One Good Love Deserves Another

When I was twelve I fell in love with Karen Sanders. She belonged to the rich Sanders who lived in a brick Georgian hall on the crest of Silver Hills. They overlooked most of us plain folks crowded in the level part of town along the River. She was related to Father Gohman, the Pastor with the limp and the scar, who had gotten shot up overseas in the war that ended the year I was born. She sat two or three seats behind me in parochial school since the first grade. And had flaxen hair that fell to her shoulders in a page‑boy that reminded me of sudden ripples in a field of wild oats. She possessed a thin lipped boyish face and the kind of figure most girls of twelve had then. Slender and no breasts. I only really saw her for the first time as I rode unconsciously on some pre‑pubescent fifth‑grade sight that made me suddenly see girls as substantially different from the boys. I still remember precisely the feelings she ignited in my fifth grade soul. A tight excitement in my stomach, like cresting the top of a steep hill in Dad's speeding car. A warm, liquid sensation like swallowing a piece of Hershey bar and feeling it melt along my throat and flow deep inside me. Every school day was a Maxfield Parrish dream in blue and gold because she was only two seats behind me for most of it. And I could watch her playing hopscotch during recess with the rest of the girls, her flaxen hair bouncing in the September sunlight. I don't remember who engineered it, but I visited her one autumn Saturday at her home on top of the hill. I remember walking along a flagstone path that ended at an overlook where you could see the town spread in arrow‑straight lines along the serpentine run of the River. I touched her hand, felt electricity, jerked away in a spasm, then did it again. And she let me, finally, hold her hand. For a minute or so. Excitement choked me and I felt sweaty. Towboats parted the lazy current below us and Karen's silvery‑blonde hair danced in the autumn wind. Karen was my secret. I watched and lived and breathed her until November when I developed a passing interest in Mary Frances McDaniel. Whose father owned a beer joint. Then my Dad got laid off. We moved to the City two hundred miles away where he found new work, and I lost track of Karen and never saw her again. But her daughter visited me in a dream two nights ago. She leaned against a limestone wall on the flagstone path above the river, dressed crisply in blue oxford cloth and tan slacks, and looking remarkably like her mother at the same age. I asked her if her Mom had ever gotten married. "No," she said. "She was too smart for that. But she falls in love a lot."