(This is excerpted from my forthcoming novel, Blood of Love.)
When I was thirteen I fell in love for the first time. Her name was Cordelia and she was impossibly beautiful and sweet and for a short time all mine. We stated seeing one another regularly in the early Fall. We went to different schools but I’d come to our house everyday after school. We would sit and chat companionably but there were no displays of affection.
One day in early November after finishing our homework Cordelia made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We sat in the living room watching a movie on TV. Cordelia liked to start movies in the middle so that she could guess what had happened and who particular characters were. Sometimes she’d make a serious effort to make sense of a film, other times she’d be silly about it as she was on this day.
“The bald man is from another planet — Neptune — the young girl is a spy in disguise,” she giggled. I always participated in this game so said. “He’s not really bald, on Neptune they grow extra skin on the top of their heads instead of hair so they get skin cuts instead of hair cuts.”
Cordelia howled with laughter. “You’re a genius, David,” she said. I couldn’t have been prouder.
The movie was ending so Cordelia switched to a cartoon show. Neither of us were particularly keen on cartoons or what Cordelia referred to as “kid shows,” but it passed the time.
We were sitting silently watching a cartoon bear swiping picnic baskets when my life changed.
Cordelia placed her hand on top of mine.
It sat there for a few seconds before I turned my palm up and softly held her hand. I felt a wonderful soft tingling start from my rear making its way to the top of my head then travel down to my toes. Her hand was like the most delicate, precious object on Earth and I, David Trentwood, was the only person on God’s green earth holding it. I was light-headed, euphoric, it took all my will power not to take Cordelia in my arms and kiss her squarely on the lips. I looked straight ahead at the TV screen where there was a commercial for a breakfast cereal. I dared a quick glance out of the corner of my eye towards Cordelia who was also staring straight ahead. I could no more have spoken than flown.
We sat in silence holding hands for what I guess to have been about ten minutes. Finally Cordelia pulled her hand away. Looking at me she said, “I’m not ready to be kissed by anyone but when I am I want it to be by you.”
I couldn’t have been happier if someone had told me that I was to be given a million dollars. But I was still without the power of speech. Noting this, Cordelia said, “you don’t have to say anything, unless the idea of kissing me repulses you.”
That snapped me out of it. “No, no, not at all. I’d be….”
I’d be what? How was I going to finish this sentence? Delighted? Glad to? Over the moon? Willing? Honored?
“You’d be what?” Cordelia snapped impatiently, perhaps feeling vulnerable.
“Happy to. That is, when you’re ready.”
“You’re sweet,” Cordelia said scootching so close to me that she was practically sitting on my lap.
I was excited, I was terrified, I was nervous. I’d once heard someone say that seldom are our greatest hopes or worst fears realized. It appeared that for me that my greatest hope would in fact be realized.
Then it happened.
“Oh, why not?” Cordelia asked before kissing me on the forehead.
It wasn’t much of a kiss. No kiss on the forehead can be. It was wet, sloppy and hasty. No, it wasn’t much of a kiss but it was my first, it was from God’s greatest creation and it was the greatest kiss a person had ever received.
Heaven.
I wondered what was next. Cordelia was dictating terms. She had given me her hand to hold, she had decided that there would some day be a kiss. She sat close to me. She placed the kiss on my forehead. I was merely there, responding, trying to keep from enveloping her in my arms while giving her a long, slow kiss — mouth-to-mouth. But then out of the corner of my eye I noted the clock. It was 5:30, my regular departure time. I no more wanted to leave than have my hand cut off but I was compulsive about obeying rules and following schedules.
“I have to go,” I said weakly.
“Ahh yes, my friend the creature of habit,” Cordelia said, then planted another kiss on my forehead. What I would have given for one on my lips.
I offered what I thought was a particularly tender goodbye then dashed for the door, fearing any lingering would result in awkwardness that would ruin this most perfect of afternoons. I ran home — though I wasn’t at risk of being late — propelled by the excitement of my first kiss.
