“I thought, if we had a good time, you might … or I might … or we might—”
“You want to kiss me, is that it?”
“Well, yes.”
“Go ahead.”
“Go ahead?”
“I’m going in.”
“Okay! Okay!”
I lifted my arms to embrace her but, as she leaned forward with pursed lips, she held me back with both her hands on my chest.
In May, on the very day I started work as a merchandise trainee at Radisson’s department store, I received a printed invitation to a nurses’ dance. There was a handwritten name at the bottom: Barbara Mason.
The night of the dance fell during one of those cold snaps that make you think summer might never arrive. I wore a trench coat over my sport jacket, sport shirt and slacks. I parked my dad’s car and followed the posters to a gymnasium that was part of the nurses’ residence building near Redwood and Main. There were lots of guys in pairs and threesomes headed that way. At the gym entrance, I lined up to show my invitation and receive a name tag. Some guys were being met by their girlfriends. I tried to look nonchalant, the bon vivant who was invited to functions like this all the time.
“Oh, Jenkins, you did come.”
It was Barbara, looking lovely in a pink sweater and grey skirt. She was one of the girls checking guys in. She winked at me.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “Thank you for the invitation.”
I hadn’t heard from Charnetski lately; I knew nothing about where he fit in this picture.
“I’ve got to stay here for a while,” Barbara said. “Go in and relax, maybe have a pop or something, and I’ll come and find you. I’ve told my roommate what a good dancer you are, so you might have a twirl or two with her. Okay?”
“Sounds fantastic.”
The roommate was a redheaded girl named Melanie with hundreds of freckles on her face. She wore a plaid skirt and a green sweater with a little white collar. She led me into the low-lit gym, where a slow dance was in progress—Kitty Kallen’s “Little Things Mean a Lot.”
“Barbara couldn’t say enough about your dancing,” Melanie said. “I’m anxious for a sample.”
I settled into the Magic Step. “Hardly any pressure at all,” I said. “I’ll likely step all over you.”
Melanie seemed nervous, but she followed me, her head tilted forward so that I got a whiff of her shampoo. “Yikes,” she said. “This is such a nice song.”
“Do you know if Barbara is still going out with a fellow named Charnetski?”
“Oh, gosh, I don’t think so. No, that’s been over for a while. Well, I don’t think it was ever very serious.”
That wasn’t the impression Charnetski had given me—but that was before Grads’ Farewell.
I bought Cokes for Melanie and me and we talked about what kind of nursing Melanie wanted to do and what kind of training I was getting at Radisson’s—selling books one week, towels and blankets another. I began to think I could get interested in Melanie; I wondered if freckles covered her whole body.
“There you are.” It was Barbara. She looked slightly dishevelled, ruffled. Her forehead glowed. “The music man’s been paid and a couple of problems taken care of. I guess I can relax now.”
“Melanie’s been a perfect hostess,” I said.
“You were right,” Melanie said. “He can dance.”
“Ready, Jenkins?” said Barbara. “I know I am.”
Barbara and I danced to the McGuire Sisters number, “Sincerely.” She seemed sure of herself in my arms and we moved together like long-time dance partners. I felt her breasts touching my chest and all thoughts of Melanie’s freckles vanished.
“I gather you aren’t going out with Charnetski anymore,” I said.
“That was over before your Grads’ Farewell. I thought you might’ve been able to tell. I agreed to go just because it was a formal event and he promised to behave.”
“Oh.”
“I think we dated no more than three times. Once I found out all he wanted to do was maul me, that was it.”
Almost involuntarily, I increased the distance between us so that our fronts didn’t touch.
“You must’ve noticed how he was going after your date,” Barbara said when the song ended.
“Now that you mention it, yes.”
“I thought, What kind of friend is he? You must’ve heard what he did later that night.”
“No, I haven’t talked to him since then.”
“He bragged about it when he took me home. He said he and—what was your date’s name? Jennifer—he and Jennifer had a plan to get together after she—as he so nicely put it—‘got rid of you.’”
