by Paul Feig
I looked up at the top of the stairs. Her bedroom door was shut. There was definitely something exciting about the whole thing, as if I were on Let’s Make a Deal and was about to find out if I’d picked the door with the new car behind it. Knowing how pretty Cathy was in school every day, my heart raced at the thought of how beautiful she was going to look after half a day of preparation.
The door opened. Cathy stepped out slowly with a shy look on her face, a look I had seen on the faces of brides in so many Westerns, when the innocent farm girl is first revealed in her wedding dress to her intended. In those movies, the cowboy always slowly takes off his hat in reverence to her unexpected beauty and whistles to himself, amazed. I stared up at her. Cathy looked down over the railing and gave me a coy little smile. Her expression bore the words So . . . what do you think?
So . . . what did I think?
Zonk, as Monty Hall would say.
She was terrifying. Whatever she and her mom had been up to all afternoon should not have occurred. Cathy’s normally soft Dorothy Hamill hair had been sprayed up into a shape that is best described as a Nazi storm-trooper helmet. It hovered up and away from the edges of her scalp like a flying saucer, defying both gravity and attractiveness. Her face had been made up like a ventriloquist dummy’s, with bright red cheeks and thick blue eye shadow that said less “I’m your dream girl” and more “I just got punched out in a bar fight.” She was wearing an ill-advised dress that was very silk-esque and clingy, which instead of being enticing simply drew attention to the fact that Cathy had the slightest bit of a gut on her. I had only ever seen her wearing tight jeans in school and suddenly realized the girdlelike qualities of tightly packed denim. The tops of her arms, which had never before been exposed to me, were now on display and revealed an overabundance of moles. She wore white pumps with a noncommittal heel that looked exactly like the shoes nurses used to wear in hospital shows from the 1960s. And topping off her ensemble was a loosely knit white shawl draped around her shoulders—the exact same shawl I’d seen my eighty-something grandmother wear for years.
If ever one could hear the sound of a libido dropping, the thud of mine must have been deafening.
“Wow, Cathy,” I said, forcing myself to sound like husbands I’d heard on TV shows. “You look great.”
Cathy gave me a shy smile and descended the stairs. Her mother led her over and delivered her to me as if we were at the wedding altar while her father took pictures of us. As we stood together posing, clouds of Love’s Baby Soft wafted off of Cathy and assaulted my nose like the green fingers of the plague that killed the firstborn males of Egypt in The Ten Commandments. Cathy kept giving me sweet, coy looks that I knew were supposed to be romantic. However, they only succeeded in unnerving me. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this dating thing, I thought. Because looking at Cathy right then, the last thing I wanted to do was make out with her.
The doorbell rang and Cathy’s friend Sandy came in with her boyfriend, Walter. Cathy’s parents knew Sandy quite well and so there were big greetings all around. They had also apparently met Walter several times and liked the guy, and so the air was suddenly filled with familiarity that threw me into the outsider role of standing off to the side and smiling as I forced myself to enjoy the warm scene in front of me. Once additional pictures had been taken with the four of us being placed into every conceivable combination, we headed out the door and climbed into Walter’s car. We all waved good-bye to Cathy’s parents and headed off. It was such a Leave It to Beaver moment that I was completely unprepared for what was to follow.
The second Cathy’s house was out of range, Sandy reached under the driver’s seat and pulled out a can of beer.
“Who wants a brew?” she asked with a big, evil smile.
“Allllll-riiiiiiiight!” Cathy said in the same cadence that Jimmie “J.J.” Walker from Good Times used to say his catch phrase of “Dy-No-Mite.”
