College applications, courses, occasional babysitting: The daily grind of a high school senior in 1965.
There was one distraction, more of an annoyance really. A boy in a couple of my classes, Tony, seemed to have taken a shine to me. He'd chatted with me a couple of times last year, and flirted in the van on the way back from the beach last June — which in part precipitated my fight with Pierre. Now he'd started calling me after school once a week.
He was nineteen too, dark-hair cropped short, a bit taller than me, average weight. Not ugly but not a stand-out, either. And shy. Really shy. We'd talk about school, sometimes about what was going on in America and the world.
Once he took me to a movie and clumsily tried to feel my breasts.
After that he started calling a couple of times a week, then every other day. He was starting to bug me, and I told him to cool it. He backed off. For a while.
Amid the swirl of classes and the stress of college prep courses, the only thing that kept me sane was music. Jess was taking guitar lessons and lent me her old autoharp. I resolved to learn the complicated string instrument and got sheet music for some wonderful Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary folk songs. The discipline of an hour practicing every day grounded me.
Everything seemed to be on an even keel when what I'd been dreading happened.
I'd been writing to Pierre three or four times a week. Events and emotion skittered all over the numbered pages in different sized letters and diverse colors of ink in my fanciful italic handwriting.
(I was getting mail from Danny, too, away at his Ivy League university, professing his rekindled affection and his regret at how badly he'd treated me all summer and would I forgive him and could I reconsider because he still loved me and wanted to marry me when we finished college ... I'm embarrassed to admit, looking back, that I answered most of those letters without ever working up the gumption to tell him how impossible his dream was, and how spectacularly unsuited I was to be his wife.)
Pierre's letters described his life on campus, the courses he liked and the few he didn't, how much he was enjoying a French reading course, how much he missed me, how he looked forward to Thanksgiving — he was saving up to take the bus to Washington to visit, and was there any chance I could come up there to visit him, too?
He was, in his words, rather "impecunious" so when the phone rang one evening and my mom beckoned me, silently mouthing the word "Pierre" with her hand over the mouthpiece, I knew it couldn't be good news.
He was in a cramped booth in the lobby of his impersonal freshman dorm, feeding quarters and dimes into the phone. He sounded over-excited, his words tumbling out. In a couple of minutes he'd run out of small talk. He told me how much he missed me. I said I missed him, too.
"I met someone at Orientation ..." There was a pause. She was cute, reminded him of me. She was sexy, reminded him of me. She was a virgin with long, dark hair and apple-shaped breasts ... she liked him, and they had sex in the woods one sunny afternoon. He regretted it. She regretted it. They did it again. And regretted it again. They hitchhiked together to visit her divorced mother in another Ohio college town. Since they couldn't sleep together at her mom's, they snuggled in a sleeping bag in the town's park. And fucked to keep warm ...
The night he called, they'd had sex under the stars in the college big quadrangle, he said, and he'd told her he was calling it quits. "I felt so empty, Taralee. Making love was okay, but the hollowness ... I felt as if I was somewhere far away, up among those distant blue stars looking down, watching our tiny figures go through the motions ... I miss you so much."
"Taralee?"
Cold fingers had wrapped themselves around my heart and my throat was so tight that when my words finally came out, they were only a tiny squeak into the phone.
"Pierre, I think you've learned the emptiness of sex without love ..."
I couldn't tell him how well I knew what that felt like. Ever.
There wasn't much more to say except goodbye. I didn't know whether I'd see him at Thanksgiving, or ever again. Mom knocked gently, and came back into the living room.
"Are you all right, Taralee?"
She glanced at the droplets running down my cheeks and hugged me, holding me until I let the tears flow. And after my sobbing subsided she walked me up to my attic room in that wonderful, warm old house, and sat on my bed rubbing my back until I fell asleep. My best friend in the world. Always.
I moped for a few days, but resumed my autoharp practice and cheered up before the week was out. I poured out my sadness and confusion in a letter to Pierre, and got a contrite, tear-spotted apology from him a few days later. He'd told me everything because we promised to be honest with each other, he said, and he was sorry he hurt me but would make it up to me at Thanksgiving ... if I'd still have him. Of course, I replied in a letter spattered with red-ink hearts. He was my once and future lover. For all time.
And so my attention returned to high school.
I hadn't been much of a Halloween girl since I'd outgrown my candy avarice as a youngster. But this year, friends in my school circle were angling to get me to their party. They'd picked an old-fashioned theme: there was even going to be apple-bobbing. Tony-the-pest bugged me for weeks to get a costume and come.
One evening I idly asked George what he thought I should wear for Halloween. He lifted an eyebrow, and said if I'd let him, he'd take care of it. I laughed, and thought nothing of it until ten days later, when my mom said Virginia had called and they'd like me to babysit while they went to an early Halloween party. When I arrived, George offered me his study to do my homework, as usual. Once the twins had their bath and bedtime story and had fallen asleep, I grabbed my books and opened the door. There on his leather-topped mahogany desk — oh, memories! — was a flat, wide box, wrapped in brown paper. A handwritten note on top said, "Taralee: Open me!"
