Just Don't Forget

                                               Just Don’t Forget

Young Mario Della Faye sat at the edge of his bed with a pencil in one hand and in the other an old sneaker with a hole in the sole. A pair of scissors and an empty Corn Flakes cereal box were beside him. He tore away one side of the box, placed his high-top on it, and traced the outline of the sneaker. He picked up the scissors, cut out the tracing of the sneaker a quarter of an inch inside the outline, and carefully slipped it into the sneaker. 

His mother called from within the kitchen of their flat.

    “Mario, where were you yesterday afternoon? You were supposed to help Mr. O’Leary clear out his basement.”

    He was in a cable car admiring a very beautiful, young, blonde-haired woman, who returned his smile. And strangely enough he was not intimated by the presence of the woman, who seemed to be at least ten years older than he. He was, however, distracted by the three blonde, children dressed in lederhosen dashing about the car as though they were playing on the grass of the valley below instead of frolicking suspended hundreds of feet above and soaring towards the peak of a snow-covered mountain.

Although his recollection of his presence on the cable car seemed quite familiar, he knew he never in his life had been on one before nor had ever been up a foothill, let alone a mountain. And so he offered his mother what he felt was the probable location of where indeed he had been the previous afternoon.

    “I was with Stan and John. I’m sorry. I forgot all about Mr. O’Leary. I’ll stop over there later and see if he still needs help.”

Once into those old sneakers and out on the playing fields of the stadium located up the block from his apartment building, Mario asked his mates where they had indeed been the previous afternoon. Stan reminded him that the three of them had used their newspaper delivery boy passes to take a free ride on the trolley down the trestle from Union City to Hoboken, a trip very much like a slow motion descent on a roller coaster. John added they had gone to Hoboken to watch the filming of a scene from the movie starring Marlon Brando.

“I don’t remember that. I thought I was someplace else.”

“Where do you think you were?” asked Stan.

“On a cable car in the Alps with a beautiful blonde.”

“Right, in your dreams.”

“But I wasn’t dreaming. I was wide awake. And besides, my dreams are usually in black and white. This recollection was in full cinemascope color.”

“Then you were day dreaming,” John added.

    “I guess you’re right. I must’ve been day dreaming.”

He assumed Stanley and John were right again four years later when the three of them attended their high school basketball game against city rival, Union Hill. As usual Stan showed up dressed casually, this time in a     t-shirt with a major tear in the shoulder; John, eating a sandwich picked up at the last minute from the alleys where he racked up bowling pins to earn spending money; and he, gaining entrance with a free pass hustled from his uncle who collected tickets at the gym. Upon his arrival, he was greeted by Stan.

    “You catch any hell for losing your winter jacket?”

    “Losing my jacket?”

    “At the dance!”

    “What dance?”

    “The Sunday night dance at St. Michael’s.”

    He knew the dance Stan was referring to, but he could not recall having been there that Sunday night nor having had his jacket stolen. He thought the one he was wearing was a new one purchased with the money he was now earning working part time at his Uncle Muzzie’s embroidery shop. He tried to recall the St. Michael’s gymnasium and the Sunday night dance he and his mates had begun to attend at the outset of their senior year, but he could not.

Instead, he was at a strange and yet familiar night club, in which he stood at a bar during what Friday night happy hour when all drinks were half price and the hor d’oeuvres plentiful and free. Across the room, at a table abutting the dance floor, sat the same young blonde from the cable car, this time in the company of another woman. He did not recognize either of them as one of the many school teachers who taught service men children on the base, but he felt compelled to meet the attractive blonde. He crossed the floor, introduced himself, and asked if he might join them. The blonde gestured for him to have a seat.

    “My name is Mario Della Faye, an Italian-American from Jersey. I teach for the University of Maryland on the base.”

    “I’m Ruth. This is Marsha. We’re teachers too, at the dependents elementary school at the Wiesbaden base.”

    “Wiesbaden! What brings you two all the way down to Ramstein?”

    The friend answered.

    “A friend of mine is with the dance band that’s playing for the October Fest at the NCO club tonight. We’ve come to listen.”

    Mario turned to Ruth. 

    “May I ask you a personal question?”

    “You may.”

    “How tall are you?”

    Ruth and Marsha exchanged inquisitive stares.

    “I’m five feet four.”

    “Five feet four; that’s good. Listen, I won’t be able to get to that dance until ten. Will you save me a dance?”

    Masha shook her head. Ruth had other ideas.

    “If you get there by ten, I will.”

    “I’ll be there by ten.”

    That was all he could recall in response to Stan’s questions about jackets and dances. He also knew of course that his recollection could not be right for he had never in his life been near an air force base let alone an Officer’s Club. And he certainly had never had the nerve to approach a beautiful woman as he had at the Officers Club.

    “Remind me again, what dance?”

    John answered.

    “Don’t you remember? We put our jackets on the grandstands off the dance floor. When we went to fetch them at the end of the night, they were no longer there. Some guys must’ve lifted them. That dance, dummy.”

    He still could not recall losing his jacket at a dance nor the even more eerie encounter Stanley disclosed afterwards.

