Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (21 page)

“What quarter is it?” I asked the doorman.

“Just beginning the third.”

“What's the score?”

“Sixty-five-sixty-three. Whiting.”

From deep inside the arena I heard great roars. I was safe! Back home! I struggled to my reserved seat: Seat 6, Row G, Section 21. At last I found it. Empty. Inviting. Waiting for me. The great scoreboard with its flashing yellow and red lights loomed reassuringly overhead.

Next to me was Schwartz. We had bought our tickets together. And on the other side of him was Flick. My chest was heaving and sweat poured down my face. A five-mile run in the snow brings roses to the cheeks.

“Boy, that must have been some date!” Schwartz stared at me admiringly. A hooting roar came from the crowd. Flick hollered: “Zodnycki canned another one! Look at that bastard hit them hook shots!”

Oblivious, Schwartz dug his elbow in my ribs. “How was she?”

“Fantastic! Unbelievable! There's no way I can tell you about it. Them Polish girls are somethin' else!”

That night a legend was born. I stood tall among my peers. Naturally, I've left many of the details hazy and embellished others, but that's the way you do in life. Suffice it to say that I never saw Josie much after that. It's not easy to see much of someone when you wear sunglasses to school and sneak home every night after dark through the cellar window.

Why does a man become a revolutionary? Just when is that precise instant of stark realization when he perceives with unmistakable clarity that he is but a humble tenpin in the cosmic bowling game of life? And that others are balls in that game? Look closely into the early private life of any great revolutionary and you will find a girl. Somewhere along the line, a pair of elfin eyes put Karl Marx down so decisively that he went home and wrote the first words of his
Manifesto.
I well remember my own turning point. Like most pivotal moments in our lives, it came unexpectedly and in the guise of rare good fortune. Her name was Daphne Bigelow. Even now, ten light-years removed from the event, I cannot suppress a fugitive shiver of tremulous passion and dark yearning. Her skin was of the clearest, rarest form of pure, translucent alabaster. She had no “eyes” in the mundane sense, but rather, she saw the world, or the world saw her, through twin jade-green jungle pools, mirrors of a
soul that was so mysterious, so enigmatic as to baffle ninth graders for yards around. I hesitate to use such a pitifully inadequate word as “hair” to describe the nimbus of magic, that shifting cloud of iridescence that framed a face of such surpassing beauty that even Buddha would have thought long and hard before staring straight into it Why I go on with this self-flagellation I do not know. Nevertheless, I cannot but continue.

There was something else about her, something I am not quite sure I can adequately convey through the sadly lacking means of imperfect human language. Daphne walked in a kind of soft haze of approaching dawn. A suggestion always lingered about her that she wasn't there at all. Rosy gold and blue tints flushed and were gone; soft winds blew. Somewhere exotic birds called out in their sleep as Daphne drifted into Biology I, trailing mimosa blossoms and offering ecstasies not yet plumbed by human experience.

Way down deep among the lower one third of the class, amid that great rabble of faceless mankind who squat among the rancid lunch bags and musky galoshes of academe, who are forever condemned to view the great pageants of life from parked third-hand jalopies amid the apple cores and beer cans of drive-in movies, I sat hardly daring to hope—from over a gulf so vast as to make all earthly distances pale to triviality—and devoured her daily with my eyes from behind a Biology I workbook.

Throughout the entire first semester after she came to Hohman High, my wonder grew like some dank, unclassified
toadstool in the coalbin of my subconscious. At first, dimly and with naive joy. I believed myself to be secretly blessed. I watched for her face everywhere: in the halls, on the stairways, in auditorium crowds, in the sullen herd who waited numbly outside the doors to be admitted in the early-morning hours, in the rumbling hordes who poured out of school after the last classes. Everywhere. From time to time, she would drift briefly into view and then disappear. Her name never appeared on those lists of kids involved in what are known as “activities.” She was above that. As day after day faded forever into history, as my intricately contrived glandular system ripened and matured, so my carefully concealed passion for Daphne Bigelow burgeoned, until finally it engulfed me and I was swallowed up like Jonah into the inky blackness of the whale's belly.

The midsemester exams came and went. Over Christmas vacation I had been haunted by nameless fears, since Daphne was out of my sight. Now a new terror-would I be assigned to the same biology class with her next semester? Finally, the dread day arrived. I could scarce credit my senses. Not only had Daphne Bigelow condescended to remain among us; our new biology teacher—a dapper gentleman wearing rimless glasses, black shellacked hair and squeaky shoes, named Mr. Settlemeyer—had, in an exquisite moment of insight and compassion, assigned Daphne Bigelow to me as my Biology II lab partner! Together we would investigate the mysteries of the great animal kingdom of which we were but a small part.

Well do I remember that blissful afternoon when, together, Daphne and I pinned a limp, formaldehyde-dripping frog to a cork specimen board and I, being the man of the house, bravely took up scalpel and showed her the stuff of which I was made. At the head of the class, Mr. Settlemeyer, pointer in hand, described various portions of frog anatomy, while beside me Daphne smiled with the faintest suggestion of approval, of perhaps even admiration, as I rose to magnificent heights of skill and daring. She averted her eyes delicately as I performed the autopsy. Her tiny
moues
of girlish fright and squeamishness drove me on to even greater pinnacles as I laid bare the vitals of the unfortunate amphibian. We both received an A+ for the afternoons work.

