ANNIKA NELSO

He was, if not my first love, my first conscious attempt at love. I am tempted to say we were meant for each other. I am tempted to say: destiny scented the air of Mrs. Firby’s first-grade class. Not being a person who believes in fate or divinely ordained romance, I must instead offer that even at age seven, I was a sucker for gentleness.

That first day, big, wall-mounted fans going against the September heat, Mrs. Firby wandered the rows of yellow tables playing her accordion. The boy had run to the same table as I, asked politely to be my desk- mate. The room, as I recall, broke out in hoots. He blushed and stared. I blushed and stared. Mrs. Firby’s hand descended in a crashing chord on the plastic keys, making everyone squeal. Mrs. Firby laughed, sobered quick. “People! If you can’t pick your own desks quietly, I’ll assign them for you!”

Pale-skinned, plum-lipped Lance Maloch. His brown cow eyes were rounded along their bottom edges, slightly lower in the outer corners, giving him a look of both hangdog innocence and perpetual ennui. His straight mink-colored hair was cut bowl fashion, like a medieval prince’s. He was slender and almost bluish white in color, like an invalid. Across the breast of his shirt, reindeer galloped.

Lance’s shirt was cowboy-styled, with pearl-covered snaps, a style then worn by only one other boy in class, a boy who had thick glasses, a hearing aid in his pocket, and smelled of pee. The shirt gave Lance the air of a heroic outcast, perhaps. I was already a sucker for rebels, too. I guess the reindeer clinched it. Everybody knew reindeer were for Christmas.

I wondered if he were poor and didn’t have any other shirts. No, he told me. His name was Norwegian. His parents were Norwegian.

Lance remained my deskmate until after lunch, when Mrs. Firby called us up front, explained that the arrangement was too disruptive, and reassigned Lance to the back of a row of boys. She smiled, red-lipsticked, eyes sympathetic behind cat-eye glasses. It seemed our nascent romance was already thwarted by a society that just didn’t understand. Such ideas, if unarticulated in a seven-year-old, were nonetheless ingrained. I had by this time seen a film version of Romeo and Juliet and the Disney cartoon Snow White, read children’s versions of these stories and more. My Barbie regularly died, wearing lavish robes fashioned from scarves a charm bracelet for a belt, a cocktail ring for a diadem. She was laid out upon a bier of handkerchief-covered books, encyclopaedia volumes stacked like a ziggurat. The climax of the game was Ken’s sorrow.His visit to her dead body. The poignancy of his grief, her beautiful death. Barbie might lie there for days, while I reenacted the pivotal moment over and over, whenever the mood struck.

Who can say if such morbid fantasies are born out of trauma or are the inevitable in a society where women are escape artists, clinging onto illusion? If I was doomed by culture to romantic fixation, I wasn’t alone. With my sister, with neighbor girls,I mimicked the television shows we watched in those days. Dream Girl of 1967. Batman. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Bewitched. I Dream of Jeannie. We acted out endless scenes of jealous women fighting over men, evil vamps seducing men, good girls dying for love.

We were, little girls in the 1960s, riding a precarious cusp. The mothers who bought us toy ovens and vacuum cleaners and tea sets, who taught us the meaning of “ladylike” and cleaned up after our fathers, were the same women who would shortly join consciousness-raising groups, get jobs and divorces,wear their hair loose, try marijuana, sleep with new men.

And so my dolls were also prone to perilous adventures, scaling tables and couches with a bent hairpin and twine, or out back of our tract house like a thousand Clairemont tract houses, by the redwood-stained fence,hunting our cat (using a pencil for a spear) in the tall grass, taming plastic model horses that galloped in the box canyon formed between us girls’ twin beds. Maybe Barbie was only benefiting from a new direction in marketing: she could now be bought boots and safari wear along with evening gowns. But I stole her a machine gun and a field telephone from a neighbor boy’s GI Joe.

