“It’s early,” I pointed out. “How about something to eat?” Ordinarily, she was ravenous for the things I bought her: popcorn and cotton candy and triple-header ice-cream cones.
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
We were passing the fun house. I thought of those crazy mirrors inside and grimaced at the thought of myself bloated and distorted. With Holly walking beside me—beside me and yet getting farther and farther away with every step we took—I wondered if the mirrors weren’t true reflections, after all. Forget it, I ridiculed myself, stop thinking of yourself as a poor man’s Dorian Gray.
“Look, Holly, it’s early. You said school’s starting. How about a trip downtown? To Norton’s? For some new clothes?” Everybody went to Norton’s and I was sure that I would be able to charge purchases there without any fuss.
She blew air out of the side of her mouth. “I think I’d rather just go home,” she said. “Besides, Mom isn’t feeling too well. I might be able to help her.”
“Your wish is my command,” I said, keeping it light, keeping it gay.
And Alison. How tired did she get? And why wasn’t she feeling well? Should I have inquired once in a while? But who inquired about me?
We made our way to the car under a sky suddenly subdued with clouds. The brilliance of the sun was muted, for which my eyes were thankful.
Once in the car, I asked: “Sure you want to go right home?” Clinging to her presence.
She looked straight ahead. I realized she hadn’t looked at me directly since she’d emerged from the Rocket Ride.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said.
Oh, Daddy. Without anguish, without any reprimand. Oh, Daddy. With a tired, weary acceptance that echoed a thousand other acceptances that had marked my life. A comment on all my defections.
“Next Thursday,” I said, “we should do something different, something crazy.” Thinking wildly. “Maybe your mother would let you come in to Boston. We could really do the town.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think there’s something special going on next Thursday. At school. Orientation Day—getting ready for September.”
“But—” I began. And then stopped. I’d been about to say: you are mine on Thursdays. But I saw, of course, that she was not actually mine, not on Thursdays or any other day of the week, or the year. We’d been playing truant, sure enough, but not as father and daughter, merely as adult and child. All those why nots I had tossed her—not bouquets of love, but bribes. I glanced at her as we drove along. She sat erect, composed, that elegance of Alison’s so much in evidence, and I ached with love and longing and tenderness, knowing that she was more Alison than me, despite the dark hair. Where was I in her? Was I there at all?
I turned the car away from Spruce Street. “I’d like to drive by the cemetery,” I told her.
“All right,” she said, eyes still on the road ahead.
I stopped the car at the comfortless place of gray and green, slab and grass, and I thought of my father and what he had said that time about being a man and confronting the debris of your dreams. Without self-pity.
“Holly,” I said.
Finally, she turned toward me—those lovely eyes, that curve of cheek. I had wondered before whether I was anywhere in her and now I hoped I wasn’t.
“Yes?” she asked, mildly interested.
I wanted to say: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for playing Santa Claus when I should have been a father. I’m sorry for wanting the whole world when I should have wanted only those who loved me. I’m sorry for the Rocket Ride—and all the Rocket Rides of your life that I didn’t share.”
Instead, I said: “I won’t be coming to Monument for a while.” I didn’t allow her to answer but began to improvise quickly. “See, I’ve been thinking of leaving Boston, getting away from the rat race. I heard of a small-town newspaper up in Vermont—a weekly—that’s looking for a man. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl.”
“That sounds interesting,” she said, as if we were strangers on a plane.
“And if it works out, who knows? Maybe the Monument Times might have an opening someday.”
Don’t you see, my darling, what I’m trying to say?
“And I’ll come home for good,” I ventured.
She looked out over the cemetery, her face as bleak as any tombstone.
“Wouldn’t you like that?” I asked.
At last, she looked at me again. “Yes,” she said. For a moment, something raced across her face, something appeared in her eyes, perhaps an echo of the child I had known a long time ago. Then it faded. And the eyes were old. I knew I had done this to her. “Yes, that would be nice,” she said, in that correct manner.
We drove away from the cemetery and to Spruce Street, and I parked in front of that house that once had been home. She kissed me dutifully on the cheek. I didn’t blow the horn to provoke Alison or as a last attempt at amusing Holly. I drove away slowly, and I kept telling myself desperately that I wasn’t saying goodbye.
Another of Mike’s Girls
INTRODUCTION
The transient quality of adolescence and the emotional debris accumulated by adolescents along the way has always fascinated me. Not merely as an observer. I have carried my own emotional luggage from those adolescent years for a long long time. I still remember vividly the impact of a but—that monster of a word, as noted in “Another of Mike’s Girls”—pronounced on the lips of a girl I was hopelessly in love with in the ninth grade: I think you’re a swell guy, Bob, but …
I have always pondered a tragic law of adolescence. (On second thought, the law probably applies to all ages to some extent). That law: People fall in love at the same time—often at the same stunning moment—but they fall out of love at different times. One is left sadly juggling the pieces of a fractured heart while the other has danced away. We tell our sons and daughters: Don’t worry, you’ll get over it, nothing lasts forever, you won’t even remember his (or her) name on your wedding day. But the anguish at the moment is devastating. The anguish finally leaves, but the echoes remain.
