“Hello, fellow Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High students,” I said into the microphone. “In the words of Winston Churchill, a good speech should be like a woman’s skirt—long enough to cover the subject but short enough to create interest.”
Most students looked at me blankly. A few teachers tittered, and a few more exchanged perturbed glances. I won the election with eighty-two votes.
The next fall, student council meetings occurred every Monday, in Mr. Heape’s classroom, during lunch period. I and a boy named Bruce, who was the student council treasurer, were always the first to arrive because we packed our lunches rather than buying them. In the ten minutes that we waited for everyone else, Bruce and I discussed upcoming math tests or his family’s springer spaniel, Buster, or who had been on The Ed Sullivan Show the night before. During these conversations, I sat in a chair desk I’d moved to the front of the classroom, with the chalkboard behind me, and Bruce sat in the front row of chair desks, facing me. In October, we made a bet about whether “Save the Last Dance for Me” would remain a Billboard number-one single for more than a week. He thought it wouldn’t, and I thought it would, and in a way we both were right, because it was bumped the next week from the top slot then returned for two weeks. When I got a haircut, he said as soon as he entered the classroom, “You look different with bangs.” Bruce himself had a blond crew cut, hazel eyes, and a collection of authentic Indian arrowheads he once brought in to show me, acquired on a trip to Ohio with his family.
When Mr. Heape and the other students arrived, bearing cafeteria trays of meatloaf and cottage cheese and peach slices in syrup, I would open the manila folder where I kept student council notes and call the meeting to order; I had used my mother’s typewriter to make a label for the folder that read, STUDENT COUNCIL PRESIDENCY 1960–61.
On Thanksgiving morning of 1960, I woke up from a dream of kissing Bruce. The dream shocked me and then, as I lay beneath the covers, made an abrupt sense; after all, wasn’t the ten minutes Bruce and I spent alone together in the classroom my favorite part of each week? But realizing this, admitting it to myself, was both troubling and exciting. I had never in real life kissed anyone. As I helped my mother squeeze lemons for the cranberry relish and roll the pie dough, I wondered if she’d sense that now I wished to. For all of Thanksgiving break, as I skated with my brothers at Hinkley Park, as we trimmed our Christmas tree, as I watched a movie at the Pickwick Theater with my friend Maureen, the idea of Bruce accompanied me, my jittery and valuable secret. Certain weather and certain times of day—the sun setting early, or snow—filled me with a new yearning, a wish to share the sadness or loveliness of the world with this other person.
The following Monday, Mr. Heape’s classroom was empty when I entered it, which threw me off. In my imagination, Bruce had already been there when I arrived for our post-Thanksgiving reunion. As I moved a chair desk around to face out, my own body felt unwieldy, and when I sat, I couldn’t remember how I usually positioned my legs or what expression my face ought to settle into. I was probably in the classroom for all of a minute by myself, when Bruce entered and casually said, as if in my mind we had not spent the last five days kissing each other, “It smells like spoiled milk in the hall.”
He was so cute! His blond crew cut and his hazel eyes and the maroon sweater vest he was wearing. At first, I had to pretend to act normal, but soon enough the rhythm of the conversation absorbed me and I was wondering with only a part of my brain, rather than with all of it, if he thought I was cute, too. At the student council meeting that day, a boy named Gregory said, “It’s dumb to sell Valentine’s Day dance tickets before Christmas,” and I said, “Some people like to plan ahead,” and Bruce said, “I agree with Hillary.” Before the meeting the next week, when we were discussing Bruce’s neighbor’s dachshund, who’d died of old age over the weekend, I said, “I love dachshunds,” and he said, “I thought cocker spaniels were your favorite.” Which I’d told him back in September, and he’d remembered.
A few weeks passed thusly: I still raised my hand in social studies class and math, read propped up on two pillows in my bed at home, helped my mother set the table and wash the dishes, played pinochle with my brothers, and all the while, my body thrummed, my heart clutched, with thoughts of Bruce.
On the last day of school before Christmas break, I gave him a note I had written in pencil on a piece of lined paper and folded twice:
Dear Bruce,
If you ask me to be your girlfriend, I will say yes.
Sincerely,
Hillary
I’d thought giving him two weeks to formulate a response was wise; the erroneousness of this logic was apparent by the time I arrived home after school and was too keyed up to eat my usual snack of peanut butter and saltines. Had he read the note yet? Had he shown the note to anyone else? What was his answer? These questions were the drumbeat of Christmas 1960, and what was usually my favorite holiday was contaminated by doubt and anxiety. And what if I ran into him during the winter break? Would that be better or worse? I considered calling him and telling him the letter was null and void—I located his number in the white pages that we kept on its own white-pages-sized shelf under the telephone nook in the front hall, at the bottom of the staircase (his father’s name was William D. Stappenbeck, and their address was 4633 Weleba Avenue)—but what if one of my family members overheard?
By New Year’s Day, my agitation had started to wane; it flooded back as soon as I awakened on the morning school resumed, and the very halls of Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High seemed to pulsate with the shame of my forwardness. When I’d written the letter, I hadn’t expected that Bruce would respond over break, but if he did like me, wouldn’t he have wished to convey it as quickly as possible?
Finally it was lunchtime. When I entered Mr. Heape’s classroom, Bruce was the only one there, seated in a chair desk in the front row. He said, “Hi, Hillary.”
“Hi,” I said.
There was a pause, then he said, “For Christmas, I got a pogo stick and a new Monopoly set because my brother left our other one out in the rain.”
“Oh,” I said. “I got a cowgirl vest.”
Soon enough, the rest of the student council members were arriving, and neither Bruce nor I had mentioned my note. By the following Monday, a part of me was convinced I ought to pretend I’d never written it, as Bruce seemed to be doing. (Or could he have dropped it before reading it? And if so, where? Please, please, I thought, not at school.) But I also wanted clarity and resolution; there was something about pretending that seemed silly. What if, before he’d read it, the note had fallen out of his pocket in his bedroom, then his mother had thrown it away, also without reading it? And what if he’d have been thrilled to be my boyfriend but had no idea I wanted it? (In the years since, on the occasions when I’ve been accused of being a pessimist, I’ve yearned to hold up this counterexample.)