Day, so there’s some triggering involved with me telling this tale. Her Mom still lives with the drummer in the same house. My ex could walk there if she was willing to spend fifteen, maybe twenty minutes on foot.
Little by little, that drummer has been creeping up, percentage-wise, on her mother’s age. In four more years, he’ll be 67% of her age, not so stomach-churning when it’s put that way. When he turns forty (there’s your answer to that earlier problem), she’ll still be younger than any of the polka lovers he’ll be drumming for. After all, if you’ve handled the math so far and have ever watched that show, you know that when she ran off, she was only, at most, two-thirds the age of the youngest tv dancer, and maybe, just maybe,
she looked girlish when she stepped, hopped, and stepped, stepped with him in that familiar rhythm.
