Triblog

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.”

“I think I saw something about Alfie in The New Yorker,” I began. “They’ve got this little section in the front where all the movies playing in Manhattan are listed, ‘Goings on About Town.’ I think 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. My orthodontist has it in his waiting room. It seemed like all too much.”

“That magazine taught me how to read,” I said firmly. 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 joke, but Linda 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 readers, to see what I could do with that. I breezed through it in five minutes. I don’t know, I 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 are telling me.

“I love it that they don’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, maybe it’s a three part thing, 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 cover, blue, 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 the morning and afternoon Cincinnati ones), anything at all. I always had to have something handy to look at, to keep my attention. It made me feel kind of awkward sometimes, because I didn’t watch much TV, so I couldn’t really 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. Like 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?”

“I don’t feel good in a big crowd like that. Three people, maybe six or seven, 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.”

I wasn’t a big fan of parties either. I always seemed to find a way to make fun of them and how people acted. I was much better in a group of kids who were working at something, like the rules of Student Court, the layout of the school paper, or in class where I seemed to always know 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 just more houses?”

We walked, and talked, for at least two hours. The chill grew sharper, I shivered now and then, but that was maybe from excitement as much as 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.”

It was maybe a thirty minute drive back. 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, 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 was content to 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, six I think.”

“ ‘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 wall between their house is built back up 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. We just 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, Eddie, he lives out there now, so he visits us. George, he just reads his textbooks for school. And Linda 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 came around to my door, but I forget about that, and was already opening it when he came around the corner, leaving it between us as I started up the walk.

“Wait!” he whispered. “I’ve got to make sure you get there OK.”

I scoffed. “Clifton is very safe…”

But up the walk he came, arriving at my side just as I pulled my key out. Leaning over the handle, 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 was 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, Linda. 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.

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.

Next Friday, I went home with Lizzie for a sleep-over. Michael would pick us up early the next morning for the drive to Princeton. We sat cross-legged on her bed, pretending to read The Catcher in the Rye. Reports were due in class 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 be a part of a culture she wasn’t born to, had subscribed to The New Yorker ever since I could remember. By the time I was 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 other stuff 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?”

“Uh hummm…” Lizzie mumbled, still trying to follow Holden Caulfield on his nocturnal Manhattan peregrinations.

“I just 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 in school. Things were easy for me, true, 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, just 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 were 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 was a blur of sitting, timing, waiting, and cheering when each of their three wins was announced. But I never really got a chance to be alone with Mike. He was always either up in front performing, leaning over in deep conversation with Beto, or getting instructions and a pep talk from Miss Foley. It was only on the way back that he seemed to open up. Or at least was open to listening to me open things up.

“So you guys won! That means you’ll be kind of like the favorites in Columbus next week?”

He seemed a bit sheepish, unsure. “I think 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 was surprised at how crushed I felt, almost like he was the one rejecting me. I didn’t know what to say. All I could think about was losing a very big chance to spend more time with him.

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.” This was a new feeling. I was being left out even though I both deserved and wanted to go.

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 s just the right way, using the time-honored form of telegram-ese. Just 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 Los Angeles. Those years in between – that’s our love story

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.

[Working title: We Could Never See Tomorrow Chapter 1]

Mike grabbed a set, looked at each one in turn, as if making sure all the numbers were there and in the correct order. He beamed, started laughing when he saw the last one. It was oriented horizontally, not vertical like the numbers, and read, “STOP!”

“Paisley – I guess that’s our thing, huh?” He turned to Bobby as he said this, who just shrugged in reply.

Miss Foley suggested, “Why don’t we give them a try? Mike, just start your first affirmative, and Janie, you sit there” – she pointed to her couch about ten feet away from the kitchen table – “then ring this bell when you want to start the clock.”

Mike, all business, laid his lectern next to the flower vase and coffee cup, and started to unscrew the handle. Lizzie plopped down next to me on the couch; Bobby sat down on the other side, giving us a smile and a pat on my knee as he did. I looked at Liz, pleading for help.

She piped up, “Where did you get that box? How does it work?”

