“Oh, it was broken, all right,” Mother said lightly. “And yours will be too, dear. It’s inevitable.” Then she kissed me.
I laughed, a little embarrassed, because we’re not usually a very demonstrative family. Besides, I wasn’t quite sure what Mother was talking about. But I did love the locket. It was tiny and heart-shaped on a thin gold chain, and it was delicate and old-fashioned and lovely. I felt about it the way Mother did about her engagement ring—“Much too valuable just to wear around.” I wrapped it in tissue paper and put it in the corner of my top bureau drawer.
The locket wasn’t the only present I received on my seventeenth birthday. Besides that, Mother gave me an evening dress, ankle length, dark rose taffeta, and Nancy, my best friend, gave me the rose slippers to wear with it. But the gift that topped everything, that caused my stomach to lurch and my heart to beat faster, was a simple blue scarf with a gold border. It came from Ted Bennington.
“I hope you like it,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t know. I haven’t had much experience picking things out for girls.”
“I love it,” I assured him. “It’s just beautiful.”
I suppressed a desire to lean over and kiss him. It would have been so easy to do because I liked him so much. I liked the way his blond, curly hair fell forward over his forehead, and his honest blue eyes and nice square chin. And I liked his being shy and sweet and serious and a little awkward; it was so different from the smooth know-it-alls in our senior class. I thought, I would like to kiss you, Ted Bennington. But I didn’t say it. And I didn’t kiss him.
Instead I reached over and squeezed his hand and smiled at him and said, “It’s beautiful,” again. Which must have been the right thing to do, because he squeezed my hand and smiled back at me.
I had begun dating Ted a couple of months before that. It was funny how it started. Ted must have been in my class for years and years, and I never really noticed him. In fact, nobody noticed him. He was a quiet boy and he wasn’t on any of the teams or in the student government or in any of the clubs; he worked after school and on weekends in Parks Drug Store. I think that might have been one of the things that made him shy, having to work when the other kids goofed around. “It made me feel funny,” he told me later, “having to serve Cokes and malts and things to the kids and then seeing them in school the next day. You can’t actually be buddies with people who leave you ten-cent tips.”
“But none of the other kids felt like that,” I told him. “They never gave it a moment’s thought. They would have been glad to be friends anytime if you’d acted like you wanted to.”
“I know that now,” Ted said. “But it took you to show me.”
Which was true. It was cold-blooded in a way. I didn’t have a date to the Homecoming Dance and was on the lookout for someone to take me. You don’t have too much choice when you’re a senior and most of the senior boys are going steady with juniors and sophomores. So I made a mental list of the boys who were left and crossed off the ones who were too short, and that left four. Ronny Brice weighs three hundred pounds, and Steven Porter can’t stand me, and Stanley Pierce spits when he talks. Which left Ted.
“Do you know if Ted Bennington’s asked anyone to Homecoming?” I asked Nancy.
Nancy gave me a surprised look. “Who?”
“Ted Bennington,” I said. “The blond boy in our English class. The quiet one.”
“Oh,” Nancy said. “I didn’t know that was his name. No, I don’t suppose he has. He doesn’t date, does he? I’ve never seen him at any of the dances.”
“No,” I said. “I suppose he doesn’t. But there’s always a first time.”
The next morning I got to English class early and as Ted came in I gave him a real once-over. I was surprised. There was nothing wrong with his looks. He wasn’t awfully tall, but he had a nice build and good features and an honest, clean-cut look about him. I even liked the back of his neck.
Ted Bennington, I thought, you may not know it now, but you are going to take me to the Homecoming Dance.
And I managed it. It is a little shameful to me now to think about how calculating I was—a smile here, a sideways look there, “Hi, Ted,” ever time I passed him in the hall. “Which chapters did she say we were to read tonight, Ted?” as we left class and happened to reach the door together. A week or two of that and then the big step. “Nancy’s having a party this weekend, Ted. A girl-ask-boy affair. Would you like to go?” It was really pretty easy.
Ted was standing at his locker when I asked him. He had the locker door open and was fishing out his gym shorts, and when he turned he looked surprised, as though he wasn’t sure he had heard me correctly.
“Go? You mean, with you?”
“Yes.”
“Why—why, sure. Thanks. I’d like to.” He looked terribly pleased and a little embarrassed, as if he had never taken a girl anywhere in his entire life.
“What night is the party?” he asked now. “And what time? And where do you live?”
We stood there a few minutes, exchanging the routine information, and I began to wonder if maybe I was making a mistake asking Ted to the party, to that particular party anyway, because it would be The Crowd, the school leaders, the group I had run around with since kindergarten days. And Ted wasn’t one of them.
But it was too late then to uninvite him, so I let it go, trying not to worry too much as the week drew to a close, and on Saturday night at eight sharp Ted arrived at my house.
He made a good impression on Mother. I could see that right away. He had that air of formal politeness that parents like. When we left, Mother said, “Have fun, kids,” and didn’t ask, “What time will the party be over?” which is how I always could tell whether she approved of my dates.
Ted didn’t have a car, so we walked to Nancy’s, and it was a nice walk. Everything went off well at the party too. The Crowd seemed surprised to see Ted at first, but they accepted him more easily than I had thought possible. Ted relaxed after the first few minutes and made a real effort to fit in; he danced and took part in the games and talked to people.
Even Nancy was surprised.
“You know,” she said when we were out in the kitchen together getting the soft drinks out of the refrigerator, “that Ted Bennington—he’s really a very nice guy. How come we’ve overlooked him before this?”
I said, “I don’t know.” I was wondering the same thing.
I wondered it even more as we walked home afterward, talking about the party and school and what we were going to do after we graduated, comfortable talk as if we’d known each other forever. I told Ted I was going to secretarial school, and he told me he was working toward a scholarship to Tulane where he wanted to study medicine. I learned that his mother was a widow, as mine was, and that he had three sisters, and that he played the guitar. The moonlight slanted down through the branches of the trees that lined the street, making splotches of light and shadow along the sidewalk, and the air was crisp with autumn, and I was very conscious of my hand, small and empty, swinging along beside me. His hand was swinging too, and after a while they sort of bumped into each other. We walked the rest of the way without saying much, just holding hands and walking through the patches of moonlight.
The next morning Nancy phoned to ask if Ted had invited me to Homecoming.
“To Homecoming? Why, no,” I said. And to my amazement I realized that I had completely forgotten about Homecoming—that, now, somehow, it didn’t matter very much.
When the time came, of course, we did go, but, now that I think back on it, I don’t think Ted ever did actually ask me. We just went, quite naturally, because by then we went everywhere together.