ROXBURY

BY DARAH GOLUB

I met David in sixth grade at Cloonan Middle School. He sat a couple of rows behind me and to my left in Social Studies, Mr. Valenti’s class. It was there I first noticed him, his lusciously curly golden hair and electric blue sweatshirt. The hook-like scar that protruded from his upper lip would have given the young boy a sense of danger or rebelliousness, but the expression of innocence he always wore on his pale, touchably smooth face was unmistakable. His head was usually cocked to one side as he halfway listened to the teacher, halfway pretended not to notice all the girls around him staring and giggling.

I was one of those giggly girls. That September I was eleven years old, on the verge of acne that would last me through high school, and I had long stringy hair (my friends later told me they kept count of how many times I flipped it). That Social Studies class was my entrance into a social scene of pre-existing friendships that stemmed from the local elementary schools.

In junior high I was new to the public school scene. Before coming to Cloonan, I had been imprisoned for six years in Bi-Cultural Day School, an orthodox-masquerading-as-conservative Jewish hell, in which I hadn’t felt comfortable since second grade. My father is a reform rabbi; we don’t believe in a lot of what they preached and it offended me, even as a 9-year-old child.

One day I decided I couldn’t stomach another morning rocking back and forth in mumbled prayer during chapel, asking God to work his divine powers to heal whoever was put on the “sick” list for Mee-sha B’ay-rach that day. My mother was helpful; she dropped me off late as usual. I walked straight past the chapel doors and down the hall into the girls’ bathroom. The walls were trimmed red. I stared at them for a long time after I got bored with staring at myself in the mirror. A friend, Amy Berken, walked in and saw me just standing there in the vestibule of the bathroom. She asked me to sit next to her in the pew when I was done. “Sure,” I said pretending to fix my hair. Then, Amy did her business and left; my business was to stay and stand on top of the toilet seats and remain undetected in the bathroom for the remainder of chapel. I stared at the two holes in the center of the bathroom door where a hook for purses or sweaters used to be. I smelled toilet cleaner and listened to the humming of the fan in the ceiling. All this was better than morning chapel. And so it became the routine.

As I got older, I resented the school and its teachings more and more, and meanwhile longed for “normalcy.” I was disenchanted by our carpeted cafeteria, and gymnasium/auditorium, incomplete with rubber floor and stage. I longed for black people, Spanish people. Christians. I was suffocating in homogeneity.

After years of disdain for Bi-Cultural, my parents allowed me to transfer to public school. Cloonan was out-of-district for me, but my family had seen a spring musical there and my mother insisted I get in somehow. Three years later I would play Laurie to David’s Curly in the Cloonan production of “Oklahoma.”

From the beginning something just clicked with David and me. There were always pretty girls with shiny lip-gloss and streaked hair who vied for his attention. Of course he had girlfriends whom he’d hold hands with or walk to class with or even kiss with tongue if they were lucky. Good for them. They weren’t the ones he’d talk on the phone with every night.

David and I had an understanding: everything, sexual or not, was fair game for divulgence. Tell me a story, one of us would say, prompting the other to reveal some juicy detail about ourselves or one of our friends. “Okay, but this is sooo secret, you sooo cannot tell anyone.” My mom would always answer David’s phone calls and come into my room with a hidden smile, in anticipation of the delight I got from our conversations. “Hello, this is David. Is Darah home?” he’d say. So polite.

Of course he was polite: his father was a pastor.

David had the perfect Protestant family. The Smiths lived in the parish house, next to the Westhill Bible Church, that Faced Roxbury Elementary School, which was across the street from Westhill High. Father Smith, the pastor, and Mother Smith, the rosy-cheeked school nurse, had two breathtaking blonde daughters and a handsome blonde young man in David. He and I were an unlikely pairing. Religion didn’t seem to matter. We were as much in love as two platonic 14-year-olds could be.

Platonic. It’s the unfortunate state of most adolescents, which they clandestinely fight with every ounce of effort. When we were in eighth grade, every Saturday night six girls and four boys would turn my basement into a cesspool of hysterical hormones. My basement was something out of “The Wonder Years,” it having been woefully neglected during the renovation of the rest of the house. There was no escaping that moth bally smell of an old lady’s tag sale, or the mismatched red and paisley couches, almost complemented by the curiously patterned green and yellow puke curtains that draped down over the cold, glass patio doors. There was a kitchen, though, and a refrigerator and a bathroom and a TV. What more could we have wanted?

“Truth or dare?” Meghan asked. Meghan was one of my best friends and a basement regular. “Dare,” David answered. “I dare you…,” she pretended to think, “to…French Darah for 20 seconds!!” This typical dare was neither shocking nor original, yet somehow it never failed to get the juices flowing for both kissers and watchers. We were all old pros at this by now; David and I didn’t pretend to not want to kiss, just to not enjoy it.

