Knots in My Yo-Yo String (12 page)

We began our relationship in first grade, after I entered Hartranft Elementary partway through the year. I don’t remember how I determined that she was my girlfriend, only that I thought of her that way, and that if someone said to me, as adults do, “Do you have a girlfriend?” I would say, “Yes.” And the adult would say, “Who?” And I would say, “Judy Brooks.”

There wasn’t much more to it than that. As a romance, it could be better described by what did not happen as by what did. We did not hold hands, we did not kiss, we did not walk to school together, we did not even talk much to each other. I did, however, accompany her parents to a dance recital that she participated in. And one Saturday morning I went with her to her dentist, Dr. Wenof on Marshall Street. I remained behind in the waiting room while she bravely followed the nurse out of sight. Minutes later I heard her scream. I tensed. I fretted. Was she screaming for me? What were they doing to her? Was it  …  The Needle? Should I charge in and rescue her? I stewed for another minute or two, then returned to my comic book.

When I say we did not kiss, I mean there was no
we
kissing. Never did she kiss me while I, at the same time, kissed her back. But once,
I
kissed
her.
Whether I wanted to or not.

One day when we were ten, Judy Brooks and I were on the other side of the tracks, near the creek. I was showing her the best kind of rocks to find salamanders
under when Eddie Carcarey showed up. This was not good news. Eddie Carcarey and I had been having our problems. They had begun about a year before when I decided to organize a gang and invited Eddie to join. Eddie was one tough hombre, and I figured he would give the gang some muscle. He joined but then refused to abide by the gang’s only rule: to call me Captain. So I kicked him out. He retaliated by marching into our backyard in broad daylight and knocking over my mother’s basket of clothespins.

And now Eddie Carcarey was coming toward Judy and me with mischief in his eyes.

“Pick her up,” he said.

“Huh?” I said.

“Pick her up. Pick her up.” His red hair and freckles flared with menace.

Judy was terrified. I imagine I looked terrified to Eddie as well, but in fact I wasn’t. I had never picked up a girl before. I had never even
thought
about picking up a girl, but now that I was being ordered to do so, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. In fact, considering that the girl to be picked up was Judy Brooks, it seemed like a darn good idea.

I had seen plenty of pickups on television and in the movies, mostly cowboys hoisting ladies in long dresses who had fainted or sprained their ankle. So I figured I knew the basic move.

“Okay,” I said, trying to sound scared.

While Judy stood rigid as a tree trunk, I positioned myself behind her and went through my pre-pickup sequence: spread and plant the feet, crouch, right arm behind her knee, left arm across her back, and—lift. In the movies the lady always came up smartly from the ground, as if she were on a swing, as if she were light as a balloon. It didn’t go quite that way for me.

When I lifted, Judy’s feet came up all right, as high as my shoulder, but the rest of her went down. Her head was around my knees, and now she was sliding toward the ground, her hand groping for my belt. I quickly dropped to one knee and propped her back against the other.

Eddie Carcarey sneered, “You’re weak as an ant.”

Maybe so, but I wasn’t through yet. Driven not by Eddie Carcarey’s sneer but by visions of Lash La Rue and Tex Ritter and how they would have done it, I pulled Judy into my butter pickle biceps, I squatted like a weightlifter, I took a deep breath, I heaved and grunted, and I picked her up. It wasn’t a classic—her head and knees were high while her rear end sagged in the middle, giving her a V-shape. My arms turned to stone, my knees buckled under me. But I thought hard of Lash and Tex, and I held it for a good five seconds before I let her down.

“Now kiss her,” Eddie said.

Good thing that’s what he said, because the only part of my body not in muscular shock was my lips. I
gave her a quick peck on the cheek, and that, to my recollection, was the first time I ever kissed a girl.

Eddie Carcarey trotted off, no doubt pleased with himself for forcing me to perform two distasteful acts.

That was the year Judy Brooks broke up with me. Well, strictly speaking, she didn’t break up with
me,
she broke up with everyone. She announced that she was through with boys, she hated them all—“you all,” I believe, is how she put it. I tried to find a loophole, but no matter how I looked at it, I was a boy, I was one of “you all.” For the first time since first grade, I was single.

With a grim, gritting vengeance, I decided to retaliate by hating all girls, which I did successfully for three or four weeks—or was it three or four minutes? In any case, by sixth grade I had another girlfriend.

Bobbi Garber.

Like Judy Brooks, Bobbi Garber lived in the 700 block of George Street. She was one of three beautiful sisters, probably the most famous female threesome in town. The oldest sister, Randy, was Miss Montgomery County. Ruby was a cheerleader at Stewart Junior High. And the youngest, Roberta, called Bobbi, was in fifth grade, a year behind me, at Hartranft.

The Garber girls’ father, Bill, was a car salesman on Markley Street, by the brewery. When I was in eighth grade, he sold us our first car, a turtle-green 1952 Pontiac.

Bobbi was a spitfire tomboy. We rode bikes around
the West End. We played in the street. And each school day at noon when classes let out for lunch, Bobbi waited with me at an alley that fed onto Chain Street half a block from school, next to Susan Davis’s father’s fish market. I was a lieutenant in the safety patrol, and it was my duty to stand at the alley and insure that the kids going home for lunch crossed it safely. I wore a white military-looking strap that circled my waist and looped up diagonally over one shoulder. Pinned to it was my badge, fancy silvered tin with an oval insert painted bright red. I guess I’ll never know which dazzled Bobbi more, me or the badge.

I never gave Bobbi Garber a kiss, but I did give her something much more serious, as meaningful a token of my affection as I could manage, and frankly, a fairly painful sacrifice. I gave her my yo-yo. I have since wondered if I truly gave it as a token of affection, or was I finally getting rid of those infernal knots? Whatever, the romance dissolved when I went off to junior high. I never got my yo-yo back.

