She wore her issues on her sleeve. And I mean in the literal, not the metaphorical, sense. It had been like this from the beginning.
Samantha started life in the ordinary way. She spent her first year sleeping under a brightly colored patterned quilt. Perhaps that’s how it started. She would hum for hours in her crib just staring at the patterns and cooing. By age two she was already expressing herself through the visual. She would point to objects to make her feelings understood. If she was happy, a vase of flowers. If she was hungry, the bowl of fruit on the table. If she was sad or angry, the black dot in the middle of a Jackson Pollack reproduction that hung in her parents' bedroom. At age four she was drawing or painting to express herself. But still, no words. At age five they took her to a child psychiatrist. He was a tall man. He was a fat man. He was a man with a full gray beard. Samantha took one look at him and his room full of dorky therapy dolls and said to her mother in a clear loud voice, “All right! So I’ll talk.”
I met Samantha when we were both living in New York City and working at Delmonico’s in the Village. We had both graduated from City College. Neither of us had any ambitions to go to graduate school so we wound up together in the restaurant, I was a hostess, she was a bartender. “Call me Sam,” she had said. That spring I had a sublet on a small studio on 12th Street and my lease was about to run out. “I have a one bedroom,” Sam said. “Why don’t you move in with me and we can share the rent.”
She wasn’t very talkative even then. She had to make small talk at the bar with the customers and she could do that fine. She could chat about the weather or whether we needed a quart of milk in the apartment, but regarding feelings, nothing. I remember the first time it happened. We were walking together to Delmonico's one mild afternoon when I sensed that Sam was distressed about something. I asked her what was wrong, fully expecting the familiar mumbled “nothing,” when she flashed me the inside of her arm. There she had painted, in red, the words, “PMS headache.” For a moment I thought I was seeing things. “Show me that again,” I said. And there it was.
She wouldn’t talk about it any further but the inside of her arm became her vehicle for emotional expression and the colors matched her mood. One day she’d flash a yellow tulip with the words, “Happy Today.” Another day there would be a chaotic jumble of green and purple with the words, “Confused, What am I doing with my life?” And then black stripes with large red dots, “Mad at Josh — breaking up.”
Slowly she began to open up to what was behind the colors and would actually talk to me. We were getting close, becoming real friends.
One day, about a year after I moved in with her, she flashed her arm at me. She had pink hearts in a big circle and the words, “I think I love you, do you?” I tried to tell her no as gently as I could. But all conversation stopped there. She painted dark swirling clouds and angry gray faces every day for a month until the words appeared, “MOVE OUT.”
That was forty years ago. I never saw Samantha again but I thought about her often, and I still do. She was unique and life must have been hard for her. And looking back I realize that I probably did truly love her.
