Perfect Moments: The Girl Group on the Bus

[Image: The Boy and his classmates, en route from childhood, almost all of them apparently terrified. Click image to enlarge to a less eye-strainingly viewable version, or choose an alternate blowup: left side, full-size (1.0MB); right side, full-size (1.0MB); entire original scanned version (2MB). The Boy sits, flat-headed and a little jug-eared, in the back row, second from left.]

That last year of elementary school would be forever, in The Boy’s mind, dotted with the footprints of change, of some things started anew and others overturned. Among other upheavals which touched him, he paid attention to a Presidential election for the first time; The Addams Family, Bewitched and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer premiered on TV; the Warren Commission report came out; his friend Lindsay moved away; the Yankees (Lindsay’s favorite team) played their last World Series for a looong time and, shockingly, lost; a country named Vietnam first entered his consciousness; and with the rest of the eighth-grade class, he visited The Museum for the first time ever.

The Museum was one of two large and world-famous museums of science in the nearest city. It specialized in what was called “natural history,” a subject of which The Boy had made a hobby since, well, since he was The Little Boy: rocks and minerals, plant life, dinosaurs, birds and animals… For this reason alone, The Boy looked forward to this field trip. He couldn’t imagine how the excursion could affect him more deeply.

As would become his habit in life, however, The Boy failed to anticipate the large inner events to be found in real-world ones, no matter how small or how outsized.


Trips to The City were a big deal.

In the first place, alternate transportation always came into play: walking there was impossible, and (for still a few more years, for a number of reasons) going there on your own simply would not happen. You took a bus, most often, and you always went with a group.

Second, most such trips — once you’d reached a certain age — happened without your family. Your fellow trekkers didn’t conduct the usual arguments about who had and who had not claimed a window; who was driving too recklessly or nagging too unmercifully; who might or might not need lavatory facilities, preferably ASAP (if not, well, five minutes ago). Instead, discussions focused on the weightier issues of life in small-town New Jersey of the early 1960s: television shows; the space race; funny-looking pedestrians; speculation about your teachers’ — Mr. X’s and Miss Y’s — personal histories; what you wanted for Christmas, and what your seatmate was a fool for wanting.

Importantly, you also were not saddled with the psychological burden of proximity to the opposite sex. In classrooms, often, the seating arrangement had nothing to do with logic, with gender, with the alphabet, and the randomness was sometimes enforced by teachers who seemed to think it their job to separate you from your friends.

But riding buses on field trips was different. True, the chaperoning teachers themselves roamed up and down the aisles, irrespective of gender loyalty. Not so with the kids. Boys sat on one side of the bus and girls on the other, or clustered alternately at the front or back depending on how they’d been sorted by nature and happenstance at the time of boarding. The main thing was, you didn’t have to grope blindly for something to talk about. For that matter, you didn’t have to endure the ride in frozen silence, staring out the window or straight ahead and hoping dear jesusmaryjosephandgod hoping that the other party would have the courtesy and good sense not to speak, at all — because if she did, every fiber of your decent blue-collar upbringing, of your being, would demand that you somehow dredge up a reply (during which you would almost certainly stammer, stop, start again, empurple, and with every drop of perspiration curse the gods for abandoning you).

The Boy didn’t (and never would) know what it was about girls that mystified him so, when it wasn’t freaking him out. He had his mother and two sisters in his everyday life, after all. Surely by now he’d know that you could pretty much talk to them about anything (about almost anything, just not — of course — about that) exactly as you talked to The Guys.

He believed it had something to do with the way girls looked at each other. With The Guys, if you wanted to communicate some fact or ask a question or assert an opinion one way or another or make a joke, you opened your mouth and words came out.

With girls, words often seemed an afterthought — a superficial, no, a superfluous manifestation of truths they all carried around inside them. One girl would look across the classroom at another, not even smiling, and they’d simultaneously burst into laughter. Or when you were forced by circumstance to interact with one, she might look over your shoulder at another standing behind you, nod silently, and then return her attention to you. Even when groups of girls gathered in conversation, they often seemed to conspire — speaking in code, whispering secrets, and out of the corners of their eyes shooting furtive glances, somehow laden with meaning, at boys, other girls, or adults. (The Boy shot some furtive glances in their direction, too, but his own glances connoted no more than a sort of fascinated bafflement.) The Boy had been wearing his first hearing aid for a year, but no hearing aid in the world could help him with girl conversations. At the New York World’s Fair the previous summer, The Boy had eavesdropped — attempted to eavesdrop — on a group of identically clothed Japanese schoolchildren; he found eavesdropping on girls in conversation about that easy, and about that successful.

And yet, talking with a girl, in isolation from others, often felt very natural. (Or so it seemed to The Boy, oblivious to the fact that in most such cases, it was the girl who carried the conversation.) Indeed, by age thirteen The Boy had already had a couple of what he later might think of as flings — without risking anything so inconceivably radical as actual dating.

