At Sixteen

He was six-foot-tall and broad-shouldered, but I was blind to his charms. His doeful brown eyes stared dreamily at me in class behind studious-looking glasses, but his oversized nose seemed to push me away. The fact that he liked me made him foolish, since I wasn’t worthy of anybody’s attention. But he was smart in school, and well-mannered, so I told him yes, I’d go with him to see the musical playing that weekend at the open-air theatre of a nearby beach park.

            I had dreamed of having a boyfriend since the fourth grade, when the sight of the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy sitting next to me in class, writing his name on the yellow loose-leaf paper given us for our spelling test, put me in a trance, so that I wrote his name on my paper. He saw me do it, then clucked his tongue disapprovingly. I crumpled my paper, shot my hand into the air, and demanded another. My teacher admonished me for wasting paper. She’d only asked us to put our name! 

            Back home, my parents filled me with delight at the idea of someday, like them, dressing up to go out for the evening, my mother in her low-cut, figure-hugging dress, with a triple strand of pearls showing off the ascent of her lovely long neck and the smell of Channel No. 5 sweetening the domestic bliss inside our happy home. My handsome father stood six-foot-two in a crisp white shirt pulled from a cardboard box after his return from work, his neck held snugly by a muted conservative tie, and his dapper suit reminding me of one James Bond might wear. My mother would die of cancer, emaciated to deathly thinness, when I was twelve, and my father, beyond grief, would lose his clever smile and the twinkle in his eye, within a year marrying a woman he didn’t love but desperately needed in an unholy alliance that would persist another forty-five years.

At sixteen, I was Cinderella, unrecognized by my father and evil stepmother for being the kind of girl who would sing to animals if she had any, never complained about nightly doing the dishes, and presented no problems at school, where she earned straight A’s, played doubles tennis, and made artful photos in her school’s darkroom, encouraged by the school’s photography teacher, eager to mentor beautiful young girls. I didn’t even know I was beautiful, despite having inherited my mother’s shapely long legs, dancing eyes, and full lips. 

            No boy had ever picked me up for a date, let alone in a car borrowed from his father. Never had I sat next to a boy in an open-air theater buzzing with excitement at the performance about to begin. The female lead, it turned out, was a girl around my age, who falls in love with a boy a few years older, in a New England mill town at the turn of the twentieth century. The mill girl admires the raw sensuality of the young man in his red shirt, motorman’s cap, and checkered trousers as he shouts to passersby to climb on the carousel he runs at the amusement park to which she’s gone with another girl that evening. But after the carousel barker lingers to talk with her as she rides her poled horse around and around in a stopped-time moment in which the two converse with locked eyes in mutual admiration, the carousel swirling to exalting music promising a lifetime of excitement waiting for her, she lets her friend go home so that she can spend time alone with the man who has put stars in her eyes.

            Beneath a dark sky of twinkling stars, in a universe so vast it takes one’s breath away, the barker sings of the unimportance of two people in love, in the general scheme of things. His rakish handsomeness has made him the playmate of the carousel owner, a brassy, old, now-ugly businesswoman who delights in the barker’s youthful insouciance. But magic has happened. The young barker sees something in the mill girl, with her long hair, rosy lips, and shapely figure inside a corseted country dress, and she sees something in the rooster-like strutting of his charms before her desiring, lonely self, desperate for respite from her dreary life at the mill. Before long, they are singing about possibly loving each other, as if they invented the emotion.

            I am elated over her decision to elope with the barker, after which the furious, betrayed carousel owner fires him for foolishly persisting in a hastily procured marriage. I forgive the mill girl for marrying a boy who, unemployed, now hangs out with a ne’er-do-well crony who craftily works at eroding his sidekick’s sense of obligation toward a wife to whom he must return nightly. The barker derides the mill girl when she gently and lovingly tries to reign him in. Then the mill girl announces she is pregnant, and in a moment of exhilaration inspired by the news he will soon become a father, the wayward husband is propelled into becoming a changed man who suddenly sees possibility, instead of despair.

            I sit at the musical, my chest breathless with glee over the transformation of everything lying in the way of happiness for the parents-to-be. The now reformed husband, despite a history of seducing wide-eyed girls looking for signs of affection from a romantic-acting rake, sings of the little boy who will bear his name, whom he will dutifully, lovingly father, then of the little girl he might just as easily be stuck with (not knowing which he will beget), and the musical acquires one of its themes, which is that the father must do whatever he can to provide for his child.

Looking at my date, I think he’d make a good father. But the prospect of ever kissing him without repulsion puts the kibosh to the notion of having children with him, no matter that I am putting the cart before the horse. Thank God he doesn’t try to take my hand in the darkness beneath the watchful night sky. I look up briefly and relive the moment when, under the same uncomprehending sky, the barker and the mill girl first pledge their love to each other by denying it, in a song that promises ecstasy, if each would only love the other. And so they do.

And so I don’t. We drive home in silence, my thoughts on what I might have had with the barker, were I the mill girl. My date probably ponders whether or not he dare kiss me, as he pulls his father’s car into my driveway.

            As he turns off the engine, he looks at me with desire, but I can see only his nose and glasses. Why doesn’t he tempt me, like the slick, worldly carousel barker? Why can’t I thrill to the thought of my date taking me in his schoolbook-carrying arms, smothering me with hungry kisses, fulfilling the fantasy I first had for the much-admired boy during the spelling test who, instead of returning my adoration, rolled his eyes at my guileless puppy love?

            If I only hold out, someday my prince will come. I must, of course, first become a princess. But I am the unhappy stepchild to an evil stepmother, daughter of a man who only sees in me what he has lost. I am the spitting image of my dead mother. There will be no happy ending for me. I will wait for my carousel barker, who will make me miserable.

            But the carousel barker won’t do right by me. He can’t. A sense of injustices committed against him, only hinted at in the play, fuels his desire to have things come easily to him. So he plots, with his ne'er-do-well buddy, to rob, at knifepoint, the community’s fine, upstanding banker, when he is carrying bags of money from his bank. The barker doesn’t think a good citizen deserves to keep what he earns honestly. And so, at a clambake, the pregnant ex-mill girl searches, terrified, for the now-missing husband she still cherishes, whose proclivities she hopes to temper with the lovingkindness flooding her heart. And in a botched robbery attempt, the errant husband loses his life to his own knife, by falling on it.

If I pick the sexy ex-barker, I will be alone forever. And the thought propels me in another direction completely.

            I turn my face toward the big-nosed boy, with his intervening glasses, and kiss him with the freshness of someone who has yet to learn how to love.