Sandy cracked open the beer and took a small sip. She handed it off to Walter, who took a slightly bigger sip. Walter then handed the can over his shoulder to Cathy. Cathy took the beer, raised it to her lips, and chugged down the entire can. I watched in amazement as she drank, pulling the beer so hard that trickles of it leaked out of the sides of her mouth and ran down her jawbone as if she were in a Mountain Dew commercial. She took the empty can away from her mouth, gave an “oops, did I do that?” look, and then burped. Sandy cracked up, Walter cracked up, and I pretended to crack up even though I was completely and utterly horrified. At this point in my life, I had only tasted beer once and that was at a friend’s house when we were twelve and retrieving a beer for his lawn-cutting father. I had taken a small sip and thought it tasted much like I imagined beef-flavored apple juice that had gone bad might taste.
“Wow, you must have really been thirsty,” I said, trying to sound unaffected.
“I just wanted to get loose,” Cathy said to Sandy.
What did that mean? Was she nervous? Uptight? Was there something about her date with me that she had been dreading? I was immediately insulted and I think my face gave me away. Cathy saw this and quickly explained herself.
“I mean, these dances can be so boring and I thought we should get ourselves more in the party mood.” She gave me a smile and called up to Sandy in the front seat. “You got another one for Paul?”
“Yeah, right here,” said Sandy, reaching under her seat.
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said, trying not to sound panicked. “I’ll wait until later.” Scenes from all those ABC Afterschool Specials about the evils of teenage drinking flooded my brain. I had just seen the TV movie Sarah T.—Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic and was now scared that by the end of the evening, I, like Sarah T., would be getting drunk and killing a horse by riding it into traffic.
“Well, if you don’t want it, I’ll have it,” said Cathy, who grabbed the can and cracked it open like a Shriner. She drank half of it, burped again, handed it back up to Sandy, and then turned to me, excited. “We’re gonna have so much fun tonight!”
I forced a smile back. I was beginning to sweat in my velour jacket.
When we got to the school, the Commodores’ “Brick House” was booming out of the cafetorium doors. Officially ready to party the night away, thanks to one and a half cans of Stroh’s beer, Cathy grabbed my hand and pulled me out onto the dance floor. She immediately started dancing wildly, jumping and gyrating as if she were a featured dancer on American Bandstand. She was scanning the room as she danced, looking for friends and checking to see if Dan had come with anyone. I looked around and was thrown by the sight of everyone from my school dressed in their finest evening wear. You get so used to seeing your peers dressed like your peers that it’s always surprising when they show up somewhere dressed like your parents.
“Hey, Cathy, what’s goin’ on?” yelled over one of her other friends. The girl, who was wearing a form-fitting Danskin leotard dress as if she were a cast member of A Chorus Line, made a face at Cathy whose meaning I could only decipher as “Who’s the dork you’re with?” Cathy made a big smiley face back at the girl that seemed to convey both “Shut up” and “I know, can you believe it?” The two girls laughed to each other across the dance floor, then Cathy turned back to me and gave me what I think was supposed to be a sexy look. Having never been the recipient of a sexy look in my fifteen years on earth, I had no idea how to interpret it. But it felt like something that was supposed to throw me off the scent of the exchange she knew I must have just witnessed. I wasn’t sure how to take any of this because, being a newcomer to the dating scene, I had no idea if this was about me or just the kind of thing girls did with each other on dates. Girls always seemed to be laughing about something whenever they were with their friends, and I had been paranoid for years that every time they laughed, somehow they were laughing at me. I forced a smile back at her, and Cathy then started dancing even more wildly, whipping her head from side to side. I became hypnotized by the fact that her rock-hard flying-saucer-shaped
hairdo was completely immune to the centrifugal force her actions were exerting upon it. You could have hit that hair with a wrecking ball and not made a dent in it.
As the song started to wind down, I noticed that Cathy’s dancing seemed to lose its initial intensity. She was still gyrating in a sort of belly-dancer-meets-drunk-guy-at-the-accounting-department-Christmas-party way, but her face showed she was becoming preoccupied. By the time the song faded, she threw me a look and said, “I’ll be right back.” And with this, she walked very quickly out of the cafetorium.
Twenty minutes later, I was standing on the side of the dance floor talking to my friend Tom, whose date was off talking with some of her friends.
“Where’s Cathy?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I think she went to the bathroom or something.”