“I’m not surprised,” I said. “She went to Grads’ Farewell with me as part of a—a bargain.”
“I won’t ask what the bargain was. Sounds like we’re well rid of those two.”
She laughed and so did I, and I noticed, as we jived to “Rock Around the Clock,” that she could follow me as perfectly to fast music as she did to slow. As I twirled her, brought her in, spun her out, sent her under my arm and back, I thought, She’s enjoying this as much as I am.
The last dance was Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.” I felt her close to me again. She hummed.
“Can I walk you to your room after this?” I asked.
“Off limits. I’ll walk you to your car, if you like.”
The record ended. The lights went up too quickly and Barbara stepped back, adjusting her sweater and her hair. I glanced at her curves. Once I found out all he wanted to do was maul me, that was it.
I picked up my coat while she attended to some details with the girls responsible for clean-up. She and I headed down the hall to the main door.
“Too cold for you without a coat,” I said.
She stepped outside and took a deep breath. “Ahh! It’s invigorating. Come on, I said I’d walk you to your car.” She pulled my arm.
“It’s this way,” I said.
Both of us ran. When we reached the car, she cried, “It’s freezing!” and I did something so spontaneous, I surprised myself: I unbuttoned my coat and held it open wide. Without hesitation, she stepped into it and I wrapped my arms and the coat around her. I looked into her eyes. They were shining, reflecting the light from a street lamp. The night, the passing traffic, the guys leaving the dance, the buildings, the trees, the cold—everything dropped away and I was in a cocoon with this girl who seemed happy to be with me and was expecting me to do something. I knew what to do.
As I drove home, I went over and over the evening, recalling what Barbara said and how she looked and how she felt in my arms and what the kiss felt like. The kiss. It had come about so naturally. There was no desperation on my part—it was simply the next thing to do—and, by her response, she was in complete agreement. There was nothing tentative about the way we approached it; both applied pressure, but nothing that could be called aggressive. There seemed to be no need to embellish the kiss in any way; any attempt to bring my tongue into play would’ve tarnished the experience. As it was, without opening her mouth, she was able to convey the impression that she liked me, that she liked kissing, that she liked kissing me, that she liked being with me, that she felt enough at ease with me that she could let me take her into my coat and kiss her right out there on the street on a cold spring night, that she wouldn’t mind seeing me again, and that she could deliver a just-right counter-kiss, just right for the moment, just right for the time of night, and just right for a guy who perhaps deserved some encouragement.
She explained before we parted that the best time to call her was on the one day a week she spent at home—Saturday. Since Saturday was the very next day, I took a break from selling men’s hats—barely twelve hours after I’d left her—and, inside the tiny Men’s Furnishings office, I dialled her number.
“Hello?”
I recognized her voice. “Hi, Barbara, it’s Jenkins.”
“Oh, hi! I just got here.
Dad came and picked me up.”
“I wanted you to know how much I liked the dance last night.”
“Oh, good! Me too.”
My impulse was to move straight to an invitation to go out, but, despite my lack of dating experience, I knew it was bad manners to appear too eager.
“You’re a nurse,” I said. “Maybe you’ve seen something like this. I was trying a hat—a fedora—on a man this morning and I was standing on one side of him and setting the fedora on his head just so, the way you’re supposed to, and there on the side of his head facing me was this hole between his eye and his ear.”
“A hole?”
“That’s the only way to describe it—a hole in his skull, around the temple, maybe an inch or so in diameter. I had to look away, I had this sick feeling, as if I was looking at the raw brain—”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that—what was the flesh like around it?”
“I’d say sort of healed, as if there wasn’t going to be any attempt to fill it in or cover it, and he could go on living with this gaping hole in his head. You might say he was so optimistic, he was buying a new hat.”
“Could you see what he was thinking?”
There was a moment of silence and then we both laughed.
“I’m awful,” said Barbara.
