Crazy in Love (4 page)

Spirits were high again, or at least optimistic, as we
scrambled into a red leatherette booth at a tiny coffee shop
named after one of the Greek islands. When the waiter came
by, Dan said in a very authoritative voice, “I think we all
know what we want. Sal?”

Rachel and I ordered Diet Cokes. I really felt like a glass
of milk, but while I’m pretty secure for a seventeen-year-
old, I’m not quite secure enough to order milk on a first
date.

“And my friend here and I will have a couple of beers.”

Rachel and I exchanged glances again, the kind that say
more than mere words ever could.

“You guys got ID?” the waiter .asked.

The legal age for ordering beer in a restaurant in New
York is twenty-one. I knew for a fact that both Dan and Fred
were seventeen, because that had been one of the many
fascinating facts Dan had thrown at me while we were
walking across town to the park. I braced myself for a
scene.

“Hey, who do you think you are?” Dan said, trying to
sound mean. Instead, he sounded so defensive that he
looked ridiculous. “I’m twenty-one, and so is my buddy
here.” He looked to Fred for support.

“That’s right,” Fred chimed in. “We’re twenty-one.”

“I need to see your ID,” the waiter went on. I thought he
was being extremely patient.

“Let me see the manager,” Dan insisted. At that point I felt like grabbing Rachel and fleeing, just sliding back into our rented skates and rolling away into anonymity.
She, in turn, had that look on her face that is halfway
between helpless and disgusted.

“The manager isn’t here right now. Look, why don’t you
guys just order something else?”

Oh, no, that would have been too easy. I could see by the
look on Dan’s face that he had no intention of complying with such a reasonable request. Fred, too, was glaring at the poor waiter. It was at that point that I decided to buck
Amy Vanderbilt’s code of good etiquette. I stood up and
said in as calm a voice as I could manage, “This is stupid.
I’m leaving. Come on, Rachel.” I flounced out of the coffee
shop, leaving Dan, Fred, and the waiter openmouthed. I could hear Rachel behind me, or actually I could hear her
wheels spinning in midair as she hurried out after me.

“Rachel,” I fumed, once we were out on the street, “was
I being unreasonable?”

“Not at all.” She, too, was furious. We marched across town toward the skate-rental place, our faces twisted into angry frowns. Then, all of a sudden, as if on cue, we looked
at each other, then dissolved into peals of laughter.

“Oh, Sallie!” Rachel cried. “I couldn’t believe that
whole scene! I felt like I was
baby-sitting
those guys, not
going out with them!”

“I know! If I’d realized what a turkey Dan Meyer is, I
never would have agreed to go out with him!”

“You know, this isn’t really very funny,” Rachel said, once we had calmed down and were breathing normally again. “Actually, it’s pretty sad. I mean, this is what we
have to look forward to: a full year of going out with total
turkeys.”

“You’re right.” It was a sobering thought, and by the
time we had returned our skates and strolled over to Rachel’s apartment, we were down in the dumps.

“What’s wrong with these guys?” Rachel wailed as we went into her kitchen
.

“What are you two moping about?” Rachel’s mother, who happens to be one of my very favorite people in the whole world, and the woman that I consider to be my
second mother, came into the kitchen and sat down at the
table with me. “Didn’t you have a good time on your
double date?”

Rachel and I both cast her looks of utter disgust.

“Fun?” Rachel squealed. “I would have had a great time
if it had been just me and Sallie. But those guys ended up
ruining the entire afternoon.”

“It’s true,” I agreed. “We ended up skating together, just
me and Rachel, because we weren’t up to chasing after two
wild men on wheels. And then they insisted upon giving the waiter at the coffee shop a hard time because they ordered
beer and then couldn’t prove they were twenty-one.”

“Are
they twenty-one?” Mrs. Glass asked.

“Of course not! I think they’re about nine.”

“It’s really discouraging,” I said. “Why are boys like that?” I gratefully accepted the glass of cold milk that
Rachel handed to me.

“I can remember feeling the same way when I was in high school,” Mrs. Glass said. “It takes most boys longer
to mature. I guess these two just haven’t caught up with the
girls their age yet.”

“Most
boys! They’re
all
like that, or so it seems.”
Rachel was emphatic. “Right now I feel like putting myself
on hold until next year, when I get to college. Who needs
to cater to these idiots?”

“It was a wasted afternoon.” I felt responsible, too, because I was the one who had been swept off my feet by Dan Meyer’s lustrous locks and baby-blue eyes. “Should we
take a vow of celibacy?”

“At least temporarily.” Rachel sighed, then sipped her
milk. A little liquid refreshment was making the world look a bit better, but it had nevertheless been a discouraging afternoon.

“Hey, come on, you two,” Mrs. Glass urged. “You’ll
meet some worthwhile boys one of these days. It just takes
time, that’s all. Surely you’ve both seen that T-shirt that
says, ‘You’ve got to kiss a lot of toads before you finally
find the prince.’“

“Well, considering all the toads I’ve put up with over the
past few years,” I lamented, “I’d say I’m about due for a
prince.”

“Me, too,” Rachel agreed. “In the meantime, however,
we do have each other. Why don’t you say we save the rest of this afternoon? Let’s go see that new movie that’s been getting such great reviews
.”

“But it’s such a lovely day!” Mrs. Glass protested. “Do
you want to spend it holed up inside a dark movie theater?”

