Away Happens by Phil Crossman

Author:Phil Crossman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

My First Time

People tend to wait for the mail with more patience than you would think them capable of. A good crowd, mostly retired folk, gathers at the post office most mornings. They peer through the little glass windows on their respective mailboxes at the employees on the other side of the wall sorting through stuff and can judge from the activity how near done the process of distributing incoming mail is. This is a familiar group, intimately acquainted with one another and only a little less so with those of us who pop in and out to get our mail or conclude our business. One day my arrival to pick up our mail coincided with that of a woman about my own age. I held the door open for her and, as I did, a memory coughed and sputtered. She bent down to open her post office box.

“You know,” I announced to the regulars and pointing to her as she straightened up, “This is the first girl I ever kissed.”

She blushed and rushed to assure everyone within earshot that she remembered nothing of the kind but did recall that, once, when a bunch of us kids were skating I grabbed her by the arm and tried to guide her into the shadows.

“Why’d I do that?”

“For crying out loud, are you that old? Think about it. All I know is that I’d just gotten a polio shot and my arm was killing me.”

I didn’t remember that incident but I do remember the kiss.

We sat behind the gym on the steeply sloping ledge with our backs against the building. I was around ten years old, she a little younger. She had on shorts. Legs like a heron’s stuck out of them. We each embraced our own drawn-up knees. Our arms afforded some modesty as, with our faces buried in them, we talked about marriage and then about kissing, which, we knew from having watched our parents, had a lot to do with it.

We would kiss, we agreed, but only after we had established a level of commitment, so we agreed to marry when we grew up, that we’d live in the abandoned house that stood right next to where we sat, and that we’d have three children. That settled, we let go of our knees and put our arms on each other’s shoulders, and, with our eyes wide open, we kissed. Her fingers were cold where one or two of them touched my neck. So were her lips. My lips were not cold. Nearly cross-eyed, I returned her stare and imagined her thinking, “My, his lips are warm,” and I imagined her imagining, “I’ll bet he’s thinking, ‘My, her lips are cold,’ “ and she’d have been right.

That was a solemn occasion. Our commitment to one another was sober and validated. We rose and walked up the drive to the main street, holding hands and full of the greatness of the moment. Then we turned left and walked a few hundred feet to where she would exit up through Sarah Bunker’s yard to her house on the hill.

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