Wednesday after the party, after dinner, Linda yelled up the stairs while I was finishing my Math homework. “Janie!! Phone!”
I opened the door and padded down to pick up. We had two phones, one at the base of the stairs near the den and living room, one in the middle of the hall upstairs where the bedrooms were. Neither had a long cord, so all conversations were in earshot of anyone who cared to listen.
“Hello?”
“Um, Janie? It’s Mike.” His voice cracked a little on my name. Only four words, but he sounded nervous, maybe trapped.
He went on. “Can we go out and see a movie this Friday?”
Not “Will you?”, or “Do you want to go with me?”, but “Can we?” I don’t know why, but I took that as a happy sign. He was thinking of us together, like we ought to be going out. I responded without thinking, just a shot of pure feeling as I said, “Yeah, sure. What do you wanna see?”
“What’s playing at the Esquire there?”
“It’s ‘A Thousand Clowns’. Did you see that.” It had come out this past Christmas. It was so popular with the college kids, the Esquire was giving it another go around. “It’s just the best movie ever, I think. My sister now rates any movie she see by the number of clowns. Like, ‘That one was only 600 clowns’.”
“Well, OK,” he ventured, sounding hesitant.
“I really think you’ll like it. It’s funny.”
When he came over on Saturday afternoon, I showed him my room. The bedspread was white, with a border of little red flowers, kind of quilted. I’d had it since grade school. A built-in bookcase lined the entire wall below windows which looked out on the backyard. My usually messy desk, filled with school work, had been cleaned off by throwing all that in the closet. He sat on the desk chair, wooden with curving armrests, painted shiny white.
I stood by the window, pointing out past the yard. “See, Bobby’s house is right there.”
Mike did not look up. He was staring at the little tchotchkes I had lined up at the edge of my desk. A little bell, sans ringer. A well-worm dreidel. A picture of my infant niece. A random hair band, red with small green circles. I felt like he was using them to fill in the blanks he saw in me.
Linda was rambling around somewhere upstairs. Just then my mom came back from the cleaners.
“Girls, I have those skirts you wanted for tonight!” She came up and peeked through my open door. Mike got up, fumbling the dreidel. Quickly I said, “Mom, this is Michael, Mike Harrison.”
She put on her smoothest smile, nodded slightly, and, setting the skirt, hidden in its paper cover, on the bed, said, “Hello, Michael.” I watched her eyes intently, wondering what she thought. She turned to me, and asked, “So, this is the boy you’ve been telling us about. Where are you two off to?”
“We’re going to see A Thousand Clowns, at the Esquire. Maybe get something to eat after.”
“Oh, you’ll love it, I’m sure,” she said to Mike. “Linda, she’s the family movie critic, won’t shut up about it. Have fun, kids!” She breezed out of the room, to drop off the other skirt with my sister.
Once she’d left, I urged, “Why don’t you go downstairs, hang out a minute while I change? Don’t worry about my mother, she’s always friendly, I know she’ll like you.” Or at least pretend to, if she doesn’t, I thought to myself.
We walked quietly down Clifton, under trees just beginning to green up. The sun filtered through the branches, giving that soft evening light which always made me feel buoyant. I thought about the movie which is about a brainy New York kid, Nick, and his uncle. It’s mostly them talking. His uncle – Murray – is also real smart, but a non-conformist who can’t hold a job. The boys was kind of left in Robards’ lap by his sister, and serves as the sane, stable member of the pair. Murray falls in love with the social worker – Sandra Markowitz – who comes around to assess the home environment, and threatens to take the kid away.
Because I’d seen the movie before I could burrow into it and get some different insights. Sure, I identified with the brainy kid, but he was only 13, so I saw I had grown away from his viewpoints now. I felt myself starting to understand a little the flustered paper-dropping messy-haired Jewish child-care professional who finds herself wrapped around the little finger of the odd gentile guy.
After we got out, we walked down to Skyline Chili. I had a Coke, he had a hot dog. We sat across from each other in the harsh fluorescent light. I started fidgeting with my hands, something my mother always tried to stop me from doing. I had this little silver ring on my right hand, fourth finger, the biggest one. I was nervously twirling it around. I didn’t wear much jewelry, ever, but this was something I’d bought a year ago, out with Lizzie, when we went through a phase of trying to look more like girls.
