v
That Friday, the basketball team headed off to its usual drubbing at the regional tournament – two losses, and they’d be out. Probably by Saturday night. The band and cheerleaders had gathered a crowd on the steps outside the auditorium for a short pep rally before the start of school. I saw Lizzie at the edge, and wandered over. She was standing next to Mike, who had three or four textbooks on top of a blue fabric notebook slung down his right side, gripped by the more beautiful of his hands.
He was saying, “…well, yeah, I guess I could drive you there.”
They lived about a mile apart in Woodland Park, but had never met before that night at Miss Foley’s. And now, here they are talking about getting together, driving somewhere. I started to inwardly grumble when she turned around and smiled, “Hey Janie, Mike’s gonna take us to the Regionals. That OK?” She sounded so innocent, but I knew she’d gotten tired of my hesitance, ready to push Mike and I together if we couldn’t do the work ourselves. But something in me worried she was there, ready to take over if I faltered.
Mike looked over his left shoulder at me with a smile that melted my heart. “We really need – like – the support. You’re right – look at what the basketball team gets, and they’re only 4th in the league, barely in the regionals.”
That smile! The first crack in the geode! Now’s the time to look inside, I told myself. “Are you going to the game tonight?”
“Uh…I hadn’t…”
“I’m going. I have to,” I improvised. “Chatterbox wants a second photographer there, and I got drafted.” I didn’t know a thing about basketball, and wasn’t sure if he cared about it either. But I thought, swim team, basketball, what’s the difference?
“OK, yeah, I’ll go.” He looked away from us, up at the sky, then down at the steps. He pulled his lips together, then pushed them out. “Uh, you think I could pick you up, and maybe we can go out before or after, get something to eat?”
Lizzie’s eyebrows shot up her forehead. I thought, My God, is he asking me out? Has he been thinking of me, too, but afraid to do anything about it? Doesn’t matter, I told myself, the ball’s bouncing now, and let’s hope one of us can put it in the basket.
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 were 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 Charlie would come home and watch the Royals on TV. Unlike the rest of our family, Charlie was tall, and quick like a cat, actually coordinated. He got to play a little basketball in junior high and intramurals. Somehow he’d missed the Stein klutz gene. All the rest of us were short people. Lisa, my mother and I were all around five foot three or four, my dad and Henry more like five-six or seven. But Charlie, first-born, during the war at that, grew to six-one.
I felt Michael would have zero interest in a girl who wasn’t true to herself. He seemed to value authenticity and didn’t follow the crowd. I decided to 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! 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 red leather of the seat. I noticed a white vinyl cover over a slim aluminum box in the middle. 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: a small fuse box, little packets of Kleenex, random change, and paper clips. “You like boxes and places to put things 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, in which a girl should only be concerned about whether a boy liked her enough to ask her 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 told him, with a slight edge in my voice, “Just be patient. We’ll get there.”
“Yeah, OK,” he mumbled as he turned left. Then, louder, back to conversation, “So, what does your father do?”
I never knew how to answer that. 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 a block from Fountain Square, near the Planter’s Peanut shop. I explained all this to Mike.
“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. 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 has an office.” Rollman was the local mental hospital.
“So her Ph.D. is in Psychology?”
“Yeah, right after the war she got a Master’s in Boston, then we moved out here when General Electric built a new jet engine plant up in Evendale. That’s where my dad works. 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 while driving three girls to a meet in Columbus, his classes, getting into Calvin, the upcoming debate tournament, whatever came out of his mind. He needed very little prodding, once we got going. Of course, we didn’t have to look at each other too much, being 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, a little chatterbox. He didn’t seem to mind, though. I wondered, Is this what it’s like to be adult friends with a boy?
When we got home, he opened the Lancer’s 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 guys up at 7:30 for the Regionals.”
Grateful that he didn’t seem like he wanted to grab me, I told him what I felt. “Me too, I like talking with you. It’s easy, friendly.” My mother appeared, opening the door. I turned around and walked inside.
vi
Next Friday, I went home with Lizzie for a sleep-over. Michael would pick us up early the next morning. We sat cross-legged on her bed, pretending to read The Catcher in the Rye. Reports were due Monday morning. I was already a big Salinger fan, but had come to him kind of backwards, through his later stories.
My mother, trying so hard to fit into a culture she wasn’t born to, had subscribed to the New Yorker ever since I could remember. By age eight, I had graduated from the cartoons and “Goings On About Town” to “Talk of the Town” and the short stories. In early May, I read one titled, “Zooey”. In it, Franny and her brother have this long conversation about life and everything, and I began to see her as a spiritual mentor. Back then, the magazine had no table of contents, and the author was not named until the end of the story. Once I saw “J.D. Salinger” there, I knew I had to read everything written by him, so Catcher became my new best friend. I felt more than ready to whip off a 500 word report Sunday night. I’d much rather share my anxiety about the debate tomorrow than read it again.