I never kept a scorecard of the emotional collisions of the teenagers in our family, but I was aware constantly of the various agonies and ecstasies taking place. I was also aware of my own part in these affairs. My position was on the sidelines. I was the audience. But it is possible for the audience to become emotionally tangled with the events taking place on stage.
All of this went into the writing of “Another of Mike’s Girls.” I knew all along I would write a story exploring the anguish that results when one person in a relationship cools toward the other. But I delayed writing the story because I was seeking another level. This other level requires further explanation.
Someone once said that poetry is saying one thing and meaning another. I have tried to apply that rule to my own writing, although I don’t pretend to write poetry. But I’m interested in a second level in stories, a level that sometimes emerges vividly or, sometimes, subtly. I seldom begin a story until I see the possibility of this other level. There are times when I succeed in finding this other level; other times I fail.
In “Another of Mike’s Girls,” I am obviously writing about an adolescent love affair that ends when one of the pair falls out of love, as helpless to prevent it as he was helpless to prevent falling in love. This satisfied (for me) a situation I’d always wanted to explore. But the story held a deeper meaning for me not only as the writer but as a participant in the plot. Not really a participant because, most of the time, I, as the father of the adolescent, was invisible. Young lovers see only themselves, not the observer on the sidelines, a man trapped not only by his fixed place in the proceedings but by what placed him there and keeps him helpless: age.
This story, then, appears to be about another of Mike’s girls and what happened to the girl and Mike. But I was really telling the story of Mike’s father, and thus it becomes a story of a man reaching that moment when he realizes he is no longer young.
The reader w
ill eventually see why I titled the story “Except When You’re Shaving, Don’t Look into Mirrors.” And the reader will probably also see why the editors retitled it “Another of Mike’s Girls.”
Another of Mike’s Girls
The trouble was that I saw her flaws before Mike did, and I was willing to accept them because she was, after all, a child really, a sophomore in high school, and I was not emotionally involved the way Mike was. At the end, I was invaded by pity, although I’m not sure for whom. However, at the beginning she was just another of his girls. Maybe I envied him, of course. I certainly envied his youth that late summer afternoon when he ran across the lawn as his friends called out raucous greetings from the car. The car was a scarlet MG, and it was unbelievable that it could hold that many people—it looked like some kind of monster with all those arms and legs sticking out. Mike’s new girl was in the car. Ellie and I hadn’t met her yet, she was too recent. Mike is always reluctant to introduce us to new girls because they come and go, and this week’s movie date is often next week’s memory. Then I caught a glimpse of her. She had extended her arms as if in supplication, and Mike disappeared into them and into the car. There was a flash of long dark hair and pretty face. Then the motor rocketed, drowning out the rock music issuing from the radio. They were off to the beach. Alex managed to squeal the tires as he backed out of the driveway—his dominant pleasure in life, apparently. At the last minute, Mike managed to wave goodbye.
“Lucky kids,” Ellie said. Her voice surprised me; I thought she’d been in the kitchen doing dishes.
“If that madman Alex doesn’t get them all killed.”
“I wouldn’t want to be eighteen again. Would you, Jerry?” she asked.
I thought of the car’s swiftness and the shining beach and the splash of the waves and the inexhaustible energy and the girls in their bikinis. “I guess not,” I said—without much conviction.
“Liar,” she admonished, chuckling. “Don’t tell me you’ve arrived at that dangerous age.”
We have been married twenty-one years and she still has the ability to turn my knees liquid when she holds her head a certain way and looks at me.
“I’ve always been at a dangerous age,” I said, giving her what passes for my Bogart grimace.
“I wonder what this one is like.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“Mike’s latest.”
“Like all the others,” I said.
All the girls Mike brought home looked alike. Long hair and short skirts. Or long hair and hip huggers. They were polite and pretty and had been pumped full of vitamins from the day of their birth and had started keeping dental appointments at the age of three or four. They were all entranced by the same songs on the Top 40, and they wore the same cologne. They had similar vocabularies—words like gross and heavy—and they prefixed almost every sentence with like. As a senior in high school, Mike majored in basketball, English and girls, not necessarily in that order, and I mention English because that’s the only subject in which he receives an A on his report card. Although he’s been on the varsity basketball squad since his sophomore year, the coach doesn’t send him in too often—Mike’s of average height, and he suffers in comparison with all those giants. But he’s loyal and industrious and loves the game. One night last year he was sent in during the final moments, and he sank a beauty, the ball going through the hoop without touching the rim. He turned, searching the stands, and our eyes caught. He grinned, a grin that was a marvel of triumph and pride. For that quick moment, he was the boy I had taught to swim and fish, the boy with whom I took long walks on Saturday afternoons. The stands, with all the cheering fans, didn’t exist for him. We were simply father and son, and the moment was all the more precious because I knew that this kind of sharing would become rarer and rarer. Why share moments like that with a father when the girls would be leaping and shouting?
As it turned out, the new girl was a basketball cheerleader. Her name was Jane, which was a change. I had been expecting something like Debbie or Donna or Cindy. Her hair streamed down to her shoulders; it was parted in the middle and stray strands kept falling across her eyes. She was sweet and well-mannered and her teeth were orthodontist-perfect and her favorite word was wow, which she pronounced with wonder and delight.