David’s mouth always tasted sweet. His kiss was vanilla or buttermilk (all others were saliva, at best). Our eyes smiled at each other as we tilted our heads in the position, and he closed his eyes slightly before I. I saw his lips pucker. Usually, that’s not attractive. It was sweet on David. His lower lip was perfectly smooth and stiff, and I could feel it press against my mouth. His tongue was fat, good fat, and it mingled perfectly with mine. It was beautiful; for 20 seconds we were prompted to leave reality and act out a fantasy.

Then, high school began.

It seemed we had to grow up suddenly over that summer between junior high and high school. In ninth grade I invited the basement crew over to watch scary movies on Halloween, as I had done for the past two years. “We’re in high school now,” some friends laughed at me. “We’re going to Rob’s party to hook up and get drunk.”

I guess we were too old to play kissing games.

As our bodies and sexual desires developed, awkwardly but surely, so did our minds. Trite conversations about Leonardo DiCaprio gave way to discussions of substance, namely religion.

Five of us non-drinkers sat in a booth at the Bull’s Head Diner sophomore year in high school. That night there were three girls and two boys, three Jews and two Christians. One rabbi’s daughter, one pastor’s son. Over mozzarella sticks and milkshakes, the five of us somehow got lost in discussing Jesus and burning in an eternal fiery hell. David didn’t know that in Judaism there is no “hell.” I didn’t know David thought that by not accepting Jesus as my savior I was condemned to go to hell.

“So basically you’re telling me that you believe I’m going to hell when I die?”

“Darah, it hurts me to think, I don’t ever think about it, but…yes, you don’t accept Jesus as your savior so you will go to hell when you die.” Despite the gravity of the conversation, David and I maintained a hint of our playfully intimate dynamic. The other three sat quiet as David and I argued.

I always looked back on that evening and marveled at how two people with such different views could be such close friends. Perhaps David didn’t marvel. After that night he slowly grew distant from me. I tried to ignore that our relationship was dwindling. Ultimately, he stopped talking to me altogether.

One afternoon I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was driving around in my ’78 Buick when I called him to ask if I could stop by. He said it was okay, but when I got there he didn’t invite me in. Instead he came outside to my car and we walked across the street to the Roxbury Elementary School playground and sat next to each other on the swings. He was quiet and looked around everywhere, except at me. The longer there was silence between us, the more my hands sweat and I grasped at the metal of the swing’s chains. My heart beating out of my chest was the only sound I heard; I knew the fate of the conversation before it began. I knew I’d stand up from that swing with one friend fewer, and my life would be different.

Silent, we sat slowly rocking on the swings like strangers, or estranged lovers. I began: “So…what’s up, why are you being weird?” Optimistic enough.

He answered, and a bullet whizzed into the playground: “I just don’t think I can be so close to you. I don’t think it’s good for me.”

That day in May I wore jeans and a black ribbed tank top. I kept thinking how glad I was to have my sunglasses, my black GUESS ones that didn’t really stay on my head but looked perfect on my face. Now they protected me; as if he couldn’t really see that I was crying. “I still want to be your friend. It just can’t be as deep as it was. I’m not comfortable with it.” What?!? “We don’t have to tell each other as much if you don’t want to,” I suggested. “You don’t have to tell me everything and I don’t have to tell you if you don’t want…” But I knew it wasn’t just that. He explained to me that being as close as we were, how could we ever have a real romantic relationship with someone else. “Is there someone?” I asked invitingly, “because that’s great if there is. I hope to have a boyfriend one day soon….” “No. There’s no one.” He looked at me with the same innocent look as he had in sixth grade. “But if there was, how could I explain to her my relationship with you, you know?”

Mary Martin was her name. We were sophomores and she was a freshman. She was little and cute and Episcopalian. (At least she believed in Jesus.) She and David had a romance that lasted through the summer. It should have been clear to me then.

As if I were hurling the words out of my very soul, I finally said what I felt was unspeakable. “It’s not …it’s not because I’m… Jew-ish, I mean,” “No,” he said. It wasn’t an emphatic “absolutely not, don’t be ridiculous.” It was just “no.” At that point I was merely trying to wrap my mind around the blunt reality I was facing. It would be too much to try to decipher truth from lies. I left it alone.

Now I looked around everywhere. I wanted to leave, quickly and silently, and never again allow him the privilege of sitting beside me. I also wanted to stay on that swing forever; maybe this wouldn’t have to be true.

It seemed as if we were there for an hour. Perhaps we were. Through my silent sobbing I told him that I simply could not be his friend like everyone else. I was special to him or I was nothing. He couldn’t answer me, so I was nothing. Soon there was nothing more to say.

David attends Messiah College now. With more age and wisdom, he grew a more open mind and I learned to forgive. He still cringes when I remind him of that day at the playground and his “religious crisis.” But it’s all part of our history.

The year that immediately followed Roxbury, however, we did not speak. It took no self-control to ignore him as if he didn’t exist. He would walk into history class with his red L.L. Bean book bag high on his back and sit down two rows in front of me. I couldn’t care less. I was busy flirting with Lucho, the Spanish soccer player who would soon become my first real boyfriend.