Peggy regarded me warily as I dashed in, I gave her an enthusiastic greeting. “What’s gotten into you, squirt?” She asked. There were no words or actions on her part that could have brought me down from this high. I threw my rucksack on my bed and gave Jim, emerging from the bathroom, a cheery hello. Accustomed to my placid moods, he scowled but said nothing.
At dinner my mother noted my elevated mood, “David, you seem in especially good spirits this evening. Did something exciting happen today?”
My parents and siblings represented the four people in the world with whom I was least inclined to share news of my being in love. I had spent the first thirteen years and nine months of my life surrounded by them, loving each in the obligatory way one does immediate family members. But I felt no connection outside of having shared experiences and being blood relations. I would no more tell them about Cordelia than I would discuss an interesting bowel movement. So to my mother’s question I did something most unusual, I lied. “Nothing too special, except I got an A on my science project and my basketball team in P.E. class won our game, I scored the winning basket.” The A in my science project had been nice but nothing I exalted over, I hadn’t scored a point in my P.E. team’s basketball game that day, which, by the way, we lost. But I'd held off any further questions.
“Well done, son,” my father said, then took another swallow of his martini.
“I’m proud of you, David,” my mother added.
Peggy and Jim were too focused on their spaghetti and meatballs to acknowledge my existence, let alone utter a word to me.
Cordelia and I continued to hold hands during my visits and she would sometimes kiss my forehead. The first time I braved a kiss, she pushed me away. “I don’t feel comfortable yet being kissed. I need to be the one who does it. I’m sure that’ll change one day,” she explained.
“Be sure to let me know,” I said with the first bit of sarcasm I’d directed towards her. She let it go and smiled at me which made me want to kiss her all the more.
We started taking walks in the neighborhood. Cordelia would point out what she thought were interesting looking houses or trees or cloud formations. It made me realize how seldom I observed the world around me. I'd always walked purposefully to wherever I was going rarely taking in my environment. But Cordelia could find the magical within the mundane. Perhaps it was the death of her mother that caused her to look outward, examine the world and wonder at its details. The color of a flower, the curvature of tree, the design of a cottage. She appreciated life’s details.
Sometimes during our walks she’d hold my hand. This both thrilled me and made me a little bit uncomfortable as I feared coming across a schoolmate who might decide to make sport of me. I knew I shouldn’t have minded but in junior high everyone likes to keep a low profile.
One day Cordelia and I were sitting on her sofa holding hands watching a Gregory Peck movie when during a commercial she said, “Do you think we’ll get married someday?”
Oh goodness, I thought, are we heading into a frightening new direction? The truth was that I’d never given the topic of my eventual marriage a second’s thought. Sure, I’d thought of Cordelia in an abstract live-happily-ever-after sort of way. But I hadn’t even begun to mull the prospect of being a high school student yet, though it was but a year away. She might as well have asked me what color house I might someday buy.
I stammered for a bit — which had to have been noticeable — before saying, “to be perfectly honest I’ve never thought about it. Why? Is it important?”
“No silly,” she said nudging in my ribs playfully with her elbow. “I was kind of teasing. We’ll probably go on to meet and date lots of different people and have all kinds of experiences and have forgotten all about each other by the time either one of us gets married. I wondered if you’d thought about it, is all. Well, not seriously thought about it. Ya know what I mean?”
Suddenly I was terrified by the notion that there would be — as Cordelia had suggested — an end to our relationship. We were together at this moment and it being a Thursday we’d be together the next day and that’s as far as my thinking went. The notion of a time without Cordelia was depressing. I never wanted to know such a day.
“Yeah,” was all I managed to say.
“You look spooked.” Cordelia was an amazingly observant girl. Far more so than anyone I knew. “What’s the matter?”
“Oh nothing,” I said, rallying and managing to sound perfectly fine. I was rescued by the end of the commercial.
I put Cordelia’s question out of mind as we watched a posse chase a gang of bank robbers. But it came back to me that evening and I practically wept at the notion of someday not being with my beloved Cordelia.
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