He Loves Me Not (12 page)

Frannie was disappointed. She had actually thought I would have a costume, as if this were a gig, and I had to be spangled and special. “My personality,” I told her, “is all the flash I need.”

Frannie laughed. “Alison, you are too much.”

She
was too much. Frankly, this breakfast thing was more pressure than I had bargained for. All the confidence Ted had given me by asking me out was dwindling away because of everybody’s interest.

“You know Todd Morrell and Bobby Bastien?” said Frannie.

“Yes.”

“You’ve started a trend. They’re taking Shelley and Margo to breakfast Friday.”

Me, Alison, setting a trend with her first date.

I decided definitely not to tell anybody that my father in his new bathrobe was present for the entire thing.

“Actually,” said Ted, “I already ate breakfast.”

My father stared at Ted and then at the mounds of food he’d bought for Ted to gobble up.

Ted said nervously, “My mother has this rule. I don’t leave in the morning without hot food in my stomach.”

We just stared at him. A breakfast date and he’d already eaten? Oh no, I thought, it’s going to be a nightmare, not a dream. I looked at the clock. The forty-five minutes we had began to look like very long minutes.

“My mother is very suspicious of other people’s nutritional standards,” he said. He was flushed. Embarrassment? I thought. “I have to brown-bag it to school instead of buying hot lunch because she knows I’ll be filling my system with preservatives, saccharin, and artificial food coloring.”

My father said, “I would have to agree with her there. Alison and I like to think we’re sort of guinea pigs for cancer-causing agents, we eat so many of them.”

Ted and my father got along just fine. In fact, they sat there for fifteen solid minutes, one-third of my breakfast date, exchanging quips. I thought, This is the pits. It’s one thing to be envious of Kimmy and Frannie and all the rest. Now I have to be jealous of my own father?

But I couldn’t seem to think of anything interesting to say. My father was filled with funny remarks and Ted kept topping them, and the two of them had a fine old time. I poured myself a cup of coffee and drank it black, which I absolutely hate, for punishment. Coffee makes me feel hot from the inside out, the opposite of sunshine, which makes me hot from the outside in. That was the sort of thing I thought about, while Ted and my father had a date.

“Well,” said my father suddenly, pushing away from the table, “guess I’d better get ready for work.” And he was gone, thundering up the stairs, so nobody could mistake the fact that Ted and I were now alone.

The good conversation stopped.

Ted and I just sort of looked at each other and smiled edgily.

“You look terrific,” said Ted.

“Thank you.”

“In fact, I was sitting here thinking a camera crew would be arriving soon to film you for a floor wax ad.”

“A what?” I said.

“You know. Where the unbelievably well-dressed superwoman, wife, and mother, who has a full-time glamorous career, waxes her floor just before the prime minister comes to dinner and she doesn’t even get her satin slippers spotted?”

I giggled. “I’m not that familiar with floor wax.”

Ted made a big production of examining our kitchen floor. “No. I don’t think you are.”

“I have better things to do than wax floors, Ted Mollison.”

And that led us into a discussion of things we’d rather do than housework, which Mrs. Mollison felt her sons should do instead of her. I was all for Mrs. Mollison’s getting out of housework, but I did feel sorry for Ted having to do any. Housework is such drudgery.

“Sorry enough for me that we could have a housecleaning date?” said Ted hopefully. “Me wash windows, you polish silver?”

“Not that sorry.”

We laughed. Ted took a piece of Sara Lee coffeecake after all, and we munched happily, poured more coffee, and talked about dusting (the evils of it).

Right in the middle of his next sentence Ted leaped up. “Committee meeting!” he said. “Forgot the time. Alison, I have to run. I’ll call you.” He was already elbowing into his jacket, gathering up his books and his ever-present camera. “Thanks,” he said at the door, and for a moment we stared at each other.

Kiss me, I thought.

But he didn’t. He shifted his books to his other side and said again, looking at the dusty Venetian blinds at the window, “Thanks, Alison.” And then he was gone.

I watched him drive away.

