He Loves Me Not

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Ted held up a hand to stop me from bending down again to get the music. “One of us at a time,” he said firmly. When he was very sure his upturned palm had stopped me from getting closer to him, he bent over and retrieved all my music. Stacking it very neatly and carefully, he said politely, “We ready to go now?”

  But we weren’t. I had to change my shoes. I had never felt so stupid. I had to sit on the chancel steps, untie the laces of my organ shoes, put those shoes back in their box, and jam my feet into my old sneakers. I was so upset with myself I could hardly tie the dumb things. Ted watched me with a sort of awed appreciation for anyone so uncoordinated that she couldn’t even tie a bow on her sneakers.

  I waited for him to make some sort of snide remark like did I require assistance in getting dressed each morning, but he didn’t. He just gave me a rather determined smile. I could just hear his mother Hildegarde telling him if you’re going to have to do something anyway, best to do it with a cheerful smile. Mother’s well-trained boy Ted gave me a glued-on, cheerful smile.

  We climbed into Ted’s car. After I accidentally distributed his neatly stacked pile of my music all over the floor of the front seat, and after we had fished my Bach out from under his gas pedal, and after he had helped me figure out all over again how to fix his crazy seat belt, I was definitely ready for an early death.

  Here I had spent my whole silly life learning how to impress people with all my super skills, and the one boy I wanted to impress…you’d have thought my body consisted of old Jell-O.

  “Well, I think I’ve got enough photographs,” said Ted brightly. “All we need now is a place to talk. You want to go to the Burger Chef or Howard Johnson’s on the turnpike and sit in a booth?”

  I had no money on me. This wasn’t exactly a date, and I had no idea if Ted planned to pay. I’d been so hard on him already—literally—that I didn’t feel up to asking what the financial arrangements were on this. I rubbed my skull where it still ached from whacking his.

  Ted, no doubt, was regretting he had ever gotten started on this interview. He was probably thinking it was truly miraculous that a girl could be a musician and still be a completely uncoordinated jerk. He had probably fastened my seat belt so that he wouldn’t have to worry about me writhing all over the seat every time he made a left turn.

  The more I looked at Ted, the cuter I thought he was. Sort of solid-looking. Friendly. The sort of guy you could snuggle up to and tell your troubles to and move on from those to…

  “Don’t worry,” said Ted, “the newspaper pays for it. We can go anywhere and it won’t cost either of us a cent.” He beamed at me. Clearly the only decent thing about our whole afternoon together was that he didn’t have to pay for it. “Okay,” I said wearily, “then let’s go to Howard Johnson’s.”

  I was starving. Daddy and I eat at Burger Chef all the time. I might as well calm my growling stomach and my aching head with a new menu.

  “I’d take you to my house,” said Ted, “except that there’s never any food there. We all work and nobody ever gets around to doing a big grocery shopping, so we never have more than enough food for the very next meal. If a war ever comes, we’ll be the ones who starve first because all we’ll have in the house is a bar of soap and a jar of pickles.”

  I burst out laughing. A boy with a mixed-up household just like mine. Well…no, really, not at all like mine. Starving is probably my father’s greatest fear. Our house is stuffed beyond belief with canned ravioli and frozen waffles. “I’ll pass on your house then,” I told him.

  And spent the rest of the drive scolding myself for saying that. Ted might think I meant I’d skip him, not his jar of pickles.

  When we got to HoJo’s, I shoveled my stuff out of my lap and tried to plan how to remove myself from the seat belt without falling on the pavement. Ted walked around the car to open the door for me. “Leave all your garbage there,” he said, properly identifying my belongings. “I’ll lock the car.”

  Just in case I was flattered that he was worried about my possessions, he added, “After all, my camera is in there.”

  Ted helped me out of the car. Now I don’t normally require help anywhere and even if I did, nobody has ever offered it. Can you imagine Ralph asking me if he could open the door for me? Unless the door smashed my fingers, thus making it impossible for me to play our next gig, Ralph couldn’t care less how I got through doors.