That’s all Mike needed. As he placed the handle down and lifted up the front, unfolding it to become, with the top, a slanted resting place for his note card, he explained, “My father made this for us. See, look at the space on top for paper, and underneath, we’ve got two drawers for our cards…”

“Yeah, Mike’s real proud of that, but I’ve gotta take my dog for a walk in an hour; let’s get this done,” Miss Foley said, nodding at me to start the clock.

I rang the little bell, held up the first card, which read, “Start”, and studied Michael as he went into his spiel. I’d heard it before, and rather than follow the argument, examined the boy as if I were framing him for a photograph. His face was long and goyish, and it looked like he wasn’t really shaving yet. His arms also seemed a little long, fingers ending about six inches above his knees. Those hands! I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. They seemed to say as much as his words, implying a maturity of thought that belied his tender visage. He had full, dark eyebrows, slightly arched, which could move independently. He used them to underscore and emphasize the facts he wanted us the remember. I was feeling that flutter down in my stomach again, and my nerves turned a little jangly.

Bobby jabbed me in the ribs. Startled, I looked over. He was tapping his watch and glaring at the cards. My reverie interrupted, I flipped to “5”, and got back to my task. The other guys – Kit and Marc, the B team, juniors prepping to take the mantle next year, and Tom, the extemporaneous speaker – had heard this all before, of course, and were busy poring over the sleeve of the latest Dylan record Kit had brought in. Kit was arguing for the full-length version of “Like A Rolling Stone” to be played on AM radio, instead of the shorter, A-side which had been released.

I wasn’t that into music, but my big brother, Eddie, was, and he had indoctrinated me into the Gospel according to Zimmerman, our little Jewish hero from the North Country. That’s where my head was at when I flipped the last card to “Stop!”,  just as Mike lowered his hands to indicate the end of his talk.

Miss Foley said, “Very good. I like the way you wove the Test Ban Treaty into it this time. I think we’ve got this just where we want it. Bobby, comments?”

Beto looked thoughtful, then murmured, “No, you’re setting me up very well, Mike. I think we’re ready.”

“OK then, Marc, why don’t you get up there as first negative, give Robert something to work with.”

I handed the cards to Lizzie, and followed Mike into the kitchen, where he was pouring a glass of water. Glancing my way, he raised those brows and asked, “Want some?”

Those were the first words Michael Harrison spoke to me.

********

Bobby was driving me to school that winter, after he finally got a car from his father. He was kind of my mentor, him being Student Council president, and me wanting that job the next year. While other girls were getting sidetracked over which boy might ask them out, and where they stood in the hens’ gossip pecking order, I was trying hard to please my mother, getting elected class representative, and working on making sure the report card was all A’s. I wasn’t athletic, not at all, couldn’t even dance. Not like Lizzie, who’d taken ballet all her life, and ran the Pony Chorus dance team in our class review, “Peanuts”.

I felt comfortable with Bobby; he wasn’t a threat to all of that. I’d known him since I was in 7th grade, when we moved to Clifton, and saw him as sort of a brother, or worldly cousin. One who wasn’t Jewish, too. All of that made him safe for me.

So it was easy to ask, “What more can you tell me about Mike Harrison?”

“Are you serious about this,  Janie? ‘Cause I think you’re gonna have to do some work to get to know him.”

“Well, for starters, where does he live? How does he get to school?”

“I think he’s in Amberly Village, maybe Pleasant Ridge.” This was a white-bread enclave at the very northeast corner of Cincinnati. Pleasant Ridge was where Lizabeth lived. Why hadn’t she told me that? “He told me he drives his mom to work every day, then comes and parks on the front drive. I think she’s getting her Ph.D. in psychology at UC. He says she got a Master’s at Radcliffe, right after the war.”

Radcliffe. That was the number one school on the list I’d made with the school counselor, Miss Mkrtchian. She was a crusty old lady, who had decided long ago that women did not get a good deal in life, especially when it came to college. So she made it her mission to find the “top” girls in each class, and guide them towards somewhere other than the kitchen or the maternity ward. Every year, she picked her five pets, called them the Senior Girls’ Council, euphemistically known as her Five Fingers. It was a honor equal to things like cum laude or Quill and Scroll. When I’d met with her to talk about college applications, she sent me signals I would be one of the chosen. Which made sense, as I was on my way to maybe being valedictorian. She said, “You know Janie, that half of all ‘Cliffies are either first or second in their high school class.”

