Hear the Wind Sing

17

For three days, I kept trying to find the girl’s phone number. The girl who lent me the Beach Boys record, that is.

I went to the office at our high school and looked up the register for our graduating class, and I found it. However, when I tried calling it I got a recorded message telling me the number was no longer in service. When I called Information and gave them the girl’s name, the operator searched for me, and at the end of five minutes, she told me there was no number listed in their directory under that name. That was the good thing about the girl’s name, it was unique. I thanked the operator and hung up. The next day, I called up a bunch of our former classmates and asked if they knew anything about her,

but nobody knew anything about her, and most of them only vaguely recalled her existence from our school days. The last person I asked, for some reason I didn’t understand, said, ‘I don’t have a damn thing to say to you,’ and hung up on me.

On the third day, I went back to the high school and got the name of the college she’d gone on to attend. It was the English department of a second rate girl’s school. I called their office and told them I was a quality control manager from McCormick’s Salad Dressing and had to ask her something from a survey she’d filled out and that I needed her current address and phone number. I apologized and told them it was very important that I speak to her. They asked if I wouldn’t call back in fifteen minutes after they’d had time to look it up. After drinking a bottle of beer, I called them back and the person in the office told me that she’d dropped out of school in March. The reason she’d quit was to recover from an illness, but they didn’t have the slightest idea why a girl who was well enough to eat salad wasn’t back enrolled in classes again.

When I asked if they had a contact address for her, telling them even an old one would be okay, he checked for me. It was a lodging house near the school. When I called there, a matronly-sounding lady said she didn’t know where the girl went after moving out, then hung up on me, as if to say, ‘you don’t want to know anyway.’

That was the end of the last line thread connecting us.

I went home and drank beer by myself, listening to California Girls all the while.