When I was in college and for 18 months afterward, I spent a lot of time with my cousin Holly. We graduated in the same high school class but didn’t hang around until after graduation when I started working with her mother at a local clothing store.
Holly was actually Mom’s cousin. Holly’s grandfather was Mummu’s brother and was 13 years older than Mummu. Holly’s mother was a couple years older than mine. The 20-year difference in ages between Mummu and her oldest sibling, with eight siblings born in between meant Mom had cousins in a wide range of ages. Three of Mom’s cousins who were local were in my high school graduating class and several more were in the surrounding years.
Holly was striking – long blond hair and in the summer her golden
tan set off her sparkling green eyes. She went to college in Boston, and when she moved there, I
spent many weekends visiting her. When we arrived at Boston nightclubs, door
security often waved us in ahead of the line queued up outside as if we were
royalty. It could be a little chilly in her shadow when guys fell over
themselves to be near her, but there were also a lot of benefits.
For a while, Holly drove a lime green Pinto that required a
screwdriver to open the hatchback. Once, around the time Pintos were in the
news for the gas tanks catching fire, we were stopped at one of the 10,000 red
lights on Route 2 between Fitchburg and Boston. The engine in the Pinto kept revving,
and we were freaking out and convinced it was going to blow up. The options were
limited at the moment – jump out of the car into traffic, or blow up.
The light turned green and Holly got the car off the road
and onto the dirt strip along the side. About five seconds after she emerged
from the car, her long blonde hair glistening like spun gold in the hot summer
sun, two different guys in pickup trucks slammed on their brakes and pulled
over to help. They conducted whatever negotiations were needed – arm wrestling,
intellectual debate, maybe a tiddly winks match – and one stayed to help. That was
the classic Holly effect in action. Crazy stuff happened and people (always
men) came to the rescue.
Rescue dude told Holly to start the car and pop the hood,
and he hovered over the engine to investigate. The noise was awful, and Holly turned
the car off. This happened several times, and the guy, frustrated, finally said,
“I can’t understand why it keeps turning itself off.” When Holly said she was turning
the car off because she didn’t like the noise, I thought the guy was going to
lose it. He finally concluded the gas pedal was stuck and fixed it, and we were
again on our way to Boston.
That Saturday afternoon, we finally arrived at the restaurant
where we had plans to meet a guy one of us knew and his friend. Throughout the
entire lunch, Holly and I couldn’t stop laughing about the hell ride in to town. It was
so bad, the guys thought we were on drugs. Watermelon was served with the lunch,
and I almost delivered the classic Mummu line, “Don’t swallow the seeds or you’ll
get pregnant.” In an effort to be “ladylike” I didn’t say it, and when she whispered to me later that she had swallowed all the watermelon seeds so the guys wouldn’t think
she was gross taking them out of her mouth, it triggered another laughing fit. We
never heard from those guys again, but we laughed over that lunch for years.
Holly and I had a falling out the weekend of my wedding, in
which she was a bridesmaid. It was the stuff of soap opera plots and centered on her, the bridegroom, and their three-hour disappearance from the rehearsal
night festivities. It escalated, and her date, who was told they were attending
a cookout but hadn’t been informed about her being in a wedding the next day,
got mad and left in the middle of the night to return to Boston.
The last time I saw Holly was after we arrived at the wedding
reception in the limo. She bummed change from my sister-in-law, made a phone
call from the pay phone, and slipped away. She went to Mom’s house the next day to pick up her non-wedding
clothes and was never heard from again. Grandpa Ray said she asked him at the
reception about catching a ride to Texas with him when he returned in a couple
days. She planned to look for her father, who had “run off with his secretary”
when Holly, the youngest of the three kids in her family, was very young. It devastated
her mother, who never quite got over it.
I’ve thought about Holly countless times since the day of
the wedding that should have been called off but wasn't. At first, it was with anger, but
as the years passed, feelings for her softened. Periodically, I would try and
look her up with no luck.
Last year, while doing genealogy research, info on Holly was
found. Sadly, it was her obituary, published in The Dallas Morning News in 2008.
It seemed she had found her father and his family in Texas and created a new
life. She died in Dallas after a year and a half battle with cancer. She was
predeceased by her mother, father, sister, and brother, and there were no relatives in Massachusetts to share the news when it happened.
May 15 is Holly’s birthday. When we were in our early 20s,
we would have been celebrating her birthday for weeks before and after the
event. Happy birthday Holly. I hope you found peace. I miss you and all the fun
times we had. And you were right, I never should have married that guy.
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