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Show 40 steaming up the windows, the smell of the girl's hair in my nose, the enormous fact of her person close beside me. Everybody necked. It was a rare exception for the couple however loosely attached not to, so Kate and I were only doing the conventional. But it seemed an enormous thing that first time. I could hardly get my breath, my chest was too big for my coat, my heart was hammering, and I could only sit there on those old mohair seats. Cold gripped my feet and began to rise up my legs. She in flimsy shoes and bare legs must have been freezing but neither of us moved or said a word. I knew I had to kiss her, my arm around her shoulders was going numb, the cold was rising higher up my legs and closer to my vitals, so I managed to turn my face toward her. Helpful, she looked up at me. My heart felt as large as a basketball, blood was roaring in my ears, I was gasping for breath but I bent to kiss her, eyes squeezed closed, our noses bumping but our lips searching until somehow they touched. The virgins kissed. No touch has ever seemed to me more momentous. My whole being was suffused with warmth, the cold gone. And in another five or ten minutes, I kissed her again, a bit surer this time, held it a bit longer. Twice though was all I could handle. Then the cold set in again. That car's heater was primitive and weak and was hardly warm by the time I got her to her small house in not a good neighborhood. I walked her onto the porch and she turned toward me to thank me, very proper, and I suppose it was the resemblance to taking her into my arms to dance which carried me through the conventional goodnight kiss. But face to face like that I found her lips easily and she kissed me back, firmly. I held the door for her, and ran back to the car. I took Elizabeth Brown to a box supper in the sixth grade, my friends, some of them, "went steady" by the time they were twelve, and so I saw nothing |
