!!!!!!!********WORKING DRAFT********!!!!!!!
October 12, Columbus Day, we had off. Since it was a holiday, long-distance rates were low, like on Saturday nights or Sundays. I bargained with my father for a 10 minute call to Connecticut. “It’s only two dollars today, it’s a holiday. I can pay you from my allowance.”
He looked up from his paper over his reading glasses at me, like he might at a puppy begging for a scratch behind the ears. “Who’s this again? That guy you stayed up all night with last May, you were mooning over on the beach this summer?”
“His name is Mike. Michael Harrison, dad. I think he’s lonely, he wants to hear from me.”
He shooed me away with the back of his hand. “Go ahead, don’t worry about it. But ten minutes, right?”
I used the upstairs phone, less of a chance I could be overheard, I hoped. I’d written him that I might be able to call at 5 PM, and hoped that he was waiting out in his hall as well. In that fishbowl environment, it was a struggle between sharing ourselves and hiding from others.
I started by telling him about the latest Janie Stein success. “I got National Merit Semi-Finalist!” That was a stepping stone to the National Merit Scholarships. Mike had been a finalist himself; that was what first caught my eye about him. At our college-prep high school, this was a big deal. Hardly anybody ever actually got a scholarship – there were only 2,000 in the whole country – but being a Finalist meant a lot on college applications. It was based on the PSAT tests we’d taken a year before. My scores were higher than Mike’s, and I liked to rub that in. But he’d soared on the SAT his senior year, and that bothered me. I’d taken mine the week before, and was really worried I wouldn’t beat his 760/720 Verbal/Math combination.
“Was there ever any doubt?” he asked.
“It’s kinda of funny. There were fifteen of us…”
“Anybody else I know? Lizzie?”
“No, not Liz. But Marc and Larry” – two guys from the debate team – “made it.’ I paused, thinking over the list. “You know what? I just realised I’m the only girl.”
“How’s that make you feel?”
“Well, my mother’s happy. She said, ‘It’ll look good on your resumé.’’
He laughed. “That’s what my mom says whenever she wants me to do something I don’t want to!”
“Wait, I’ve only got ten minutes or my dad will come upstairs and start looking at me. What’s going on with you?”
“We went to Boston last weekend…”
“We?”
“Yeah, three of us, a guy name Rich, and another one of his friends from Fairfield County. They knew somebody at Harvard, and thought we could sleep on their floor or something. But apparently there are rules about guests and everything, so we had to find a hotel. We went to one right at the Common, it was a lot of money, but with three of us, we made it. We hung out, went to their football game, and saw a play there Saturday night.”
I thought wistfully of Cambridge, Radcliffe. My parents weren’t taking me there for an interview or tour that fall; we’d gotten all that out of the way on our way home from the Vineyard the end of July. I wished I could be there when it was full of students, people going to classes. I couldn’t wait to go to college.
“Fun?” I wondered.
“Well, until we had to go home. We’d taken the train up there, but the hotel used up almost all our money, so we decided to hitch-hike back. We got as far as New London, but then no one picked us up for hours. Then it started to rain, snow almost. So Rich called his dad – he’s a doctor – to pick us up. He did it, but gave us hell for being stupid. Everything we did was stupid, he said. I can’t wait to get a car here.”
“How’s that going? Think your dad will let you?”
“I’m not worried. He gave one to my sister her first year, a red Corvair convertible, stick shift. If he trusts her with something that, I should be able to take the Lancer.”
“How are you getting back? When?”
“Taking the train from New York. I’ll get a ride with a guy down the hall to Queens, then the subway to Grand Central.”
It all sounded so adult, going to Boston, to Manhattan, just what I’d been wanting to do for years. “When?” I repeated.
“Let’s see, I get on the train around 9 o’clock, get home the next day at noon or something. Then classes start Monday morning, So really, all I’ll be there is on Friday, We can go out on Friday, but I have to leave Saturday morning. OK?”
It wasn’t “OK”, but, “How much time do you have at Christmas, again?”
“Two weeks. Get home on Saturday, the 17th, then leave again before New Year’s”
It sounded bleak, desolate, trying to cram so much into so little time. I didn’t sense any fear in his voice though, over the long-distance line, so I tried to feel cheerful myself. “Well, I gotta go. Write me a letter soon, Mike, I need to hear from you. And if you’ve got another poem, send that along too. I love those.” Quieter, “I love you, too.”
“I love you. I want to see you, be with you.”
I stood by the phone for a long time, head down, wondering what I was doing, trying to keep a friend, a boyfriend, over all that time and distance. I went to my room, sat at my desk and picked up the last piece of onion-skin he’d sent. I opened a book I’d gotten from Linda for my fifteenth birthday, about Origami. I turned to the page showing how to make a flower, and started folding. I began to feel safer, as I followed the intricate directions. Small things, like my tiny handwriting, like a little bird made out of paper, calmed me down. Within ten minutes, I had a passable daisy in my hand. Not one I could pick the petals from, for sure, but in my mind, I could pull them off one-by-one. There were an odd number, and I made sure to start with “He loves me…”