  But Ted took my arm, extricated me from his seat belt, positioned my shoulder bag again on my shoulder, and turned me very gently away from the car. I was all set to feel warm and good about his attention—when I figured out the only reason he did all that was that he was afraid I might slam the door on the seat belt, and he wanted to feed it back into its slot. He did that. Lovingly. I wanted to make a smart remark about men who stroked seat belts for fun, but I had wrecked enough already. I kept silent.

  After he’d locked up the car, Ted took my arm again, and we walked into the restaurant together. We took a booth in the corner and I sat opposite him. I watched his face. First he surveyed the restaurant, found that it looked exactly like every single other HoJo’s on earth, decided that the other patrons didn’t look all that interesting, and finally his eyes came to rest on me.

  And he grinned.

  Gosh, if I had been like old Jell-O before…

  I thought that Ted Mollison had possibly the world’s nicest smile.

  This is an interview, I said to myself. The Register is paying for this and it is not a date. I will not see Ted again. I must be calm and professional as befits an interviewee. I must be fascinating and intriguing, however, so that Ted calls me up for a date anyway.

  I tried to think of one single solitary fascinating thing to tell Ted about me.

  The waitress, chewing more gum than any three people normally could, wanted to know what I was having. “Uh,” I said, fascinating nobody. Ted, the infuriating creature, was fascinated by the amount of gum in the waitress’s mouth.

  I gave up. Fascination was not my strong point. I didn’t have any strong points except playing hit tunes. If I did have any, why, I’d already have a boyfriend.

  “Could we see a menu, please?” said Ted.

  The waitress mumbled something and ambled off. I figured she wouldn’t be back for ten minutes. How was I going to be fascinating for ten whole minutes?

  It turned out that I was not going to have time to worry about that. I was not even going to have time to read the menu. Ted shot questions at me like machine-gun bullets. He’d start with one topic and jerk into another and back to the first and off on a third. I could hardly keep track of anything and pretty soon I was just spouting answers without thinking—probably what Ted wanted. I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted, though. I like to think long and hard before I speak.

  He wrote it all down, too, in a shorthand notebook.

  “Tell me the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you.”

  I told the waitress I would have the seafood platter and told Ted about the Polish wedding where they had to explain to me what a polka was.

  “Tell me about Ralph,” demanded Ted.

  I told him about Ralph. How come he didn’t want to hear about Alison? Who cared about music and Ralph and gigs? I wanted to talk about me, and then I wanted to talk about Ted and me.

  The delivery of our food was a welcome diversion for me, but Ted was just annoyed by it. He couldn’t talk as well with his mouth full, and he was very impatient because I had to finish each mouthful before I could answer him. It is very hard to chew normally when the person across the table from you is tapping his pencil waiting for that chewing nonsense to finish up.

  Finally Ted began talking about himself in order to fill the moments when I was chewing. I relaxed a bit and enjoyed my supper after all.

  “Once,” said Ted, “I interviewed this fascinating guy who runs the only one of this business in the entire world. He manufactures autographed baseballs.”

  I cracked up laughing. Imag
ine doing something like that all day every day of your entire life—writing names on little white balls. Ted laughed, too. “That’s what I thought, but it turned out to be a fascinating business, especially if you like sports, which I do. Well, I not only sold my story to The Register, but I wrote it up differently—they call it slant in publishing jargon—and sold it to four major national magazines, including Sports Illustrated! Talk about a hit, Alison. There I was, sixteen, and I’d broken into four big, slick, tough, adult markets.”

  “Congratulations,” I said, and I didn’t say it lightly. I could well imagine how good the writing must have been to accomplish that. As Ted leaned forward, eager to tell the rest of his story, his notebook slipped and I saw that he had not been writing my words down in longhand, but in shorthand. He must have learned it because he felt he needed it for his career.

