When We First Met

by Norma Fox Mazer

  One morning she woke up with the thought that today she was going to break through their anger, force them to talk to her, to acknowledge her right to her own friends and her own feelings.

  “Good morning,” she said, sitting down at the table. “Isn’t it a great morning?” Her father rattled the paper. Her mother poured coffee and sat down. Pancakes were heaped on a plate in the middle of the table.

  “Hi, Ethel,” Jenny said.

  “Hi, Jenny.” Leaning on one elbow, Ethel dreamily dipped a spoon into cornflakes. Her corkscrew curls were freshly combed and held back with a pair of flowered barrettes.

  “Is Frankie coming up?” Jenny said, reaching for the milk.

  “I don’t think so,” her mother said briefly.

  “Did he come in late last night?”

  “Mmm.”

  “I had a really funny dream,” she persisted. “Anybody interested in hearing it?”

  “I am,” Ethel said.

  Jenny kept the smile on her face. “It was about cats. Someone had stolen a cat and I was yelling, ‘Cat thieves! Cat thieves!’”

  Ethel laughed. “Cat thieves!” she repeated.

  “It wasn’t funny-funny, though,” Jenny said. “Actually, I woke up feeling sort of blue.”

  “Sometimes I have bad dreams,” Ethel said. “I dream about cats, and sometimes dogs chase me in my dreams.”

  Her father cleared his throat. “Listen to this. It’s from Dear Abby.

  “‘How They Handle Drunk Drivers in Other Countries.’” He emphasized each word. “‘In Finland, England, and Sweden, drunk drivers are automatically jailed for approximately one year. South Africa, the drunk driver is given a ten-year prison sentence or a fine of $10,000, or both. Bulgaria, a second conviction of drunk driving is your last. The punishment is execution.’” He looked up. “They don’t fool around. ‘San Salvador. Drunk drivers are executed by firing squads. Malaya, the driver is jailed. If married the spouse is also jailed.’”

  “Why not the children, too?” Jenny couldn’t resist the remark. Her father leaned eagerly into the opening she’d given him.

  “Maybe you think the penalties in those countries are too harsh? I say that it’s a crime in itself that in our country people can run around in their cars committing outright murder, and get away with it. Is that your idea of justice, Jenny?”

  No answer. Nothing to say. What was justice? Gail was dead, that was a fact. And Rob’s mother was free. Another fact. Of course it wasn’t justice. But would it be justice if Nell Montana were in jail?

  Walking Jenny to work later that day, Rob said, “How’re things on the home front?”

  Jenny shrugged. “Wonderful.”

  “Oh, it can’t be that grim. What do you think we could do to get them to accept me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Jen, there must be something.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I do. And I think that time will make a difference, too.”

  “Why don’t we talk about something else?” Jenny said, but before long they were drawn into the same conversation again.

  “I was thinking about that day I came over,” Rob said, “trying to remember—did your mother say anything? Or was it just your brother and your father?”

  “Oh, she had something to say, all right.”

  “Where do you think I stand with your family now?”

  Jenny laughed shortly. “You really want me to tell you? Pit City.”

  He put his arm around her waist. “Sometimes I have this really bad feeling. What if I lose you? What if they make you stop seeing me?”

  “No, they can’t. I’m nearly eighteen. They couldn’t make me do things when I was thirteen.”

  “Well, you know me. I really thought things would be different. I just, somehow, didn’t believe your family would be that hard-nosed.”

  “I warned you,” she said, but in fact she, too, had let herself hope. Castles in the sky. Daydreams. Fantasies. Rob Montana? What a splendid young man. Put it there, son. Come in, come in, welcome to the family.

  “They’re your parents,” he went on. “Jenny’s people. Maybe I thought your mother would be a big Jenny and love me—”

  “At first sight.”

  “Of course.” He sighed ruefully. “I don’t think I’m naïve, but I must be. I keep being surprised about people. I honestly didn’t think they would be so bitter.”

