I Met Him That Morning
art by Joana Solá
I am between boyfriends. The truth is I am still in love, will always be in love with my high school sweetheart, but I am not a girl who pines or waits. I am a butterfly, a bee, a moth drawn to light. I am also a college senior, and diamond rings are popping up on my classmates’ ring fingers like dandelions in spring. In those days, the late 1950’s, girls like me, Jewish and middle class, went to college to find our prince, and in our naiveté, most of us believed or pretended to believe we would fall in love and live happily ever after—even if our own households said otherwise.
I am on a first date. I met him that morning. Natalie, my roommate, and I were sitting in the knotty pine breakfast nook in her kitchen when he rang the doorbell. Her mother answered. We heard voices in the entryway. “Oh, my God,” Natalie said. “It’s Dick Morse.” Her older brother’s best friend, her long-time crush.
I breathed his smell of sweet spice. He was funny and charming. Alive. Full of life. Something sparked between us. “Who are you fixing your roommate up with these days?” he asked Natalie.
“You,” we chorused.
Dick parks in the driveway to his house. We have been to see a movie, and whatever the movie, I was so exhilarated, afterwards, I let go of his hand, skipped, and spun along a brick sidewalk in downtown Boston. We stopped at the Lenox Lounge ordered whiskey sours and listened to mellow jazz. I was swept away by this alluring handsome boy who was a man—twenty-four to my twenty.
He turns off the car engine. It is New England cold. He leans toward me. Our lips touch. He is tender. I like this about him. We kiss again. “Let’s go inside,” he says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
I know who he is, a boy who left college, lived at home, hung out in bars, played poker, and bet on the horses with Natalie’s older brother. Then, he joined the army. That or be drafted. He travels for work, selling frozen fish to supermarkets in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. He traces the fine hairs on the back of my neck with his fingers. I shift and move closer. “I had a really nice time,” I say.
“Let me show you the house,” he says.
A porch light illuminates a three-story colonial with first floor wings, one a den, the other a breakfast room, he says. I’ve never heard of a breakfast room. We stand in the entryway under a crystal chandelier, the soles of my Pappagallo flats sinking into plush gray carpeting. I live in a five-room cape in Millburn, New Jersey—two bedrooms and a hall bathroom upstairs, living room, dining room, kitchen, and half-bath downstairs. I am here for a visit. He is here for a visit. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. His sister shouts from the den, “You can’t come in here. We’re in here.”
She and her boyfriend.
“We’ll go downstairs,” Dick calls back.
“You can’t go there either; mother and Sidney are down there.”
He takes my hand and leads me to the wide carpeted center stairway. I whisper. “I’m not going up.”
Upstairs, there are bedrooms. Upstairs, the air is seeded with sex.Nice girls do not go upstairs.
“Just for a minute,” he says.
Second floor, third floor, back down to the second floor—the master bedroom with its own bathroom. His sister’s bedroom, his bedroom which looks as if it hasn’t changed since he left—Red Sox pennants on the walls, baseball gloves, and a coveted signed baseball on a shelf. I hear voices in the downstairs hallway. A woman. A man.
“Mother,” he says.
Panic courses through me like an electric current. I haven’t done anything wrong, but I am conditioned to guilt—words my father drummed into me—wrong place, you’re a tramp; wrong place, you get what you deserve. I was in a wrong place. More than sixty years have passed since that moment; yet I feel my shame as I raced to the stairs, slipped on the smooth leather soles of my Pappagallo flats, and slid, in disbelief, to the hall below where I landed at my future mother-in-law’s feet.
