“No apologies necessary.”
Laura grabs my hand. “Want to catch the last ten minutes of a flick?”
“What’s on?”
“Working Girl.”
“The movie isn’t on my must-see list. Anything else?”
“Nope,” Laura says. “Last show of the night.”
“Why don’t we just stay out here?”
Laura pushes me. “You’re no fun.”
I grab her by the hips and pull her toward me. “It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
“Unless it involves an alien popping out of someone’s chest cavity or a giant marshmallow man, I don’t care for Sigourney Weaver.”
“And I suppose you don’t like Melanie Griffith, either?”
“I happen to like Melanie Griffith very much, at least when she plays a stripper and when Brian De Palma is her director.”
She doesn’t catch the reference.
“You know, Body Double?”
Still nothing.
“Holly Body? Frankie Goes to Hollywood? Relax, don’t do it, when you wanna go to it? Not quite legendary B-movie actor Craig Wasson?”
Laura hasn’t seen the movie. By the time we finish arguing about it, Working Girl is over. Three couples file out the front door of the theater to the tune of Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run.” I refuse to admit I like this song, although it is quite catchy. Any acknowledgment of its positive attributes takes me right back to that impressionable four-year-old boy whose mother played Helen Reddy’s Greatest Hits (And More) so many times he memorized the lyrics. Mom would invite friends over and have me sing “I Am Woman” and “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady,” and they’d all tell me how cute I was. Yeah, Mom, it’s cute to emasculate your four-year-old son for the neighbors’ amusement.
“Time to close up.” Laura starts to segue into another subject. I pretend I’m listening, but the only thing in my head at the moment are the lyrics to “Delta Dawn.”
“What do you think?” she asks.
I have no idea what I’m about to agree to, but nonetheless I nod eagerly. “Sounds good.”
Laura hands me a broom and dustpan, so I’m guessing I agreed to help her sweep down the aisles of Screen 3. At least Helen Reddy has stopped singing. Scraping Dots and Milk Duds off a sticky, cola-stained floor of a movie theater is not what I had in mind for tonight. I tell myself it’s all for the cause.
Laura walks by and gives me a peck on the check. “You’re such a cutie.”
Hopefully somewhere down the road, “the cause” involves a little more than a peck on the cheek and being cute.
Chapter five
Laura hands me an oversized red-and-pink cardboard heart stuffed with chocolates. “They’re coconut-filled,” she says. “Your favorite, right?”
“Yeah, right.” I think about all those Halloweens waiting for Jeanine to empty her treat basket and hand over her discarded Almond Joy and Mounds bars. Have I already told Laura that story? Fuck, what haven’t I told her?
We sit on Laura’s front porch, the two dozen red roses on her dresser visible through her bedroom window. I had them delivered by a local florist, courtesy of the Fitzpatrick Olds-Cadillac-Subaru expense account. Laura told me the roses were the most beautiful flowers anyone had ever given her. I told her I paid for them with my own money and then ended with the exclamatory flourish, “Two dozen roses for two months of being in love.”
Yes, I said it. Fucking goddamn right I said it.
The Valentine’s Day dance was last night. Laura and I were on the dance floor. I floated the word out there for public consumption sometime during Aerosmith’s “Angel.” She floated the word back at me during Patrick Swayze’s “She’s Like the Wind.” We said it together during George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set on You.”
The chasm separating the act of being in love and the act of making love is filled with the nervous sweat and rendered tears of my many unconsummated relationships. I’m a junior, of course, turning seventeen in April. Laura is a senior, and turned eighteen right before we started dating. Up until now, we have acted under the tacit assumption that neither of us are virgins. More to the point, I know she isn’t a virgin, and she has bought into my bullshit sexual history.
Laura puts her head in my lap. She reaches up and runs her hand through my hair. “You were such a gentleman last night.”
We ended up in Laura’s basement after the dance, both of us a little tipsy on purple passion—a noxious mix of grape soda and Everclear. I got her naked on the old couch. Loose change kept rattling inside the clothes dryer behind our heads. She gave me a hickey and a hand job. I buried my face in her bare chest, squeezed her nipples until they turned red, and fingered her until she came. A lesser girl would come right out and say, “Why didn’t you fuck me last night?” But for whatever reason, Laura seems intent on mistaking my awkwardness for chivalry.
“What’s all that?” I nod at the stack of letters in her other hand.
“These?” Laura throws the letters aside. “Nothing but junk mail. Ever since we booked a room down in Panama City, I’m guessing my name got on a ton of spring break mailing lists. I sift through a half dozen of these things every day.”
“Spring break?”
“Hell yeah! Senior year, rite of passage, the last hurrah.”
Senior spring break has been looming on the horizon. With Laura being a senior and me a junior, it’s the one thing that has scared me more than anything else in our relationship. She will go to Florida my girlfriend, and she will come back single. That is just how the world works.
“This is news to me.” I reach over and grab one of the letters. I pull out and unfold a full color poster of sunburned frat boys with bulges in their pants ogling drunken bikini-clad girls.
Laura scoots right up next to me and takes my hand in hers. She kisses me on the cheek. I want to say, “I love you,” or, “don’t go,” or something, but anything comprehensible or appropriate defers to an internal reel of Laura climbing out of a pool Phoebe Cates-like in a red-string bikini to The Cars’ “Moving in Stereo.”
“Hank?” Laura grabs my chin with her hand, pulling me around until we were facing one another. “You okay?”
If okay means watching my girlfriend’s bare breasts burst out of her bikini top while Benjamin Orr serenades her, I’m fine. I nod but don’t say anything.
I’ve never been jealous. Is this what it feels like? Is this what love feels like? Panic. Mistrust. Paranoia. Life gives you every reason to be happy, and you’re all, “Fuck it, bring on the misery.”
I stand, taking
