Home from the Vinyl Cafe (5 page)

“It’s time to say goodbye,” said Morley.

Five minutes later, she knocked again.

“Hang up,” she said, sticking her head in the room. And then, spotting her hairbrush on the bedside table, Morley walked in and picked it up.

“I’ve got to go,” said Stephanie into the phone. She lunged for the brush but was too late. “I need that,” she said to her mother.

Her hand was out, and they were both looking at the hairbrush, which Morley was holding close to her chest. Morley said, “It belongs in the bathroom.”

As she turned to go, Stephanie said, “There’s a Valentine’s dance on Saturday. I’m going with Paul Chalmers.”

“On a date?” said Morley, stopping at the door.

Stephanie was sixteen. Ever since she became a teenager, she had moved around the city—to movies, to parties, on shopping trips, even to the library, with a pack of friends. As far as Morley knew, she had never been on a date.

Morley looked at her daughter and smiled. “That’s wonderful, darling,” she said.

Morley had begun dating when she was twelve. She was pleased when Stephanie hadn’t shown any interest in boys during her early teenage years. But lately, she had begun to wonder when it was going to start. It was, she had thought, time.

Stephanie said, “It’s no big deal.”

Morley said, “Is he a nice boy? Do you like him?” What a stupid thing to say, she thought. She put the hairbrush down where she had found it, and she smiled. “Put it back when
you’re finished, okay?” Then she said, “Well, it’s nice. That he’d ask you.”

Stephanie shrugged. “He didn’t ask me. I asked him.”

“Oh,” said Morley, her fingers fiddling absentmindedly with her lips. “Great.”

Morley was a child of the sixties. She believes in equality of the sexes. She thinks of herself as a feminist. Part of her was delighted her daughter was living in a world where she could do this. This powerful thing. Yet somewhere Morley felt an uneasy rumble of anxiety.
The boys ask the girls
. That was the rule she’d grown up with. Did her daughter have any idea how much the rules had changed? And
had
they? Was everybody else doing this? What would the boys think? Morley knew she shouldn’t feel this way. She knew this could make her a traitor to her generation, to her feminism, to her very sex. But she couldn’t help it. She didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about her daughter.

“Why am I feeling like this?” she asked Dave.

“Because it makes her vulnerable,” said Dave. “You don’t want her to be hurt.”

It was not as if the
boys ask the girls
rule had served Morley particularly well. As a girl, she had been subjected to an astounding number of doleful dates. Evenings she had spent with boys for whom the strongest emotion she felt was pity.

There was Colin, who, for weeks before he screwed up the courage to ask her out, rode his bicycle endlessly up and down the sidewalk in front of her house. This was when they were sixteen years old. When so many of them had their driver’s licenses that it wasn’t cool to ride a bike any more. What made it worse was that Colin used to pretend he was driving a bus: When he thought no one was looking, he
would ring his bell and slam on his brakes, opening the bus doors to pick up passengers. He could make all the bus sounds with his mouth. And once the passengers were on, he would hiss and ride down the street. Until the bell rang and he had to let someone off again.

When Colin asked Morley out, she said yes. She was tired of being the only one who didn’t go out on weekends. She thought, Surely Colin will be better than no one. She was wrong.

They went to a movie—
Carry On Doctor
. The feature had hardly begun when Morley became aware of Colin’s hand inching toward her, creeping across the armrest in the darkness.

Colin was looking straight ahead as if he had no idea what his hand was doing, so Morley was able to watch its approach. She watched in dumbfounded fascination as his hand left the armrest and headed out into space—it was inching toward
her
hand, which was gripping her knee.

She watched Colin’s hand get closer and closer, and then, as it closed in, she held out her drink, watching as Colin’s hand sank into her Coke—up to the wrist—as if it were thirsty. Colin didn’t even flinch. Just as slowly as he had sunk his hand into her cup, he pulled it out, easing it inch by inch back into his lap, his gaze never leaving the screen. A few minutes later, Morley watched him wiping his fingers carefully between his knees.

