While my father watched television in the family room, Howard and I sat together in the living room. He listened to my story and fidgeted, as though he preferred to explode. Howard had presented me with a gift box that I barely acknowledged in my eagerness to share the profound revelations of the day.
I doubt Howard had heard a syllable of my monologue when he insisted that I open the package. Of course, I appreciated that he had thoughtfully selected something to please me, so I carefully pealed the paper away from its underlying carton. Folding back tissue paper, I found a woolen sweater with embroidered figures of ice skaters worked into the knit. It was an adorable garment and I leaned over to kiss Howard’s cheek coquettishly.
“Take it out of the box,” Howard prodded.
I smiled at his boyish enthusiasm, and pulled the sweater from its wrappings rising to slip it over my blouse. From within the folds of wool, a small box dropped to the floor at my feet. For a moment I stood frozen staring at the tiny case. A jewelry box. My heart filled with mixed emotions, most notably dread. My eyes moved from the little item on the floor to Howard who grinned like a happy idiot.
“Well, Kate, aren’t you going to pick it up?”
In all honesty, I would have rather it disappeared. I could only hope that it contained a pendant or promise ring or a spring-loaded snake that would pop out causing me to scream with surprise. My eyes readjusted to the pretty velvet container, and I extracted it from the pile carpeting. Howard monitored my every move, continuing to beam with utter delight. Drawing a quavering breath, I grasped the hinged box firmly. My hands felt cold and clammy, crushing the delicate pile with their dampness. I had forgotten the wondrous communion with my father and focused only on the task at hand.
The velvet lid opened revealing, among other things, a gateway to a dimension of disjointed remembrances.
As eighth grade pupils, my best friend, Melissa, and I sat side-by-side on the floor of the middle school library during a rainy lunch period sharing a teen magazine. It was a prom issue filled with photographs of girls in frilly dresses applying make-up, giggling with their friends, and posing alongside handsome tuxedoed high school boys. Those high school students looked so mature; to us they were adults. As a grown woman, an adolescent looks like a child to me; but from the viewpoint of a thirteen-year-old girl, age sixteen loomed incomprehensibly far in the distance, in another world, a world called high school where we would make new friends, date boys and learn to drive.
As pubescent girls, Melissa and I forecasted a most appalling scenario: we might not have dates to the prom! While we looked forward to the excitement of teenage years, we worried about somehow missing out on traditional rites of passage. Neither of us was especially gregarious or popular in middle school, yet we expected a miraculous transformation at Cambridge Hills High where young people from all over the area met to live their adolescent years in its hallowed halls.
This was before I met Zoë and before Howard Millbank waltzed into my heart by yanking my Farrah Fawcett hairdo. Melissa and I went our separate ways in high school, she living more the conventional teenage experience as a track athlete and student council officer. As pre-adolescent girls we had been great friends. On Fifties Dress-up Day in junior high, Melissa and I would don her mother’s square dancing dresses and petticoats, covering the corny western bodices with white cardigan sweaters. We tied our hair up in ponytails beribboned with gaudy scarves. Of course, we wore roller skates to school. Only on Fifties Day could kids get away with wearing roller skates to school. Half of the female student body wore roller skates of all varieties including metal or plastic wheeled boots, clamp-ons, and disco tennis shoe skates that were not exactly true to 1950s fashion, but looked especially cute with bobby socks.
Of course, Melissa and I had dates to the prom. I actually met the boy who would be my date during the first few weeks of high school. Shyly entering the classroom where the foreign language club held its first meeting of the academic year, I scanned the desks, recognizing few people. Alone in the back of the room sat a strange boy in ratty jeans, a leather jacket adorned with an artful arrangement of safety pins, and bleached blonde spiked hair; his naturally dark roots showing near his scalp. Plenty of chairs remained available around him. Although I could have sat somewhere else, I was naturally drawn to this outcast brooding character and settled into the seat beside him.
“Hi,” I began politely.
The boy looked up at me apathetically. “Hey,” was all he said.
“Cool jacket,” I persisted, trying to be friendly. I felt terribly plain and conservative in my calico blouse, lace collar and blue jeans.
He looked up at me again, trying to ascertain whether I was just another giddy cheerleader who felt an annoying need to be nice to everyone. “Thanks,” he muttered.
“I’m Kate.”
Again, the young fellow regarded me suspiciously before extending his hand for an unexpected shake, “Quentin,” he returned.
Quentin Aspland slowly became one of my best friends during high school. He inspired me to dye my hair, express myself through fashion, and dust white powder on my face; but Quentin also fostered my scholarly growth. A year ahead of me in school, and therefore in foreign language study, Quentin encouraged me to enroll in summer courses so we could sit together in French class the next autumn. This not only got me out of the house and away from my parents during the early stages of rebelliousness, it also contributed to my ability to graduate from high school a year sooner. I signed up for classes again the next summer.
While my parents worried that Quentin was a bad influence, we actually spent more time studying French than French kissing. In fact, Quentin and I were not romantically involved at all until a few weeks before the prom. As a three-year student, I only attended one prom, during my last spring of high school. Quentin had not gone to his junior prom but decided to escort me (his good friend and quasi-girlfriend) during his senior year. In the wake of my Howard Millbank obsession, I was not capable of genuine romantic feelings toward anyone, assuming a teenager can have genuine romantic feels at all. Quentin and I so valued our friendship that we remained platonically involved through high school, both of us sporadically dating other people as the mood struck.