I was so exhausted by the whole thing I was ready for bed again. It was only seven forty-five and I had an entire day of school ahead. A day in which an awful lot of people would be wanting to know what a breakfast date was like. I tried to think of a good catchy answer I would toss at everybody. “Well,” I’d say casually, “we sloshed a lot of coffee around, that’s all.”

I wondered if that
was
all. Or if Ted would call again for a longer, better date than one slice of Sara Lee and a few minutes chatter about dust.

Ted’s car turned the far corner of our street and he honked twice. Good-bye, I thought; that wasn’t a honk at another car, that was a honk good-bye to me.

All day long in school I could hear the horn beeping at me.

T
ED DID NOT CALL
me.

On Saturday night he just appeared. We were supplying background dinner music at a fund drive kickoff for a new Y.M.C.A. We’d had three speeches—boring—and now they were asking for pledges—boring. Most of the people there were not physical fitness types. They were stodgy, moneyed types. I was yawning to myself over the keyboard. We had to play very softly and Rob was just sort of diddling at the drums and we were all in danger of falling asleep over our own music—and there in the doorway was Ted.

The first thing I noticed was that he did not have a camera with him. He looked almost undressed without it dangling from a cord around his neck. I envied his poise, the way he simply smiled at the dinner organizers and threaded his way through the pledge-takers, around the tables, and over to me.

He gave Ralph a quick look, obviously worrying that Ralph might throw him out. “Not to worry,” I whispered. “Ralph is so bored he wouldn’t mind if you hung from the chandeliers.”

Immediately Ted looked up at the ceiling for good chandeliers to hang from, but all there were were long white strips of fluorescent lights. Ted looked disappointed.

Ted found a folding chair and sat next to me. I moved a little on my piano bench but he didn’t take me up on it. “I promised your father not to bother you on the job,” he whispered. “I think that includes taking a separate seat.”

So he had called Daddy to see where I was tonight!

It made me all warm and excited to think about that call. About Ted wanting to be around me, talking to my father, getting in his car, and driving out here just to come sit with me.

Get closer, Ted, I thought. I love you for your long, lean legs.

But Ted stayed where he was, on the gray metal folding chair.

“What’s in your hair?” said Ted.

“Stars.”

“That’s what I thought they were. Why do you have stars in your hair? How do they stick?”

“Decorated hair is in this year. Ribbons, combs, bangles, beads, and even stars. They come in a jar—you just shake them on right after you spray on the hairspray and they stick.”

We played the theme from
Ordinary People.
The best scene in that film was where the boy, Con, lies in bed rehearsing the phone call he’ll make to the girl he wants to date. I wondered if it had been hard for Ted to call my father. Somehow, I couldn’t picture Ted having trouble phoning people or walking into rooms filled with strange people.

“I’m not sure I like them,” said Ted.

I thought he meant rooms full of strange people.

“The stars in your hair,” he explained. “They don’t look very strokable.”

That time I really did miss a beat in the music. It was a perfectly simple phrase that I’d played perhaps a thousand times, and I fumbled it. Ted noticed it; Ralph noticed it; in fact, I think the whole room noticed it. I stared down into the keys and waited for the repeat to come so I could set it right.

I’d set my hair with my electric curlers and I was wearing it loose, which I don’t usually do, because it falls forward into my face and makes it impossible to see what I’m doing. But there was enough hair spray in my hair to make each strand like wire.

And tonight Ted Mollison wanted to stroke it.

I wondered if Lizzie would lend—or even sell—me her hairbrush so I could brush it all out during a break.

Ted said softly, “You really look fantastic.”

It was a good thing he said that during a rest. My hands began to dampen. I tried to think of what to suggest to do after the music. Ted obviously had his car. Ralph always took me home, but tonight I’d go home with Ted.

Ted didn’t talk to me again, but I could feel him there, only inches away, looking at me and thinking about me. I had sat on a hundred stages in front of a lot of audiences but I had never felt the spotlight as much as I did then. I could hardly breathe. A good thing I wasn’t a singer!

When we broke up Ted went to get my jacket, and Ralph said to me, “You want we should keep on playing so you two can have a little music to make love by?”

“Ralph!” I said furiously.

“Well, you’re making it awfully obvious, dear,” said Lizzie.