“I guess the main thing is, from the point of view of a salesman, he did buy the hat. But listen … to change the subject to something more pleasant … I was wondering if you’d like to go to a movie.”
“Sure, that’d be nice. When?”
I’d reached a critical point in the conversation. I knew a guy shouldn’t presume that a girl was sitting around waiting for his call or that she didn’t have any plans for the evening.
I said, “How about next Saturday?”
“That should be okay. Or it might have to be Friday. I’ll have to check the schedule.”
Time to say what I really wanted to say. “You know what?”
“What?”
“I’d rather see you tonight, if it’s possible.”
“I’d like that.”
“You would?”
“Sure. I don’t get out much. Sometimes it feels like I’m in a convent.”
I drove my father’s Chevrolet into the driveway on Kingston Row. The Mason home was about three miles from where I lived, a sprawling single-storey ranch-style house with a maple tree standing guard beside a driveway that led to a double garage. The house, in my sociological view, placed the Masons among the city’s nouveaux riches—it had definitely been built since the war and the maple must’ve been transplanted.
I walked up the concrete steps to what was surely an oak front door. The coach lamps on either side were on. The shape of the doorbell reminded me of a woman’s breast and I pressed the nipple. There was a small translucent window in the door and a blurred image appeared. The door opened and there was Barbara.
“You’re right on time,” she said. “Come in—I’ll just be a minute.”
As I stepped across the threshold, all my senses shouted at me that this was the classic date, the kind of date guys like me wished for.
Barbara wore a white sweater, a flared plaid skirt, bobby sox and saddle shoes. She gave off a piquant fragrance—perhaps something by Chanel—that lingered after she’d gone into another part of the house.
It’s important to remind you that this was 1955, a time when perfume was used as much to hide body odour as anything. I myself had prepared for the date by having a bath and a shave just before leaving my house. Bath soaps like Lifebuoy were meant to combat body odour, not under-arm smells specifically. There was no such thing as a spray deodorant then, and the best any young man like me did was wash well under the arms—and all over, if you had time for a bath. I knew that my mother owned a mysterious jar of cream called Odorono, but she kept it out of sight, leading me to believe it had something to do with female hygiene. I had no idea where she applied it, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask. Before spray deodorants were marketed in the 1960s, under-arm odours were never spoken of. Some might say that under-arm deodorants were a triumph of the advertising industry, that we didn’t even know our armpits smelled until arbiters of good manners allowed advertisers to tell us they did. (The first ads on the subject avoided that dastardly word armpit, referring instead to the curve of a woman’s arm.) It was assumed that women might have to take some precaution when wearing a sleeveless blouse or dress in the summer; men kept their jackets on, especially at work, and if they gave off an odour, well, it was likely the masculine odour that was expected of them. As for me on this night, I had covered the lower part of my face with after-shave lotion. It could be that Barbara had applied the relatively new Ban roll-on deodorant, but most likely she relied on a good wash and perfume, since girls of a certain class believed they didn’t give off any odour.
I stood in a vestibule that featured an oriental rug over cream-coloured broadloom, and an oak table with a lamp and an ornate dish that was likely intended for calling cards. Barbara came back with a woman who looked like an older version of her—just as erect in posture, hair the same shade of brown, just as tall, only slightly less shapely—except that she had a beauty spot on her upper lip where Barbara was blemish-free.
“Hello, I’m Barbara’s mother,” she said, smiling as brightly as Barbara, one eyelid fluttering in a potential wink. “You must be Jenkins.”
“Hello, Mrs. Mason, yes, hi.”
We didn’t shake hands. Women seldom shook hands with men or other women in those days.
“I understand your Christian name is Robert,” Mrs. Mason said.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I like Robert. A shame it gets contracted to Bob. But in your case they call you neither. Why is that?”