Our grandest dolls,my sister’s and mine,were kept on a high shelf in our room with the best stuffed animals and music boxes.Our girlish room with ballerina pictures on the walls, and high ranch windows covered by frilled, chintz curtains that matched the twin beds’ spreads, the beds French provincial and matching the bureaus, all painted white and “antiqued”in gold and stuck with adhesive flowers in mod colors. The best dolls were not to be touched without permission, and then not without washing our hands with hot water and soap. Madame Alexandre “brides,” 15 inches tall, the dolls stood poised on tiptoe in high, white satin shoes. Metal braces snapped around the dolls’ waists, under their clothing, to hold them up. These collector dolls were wildly popular in our neighborhood. Their costumes were beautifully made, detailed, and entirely removable. The secret of their popularity, however, lay beneath the lace-trimmed veils, gowns, and petticoats of white tulle,bodices embroidered with seed pearls, satin pantaloons, sheer silk stockings (held by flower-and-rhinestone garters), tiny pearl wedding rings, and rhinestone earrings that stuck into the dolls’ heads on straight pins. The bride dolls were children.

Heads child-large in proportion to their prepubescent bodies, the dolls’ eyes were preternaturally round beneath brows innocently upraised. Below snub noses,their pouting mouths were orifices deep enough, I discovered, to support a baby doll’s bottle. I had coveted such a doll long before my grandmother gave her to me. My sister was given one, with blonde silk hair in curls down her back,the year before; I was provided a doll suitable for younger children. This doll was made on a larger scale, had cheaper hair, cut short, was molded from an inferior plastic that could be seen through in the light and held on to grimy fingerprints. I sat on my bed, on its quilted, ruffled spread decorated with cabbage roses, and held the stupid doll in my hands and contemplated her inferiority. She had short hair. The skirt of her dress was straight, unadorned. She smelled funny. My mother sat on the bed with me, consoled me while I cried out my shame. She stroked the doll’s hair. “See how pretty she is? And you can change her clothes. We can make her lots of clothes.”

But she was a bride doll. She was supposed to wear bride clothes. My mother left the room, returned what seemed to be much later.She opened her hands, revealing three bottles of nail polish, gleaming glass wedges with elongated screw-on tops of ridged white plastic. These were magic objects of female adulthood,kept off-limits on my mother’s dressing table.My older sister wasn’t allowed to touch them. “Now, which color shall we paint her nails?” The miniscule plastic nailbeds of the doll’s hands and feet ended up a deep blood red, marred by fibres of crinkly brown doll hair.

The next year,when my Madame Alexandre bride doll was given to me, my sister and I acted out scenes in which my older doll, the ugly one, with her short hair and cheap dress and chipped fingernail polish,attacked them in murderous jealousy. The ugly one was always — as in fairy tales, as elsewhere in our world— the mean one.And meanness was anger.

We played the game with our father, who sat in a big leather armchair after dinner. We danced the dolls in the air, holding them by their stiff legs. “Which one will you marry, Daddy?”

He squinted, rubbed his bristly chin.“Ummm…That one!” His big hand swept through the air toward the old doll, the ugly one. We squealed and hopped the dolls away from his hands.

“But she’s the ugliest!” We made the dolls’ voices higher pitched than our own. “No fair! No fair!” We made the dolls attack each other in the air, butting their veiled heads together. A satin shoe dropped to the carpet. A bouquet flew off a rubber wristband.

Our father leaned back, abashed — the one embarrassed bridegroom. “Well,” he asked,“which one do you want me to pick?”

We continued to hit our dolls together. “No fair! No fair! Let’s get him!” We hit his face, his arms, his hands put up to protect his face, with the hard plastic doll bodies wearing scratchy tulle. We hit him until he said, “Enough.”

I had not yet been forced to negotiate the more obvious disparities between reality and romance; for example, that romantic heroines were usually at least a head shorter than their swains, whereas I, at age seven, had that early height advantage girls sometimes develop. At school we lined up boys and girls separately, shortest to tallest. Looking over to the boys’ line, I could see the crown of Lance Maloch’s head. I probably could have whipped him in a fight. This, however, did not occur to me. I simply imagined the scenes I’d watched on TV, in movies, read in fairy tales, over and over again. Lance would be taller on a horse, anyway. I would imagine this as I walked up the steep hill to school. We would ride horses all through the neighborhood. We’d ride them to school and hide them in a secret place.

