He Loves Me Not

by Caroline B. Cooney

  I struggled through the next piece. It was only three minutes long, I guess, but it felt like an hour. My fingers felt heavy, like metal slugs breaking the ivory. And I was going to cry again, I knew it like the voice of doom. In public, on a stage!

  I gritted my teeth and concentrated on the notes and the beat.

  “All right, all right,” said Ralph. “You win. Go find your pal Ted and dance the next number. I’ll do the piano.”

  “You know how to play piano?” I said, amazed.

  “Alison, would I own one if I couldn’t use it?” He sat down literally before I could get up, nudging me right off the bench—into Ted.

  If we’d rehearsed that we couldn’t have done it better! Ted caught me, pulling me down off the bottom level of the bandstand and onto the dance floor. He was grinning from ear to ear. “Old Ralph’s bark is worse than his bite, huh?” he said. The floor was very crowded up near the band so Ted locked his fingers around my wrist and hauled me off to a more secluded spot. I cooperated. I certainly didn’t want to dance for the first time in two years right in front of my combo!

  “Hey, Ted,” said a boy near our spot, “you’re supposed to lead, not shove.”

  He and his girlfriend burst out laughing at us.

  I bit my lips, but Ted only laughed back. “You can’t lead in a dance like this. All you can do is demonstrate.” He demonstrated, twitching, wiggling, and thrusting wildly.

  “Well,” said the girl, still laughing, “you’re supposed to stop short of bodily mutilation.”

  The girl was shorter than I was and had the friendliest smile! I liked her right away. I stopped blushing and started laughing, too. Ted and I were pretty funny, with him dancing so insanely and me afraid to try. “I’m Cindy,” she said to me, “and this is Jon.”

  We beamed at each other. “I’m Alison. I’m with the band.”

  “I know,” said Cindy. “We noticed you. You’re not wearing the sort of clothes anybody could overlook. Ted,” she asked him, “how you’ve changed. The last I knew, the only girl you cared about was the one who could do your enlargements cheap.”

  Next thing I knew, the four of us were standing over by the refreshments talking as if we were old friends, and Ted had gotten me a ginger ale and Cindy shared her cup of M & M candies with me. I stared back at the band for a minute. I did not feel as if I knew anybody up there. In their vivid, gaudy costumes, making their wild noisy music, they looked like a race apart. I’m not the music tonight, I thought. My wish came true. I’m the guest, I’m the date.

  Jon said, “It’s remarkable, isn’t it, Cindy? Ted Mollison. Actually participating in normal high school life. He’s even dancing. With a real, live, attractive girl.”

  Cindy snorted. “I wouldn’t call it dancing,” she said, and we all laughed. I felt like a soda bottle that had been shaken up: Open me and I’d fizz all over the place.

  When the number ended it was like Cinderella in reverse. Cinderella had to go back to an ordinary life, but I had to hurry back to the palace.

  We played another hour, I guess. It didn’t feel like me playing. I was out there with Ted, holding his hand, meeting his friends, laughing at his jokes.

  Ted was clearly a person with a lot of extra energy and no hang-ups whatsoever about doing things in public. He actually climbed to the top of the closed-up bleachers way at the rear of the gymnasium and began making semaphorelike signals at me. None of his classmates so much as blinked an eye. It must have been normal behavior. “Good grief,” said Lizzie, as Ted turned his entire body into an alphabet spelling out A-L-I-S-O-N (the N nearly killed him). “Can’t you do better than that, Alison?” she wanted to know.

  I looked at Ted, who was vaulting down at last, being applauded by some of his friends, bowing to them.

  “No,” I said. “No, I don’t think I can do better than that!”

  14

  “ARE YOU PUTTING ME on?” said Frannie. “You have a date for breakfast?”

  Like a dope I had told one girl—a reasonably pleasant, seemingly trustworthy person who shared a gym locker with me on Thursdays—that I was going to have breakfast with Ted. She had told everybody she had ever met, heard of or seen in her entire life.