  “They have a right to be bitter,” she said. “You can see that.”

  “A right to be bitter,” he repeated. “What does that mean? Is that like the right to vote?”

  “Wow, you can be really sarcastic, Rob.”

  “I’m just trying to get things straight in my head, Jenny. A simple question—”

  “Simpleminded!” she heard herself saying sharply. They were still walking close, but a stiffness came between them.

  “I’ve noticed you don’t like being put on the spot about your parents,” he said. “You’re very defensive. You jump right out of your skin every time I say anything about them.”

  Stop this right now, she thought. Stop this squabbling before it turns into something bigger. Instead she said, “I suppose you’re not defensive about your mother?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t apologize for her—”

  “Oh, come on! You do, you know you do. When you first met me you insisted she had only one drink that night. But when I met her at your house—remember this? I do—your mother said two. She said two drinks.”

  “What are you doing? You’re making something out of nothing.”

  “Really? Two drinks appear to me to be one-hundred percent more than one drink. Not what I call nothing.”

  “Listen, Jenny, let’s leave my mother out of this. She’s not working us over like your family. She’s holding up her head, and it isn’t easy for her.”

  “Ah, no, she’s suffered. Isn’t that what you told me?”

  His arm dropped from her waist. “Now who’s being sarcastic? Let me tell you something, Jenny. Let me tell you something about my mother.”

  “Keep your voice down. You don’t have to yell.”

  “My mother has suffered, you’re right.” The bones of his face were all sharp. “You used the right word. You think what happened washed off her back? That she doesn’t care? You met her and you think that? Let’s be honest here. You’re not everything you think you are. I know how you think about yourself, that you’re so intelligent, so sensitive, but you can be just as thick and insensitive as the next person.”

  Her head went up like a horse’s; she felt a cold calmness coming over her. It wasn’t her family destroying Jenny and Rob now. They were doing it to themselves.

  At the corner across from Hamburger Heaven they parted without saying good-bye.

  She worked that afternoon like an automaton. “May I help you?” “Drink?” “Is this for our dining area?” And all the time their quarrel—what she had said, what he had said—sent up flares in the back of her mind, rising moments of heat, of anger, of disbelief. They had had spats before, little to-dos over this and that. No one, least of all she, could be loving and nice at all times. They were two different people, saw the world differently, liked different things. It was good for them to spar, get their disagreements out in the open. But this was something else—this had been hurting each other.

  Later that evening he called. “Hello, it’s me.”

  She wound the cord over her arm. Her parents were in the living room. Were they listening? “Hello.”

  “Do you want to make up?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “I do! Look, I’m sorry for all that junk I said. I didn’t mean it, you know I didn’t. I was just mad—”

  “We shouldn’t do that to each other,” she said. “We shouldn’t attack each other. We don’t need that.”

  “You looked so sad when you left.”

  “I was mad.”

  “You were sad, too.”

 
“Well, you’re right,” she said.

  “I couldn’t do anything when I got home. Didn’t want to study, didn’t even want to eat.”

  “That bad?”

  “I suppose you ate like a horse.”

  “I don’t know what I ate. I don’t even know what’s happened since I left you. I’ve been on automatic. Rob, remember what we read the other day on the rock?” Someone had painted a slogan in the park. The world’s a tough place. Most of us won’t come out of it alive. They had decided to adopt that as their personal motto, agreeing that there was something so crazy, funny, and true about it that, somehow, it helped put all the difficult things into perspective.

  “I remember. Jenny—I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” Were her parents listening? Well, let them. Didn’t she have a right to be with Rob? To talk to him? To love him? No one asked Frankie to give up Mimi, or her father to give up her mother. Why should they tell her to give up the one she loved?

  Chapter 18

  “I don’t go out with barefoot ladies,” Rob called out of the car window as Jenny ran out of the house.

