I’d been in love with Colleen Clark since we launched our relationship with exquisite naked-dancing in her mother’s bathroom. It was the summer before first grade. The Platters and The Penguins, humming from the acid green transistor on the toilet tank, echoed off the tile. Behind the button-locked door we felt for the first time the warm ease of skin across our flat chests, our round little child bellies, our inner arms and thighs. The part of me that was different from Colleen remained in place, unnoticed, but our peach-fuzz stood on end as we tingled with delight.

It seems to me now that the most pleasant times of my childhood were spent playing Barbies at Colleen’s house. My mom always busy with my baby brother, Colleen’s with an ailing husband and two toddlers, they left us on our own. We never quarreled or made noise, so they trusted us together. We played and talked and pretended. We came to know the rules. Our little dance was neither spoken of, nor repeated.

For six years there were no other girls Colleen’s age on our block. I had four or five boys to play with, but Colleen was isolated. We played and joked about “when we’re married.” In my mind Colleen was my future wife, but I don’t think she ever believed it. I was her substitute best friend.

As the training wheels came off my childhood, I played Little League and basketball and ran with the mob of boys on the block, but I continued to play with Colleen. I thought of Colleen as “My Girlfriend,” — the label my parents used. Our brothers and sisters and the other kids on the block thought the opposite sex had cooties, but Colleen and I were comfortable together.

The adults loved it when we showed off, holding hands and walking arm in arm. I think now that young parents of baby boomers had a lurking fear of their kids not “turning out right.”  Heaven forbid we should turn out to be “fruitcakes” or “lezzies.” This unspeakable fear was dispelled every time they saw the miniature couple we assumed from their every encouragement they wanted us to be.

                                                

Carla Bass moved in around the corner early in our sixth-grade year, about the same time Colleen’s father died. Colleen and I never talked about her father, or sickness, or death.

Colleen latched onto Carla as if to a lifebuoy, and they began spending most of their time together—time I would have spent with Colleen. When I was with them both, walking home from school, watching TV, or acting out Barbie make-believe in Colleen’s room, I felt like we were playing a game with rules only they knew. Exhilarated, confused and too young to understand, I floated along, loving being with either or both of them, no matter my discomfort and confusion.

That 6th grade winter Colleen and I played house on our own a few more times, but it wasn’t the same. Her smile looked harder, firm at the corners. Her eyes gleamed like they held a breathtaking secret. Each of those last times we played in her room, she would strike up an argument on some pretense, and we would end up play-fighting on the bed. We hadn’t been that physical since our naked dance. I remember her strange, wide eyes all the while we pushed and rolled.

As our play changed and took on unexpected tension, my feelings changed as well. I began to feel a need to state my intentions. Unsure as I was of exactly what they might be, I knew they involved going steady, kissing, getting married, and something called sex I’d heard about in movies.

I thought I should start by making our relationship official. As a 6th grade paperboy with a good route, I was a schoolyard millionaire, so one spring day, swept up by some kind of seasonal confidence, I headed for the strip-mall jewelry store, a wad of bills floating atop a pocket full of silver coins chinking against my bike seat. I bought Colleen a stainless-steel steady-ring-on-a-chain just like the ones high school girls wore. Trembling and breathless, I gave it to her on her front porch the afternoon before Easter.

I pulled the weighty bauble from my pocket without preamble.

“Here.” Her moment’s hesitation spurred me on to the babble I’d hoped to avoid. “It’s like what high school girls wear.” She took the chunky ring of silvery metal with its flat, blank square into her cupped hands like it was liquid. I held the ball chain on either side of the coupling, my fingers hovering above her palms. “See this thing? The chain hooks into it like this.”

I showed her again, popping the end ball in and out of the coupling from each side, jabbering about how the wire went through all the little balls and pointing out how they had seams like a baseball and how cool it was that they bent the metal into a ball. There were several other characteristics of the chain that I’d extracted from the jeweler while I whipped up my courage to make the big buy. I’m sure I told Colleen about them all. She was patient if not that interested. I soon ran out of steam, feeling stupid and hot. Whatever romantic delight Colleen might have felt at the initial presentation had been talked out of her.

“Okay,” she said. I let the chain pour into her hands, and in a single motion she popped it over her head and flipped it under her new, longer hair. We watched the ring bounce down her blouse, nearly to her waist—it really was for high school girls. Neither of us found that funny at the time. “Does this mean we’re going steady?” she said casually, like it was no big deal either way.

“I guess so.”

We weren’t ready for kissing, and I didn’t know what else to say but, “Let’s go play!” We both hopped once in place and ran up the street to join the other kids climbing around in the Chinese Elm in my front yard.

Only then did it become real to me that everyone would see what had always been private. I wavered between being proud, wanting all the kids to see, and hoping she would keep her shiny new token hidden in her blouse with her training bra. She ended up taking it off and swinging it around on her finger like a sling. At one point the blurring chain slipped off the end of her finger and the steely chunk flew out of orbit into the blue stucco of my neighbor’s garage. Only Colleen and I noticed. “Oops!” said Colleen, and we ran across the driveway to retrieve it from the flower bed. We giggled at the chip of stucco it had taken out, and Colleen slipped the chain around her neck and dropped the ring into her blouse with her training bra.