Mike was dazzled by her although, frankly, she was virtually a replica of the girl whose name I’ve forgotten that Mike had brought home a few weeks before. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her, gulping her at every glance. He didn’t mind the way she said wow about twice a minute. As in, “Wow, is that a heavy song.” Or, “Wow, is that a neat sweater.” She liked that word neat almost as much as wow. Embellish every sentence with the same recurring words, and the results can be nerve-racking, particularly if you hear it all from the next room where you’re trying to concentrate on the new Maigret novel.
Actually, I was accustomed to the sounds of young people in the house. Annie brings her friends home from college for occasional weekends, and there’s lots of singing and laughing. Julie is fourteen and brings home the younger set, and some of her girl friends merge into Mike’s crowd. The telephone seems to ring all the time and the stereo plays frantically and the television is never mute. Ellie calls it “sweet racket,” but it’s only sweet to me when strained through a closed door.
Jane became part of the racket and the activity throughout the fall and on into the basketball season. Mike managed to play regularly—one of the Goliaths broke an ankle—and he scored his share of points. He’d drop his eyes modestly after making a basket, and Jane would leap in joyous triumph. There were five cheerleaders, and sometimes I couldn’t tell her apart from the others.
Snow fell early, and they went off skating or skiing on weekend afternoons and evenings. “All that energy wasted on the young,” I said to Ellie. Mike failed an important algebra test and received a warning card.
“Better talk to him,” Ellie said.
And I did. He promised to do better, dismissing the subject quickly. “What do you think of Jane, Dad?” he asked. “Isn’t she something?”
“Right now, I’d rather talk about algebra, Mike.”
“I know, I know,” he said, sighing. “And I know you’re blaming my rotten marks on Jane and all the time I spend with her. Maybe I’ve been goofing off, but she’s worth a warning card in algebra.”
“Not to me, she isn’t,” I replied. “She’s a sweet girl, Mike, but she’s transient in your life. Here today, gone tomorrow. But your marks are important for the future—for college, scholarships. You can’t afford to flunk subjects, Mike.”
“She’s not transient, Dad. I mean, she’s here today, and she’ll be here tomorrow.”
“How long have you been going out with her?”
“Four months and three days,” he said.
“That’s some kind of record for you, isn’t it?” I asked.
“She’s keeping score,” he said. “She reminds me every day.” Although we were in touching distance, he was suddenly far away. “That Jane. She’s really something …”
I had an opportunity to see her through Mike’s eyes one Sunday afternoon when she poked her head into the den, blinked her eyes, smiled tentatively and said, “Hi, Mr. Croft.”
I gave up my struggle with the newspaper and let the various sections fall like collapsed tents to the floor.
“May I come in?” she asked.
We had never exchanged more than pleasant greetings, and I studied her as she entered and then sat, Buddha-like, on the floor. Her long hair sparkled with cleanliness. As she pushed it back, I saw a constellation of acne on her forehead, but this only made her seem more human and less a model for shampoo on a television commercial. At Mike’s age, I could have been dazzled by a girl like her.
“Well,” I said, noticing finally that she carried a loose-leaf binder in her hands.
“Wow,” she said, drawing out the word, like a sigh. “Mr. Croft, I know I shouldn’t be bothering you, but …”
&n
bsp; I tried to disguise my own sigh: I knew what she wanted. Although the company that employs me deals with art objects, and although I was an art major in college years ago, I am now involved in administrative affairs and have not touched brush or crayon for years.
She held out the binder. “I’ve got to show these to someone. Someone who knows, who’s heavy in art. Like, my art teacher is a spaz.”
“A spaz?”
“You know. Hopeless, a wipe-out.”
And anyway, I thought, whether your teacher is a spaz or not, the way to a boy’s heart is probably through the approbation of his father. I looked at her sketches. Landscapes. The same tree in every sketch. And everything perfect. But too perfect. The trees as alike as strings on a harp. Like painting by numbers. Yet she was obviously talented. Like thousands, millions of others. We talked awhile about her work, and I was encouraging, of course. It was a pleasant conversation. Her wows and heavies weren’t as irritating when she flashed that smile at the same time.
“I really appreciate this, Mr. Croft,” she said, getting up. “How can I thank you?”
By letting Mike get his mind back on algebra. But I said nothing, merely nodded at her appreciation.
Later, passing the kitchen doorway, I saw her with Ellie. They were discussing recipes. Jane was wowing all over the place as Ellie described her special coffeecake recipe: The way to a boy’s heart is also through his mother’s kitchen.
But apparently Jane encountered a detour. At dinner a few nights later, Mike announced that he had volunteered to become photographer for the school yearbook.
“You actually volunteered for something that’s got nothing to do with girls or basketball?” Julie asked.
Mike ignored her. “It’s going to take up a lot of time, but my counselor at school thinks the extracurricular activity will help my scholarship chances.”
“How about algebra?” I asked.
He had anticipated the question. “I got an A minus in this week’s test and a B plus last week,” he said.