We enjoyed drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and philosophizing. We solved the world’s problems, pondered the nature of parallel universes and read literature; discussing and dissecting it for hours. Quentin excelled at these intellectual pursuits, leaving me his disciple rather than his contemporary; but he stimulated my need to learn and to reach beyond my limitations. Unlike Zoë, I could count on Quentin to share my anguish on esoteric and artistic levels. Although he had no similar experiences, he commiserated about the futility of my quest to become a skater. He wrote angstful poetry describing my plight. In retrospect, I realize Quentin’s poems were insipid drivel; but as a teenager, exposed for the first time to disappointment and other overwhelming emotions, they expressed the turmoil inside of me. Having found someone who truly understood my pain and could express it in words became profoundly important to my well being.
So we went to the prom together, after breaking down and deciding to date during our last months as secondary school students. Quentin was the perfect gentleman. We shared a precious evening, during which I nearly forgot about Howard Millbank, who was still only a junior and not invited to the senior prom.
Quentin attended a private college, and we stayed in touch through letters and telephone calls during our first year apart. He did not come home in the summer; and I began to date Jonathan, a busboy at the restaurant where I had taken a job. After dropping out of foreign language studies, my energy focused on my new beau. Had Quentin been around, he might have directed me back to a sensible academic path or re-stimulated my interest in linguistics. But Quentin had found religion and began a faith journey that eventually led him to the service of God as a minister and missionary. Our paths no longer overlapped and we lost contact with each other.
Although Quentin had been my confidant, spiritual guru, and empathic soul mate; he was still a man, and I preferred to discuss feminine matters with Zoë. Zoë and I daydreamed about our weddings, which we would combine into a double ceremony with Quentin at my side as best man, rather than bridegroom. Just as Melissa and I prematurely wondered if anyone would ask us to the prom, Zoë and I worried that no one would ever propose to us. During our sleepover parties, I imagined Howard Millbank as my fantasy groom for the double wedding. Zoë picked a boy from the football team who she intentionally decided to like, because having a crush on a boy was the fashionable thing for teenaged girls to do, but her crush was certainly not a detrimental obsession precluding her from have a normal high school sweetheart.
My silly youthful heart would just flutter with excitement when I thought of being the ripe old age of twenty or twenty-one and walking down the aisle into handsome Howard Millbank’s arms. Oh, how I wanted to grow up! Oh, how I wished Howard had not transferred out of my French class!
“Kate? Kate?”
Howard Millbank’s voice awakened me from memories of my adolescence. I stared at the ring in its little velvet treasure chest. Diminutive by comparison to the garish headlight Neil had presented, Howard carefully selected this small but lovely diamond, keeping within his budget. Just as I had been foolish to worry about not having a date for the prom, when my date turned out to be a saving grace of my high school years; I could not have more wrong to preoccupy myself with becoming an old maid. Devin would have bought me a ring had I not turned pallid in the jewelry store. I got the grandfather of all diamonds from Neil Fitch (and gave it back, of course), and now the man of my teenage dreams was asking me to marry him!
For a moment I was transported back to Zoë’s bedroom where our fifteen-year-old alter egos flipped through a bridal magazine planning our double wedding. I had not talked to Zoë since her own wedding, which I could not attend, a couple of years before. She would undoubtedly be completely flabbergasted to hear of Howard Millbank’s proposal. Had a fortuneteller predicted this future, I would have declared it outrageous and dismissed her premonition as lunacy.
“Kathy?” Howard probed. Only his parents called me ‘Kathy’, a nickname I despised because it was so common. There were always five Kathies in school, all with different spellings, and I did not want to be the sixth. But in this context it got my attention, and I turned to Howard Millbank.
I should not have been thinking of old friends and childish daydreams as my boyfriend proposed marriage, but under the unusual circumstances of my emotional history with this man, I could not settle into a socially acceptable response pattern. Initially, I did not want to acknowledge the ring box as it lay in symbolic exile on the rug. I was still not ready to make a commitment to anyone after ending my engagement to Neil. Although I had eventually offered Howard a diluted version of my escapades with Neil, it was obviously insufficient to communicate the depth of my distress. Howard assumed I had recovered, probably because I felt too embarrassed to elaborate on the psychological damage inflicted by the fiasco. Although I had not seen this proposal coming and could not prepare for it, exhilaratingly pleasant memories and improbably events consumed me. Swept up in pure romance, I succumbed to the moment, surrendering my emotions and allowing myself to experience unmitigated happiness. Forgetting prior hesitation born from the shame of Neil’s deception, Dr. Perez untimely death, and my aimless wanderings through academia; I admired the ring perched in a fold of satin lining with complete satisfaction.
Above the discordant recollections and accompanying delight singing in my consciousness, I heard Howard Millbank’s voice and looked at his beautiful face that had hardly changed in ten years.
“Will you marry me, Kate?”
My mind was still reeling from the earlier conversation with my father when Howard came to the house after Christmas dinner. Although we were alone, my father and I prepared a traditional meal and ate in the formal dining room. We said nothing else serious to each other that day, struggling to make small talk to cover empty expanses of silence. I played Christmas records on the old stereo console to fill the void. Although I wanted to discuss our exchange with Talbert, I could not expect Talbert to be in his apartment on Christmas Day with nothing to do but listen to my chatter over the telephone. Therefore, I stewed until Howard arrived.
Chapter 44 posted 1/8/02
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