I never had a curfew at this point. It didn't matter anyway. I was always home at a reasonable hour because there was nothing else to do.
“We trust you,” Mom would say as she dabbed on some Chanel No. 5 before her own night out.
“Just don't let any of those boys touch you,” Dad would warn, fastening his cuff link.
Plus, all my girlfriends had to be in by midnight on Saturday nights, so it wasn't like I was dying to stay at the party after they all had to leave.
Then my parents told me they were going to New York for the whole weekend. This was not something uncommon per se. See, by this point my parents were always flying someplace or going somewhere and our housekeeper, Matilda, came and stayed. This time, though, they were leaving me alone.
“We trust you, Al,” my dad said. “You're fifteen and you can take care of yourself.”
“We're only a phone call away,” mom said.
“Can't I go with you to New York?” I asked them.
“Now, what are you going to do when we're at the gala? You're going to sit alone in a hotel room all night? Go out with your friends, have fun,” Dad soothed. “You can take care of yourself here.”
“Penelope can stay over if you want,” Mom offered.
Any other kid would have been doing cartwheels to be left alone, but, for me, it had been forever since my parents and I had done something together. I wouldn't have said that to them though. It would have sounded too sappy. Like the time I asked if we could go to Bookbinder's on a Friday night, just the three of us.
“Come on, Alex, you know we have to go to this benefit tonight. A lot of important people are going to be there. Don't you have any friends who want to do something with you? Where's that Penelope?”
So, I held my tongue and called Pen, and I told her that the 'rents were going away and she was staying over. What did she say?
“Andrew and I call your parents' room!”
Great. Now I was going to sit on my own couch, in my own living room, while I heard my parents' bed creak.
So that Friday night came. I ordered two pizzas, one for Pen and Andrew and one for myself with extra cheese (because I was already corpulent and repulsive, how could it get any worse?). I rented
Sixteen Candles
on video for my own enjoyment. I had just combed a bottle of conditioner through my hair and put it in a shower cap when my phone rang.
“Hi,” Pen said, sounding worse than I'd ever heard her sound. “I think I got food poisoning from the steak sandwich at school today . . . Hold on, I have to throw up again.”
When she finally finished hacking, she said, “I can't leave the toilet. Andrew said he would come over to keep you company.”
“I don't want Andrew coming here alone,” I yelled at her.
“What else can I do?” she said. “You know you get scared of the uncle Morris death room when no one else is there.”
She had a point.
“I've never been alone with Andrew,” I complained. “What are we going to talk about?”
“Rent a movie or something.”
“I rented
Sixteen Candles
. Is he going to want to watch that?”
“He loves
Sixteen Candles
. He thinks he's Jake Ryan.”
Twenty minutes later, Andrew was at my door. I didn't care that I had the shower cap full of conditioner on my head and was in my flannel pajamas. As if I wasn't beautiful enough, I had just popped a zit that was growing on the side of my nose.
“You're bleeding,” he said when I opened the door.
I shrugged it off and let him in. What did it matter if I spruced myself up? Even if Andrew wasn't Pen's boyfriend, I wouldn't be attracted to him.
First of all, Andrew was like my height. I don't know if you're familiar with this, and maybe there's a reason for itâyou'll have to let me knowâbut almost every guy on the Main Line is less than six feet. I analyzed this through the years whenever I was out of state, and it's something I never saw anyplace else. I don't mean to put anyone down when I say this. It's just something I've noticed.
Anyway, Andrew was short. He had dirty blond hair; it was very thin even back then, so you knew he would lose it all someday. I ran into him years later when we were like twenty-eight and he was totally bald except for some hair on the sides.
He was a nice kid, though, and he really liked Pen so I liked him. It was a real menschy thing he did, coming over to keep me company like he did.
Right when he got there, he called Pen. She was still hacking it up in the bathroom.
“Don't worry, I'll take care of her,” I heard him say as I blotted some toothpaste onto my bleeding zit. “You just make sure you're okay.”
Like I said, a really nice kid.
Now, I know exactly what you're thinking: Andrew comes over and he sees through the plastic shower cap and the toothpaste on my face and the thirty extra pounds and we make out, right?
Sorry, that's not what happened. You think I'm the kind of person who makes out with her best friend's boyfriend? I'm trying to stay in seventh heaven, for crying out loud, not get sent to first!
What happened was, about twenty minutes after Andrew came over, we were still waiting for the pizzas and we were just starting to watch
Sixteen Candles
when my phone rang.
“Can Andrew go over to Babis Pharmacy and get me some Pepto?” Pen barely got out before hacking it up again.
I gave the phone to Andrew and tried to listen to his conversation as the sounds of Molly Ringwald's cry, “Grandparents forgetting a birthday? They live for that shit,” blared on the television.
“Okay, I will. I'll see you in a bit,” he said, hanging up the phone.
“I gotta go over to Babis to get Pen the Pepto, but she doesn't want me to leave you here all alone. You can come with, or my brother is home from college and he could come over.”
I had never actually met Andrew's brother, Bobby, before. Andrew had mentioned once or twice that he had a brother at Princeton, but that was it. I honestly don't know why I said it was okay for Bobby to come over. Thing was, I didn't feel like going over to Babis, and it was time to get the conditioner out of my hair. I hated being in my house alone. The place was so big. Every time the house made any kind of a sound I thought it was uncle Morris from beyond the grave. Actually, I just asked uncle Morris yesterday if it was him spooking the house and he said, “You think I had nothing better to do than spook my teenage niece?”
Anyway, I told Andrew to call his brother. Why Bobby was sitting at home waiting for his little brother to ask him to watch his girlfriend's fat, pimply friend was beyond me, but when Andrew called him and asked if it was all right, Bobby said he'd be over in a half hour.
