Hope Edelman - Boys Like That: Two Cautionary Tales of Love

He lumbered into tenth grade home ec class about a month into fall semester, a big bear of a boy with a short, neat haircut and a freshly washed T-shirt and jeans. He was just out of juvey, according to the high school rumor mill, and the story involved a robbery, a car heist, or a gun, depending on whose version you heard. It wasnt impossible to believe. In the ninth grade, hed punched his right hand straight through a closed window in third-period English class. No one knew why.

Mrs. Rabinowitz added him to the cooking pod on the far left, which, until that moment, had consisted of me and my friend Nadine in our own little L-shaped, blond-wood kitchen.

He plunked himself down on a chair at our matching little blond-wood table. He didnt look all that dangerous to me.

Hey, he said, nodding slightly. David was his name.

Hey, we said back.

Then he smiled.

This was the fall of 1979. Jimmy Carter was, more or less, running the country. In India, Mother Teresa had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and a few dozen miles from where we sat, the Shah of Iran was receiving cancer treatments at New York Hospital, which meant relations between the U.S. and Iran were about to get a whole lot worse. But in suburban Spring Valley, our most pressing concerns were whether Bruce Springsteen would return to Madison Square Garden and would Mrs. Rabinowitz notice that David had just dropped a chunk of hash into our bowl of brownie mix. She didnt.

As he poured the chocolate lava into the square silver pan, I saw the ragged scar winding up the side of his right thumb where his hand had been stitched back together. He asked me to put the pan in the oven because hed lost enough feeling in his hand that he couldnt tell if he was getting burned until too late. He said this matter-of-factly, not in the kind of overdetermined, attention-getting manner Id come to expect from 15-year-old boys. When I took the pan, my knuckles bumped into his, and an electric current ran up the front of my body like a zipper from my thighs to my breasts.

I had no sexual experience to speak of, other than a few sloppy tongue kisses in the ninth grade with a round, pale boy Id found about as sexually exciting as a dial tone. Id agreed to go out with him for a few weeks simply because he was the first boy whod ever asked. In the spring of that year, Id traded my silver aviator-rimmed glasses for contact lenses and let my unruly neck-length hair grow into long, bouncy curls. The suddenness of the transformation startled everyone, including me. Overnight, Id gone from being an object of ridicule, tall and awkward, to an object of interest to males. My mother had predicted this would happen one day, and despite my stubborn insistence that she understood nothing, nothing! about me, she was right. Boys on the cusp of manhood were everywhere now, miming air guitar riffs at public bus stops, hanging out of car windows brandishing half-empty bottles of beer, taking cigarette breaks at loading docks in lower Manhattan on days when I accompanied my father to work. All of them signaling their appreciation of the female form with catcalls and low whistles and invitations to accompany them into dark movie theaters, into their cars, into their bedrooms when their parents werent home.

Plenty has been written about the objectification of women in our patriarchal culture, but if anything, it felt as if the girls I knew objectified the boys, using them to affirm our sexual currency. To me, boys existed exclusively for my own purposes, to be teased and cried over, their behavior providing raw material for endless hypothesis and analysis. Showing interest in one meant positioning yourself somewhere in his orbit and manipulating your behavior to get him to notice you. What to actually do with his attention once it was obtained was a far less calculated plan. Like a preschooler who believes the teacher sleeps at school at night, it was hard for me to imagine that boys had regular lives outside my range of vision. The idea that they brushed their teeth in the mornings, or fed cats, or bought black concert T-shirts at the mall, was nearly incomprehensible.

Still, I badly wanted one of my own.

In our sophomore class of more than 600, students paired off, broke apart, and paired off again with the rapidityand, sometimes, the randomnessof a reshuffled deck of cards. In the loud, echoing hallways of our enormous public high school, couples walked to classes cemented at the hip, pausing for long, meaningful kisses outside the doorway of the girls class until the buzzer finished ringing. Then the boy would hightail it to geometry or social studies or chem, skidding through the doorway thirty seconds late in a public announcement of devotion to his girl.

Probably some of those couples were sleeping together. For sure some of the seniors were, although my 15-year-old girlfriends all claimed to be virgins. The one couple in our tight group who might have gone the distance had broken up that past spring when he wanted to and she didnt, the kind of cat-and-mouse game I imagine makes us look like relics to high school sophomores today. Well, so be it. In middle-class Spring Valley in 1979, 15 was still awfully young to be having sex. Which is not to say that we didnt think about it, constantly. Sometimes I would make excuses to stand next to David in the home ec kitchen just so I could catch a whiff of his shampoo. I imagined what it would feel like to have his hands on me. Or what his scar would feel like against my skin. At night, I could hardly keep my hands off myself. When the class ended in December, I signed up for speedwriting, not because I had any idea what speedwriting was, but because he told me he was taking it, too.

Winter arrived, and stayed. Fifty-two Americans were being held hostage in Teheran; the U.S. hockey team kicked serious Soviet butt in Lake Placid and went on to win the gold; and right across the Hudson River, the Scarsdale Diet doctor was shot and killed in a crime of passion, but my friends and I were obsessed with the news that 11 people had been crushed to death at a Who concert in Cincinnati. Riding the ski lift at Mount St. Peter, the rinky-dink slope where the ski club took us every Thursday night, David and I passed a clandestine bottle of blackberry brandy back and forth and debated what could have gone so horribly wrong in Ohio. Had people really mistaken a sound check for the concert starting? Could that many people have been