than Betty and both alternately sullen and weepy, surrounded by a changing orbit of identical friends. Only Clare was approachable, and back at the small house, Betty had sat next to her, introduced herself, and then, eventually, had taken her hand. The photographs of Jacob, the cousin she had never met, made him seem young, and, she’d told Clare, very nice. Even at fifteen, Betty believed her attractiveness came with an obligation to be good, and she had thought, that day, that both she and her mother had succeeded quite well in being beautiful and good.
But when Betty Kelly was feeling disinclined to be kind, she knew that the death of the boy in Vietnam had actually made his family more socially acceptable to her mother, more interesting at least, and that the sudden reconciliation was as motivated by her mother’s desire to be an insider to the tragedy as much as it was by any pity she felt for the family’s pain. Rather than expose the shallow roots of her own social history, Jacob Keane’s family now provided her mother with a certain moral authority when the war was discussed with her Garden City set, few of whom knew anyone who had even served, much less died, over there. Her uncle’s old car in the driveway when the family came for dinner was no longer an indication to the neighbors of a less than illustrious pedigree, but of a sympathetic noblesse oblige. This was the family, after all, who had lost a boy in Vietnam, so close to the end, and Catherine Kelly was doing what she could for them.
Betty Kelly wondered, too, from time to time, if both her mother’s sympathy for the family and the satisfaction she felt at being able to display that sympathy were equally real. Preparing now to be a military wife herself, she had, on occasion, mentioned Jacob to her future in-laws, without ever adding that she and her soldier cousin had never actually met. She had seen the advantage the connection gave her; she had, to be honest with herself, savored it, without for a minute feeling any less pain for poor Clare and the gray-haired parents who were left to raise her.
The blind date, it was agreed-all the girls in the discussion warming to the possibilities-would be arranged by saying that Gregory/Clare had just broken up with his/her girlfriend/boyfriend and wanted to meet someone new. This would eliminate, it was agreed, any hint that either one of them was a loser who’d never had a date, while at the same time taking off some of the pressure to be charming that might move either one of them, shy souls both, toward total catatonia. “Just tell them it’s not really a date,” one of the girls offered. “They just want to have someone to talk to while they’re between serious relationships.”
“Just a friend,” Gregory’s sister said, nodding, and all the other girls in the circle of T-shirts and pajama bottoms and fuzzy slippers echoed the phrase with such wistful enthusiasm it might have been a refrain from their own prayers. “Just a friend.”
Gregory’s sister, who was in awe of, and a little in love with, Betty Kelly and her clean hair and pink nails and turquoise jogging suit-not to mention the diamond in its Tiffany setting-pictured Clare as a younger, shyer version of her cousin; a willowy beauty who her brother would love instantly, cherish like a delicate bird in his soft big hands: an incongruous but perfect pair.
Betty, who knew her cousin and had met Gregory in the Ladycliff dining hall, thought more along the lines of beggars can’t be choosers. At her wedding reception, with her train pinned up and her veil pushed aside, she drew Clare’s arm across her beaded waist and walked her to a corner of the room. She whispered, “Would you do me a favor? Would you go out with this boy I know?” From the corner of her eye, Betty saw her new mother-in-law in her raw silk suit smiling at the two of them, making note-Betty was sure of it-that this was the cousin who had lost her brother in the war, making note of the sweet special attention Betty was giving her.
For Clare, the rapidly accumulating number of “firsts” that her blind date marked became a mantra for the entire summer: first time she talked to a boy on the phone (to set up the time and to give directions); first time she shopped for something to wear on a date; first time she showered and washed her hair and dressed for a date; first time she heard the doorbell rung by a date while she was still getting ready upstairs; first time she heard her father say, “How do you do,” to a boy at the door, heard her mother’s “Nice to meet you Gregory,” and the self-consciously soft, mellifluous call up the stairs, “Clare”-not the usual sweetie pie or baby doll or Clare de Lune-”your date is here.” First time she came down the stairs to greet a boy in the living room (first time in these new shoes, too, which were wooden-soled sandals all the girls were wearing but which she had not gotten the toe-gripping hang of yet). First time she laid eyes on him: a big guy (that was good) in neat shorts and Top-Siders (that was good) and a polo shirt and with not too long hair-all good. First time she said, “Hi,” and he said, “Hi,” before both of them let their eyes drop to the floor. First time her mother and father both moved forward to sweep her out the door by the side of a strange young man. First time she looked up to see Pauline at her brothers’ window, giving a brief wave. First time he opened the car door for her (good) of his father’s Ford Torino (okay) and got in the driver’s side, and before turning the ignition leaned his head toward the steering wheel and said to her, smiling a little and from under a falling shock of his brown hair, “Hi again.” First time he made her laugh.
