The first girl I ever loved. February 10, 1986
I recall her handing me my birthday present over the back
yard fence that birthday when I was seven and forced to get my first holy
communion by myself because the week before I had caught measles when the rest
of my class at St. Brendan’s got theirs.
I wore my white suit and posed for pictures on the back porch
when she – a few years younger than I was – called to me from her backyard to
tell me she had a present for me.
Her family had moved into the house next door about a year
before I was born, though they were the only neighbors I ever knew, and I assumed
they had been there forever, leaving for South Jersey during the Summer of Love
after their patriarch, Bill the telephone installer, passed away, she vanishing
from my life though I continued to think of her each time I returned to the old
house, even later, even after the remnants of my own family fled for South
Jersey, too, and strangers occupied both houses – the house next door to my old
house would always be hers, as I remembered those warm summer days when she sat
out on her front stairs giggling at me, too young to know better, and later
when we both got older, too wise to giggle or look at me again.
She hated me for becoming a hippie, after I found out how
easy it was go board the bus for New York in front of my house, wandering
through both the East and West Villages, looking for something I couldn’t find in
that working class neighborhood, while she followed the footsteps of her
parents, the straight and narrow path that led in exactly the opposite
direction as my crooked one.
In-between that gift and her leaving, my then-best-friend
fell in love with her, too, and she hated him, and because she hated him and he
was my friend, she came to hate me, too, forcing me to choose between them,
when I already knew it was too late to choose – the girl who would not look me
in the eye when the moving van came, when their cars pulled away, leaving me
standing in front of their empty house, feeling the same way I did all those
years earlier, when I walked up the long aisle alone in my white suit to get my
communion, her shrill voice still echoing from my back yard, saying “I love you,”
when in the haze of car exhaust, she wouldn’t even look back at me in the
rearview mirror.
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