How They Met and Other Stories

by David Levithan

  This is a story we tell all the time. A couple of the details change every now and then, or a character is added (what was the name of the justice who married them?). But the moral of the story is that it worked. They knew, and they were right.

  It wasn’t until my Pop-Pop Arnold had heart surgery that I realized I didn’t know how he and my Grandma Grace had met. I asked my mother and she didn’t know, either. She got the story, told it to me, and the next time I saw my grandfather I asked him to tell it again. It’s a different kind of story than “during the war.” But I love it just as much.

  My mother’s parents met because they often passed each other in the neighborhood. My grandmother was in a group of girls who would hang out on a certain stoop, chatting. My grandfather was in a group of guys who would walk past on their way to work and say hello. Soon they started talking, group with group, and my grandfather’s friend, Sidney Throne, decided to set Arnold and Grace up.

  I don’t know what their first date was, but I do know that they had such a good time that my grandfather traveled to another borough in order to walk her home. They said good night, saw each other a little more, and eventually it came time for my grandmother to bring my grandfather home.

  My great-grandmother was not amused. My grandfather was from Detroit. He’d run away to escape the Ford factory and his parents. He was not from a Fine Jewish Family, like my grandmother was. According to my grandfather, the moment my great-grandmother set eyes on him, she thought, Who is this shmegegie?

  “She wouldn’t give me a glass of water” is how my grandfather tells it. He was ushered into the living room, where all the chairs had cords over them, like antiques in a museum. The only place that didn’t have a cord was the piano bench. The piano itself was an ugly green Steinway, never used. My grandfather squeezed in among the clunky furniture, made small talk, but was never offered anything polite, not even a glass of water.

  This repeated a few times.

  Then one day, sitting on the piano bench, my grandfather decided to open the piano. With my great-grandmother out of the room, he started to play for Grace. He had been to Juilliard, you see, and the room was soon filled with music. My great-grandmother stormed in, disbelieving. Then slowly she went over to the window closest to the piano and opened it. Then the next window. Window after window. So the neighbors could hear. So the neighbors could know what kind of visitor they had.

  The next time, he got a glass of water.

  Is this the whole story? Of course not, in either case. But these are the true-life family fairy tales, and I’m happy to be the one to tell them ever after.

  In 1964, in the summer after they graduated from high school, my parents were set up on a blind date. They went to see A Hard Day’s Night.

  I am here because of a piano, a jeep, Hunter College, the U.S. Army, the Beatles, and a whole bunch of matchmakers. I am here because of letters written during a war, music played with windows open, a crazy leap.

  And love. I am here because of love.

  MEMORY DANCE

  Wallace liked his cornflakes to be served the same way every morning—with only enough milk to surround (and not dampen) the cereal, perhaps with a piece of fruit thrown in. He was accustomed to having them day after day, a constant in his unextraordinary life.

  The other constant in Wallace’s life, of more importance than the cornflakes, was Mary, who for forty years had sat across the breakfast table from him. Recently, she had been the same every morning, too, dressed in a bowed blouse, blue skirt, and white sneakers (a gift from one of their few grandchildren), the standard outfit for a schoolteacher over sixty.

  That day started like many others before it, with Mary waking first and Wallace wandering into the kitchen after ample time was provided to make coffee and pour orange juice (coffee for him and orange juice for her). Wallace had on a bathrobe over his flannel pajamas; he had recently been feeling a chill during the unpredictable April nights.

  “Any coffee?” he asked as he entered the kitchen, more out of habit than thirst.

  “Here,” she answered, pouring the coffee into a World’s Greatest Grandmother mug, leaving just enough space at the top for the milk.

  The cornflakes box and bowl were already on the table, awaiting Wallace’s use. As he sat upon a cushion worn thin over the years, his wife impulsively went to the refrigerator and got Wallace the milk for his cereal. And although she realized that he could have gotten up himself, she always did it. Bringing the milk was merely one of the many constant mini-actions in her life, and to change the process would only make her think about it, thus making the whole thing much more complicated than it was.

  “Thank you,” Wallace said, always routinely appreciative.

  “You’re welcome,” Mary mumbled, as she walked the ten steps to retrieve her toast from the toaster.

  Sitting at the table, neither of them was terribly interested in the other. Granted, had one been missing, the other would have noticed. Yet breakfasts could be eaten with little more than a few words spoken between the lifemates. They had been together so long that superfluous conversation (“Nice weather we’re having,” “What time did you go to sleep last night?”) did not need to be voiced. It was assumed.