His mother going to Radcliffe, and in Psychology at that, added to the intrigue. I just had to find a way to him, to learn more about him and find out what that wrenching flutter in my pit was all about.

As we pulled into the football field lot – only seniors at the top of the social order dared park there – I asked Bobby, “What about college? Do you know where he’s applied?”

Bobby gave me his serious look, a downward nod as if peaking over reading glasses. “Oh, he’s already in. Amherst, early decision. Found out last year. He doesn’t have to worry about a thing.” Bobby’s first choice was Williams, so that made sense. The two paired up so well, intellectually at least. They weren’t friends, but they could at least hold their own with each other.

As we walked by the gym towards the back entrance under the dome, Bobby continued, “Are you two serious about this timekeeper thing? We’ve got the Regionals coming up in two weeks.”

“We’ll be there. Lizzie’s got some dance recital that night, but you’re done by three or so, right?”

********

It was Friday, and the basketball team was 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 were gathering 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, carrying my pile of books in two arms in front of me, like most of the girls, or at least the ones who carried books. The boys hauled them one-handed at the side, resting on a hip. She was standing next to Mike, who had three or four texts 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 Pleasant Ridge, but had never really 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 Princeton next week for the debate. That OK?” She sounded so innocent, but I knew she was getting tired of my hesitance, and was trying 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 just 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. Chatterbox wants a second photographer, and I got drafted.” I didn’t know a thing about basketball, and wasn’t sure if he cared either. But he was a little jock-ish, being on the swim team and all. 

“OK, yeah, I’ll go.” He looked away from us, up at the sky, then down at the steps. He pulled his lips together, the pushed them out. “Uh, you think I could pick you up, and maybe we can go out before or after to get something to eat?”

Lizzie’s eyebrows shot up her forehead. My God, I thought, is he asking me out? Totally forgetting that I was the one who’d started the idea. Maybe he’s been thinking of me, too, and just too 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.

Every broken heart starts with a love story

The first thing I noticed about him was his hands.

My junior year in at Avondale High School, I sat kitty-corner from him in French class, one row back, hiding in my John Meyer of Norwich sweaters and skirts. Languages were easy for me – I’d taught myself to read before kindergarten –  so when I got bored I had a lot of time to pore over his appearance. His hair, though dark, had a blond-green sheen, like you get from too much time in a chlorinated pool. Parted on the left, long enough to flop over his brow, but short enough to not yet curl. This was a year or so into the Beatles’ reign, and he seemed torn between letting a mop-top grow, and keeping it short for his swimming. His face was still smooth and soft, but getting chiseled. He wore those plastic glasses, translucent frames which would now be nerdy, but back then were the norm for our mid-western city. Later, in college, he’d go full John Lennon, hair over the ears, wire-rims, worn work jacket and jeans.

But his hands; he had “good hands”. Perfectly proportioned, in my estimation: fingers and back of equal size, nails with short white tips, ending just at the top of each digit. Palms neither skinny nor fat. He seemed in control of his fingers; at rest, only slightly curled, and moving them independently when he gestured. I could see his right hand best, and the veins on the back traced curved, not straight lines from wrist to knuckle, a very pleasing pattern. The hands of a doer, not a thinker, I felt.

I vaguely wondered if he knew I was there, sitting off his right shoulder, but we were on the right side of the classroom, and he never really had any reason to look my way. For the first three months, when I got bored with declensions, I would fantasize about those hands, and pretend they showed his soul.

“He’s a senior?” Lizzie asked when I confessed my obsession in the lunch room one drizzly November day. We’d arrived late, and the Johnny Marzetti casserole had grown cold.

“I know he’s on the swimming team. Debate team, too.”

“Debate? Is he the one who almost won the regional match, with Beto last year?”

“Don’t know. All I really do is stare at him when Mr. Gleason starts doing that unintelligible Gallic thing in class.”

Lizzie Upton and I were best friends. She was a blond-haired goy, a dancer, and just the sweetest girl in class. We sang together in choir, worked together on the school paper, and shared the same disdain for Jocks and Jills.