  “Alison,” said Jan, shaking her head either in admiration or disgust. “I couldn’t even get my hair brushed by six-thirty. Are you seriously going to be up, dressed, fixed, and able to speak in words of more than one syllable by six-thirty in the morning?”

  “With a reporter,” pointed out Frannie, “she’ll even have to be articulate.”

  That was in the hall. In my next class Phyllis said, “You should at least have made this date for Saturday morning instead of during the school week. Then you could have your breakfast at a more respectable hour. Six-thirty in the morning! Really, Alison!”

  And after that class Mike’s girlfriend, Kimmy, said, “Romance does not occur at breakfast.” I listened to her mostly because I figured Kimmy knew a lot more about romance than I did. All I knew were the lyrics of a thousand songs. Kimmy knew firsthand. “At brunch, you could have romance, yes. At luncheons, dinners, cocktails, and after-theater drinks. But not at breakfast.”

  “Why,” said Lisa, “didn’t you make this date for Saturday morning?”

  “Because he’s leaving Friday afternoon for a seminar on Creative Journalism in the Small City.”

  Everybody was momentarily diverted by having to protest that we did not live in a small city. This led to definitions of what a city might be and everybody had to shut up when Janey, who is from Manhattan, told us what a city was. Not our town, she said firmly.

  And then in Latin, Ms. Gardener actually said that she promised not to call on me the day of my breakfast date. “Since you’ll be too busy during breakfast to do your translation,” she explained.

  “How did you know I do my translations during breakfast?” I said.

  “Just a lucky guess.”

  The class howled with laughter.

  And the strangest thing was, they were laughing at me—and yet it didn’t bother me at all. I rather enjoyed it. Ted’s whole high school had laughed at his antics during the dance, and Ted just figured the laughs were their way of saying they liked him. Ted, just by asking me out, had given me confidence that performing music never had. I felt ten times stronger than I had a week ago.

  We hadn’t meant to date over breakfast, of course.

  We’d compared engagement calendars and the only free evening for both of us was actually eleven days off. Ted frowned at my calendar and said firmly that he wasn’t going to wait any eleven days!

  Technically speaking, Ralph drove me home from that dance in his van, but actually, I floated home. On Ted’s words.

  And no amount of teasing in school could puncture my balloon.

  “I guess I wasn’t creative enough,” said Mike MacBride. “It just didn’t occur to me to ask you out for scrambled eggs at dawn.” He was smiling at me, with the funny gentle smile he had.

  I didn’t know what to make of his remark. He had never asked me anywhere for anything, just hinted vaguely that he might. I wondered if he was just teasing, in his nice easygoing way, or if he really meant that he wished he had asked me out.

  All my thoughts about Ted quivered. I was crazy about Ted…and yet, I’d been crazy about Mike my entire life. What if Mike wanted to ask me out?

  What would I really do if my dreams came true and two wonderful boys wanted my company?

  But Mike was going off with Kimmy, so that one was likely to remain a daydream.

  Ted and I were going to have this breakfast date at my house, a factor I omitted to tell anybody at school. I don’t drive, and if Ted came to pick me up and we drove somewhere, there wouldn’t be time to eat before we’d both have to go on to our separate schools.

  My father was so delighted at the idea his little girl was going to have a date (and under his supervision) that he didn’t even comment on the odd hour. He just said that along with the usual froz
en doughnuts we thaw each morning in the microwave, he—my very own good father—would demonstrate his affection by laying in frozen bagels, frozen waffles, bacon strips, and instant maple-sugar-flavored oatmeal.

  I asked Daddy if he planned to be present.

  He looked very hurt and said if he didn’t have breakfast he would collapse at work, and besides, I made terrible coffee and he had to get up to make it himself.

  I said the coffee was instant and nobody could make it any more terrible than when it came out of the jar.

  He said, well, he would come down in a new bathrobe, how was that? And I said, that was perfect.

  The night before this breakfast date Ralph called up. I could tell by his voice that he was up to no good so I was suspicious of everything he said, which was a good thing, because he tried to con me into a gig. “Did I remember to tell you I promised the Men’s Breakfast Prayer Meeting that you’d play hymns for them tomorrow? They’re not paying anything, of course, but I told them you were free and you’d love to do it.”