A couple of minutes after I got out of the shower, my door-bell rang and I went to answer it. Again, who cared how I looked? I had a towel on my head and my big terrycloth bathrobe on and those cliché fuzzy rabbit slippers that Pen said were the gayest looking things she'd ever seen, but I didn't care, they were comfortable.
When I answered the door, my first thought was that Bobby looked nothing like Andrew. He was still short, as you know most boys from the Main Line are, but he had dark hair that was really full. It looked like he'd never lose it. As a matter of fact, that time when I ran into Andrew years later, Bobby was with him and he still had all his hair. I wonder if that bothered Andrew.
Anyway, while Andrew had brown eyes, Bobby had green. Also, he was dressed in an oxford shirt and khaki pants. Nice. Though I recall the pants being pulled up too high on his waist, which was very geeky, and that was so unlike Andrew, who always wore a T-shirt and jeans and was never without his Haverford varsity soccer jacket.
“Thanks for coming over,” I said as he walked in.
“No problem,” he said, giving me a once over and taking in my terrycloth bathrobe and fuzzy rabbit slippers.
“I just took a shower,” I excused myself. “I'm just going to throw on some sweats,” I added, walking back into my bedroom. “If the pizza guy comes, the money is on the table.”
Now, what sweats were going to be cute enough for a college boy who most likely had no interest in going to third base with me, but might? I needed to look a little more attractive.
I remember clearly being pissed off at myself that I said I'd put on sweats. Had I come out in anything more special than sweats, it would have meant that I thought he was cute, which I did, but I had to play coy. You know how that is?
Okay, the truth must come out. Bobby wasn't actually that cute at all. He was really thin, first of all. All boney. You could literally see the bones in his face. Didn't this kid eat? He also had zits, not as many as mine, but, still, the face was nothing to write home about. His khaki pants were pulled a little too high for my taste. No, he wasn't cute, but the fact remained, a boy was in my house.
I must have been in my bedroom trying on every pair of sweats I had for about half an hour when I heard the door-bell ring and Bobby answer it.
Sixteen Candles
was at the point where Jake found Farmer Ted trapped under the coffee table and Farmer Ted told him that Samantha had a crush on him. I loved that the pizza guy saw a guy answer the door. The pizza guy from Boston Style Pizza had been to my house many, many times. We never said anything beyond, “How much?” and, “Thank you,” but, still, how cool would the pizza guy think I was to have a guy over, a college boy at that, even though he wasn't that cute and had visible bones in his face?
“The pizza's here,” Bobby screamed out.
I had finally found the perfect pair of sweats, my red Champion sweatsâthey seemed to make me look a half a pound thinnerâand my Friends School blue sweatshirt. I headed out into the kitchen where Bobby had put the boxes on the table.
“I actually already ate,” Bobby said, which made me think he might have been anorexic, “but you can dive in if you want.”
As if.
I really wanted to though. The smell of that pizza wafting through the box was enough to make me float over to it, but never in front of a guy, no matter how thin or unattractive he may be.
“I ate too,” I said. “That was for Andrew.”
There was a pause.
“Thanks again for coming over,” I said again.
“It's fine,” he said. “I'm actually studying for finals right now and my little sister had some friends over. Andrew said it would be really quiet here.”
“Yeah,” I said, not knowing what else to say but feeling vaguely insulted, as if Andrew had told Bobby I lived in a funeral home. “It's really quiet here. Well, I'll let you study. I have to dry my hair anyway.”
“Thanks,” he said, looking at the books he brought in. "Then again,” he stopped, “I could make room for a slice if you're game.”
A half hour later we were three-quarters through the first pizza.
“Frat parties suck,” Bobby said, digging into his third piece. “I even thought about joining a frat, but what's the point? It's just a continuation of high school, and how much beer can a person drink?”
“I totally get it!” I replied enthusiastically. “I mean, do these people know how stupid they look?”
“I thought it was just me,” he said, smiling at me. “It's fine to get drunk once in a while, but every night?”
“Exactly!” I agreed as I started to become a little more attracted to him. Maybe I could teach him not to pull his pants so high.
“Anyway, I'm planning on going into the ministry after college, ” he said. “How would it look if I were drinking my way through school?”
“Exact . . . What?” I stopped. “The ministry?”
“Yeah,” he said, real emphatic, as if he was proud of himself. “I'm planning on being a minister. My parents don't want me to, they want me to be a doctor or a lawyer, so that's why I go to Princeton, but my real calling is to God.”
“So, does that mean like you can't have sex or anything?”
What did I know? I was fifteen and Jewish (and a Hebrew-school dropout to make me even more clueless about what he was saying).
“No,” he laughed. “I'm not going to be a priest, I'm going to be a pastor. Pastors can get married and have kids and all that.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that's cool, I guess.”
We sat in silence, eating our pizza for another few moments. I guess he sensed that I didn't think becoming a pastor was the coolest thing in the world. He turned to me and smiled.
“You know,” he said, “you're kind of cute. Andrew didn't mention that.”
“Thanks,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I honestly didn't think he was hitting on me though. I mean, I was a fifteen-year -old uneducated Jew and he was a future pastor who heard the calling, I think. I could have asked if it was against the rules to hit on someone of a different religion, but I decided against it. I had already made it perfectly clear that I was pathetic both physically and scholastically, why dig the hole any deeper?
“I hope you don't mind,” he said.
And that's when he leaned in. Where he was going, I wasn't sure. He had put his slice back in the box and he was leaning into me, me with my wet hair and sweatpants on and my pink fuzzy slippers, with toothpaste on my face.
“What, don't you mind?” I asked him seriously. I mean, I honestly had no idea.
And that's when he kissed me.
My first kiss (and the fourth best day of my life).