Ward Beca Kissed Me: A First Love in the 1950s

A Memoir
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60984-183-6
Verlag: Book Baby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

A remarkable first love in the 1950s leads to a life of obsession.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ward, Richard

Leseproben

Beca Kissed Me

Beca Bates once told me first impressions were everything. First impression: she was short and cute. Full grown at 17, she stood four feet eleven and a quarter inches.

"That quarter inch means a lot to me," she told me when we started dating, senior year in high school. "Well, I can understand," I said. I was driving her home from a movie. "You can't understand – a great looming thing like you."  Her hand waved toward my head. "What's a quarter inch mean to you?" "No, well, I can see how it sort of puts you on the brink." "Brink?  What brink?"  Her voice had a cackle in it. "Of being five feet." "Is that what you're looking for, Mr. Ward – someone who's five feet?" "No, no, it's you.

You said---" "Then let's hear no more about it."  She gave her skirt a pat. 

It was April 1958; there were no bucket seats or seat belts. She sat with her legs tucked beside her, as no girl would today. "Five feet," she said disdainfully. I was silent, wondering if she was offended.  I felt she was looking at me.

Then she started laughing. It was a warm, light, somehow gulping laugh – part woman, part country bumpkin.  I glanced over.  She was looking at me, her face shining, a vein standing out on her temple.  I laughed too.

Hi, Beca.  I really flubbed that test.  I'm glad it didn't count.

She mentioned her shortness, joked about it, before others did. In Tenny, our senior yearbook, which came out a month after we started dating, the clever remark by her picture was, “How come I’ve got these full-sized feet?” Beca wrote the yearbook.

She had a round, fresh face, damp with youth.  Her hair was brown and short.  She had a high forehead and usually, as in the yearbook picture, she wore bangs. Once, at the end of a quarrel, I pushed up her bangs to study the curve of her brow. "Leave my hair alone," she said, brushing the bangs back down. "I love your forehead," I said. "Yeah," she said, "it was very big in the sixteenth century."

Her eyes were small, misty brown, and bright.  Her nose was small and straight.  Her nostrils had a flare that reminded me of a flower. She had a small mouth and slightly receded chin.  She sometimes wore a dab of lipstick but no other makeup.  She looked like the kid sister in a Norman Rockwell cover. 

Cute. She said she hated the word.  I wasn’t convinced. 

She joked about her height to draw attention from her other conspicuous shortcoming: her figure. Her legs were good, slim and muscular.  She was pigeon-toed, which she would sometimes, little girlishly, exaggerate.  She was definitely flatfooted (this she also joked about).  Her hips were small, like a boy's, a style that enjoyed some popularity in the fifties thanks to the fashion magazines and Audrey Hepburn.  But her waist was really the same width as her hips, and she had no bosom at all.

When we went on a date, Beca wore small earrings.  It occurred to me later that these were for gender identification. They made it easier for strangers, looking at her boyish hair and figure, to recognize that she was a girl.  "You have to say 'Two adults,'" she whispered to me as we stood in line to buy tickets to an early movie.  I gave her a puzzled look. "You watch.  She'll ask if I'm under twelve."

I laughed and put my hand on the back of her neck. Carrie Wiseblatt, who I'd been in plays with, said she liked it when one of her boyfriends did this. "’Course if you want to save money, that's okay," Beca said.  "I'm glad to be your little sister, Rick.  I know how to play that role." What she didn't tell me then was that she didn't want to be my little brother. That had happened to her once, she later confessed. "The ticket woman told my date how nice he was to bring his brother.  Boy, that did wonders for my self-esteem."

During a softball game in eighth grade, one of the class bullyboys spoke about a short blond he subsequently dated. “She looks down her shirt,” he said, grinning meanly, “and she sees her feet!” Though Beca and I told each other painful things about ourselves, it was a long time before I told her that joke.

It was a long time, too, before I told her my first memory of her.  We were in ninth grade.  It was the end of winter.  The ground was covered with sodden snow.  I was starting to walk home with Lee Hewitt, my neighbor and long-time best friend.  A school bus was stopped at the curb, vapor rising from its engine.  Kids dawdled and surged about.  There was a mood of incipient hilarity.  It must have been a Friday.