“Janie, it sounds to me you want to meet him somehow.”

That gave me an inner shudder. I spent my time either studying or running from one school service task to another. Big sister. Student Council. I was just coming out of a prolonged early adolescence ugly ducking phase. Boys were kind of scared of me, and scary to me. I had three older siblings, two brothers who’d gone to Brown and Princeton, and a sister just off to Beloit. In our family, good grades and good schools were all my parents – well, my mother really – cared about. No sports, no “make sure you find a good Jewish boy”. My older brother Eddie rebelled a bit. He was already married, with a kid on the way. He could have gone to law school, or had a good job on Wall Street, But he was living on a farm in Rhode Island, with three other couples, eating a macrobiotic diet, and sewing his own clothes. Middle brother George, still in the Ivy League, had maybe never gone on a date. I don’t know if he was a monk, or gay, or what. We never talked. Linda had been voted “Wittiest” in her class, the quintessential class clown. She’d landed in a lower-tier college, and was already being written off by mom. I seemed to be the family’s last, best hope, and was trying so hard to be the Good Girl that I thought I had no time for boys. But, at sixteen, I did have feelings, stirrings, and found I couldn’t fight them off any longer.

Christmas was coming up. Lizabeth and I were both in choir, and rehearsals started coming daily. Even though 20% of the school was Jewish, the only songs we sang were things like “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” We’d march onto the stage in our blue robes with gold collars, carrying burning candles in the otherwise unlit auditorium. I couldn’t help giggling when that made everyone’s face look like some kind of dybbuk. During all the solos, we whispered out various scenarios we could try to get the debate team’s attention, come January.

“You know, these guys are really good at their tournaments, certainly doing better than the football or basketball teams.” Our college-prep high school, pulling all the smartest kids city-wide, had never gone to team sport regional, much less state competition in the five years we’d attended.

That flashed an idea through my head. I started laughing, catching the stern glance of our choir director, Mr. Hammons. Sotto voce, I mouthed to Lizabeth, “They’ve got cheerleaders at every game. That must be some consolation. And I bet it’s easier to get asked out by the players if you’re bouncing around in one of those short skirts and all.”

“You want us to wear mini-skirts or something and dance in the audience?” I couldn’t see her, but could certainly feel the feminist skepticism in her voice. Not being part of the social crowd, we prided ourselves on making fun of what we thought of as the debasing behaviour of even some of the smartest girls in our class, when it came to getting boys’ attention.

Always comfortable approaching teachers, the next day I went to room 338 about ten minutes before the home room bell rang. Even though Miss Foley had never taught me, she certainly seemed to know me. She looked at me over her cat-eye glasses, her smile mellowing out the pock marks on her cheeks.

“Well, Janie, you lost?” she chortled.

“Miss Foley, you coach the debate team, right?”

“Yes…”

“Lizzie Upton and I, we were thinking, maybe they need some cheerleaders. They’re going to do well this year, right?”

“If we can get by my sisters’ guys there at Princeton, then, yes, they should win the regional and have a good shot in Columbus at the State.”

“Well, we’re thinking we’d like to help them out somehow. For starters, I’m on the Features’ staff at the Chatterbox, and I can get a good article published in it next week, talking about their upcoming meets.”

“That’d be great. I expect you’ll want to see them in action? There’s the Public High School League round robin at Hughes this weekend.”

Hughes High School was literally right down the street from me, less than two miles away. Lizzie could come over, ostensibly to study, and maybe we could get a ride from my big sister, who was home for winter break.

So five days later on Saturday morning there we were. I’d told Miss Foley we wanted to be incognito, sort of like a restaurant critic, so they wouldn’t feel any performance anxiety. I’d never seen a debate tournament before. Apparently, it was a lot more than just arguing back and forth. There was a whole slew of thespian categories, kids individually giving performances, or expounding extemporaneously on topics announced just before their speech.  But we were there to see Beto and Mike.

Bobby Buchannon. was the Big Man On Campus that year. He lived just behind me, one street south, His father was Speaker of the State Senate. He was president of the Student Council, captain of the swimming team, and a National Merit Finalist. Smart, good-looking, and popular to boot. Everybody loved Beto.