    “You gotta remember the woman you were talking to most of the evening, the one who came to a dance but would not dance with you. We asked her and her friends to join us for sodas at Steckman’s. When she stood up, she hovered over you by at least six inches.”

    “That’s why she wouldn’t dance with you; she didn’t want to embarrass you.”

    He was even more confused than he had been years ago when he was on a cable car and his friends assured him he had been with them on the trolley car descending the trestle. But once again he accepted their explanation as a mystery, which he had learned in catechism class was a truth we cannot understand. He would have to accept one more mystery before his high school days with Stan and John were over.

    Mario sat in the back seat of the new, black Cadillac; Stan was at the wheel of his father’s car; John, in the front passenger seat.

    “Mario, baby, that was one helluva catch you made of John’s pass. Man, you ran down along the beach, leapt into the air, did a pirouette, and hauled it in from the sea side of the beach with one hand. It made all the difference, and we beat those jocks.”

    “Yeah, that made up for none of us trying out for the school football team,” John added.

    “Too bad you didn’t fare as well with those girls.”

      Mario stood before a class of young college undergraduates and older, non-traditional students. Sitting at a desk at the front of one of the five rows in the room was Connie, an attractive, young, dark-haired woman more fashionably dressed than anyone else in the room. Her legs were crossed in a manner which left a good bit of one thigh in view of anyone standing at the head of the class, and he seemed to be standing at the head of that class.

      “Okay, I’ll see you Thursday night when we’ll examine the imagery in John Keats’s “To Autumn.”

      The woman in the front row was the last to leave the classroom. She stopped to talk to Mario, who already had his book bag over his shoulder ready to leave.

      “Mr. Della Faye, do you have a moment? I have a question about the e. e. cummings’ poem.”

      “Sure. There’s a class coming in here now; why don’t we go to my office.”

      His office was in the bull pen, a large room with six desks, each of which belonged to a graduate assistant. The other five desks were not occupied this late in the evening. Connie moved her chair around beside Mario in order to look over what he was showing her in the text book open on his desk. As she leaned forward, her knee came up against his thigh and moved slightly from the left to the right.

      An hour later, after a stop at a small Cocoanut Grove bistro that served free pretzels with its Michelob draft beer, they were in her apartment dancing cheek to cheek to Johnny Mathis’s “Look at Me”.  Several hours later, he was awakened by a knocking at Connie’s door.

      Connie was already sitting up in bed. The knocking continued.

      “Who’s that?”

      “My boyfriend.”          

      “Boyfriend? What boyfriend? You didn’t say anything about a boyfriend?”

      “He thinks he’s my boyfriend. Just because he pays the rent, he thinks he owns me.”

      From outside her apartment came a deep, rough voice.

      “Connie, let me in!”

      Mario jumped out of bed as quietly as possible, grabbed his clothes from a chair, his shoes from the floor, and tip toed out of the bedroom. He was in the bathroom having trouble getting into his clothes when Connie entered.

      “God, I hope he doesn’t have his gun with him.”

      “Gun?”

      “Yeah, sometimes he carries a gun.”

      It took three attempts for Mario to get his right foot into the right side of his pants and many more fitful starts before he was fully clothed again.

“Connie, I know you got a man in there. If you know what’s good for both of you, you better open this goddamn door.”

“Christ, I’m gonna lose my assistantship.”

Connie stared at him in disbelief.

“What girls?”

    “The chick you tried to hit on, the one sitting on that black blanket with the red flamingos,” answered Stan.

    “Yeah, the one who told you, “get lost, you sand crab!” added John.

    “Oh, those girls.”

    He did not recall any girls on any black blanket with red flamingos. He, nevertheless, once more accepted the mystery of things.

    A year later, Mario was lying on the sofa watching the “Show of Shows” with Sid Caesar when Stan dropped in to pick him up on their way to the local ice cream parlor where they were to meet John and any former classmates gathered there. As soon as Stan entered the living room, he tossed several papers onto the sofa.

    “What the hell are these?”

    “Those are admission and scholarship application forms to Fairleigh Dickinson.”

    “What, that new college, where you and John have been attending since graduation?”

    “Yeah! Fill them out tomorrow, and I’ll pick them up Monday morning on my way to school and turn them in for you.”

    Both Stan and John had begun their college education taking classes while working days; Stan, in his father’s slipper factory; John, at a flavor enhancing company in Hoboken. Mario was now working full time for his uncle. His parents had saved some money and had offered it to him if he wanted to go to college. If not, they had said, they would use it as a down payment for a home in the suburbs.

Mario refused the offer for he was not certain he wanted to go to college or, if he did, what he would possibly study. He also, like his parents, wanted to move to a home in the suburbs. He therefore decided to wait a while, save some money, and find out what he did want to do with the rest of his life. 

    “You’re the smartest of the three of us; you belong in college more than we do,” Stan said.

    “A scholarship?”

   “Full tuition! If you get it, who knows, it might just put you on a road that might lead to that cable car and the blonde.”

    “You think?”

"Fill out those forms."

"I will."

“Just don’t forget.”