I was always ill at ease when called upon to hack around, as we used to say.  Lee was a master hacker.  He had found younger boys to tease.  He was talking up a snowball fight while waving a snowball in their faces.  I told him to come on, my feet were getting wet.  I also had a snowball in hand, but because snowballs were forbidden on school grounds, I held it under the tail of my jacket.  My other arm was wrapped around schoolbooks.

Behind Lee I noticed two girls – one tall, one short – coming down the steps.  The tall girl I knew well: she was Chris Revel.  We had gone to elementary school together.  The short girl I hadn't met, but I knew she must be Beca Bates, a new girl.  I had heard about her: that she was short and cute and bright and a friend of Chris’.  They were going toward a car parked behind the bus.

Lee strolled toward me, his grin lopsided, his head bobbing.  I looked at the car and saw a father behind the wheel.  He was in his fifties, with a rugged face and wiry hair.  I knew refined Mr. Revel.  This wasn't he.  Beca opened the door and got in first.  Lee noticed what I was looking at, turned, and went into a windup.  He lobbed his snowball at the car.  Instinctively (I have no other excuse) I threw my snowball too – but behind my back like a Cousy pass, glancing over my shoulder.  Lee's snowball sailed above the car's hood.  My snowball snuck through the passenger's window and hit Chris on the coat.  The girls, startled, looked to see who had thrown it.  They saw Lee in the follow-through of his pitch.  I turned and began walking off.

The next thing I knew there was a scuffle behind me, and Mr. Bates was grabbing at Lee's arm, muttering, "Now, look, you bastard  . . ." or something of the sort.  Lee, who had rubbery knees, dipped and sidestepped, emitting a nervous laugh.  Mr. Bates lost his footing and caught himself with one hand on the slushy ground.  Lee did a tiptoeing run away.

So this is my first memory of Beca.  She is in the car looking out toward me but not at me.  Her face, a circle, is pale and empty.  Nothing shows her concern for her father or her shame at being related to him.  To all appearance, this is not happening to her.  Her father is furiously getting to his feet, slapping his hands and one pant knee.  And I am looking on, the guilty catalyst, uninvolved.  This is not happening to me.

So much for ninth grade. In tenth grade I stayed away from Beca. I thought she might hold a grudge. Sometime during that year she started going out with Doug Daley who was in my homeroom and the very good friend of a very good friend of mine, Tom Cappelman.  Duggy was a stocky, lively boy with a big grin and a big greasy pompadour that showed the teeth of his comb.  He and Beca made a cute couple, people said, both being short and Irish-looking and having alliterative names. Tom Cappelman was tall, fat, pink, handsome, and hilarious. Duggy and Tom (called the Appleman or the Apple for short) carried on impromptu dialogues of non sequiturs:

"The cat has lumbago," Tom might say, taking a drag on his cigarette. "Does your grandmother ski?" Doug the boyish. "One . . . if by land."  The Apple, his accent suddenly Middle European and sinister. "I'm completely in the dark."

"Total Immersion!" Whoever laughed first lost that round.  It was always Doug.  His giggle overcame him.

The next year, eleventh grade, Beca and I were in the same class, Honors World History.  She sat across the room, on the far side of Chris Revel.  They were quiet and serious.  I sat by the window, next to – sorry: another important person – Patrick Odom, who sat behind the Apple. [Dad’s later comment, penciled in the margin: “Too many damn names at the start. But who knew who was going to be important?”] Patrick was a sardonic broad-shouldered boy with the face of Augustus Caesar. We boys were serious but not quiet.  We tried to be provocative in safe ways: for example, we put in a good word for madmen like Nero and Marx.  We tried to be funny, and sometimes succeeded.  I remember Beca's and Chris' faces crumpling with laughter across the room.  I remember also my unhappiest intervention.

The teacher was lecturing on the geography of the Mediterranean basin.  He talked about the weather and mentioned the hot summers.  Now, it happened that two summers before I had spent a month in Spain with...