“What’s that,” he asked, innocently enough. Of course, he could see it was a ring, so I guessed he was asking something else.
“Want to see it? I slipped it off and handed it to him. He turned it over between thumb and forefinger of his left hand, and then pulled it over the little finger on his right – that beautiful right hand!
“Look, it fits!” he announced, surprised. “I like it there. It feels good, having a ring. Never worn one before.”
“You want it?” I ventured, not really knowing what I was saying. I thought we were having a simple little conversation, not one fraught with any meaning. “I don’t really wear jewelry.”
“Mmm, neither do I.” He took it off, but kept it curled in his hand. “Can I keep this?”
I didn’t know what that meant. The social girls, the ones in a sorority, would exchange pins with the boys in the fraternities, so everyone would know they were going together. I didn’t want him to think I was one of those kids, so I tried to act blasé. Casually, I said, “Sure, I don’t wear it that much.” Truthfully, I had worn it everyday since Lizzie and I bought it. That ring had come to mean our friendship to me; with it, I knew I would always have someone I could feel comfortable with, someone who saw the world just as I did.
We’d walked to the Esquire, just a mile down Clifton from my house. On the way back, I had to know what he thought about the movie. “What did you think, about Murray and Nick and all?
“Nick was really slick, almost like he was the adult, and Murray the child. I’d like to be as free as Jason Robards” – the actor who played Murray – “but I think I’m too straightforward. Just can’t seem to stop heading towards college, and after.”
“What do you mean?”
He struggled with his next thought, almost like he was divulging a secret he’d promised to keep. “Um, I want to be a doctor…”
“How…when…did you decide that?”
“See, one afternoon, last year, I was sitting on the diving board over our pool, looking in the water. It was spring. I thought I should decide ‘what I want to be when I grow up’. My mother’d always told me, ‘you can do anything you want.’ I believed her, ‘cause she’d given me a lot of tests when I was a kid, and told me I had an IQ of 138 or 140 or something, so I was smart enough to pick and choose. I thought about a lot of things, minister, engineer like my dad, teacher, writer maybe, but I realised I wanted a connection with people, I wanted it to be direct, go right the their primary core. What’s more important to someone than their body? It’s really all they are, right? And besides, doctors get a lot of respect in society. And they don’t ever have to worry about money, I figured.”
“What kind?”
“Don’t laugh, but I think I want to be a psychiatrist?”
“Why”
“I’m just so fascinated by why people do things, how they get along with other people, stuff like that. But it’s kids I really like, I think. A child psychiatrist.”
We were getting close to my street. Cars occasionally rumbled by on our right, glistening under the street lamps. The asphalt sidewalk cracked with bumps and heaves from the roots of the old elm and oak trees crowding in on our left. I looked down, making sure I didn’t trip. I looked over at him. He was staring back, warm eyes and hopeful gaze. I felt an eerie shudder. My secret dream was to work with kids, to be a child psychologist. Ever since I’d spent a summer on the Vineyard with some younger cousins, when I was 14, I’d thought working with kids, playing, leading, teaching, was where I should be. Under ten, they are still so pure, so eager to be molded, so untouched by all the seeking and yearning we get as we grow up.
He must have felt something just then, zeroed in on my thoughts somehow. He took my right hand with his left – he was walking on the side facing traffic, such a gentleman. I felt his forearm brush mine, and couldn’t wait to get back home, home base where I’d be safe. He dropped my hand as we walked up the bricks to the door. I stopped, turned around, and looked up. All I saw were my own eyes, reflected back in his glasses, and wasn’t quite ready when he leaned forward, tilted his head, and touched his lips to mine. I liked it instantly, reaching up behind his neck and pulling him in while he tucked his right hand, that beautiful hand, in the small of my back. He stroked my hair, we eased apart, caught each others’ eyes and smiles, and went back in for another try. It felt good. As I floated through the door, I thought, “I hope he hadn’t lost the ring anywhere.”