Colin wasn’t even close to being the worst date in her life. There was the night she found herself sharing the sofa in Miriam Decker’s basement with Michael Casabon. To be
that close
to a face with
that look
is something that you never forget. She was sitting on the couch talking to Michael when she noticed his glasses had begun to fog up—for no apparent reason—and
he seemed to be out of breath. Which struck her as peculiar, because he wasn’t moving. He was just sitting there with his arm around her shoulders. She wasn’t sure how it got there. Then she realized his face, with that faraway look, was moving closer and closer, and she knew what was happening and she knew that it had nothing whatsoever to do with her. It could have been any girl sitting there beside Michael. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—it was like a traffic accident. She didn’t dare move, not a muscle, even though the arm of the couch was digging uncomfortably into her back. She was afraid if she even shifted, Michael might take it as a sign of passion. And things could get worse.

Maybe the worst date in Morley’s life was with a boy called Bucky who moved in next door in the summer of 1968. Bucky was two years younger than Morley. He was fourteen years old when he asked if she wanted to go roller-skating. He said a whole gang was going. Morley had never roller-skated in her life, but Bucky said it didn’t matter. Everyone she knew was out of town, and Morley thought, Why not? I can ice-skate. I’ll be fine.

She didn’t understand that she was Bucky’s date until she was squeezed beside him in the front seat of his family’s Buick. The “whole gang” turned out to be Bucky’s tenyear old brother and
his
two friends. Bucky’s older brother, Chucky, eighteen, the boy Morley
should
have been dating, was dropping them off at the roller rink.

It was one of those hot summer nights. Morley was wearing shorts, and she could feel the backs of her legs sticking to the vinyl of the front seat. Everyone was teasing Bucky because he had a date, cracking jokes as if Morley weren’t in the car. All the way there, she kept lifting one leg and then the
other, trying to keep them free of the seat. By the time they got to the rink, she was feeling sick.

When they had their skates on, Bucky said they should hold hands, and Morley, who was surprised to find how unsteady she was, had no choice. So around and around they went—Morley, against all her instincts, clutching on to this boy who was four inches shorter than she was—praying that no one she knew would see her. The music stopped, and the man on the PA announced a couples-only contest. Bucky wanted to enter.

There were only four other couples standing on the concrete oval waiting for the music to begin. The girls were all wearing short skating skirts. The boys all looked as if they could toss their dates between their legs.

This didn’t seem to faze Bucky, but Morley drew the line and said she wasn’t going out. When Bucky couldn’t change her mind—and Lord knows, he tried—he disappeared, abandoning Morley, who had never been downtown in her life, in the noisy roller rink.

After trying valiantly to skate around a few times alone, Morley fell, and another girl landed on her and winded her. When she got her breath back, she started to cry. She couldn’t phone her father—he’d have a heart attack. Instead, she glommed on to Bucky’s baby brother and spent the rest of the evening with the ten-year-olds. She didn’t see Bucky again until eleven o’clock, when he mysteriously reappeared, just as his father arrived to drive them home.

Stephanie had heard all these stories before. More than once. It infuriated her that her mother seemed to believe that she was destined for a similar string of disasters. Stephanie didn’t intend to have the same experiences as her mother. Stephanie’s goal in life was to end-run all the disasters.

But you don’t learn about love from someone else. Love is experiential. You have to make your own mistakes.

If Morley knew some of the mistakes that her daughter had already made, some of the lessons she had learned, if she had any inkling of what a great act of courage it had been for Stephanie to ask Paul Chalmers to the Valentine’s dance, and then to suggest that he
actually pick her up at home
, it would have broken her heart. And she wouldn’t have felt so uptight about it.

Paul Chalmers was not the first man in Stephanie’s life. Love first came to Stephanie the summer she was fourteen. It came in the form of a tall, long-haired, strong-faced, thirty-eightyear old television producer. His name was Cameron Flemming, and he lived with his wife and two children on the same street as Stephanie. That summer Stephanie would take the newspaper onto their front lawn before supper and sit on the stoop, pretending to read, so she could be outside when Cameron Flemming walked by her house on his way home from work.

One afternoon when Sam had set up a lemonade stand, Cameron Flemming stopped and bought a glass of lemonade. As he put his glass down on the card table, he smiled at Stephanie. She felt herself flush. She was in love with him. The world was perfect because he was in it.

One evening he stopped and asked if she could babysit. Stephanie felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. It was his birthday, and his wife wanted to take him out to dinner. Stephanie said, “I took the babysitting course at school. I have a certificate.” She was trying to sound sophisticated.

She arrived at his house with that month’s
Reader’s Digest
. “I’m going to read when the kids are in bed,” she said. She thought this would impress Cameron. She was wearing her
favorite pair of jeans and a sweater that was too large for her—she liked the way the arms hung over her hands and covered her fingers.