Crazy in Love (3 page)

“Fine. Terrific.” I slammed my locker shut, feeling guilty all of a sudden. It was as if I had a body hidden in there instead of my dull old textbooks. But that’s the thing about Dan and his
gorgeous blue eyes. No matter how confident you’re
feeling, no matter how much preparation you’ve had for
your conversation with him, you, always end up looking like
you’re posing for animal crackers in his presence. The cool,
sophisticated side of Sallie Spooner didn’t stand a chance.

“Great. I’m glad to hear it. Did you stay in the city?” I nodded like some kind of wooden dummy. I could feel myself turning red. Sometimes I think I’m the only woman alive in this day and age who still blushes. You’d think I’d taken lessons from Scarlett O’Hara.

“Too bad. I was lucky. Spent a couple of months out at my brother’s place in Colorado.  Beautiful country out there.”

“Terrific.” It’s funny. I’m someone who usually talks a
million miles a minute, but Dan Meyer’s presence had this
peculiar effect on me. If it could have been packaged, my
parents would have bought it by the ton.

“Hey, listen, Sal, I’m in kind of a hurry, but I wanted to
ask you something.”

Now, I’d like to interject here that there is probably nothing I hate more in this world than being called Sal. Call me buddy, call me girlie—anything but Sal. Whenever
somebody calls me that, I feel as if I should instantly sprout
hair in my armpits and change into an undershirt with giant holes in it. But because of what Dan said next, I quickly forgot my resentment,

“I thought if you weren’t busy tomorrow afternoon, we
could go skating in the park.”

I gulped. Noticeably. I’d had absolutely no time to
prepare for that one. He just threw it out at me from
nowhere. I turned redder; I’m sure of it.

“Sure. Sounds terrific.” Whenever I’m nervous, I use
the word “terrific” constantly. Every second word I use is
“terrific.” Then I remembered. “Oh, wait a second. I’m
supposed to spend tomorrow afternoon with Rachel.”

“Well, then, bring her along. And I’ll bring my friend
Fred.”

“Fred? Who’s Fred?”

“You know, Fred Abrams? He’s one of my best friends.
Surely you know Fred.”

“Oh, yeah. Fred. Terrific.” Terrific, again. There must
be some weird correlation between my pulse rate and my
compulsion to use that stupid word.

Anyway, within five minutes of that encounter, I’d
left a message with Rachel’s mother
that she was to call me the instant she got home from
school. My first date of the school year, and with Dan
Meyer, no less! And, of course, Rachel’s first date of the
year, too. I wasn’t sure what she thought about Fred
Abrams, and I didn’t know how she’d feel about having
been set up with him without even knowing about it.

I suppose I should mention at this point that Rachel is
Jewish. The reason I’m bringing that up now is that she
mainly goes out with Jewish guys, people she knows from
school or from temple. Or every once in a while her parents
come up with some guy they want her to go out with. The Glass family is not what I’d call religious, but they do have a very strong sense of their Jewish heritage. Her mother
preserves as many of the traditions as she can, and she’s
passed along an appreciation of both the heritage and the traditions to all her children. So Rachel tends to be selective
about the boys she goes out with.

Fred Abrams also happened to be Jewish, a fact that I
pointed out to her later on that afternoon when I ended up
arguing with her on the telephone.

“But you’ve always liked Fred!” I insisted, desperately
afraid that the plans for our double date would get messed
up. “You haven’t once in the whole time I’ve known you
said one word against Fred Abrams.”

“Sallie! I don’t think I’ve ever said a single word, for
or
against, Fred Abrams. I don’t even
know
him! And now
you’ve got us set up in this cozy little foursome.”

“But maybe you’ll turn out to like him. Can’t you look at this as a rare chance to get to know somebody better?
Even make a new friend? You know what they say—‘Make
new friends, but keep the o-old....’ ”

“Don’t sing, Sallie. Not now, when you’re using me as a
way to get to Dan Meyer.”

“Don’t you think you’re exaggerating? Few people would call me
an opportunist, under these circumstances. Look, Fred’s
a lovely guy. He’s smart, he has a good sense of humor....”

“Right. And he’s a nice Jewish boy. You sound just like
my Aunt Libby, our family’s resident matchmaker.”

“It’s only skating. And it’s only for a few hours.
And I’ll be there. You can always spend the whole time talking to me.
Besides, it might even turn out to be fun. You and Fred
could end up becoming a hot item.”

“Humph.” Rachel sighed, but I could tell she was about to give in. “We-ell, okay. But only because you’re my best
friend. Believe me, I wouldn’t do this for anybody
else but you.”

“You’re a peach!”

By the time the next afternoon rolled around, I’d
washed and blow-dried my hair, tried without success to cover some
of my freckles with liquid foundation, and changed my clothes at least five times. My excitement turned into nervousness as I walked over to Rachel’s house,
the meeting point for all four of us before walking over
to Central Park together. It’s not that I generally worry about going out with guys; it’s just that I’d had this ridiculous
crush on Dan Meyer for such a long time that I’d built him
up to be a real superman in my mind. So I naturally felt that
I could be nothing short of superwoman myself.

When I got to Rachel’s apartment, I started to feel a little
more like a normal person and less like someone who was about to appear before a Grand Jury. Rachel wasn’t the least bit
excited, much less anxious. In fact, the looks she kept giving me made it clear that she was only
going through with this whole thing for my sake.

“I’ll go,” the look in her blazing dark eyes said, “but
don’t expect me to have a good time. And don’t expect me
to forget this favor, either.”