  It was partly his story and what it had in common with my own, and partly his calling me Alison as if we were friends, not reporter and interviewee. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, I felt a deep kinship with Ted Mollison. I set down my fork and had a tremendous impulse to use that free hand to reach over and grab Ted’s and say, “Ted, I feel a deep kinship with you.”

  The mere thought of actually doing that made me choke up with horrified laughter. How disgusted with me he would be then! The girl not only tried to break his bones, she got all soppy and maudlin on him.

  “There wasn’t one adult reporter on the whole Register who’d sold more than one article to a major magazine and most of them hadn’t done that. Boy, was I cocky. I bragged until the staff was ready to slit my precocious little throat.”

  I could identify with that, as one who had done a lot of bragging in her time.

  “But I never did it again, you see,” said Ted, and there was a funny tired look in his face. “Since then I’ve never sold a single line to any publisher except The Register. I guess I’ve written fifty stories now that I thought were worth publishing, and all I have is a box full of rejection slips.”

  Ralph handled all our bookings. I suppose that our combo had had its share of rejections. But I hadn’t had to face the agony of being informed I wasn’t worth anything. Ralph yelled at me from time to time. I flubbed things now and then. But I was never thoroughly and completely rejected.

  “I know how it must hurt,” I said helplessly. I wanted to hug Ted. I wanted to say that I knew he wrote super stories even if the national magazines didn’t.

  Then I thought, I’ve gone crazy. I’ve never read one line by Ted Mollison. For all I know, he’s illiterate and the editor at The Register spends every morning correcting Ted’s stories. For all I know Ted’s mother actually wrote the article about the autographed baseballs.

  Ted cleared his throat, wrapping up that little moment of confidence. He looked flushed and disgusted with himself for saying anything. I wanted so much to talk with Ted about failure and success and trying again and again, but I couldn’t seem to find the words fast enough. Ted said, “Your combo ever plan to go on the road?”

  “No. Ralph went on the road for a few years and he makes it sound awful. Seventeen airports in twenty-two days, rundown motels in dreary industrial cities.”

  “Hey, neat,” said Ted, grinning, “when do we leave?”

  The grin almost unwrapped me. I restrained myself from saying that I would go anywhere with him, even seventeen airports in twenty-two days. Instead I gave him this dumb smile to fill up the space.

  “You like what you’re doing?” said Ted softly. “You have any regrets?”

  I want to share my thoughts with Ted the way I never had with anybody. The table was this terrible obstacle, keeping us apart, and I could use words and we would understand each other and it would be such a wonderful thing, to have a friend who understood.

  But Ted was not really interested in my regrets and griefs. He was writing an article to go in a newspaper that every family I knew read every afternoon. Did I really want people to know how lonely I was and how much I missed a normal high school social life?

  “None,” I said.

  Ted shook his head. “I admire you. I think’s it’s hard as hell to juggle high school and a job, especially when people think you’re too young for it and that you’re probably not really serious about it.”

  I felt split, shattered almost. The one person I had met my age who would understand…but if I explained anything, his fingers were wrapped around that pencil and he would publish my answers.

  “I know what you mean,” I said, and I kept the rest of our conversation meaningless.

  10

  “WE’VE GOT A NEW form of competition,” said Ralph gloomily at our next practice session.

  “What’s that?”

  “Music is out,” he said.

  According to my schedule, music was still exceedingly fashionable.

  “Video games,” explained Ralph sadly. “Electronic games. Rentable video and electronic games. That Harrison party—the big reunion I’ve done each year for six years now? This year they’re not having live music. They’re renting enough different video games for everybody to play all night long.”

  “Now, Ralph,” said Lizzie. “It’s just one casual party. The whole career isn’t down the tubes just because the Harrisons are hiring electronic games instead of a combo.”

  “These things spread,” said Ralph darkly, as if we were discussing an infectious disease.

  “Yeah, well, meanwhile, we’ve got four club dates this weekend,” said Lizzie, “so let’s jam.”

  I was using the piano bench as a desk to scribble out the rough draft of a book report. This utterly stupid collection of poorly written stories, I began.

