The Beginning by the River

My dad had a respectable leather-brown neck from a lifetime of outdoor work. He had creases around his eyes that could hold water in the rain, and he had a permanent crimp in his hair from his hat.

During the summer I turned eighteen, my older brother started getting the same tan and the same crimp because he went to work for the same construction company as Dad.

I didn't want to be like them.

I spent the summer playing baseball with my friends and sneaking into the movie theatre on days when it was too hot outside. We got cheap beer from the gas station on the highway because the Pakistani guy who owned it never carded, and we drove down to the river to drink and look at stars and come up with plans for a better life.

And on the first day of school I met Helena.

My senior year, I was on the varsity team, and I made the jokes in the classroom that even the teachers smiled at. I was tall enough to look down the girls' tops, and Helena wore this thin teeshirt under her sweater instead of a bra, and I wished I'd had a summer job just so I'd have a car just so I could take her out and feel her up.

But I made the best of the situation and smiled at her, and she smiled at me. From then on she sat with me and my friends at lunch and under the tree after school while we waited for our rides home. 

She listened to our plans for a better life, our dreams for futures that held skylines full of skyscrapers instead of endless trees. 

It turned out her dad had lived in Gilmer his whole life as well, but her mom had taken off with her when she was just a toddler. Now her mother was remarried, and Helena was back with her dad. Lucky me.

Unlucky me: when I asked her out one afternoon while we huddled with the crowd on the covered walkway after school, she turned me down because her father didn’t allow her to date anyone more than a year older.

She was a junior, and I was a senior, and the fourteen months that separated our ages was utterly inconsequential, as far as I was concerned. She fidgeted with her fingertips and looked down at our shoes. “I’ll be seventeen in a few days, and then I can say yes,” she informed me in her small voice. 

On that first Friday in September I leaned down and kissed her in the middle of the crowd. I kissed her soft top lip and then I straightened up and watched her brown eyes flutter open.

“Let me take you out on your birthday then,” I said.

Her eyes shifted left and right and she bit her lip in thought. “Okay, but only if you promise to act like it isn’t my birthday at all. Don’t tell anybody it’s my birthday. I hate that.”

I laughed at her, and she watched my face, clearly waiting for me to agree, but she laughed too. I tried to kiss her again, but she shoved a hand in front of her mouth to block me. “Okay, Helena,” I agreed. “No birthday. Just a date. When is it?”

“Next Friday.” She let me kiss her again, and neither of us had noticed that the crowd had dispersed and the momentary downpour had eased up to a standard drizzle.

***

"Jay, I need to borrow your car."

"No." My brother always answered unequivocably, so I was not surpirsed. His mouth was full of pastrami on rye, so his sunburnt cheeks looked like two tomatoes.

"Come on. I got a date."

"Why don't you take her out on your bicycle?"

"I'll wash it and wax it and fill the tank."

He paused mid chew.

"Is she a cheerleader or something?"

"Better."

I got the keys from him and borrowed twenty bucks from Dad. His eyes crinkled up when I told him I had a date. Mom pretended not to notice that I left the house at seven in my best jeans, but I saw her smile.

It's not that I hadn't dated before -- it's just that I'd never done it right before. Usually I walked a girl home after school and made out with her in her back yard until her folks came home. Or all summer long, there was a fair bit of fooling around down by the river with whoever would show up. Or after a game the gang would all go to the Denny's in Cedarville and then split off into pairs. 

I’d made it to third base with Jessica that way and then rounded home with Lauren, but she wanted to wear my class ring. Needless to say I stopped sitting beside her at Denny’s and then she came up to me outside of Mr. Lanner’s room on the following Tuesday and asked if we were breaking up. Her nose was all red and her eyes were all watery, and I said “We were never going out.” She punched me in the chest and then for weeks she shot me dirty looks.

Helena's house was at the end of Hill Street, a full two blocks past where the sidewalks stopped. The street kept going over the hill, but I, personally, had never been that far. I always took Elm to get over the hill.

I pulled up out front and the crabgrass caught my sneaker on my way to the door. She opened it before I could even ring the bell.

Her lips, which I had kissed two and a quarter hours earlier were covered in some sparkly gloss and her hair looked smooth and I could still see down her top.

She wore a pale bra that made her tits very round, and I could see that the clasp was right there in her cleavage.

"Hi."

"Hi."

We didn't kiss or touch. She didn't invite me in. She just smiled and then stepped past me and walked to Jay's careworn blue Saab without tripping over the crabgrass.

I opened the door for her, and then somehow I was in the car and it was running and we were rolling over the hill, and I had no idea what to do next.

"Would you like to eat?"

"Sure."

"Any preferences?"

Helena picked at the blue nail polish on her thumb and scrunched her nose in thought. "There aren't many choices. D'you think the diner will be crazy tonight?"

"On a Friday? Sure."

I turned right on Seventh Street and then another right to get back to the middle of town. We passed a place called Antonio's with colored lights on the patio, but I'd never been there, and Jay told me it made him sick, so I didn't even slow down as we drove by.