  “Isn’t it a perfect day?” She leaned into the open window, standing on one bare foot. “Hi! You’re early.” They didn’t kiss, too many windows looking out on them, but rubbed their faces together. “Mmm, you smell yummy. What’d you put on your skin?”

  “It’s a new after-shave,” he said, looking pleased.

  “I haven’t combed my hair yet,” she said. “Otherwise, I’m about ready.”

  “Are you going to wear braids?”

  “Okay. Do you think I should put on something fancier?” The plan was to go downtown, shop, eat lunch out, maybe see a movie. Rob, wearing dark-blue cords and a blue-and-white striped shirt, was certainly dressier than Jenny in her jeans and gray, hooded sweatshirt.

  “I like the way you look,” he said. “How long are you going to be?”

  “Shoes, hair … oh, ten minutes.”

  He switched on the car radio, and Jenny turned to go back into the house. Halfway up the walk she turned again. “This is ridiculous, you sitting out here. You’re my friend. Come on in.”

  Without knowing how it had happened or that it would happen, she had reached the limit of her patience. She’d had it with tiptoeing around watching what she said, and how she said it, and who she said it to. Enough already with not daring to phone Rob and whispering when he phoned her. Enough already with watching her mother’s face for every little change of mood and quailing inwardly if her father’s voice reached a certain pitch.

  Her father had read her a Dear Abby column to break her down about Rob. Well, she could do a Dear Abby of her own.

  Dear Abby,

  I’m in love with a boy that my parents refuse to be civil to. Their only response to him is to tell me to give him up. Abby, he is eighteen, responsible, polite, and thoughtful. He loves me, too. This is not a teenybopper crush, Abby. We’re both serious about each other and our future. We love each other tremendously, but making out is far from all we have on our minds. He’s looking for work, I hold down a part-time job, we both get respectable marks in school and have plans for the future, which include college. We are not acting foolishly or immaturely. His “crime” is that he is the son of a woman who caused grief and hurt to my family. I know this has made it difficult almost beyond words for my family but, still, don’t you think they should at least try to see him for himself, and to give us a chance?

  Signed,

  Deeply in Love

  And the answer? Jenny could write that, too.

  Dear in Love,

  If you two are the kind of kids you describe yourselves to be, I think your parents should definitely give you a chance. Go to them and tell them Dear Abby approves.

  “I don’t want to make things unpleasant for you,” Rob said, getting out of the car.

  “I’m not suggesting any confrontations. Just Mom is home. Daddy’s at work,” she said as they walked toward the porch. “Frankie, too.” Then, quickly, keeping her voice neutral, not wanting to hurt his pride, “Are you, er, a little worried about them? Physically, I mean?”

  “Do you mean am I worried they’ll beat me up?” Rob shrugged. “I thought about it the night I came over. It seemed like a real possibility.”

  “You didn’t act scared.”

  “I wasn’t. Not really. I don’t like fights, but if you’re a guy, you always half-expect somebody might take a poke at you.”

  “Why? What for?”

  “For nothing. Just because the other guy’s feeling evil. It happened to me in Binghamton, and for no reason except a couple of punks didn’t like the color of my eyes.” He took the steps two at a time, not rushing, just moving his legs the full distance they could cover, and he was whistling under his breath, a jaunty tune between teeth and tongue.

  “Do you think it’s cowardly, me bringing you in when just Mom and Ethel are home? Oh, I don’t care if it is! It’s just the way things have worked out. We didn’t plan this. Besides, Rob, I’ve been wondering if we didn’t make a big mistake the first time, practically flinging you into everyone’s faces. We might have approached it all more gradually, taken on my mother and my father separately. What do you think?”

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “Yeah. I know I’m chattering. I’m nervous, I admit it, but I’ll be fine. You were the one who said we had to do this, right? Have to get them used to you.” She took his hand, squeezed. “How about you? How are you?”

  “Ah, well, a little … not exactly tense, but not exactly relaxed either. Okay, actually, except for a feeling of walking into the lion’s den.”