Mrs. Firby was a great believer in music. On hot days, when the boys and girls came in from recess sweating and panting, she appointed monitors to dampen paper towels in the sink and distribute them to the class. We pressed the wet cloths against our foreheads, imagined ourselves feverish and near death. “If you sit still and quiet, you’ll cool off faster,” she said. And then Mrs. Firby would sing a song, accompanying herself on the accordion. With our foreheads resting on our crossed arms, we listened to “Home on the Range,” “Turkey in the Straw,” or “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie.” Once she began a Brahms lullaby but was forced to stop by our indignant whining. We weren’t babies, after all.

Music was on Wednesdays. Favored children — often Lance and me — took cymbals, drumsticks, recorders, and orange songbooks from a cupboard smelling of paste and dust, placed one on each desk to be shared. The hard- bound books, titled Songs of Many Lands, opened flat. The pages were slick. Next to each song was a bright-colored illustration of children hiking in the mountains or skating on a pond. If your desk- mate were sick and you have a book to yourself, you could lean forward and smell the fresh, good book smell of ink and glue. At the front of the classroom, Mrs. Firby would write a page number on the board, give the starting note on a pitch pipe. We sang “This Land Is Your Land,” and “The Animal Fair,” and “The Hiking Song.” We sang “Cherry Bloom.”

One day she tested our vocal range by having each of us sing a scale. She pointed to girl after girl. She pointed to boy after boy. Then she pointed to me a second time. Then she pointed to Lance a second time. “You two,” she said,“have the highest voices in the class.” We looked at each other, looked at our shoes. The other boys guffawed. “Lance is a wussy!” someone shouted. Mrs. Firby called us to the front.

Mrs. Firby placed her larger teacher’s copy of the songbook in our hands. Lance’s side of the book tipped down because he was so much shorter.“Sing ‘Cherry Bloom,’” Mrs. Firby said. She gave us a starting note, an octave higher than we usually sang it. Lance and I sang together. His breath bounced off the page into my face; it smelled like oranges and bologna, from the halved orange and the bologna sandwich he brought in his Thermos lunch box every day. When we hit the highest notes, we looked at each other, and later, after school, when the other children had melted off the far side of the dirt field, we met in the shade of the bungalow and sang the song again, in higher and higher keys, until our voices were squeaks and we bent over laughing.

Ours was a delicate courtship. Lance was not a boy who chased girls to the outer field fence and pretended to handcuff them to it or kicked them in the crotch during disputes in foursquare. He played kickball with the boys but spent most of his time at the monkey bars. Girls lined up on one end of the horizontal ladder, boys on the other. You gripped the hot metal bars with one hand, swung forward from every other one. In the middle of the horizontal ladder, you tangled legs with a member of the opposite sex until your grip was too sweaty to maintain or until the teacher on yard duty came to break it up. Grown-ups did not seem to like this game.

We somehow came to be seated together during Handwriting. Lance and I shared certain meticulous habits and compared our respective Hs and Os and Qs in whispers. Lance made his Qs like an O with a cat’s tail and then added ears. I had never seen this done before and thought it a very clever trick.

In a whisper, he asked me, “How do you spell your name?” I wrote it out in my best writing, and he wrote out his, and we exchanged the grainy green-ruled papers after school.

We spoke for seconds at a time in line after recess, exchanging information like furtive refugee-camp lovers.

“Do you have sisters?”

“No. Do you have brothers?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been to Norway?” All this made my previous kindergarten entangle ment with Buvvy Lockerson seem brutal, carnal. Buvvy, square-faced, buzz-cut, was twice sent to the principal’s office for biting. To experi- ence Buvvy’s affection was to endure endless perversities. He stole your scissors, kicked you in the shin, threatened to push you off the jungle gym. You could only hope his attention would be diverted soon.