“You know, I told you about talking with Mike Harrison last week?”
“Um hummm…” Lizzie mumbled, still trying to follow Holden Caulfield on his nocturnal Manhattan peregrinations.
“I don’t get him, really. I mean, it was easy to talk with him and all, and he seems pretty deep and very quick. But I don’t know if I got any feelings from him, you know what I mean?”
“Well, maybe he’s not a phony…”
“No, I’m talking about Michael, not…”
“Look, Janie, you may be the smartest girl in school, and you’ve read this book a zillion times, but I’m trying to get into AP English next year, so I have to get an “A” on this report. I can’t fake it like you can.”
That hurt a little bit. I didn’t think I “faked’ anything. School may have been easy for me, but I still had to actually do all the work. I spoke up in class, I thought a lot about what I wanted to say and write. But I decided to keep my feelings to myself, both about Lizzie’s jealousy and my anxiety over Michael.
On the way to the regionals, Mike seemed distracted, so Lizzie and I, both in the back, kept quiet. We parked in silence, and he bolted out of the car. Carrying his lectern, he cruised on ahead towards the school doors. No gentlemanly opening of the door this time.
Lizzie hollered, “Hey, wait! Where are we going?” This seemed to wake him up a bit. He stopped at the double doors, looking puzzled.
“I think we go in here…oh, there they are,” he answered.
Miss Foley, Beto, and the rest of the boys huddled in the foyer, right next to a trophy case under a school banner.
She smiled at us, “You ready? You have your cards? Bobby and Mike are in Room 218 for the first round.”
The day blurred into sitting, timing, waiting, and cheering when each of their three wins was announced. But I never got a chance to be alone with Mike, always up in front performing, leaning over in deep conversation with Beto, or getting instructions and a pep talk from Miss Foley. Only on the way back did he seem to open up. Or at least he listened to me open things up.
“So you guys won! That means you’ll be kind of like the favorites in Columbus next week?”
A bit sheepishly, he said “We’re going up Friday night. We’ll be staying at some hotel, close to Ohio State – that’s where they’re having the debates.” He hesitated, almost embarrassed, and went on in a softer tone, “Miss Foley said they don’t allow spectators, so I guess that means no time keepers?”
I felt crushed, almost rejected by him. I didn’t know what to say. Back at Lizzie’s, I brought this up. “I am so … I don’t know … disappointed doesn’t have enough emotion in it…mad that we don’t get to go to state. It’s like I’m losing a very big chance to spend more time with him. We deserve to be there, too!”
We talked about this on and off all the next week. By Wednesday, we had a plan, to write them a “Good Luck” telegram the night before. For the next two days, I mulled over how to word it just the right way, using the time-honored syntax of telegram-ese. As it came out of the teletype, mistakes and all, here is how it read:
MISS HARRISET FOLEY, FT HAYES HOTEL
COLUMBUS OHIO
DOESNATIONAL ALLOW TIMERS? WEC LOVE YOU
JANIE AND LIZABETH
In my mind, this was code for: It’s from me (my name came first), I want to see you again, and I’ve got feelings for you. The message must have gotten through. Although addressed to Miss Foley, Mike ended up keeping the telegram, which he showed me 4 years later as he was packing for his move from Cincinnati to med school.
vii
Tuesday morning at 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 ostensibly 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. Immediately I wanted to go, but was too unsure of what Mike thought about me to maneuver him into another invitation. I had hoped the telegram would trigger something in him. 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 wore 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. With his red hair, chipmunk cheeks and Buddy Holly glasses, he reminded me of Howdy Doody as they sat together on a sofa. I plopped down next to Liz. Just as I was about to interrupt what seemed to be their staring contest, Mike and Marc strolled over.
“I’ve got two rules that 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’,” Mike pronounced.
As the first affirmative on the second-string debate team and the heir apparent to Mike, Marc idolized Mike. He 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? Now 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, leaving Mike the one on my right. I felt 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 Avenue from me. It ran foreign films, with subtitles, or American films that didn’t come from Hollywood. The college kids went there all the time. I was beginning to see the difference between growing up in Woodland Park and Clifton, an inner-city enclave near the University, hard by the art museum, Zoo, and theaters, where the upper crust lived. “Maybe we should go with them?” I ventured. The words simply popped out of me with no fore-thought at all.