Still, she was making as much of an effort as I was. She was dressed in acid-washed jeans and an “I Love New
York” T-shirt, and I could tell that she had spent a lot of
time getting her hair just right and putting on her mascara and blush very carefully, just as I had. I started feeling
pretty good. I knew that I looked as nice as I could, and I was wearing my favorite new outfit: lavender pinwale
corduroy overalls and a pale purple-and-pink plaid blouse. I’d
even worn matching lavender plastic combs to keep my
hair out of my face.

Dan and Fred showed up at the Glasses’ front door before
Rachel and I had a chance to talk. But I could tell by the
way she was acting that she was starting to get into it. Fred
Abrams isn’t a bad-looking guy, and he’s got a great sense of humor. He also has a brain, which is more than I can say for most of the guys we go to school with. Rachel started flirting with him as soon as we started walking over to the
park, and I relaxed.

At least I relaxed as far as the Rachel-and-Fred duo was
concerned. As for Dan, I still felt as if I’d to try really
hard, as if I’d to impress him. I ended up doing what I
usually do in a situation like that: clamming up. Instead of saying something stupid, I always opt for saying nothing at
all. It’s amazing how many guys have actually said, after a first date, “Gee, Sallie’s a nice girl, but she’s awfully
quiet,
isn’t she?” Me! Old blabbermouth herself! It just goes to
show you what nerves can do.

I found myself lapsing into my typical first-date silence, even when we stopped at the skate shop on Lexington Avenue to rent skates for the afternoon. Dan didn’t seem to
notice, though. He talked constantly. He didn’t stop once,
not even when we started to cross Park Avenue without checking the street lights and nearly got run over by a taxi. As the taxi driver yelled at us out the window
, Dan kept on talking.

What he talked about was himself. He told me about his
family, his basketball team, the concert
he’d gone to the week before at Madison Square Garden,
the reason why he couldn’t wear wool sweaters, and about a dozen other topics of interest to no one else except his
mother and possibly his shrink, if he had one. But I was trying to be a good listener, so I just smiled and nodded a lot. I guess I was even grateful that I wasn’t being called
upon to make any social contribution.

Meanwhile, it seemed as if Rachel and Fred were really hitting it off. They, too, were chattering away. Rachel had
stopped giving me those dirty looks, so I figured I was back in her good graces again. We strolled into the park, found a
bench, and put on our skates.

Now, as I have already
mentioned, athletic prowess has never been one of my strong points. I can stand up on skates, and I can get around
okay on flat surfaces, but give me a hill—going up
or
down—and it’s all over. Rachel is a little better than I am, but she’s no Olympic star, either. As we all got ready to start
skating, Rachel and I glanced at each other ruefully. I began
to wonder if we should have insisted on doing something less physically demanding
like going to the movies or sitting on a
curb somewhere. But it was too late.

“Come on, Sal,” Dan called as he stood up with ease
. I thought he’d reach for my hand and expect
to glide off with me as if we were Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers. But instead, he took off and
called to me, “I’ll race you!”

“Hey, wait up!” A few seconds later, Fred had taken off
after him like a bolt of lightning.

Rachel and I sat on the bench, staring at our knees. I distractedly ran my fingernails against the lavender cor
duroy of my overalls. I love that feeling of running your
nails over the little ridges. It was a good thing, too, since it
suddenly looked as if there was a strong possibility that I’d
spend the rest of the afternoon doing exactly that.

“Was it something I said?” Rachel joked, and we both
burst out laughing.

“And to think I was worried about my grace and form!” I exclaimed. “Come on, let’s give this a try.” I stood
up cautiously, then reached for Rachel’s hand. “We’ll
probably have a better time without them, anyway.”

The two of us slowly made our way down one of the
roads that run through Central Park. On the weekends when the weather is good, the roads are closed to traffic. So all we
had to contend with was bicycles, skaters with earphones
, and an occasional dog who, for some unknown
reason, had taken it upon himself to discourage skating in
Central Park by barking and jumping up on innocents like us
.

“You realize we might never see them again,” I said after
about an hour of us wheeling around the park in slow
motion, clutching at each other and occasionally dragging
each other down to the hot, grainy pavement.

“No such luck. Here they come now.”

Sure enough. Dan and Fred came racing toward us.
Instead of looking apologetic, though, they looked cross.

“Hey, what happened?” Dan demanded.
“We kept waiting for the two of you to catch up.”

I was tempted to explain that we’d been discovered by a famous film director who’d insisted on filming our
agile movements for his latest picture, but I stopped myself. M
y wonderfully cynical humor is often wasted on people who
are too dense to understand it.

Instead, I turned to him, and still holding on to Rachel to
keep myself from spilling to the ground in an undignified
heap of lavender corduroy and spinning wheels, I growled,
“What happened to
us!
What happened to
you?
Why didn’t
you wait, or come looking for us?”

I am generally a pretty easygoing sort of person, and it is
not in my nature to make trouble. So once I’d complained
, I made sure things returned to an even keel
pretty fast. Within a minute or two, we were all friends
again. Just a happy foursome, tripping through Central Park
on a sunny Saturday in Indian summer.

“How about getting a Coke somewhere?” Rachel sug
gested. “I’m dying of thirst.” I had to admit that she looked a little flushed. Personally, I was completely drained from
the experience of fighting gravity for over an hour, all in the
name of appearing to be a trendy, fun-loving New Yorker.

We found our old bench and changed back into our shoes.
My feet had never been so happy before in their whole
lives. Solid ground had never felt better.

“Where should we go?” Now that I was stable again, it
was easy to return to my usual chirpy self.

“There’s a coffee shop on Madison,” Fred informed us.
“Let’s go there.”