“I wonder if she’s talking to Dan,” said Tom. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”
I hadn’t even considered this possibility and quickly grew concerned. But my concern immediately turned into a hope that she was talking to him. In fact, part of me really wanted them to be professing their love and agreeing to get back together. I wasn’t enjoying this date with Cathy very much, and any excuse to get to leave the dance and go home to watch The Six Million Dollar Man and drink root beer was a welcome thought.
I concocted a plan in which I would walk outside and discover Cathy and Dan making out and then play the sad, jilted cuckold as I walked home through the rain in my dress clothes while sad music played on the sound track. Looking forward to my new role as the Misunderstood Romantic, I headed out of the cafetorium to find Cathy. However, as I entered the trophy case–lined front lobby of our school, her friend Sandy ran up to me.
“Paul, Cathy’s in the bathroom and she’s really sick. She’s throwing up and everything.”
“What?” I asked, my mind reeling with horrific images of Cathy on her hands and knees in her dress heaving into a school toilet. “Does she have the flu?”
“No, it’s because of the beer. I think it made her sick,” Sandy said, looking upset.
I immediately lost sympathy for Cathy and my feelings of ambivalence about our date now turned into indignation. This is what she gets for downing a beer two minutes into our date, I thought to myself. If the idea of spending an evening with a nice guy like me was so hard to face that she had to turn to booze for moral support, then she can just heave all night for all I care. But, being a kid who was brought up to never make others feel bad about themselves, I forced a concerned look onto my face and said, “Oh, man, I hope she’s okay.”
“She’s really upset,” Sandy said with a look that showed she was worried I was going to be mad at Cathy. “She’s crying and everything. She said she didn’t want to ruin your evening.”
Too late, I thought. When an outing to a dance sees one half of the couple hearing that the other half of the couple is puking up beer into a toilet a mere thirty minutes into the date, then I’d say the evening is about as far down the road to ruin as it can get. Unfortunately, hearing that Cathy was crying made it hard for me to act angry. I once again slipped into the role of the Concerned Guy.
“Oh, she shouldn’t worry about that,” I said kindly. “I just hope she’s okay.”
“She’s fine. We got her cleaned up after she stopped barfing about five minutes ago. I’ll see if she’s ready to come out.” And with this, Sandy disappeared into the bathroom.
I had no idea what I was supposed to do. The idea that Cathy had been vomiting put the final nail in the coffin of my make-out fantasies. The mere mention that she had to be “cleaned up” made me wish she would simply stay in the bathroom all night, since the thought of seeing Cathy with puke stains on her already less-than-enticing dress was making my stomach sore. Before I could formulate any sort of a plan, the bathroom door opened and a contrite-looking Cathy emerged. There were no stains on her dress, but her makeup had taken a hit. The blush on her cheeks had clearly been wiped clean and reapplied with even less competence than her mother had demonstrated. Her eye shadow had been repaired simply by doubling its already heavy dosage. But it was her mascara that had borne the brunt of her emotional and gastrointestinal outburst. The black from her eyelashes had run and commingled with her liner, giving her eyes a Norma Desmond–meets–Alice Cooper effect. She walked over to me, her eyes cast down at the floor.
“I’m so sorry, Paul,” she said, looking like she might cry. “I understand if you don’t want to talk to me.”
What was I going to say? I really didn’t want to talk to her, simply because I was terrified that I might smell the vomit on her breath. Her large mouth, which I had found so sexy in the past, had now become the focal point of my angst. I knew that vomit had come out of it very recently, and I couldn’t be sure that bits of it weren’t still floating around in there. I knew from the few horrible times I had vomited in my life, that the taste had stayed with me for hours. Therefore, no matter how sad and coy Cathy was going to act, she was one thing and one thing only in my mind: a person who had just puked.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, shifting my weight back a bit.
“I feel terrible,” she said, stepping forward in order to get close to me. “I’ve completely ruined the evening.”
I shifted my weight away from her again, inching my foot back discreetly. “No, it’s not ruined. You just probably shouldn’t have drank all that beer in the car.”
