Tuesday morning just before the start of French class I leaned forward and, touching Mike’s elbow, mouthed “Sorry.” They’d finished 4th, losing their last two debates in the semi finals and consolation round. While Mr. Eick rambled on about “oiseaux et printemps”, I doodled along the outer edges of the paper where I was allegedly taking notes. My handwriting is very small, almost illegible without a magnifying glass. Using my favorite Rapidograph, with the finest point available, I made a swirling portrait of Mike’s head, complete with glasses and slight receding chin. Instead of making a simple line sketch, I used his initials “MAH” endlessly repeated to outline his face and represent the strands of his hair. A little speech balloon rose above, still empty. I didn’t know what he felt about the weekend: was he dejected, relieved, defiant, or something else entirely? As usual when he wasn’t talking, his face gave away nothing about what might lie inside.
Leaving class, I brushed up against him and blurted, “So what’s next for the debate team?”
He looked over, a bit startled. “Oh. Janie. Um, we’re all going to Kit’s house this weekend for a final party. Tom got third, and our 4th, well that’s better than anyone’s done since Miss Foley started coaching. So the juniors, they think we ought to celebrate. Are you gonna come? You’re the timekeepers, you’re part of the team, too.”
This was the first I’d heard of it. I knew I had to show up, but I still was too unsure of what Mike thought about me to press him into another invitation. I had hoped the telegram would trigger something in him, but maybe he was too slow, or too dense to get it, or maybe he’d never even seen it. Instead, I finagled a ride with Beto and Bev. Friday night, we drove up to the end of a treeless cul-de-sac on the edge of town, in a new development filled with curving sidewalks and two story houses. I was wearing my Bobbie Brooks penny loafers, a gift from my mother once my feet stopped growing. Even though it wasn’t in the same fashion league as the clothes she usually bought for us, she seemed to have a fixed attraction to this particular brand. And the shoes were surprisingly comfortable without looking stodgy.
Inside, about twenty kids milled around. Kit greeted me, leaning down with a broad smile while he guided us to the drink cart. I saw his parents’ liquor bottles there, and knew that somehow I’d have to find a way to avoid the alcohol without seeming to be a prude. “Maybe later,” I murmured. “I’m going to hang out over there with Lizzie and Leon.”
“Sure thing”, he answered. “Enjoy yourself.”
Lizzie had a crush on little Leon, about two inches shorter than her. He was a sophomore, a year younger than us, but razor sharp and always smiling. I could see the attraction, but his red hair, chipmunk cheeks and Buddy Holly glasses just made me think of Howdy Doody. They were seated together on a sofa. I plopped down next to Liz. Just as I was about to interrupt what seemed to be a staring contest they were having – though they both were smiling just a little – Mike and Marc strolled over.
Mike was saying, “I’ve got two rules I think cover most of how I try to act. First, ‘Always be honest’. And second, ‘Never do anything for the sole reason it’s expected of you’.”
Marc was the first affirmative on the junior’s debate team, the heir apparent to Mike next year. He idolized Mike, and stood stock still, eyes upward while he digested this philosophy. “OK, honesty, that’s easy, we should all be authentic, otherwise, how can you trust anybody. But the other – I really like that. It means you’ve got to have good reasons for what you do, you’re not just following the crowd?”
Mike seemed pleased with his acolyte’s acceptance of this nascent world view. They sat down in the chairs positioned at either side of the sofa, making a three-quarter square around a small glass coffee table, Marc closest to Leon, and Mike just to my right. I could feel the warmth, either from him or inside me, I’m not sure which, start to build in the space between us.
“OK, then let’s go see ‘Alfie’ tomorrow night,” Leon was saying to Liz.
“Alfie, what’s that?” Mike wondered.
I turned to him and said, “It’s this English thing that’s playing at the Esquire. My sister said it’s really sweet.”
“How do you know about it? I never heard of it,” Mike wondered.
The Esquire was an artsy movie theater, about a mile down Clifton from me. It always seemed to have foreign films, with subtitles, or American films that didn’t come from Hollywood. The college kids went there all the time; it was just a short walk from UC. I was beginning to see the difference between growing up in Clifton and Pleasant Ridge. “Maybe we should go with them?” I ventured. The words just seemed to pop out of me, not fore-thought at all.
Mike looked down at his shoes, scruffy lace-tie things, but he seemed to find no solace there. He looked up at Liz, then Leon, who were back to staring at each other. Marc was also no help; he was looking around the room, hoping he could find someone else to latch onto. Finally Michael Harrison turned back to me. “You want to go outside for a minute, take a walk or something?”
We headed out the front door into an early spring evening. The day had been warm and humid, but the night was turning a little foggy, just enough to make me glad I’d brought my sweater. Mike had on one of his sports coats, this time with a blue cotton twill shirt. He buttoned it up as we walked together down to the empty sidewalk.
“This is the kind of night Jewish girls always hate,” I started. Mike seemed puzzled, his hair glistening a bit from the moisture in the air. “I mean, our hair gets all frizzy and everything – it’s much harder to deal with.”