Mike looked down at his shoes, scruffy lace-tie things. Finding no solace there, he looked up at Liz, then Leon, who were back to staring at each other. His understudy Marc looked 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 snuck out the front door into an early spring evening. Although the day had been warm and humid, the night had turned a little foggy, enough to make me glad I’d brought a sweater. Mike had on one of his sport 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. On the way back, we started talking, and she became my girlfriend that year. I had a girlfriend every year in grade school. We stayed together 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.
“She did, but her parents didn’t want her to. She’s an only child, her parents live in Wilson Heights, 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 around AHS was home to that great diaspora of great-great-grandchildren of slaves which occurred during and after the war. “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 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. 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 a worldly senior, driving a car and going to college next year, almost an adult. Instead, he was sixteen, like me, as much a boy as a man.
He added, “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. 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 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 bad grades. One day in February or March, my mother kept me home after feeling my forehead, she said I’d probably would be out for a whole week, even though I felt fine. After a couple of days, 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, like me, inhabited the newspaper staff, Student Council, Big Sister, Choir, all the things good Jewish girls did 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 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 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. 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 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. The teacher picked captains, who got to choose their teammates, like on the playground. Everybody wanted me on their team, so I felt recognized as good for something. That was the class where I first met Kathie. 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, Leona. I had seen her as, if not a role model, at least an example of what I might be. And he’s saying he doesn’t like her. What does that mean for me, I worried. Next, he’d actually enjoyed being smart all his life. I could see him reading books under the covers at night with a flashlight, same as me. And what’s this story about learning to read from a hymnal? Must remember to get back to that, I thought. That connection, our mutual genius status, was starting to pull at me. Finally, this Kathie 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.
“I saw something about Alfie in The New Yorker,” I began. “They’ve got this little section in the front where they list all the movies playing in Manhattan, ‘Goings on About Town.’ It’s about some English guy who has a messed-up life.”
“Well, that sounds promising, doesn’t it,” he responded sarcastically. “I’ve only ever seen the cartoons in that magazine. My orthodontist has it in his waiting room. It all seemed like too much.”
“That magazine taught me how to read. Early on, my sister and I would look at the cartoons together. She’d read them, and we’d both laugh, me not really understanding the jokes, but Lisa always had a sharp sense of humor. The big thing, though, was I began to link the squiggles below the pictures with the words she was saying. I don’t know exactly how, but one week, I started to read the captions to her. Or at least tried. She was in first grade by then, and brought out one of her ‘Dick and Jane’ readers, to see what I could do with that. I breezed through it in five minutes. I don’t know, I’ve always loved to read – what happens in my head, it’s like I’m a sponge and everything stays there, and I go wherever it is the words take me.”
I went on. “I love it that the New Yorker doesn’t have any table of contents, or that you don’t know the author until the end of an article. You can be reading something, and then at the end, you find out it was by someone like J.D. Salinger, or Pearl Buck, or John Hersey. I read a lot of things that later become books.”
“Huh…Yeah, I was like that, too. Except, it was in church. See, they’d post the hymns they’d sing, the number of the song, beside the pulpit. I’d pick up the hymnal – it said, ‘Hymnal 1940’ on the blue cover – and I could hear what everyone was singing. They’d be looking at the book, I guess that was my clue that the little marks were telling them what to sing. I asked my mother, and she told me, ‘Those circles are the notes people sing, and here, down between these lines, those are the words’.”
Words. So very important to me, and to Michael Harrison as well. I felt a rising in my chest. Reading had been how I grew up, what taught me about the world, and people, and what to expect in life. Books, magazines, newspapers (we took the Sunday New York Times as well as Cincinnati’s, both morning and afternoon), anything at all. I always had something handy to look at, to keep my attention. It made me feel awkward sometimes, because I didn’t watch much TV, so I couldn’t talk about the shows everyone else liked.
“I bet,” I ventured, “you were one of those kids who read under the covers with a flashlight, after your parents told you to go to sleep”
“Yeah! That was me…”
He hesitated, so I pressed on. “It made me feel a little illicit, like I was breaking some sort of rule, defying my parents. A little rebel.”
“Hmm – yeah, I guess I never got scolded about that – maybe they wanted us to do that.”
“Uh-huh. But lately, there’s so much in school I’ve got to do, I don’t have time anymore for books I want to read, outside of English class.” I paused a moment, as a new thought came to me. “Why didn’t you want to stay in there, at the party?”
“I don’t feel good in a big crowd like that. Up to six or seven people, that doesn’t seem to bother me. But a lot, with music playing so I have to talk loud, I don’t know, that makes me nervous.”
Not a big fan of parties either, I always seemed to find a way to make fun of them and how people acted. I much preferred a group of kids working at something, like the rules of Student Court, the layout of the school paper, or in class where I always knew the answers, and wasn’t afraid to speak up at all. “I feel good, though, talking here with you. Let’s keep going out there, OK?” I said, pointing to the T-intersection where the cul-de-sac joined the larger neighborhood. “What do you think we’ll see?”