“I’d say we’ve both had enough fresh air for one day.
Let’s hear it for chairs and the fine art of just sitting.”
I groaned, massaging the backs of my calves. I could
already feel those muscles stiffening up, screaming at me,
“Sallie, what have you done? We thought you were on our
side!”

“I don’t blame you for being disappointed,” Mrs. Glass
said as she stood up and pushed her chair to the kitchen
table. “But I promise you that things will change. There will be Prince Charmings, or at least something close,
in your futures.”

At that point all I could do was hope that Mrs. Glass,
being older and wiser, was right. But in
the meantime, I looked forward to spending the rest of the afternoon enjoying the friendship of another female.

“Let’s get moving,” I said, starting to look forward to the
movie. “The movie theater awaits us.” Arm in arm, Rachel and I
marched out of the kitchen.

It was almost entirely by accident that I first became
interested in songwriting. One night, when I was still living
in Boston, I was baby-sitting for some friends of my
parents, the Clarkes. I remember that I was supposed to be
studying for a math test the next day. But logarithms aren’t
exactly the most exciting thing in the world, and
after a couple of hours of staring at those log charts with
thousands of numbers on them and doing all those dull practice problems, I decided to chuck the whole thing, at
least for a little while.

I turned on the TV and started channel-surfing, looking for something that would be more interesting than “log 387.” That shouldn’t be too difficult, I know, but all I could find was news shows. I had something
a little more entertaining in mind than weather reports and
film clips of diplomats shaking hands with each other. Finally
I stumbled upon the Public Broadcasting sta
tion—you know, educational TV. And there was this man
teaching guitar.

From what I can recall, the guy was a bit lacking in the personality department. But one thing was for sure: he made it look as if playing the guitar was as easy as
...
well,
easier than doing logarithms. I quickly cased the Clarkes’
living room, but not surprisingly, there were no guitars
around. But there was a tennis racket in the hall closet,
thrown in among the rubber boots and hangers
that had fallen off the rod.

The tennis racket was warped and frayed, and I don’t
think it would have been much good on the courts. But it
made a perfect guitar. I remained glued to the set for the next twenty minutes or so, the fingers of my left hand
wrapped around the handle as I copied the
man on the TV screen, my right hand strumming the strings
of the racket. I guess it would have looked sort of weird if
anyone had wandered in, but the kids I was baby-sitting were busy tying each other up, or whatever it was they were
doing up in their room.

I kept on watching that show, every week for the next
month. I had to leave behind the Clarkes’ makeshift guitar,
but tennis rackets seem to be one of those things that
families always have lurking in some closet somewhere.
They’re like safety pins and bobby pins: you never actually
buy
any, but somehow they’re always around when you
need them. So I found an old tennis racket up in the attic, in the same trunk where I’d found my redheaded grand
mother’s diary, and starting strumming away.

I guess I did look pretty pathetic. I didn’t realize that
anyone was even aware of what I was doing, but mothers
have eyes in the backs of their heads. On my birthday Morn presented me with a huge, bulky gift—and sure enough, it was a guitar. A
real
guitar, one that made sounds and couldn’t be used at Wimbledon for anything other than playing music.

I think I progressed faster on the real guitar than I had
on the tennis racket, although it’s impossible to tell. Not
only did I watch my weekly lessons on
television; I bought myself a book of songs with little
charts to show the chords that went with them and started
to learn to play actual music. The very first song I ever played from start to finish was “The Streets of Laredo.”
Now that’s a song you don’t hear too much anymore,
outside of rodeos and camp fires on the cattle range, and I
rarely get requests for it. But for me it was a milestone, and
true inspiration. I could play real music!

The funny thing about playing the guitar is that writing your own songs seems almost inevitable. Once you start teaching yourself to play the stuff you’ve heard on the radio
and your record albums, you realize that most songs are
made up of only three or four chords. The
same
three or
four chords. That’s an earth-shattering discovery, since once you figure that out
, you can start putting little tunes together
without even trying very hard.

I tend to go overboard, and I became obsessed with music. Little melodies would occur to me at the most
unlikely times—while getting out of the shower, talking on
the phone, even trying to fall asleep at night—and I would hop out of the bed or the bathroom or wherever I happened to be and jot them down on the back of a grocery receipt or
whatever I could find. And then, when it was more
convenient, I would sit down and try to fit words to the
melody. Then I would pick up my guitar and pick out the chords I could
already hear in my head.

It wasn’t long before the fame bug hit me. Spending a lot
of time banging out tunes puts wild ideas in your head. I
saw stardom, I saw fortune ... most of all, I saw the
thrill of having talented, well-known performers recording
songs I’d written. Sallie Spooner, Incorporated. While
my friends were daydreaming about becoming doctors and
lawyers or running away to the south of France with the movie star of their choice, I started to
picture my name on the label of a
record as it went round and round on the turntable.

The problem was that I had no idea of how songwriters
actually got then: songs produced.
So I decided to sit it out until golden opportunity
came knocking at my door. I didn’t know how or when it
would, but somehow I had faith that eventually it would all
work out. In the meantime I kept plugging away, turning
out song after song. I ended up being the hit of every
party I went to, that’s for sure.

“All things come to she who waits.” Isn’t that a famous expression? In my case it proved to be true. About a week
after my less-than-memorable afternoon with Dan Meyer
and friend, I was sitting in my room, puttering around and
half listening to the radio. It’s amazing how much time I
spend doing that. I pretend I’m keeping up with music
trends, but really I’m just lazy a lot of the time.