He had first had more than a passing interest in a (non-family) girl way back in first (or maybe second) grade. This was Robin [middle row, 6th from right], who had been cute from the start and would continue to grow into beauty with each passing year. But The Boy had been oblivious to things like beauty at first; he just liked hanging out with Robin, especially at her house (just a couple blocks from The Boy’s own).

His friendship with Robin, alas, completely evaporated for the dumbest of reasons:

The last time he visited her, Robin’s older sister answered the door. “Robin!” the sister called in a teasing voice. “Your boyfriend’s here!”

The Boy turned to stone there on the front porch; he felt the heat of embarrassment rushing to the tips of his ears. He had heard the terms “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” before but had only the barest idea what they meant. He took for granted, though, that Robin wasn’t his girlfriend and that he wasn’t her boyfriend. It had just never entered into his calculations of everyday life.

But suddenly laid bare, like a snake revealed in tall grass, there it was: the central ugliest fact of life, that boys and girls couldn’t be just friends, even at six or seven years old. (Worse, much worse: you could be teased if not outright mocked for thinking so.)

The Boy never returned to Robin’s house. They graduated together from eighth grade and high school (Robin was the “queen of the Snowball Semi-Formal” in their senior year), and then they went their separate ways.

(In a twist of coincidence, in college Robin would become close friends with a girl who became The Boy’s second wife. He never pursued getting in touch with her, though; he knew he would just stammer and redden and wish to God he were somewhere else. Old habits die hard, and old shame dies even harder: he had once imagined himself to be her friend. What a maroon.)

And then there was Susan [back row, 6th from right]. Oh, Susan.

Although they’d gone through every year of school together, The Boy’s first lasting impression of Susan had been in sixth grade — Miss Pearson’s class. Pretty much every boy in that class, including The Boy himself, had had a (silent) crush on Miss Pearson. She was a slender, pretty brunette from England, who spoke with that accent and had gone through World War II in a city known as Coventry, which had endured fierce bombing by the German air force. Miss Pearson seemed to have escaped with her life exactly in order to spend time with The Boy (and — all right — with Jimmy, and Dean, and Ronnie, and Richard, and Lindsay, and Steve, and…).

At the end of every year, as the whole class knew, Miss Pearson held a contest similar to a spelling bee — but it covered every subject theoretically known to eleven-year-olds, including arithmetic, science, and history as well as spelling. One boy and one girl “champion” would receive a prize at the end of the contest’s term. Students who obsessed about such matters paid attention all through the year to one another’s progress; The Boy — although he would deny an obsession — could not help  noticing that his own grades and test scores were often the highest, for no reason that he could figure out, let alone explain. (He was a lazy intellectual.) He could not help noticing, furthermore, that one particular classmate’s name kept floating up beside his, and that that classmate’s scores often surpassed his own. He didn’t mind this, exactly (he had never developed much of a competitive instinct), but couldn’t help noticing it. And he couldn’t help noticing, finally, that it was a girl.

Susan was a tall, willowy girl with dark hair who had been lovely from the start and would continue to grow into beauty with each passing year. Daughter of the Scoutmaster for the Boy Scout troop which The Boy belonged to, she was unique among the girls he knew for, well, her mildness. She didn’t seem to compete for the attention of boys (or other girls, for that matter); on the other hand, she was liked by everybody, as far as The Boy could tell. Her voice had no sharp edges to it, and when she laughed — even burst out laughing — the sound did not slice at and pierce your (amplified) eardrums. He could not imagine being embarrassed in Susan’s presence. [*]

The Boy did indeed win Miss Pearson’s contest that year. His prize, a book about the D-Day Normandy invasion, seemed both to have been chosen specifically for him — as though Miss Pearson knew he’d win — and to connect him personally to Miss Pearson, via the war. But aside from the prize, what marked The Boy’s mind about the contest was Susan, alongside him, at the front of the classroom. He had no idea what her prize might be. He had no idea if she’d actually scored higher than him, although it seemed likely. (She’d probably done it effortlessly but without laziness, to boot.) What sank in was, simply, Susan.

(In seventh grade the next year, just about all of The Boy’s circle attended a dancing school in the next town; there, he and Susan would dance together — once — in a randomly selected “spotlight dance.” They shared a lot of classes in high school, and had a lot of friends in common, and worked on the yearbook staff together. Somewhere in there, she began dating a mountainous wrestler from a nearby city. When The Boy — at the urging of a go-between friend — asked her to attend the Snowball Semi with him in senior year, and she accepted, the guys teased him mercilessly. “The wrestler,” they said, laughing, “is gonna kill you!” Throughout the dance and afterwards, The Boy would jump at the sound of heavy footfalls, and wince whenever a stranger tapped him from behind on the shoulder.)