  “Very funny, Ralph.”

  About half an hour later Lizzie called. “I just spoke to Ted,” she said ominously.

  She’d do that, too. Lizzie would stop at nothing. “Did he survive?” I said weakly.

  “I told him his schedule was altogether too crowded and he would just have to omit something.”

  “What did you suggest he should omit?” I asked, although I had a pretty good idea.

  “You,” said Lizzie, and she laughed until I had to hang up on her.

  “And they pretend to be adults,” said my father. “Those musicians of yours are infantile and immature.”

  I agreed with that. I sat trying to do homework so I wouldn’t be worried all through my Ted breakfast about not having done my math. Instead of doing the math, though, I worried about what I would say to Ted. Would having Daddy there make it difficult? What if we couldn’t think of anything to say to each other? What if the whole thing consisted of me saying, “How about some more orange juice, Ted?” and Ted saying, “No, thanks, Alison, prune juice is fine.”

  I decided Kimmy was right. You couldn’t bring up romantic subjects at breakfast. Breakfast was not romantic. At breakfast, I thought, Ted will see the real me for the first time. Not me performing and not me rehearsing. Me eating frozen waffles.

  The phone rang again and I knew it would be Rob this time, probably coached by Ralph and Lizzie about what to tease old Alison about this time.

  But it was Frannie, who wanted to know what I was planning to wear.

  “Wear?” I said, as if I usually went around naked.

  “On your breakfast date,” she said impatiently. “What sort of costume?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. We’re both going on to school afterward. I’m just wearing school clothes, I guess. Oxford shirt, skirt, Shetland sweater.”

  Frannie was disappointed. She had actually thought I would have a costume, as if this were a gig, and I had to be spangled and special. “My personality,” I told her, “is all the flash I need.”

  Frannie laughed. “Alison, you are too much.”

  She was too much. Frankly, this breakfast thing was more pressure than I had bargained for. All the confidence Ted had given me by asking me out was dwindling away because of everybody’s interest.

  “You know Todd Morrell and Bobby Bastien?” said Frannie.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve started a trend. They’re taking Shelley and Margo to breakfast Friday.”

  Me, Alison, setting a trend with her first date.

  I decided definitely not to tell anybody that my father in his new bathrobe was present for the entire thing.

  “Actually,” said Ted, “I already ate breakfast.”

  My father stared at Ted and then at the mounds of food he’d bought for Ted to gobble up.

  Ted said nervously, “My mother has this rule. I don’t leave in the morning without hot food in my stomach.”

  We just stared at him. A breakfast date and he’d already eaten? Oh no, I thought, it’s going to be a nightmare, not a dream. I looked at the clock. The forty-five minutes we had began to look like very long minutes.

  “My mother is very suspicious of other people’s nutritional standards,” he said. He was flushed. Embarrassment? I thought. “I have to brown-bag it to school instead of buying hot lunch because she knows I’ll be filling my system with preservatives, saccharin, and artificial food coloring.”

  My father said, “I would have to agree with her there. Alison and I like to think we’re sort of guinea pigs for cancer-causing agents, we eat so many of them.”

  Ted and my father got along just fine. In fact, they sat there for fifteen solid minutes, one-third of my breakfast date, exchanging quips. I thought, This is the pits. It’s one thing to be envious of Kimmy and Frannie and all the rest. Now I have to be jealous of my own father?

  But I couldn’t seem to think of anything interesting to say. My father was filled with funny remarks and Ted kept topping them, and the two of them had a fine old time. I poured myself a cup of coffee and drank it black, which I absolutely hate, for punishment. Coffee makes me feel hot from the inside out, the opposite of sunshine, which makes me hot from the outside in. That was the sort of thing I thought about, while Ted and my father had a date.

  “Well,” said my father suddenly, pushing away from the table, “guess I’d better get ready for work.” And he was gone, thundering up the stairs, so nobody could mistake the fact that Ted and I were now alone.