  That morning, however, the morning was in some manner disrupted. It started very innocently; Mary had been looking at a slightly askew picture frame behind Wallace when he, sensing her head’s movement, looked up to match her glance. But when Mary’s gaze shifted back from beyond Wallace, she couldn’t see him at all. She suddenly found herself reaching through the bonds of time and under the tattered layers of skin.

  A hand appeared before her—a man’s hand free of age spots and prominent veins. And when she followed the hand to see its keeper, she saw him again, the one she had only seen long ago.

  He was a young man once more, looking polite and hesitant, like one of her fourth-grade students on the eve of a school dance. His smile was a mixture of delight and fear, his voice searching to sound assured.

  “Would you care to dance?” he said, without a quake and barely a motion.

  “Oh, I could hardly…,” she said, putting down her wedge of toast.

  “Um…why not?” said the familiar stranger, starting to sway back and forth, anxiety and doubt starting to make themselves known.

  “It’s just…in this skirt?” she asked, more out of reaction than out of thought. Yet, when she motioned to reinforce her statement, she saw her blue skirt had turned into the bottom of a blue dress. Her white sneakers had disappeared to be replaced by a pair of blue formal shoes. In surprise, she ran her hands down the cotton of the dress and noticed that her fingers looked younger, too.

  He paused. Paralyzed with rejection.

  “Oh, what am I saying? I’d love to,” Mary concluded aloud, going along with the game being played.

  She took the hand before her and stood within the kitchen, seeing nothing but her unearthly partner. Slowly, the white tile of her kitchen gave way to the brown, white, and blue of a dance hall. Her appliances disappeared amid a flurry of true metallic music, the triumph of horns and drums that had been nearly forgotten in the distant present.

  “I hope you don’t mind a slow song,” he said, gaining confidence as he led her onto the dance floor.

  “Oh, no. I like slow songs. I’m not much of a dancer, never have been, but slow songs just seem easier,” she found herself saying effortlessly.

  “I think they are, too,” he confessed, smiling deeply into her eyes. Gradually, his arms stretched around her, as the band regained its melody.

  She gave in at once in his arms, feeling security that she had felt for the first time long ago. Her smile matched his, her soul was his for the taking (she knew now as she didn’t know then).

  As they danced, the hall faded away. They were light amid a darkened space, with events and faces flashing by.

  Their figures drew closer at times and distanced themselves at others, bombarded by emotions and discord somew
hat out of their control. Yet, with their eyes meeting and their bodies embraced, the music could not be destroyed. At times the perception of the sound changed, but the song remained the same.

  Backward to forward. Forward to backward. They were once again in each other’s arms on the dance floor. The music resumed its earthly tone, letting that moment’s dance slide gracefully to a halt, joined by applause of appreciation for the music’s makers.

  For a moment, the couple remained embraced. Her cheeks dimpled with a smile. His eyes moved over her shoulder.

  Slowly, his hands lowered.

  “It’s a shame that’s the last song,” she said, seeing the finality in his eyes as he looked at the clock.

  “There’ll be more tomorrow,” he said, with yet another grin.

  “Do you think I could see you then?”

  “Certainly,” she said, walking with him toward the door.

  “Until then,” he remarked upon departure, walking into the balmy summer night, his thoughts and hopes as incomplete as his farewell.

  As he left, she sat herself down, seeing the decorations undone around her. In her lap was a clean handkerchief someone had left on the chair next to hers.

  Before her eyes, the handkerchief slowly transformed, as Mary returned to the familiar. It metamorphosized from cotton to silk to velvet to paper, from white to red to blue to yellow, until all that was left was a napkin in her lap.

  Mary quickly glanced to her side, seeing the kitchen once more. Although nothing in the room had changed, she felt that some things did not seem to be the way they had been before. She centered her sight and saw Wallace again. Looking into his steady eyes, she had a feeling that he felt it, too. The music had faded, but it was there all the same, awaiting the next crescendo.

  INTERSECTION

  It takes a thousand people to create an accident. The man who installed the traffic sign a little askew. The woman who held the elevator for an extra moment as the driver left his office. The driver’s great-grandmother, who fell in love with the man at the hat shop. The driver’s two-thirty appointment, who had to put him on hold because of another call (his ten-year-old daughter). The technician who made the song on the radio sound so good. The television weatherman who had predicted rain.

  Person after person after person…they all converge at one moment, irrevocably changing the course of a thousand more lives.