But between Robin and Susan, The Boy had been fascinated (and perplexed) by a good number of other girls in his class, for one reason or another: Lori; Rose [middle row, 4th from left]; Cheryl; Corinne; Ana; Nancy; Brenda — well, pretty much all of them, in fact. And they were all (in his mind’s eye, although he knows it was impossible) on that bus on the day of the eight-grade field trip to The Museum. All of them singing.

Singing, like girls, was a mystery to The Boy. (His fourth-grade teacher, who seemed to believe he could do anything, had once all but forced him to sing “We Three Kings” before the entire class. Never again, he swore.) It mystified The Guys, too; none of them sang on their own, as far as The Boy knew, and no odds existed, in any quadrant of the known universe, that they might suddenly start singing together.

…All of which perhaps made it inevitable that the girls would somehow (spontaneously?) burst into song.

They opened with “Leader of the Pack,” and the hair stood up on the back of The Boy’s neck as though the girls’ commingled breath from back there blew against it; the words Met him at the candy store… would forever after transport The Boy back to that bus ride:

What was it about girls’ a capella singing which so moved him? It had something to do with the way they seemed momentarily to surrender themselves to bigger matters… but didn’t show off, while at the same time being not-quite-serious.

(Compare this, say, to the annual Christmas solo of the woman at the church which The Boy’s family attended. That woman, serious beyond dispute, clearly seemed to be claiming the moment for herself, and she did not seem to recognize — as even The Boy did — that there might be a reason why she got only one invitation to sing during the year. The Boy would have invited the eighth-grade girls back every week, on the other hand.)

The vocal quality mattered, too. Somehow the girls managed to twist their voices just so to indicate heartbreak (“I felt so helpless — what could I doooooo-oooooooo?”). How could they possibly know about heartbreak? Were they somehow channeling what adults felt (adult women, anyhow)? Was it possible that girls could not only communicate psychically back and forth with one another, but also, well, reach unbidden into the heads of people who hadn’t been inducted to their secret society, pull out emotion, and claim it as their own?

The implications boggled The Boy’s mind. He would have fought against them, tried to blank his mind, but he was too awash in music. By now the girls had already moved onto a second song, and then a third. Oblivious to whatever boy was beside him, he looked out the window of the bus. They were just about across the river then, officially in The City. They’d be at The Museum in a few minutes…

…and then the girls reached into Roger Miller’s head, and stole his song from him:

Leader of the pack… King of the road… The Boy sensed, somehow, that whatever yearning was embodied (and carried) in the girls’ mixed voices, it was a yearning he would never participate in.

At the same time, though, he could feel something taking hold of his mind — a yearning of his own. It was like the wood-burning kit which his Uncle Jack had: a blazing-hot tip of metal pressed into something wooden, something plain, something innocent and until then unmarked. A few seconds later, after the smoke had cleared, that which had been burned was forever incised with a message and an indelible image…

Nothing else about his first trip to The Museum stuck in his mind (except, and only vaguely, that one of The Guys — probably Richard — could not stop talking about the petrified dinosaur turds). But those sweet, straining voices, and the way they had seared his soul: he carried those memories, those sensations, for the rest of his life. Individual girls would (yes) reach into his mind from time to time, rummage around, come away with one or more things they fancied and leave other things behind. Some of the latter had staying power, all right, and they would shape The Boy’s mind and heart and life in ways which he would never understand or never admit.

But he never forgot those two songs, sung in the voices of a dozen thirteen-year-old girls while the world outside the bus windows came to a halt. And he never stopped wishing that somehow or other, he could have told them — Robin, Susan, all the rest — about it, made them know how it made him feel, and granted to them the same feeling: back then, or now, or ever.

__________________________

* Once, sometime in his fifth-sixth-seventh-grade era, The Boy did approach embarrassment with Susan. It happened like this:

After an evening Boy Scout ceremony of some kind, The Boy and his father were standing on a porch outside the Presbyterian Church where Scouting activities took place. On the porch with them were Susan’s father the Scoutmaster, Susan’s mother, and Susan herself; the two fathers were speaking to each other, while the rest of them waited patiently for the business of manhood to complete. The Boy stood next to his father; Susan’s mother stood beside her husband, and Susan herself sort of lurked behind-but-not-quite-behind her mother. The Boy glanced up at Susan’s mother (who wore glasses and was, The Boy thought, at least as pretty as Miss Pearson); she caught the glance and smiled down at him. And then she reached around behind her and sort of nudged Susan out from hiding, simultaneously smiling, nodding encouragingly, and crooking her finger in The Boy’s direction.

Huh?! The Boy was stunned. Susan seemed not just mild at that moment but positively, well, shy, afraid to look up. Why the heck would she be shy? (All the onrushing embarrassment was The Boy’s, after all.) He retreated to the safety of the shadows behind his father’s legs.

Soon afterward, the men concluded their ritual; as all of them turned to walk in their respective directions home, The Boy glanced back, just once. Neither of Susan’s parents, nor Susan herself, looked back towards him. He continued to walk home with his father and evidently filed the entire incident away, unremembered, for a half-century.

[back]