That night, we danced up a storm. She had good moves. I didn’t. Then the dance was over. I drove Cheryl back to her house in my VW Bug. It was time to see her to the door and say good night. Damn it, I was still too nervous to pull the trigger.
But then, while we were still sitting in the car, Cheryl looked left, right, up, and down with some concern. “I can’t find my purse,” she said. “I must have left it back at the school!”
So we drove all the way back to Burroughs, which was now virtually abandoned. We looked everywhere for her purse. No luck.
Well, no luck in that regard, anyway. We found ourselves standing alone in front of the high school. I went for it. I kissed her on the lips.
Cheryl did not pull away. In fact, she welcomed the kiss. Then we kissed some more. Our first kiss was quickly followed by our second, our third, our fourth, our fifth . . . probably in the neighborhood of our thirty-seventh kiss.
When we got back to the car, she rooted under the passenger seat and pulled something up: her purse. “It was here all along!” she said.
Cheryl later admitted to me that the “missing purse” thing had been a ruse. “I just didn’t want the date to end,” she said.
I WAS FULLY in love by Christmas. The more time I spent with Cheryl, the more I couldn’t believe my good fortune. By that point in my life, I had developed a keen sense of who among the kids at my school was just curious about meeting Opie and who was genuinely interested in me. Cheryl was definitely in the latter category. More important than that, she had a quiet individualism and an energy for tackling challenges that I had never seen in someone my own age. She had already soloed in her father’s plane, on her sixteenth birthday. She was well-liked by the popular girls in our grade at Burroughs, but she wasn’t of them; when she was rushed to join the class sorority, she politely declined. She didn’t give a damn about social status.
Cheryl’s father, Charles, was a Louisiana native who looked and dressed like the aerospace-era scientist he was: crew cut, black horn-rimmed glasses, gray slacks, and a short-sleeved dress shirt with a pen protector in the front pocket. Decades later, when I gave him a walk-on part in Apollo 13 as one of the Grumman engineers who were advising the mission-control guys, I told my wardrobe department to leave Mr. Alley alone; his regular work clothes would do just fine.
But his tan, weathered skin betrayed that Mr. Alley wasn’t as straitlaced as he initially appeared. As a teen, he hopped freight trains to get himself to the 1933–34 World’s Fair in Chicago, and he later worked on icebreaker ships in the North Pacific and panned for gold in Mexico. Cheryl’s mother, Vivian, had run away from her family’s Wisconsin farm when she was only fourteen, fleeing abusive relatives. She made her way to California by working as an au pair and waitress. When she was only twenty-one, Vivian got pregnant by Charles, who was almost seventeen years her senior. They married as a result, with Cheryl being their firstborn. Two more girls, Cheryl’s sisters Sondra and Floyce, came after her.
Her parents divorced when Cheryl was in her early teens. But she had inherited the best of them: her father’s intellectual curiosity and her mother’s kindness and heart. Though our households were very different—Cheryl was a remarkably self-sufficient latchkey child, whereas I was the highly supervised son of a tight nuclear family—I saw some similarities in our backgrounds. We were both the products of parents who took unconventional paths in life and didn’t care what anyone else thought of their choices.
Cheryl had this trait, too, more so than me. She wasn’t a follower. If anything, she was an agitator. She railed against Burroughs High School’s policy of not allowing girls to take auto-shop class, because she wanted to learn how to repair a car. And she thought it unfair that Burroughs didn’t have a track program for girls. She had been a skilled sprinter in middle school. With a friend, she lobbied the school administration to create such a program, which finally came into being shortly after we graduated.
* * *
CLINT