“Oh, you know how kids can be. I’m glad I didn’t get one of those crazy nicknames.” I thought of a guy I knew named Bill Baxter whom everyone called La. The nickname had evolved from Baxter to Backhouse to House to La Maison to La. “I guess my friends thought I was more of a Jenkins than anything else.”
There was no sign of Barbara’s father. In Barbara’s social class—Upper Middle, if not Lower Upper, using Burgess’s six-class theory—fathers normally didn’t make an appearance when a boy went to a girl’s house for the first time. In the patriarchal, pre-feminist period that extended through the 1950s, meeting the father was a serious matter, reserved for a later date.
“We’re off to a movie,” Barbara said. “We won’t be late.”
“What one are you going to see?” her mother asked.
“Marty, with Ernest Borgnine,” Barbara said.
“Oh, I’ve heard that’s very good,” her mother said. “Have a nice time.”
Barbara took her raincoat from the front closet.
“Allow me,” I said. I reached for her coat and she let me hold it open while she slipped her arms into the sleeves.
“Thank you,” she said.
I saw her glance at her mother as if to say, Big improvement over the louts who’ve come calling before, don’t you think, Mom? She kissed her mother on the cheek. I opened the door and stepped aside to let Barbara precede me out onto the landing. I closed the door.
“Your mother’s very nice,” I said.
“We get along,” Barbara said. “It helps that I’m in residence and we don’t get to see much of each other.”
I walked her to the passenger side of the car and opened the door for her.
“Thank you,” she said, and she eased herself into the seat. I made sure her coat was tucked inside before I closed the door.
So far, so good.
I didn’t have a checklist of things you should do on a date, but I might as well have. My head was full of dos and don’ts accumulated from many sources. There were the things I’d seen my father do on social occasions: helping my mother with her coat, opening doors for her, helping her out of her coat, pulling a chair out from a table and slipping it under her as she sat down, walk
ing beside her or behind her and never in front of her, fetching her drink before his own. There were things I’d seen my friends do: dropping off a girlfriend at the door before parking the car, letting her go first into a room, staying on the traffic side of her when walking together on a sidewalk, complimenting her at every opportunity, paying for her movie ticket and her popcorn and her post-movie snack. And there were things I’d seen in movies: lighting your girlfriend’s cigarette, holding your umbrella over her even if you yourself got wet, summoning the waiter when her dinner wasn’t quite right. I’d tried to abide by these guidelines as far back as on that first date with Doreen; I’d tried to be observant and attentive with Shirley, Janie, Mary, Marcia and Jennifer, but somehow it seemed more important to be observant and attentive with Barbara. She was more refined than the others, or I saw her as more refined. That could be because I’d seen the interior of her home—or at least the vestibule—and I’d met her mother. It could also be because of what she’d said about Charnetski—Once I found out all he wanted to do was maul me, that was it. I very much wanted to—well, let’s not say maul—touch her, but I had to prove I was a considerate gentleman first.
Midway through the movie, I reached for Barbara’s hand and held it loosely. It felt warm, soft, relaxed. I tried not to transmit my anxiety caused by keeping my hand in one place for such a long while—I turned any twitches into squeezes that she returned. I rejected the idea of playing with one of her fingers or slipping one of mine between two of hers—too phallic. My palm covered the back of her hand; her keeping her palm turned from mine was virginal—beautifully so. Somewhere near the end of the movie, she turned her hand over so that her palm faced mine, a gesture that seemed suddenly submissive, loving, trusting. It sent a wave of warmth throughout my body.
We went to a small restaurant on Portage Avenue called The Ivanhoe. Over coffee and toasted pecan buns, we talked about the movie. I didn’t let on that Marty closely reflected the life I’d been leading (“Whaddaya wanna do tonight, Marty?” “I dunno, whadda you wanna do?”). We agreed on how likeable Borgnine’s character and the others had been. After finishing her bun, Barbara excused herself and came back wearing fresh lipstick. I loved the happy red colour of it and the fragrance of it, and I couldn’t wait for the moment when I’d be able to taste it.
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