But it was Michael I was there for. Mike, the boy in my French class, the one whose hands entranced me. We tucked ourselves into the back of the room, hiding behind the judges and coaches, who filled the front row. Mike went first, giving a tightly spaced ten minute argument in favor of controlling nuclear weapons through a treaty among the five major powers. He had it memorized and well-rehearsed; it seemed that every hand gesture, hesitation and side-step was planned in advance for maximum effect.

Three things struck me about that performance. First, his voice. In French class, as he struggled with diphthongs, that had seemed a little reedy, even cracking now and then as befitted a late-blooming teen-ager. On stage though, he held his audience with a deep-throated baritone, smooth and confident. Second, his clothes. He and Beto made quite the dapper pair, with their sports coats and neatly pressed slacks. Beto’s were slightly ragged corduroy, while Mike had a smooth blue wool coat and pants to match. Each wore starched white button down shirts. Most striking were their ties. The British Invasion had unleashed a Beau Brummell aesthetic, evidenced by their freely flapping paisleys. Mike’s was a darker blue than his coat, with those eye-catching ameboid shapes widely spaced. Their opponents looked like ragged street waifs in comparison. Michael was walking back and forth in between stopping and looking directly at the judges when he wanted to emphasize a point. He seemed to keep returning to the lectern sitting by itself in the middle of the classroom desk. Every now and then, he pulled a little note card off it, snapping the 4 x 6 smartly or tapping it gently as he built the argument. Then, when his ten minutes had ended, he surprised me by folding up the slanted top of the lectern, and closing the contraption with a flourish, using a small handle which screwed the whole thing shut, and then served as the grip he used to pick it up and carry it back to his seat. Wow, I thought, those other guys don’t have anything cool like that.

Ten minutes later, after the first negative speaker gave his response to Mike’s dissertation, Beto got up as the “second affirmative”. He saw me, and gave his twinkly-eyed smile, kind of an Elvis thing with just the right side of his mouth going up. I panicked, met his eyes, shook my head, and put a finger to my mouth, miming “Shhh.” He gave a slight nod like he understood, and then proceeded to totally bury the other side’s rebuttals, using more 4×6 cards filled with quotes from newspapers and magazines to buttress his assertions. There was another half hour to go, but it was obvious the other team was over-matched, so Lizzie and I started exchanging notes.

“Did you see those ties?”

“And the box. I love it!”

“They are polished!”

We sat quietly while the head judge gave the critique and final score, Avondale in a rout. There would be one more round in the morning, and another after lunch. After everyone had filed out, we headed down the hall to watch some of the other AHS debaters, so I could actually write in good conscience a summary piece for the school paper. But I couldn’t get Michael Harrison out of my mind. At first glance, he seemed a bit of a nebbish. But watching him command that first affirmative slot, hearing his voice, seeing that tie, and being amazed at the home-made lectern box, I noticed a subtle feeling somewhere just below my ribs. Almost like being in a scary movie. I knew I had to find a way into that hidden core of Michael.

Mid-afternoon, after our team had walked off the stage with the first place trophy, Mike headed directly to his car for the drive home. Beto came back to us and said, “Hi, guys, what’s up?”

I volunteered, “I’m writing a story about you for next week’s Chatterbox. So we needed to see for ourselves, not just rely on Miss Foley’s report. Impressive…You and Mike know your stuff.”

“Yeah, he’s a lot smarter than he looks, isn’t he?”

Lizzie piped up as I vainly tried to shush her, “Janie wants to know how to get him to pay attention to her.”

My dark Semitic face doesn’t blush easily, but I could feel the space just below my neck warming up. Luckily, I always kept the top button of my shirts closed, and I hoped no one saw. I noticed a wet feeling under my arms.

Beto gave another one of his impish half-smiles, and offered, “Why don’t I drive you home, we can talk about that.” He casually put his arm around me. I turned around, nodded at Lizzie to follow, and gave her the facial equivalent of a shoulder shrug.

