The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [46]
She is not alone among her friends in this failure to connect. Among the four of them there is a total of two and a half dates. The popular girls, athletic or fashionable or daring, have dates every weekend, but Miranda and her friends, members of the Glee Club, the Debate Club, the school newspaper, the literary magazine … they don’t know why … they feel their failure. But it hasn’t happened.
Her first date with Adam is as extensively discussed as the arrival of the Beatles. They think it’s wonderful that he suggested Zorba the Greek. It proves he’s got imagination; she’s lucky he’s an artistic type.
She loves the movie; she’s almost drunk on it, and after it (all during it, he is in a literal sweat with the desire to hold her hand and the impossibility of doing it, not least because his palms are clammy with anxiety and she might, he fears, find that unappetizing) she takes his hand and says: That’s what I want from my life, real life, strong life, life and death, and to lose yourself in that kind of dancing. I mean, his little son dies and instead of weeping he dances. God, that’s what I want. I can’t wait to get to Europe where people really live instead of this damn Westchester keeping up with the Joneses. Look, it’s snowing, she says, and she puts her head back and opens her mouth, sticks out her tongue and starts swaying to the Zorba music she’s humming. He’s embarrassed, at first, on the street, but then they turn a corner, no one’s on the street, no one can see them, and he lets her dance him down the street, his heart is full, she is the most wonderful person he has ever known, he would like to kiss her but he’s afraid, but he does squeeze her hand, and they go on dancing. The snow falls on her hair and he would like to brush it off, but thinks he mustn’t, and then does and says, “Maybe before vacation we could see another movie.”
And then another movie and another, and the slow anguishing prospect of hand holding and first kisses (neither has kissed anyone before) and then meeting after school, the shock of Christmas vacation, unable to say they will miss each other, and more movies … it’s the only place they can go that they can kiss. Hours of kissing, blissful kissing, imagining nothing more is possible for them. The pride of sore, dry lips. They kiss through the entire three and a half hours of Dr. Zhivago and are terrified that their parents (by which they mean her father) will ask them what the movie is about.
He is afraid of her father. Her brother makes him feel unmanly. Her mother’s anxiety creates in him a terrible tenderness. It is much easier for her in his house.
And then he feels he must tell Henry Levi, and Henry is immediately practical and clinical. He speaks of “prophylactics,” and Adam is abashed, and Henry sees his mistake and says, “Bring the young lady with you to a lesson sometime.”
He says to his wife: It is important that he not be lost in the whirlwind of adolescent sex. It’s good for him to have a girl, but it can’t interfere with his music.
And so Sylvia is given the task: that Miranda must understand she, too, is involved in something greater, older, far more important than herself. But after talking to Miranda she says to her husband: It’s all right, Henry, she’s a serious girl.
She takes Miranda to Bergdorf and buys her a gray cashmere cardigan, which thrills Miranda because it is, she thinks, her first serious garment, the first garment that acknowledges her seriousness; it is her passport into the adult world.
They are both serious, Adam and Miranda, but in different ways, about different things. He is serious