She sighed heavily. I held my breath, afraid of what I might smell. “You’re right. God, it was so stupid. You don’t even drink, I can tell.” She looked into my eyes as if I were some sort of wise man. Clearly the girl was a mess. All I could do was stare at her mouth and wonder just how many times she had thrown up and whether her hands had gripped the sides of the toilet bowl as she did.
“As long as you’re okay, that’s all that matters,” I said with a forgiving smile, stepping back and putting my hands on my hips, as if I were her father. She sighed in relief to Sandy, then gave me a look that said she now thought I was a great guy and a potential boyfriend. “Slow Dancin’ “ came on inside the cafetorium. She looked toward the music, then gave me one of her now-familiar shy looks.
“Do you want to dance?” she asked, doe-eyed.
Good God, no, I thought. “Okay,” I said.
She took my hand, gave me a romantic smile, and led me into the dance. Her friend Sandy gave me a grateful smile that showed she was happy that I didn’t care about what had just happened in the bathroom. I smiled back, trying to figure out exactly how I could get the hell out of the rest of this date.
Cathy and I got onto the dance floor. She put her arms around my neck and pulled me close, in the standard death-grip slow-dance position that we as teenagers in the late 1970s were required to perform. Gone were the one-hand-on-waist-the-other-hand-up-and-out-to-the-side days of our parents. I had danced with my mother and aunts for years in this old-fashioned way and had dreamed about the time when I would finally get to put both my arms around a girl and pull her close, her arms around my neck, our foreheads touching, staring deeply into each other’s eyes, moments away from a kiss neither one of us could stop. Now, Cathy’s arms were around my neck, her face was inches from mine, and all I wanted to do was run. I gingerly put my hands on her waist and held her lightly, tilting my head back a bit, pretending to survey the room as I moved my nose out of breathing range.
“Wow, there sure are a lot of people here,” I said in as nonromantic a tone as I could muster.
“I wish there weren’t,” she said quietly. “I wish it was just you and me.”
I had lain awake at night for years dreaming of having a girl say something like that to me. I looked into Cathy’s eyes. She smiled coyly and exhaled. I smelled a trace of vomit on her breath. I felt like I was going to faint.
“Oh, yeah, well, too bad it’s not.” I delivered the line much like a clerk in a complaint department would tell a customer that he understood her grievance but there was nothing he could do
about it.
Cathy looked into my eyes and moved her head forward, getting very close to my face. I held my breath. “I’m so glad you asked me to the dance,” she said sweetly.
“I’m glad you came with me,” I said, contorting my neck into a question-mark shape in order to put the maximum distance possible between her mouth and my nose.
“We’re going to have a great time.” Cathy’s smile started to transform into the flat-faced expression that people get just before they kiss someone. She moved her face toward mine. My neck had put my head as far back as it could go without dislodging it from the top of my spine. As Cathy moved her mouth toward mine, eyes closing to commence the kiss, I moved my head to the side and forward, effectively dodging her face and parking my ear next to hers. It was such a bold move that I didn’t know if she was going to get mad and push me away or if she’d just assume I didn’t know she wanted to kiss me and figure I was simply going into the heads-together slow-dance position. Cathy leaned her head against my cheek and sigh contentedly. All I could think of was how happy I was that her face was now behind me.
The dance went by slowly. I started pawning Cathy off on other guys she knew. I worried that she would figure out I was trying to get rid of her, but my nice-guy act was going so well that I had Cathy fooled into thinking I was being selfless.
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” she would ask me before going onto the dance floor with any number of football players.
“No, no, you two should dance,” I’d reply, as if I were her grandmother who was just happy to be sitting and watching the young people enjoy themselves. I hung around with the few guys I knew at the dance. None of my core group of fellow nerds had bothered to attend, knowing as I did that school dances were not the place where any of us felt at all comfortable. Coffee shops, movie theaters, and our bedrooms were our turf, and we never had to defend those places from cool guys.