  The good conversation stopped.

  Ted and I just sort of looked at each other and smiled edgily.

  “You look terrific,” said Ted.

  “Thank you.”

  “In fact, I was sitting here thinking a camera crew would be arriving soon to film you for a floor wax ad.”

  “A what?” I said.

  “You know. Where the unbelievably well-dressed superwoman, wife, and mother, who has a full-time glamorous career, waxes her floor just before the prime minister comes to dinner and she doesn’t even get her satin slippers spotted?”

  I giggled. “I’m not that familiar with floor wax.”

  Ted made a big production of examining our kitchen floor. “No. I don’t think you are.”

  “I have better things to do than wax floors, Ted Mollison.”

  And that led us into a discussion of things we’d rather do than housework, which Mrs. Mollison felt her sons should do instead of her. I was all for Mrs. Mollison’s getting out of housework, but I did feel sorry for Ted having to do any. Housework is such drudgery.

  “Sorry enough for me that we could have a housecleaning date?” said Ted hopefully. “Me wash windows, you polish silver?”

  “Not that sorry.”

  We laughed. Ted took a piece of Sara Lee coffeecake after all, and we munched happily, poured more coffee, and talked about dusting (the evils of it).

  Right in the middle of his next sentence Ted leaped up. “Committee meeting!” he said. “Forgot the time. Alison, I have to run. I’ll call you.” He was already elbowing into his jacket, gathering up his books and his ever-present camera. “Thanks,” he said at the door, and for a moment we stared at each other.

  Kiss me, I thought.

  But he didn’t. He shifted his books to his other side and said again, looking at the dusty Venetian blinds at the window, “Thanks, Alison.” And then he was gone.

  I watched him drive away.

  I was so exhausted by the whole thing I was ready for bed again. It was only seven forty-five and I had an entire day of school ahead. A day in which an awful lot of people would be wanting to know what a breakfast date was like. I tried to think of a good catchy answer I would toss at everybody. “Well,” I’d say casually, “we sloshed a lot of coffee around, that’s all.”

  I wondered if that was all. Or if Ted would call again for a longer, better date than one slice of Sara Lee and a few minutes chatter about dust.

  Ted’s car tur
ned the far corner of our street and he honked twice. Good-bye, I thought; that wasn’t a honk at another car, that was a honk good-bye to me.

  All day long in school I could hear the horn beeping at me.

  15

  TED DID NOT CALL me.

  On Saturday night he just appeared. We were supplying background dinner music at a fund drive kickoff for a new Y.M.C.A. We’d had three speeches—boring—and now they were asking for pledges—boring. Most of the people there were not physical fitness types. They were stodgy, moneyed types. I was yawning to myself over the keyboard. We had to play very softly and Rob was just sort of diddling at the drums and we were all in danger of falling asleep over our own music—and there in the doorway was Ted.

  The first thing I noticed was that he did not have a camera with him. He looked almost undressed without it dangling from a cord around his neck. I envied his poise, the way he simply smiled at the dinner organizers and threaded his way through the pledge-takers, around the tables, and over to me.

  He gave Ralph a quick look, obviously worrying that Ralph might throw him out. “Not to worry,” I whispered. “Ralph is so bored he wouldn’t mind if you hung from the chandeliers.”

  Immediately Ted looked up at the ceiling for good chandeliers to hang from, but all there were were long white strips of fluorescent lights. Ted looked disappointed.

  Ted found a folding chair and sat next to me. I moved a little on my piano bench but he didn’t take me up on it. “I promised your father not to bother you on the job,” he whispered. “I think that includes taking a separate seat.”

  So he had called Daddy to see where I was tonight!

  It made me all warm and excited to think about that call. About Ted wanting to be around me, talking to my father, getting in his car, and driving out here just to come sit with me.

  Get closer, Ted, I thought. I love you for your long, lean legs.

  But Ted stayed where he was, on the gray metal folding chair.

  “What’s in your hair?” said Ted.

  “Stars.”

  “That’s what I thought they were. Why do you have stars in your hair? How do they stick?”