From that deceptively unprepossessing yet starkly symbolic beginning, our love took root and grew. By the end of the third week we were on a first-name basis. This may seem a small achievement, but it is not every man who is privileged to call a genuine goddess by her first name, and to be answered in kind.

I learned more about her every day, but mostly from outside sources. She spoke little of her home life, her joys, her aspirations, her dreams. While I, being a male, babbled on endlessly, weaving about both of us a rich cocoon of myth and grandiose philosophical generalities.

As winter silently faded into the soft sensuality of early spring, my resolve strengthened and took specific form, though I never saw Daphne outside of biology class. Officially, that is. Unofficially, I shadowed her like a maniacally devoted dacoit, one of the sinister footpad
tribe of early India. Watching her from afar, I cataloged her every movement. I covertly made a note of every article of clothing she wore; her wardrobe was immense and infinitely varied. My maroon corduroy slacks, meanwhile, a holdover from the Christmas before, grew increasingly repugnant to me. My purple pullover sweater, with its faded, block-lettered “H,” somehow did not sing to me as it used to.

Daphne never rode the school bus or the streetcar, or hitchhiked home like me and Schwartz and Flick. She just magically disappeared. One day I thought I saw a fleeting form enter a long, black, waiting Cadillac down the block from the school, but I could not be sure it was she.

When we passed in the halls, I always wore my carefully rehearsed, debonair Fred Astaire smile, evincing private amusement at this unexpected coincidence. But she always smiled back even more enigmatically as she drifted past—always alone and aloof from the grubby, normal kid hoopla of high school life.

The time for the spring dance was fast approaching. It was the custom for dates to exchange invitations well before the event. Posters appeared. Mickey Iseley a big-name local band, was engaged to officiate. I decided to lay the groundwork for a move so daring, so hazardous that if I had ever confided my scheme to Schwartz or Flick, they would have immediately wrestled me to the ground, hollering that I had finally completely gone off my nut. But I had not breathed to a soul, even to myself, that I had designs on the most magnificent woman
in all of Hohman High, if not of the known universe. Few common gophers ever entertained designs on prize-winning, thoroughbred fillies. I did, and learned a lesson that I have never forgotten.

One night, while safely huddled in the familiar lumpiness of the bed I had slept in ever since I had first crawled out of the playpen, staring up into the blackness—the faint sounds of distant, romantic whistles on trains bearing magic people off into the mysterious outside world drifting in through the cracked window shades and limp curtains of my bedroom—I decided to bestow my invitation to the big spring dance on Daphne Bigelow. My mind reeled with the mere thought of it! Craftily I began to piece my plan together. First I must have a date—a casual, everyday date—with her, and from there, inevitably, I would lead her to that dazzling ballroom where our love would finally be consummated in the throes of a dance I had zealously perfected in long hours of loose-limbed, sweaty practice, a dance that I knew neither Daphne nor any other woman alive could ever resist: the lindy. Among my peers, those who really appreciated subtle creativity, the beauty of the withheld statement, my lindy knew no rivals.

The next day my sardonic, martini-dry wit during Biology II flickered like a flame as Daphne hunched next to me over a huge night crawler that together we were dissecting, the heady aroma of her exotic French perfume blending provocatively with the rich fumes of preserving alcohol and dead worm. My courage grew as my bons mots became more and more epigrammatic. Oscar
Wilde would have stood tongue-tied in my presence. And then, casually, amid a brilliant analysis of Mr. Settlemeyer's teaching deficiencies, I prepared to drop my bomb.

“Oh, say, Daphne—heh, heh—pass me another roundhead pin.”

Snakily I watched her from the corner of my eye as she turned her gaze away from the benighted night crawler and readied her delicate hand, with infinite grace, over to the pin box. For a moment, panic almost stilled me. Her beauty was such that it took the breath away. Rallying quickly, however, I plunged on:

“Ah-heh, heh-”

I took the pin from her hand, the light brush of her fingers over mine sending goose-pimples all the way down to my Argyle socks and out the ventilation ports of my Keds. Without thinking, I did it. It came out in a rush.

“Howaboutyouanmehavinadate?!”

Instantly, I bent over my friend, the deceased denizen of the underground, a distinct ringing in my ears as the classroom faded from my consciousness and I stood alone, unafraid, in the bull ring. From somewhere off in the hazy distance I heard a flutelike voice say softly:

“What?”

Did I detect a note of incredulity, or was it my imagination? I repeated my question, not daring to so much as glance at her. After a three-century pause came the answer.

“When?”

From a distant auditorium, the school band struck up
The 1812 Overture.
Cannons roared; bugles blew. I had scored beyond my wildest dreams I The rest of the conversation went by and is now mercifully lost from memory. But I remember mumbling something about a John Wayne movie, and that I would pick her up. She told me where she lived. The next night, a blessed Friday, was going to be
it!

Realizing that there was much to be done and no time to lose, like an arrow loosed from the bow, I shot homeward the instant the doors of our pen were grudgingly thrown open. Closeting myself immediately in the bedroom, the scene of so many sweaty erotic daydreams, I went over every item in my vast wardrobe, carefully calculating piece by piece how best to achieve the magnetic effect I knew was necessary. Overlooking nothing, including my American Legion Ball left fielders uniform, I considered, weighed, rejected, wavered; selected each tiny link in my crucial costuming for what was to prove a fateful night. Individual socks were pored over with infinite care, held up to the light, smoothed and laid reverently aside for a final screening.