Sure enough, the gravel lot surrounding the diner was full. Half our classmates were inside. This was the place for couples to be seen, and I wasn't sure how comfortable Helena looked with that.

"We could order sandwiches to go, or something. If you like," I offered.

"It's just," she turned fully in her seat to look at me. "I've never been on a real date, and it's so loud in there we won't even be able to talk, and chances are ten people would join our table, and then it wouldn't really be a date at all."

She made a very good point.

The faded red banner hanging on the side rail of the wheelchair ramp advertised "GR8 FOOD 2GO" so I dialed that number and we watched through the plate glass as Milton in the white paper hat from 1950 answered the phone and yelled at me.

"I want to make an order to pick up." I stared at Helena as I spoke. "Uhhh, a club sandwich and," I raised my brows at her, and she vigorously nodded. "Two club sandwiches and potato chips and two lemonades?" Helena smiled. "And a slice of pie. The pie of the day."

Milton repeated it back to me in his gruff voice and told me it would be ten minutes and thirteen eighty-seven.

And then it was just me and Helena in the Saab and the semi-quiet.

"If you were a breakfast cereal, which one would you be?" she asked.

I laughed because that was just so unexpected and odd. "What?

"Cereal."

"Where'd you come up with a question like that?"

I pulled one of her hands into mine because she had a little pile of blue flakes in her lap from the nail polish she'd peeled off, and I wanted her to be calm and comfortable with me.

"Well," she said. "There was this show on TV that suggested this question and answer thing for a first date. You know, to get rid of the awkward."

I squeezed her hand a little. Her fingertips were cool and slightly moist. "What's awkward about this? You've already seen me eat at lunch for the past few weeks, and you've already heard Tyson's story about when I broke my nose playing roller hockey, and I've already told you that I'm gonna shake the dust of this little town and be somebody someplace else.  There's no awkward."

She nodded at me, sort of timidly, and with her free hand she was still using her index finger to scrape at her thumb.

"Honeycomb."

Her eyes shot up to mine.

"What?"

"I'd be Honeycomb because it's big and tough and crunchy,” I declared with a straight face.

“But if you let it sit in the milk too long, it goes mushy,” she teased.

“No! It stays sharp on the outside. But in a way that makes you want more." With my hand over my heart, 

I made my voice as deeply sincere as possible until we were both cracking up.

“And it’s sweet.”

She laughed, and I realized for the first time that I'd never really heard that before. Not at the lunch table or under the tree or in between classes or at the pep rallies. I'd never heard Helena do anything more than giggle timidly, and it made me stare at her glossy lips and try to memorize everything.

We watched Milton pile stuff into a white paper bag, and Helena said she’d be Cheerios because they’re steadfast and trustworthy. I gave her a look and told her no seventeen year old should aspire to be steadfast or trustworthy, and then I went in to get the bag from Milton. And as we drove aimlessly we traded ideas on what each other should aspire to be.

“You should be the girl that pops out of cakes.”

“You should be a train conductor,” she countered.

I laughed, “You know, that’s funny because I’ve been saving for years to travel after graduation—before I go to college. I’m gonna buy the Amtrak pass and see the whole continent.” I looked over to Helena's bright eyes and smiled, hardly noticing that my directionless driving was taking us to the river.

“You really hate it here, don’t you?” she asked, with this echo of sadness in her tone.

I sighed and pulled the parking break because we were at the levee and the river spread out below us, and a light fog hung right over the water. “I don’t hate it. I just know it. I’ve never been anywhere else. Ever. I know every inch of everywhere you can go in a four hour drive from my house. And if I don’t get to see more soon, I’ll implode.” With my elbow on the doorframe and my head in the palm of my hand, I spilled all this to a girl I’d only known a little while. “I already feel this atrophy.”

Then I felt another hand on my face. 

Helena’s hand was warm and firm and I looked at her. Her eyes were sympathetic as she scooted up onto her knees and tugged on me so she could kiss me. We made out until our mouths were uncomfortably sticky and dry, and we needed to pull the lemonades out of the white paper bag.

I withdrew the old quilt from Jay's trunk and tried to ignore the crusty patch that my knuckles dragged over as I spread it out for a picnic on the dewey grass. I made sure to put my wet shoes on the disgusting part of the blanket. 

The sky was remarkably clear, and we made each other laugh by misidentifying late-summer constellations as we ate. Neither of us really knew anything other than the Big Dipper.

Helena put potato chips on her sandwich, and every bite was full of crunch and crumbs. She made me take a bite from her messy hands, and forced me to admit it was delicious. She teased and laughed, and used her magic to erase all that mental malaise I’d dragged to her birthday party. 

I was enchanted and enraptured and determined to memorize the moment. I stared at every morsel of skin my eyes could reach. When dinner was done, I kissed and groped her as much as she would allow. I sniffed her neck and hair and clothes, and even though parts of her smelled like me and my own stale saliva because I’d licked her, I memorized that too because it was still kinda hot. We didn’t round second base, but I felt high anyway—just from an innocent date that surely bore the Daddy Seal of Approval.

When I dropped her at her door four minutes before curfew, I wondered if, when I was old-- like ten years down the road-- if I would really remember it just the way it happened.