He pulled smoothly out of the driveway and drove to the movie theater with an easy confidence. He repeated, gamely, what they both already knew (“So your cousin knows my sister from Ladycliff and my sister told your cousin all about me and your cousin told my sister all about you…”), leaving out, from sheer awkwardness, the part about Clare having broken up with an old boyfriend, as well as, from sheer tact, his sister’s description of Clare as beautiful. He could not have been more pleased to discover that the latter, which had caused his hand to tremble when he raised it to her doorbell, was inaccurate. He could not have been this charming, he was certain, as he pulled into a parking space and opened her door for her with a bow, had it been true.
First time to find herself among the denizens of date night – a newly discovered time of day lit by streetlight and movie marquee and scented with aftershave and patchouli and popcorn and spearmint gum. First time to sit beside a boy at a movie, to make small talk before it begins (“So, do you want to go to Ladycliff?”), sharing a tub of popcorn, elbows touching on the single armrest which she had always, until now, thought unnecessarily stingy. First time to laugh, in this new society of her dating peers, when someone cried out, “Start the fucking movie already,” and the whole of the theater erupted in applause.
They went to the diner after. He ordered a cheeseburger platter and she, demurely, a grilled cheese on whole wheat. In his car in front of her house, he put his arm across the back of the seat as they talked more about the difference between college and high school. Her first kiss was soft and gentle and lasted long enough to make her wonder how to breathe. His tongue tasted of dill pickle. Hypothetically, her plans about how far to go with a boy when the opportunity came involved the coy catching of a hand or the playful but firm whisper of “No, no, no.” But the reality was that this was the first time she had been held in anyone’s arms and there was no certainty whatsoever that it would happen again, so rather than the coquettish straightening of the spine and the flirtatious reprimand, she found herself simply giving in, falling into him, letting his tongue fill her mouth and his hand brush her arm, her thigh, and gently make its way under her shirt to her bare skin. His fingers covered her breast and he stirred and sighed and moved his legs out from under the steering wheel. His fingertips hooked themselves over the cup of her bra and tugged a little and were it not for the fact that Betty Kelly had told her he had just broken up with a longtime girlfriend, she might have seen this as an indication of his inexperience. He moved his hand to her back, brushed the hooks of her bra, and then, as if he had been barred from the door, moved his hand out of her shirt and onto her arm. He lifted her own hand and placed it on his thigh and were it not for his sister’s lie, he, too, would have seen the way she simply kept it there, unmoving, as proof of her inexperience as well. As it was, they both believed the other’s awkward hesitation was due to a painful remnant of affection for someone else and they broke apart, a little breathless and shy once more.
Each of them wondering if they could ever replace the phantom ex in the other’s loyal heart.
At her door he said, his eyes on the welcome mat, “Do you want to go out again tomorrow?” and she said, softly, “Okay. That’d be good.”
In only a few weeks’ time, the refrain of first-first party together, first walk on the beach, first dinner in a restaurant-exhausted itself in the social realm and came to refer exclusively to the physical milestones they marked during their hours together in the dark: first love bite, first success with those hooks, first glimpse of her bare breasts in the shadowy streetlights, first obedient touch of her hand, first nakedness against the plush cloth seat, first astonished completion of what they had begun, the silver shimmer of their success spread across her bare belly.
That summer, Barb Luce, who had been Clare’s best friend since fifth grade, accused her of abandoning their friendship because of a boy-an error they had marked in other girls at their school and had always condemned- and Clare denied it, but without conviction. She would not return to those suffocating Saturday nights of TV movies and cake mixes and playing with each other’s hair for all the best girlfriends in the world. “Maybe we can double date sometime,” she told Barb. “You know, when you meet someone.” And that was the end of that.
It was the girls who already had boyfriends, or who already had a string of them, who noticed his ring around