Lance-and-me was just for the two of us, not a showy, challenging kind of interac- tion meant to entertain friends. There were no conferences with deputies in the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms; he never sent another boy to ask me to speak to him. Likewise, I didn’t pass notes about Lance back and forth to girlfriends. Mostly because they couldn’t read and write very well.

I didn’t know where Lance lived, but sometimes I saw him ahead of me in the distance as I walked home along Clairemont Drive. It was sometime in the winter, a day of sharp blue sky when the grass lawns were crabby and brown, that Lance was outside the chainlink gate when I walked through it and fell into step beside me, nei- ther of us saying a word. At the first corner we turned, he offered to carry my books. His were in a dark blue can- vas book bag on his back. I gave him my books. He put them under his right arm. He dropped his left arm down. “Let’s cross the street,” he said. I said okay.

We stepped off the curb. “We should hold hands crossing the street,” he said. I said okay. His hand was soft, clammy.

Across the street our hands stayed together, and we swung them back and forth, and then we started laughing, and we skipped down the block to the corner. We talked about what animals we would have, if we could have any animals. We talked about what horses we would tame and ride to school, if we could have any horses. We came to where my neighborhood, a subdivision of a few meandering blocks, started. I knew he lived on the other side of it, in a subdivision of ranch-style houses with red- wood fences just like mine. He said he’d walk through my neighborhood with me. At the corner house of my block, with a split-rail fence and white, sparkly rocks around the rose bushes, he asked,“Do you think we should kiss?”

I said,“I guess we should.”

One or the other of us said we should perform this ritual in my house. My mother wasn’t home yet, and his parents, he said, wouldn’t be mad if he went to my house. “You should have my phone number,” he said.

“Write it on my folder,” I said. Lance put my stack of things on the sidewalk, slung off his knapsack, scrounged for a pencil. We knelt together over my PeeChee folder. He smelled slightly sweaty, of boy-sweat — light and sweet but faintly tinged with feces, dirt, and mold. He wrote his phone number, in the smallest numbers, on the inside flap. He wrote my phone number on the inside of a library book. This was shocking, kind of dangerous.

Before I unlocked my front door, he pulled out a key from inside his shirt, a key on a dirty string. We tried it in the lock of my front door, but it wouldn’t fit. Inside my dark house, we stumbled sun-blind into the kitchen, drank big plastic tumblers of water from the kitchen sink. It was quiet in the house. Lance looked around. “Where should we do it?”

The bedroom my sister and I shared was out of the question — too full of private things, girl things. I wouldn’t want Lance to see my pink stuffed poodle, my Barbie van, my bride doll. My parents’ bedroom was inviolate for other reasons. The spare room had a window onto a neighbor’s yard through which we might be seen. The living room was too close to the front door, where, for whatever reason, my mother or father might come bursting through at any minute.

I led Lance by the hand down the hall. We went into the bathroom. We turned on the light. I locked the door behind us.“Wait,” he said. He took off his knapsack again. He opened it and pulled out a blue nylon windbreaker. He put the jacket over his head, pulled it forward with his hands, so that it tented his face. “Okay. Now.”

I stepped in, scrunching down to his height, and put my hands up to hold the jacket, too. We dropped the fabric over my head and breathed in each other’s quick breaths. He pressed closed lips against my cheek, just barely, and made a loud smacking noise. I pressed my closed lips against his cheek and made a loud smacking noise. We separated quickly and went out to the living room. Lance put his windbreaker back in his knapsack, heaved the bag’s straps onto his shoulders, and went out the door.

Back in Mrs. Firby’s class, Lance began spending more time with the other boys — laughed when they laughed, evinced disgust at all things girl. I rediscovered a girlfriend in another class and spent my recesses with her. Now comes the line you know is coming. Rather, you may have your choice of the three:

After that kiss, things between us seemed to have changed.

We drifted apart after that.

Lance moved away that summer, and I never saw him again.