  As it is with accidents, so it is with love.

  Meredith and John are standing in the Elysian Fields, on the edge of Hoboken, overlooking the New York City skyline. The sky is so dark that all the lights are magical. It is late in the hour, late in the night, late in the year. And yet the air is filled with beginnings—sweet, giddy lightness and the languid feel of clocks at rest.

  John and Meredith dance. They dance to the sound of the fabric-maker who made John’s sleeve so soft. They dance to the sound of their families’ arguments, and to the sound of their grandparents’ praise. They dance to the sounds that are carried in the airwaves around them—radio transmissions at lunar speed, one of which carries Meredith’s favorite song from high school, bound for another listener, miles away.

  They dance to the sound of a baby’s heartbeat. They dance to the sound of their first kiss.

  Somewhere back in time, a boy named Daryl broke Meredith’s heart. Somewhere back in time, John woke up driving at night, and swerved just in time to miss a tree. Somewhere back in time, Meredith’s parents said I love you. Somewhere back in time, a man said, This land should be a park. Another man’s wife named it Elysian Fields.

  Right now, a man in a red Chevrolet is driving by. Right now, John’s boss is getting ready for bed—her husband rolls over and gives her a corner of his pillow. Right now, the friend who taught Meredith to kiss in fourth grade is thinking about her, wondering where she is.

  Every two people cause an intersection.

  Every person alters the world.

  Meredith’s grandparents were married so long that their time together acquired all the time before and all the time after, so it could be truly said that they are married forever. John’s parents are much the same way.

  At any given moment, there are millions of people saying their lover’s name. The words travel through the air.

  Meredith leans into John, her hand loosely on his sleeve. He pushes a stray hair behind her ear and leaves his palm on her cheek. Then he retreats, and moves closer. The lights of Manhattan twinkle.

  They kiss.

  Maybe fate’s arithmetic is so diffuse that it’s not arithmetic at all.

  The lights. The sleeve. The park. The taxpayers of Hoboken. The parents. The friends. The past. The swaying of the streetlights. The car passing. The present. The hopes. The break-ups. The conversations. The invention of the lightbulb.

  It is the miracle of all these things coming together that constitutes love. The orchestra has been assembled…and now it plays.

  It doesn’t have to be on Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn’t have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn’t have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third date.

  It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirit.

  It just has to be.

  Two people in a park—

  They kiss.

  An intersection.

  One day when he was bored in physics class, David Levithan decided to write a Valentine’s Day story for his friends. With this one small decision, his future as an electromagnetic engineer was doomed…and a new story-writing tradition was born. He’s been writing stories for his friends ever since, and eventually some other people wanted to read them. A few of the stories got really long, too, and became novels. These include Boy Meets Boy, The Realm of Possibility, Are We There Yet?, Marly’s Ghost (illustrated by Brian Selznick), Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (written with Rachel Cohn), Wide Awake, and Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List (written with Rachel Cohn). He’s also interested in collecting other people’s stories (true or fictional), most recently in The Full Spectrum: A New Generation of Writing About Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, and Other Identities (edited with Billy Merrell), This Is PUSH, and 21 Proms (edited with Daniel Ehrenhaft).

  David’s senior-yearbook entry started with a quote from Philip Roth: “And as he spoke, I was thinking, ‘the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.’” He is still intrigued that his seventeen-year-old self chose those words.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2008 by David Levithan

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Some of the stories contained in this work were originally published as follows:

  “The Alumni Interview” in Sixteen: Stories About That Sweet and Bitter Birthday, edited by Megan McCafferty (Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., 2004)

  “Lost Sometimes” in 21 Proms, edited by David Levithan and Daniel Ehrenhaft (Scholastic, Inc., 2007)

  “Princes” in Every Man for Himself: Ten Original Stories About Being a Guy, edited by Nancy Mercado (Dial Books, a member of Penguin Group [USA] Inc., 2005)

  “Breaking and Entering” in Rush Hour: Reckless, edited by Michael Cart (Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 2006)

  “What a Song Can Do” in What a Song Can Do: 12 Riffs on the Power of Music, edited by Jennifer Armstrong (Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 2004)


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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Levithan, David.

  How they met, and other stories / David Levithan. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  SUMMARY: A collection of eighteen stories describing the surprises, sacrifices, doubts, pain, and joy of falling in love.

  1. Love stories, American. 2. Short stories, American. [1. Love—Fiction. 2. Short stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L5798Ho 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2007010586

  eISBN: 978-0-375-84942-8

  v3.0