Accept With the Left

[This is another installment in Extra-Ordinary: a Step-by-Step Memoir. In this episode I explore my first interactions with the opposite sex. Don’t be looking for anything titillating! You’ll be disappointed. SB SM]

Accept with the Left

The year after I gave Alan Hassenfeld the fishing net, everything changed. He got a girl friend, Nancy Krause, who lived midway between us on Grotto Avenue. Her big brother Bob was a star on the Moses Brown basketball team, so not surprisingly Nancy was a whole head taller than Alan. Height, like socio-economic status, didn’t matter a whole lot. I started noticing a number of changes with my Jewish friends as they cruised into their Bar Mitzvah era. More attention was paid to haircuts and clothing. Instead of fishing and baseball, we talked more about pop music and … girls.

The transition took place very quickly. The hot topics became Ellen Chaset, Evelyn Zuckerman, and the Paley twins. Who was slow dancing with whom when it was time for the last dance.

I was cluelessly mired in boydom. I had no experience with girls beyond my cousins at Post Island. Unlike many of my classmates I did not take weekly dancing lessons. So, when it was announced that a tea dance would be held at Moses Brown, all of my friends got very excited. I was at a complete loss. Mom, however, had the solution. She was, remember, a part-time phys-ed teacher at Lincoln School and was completely familiar with all the seventh grade girls at our sister school. She’d pick out one who would be just right. As for the dancing, she cut a pretty mean rug herself and would be glad to teach me the basics.

The dance would be held from 4 to 7 pm in Moses Brown’s Alumni Hall. Music would be provided by the Ed Drew Orchestra. (Ed Drew’s son, Frosty, was in our class.) The boys were issued dance cards that were expected to be filled by swapping dances with your friends. This was one part of the process I could handle. I had traded plenty of baseball cards in my day, so treating women as chattel was something I came by naturally.

The perfectly completed dance card.

The week before the dance–the swapathon–was lively and fun. Dancing with Mom in the kitchen was less fun, but tolerable. Unfortunately Sunday eventually came. I will spare readers my account of the tea dance itself. Just imagine every awkward, cliched moment of every coming-of-age movie or television show, and you’ll have it.

My date was Patty Gifford. She was pleasant and attractive, but I can’t say much more as I was overwhelmed by my own self-consciousness. I survived and was palpably relieved when the last dance was over.

The tea dance was all the talk the next day, heck the next week and month. I was still on the fringe of the hormonal surge. A number of guys made the assumption that Patty, as my blind date, was automatically “my girl,” a myth I was entirely willing to perpetuate.

The assumed myth, in fact, continued for the next several years in a total void of any contact between Patty and myself. There were no phone calls, no letters, no dates, no casual conversations (despite the fact that she lived nearby). Absolutely nothing, and yet my friends vaguely assumed she was my girlfriend, and I did nothing to correct their assumption.

Although I was retarded socially, my hormones were right on schedule. By the time I entered my junior year at Moses Brown, I was a guitar-playing Beatle wannabee who played three varsity sports, made the honor roll, and was beginning the panic about where to go to college. The wisdom of the world was communicated to me through the pop songs of the day. Patty Gifford was still my girl, although we hadn’t spoken in the four years since the tea dance.

Then, when you least expect, life hits you upside the head. In the words of Del Shannon, “As I walk along, I wonder what went wrong.” Only in this case I was standing in our living room on a Sunday afternoon when I noticed a couple about my age strolling by. I recognized the guy as David Stegmaier, a new boarding student at Moses Brown, and the girl was … Patty Gifford.

My knees buckled. I collapsed onto the couch as if I had just taken one in the gut from Mohammed Ali. My mind raced with incoherencies … betrayal, revenge, suicide, backstabbing, longing, hurt. I could now feel the pain that was in Brian Wilson’s falsetto when he sang “Wendy, what went wrong? We’ve been together for so long” and “I can’t picture you with him. His future looks awful dim.”

By the next morning, my emotions had given way to sanity and I decided to handle this betrayal with the same stoic silence with which I had handled to romance for the past four years. This lasted about five seconds on Monday morning when someone said “Hey Morris, I saw Stegmaeir walking with your girl yesterday. They were holding hands!” I didn’t think it possible, but the situation had gone from bad to worse.

Mosher! … Her last name was Mosher.

The pain from being jilted by Patty Gifford lasted a surprisingly long time. My first real girl friend came along in my senior year. Her name was Lynn and she went to a Catholic girls’ school on the other side of the Providence River, but I can’t recall her last name or how we met. Strange … I thought those things were indelibly etched into a young man’s brain.

Our dates were entirely predictable. I picked her up in my blue Pontiac Catalina and we’d drive to one of the big downtown movie theaters in Providence.

We’d go back to her house and make out like fiends (nothing more) on her living room couch. Her parents were home, but I never saw them. This was quite an acceptable relationship for me, but suddenly in May, just a couple of weeks before graduation, she dumped me. No reason, no explanation. She didn’t even do it in person. Her friend called to let me know.

Once again, I was the clueless guy. This was the rare, sweet interlude of harmony–spring was in full bloom, exams were over, college acceptances were in (I would be going to Yale), sports seasons were complete, and the Van Goghs were playing the Prom, but I didn’t have a date. The sweet now tasted bitter.

I knew that the next week was Lynn’s birthday, so I decided to take a romantic risk. This is what you do when you have nothing to lose. With classes all but over, I had some spare time on my hands, so I made her a birthday cake. I frosted and decorated it. I had to admit, it looked pretty good. Then I drove to her school and left the cake on the front seat of her car.

I felt good about myself on the way home. It was a bright sunny day, more summer than spring, and I had given it my best shot in the game of love. My miscalculation was that the bright sunny day, more summer than spring, caused the cake to melt, causing a complete mess, something that I heard about second or third hand. As Chester A. Riley used to say to his neighbor, Gillis, on The Life of Riley TV show “Whotta revoltin’ development this turned out to be.”