The uproar among the kids over Colleen’s steady ring ended up being no more than over somebody’s really cool aggie shooter. After a chorus of “Two Little Lovebirds,” everything went back to normal. I played along, but things had changed. I understood only later how the change involved Carla Bass.

                                                

Carla and Colleen were opposites in many ways. Colleen was round-faced and pink, her bright blonde bangs cut straight above dark eyebrows and clear blue eyes—Carla’s face tawny long and lean, with lank ringlets of nut-brown hair falling about black-almond eyes. They were a striking, mismatched pair.

I got my first fruitful erection thinking of Carla.

We talked on the phone—something Colleen and I had never done. Speaking into my ear as I curled on the floor in the dark kitchen while everyone else watched TV, Carla was not a disembodied voice. As she spoke, her face became clearer in my mind than it ever was in my eyes when we were together with Colleen or other kids. On the phone we had privacy. Her froggy little voice spoke only to me, telling me about problems with other girls, about her parents fighting, her brothers smoking and drinking. The things she told me frightened me some, but she seemed so cool and different and exciting. I would think of her long after we hung up. I would fall asleep thinking of how it would be to make her happy, to stroke her face, to touch her lips.

I began to write her love letters.

When Colleen and I began as friends, we hadn’t learned to write yet, so we never wrote notes to each other. It was different with Carla. By eleven years old I was literate enough to get myself into trouble. I spent one entire truant afternoon with the only picture I had of Carla, in the school portrait of Mrs. Potts’ sixth grade class, filling in the margins with tortured cursive purple prose. I hid it in the deepest recess of my closet.

I had just seen The Pride and the Passion for the third time that week on The Million Dollar Movie and I was moved. I identified with the Sophia Loren character, divided in her feelings between the long-beloved, heroic Spanish revolutionary, played by Sinatra—the Pride—and the dashing Duke of Wellington, Cary Grant—the Passion. I wept throughout the final scene as the Duke carried the limp bodies, first of Sofia, then of Sinatra, back into their recaptured city. I was attracted to the idea of these different aspects of love. Love could be many things. I could be in love with two girls at the same time. I poured my passion out to Carla with my pen.

I never gave Carla the unedited versions of my letters. She got my feelings, watered down to the level of Hallmark Valentines, in the form of tape-sealed notes passed to her through the hands of other girls in class. At first it didn’t enter my mind that Colleen would read the notes. After all, she was in a different classroom, and the girls who passed the notes always promised not to read them. I assumed Carla would never share them with anyone. I didn’t want to think of what Colleen’s reaction might be if she did read them. But when we talked on the phone, Carla pretended she hadn’t read the notes at all. It was all too embarrassing to mention. And besides, in my pre-pubescent mind my feelings about Carla were separate from what Colleen and I were to each other—whatever that might have been.

In the midst of a hormone storm, I was in a warm bath of ignorance. The water would soon be cold.

But as spring approached that sixth-grade year, some kind of awareness grew within me. It could have come from clues I picked up when I was with Colleen and Carla together—the conspiratorial tittering, the under-current of whispers. Or I might have been starting the long haul to catch up with the girls’ march through puberty; getting wise to the world of 1963, taking in the strange new ways by osmosis through the media. However my awareness dawned, my reaction was to panic. Of course! Everyone’s reading my notes! Colleen will be jealous. She’ll hate me. I’m too weird for Carla. She’ll drop me, and I’ll lose them both.

I decided I had to stop thinking about Carla—stop writing dangerous notes to her anyway— and make a commitment to Colleen. By giving Colleen that ring and chain, I chose Pride over Passion.

                                                

Only when Mr. Clark died did I understand how sick he had been, and why Colleen’s mother was unhappy all the time. Soon after the mid-winter funeral, Mrs. Clark seemed happier than ever. As the days grew warm, she cut and colored her dark, curly hair to a bouncy blonde halo. She took to wearing short shorts and halter tops. She would sun-bathe in a bikini in the middle of the back yard lawn, smiling with cucumber slices on her eyes. In April, when Mrs. Clark’s Greek boyfriend, Ilia, moved in, they acted like they’d known each other for a long time.

The kids on the block didn’t like Ilia much. He treated us like the nuisances we were. But he was a warm breeze to the Clarks. He rough-housed with Colleen’s younger brothers and, though he kept a certain distance from Colleen, she bragged about Ilia’s worldly travels and really seemed to like him. I think she liked the way he made her mother laugh. Colleen didn’t know what it was like to have a happy mother.

                                                

On the morning of the day my oblivion crumbled, I’d been mowing the Clarks’ lawn. A Southern California Saturday in May, lawn engines droned and the odors of green grass and blue smoke infused the endless suburban neighborhood. Ilia had been hollering at me about a patch of lawn that looked uncut no matter how many times I ran over it with the mower. I tried to explain that it was because the ground was uneven and there was nothing I could do. The second time I mowed it, Ilia could see I was right, but he made me do it a third time just to show me who was boss.