In seventh grade I moved on to the next level of kissing: lip to lip (or to be precise, teeth to teeth). Until then I had never kissed a female, not even my mother, on the lips, unless you count a few times when our dog Lucky surprised me with a wet one.

This innocent era came to a close on a spring evening in my thirteenth year. I was riding my bike after dinner. There were several hours of daylight left. I
was cruising Haws Avenue. I had just made my daily pass of Dovie Wilmoth’s house and had crossed Oak into the next block of Haws when I saw several classmates on the sidewalk in front of Kathy Heller’s house. They called. I stopped.

Someone said, “Want to play?”

“What?” I said.

“Truth or consequences.”

“Okay,” I said.

Kathy was there. And Judy Pierson. And Kenny Hengen. And another girl. Apparently they were short on boys.

However the truth part of the game went, the consequence was always the same: You had to kiss a girl. I saw Kenny Hengen do it and thought,
Uh-oh.
He really got into it. Lip to lip, arms around the girl, eyes closed. The smooch seemed to go on for hours, right there on the sidewalk, broad daylight. I had stumbled into the big time. Was I ready for it? Why hadn’t I just waved and kept on pedaling? I wished I were still a cowboy. Nearby waited my Roadmaster like a patient, faithful horse.

And then it was my turn. And there was blond-haired Kathy Heller, to whom I hardly ever spoke, with whom I had absolutely nothing in common, standing in front of me, taking off her glasses, awaiting her consequence. Had I time to practice, I might have rehearsed with a pillow or teddy bear. As it was, my
lip-eye coordination was a trifle off. I did not so much kiss her as smash my face into hers. Our teeth met with an audible
clack.
But I stayed with it, and so did she. We disengaged teeth and backed off to lip depth and resumed blotting each other. I forgot to close my eyes, however, and to this day I have never had a better view of two eyebrows. When it seemed a respectable amount of time had elapsed, we stopped.

The kiss itself could not have lasted more than three or four seconds, but in my ruminations later it went on for weeks. I soon began to imagine that I had been as bold, smooth, and masterful as Kenny Hengen. Once or twice I heard my Roadmaster whinny, but it was only in my dreams.

It was January. Snow lay heaped outside Stewart Junior High School in the far West End of Nonistown. Homerooms had dismissed an hour before, but dozens of ninth graders still milled about in the gym. Earlier that day we had voted for class officers, and we were waiting for the results.

I had run for class president, along with Bill Steinberg, Susan Lane, and Bob Peterson. A teacher came in and made the announcement. I had won. My old pal Roger Adelman had won, too; he was vice president.

I’m the second from the left, the newly elected class president of Stewart Junior High School. In the center is Roger Adelman, my friend and vice president.

I was happy, but I was also uncomfortable. The three other presidential contenders were my friends. In sixth grade Bill Steinberg had finished second to me in the grade-school fifty-yard dash. Now he was my best friend, and here he was trailing me to the finish line again. I apologized to him, he congratulated me, and I think we both took solace in knowing that he was already student council president and that he had gotten faster than I and that if we were to race right then, he would win.

Susan Lane and I had a close, nonkissing kind of relationship. We told each other things we told no one else. We appointed ourselves honorary brother and sister. We trusted each other. Once when a boy asked Susan for a date, she excused herself, hurried to a phone, and called me to ask if she should accept. When I won the election, I apologized to her, too.

I would have apologized to Bob Peterson as well, but I couldn’t find him in the gym.

Once I got the apologies out of the way, I was free to feel good—and not just about winning the election. It seems I had won something else, too.

For several years I had admired Judy Pierson, mostly from afar. She had been in my grade at Hartranft, but she was always in the other class. She was at Kathy Heller’s house on the Day of the Clacking Teeth, but I don’t recall if I ever served as her consequence. In the early months of ninth grade, she had been Nick Salvatore’s girlfriend.

But Nick Salvatore was not a basketball player—and I was—and that led to an interesting coincidence involving the “He’s Our Man” cheer. In this cheer, each of five cheerleaders was assigned the name of a starting player—in this case Roger Adelman, Louis Darden, Bob Hopple, Bruce Lindeman, or me. And so it went:

To my delight, it was Judy Pierson who had my name. Often the cheer was performed while we were gathered around the coach during a time-out. To anyone looking at the huddling team, I must have appeared to be listening intently to the coach. As a matter of fact, I was listening to Judy Pierson, her lone girl voice echoing through the gym, calling my name:

I’m here,
I wanted to say. And then I was listening to the bleachers pick it up and roar back at her:

And then I was peeking at her, at the arms churning, the orange and blue sweater:

And I was wondering, was it just dumb luck that she got my name, or had she made sure?

I had been hearing reports that since Christmas she had been less than happy with Nick Salvatore. And now I was in the gym not to play basketball but to accept congratulations for winning the election, and Nick Salvatore was nowhere in sight, and Judy Pierson was.

I walked her home that day, down snow-flanked sidewalks. She wore red mittens. Somewhere along Marshall Street I asked if I could hold her hand. She said yes.

There are few times in a life of which it can be said: Nothing is wrong. The twenty minutes that it took for Judy Pierson and me to walk from school to her house on Kohn Street was one such time. It was as if a train I had been riding had dropped me off at a solitary station,
and the next train would not be along for twenty minutes. Gone were the shakes and sways and rattles of the old train, yet to come were the distant rumbling mysteries of the next. In the meantime there was only silence and stillness and a brisk cold white world and a girl who had taken off her mitten so that our hands could touch.