Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [46]
Sorta. (This will become the story of my dating life. More later.)
“But you’ll officially be there with Lydia and you will pull her chair out for her and order for her and talk to her and make her feel that she, that she… is…”
A hint of tears began to make their way to the front of her eyes, but she blinked fast enough to catch them and wick them back behind her sockets and finished her sentence.
“That she is wanted. Can you do that, Michael?”
That this had suddenly been elevated beyond an etiquette lesson, beyond a date, to a call for mercy and possible sainthood—well, that was all I needed to hear.
“Yes, I can do this. I want to do this. You can count on me! You’re right, I won’t have any use for girls after this year anyways!” Exactly! Mrs. Beachum, you’d just be wasting all these lessons on me. I’m off to be a monk for life!
I had a pain in the pit of my stomach.
I went into the classroom and asked Lydia to be my date. Though I tried to say it soft enough so none of the other boys would hear me, it wasn’t long before word got out that I had given up the top prize for the Loser Lydia—and these little men in their high-waisted pants spent a lot of time on the playground scratching their butch-cut heads and trying to figure out exactly what had happened to me.
“Don’t make sense, Mike,” Pete said, shaking his head. “How are you even gonna stand it, being next to her?”
“I dunno” was about all I could muster. How was I going to sit next to her? Ewww.
The big night came to go to Frankenmuth, and Lydia was all freshly scrubbed and her dress was plain but pretty. I opened the door for her, let her take my arm, pulled her chair out for her and, in a momentary act of rebellion against my impending lifelong celibacy, I pulled Kathy’s out for her, too. Kathy talked to Lydia, then I talked to Lydia, and Lydia talked back to us. We heard the story of how her brother had died and how her dad was working two jobs because her mother had health problems and how she spent her time in her room writing poems. Lydia was shy but not a cipher. She was funny, and she had a snorty laugh that after a while was cute and catchy. The other classmates looked down the table to see what the three of us were up to, and a couple of the boys joined in to talk to the newly interesting Lydia. This gave Kathy and me a chance to talk, also a new thing for me, for up until now she had just been an object to observe as often and as vigorously as possible.
“You were a good guy, Mike, to do this,” she whispered to me.
“Really? Um, well, you know I’m going to the seminary?”
“Sure. I heard that.”
“So, you see, this class wasn’t really for me.”
“Well, it was fun, don’t you think?”
“Sure. Can I have your pie if you’re not gonna eat it?”
After our class’s First Date Night at the Frankenmuth Bavarian Chicken House, there was no going back to the War of the Sexes. Thanks to Mrs. Beachum, we all discovered that we liked each other—a lot. And while others contemplated their next moves in the dating life, I had time to ponder such things as what kind of trouble would Mrs. Beachum be in for having upended the Puberty Retardation Policy that the Church had implemented. Boys stopped picking on girls, and girls stopped laughing at boys. We helped each other with homework. We let the girls throw the basketball around. Everything felt better and we were grateful to Mrs. Beachum for her enthusiasm and her desire to teach us more than just the capitals of all fifty states. We looked forward to our afternoons with her; it was the best part of every day. So when we came back from lunch for our afternoon with Mrs. Beachum on February 5, 1968, we were surprised to learn that she had not shown up to school. She did not show up the next day, either. Nor the next day. We were told that no one knew where she was, that she was missing. At first, we hoped that maybe she had overslept and just not shown up for work for a few days. The Mother Superior filled in for her. But as the week went on, the look of worry and concern on Mother Superior’s