By the time Cheryl came along, I had begun to consider an adult career as a sportswriter. Fledgling journalist that I was, I looked up Cheryl’s stats when she entered Ron’s life. She held the record in the 220-yard dash at her junior high, Luther Burbank Middle School. Ron was impressed by Cheryl’s athletic prowess. As they got more serious, I think he may have been harboring dreams of breeding jocks.
* * *
One evening as we walked to my car after a movie, I leaned in to kiss Cheryl and she pushed me away playfully and took off—while wearing suede saddle shoes. I gave chase. I was pretty confident in my running abilities. I was one of the quicker players on my basketball team and a base stealer on my baseball team. But as I chased Cheryl, I noticed that I wasn’t closing in on her. So I decided, Fine, I’ll kick into high gear, catch up to her, and then swing her into my arms for that kiss. As I accelerated, though, she turned on the afterburners and shot off like a bullet. My girlfriend, I discovered, had some serious wheels. She finally eased up and flashed a coquettish look over her shoulder. That’s when, panting like a dog left out too long in the sun, I got my kiss.
As we got to know each other better, Cheryl told me that she was attracted to me because, unlike a lot of boys in our class, I didn’t seem full of myself. She liked that, counter to expectations and stereotypes, I didn’t act like a television star. I didn’t drive a flashy car. （Thank goodness my parents nixed my getting the Barracuda.） If anything, my status as an actor was a potential detriment. Her father owned an apartment building. Some of his tenants were actors, and they were the worst about paying their rent on time.
Cheryl also told me that her father had never asked to approve my first-date choice of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. While I had waited on the phone with bated breath, she was looking up the movie in the newspaper listings to see its rating, which was G. Cheryl was raised in a strict Southern Baptist household, and she wouldn’t have gone out with a guy who proposed seeing a PG movie on the first date or, God forbid, wanted to sneak into a rated-R picture.
I spent the days before Christmas zipping around Southern California in my Bug, picking up the component parts of the present that I was customizing for Cheryl. She was a pilot, so I bought her some old-fashioned Amelia Earhart cockpit goggles, a leather aviator’s cap, and a scarf. Over that holiday break, I gave her these gifts and told her that I loved her.
She wasn’t alarmed by my saying this, but she was less ready to jump to conclusions. “My dad says that it can’t be love now,” she said. “It can only be infatuation. He says it takes years for real love to develop.”
I was willing to accept this. She wasn’t saying “I don’t love you.” She just wasn’t ready to say those three big words yet. I got it. This might be hard to believe, but I was happy to wait. I was actually proud of myself for this, feeling wise beyond my years in my maturity and patience. Besides, we kept on dating and kissing.
But my parents were leery of this new relationship. They never demeaned my feelings or used that condescending phrase “puppy love.” But they were concerned that I had fallen so hard for Cheryl that I might derail, either by getting my heart broken or by being so caught up in my relationship with her that my schoolwork would suffer. There was a sociopolitical backdrop to this: my eighteenth birthday loomed in the near future, and I would soon become eligible for the draft. The Vietnam War was still very much on, and we were all hoping that college deferments would keep me out of the military. Ergo, I needed to keep my grades up.
I thought that I had forever slipped off the Bubble Wrap that my parents had kept me in as a boy, but now it came back. Their protectiveness of me went into overdrive. They issued an edict that I could only go on one date a week with Cheryl, believing that I was moving too fast. Forbidding me from riding my bike in the street when I was little was one thing. But this was a whole new level of controlling behavior. I was angry.
My response was to prepare a presentation for my parents in which I cited other boy-girl couples in my grade. I had conducted a survey of them and compiled the data, which demonstrated that every other couple besides Cheryl and me was spending more time together. This did little to persuade Mom and Dad.