  No doubt it would turn out that my teacher’s sister had written them. I scrunched up the paper and began again. The beautiful prose of—“Four club dates?” I yelled. “I have only three written down!”

  “Friday is our regular end-of-the-month dance sponsored by the Downtown Businessmen’s Association,” said Ralph.

  “Check.”

  “Saturday afternoon, Farkis wedding reception.”

  “Check.”

  “Saturday evening, dance at the convention of dental supply jobbers.”

  “Check.”

  “Sunday afternoon, your solo appearance at the Camellia Festival at the mall.”

  “Aaaaaaaaahhh!!” I had completely forgotten that. My whole Sunday schedule wrecked. Now I would never get the book report done.

  Ralph just yelled at me for not keeping better track of things. I thought of Ted. I wondered if he had ever botched up his plans and missed an interview or a deadline. I wondered what he would think if I called him up and said I had blown my weekend. Would we talk about it, would we share? Or would he just be completely mystified about why that Alison Holland creature was bothering him?

  Sunset Mall had two hundred stores arranged in a two-story star around a huge, egg-shaped stage. The stage handles everything from antique car exhibits to kids’ Halloween painting contests. I hate that stage. It has no rails or benches at the sides, so you always have the feeling you’ll roll down the curved, eggy parts and splat in front of the stores.

  The owner of an electronic organ store was loaning an instrument for the occasion. It had so many gadgets I felt as if I were assembling a color television instead of playing a keyboard.

  “Got to make a few sales here,” said the organ man to me severely. “You play what the folks like, right?”

  “Right.”

  And then, of course, I could not think of one thing to play. Not a single solitary melody came into my tiny mind. I stared at the organ keys as if they belonged to a typewriter.

  Here it comes, I thought grimly. My first complete public failure.

  “How about ‘Mighty like a Rose’?” said the organ salesman. “Or ‘I Love a Rainy Night’?”

  It was sleeting out and this was a camellia exhibit, but he was paying, so I began the thin, mournful chords of “Rose.”

  “Hey there! Aliso
n!”

  I glanced up, startled, and who should be in front of the organ but Mike MacBride, with a girl I didn’t know, and Dick Fraccola with Frannie. “What are you doing at a flower show?” I said, laughing. Immediately I was okay: I had an audience. I found my stride and failure disappeared.

  “We’re just wandering around,” said Frannie. “We didn’t even know about the flowers.” She waved a bored hand at the long rows of tables all around me displaying camellias. “We’re just killing half an hour till the movie opens.”

  Perhaps if I had been better company that time when Mike walked me down to gym, I’d be the one waiting with him now, I thought.

  “Would you play ‘Evergreen’?” said Mike.

  I was so sick of that song I wished it had never been written. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I said, just the way Ralph had taught me. “Sure, I’ll play it next.”

  Mike’s eyebrows arched wistfully, waiting for it. Somebody should write a song about those eyebrows, I thought.

  I wondered if Ted had good eyebrows. I could picture his face and his fingers and his hair, but not his eyes and eyebrows. Can’t judge a man by his eyebrows, I told myself.

  But if I did, Mike certainly came off well.

  For about ten minutes the Camellia Festival was like a dream: two marvelous, handsome boys ignoring their dates and staring at me with respect and pleasure as I played for them. (I just hoped they didn’t lean so hard on this portable organ that we all slid off the egg.)

  And then some overweight, middle-aged man with a mustache that needed trimming asked for a John Philip Sousa march. The organ salesman nodded at me; obviously he wanted this potential customer pleased. Who cared what a bunch of teenagers wanted? They didn’t buy organs.

  Unfortunately, I had never had occasion to play any Sousa marches. Or anybody else’s marches. I added a long tag to the rock number I was doing to give myself time to think. I hated to admit ignorance. On the other hand, if I tried to play a march and failed, the whole mall would know I’d been defeated.

  Most of all, Mike and Dick would know.