“How about Ted?” I asked her. “Is he making it obvious?”

“He came, didn’t he?” said Lizzie.

I decided she was right. He had come; that made it obvious. He liked me, too. Ralph left by himself, after informing Ted at length that it sure was a pleasure not to have to tote Alison around anymore, and why didn’t Ted show up every night like this and set Ralph free? Ted just grinned, but he didn’t commit himself to every night.

We sat by the piano and talked until the dinner organizers asked us very politely did we have rides home? Because it was getting very late and they really did have to lock up.

I was amazed to see that Ted and I had talked for an entire
hour
after Ralph and the rest had left. I could not believe it. Ted was so easy and companionable I really had not noticed the time. “Come on,” said Ted, “I’ll drive you home.”

“You…you want to stop off somewhere?” I said. It was also amazing how much courage it took me to ask him that. “We …we could get ice cream, or something.” Ted hesitated, and I said, “My treat.”

“Actually,” he said, “I’m in a popcorn mood. Where can we go besides the movies where we can get popcorn?”

“My house.”

So we went to my house. Ted, it turned out, was forbidden to have popcorn at home. His mother hated the smell. She thought popcorn smelled like Woolworth’s, and that made her think of unwashed shoplifters getting their popcorn out of a machine using fake butter.

“I,” I told Ted, “supply nothing but the most high-class popcorn with real butter.”

We talked all the way home, too, and it was like a television script. I thought everything Ted said was funny and he thought everything I said was hysterical. We kept laughing and enjoying each other and I actually felt giddy, I was enjoying myself so much.

When we got to our driveway and pulled up behind the fat old fir trees between the house and the garden, Ted turned off the motor and the lights and we sat for a moment in silence and darkness.

I wanted to kiss Ted so much I could hardly stand it, but I wanted
him
to kiss
me,
so I just sat there. We looked at each other and I could feel him holding his breath, too, and I thought, Go ahead, do it. But he got out of the car and came around to open my door, and the moment was gone. Daddy heard us and turned on the porch lights and yelled for us to come on in. The three of us popped popcorn, and the three of us joked and talked together, and the three of us had a wonderful time.

The only trouble was, I would rather that just two of us had that wonderful time.

“I wonder if the space shuttle is doing okay,” said Ted. I blinked at him, because nobody had expressed any interest in space shuttles up till then and the remark had nothing to do with anything.

My father said, “I don’t know. It’ll be on the news, though. You want me to turn it on? There’s a set downstairs and another up.”

I said, “Your TV upstairs is a better one, Daddy.”

My father looked at me for a moment, and then at Ted, and then he laughed. “So it is,” he said. “Enjoy your popcorn.”

He went on upstairs, and Ted and I were alone in the unwaxed kitchen with the rest of the popcorn. “Are you really interested in the space shuttle?” I asked. “Or was that a ploy?”

“I’m interested in everything,” said Ted, and he proceeded to tell me all the things he was interested in. I felt as if we could talk for a decade and not begin to say all the things we wanted to say to each other. I had forgotten, really, how wonderful it is to share things with a person your own age, who has your own ideas.

Ted handed me a napkin when the popcorn was finally gone—we’d popped a huge batch—and when our fingers touched I shivered. For one moment it was just like in the car, both of us holding our breath, and then Ted was leaning across the table and we were kissing each other. I loved touching him. We moved the chairs and got closer and kissed again. “Tastes of popcorn and butter and salt,” said Ted, laughing softly.

“Want a glass of water?” I said, embarrassed.

“Definitely not. I’ll just kiss away the rest of the popcorn till I get down to the real Alison.”

We started to go into the living room, to sit on the couch and be more comfortable, but we never got there. We just stood between the stove and the refrigerator and hugged and kissed.

“I was right,” said Ted after a bit. “You can’t stroke stars.”

We were both gasping for breath. It wasn’t that kissing was so strenuous. It was just that I was so glad to have it happen I couldn’t seem to fill my lungs. I put my hands on Ted’s shoulders and I wanted to hang on to him all night.

My father yelled, “I’ve finished my popcorn. Have you?”

“No,” yelled Ted, “not yet, sir.”