  The living room was empty. “Whew.” Jenny rolled her eyes and they both laughed. She heard the whine of the vacuum cleaner in her mother’s room. Question: Where does Rob wait in Jenny’s house for Jenny?

  Where would Rhoda wait? Answer: In Jenny’s room, of course. “Come on.” She took his hand with a great show of confidence and led the way.

  The first thing he did was to go around her room and look at the pictures on the walls: Some were posters, but most were pictures she’d cut out of magazines and “framed” with colored tape. One, for instance, she had cut from an oil company ad—something about how generous, public-spirited, and philanthropic the company was—but what she had wanted was the picture used to illustrate the corny pitch: an immensely fat old woman in a shapeless lavender dress, looking into the camera with a fierce and defiant dignity. Most of Jenny’s pictures were of old people. She hadn’t planned it that way, had just cut out the pictures that went straight to her heart.

  Next he picked up the china elephant. Then the framed picture on her bureau. “This isn’t you?”

  “It’s Gail, when she was fourteen.”

  He put it down at once. “Where’s your grandfather’s picture?”

  She pointed to the snapshot tucked into her mirror. He studied it, and she put her arms around him from behind, snugging her chin into his neck. “I’d like to have this picture of us,” she said. They looked at themselves in the mirror, their faces side-by-side.

  He put his hands over hers. “Let’s take it.”

  “Cheese,” they said together with big flashy grins.

  “Print that one,” Rob ordered. They broke apart, laughing, and she picked up her hairbrush.

  Rob perched on the edge of the bottom bunk bed. “It’s a funny little room, isn’t it, so long and narrow? I like it.”

  “So do I. It used to be Frankie’s.” Jenny bent, her hair falling over her face, and brushed vigorously. “I used to sleep in the front room with my sisters.” The familiar litany slipped through her mind. First Grandpa died, and Vince and Valerie lived in his apartment in the basement. (I was thirteen then.) Then Vince and Valerie moved to California. (I was fourteen.) Gail was killed. (I was fifteen.) And Frankie moved down to Grandpa’s place. (I was sixteen.) And I moved into Frankie’s room. (On my seventeenth birthday.)

  “The whole fr
ont room is Ethel’s now,” Jenny said, “except Gail’s stuff is still there.”

  Again she said Gail’s name with a certain deliberation. They couldn’t forever avoid the painful things. It had been all right in the beginning to play the just-Rob-and-Jenny game; in fact, they really needed to do that. A way of getting over what then seemed the insurmountable hurdle of their families. And now? They weren’t exactly on the other side of that hurdle, but maybe somewhere midway over it. Flying through the air and hoping not to crash, but to land on their feet.

  She whipped her hair back and continued brushing. “Did that make you uncomfortable, my saying Gail’s name?”

  “No, you said it before—her picture. And it isn’t the first time, anyway.”

  She nodded. “We have to talk about Gail and—everything, Rob.”

  “I’m willing. Only I don’t want to get in fights with you. You know you get awfully tense—”

  “All right, I admit it. I don’t make it easy.” Already she felt the tension of this little discussion. She sat down next to him, braiding her hair. “Was it fun playing with the band the other day?” The band director had asked him to fill in for a drummer who was out sick.

  “Loved it.”

  “When you’re a kindergarten teacher you can play the drums for your kids.”

  “I’m going to take piano lessons, did I tell you that?”

  “No, when’d you decide?”

  “I was checking out the community college catalogue again. I can take lessons and get credits toward my degree.”

  “Terrific.”

  “Yeah, I’m really glad. I think going to school here, at least for the first couple years, is going to work out. I only wish you weren’t going so far away.”

  “Watch what you say, you may get your wish. I’m set for my first year—we got our loan—but my father says if college costs keeping going up I might have to eventually live at home and go to school around here.”

  “Really?” Rob brightened.

  “Don’t wish it on me,” Jenny said. “Anyway, it’s not that far away where I’m going. Only an hour’s drive.”