“Probably more houses?”
We walked, and talked, for at least two hours. The chill grew sharper. I shivered now and then, from excitement as much as the cold. Michael took everything I said so seriously, but often turned it into a little joke or wry observation about the larger world. I felt his mind opening up to me, and me letting him in more and more. I got a little dizzy, it was all so new and different.
By the time we found our way back, it was nearly one in the morning. Beto and Bev were gone, Lizzie and Leon too. About the only ones left were Kit and Marc, and Kit’s girlfriend. I needed a ride home. I sure wasn’t going to call my mom or dad at this hour, not after I’d told them I’d be home before midnight. I was a little scared, but I had to ask, “Uh, Mike, I don’t have any way home. Can you take me?”
“Yeah, no problem.”
I knew he hadn’t had anything to drink – he didn’t seem like someone who ever drank – still, I hoped he wouldn’t get drowsy. “You OK? Still awake enough?” I said.
“Sure. I don’t have any trouble staying up. Seems to be a special talent of mine, think I got it from my mother. She always stays up late, reading the Saturday Evening Post past midnight. My father, he goes to bed around ten, has to get up for work and leave by 7. He watches the Today show then drives away. Except morning’s in the summer, when he swims first thing….” Mike seemed ready to go on and on all night. I could listen to whatever he had to say, so reassuring and stable, so domestic were his thoughts.
“…and so, after they dug out the dirt for the swimming pool, that raised our back yard about a foot all over. My dad hauled in a lot of rocks, and created a barrier between us and the next door neighbors, ‘cause we had to have a wall protecting the pool from little kids, I guess…”
“There should always be a wall,” I interrupted. “You must always leave the wall” I sang.
“Huh…wha…” Mike had clearly never heard this before.
“The Fantasticks? It’s been running for years in New York.”
“ ‘The Fantasticks?’ What’s that?”
“It’s a play,” I almost whined. “A musical.”
“Where did you see it?”
“My family goes to Martha’s Vineyard every summer. When we drive out, we stop off in New York on the way. There’s always a show there somebody wants to see.”
“What’s it about?”
“I saw it when I was twelve or thirteen. It’s about two families, they live next to each other with a wall in between. There’s a boy and girl, they fall in love. But things get in the way, the boy goes out in the world, and only when the fathers re-build the wall between their houses can they have a happy ending. It’s hard to tell if their fathers are trying to get them together or keep them apart. At least that’s what I remember.”
“What’s Martha’s Vineyard?”
“An island near Cape Cod. It’s like going back in time. We go to the same house every year for a month, a house they only use in the summer.” I closed my eyes, getting lost in summer memories. “We go down to the beach, collect shells, wander in the town, Menemsha. My father sits around and reads the paper all morning, my mother looks in the little shops and buys shawls and stuff. My older brother, Charlie, he lives out there now, so he visits us. George, he spends his time reading textbooks for school. And Lisa looks for trouble, trying to find a boy with a car.” Why was I telling him all this about my family? It felt like I wanted him to know everything about me, and there would never be enough time.
We left the expressway, heading up the hill towards my house. I’d have to leave him soon. I didn’t know what to do. Once again, he walked around to open my door, but I forget about that, opened it myself, and left it there between us as I started up the walk.
“Wait!” he whispered. “I’ve got to make sure you get in OK.”
I scoffed. “Clifton is very safe…”
But up the walk he came, arriving at my side just as I pulled my key out. Reaching for the door knob, I said simply, “Thanks for the ride,” and hurried inside.
Up in my room, I flopped on the bed, lying down, then sitting up. I looked in the mirror. My hair was a little messy, after I’d taken my headband off while we walked outside. My face flushed, and I felt like crying for some reason. I’d never been so confused in my life. Before tonight, things were pretty simple and straightforward. Lizzie was my best friend. I always had something to do after school, something to keep busy with. I studied every evening, aiming for all Advanced Placement classes as a senior. But now…now, I’d started day dreaming about something – someone, really – at the most inconvenient times. I wanted this boy to like me, I didn’t know if he did, I didn’t know how to find out if he did, and I didn’t know how to get him to like me if he didn’t. Before, I’d always known what to do, or at least who to ask – Lizzie, my mother, Lisa. With Michael Harrison, though, it all seemed so personal, so secret, almost like I didn’t want to share that part of myself with anyone else.
“ARGHH!” I thought. Boys! I always knew they were trouble, but I’d thought I could avoid all that, I was above all that. I cried myself to sleep for the first time I could remember.