We lived in Clifton. This was an inner-city enclave near the University, hard by the art museum, filled with churches, cemeteries, and forested parks. The upper crust lived there. As he backed out of the parking lot, looking sideways at us in the back seat, he said, “Here’s what you gotta know about Mike: it takes a long time for him to let people in. But once he does, he’s totally comfortable, and cool, and funny. As well as being the smartest guy I know. Smart meaning he can take an idea, see right through to its center, then talk about it in a way that’s easy to understand.”

  Lizzie piped up, “Does he ever go out on dates? Talk about girls?”

I glared at her.

Beto let out with a single chortle. “Not as far as I can tell. He sure doesn’t talk about it if he does, not like other guys do, you know?”

Well, that was encouraging. At least the part about his analytic brain. He might be a tough nut to crack, but worth the effort. Beto dropped us off, and Lizzie and I went into the kitchen, to help Mom get the Saturday night dinner ready.

On the counter was a geode someone had bought on a trip to the Southwest. While Lizzie chopped vegetables, and Mom shredded potatoes and onions for the latkes, I picked up the heavy grey rock, turned it over, and stared into the interior for a long time. The outer shell was encrusted, almost like it was layered with barnacles. Next was a white seam, looking as soft as snow, glittering in the afternoon light. Finally, pale blue crystals jutting all over the hollow core, pure and luminescent. At once, I knew the way into Michael Harrison’s secret center.

“Lizzie! We could be their timekeepers!” My mother, deep into chicken fat, couldn’t hide her interest, though her eyes never left the stove. I turned to her. “Mom, where’s that bolt of paisley fabric Linda had to make her prom dress last year?” Linda, the clown, thought it would be funny to go to a dance in a hand-made outfit all covered with funny blotches. She was puzzling over the sewing machine one day when Mom ended that potential fiasco, and hauled her immediately to Pogue’s department store for a proper prom formal.

“Sweetie, I think it’s there in the den, behind your father’s chair, still all folded up…Say! I bet that’s where my pinking shears went. If you find them, let me know. What do you want it for, anyway?”

“Bobby asked me to the prom, and I want to make a dress he’ll be proud to show off.” Mom knew this was totally a joke; Beto and Bev Page, the coolest girl in our class, had been pinned for months now. But at least it made her forget to ask what I really wanted it for.

**********

Next Tuesday, we showed up at Miss Foley’s apartment, just after debate practice had started. “There’s a couple of girls who’ve got something they want to ask you,” she announced, turning around to face the guys as we shadowed behind her. Miss Foley, while a stickler in class, had a very informal attitude with the debate team. She half-smiled as she went on. “Is that OK?”

“Who?” Mike asked.

“Let’s see, Lizabeth Upton and Janie Stein,” she responded.

Mike stood there slack-jawed, face totally blank. Beto was right, he was a very slow starter when it came to anything or anyone new. I don’t remember which of us spoke first; Lizzie and I were  joined at the hip in my little project.

“We noticed you guys have been doing so well at the regional and state meets last year and now. But nobody pays any attention. So we think you need cheerleaders. This is Walnut Hills; we shouldn’t just be paying attention to the football team.”

“So we want to be your cheerleaders.”

“What, like pom-poms and chants? That won’t go over very well during a debate,” Beto noted, somewhat sardonically.

“No, we’ve got another idea. We’ve seen a couple of debates…You guys have to hold up those time cards for each other, when you should be thinking about what you’re going to say next round.” It was true. Each speaker had 10 minutes to first present arguments; then, 5 minutes for rebuttal. Going over the limit incurred a severe penalty from the judges, so instead of just guessing, the guys timed each other with cards they flipped over, counting the minutes down by 1, until the final 30 seconds, when another card flashed up.

“We could be your timekeepers,” I said. I was using what I thought were my best physical features. I ran my left hand through my thick (but slightly frizzy) black hair, cut in bangs above the eyes, flowing down past my shoulders, held back with a paisley headband. True, my head is a bit large for my body, but I used every bit of that face to smile. Dark eyes, dark brows, with a voice and diction beyond my years. I was determined to seem oh so sure of myself.

“We made these cards to use.” We brought them out, fanning a set each in front of us. They were white thick paperboard, the numbers hand cut with pinking shears from paisley fabric.