All day, during every class, I came back to one big worry…what would we talk about. It would be easy at the game itself, we could just watch, or comment on the quality (or lack thereof) of our team. If I were a normal girl, and he was a normal guy, I could play dumb and ask things like, “Why did they blow that whistle?” or “How come they’re all lined up in front of the basket?” These were things that confused me whenever Eddie would come home and watch the Royals on TV. Eddie was the only one remotely athletic in our family. All the rest of us were short people. Linda, my mother, and I were all around five foot three or four, my dad and George more like five-six or seven. But Eddie, first-born, during the war at that, grew to six-one. He got to play a little basketball in junior high and intramurals. He was lean, and quick like a cat, actually coordinated. Somehow he’d missed the Stein klutz gene.
I felt Michael would have zero interest in a girl who wasn’t true to herself. He seemed to value authenticity quite highly. So I ultimately decided to just start with a simple question, and follow my instinct from there.
He drove up in a bright red compact car, a Dodge Lancer, one of the first with a sloping hatchback and bucket seats. Bucket seats! That was actually a relief to me when I saw them; I wouldn’t have to worry about whether to sit next to him, in the middle of the front bench, knees hunched up from the transmission bulge on the floor. And I wouldn’t have to worry about him parking, sidling over to me, and trying anything I wasn’t ready for.
I got in – he actually held the door for me! – and rubbed my hands along the smooth and supple faux leather vinyl of the seat. It was also red, along with the carpet. In between the seats, I noticed a white vinyl cover over a slim aluminum box. He plopped down, started the engine, and headed off towards Clifton Avenue.
“What’s this?” I asked, patting the white cover. It was clearly not part of the original equipment. That seemed a simple enough question.
He glanced down briefly. “Uh, that…I made that in shop, back in 8th grade, when we first got the car.”
I lifted the lid. Inside were the usual odds and ends of car travel: small fuse boxes, little packets of Kleenex, random change, and paper clips. “You like boxes and places to put things just like that lectern thing you use in your debates?”
We’d come to the stop sign. Early evening on a Friday night, a seemingly endless stream of cars headed north, down the hill to the new expressway. He grew frustrated, and said, “We’re never gonna get out of here!”
“Sure we will. There’s no one here from yesterday, is there?”
“What?”
“That’s what my mother always says, when my father complains about the traffic. ‘There’s no one here from yesterday.’ It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but I still wanna get out of here, and these cars are in my way!”
Back then, teen magazines featured articles like, “How To Win Him Over On The First Date.” As if it were some kind of game, or that boys were too stupid to know how to act or what they wanted, or that girls should only be concerned about whether a boy liked them enough to ask them out again. While I was jealous of those girls who went out and had fun on dates, I also didn’t want to try and be somebody else. If somebody didn’t like me for me, I figured, he wasn’t worth my time. If I’d been following those rules, I probably would have tried to assuage his ego. Instead, I just told him, with a slight edge in my voice, “Just be patient. We’ll get there.”
“Yeah, OK,” he mumbled as he turn left. Then, louder, back to conversation, “So, what does your father do?”
This was always a problem for me: I wasn’t quite sure. We’d always had enough money since we’d come to Cincinnati, after my parents left a family business – never explained to me – in Cleveland back in the ‘50s. Now, he had another business, something to do with tobacco, and a little storefront downtown just a block from Fountain Square, near the Planter’s Peanut shop. I explained all this to him.
“Hmm..” was all he said.
I guess I should have asked about his father then. Instead I queried, “Your mother, does she work?”
“Well, yeah, kinda, I guess. On my way to school I drive her most days to UC, she’s working on her Ph.D. there. And a couple days a week, we go to Rollman instead, where she does some work.” Rollman’s was the local mental hospital; we were just transitioning to that phrase instead of “insane asylum”.
“So her Ph.D. is in Psychology?”
“Yeah, right after the war I think she got a Master’s in Boston, then we moved out here when General Electric built a new jet engine plant up in Evendale. She had kids, my sister and I, and when we got old enough, she wanted to go back and get her doctorate. Been working on it for ten years now. She’s supposed to finally graduate this year.”
The evening went on like that, sharing little details about our lives. It felt easy, getting to know each other. We talked about his swimming, the car crash he’d had the year before driving three girls to a meet in Columbus, his classes, getting into Amherst, the upcoming debate tournament, whatever came out of his mind. He needed very little prodding, once we got going. Of course, we really didn’t have to look at each other too much, so that made it easier. We were either in the car, or sitting on the bleachers, watching the game. I told him about making the time cards, the kids in my neighborhood, my mother’s cooking, not going to Hebrew school like my brothers, writing for the Chatterbox. That was me, just a little chatterbox. He didn’t seem to mind, though. It was the first time I’d ever really felt like I could be adult friends with a boy.
When we got home, he opened the door for me again, and walked me up the curving brick steps to our little open porch.
“That was fun, thanks,” he said softly. Our eyes met. I saw a glow there, but no urging. He wasn’t trying to touch me or reach for me. His feet moved like he was heading back down to the car. “See you next week? I’ll pick you up at 7:30 for Princeton.”
Grateful that he didn’t seem like he wanted to grab me, I told him what I felt. “Yeah, I like talking with you. It’s easy, friendly.” My mother appeared, opening the door. I turned around and walked inside.