That afternoon we played in the water for the first time that season in Colleen’s backyard. Colleen and her brothers, Carla and I, and two or three neighbor boys glided on the Slip-n-Slide and lolled on beach towels sucking the juice from late Valencia oranges still falling off the Clarks’ tree, ripe and ready. Ilia rolled out the barbeque while Mrs. Clark, in a brand-new bikini, basked on a chaise lounge in the sun. I remember it as a kind of Eden.

I had gone into the utility room to dry off before going into the house to use the bathroom. Colleen stepped out through the kitchen door at the same time Carla came in behind me from the yard.

“Come’ere, I want to show you something.” Colleen’s strange, hoarse whisper sounded like it came down from the rafters.

Colleen took me by the arm and turned me toward the adjoining garage. Carla was right behind me as we entered the unlit space where Ilia sometimes parked his car. Dust motes hovered in shafts of light around the garage door. The dank odor of fresh-cut grass rose through the stifling darkness.

Carla spoke to me with lips so near her breath tickled my ear. “Do you know what pussy is?” she said. A squeal threatened to break through her whisper. 

My neck twisted and my head spun as I looked in panic from face to grinning face. Their eyes darted back and forth from each other to me.

“Sure I do,” I lied.

My mind scrambled to make sense of what they were doing, sifting through vague knowledge of sex gleaned from children’s apocrypha, movies, and sex-ed films. I knew a pussy was the same as a vagina, but I’d never said the word vagina out loud, afraid of pronouncing it wrong. I had no idea what Carla meant by the word pussy without the article.

“It’s your… thing,” I said, “Where you pee.”

The girls were not yet old enough for bikinis. Their wet, one-piece swimsuits were modest, with skirty frills around their burgeoning hips, but their naked legs and arms glistened in the angled light from the utility room so that the darkened garage became a silvery black-and-white film like one my parents would watch.

Colleen stood next to the trash barrel that held the grass from the morning’s lawn job. Topping the full barrel was a layer of trash from a bathroom wastebasket.

“Look at what we found.”

Colleen picked up an envelope from the trash and offered it to me. Taut with nerves, I recoiled into Carla. She was ready. Her hands were up, pushing my bare torso back toward Colleen and the envelope. I had no choice but to take it.

It was small and square; not like any envelope I’d ever seen. Even in the dim light I could tell it wasn’t white, but purple or pink, and I could just make out, across the front, in sweeping cursive, Ilia.

“Look inside,” said Carla.

Between my fingers the envelope made a crinkling sound. It was not sealed. I lifted the flap and slipped my fingers in. Instead of the nasty note I was sure they planned to make me read aloud, I found a dry, springy substance lining the bottom.

“Did you know it was hairy?” said Colleen with wicked delight.

I slowly withdrew my fingers from the envelope, trying not to betray my confusion. Carla’s chin was at my shoulder, a giggle bubbled in her throat.

“Yeah, sure I did,” I lied again.

With a clench of my stomach, it came to me that somehow this was Mrs. Clark’s pubic hair. It was something adults had. I’d seen the illustrations and heard about “body changes” in that infamous film at school. I remembered catching glimpses of it on my mom at awkward moments in the past. How and why Mrs. Clark’s pubic hair came to be in that envelope with Ilia’s name on it, and what Colleen and Carla expected me to do with it were too much for me to consider.

My forehead burned. The water dripping off my trunks splashed my cold feet as it spattered on the concrete. Standing in a puddle of my own making, I started to shiver in the hot and stuffy garage. My bladder ached as Colleen stepped close enough for me to catch the peppermint sweetness of her breath.

“Look at it. It’s my mom’s.”

I nearly knocked Carla down when I dropped the envelope and ran.

                                                

Colleen kept the ring. It was never spoken of. I spent the summer developing a passion for baseball. At the beginning of seventh grade Colleen moved to Anaheim.

I saw Carla only at school and, later, through the windows of older guys’ cars. She saw me but our eyes never met.

I tried once more with Colleen just after seventh grade. I called her on the telephone one lonely night. I don’t remember asking her, “Read any good books lately?” nearly as well as I remember the lengthy silence that followed the question, and the sick feeling it gave me.

Why she agreed to go on a movie date with me, I’ll never know—I guess it was the draw of an Elvis Presley double feature. But I was encouraged. Soon we’d be in high school, and I hoped we’d have another chance to dance. At a prom. In formal wear.

My mom drove us to the Brookhurst. Colleen was wearing strange new clothes—a short skirt with giant cartoon flowers and a clingy sweater that showed off her newly acquired breasts. I wore what I considered dress-up clothes—a white dress shirt tucked in to a pair of black slacks. All her new friends were there at the matinee—the girls in similar skirts and sweaters, the boys in jeans and tee shirts.

Before Kissin’ Cousins and during intermission, Colleen would sit with me for a minute or two while she looked around, then jump up and return a moment later with someone else to show me off to as her old boyfriend. During the movies we didn’t talk or touch. At times during Viva Las Vegas I wasn’t sure if she was sitting next to me at all. I didn’t look.