He turned to look at me, reached out and ran two fingers of his left hand through the thick thatch falling from my headband down past my shoulders. “I like your hair. When I was in the fifth grade, a girl sat in front of me, Kathie. She had dark wavy hair like yours, and I would play with it in class. One time, we rode on the bus together on a field trip, can’t remember where. But on the way back, we started talking, and she became my girlfriend that year. I had a girlfriend every year in grade school. She actually stayed with me into the sixth grade as well. But then I came to Avondale, and that stopped happening.”
“She didn’t get into Avondale?” Our high school was city-wide, all college preparatory. To get in, you took a test in the sixth grade. If you were in the top 20% in your school, you could go to AHS if you wanted to.
“She did, but her parents didn’t want her to. She’s an only child, her parents live in Amberly Village, and they were afraid of her going on the bus everyday so far away into Avondale.”
It was true, our school was smack in the center of one of the scarier parts of town, what people were calling a “ghetto” then. We never used that term in our house, for obvious reasons, but the neighborhood was home to the grand diaspora during and after the war of the great-great-grandchildren of slaves. “Do you know what happened to her?” I asked.
“Well, she went to the local junior high. Funny thing, I read in the Enquirer she won the Miss Cincinnati contest and and so she goes to Columbus next week for Miss Ohio.”
“What was her talent?”
“She played violin when I knew her, so that might have been it. I never took her for one of those girls who would be all excited about something like Miss America, but maybe people change. I don’t think we’d be together now, the way I am and the way she is. Besides, she’s a year older than me, and probably would have dropped me long ago.”
“A year older? Did she get held back?”
“No, I skipped a year.”
That was news. Here I’d thought Michael Harrison was a worldly senior, driving a car and going to college next year, almost an adult. Instead, he was sixteen, just like me, still as much a boy as a man.
He was adding, “Well, not really skipped a year…See, in the second grade, I was a real whiz. Well, I’d been a whiz kid since before I got to Kindergarten. I taught myself how to read from a hymnal when I was four and by the time I got to first grade, all the kids were asking me for help. I’ve always thought it’s kind of a curse to be viewed as smarter than everyone else. Anyway, in second grade, I never missed a day. Second grade! I mean, everybody gets colds all the time when they’re a kid, but I liked school so much, and my teacher, Mrs. Grimes liked me, so I never wanted to miss a day. By the time I got to third grade, school was so easy that I stopped paying attention, and began to get really bad grades. One day in February or March, I was home sick, probably would be out for a whole week maybe, my mother said. I felt fine, but she was keeping me home. One day, my mom and dad sat down with me and said, ‘When you go back, you’re going to be in the 4th grade.’ I remember feeling kind of weird. The year before, a girl in my class, Leona Block, had been moved from second to third grade, and I’d been a little jealous, ‘cause I thought I was at least as smart as she was.”
“Wait a minute, Leona who’s a senior now?” Leona Block was kind of like a doppelgänger to me. She was on the newspaper staff, Student Council, Big Sister, Choir, all the things good Jewish girls were supposed to do if they wanted to fit in. Not that we ever really did; the gentiles tolerated us, even went out with us, but seemed to know that the world was their oyster, that they didn’t really have be twice as good just to get half as much. “So you’re like her, huh?”
“Leona? No way. She’s always seemed awkward to me, not someone I want to spend any time with. Anyway, I got to go to the 4th grade, in the middle of the year. I didn’t know anyone, and we had to start going to four classes a day, instead of just being in the same room with the same teacher and kids all the time. I was still the smartest kid in all my classes, but I was smaller than most everyone, and the girls of course were even older in some ways. But still, a lot of people saw me as a brain, and that felt good. I remember soon after I got there, in arithmetic class, they had this game in May called “baseball”. We were on teams, and the teacher asked math questions. If you got the answer right, you got a hit, harder questions were worth more, like a double or home run. Captains were picked by the teacher, and they got to choose their teammates, just like on the playground. Everybody wanted me on their team, so I felt to I was recognized as good for something. That was the class where I first met Kathy. We sat in alphabetical order, and for some reason, when I was in her class, she always ended up in front of me. She liked it when I stroked her hair, told me to keep doing it.”
This was almost too much to take in. The boy could talk when he got wound up. Mostly about himself, true, but at this point, I was hungry for everything I could find out about him. First off, this Leona thing. I had seen her as, if not a role model, at least an example of what I might be. And he’s saying he really doesn’t like her. What does that mean for me, I worried. He was a brain, had been all his life. Probably read books under the covers at night with a flashlight, I bet. And what’s this story about learning to read from a hymnal, for Christ’s sake? Must remember to get back to that, I thought. That connection, our mutual genius status, was starting to really pull at me. Finally, this Kathy girl he had a crush on, or maybe she had one on him. Another shiksa, like Lizzie, probably decent enough, but pretty clueless when it came to appreciating what really matters in the world. I decided it was time to talk about me, whatever the cost.