When I was fifteen, I cut off the last joint of my left ring finger during a woodshop class. I was laughing at a joke while cutting a board on a table saw. The bite of the blade sent a great shock through me, and I didn’t dare look down, but the bleached faces of the other boys told me just how bad it was.
They didn’t reassemble bodies in those days. Later, I heard that one of the guys in the class had picked up the joint, complete with dirty fingernail, and scared some girls with it. No surprise, no hard feelings; it was the kind of thing I would’ve done, and not only because I was a jackass. The girls around me were coming into glorious bloom, and my way of pretending not to be in awe of them was to act as if we were still kids—to tease and provoke them.
I’d never had a girlfriend, not really. In sixth grade, in Seattle, my friend Terry and I used to meet his cousin Patty and another girl at the Admiral Theatre on Saturday nights. Patty and I sat in the back and made out for two hours without exchanging a word, while Terry did the same with Patty’s friend. After the movie, Terry and I left by the side exit so his aunt wouldn’t see him when she picked the girls up. Never a dance, never a soda with two straws.
That winter, I moved to a village in the Cascades. The elementary school had four rooms, where four teachers taught the eight grades. Of the ten kids in my class, nine were boys. Nevy drove us crazy, favoring this one, then that one. I had her attention for a while when I was new, and never again. Anyway, she was into horses, not boys.
The high school was in Concrete, thirty-two miles downriver. When we finally got there, we found girls, all right, but the pretty ones in our class got picked off by juniors and seniors, and the older ones wouldn’t look at us.
That was the situation as I woke one afternoon with two-thirds of a finger and a bandage as big as a boxing glove to find a beautiful girl smiling down at me from the foot of my bed. By then, I’d been in the Mount Vernon Hospital for almost a week, because my stump had got infected and there was a danger of gangrene. I was floating on a morphine cloud and could only stare. “Hi,” she said. “See, Daddy—just like Dr. Kildare!”
“That’s my girl, Joelle,” the man in the next bed said. There were five others on the ward, all men. Joelle sat on my bed and offered me a candy bar. She said that I looked exactly like Dr. Kildare. I didn’t speak, just listened to her husky voice. She had dark-red hair held back from her high brow by pink barrettes. Her skin was pale, pearly, with a few freckles across her cheeks. Her eyes were green, her lips red with lipstick. The other men watched us with amusement. They must have seen that I was in love.
When she came back the next day, she sat beside me again and talked and talked. An unfair grade. An argument with another girl. Before she left, she wrote her telephone number in the book I was reading. I felt embarrassed that she had done this in front of her father, but I needn’t have been. When I was discharged and was saying goodbye, her father said, “You call Joelle, now, hear?”
I called Joelle every day. She talked and I agreed, and sympathized, and waxed indignant as required. She wanted me to come visit, and one Saturday I hitchhiked the many miles to her house. She was waiting for me on the front steps of a small white house just off the road. The day was warm and she wore cutoff shorts and a sleeveless blouse. Her whiteness was dazzling. She led me inside to say hello to her father, who was lying on the couch in his bathrobe, watching TV, then she announced that we were going for a walk.
She took my hand, and we climbed the grassy hill behind the house, and sat on a fallen tree. She was quiet now, for the first time, facing me. I understood that she was waiting. That I had come to the moment I’d dreamed of, alone with a girl I liked, a beautiful girl, who liked me, and wanted me to kiss her. And I didn’t. Couldn’t. Instead, I started talking. I’d been mute before, but now I was babbling, asking her questions about school, her parents, which TV shows she liked. Here she was, with her beautiful green eyes and beautiful red mouth that she wanted me to kiss, and I could only make noise. I was in despair. Finally, she turned away and watched the traffic on the road below. “I wish I had a car,” she said.
We walked down the hill, Joelle well ahead of me. She stood by the back door and said, “Bye. Nice to see you.”
I called her the next day. I had to do all the talking. When I asked her questions, she said, “Yes,” “No,” “I guess.”
Later, it all seemed like something I’d dreamed up. Why would a beautiful girl give me her number, and hold my hand, and want me to kiss her? Me—a boy without a car, who cut off his own finger?
And I didn’t really look like Dr. Kildare. ♦
