The day Jonathan told me the name of the girl he loved

When I was six my parents moved from our sweet one story house with nearly an acre and our own creek and woods in Princeton, NJ to a much snootier, gated neighborhood also in Princeton. It was a beautiful, leafy, hidden neighborhood that you had to take a long drive into before you saw any houses. In fact, the first thing you would get to at the end of the drive is a T intersection with a giant, medieval looking private boys’ school in front of you and the two arms of the T-junction leading to quiet, private, residential streets that then curved around in a giant loop around the neighborhood. To get to our house you had to turn left at the private school and when you got to the far left boundary of its main grounds turn right. The fields and woods on your left side as you continued were the playing fields of this exclusive private school. After the fields ended you would see on the right the clubhouse and tennis courts of the neighborhood on the right and a small apartment complex, which I still wonder about now. Who lived in the only apartment building in this whole rich neighborhood of sprawling green lawns, acre plots, large old houses set way back from the road and surrounded with award-winning landscaping (in some cases) and backing onto a giant green mall that ran the length of the neighborhood?

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From the beginning it felt like we didn’t belong, but being six years old I didn’t really pay much attention to the signs. Slowly I began to realize that a physicist father and working psychologist mother who were health food fanatics and Democratic voters was not “normal” here. The women of our block were beautiful, tanned young blonde preppy housewives whose doctor and stockbroker husbands had made it rich and become major Republican donors. The wives spent their days taking care of the giant homes (with the help of maids in some cases), tanning out in the back yard, and occasionally baking cakes with the kids. It was summer when we moved in, so the kids in the neighborhood roamed it freely, their moms having told them to “get out of the house and play!” Teenagers were out mowing lawns for spending money (one difference between then and now – rich kids didn’t always get huge allowances.) Fathers were off performing surgery or making a killer on mergers and acquisitions or doing whatever they did, being away from the house 95% of the time.
The Moms reminded me of Tennis Barbie...
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My parents were what you might call Bohemians, sort of Proto-Granola. They had been part of the counterculture in California starting in the very early 1960s, but they were too old to be hippies. And they had become too responsible later, having moved to New Jersey, settled down with jobs and children and not in a position to run away to San Francisco and live in a commune. If they had been 10 years younger they probably would have. My Mom confessed to me that the time when I was three years old and we were at a party at their friends’ house and the father took me and the other kids out “for a walk” at 8:30 at night(!) was the first time my parents had tried pot. That’s what the other adults were doing back at the house when the Dad started walking us around the suburban cookie cutter neighborhood we were visiting, where every street looked the same as the next, and a large dog suddenly came up barking excitedly and I ran off before the man could see where I went. It’s the only time in my childhood I got completely lost and suddenly my parents were frantically scouring the pitch-black neighborhood with flashlights calling my name, but also stoned for the first time! I remember walking and walking and thinking I would never see my parents again. I remember walking up to a door and ringing the bell and telling the people I was lost and not being able to remember the names of the people we were visiting or where I had come from. I recognized nothing anymore. The weird thing is I remember them saying there was nothing they could do and closing the door on me. Who wouldn't call the police when a three year old rings their bell at night and says she's lost? My Dad says that when they finally spotted me I was walking, sobbing, towards a major street.

Anyway, back at our new house our first next door neighbors were a girl who was three years older than me and whose mother had mental problems. The girl was a fair weather friend and I think to her I was a bit of plaything, to be enlisted when she had some kind of scheme that needed a patsy. One time she locked herself in her mother’s room for a long time while I waited outside asking what she was doing, getting more annoyed by the minute. She kept telling me she had something special to show me that would be worth waiting for. Finally, she burst out of the room and showed me her nails, which now had half-inch long nail extensions glued to them. She was really excited because she thought I was naïve enough that I would believe her when she said she grew the nails in the room in the 20 minutes that I had been waiting. I just rolled my eyes and kept telling her, “I don’t believe you. Those are extensions.” I could see all the light go out of her eyes and she got annoyed and told me to go home.

Then one day I found out they were moving away. I don’t remember saying goodbye to her. I just remember when I first laid eyes on Jonathan, the boy I loved for the three more years that we were there. He came over through the path in the thick stand of trees separating our properties. We found out that each of us was six years old and, amazingly to both of us, his birthday was exactly 1 day before mine. We were going to be in the same second grade class the next year. So we played together all summer, when his boy friends were not around. Sometimes, even when the boys were over, he tried to include me, but the boys did not want to play with a girl so they were rude to me. I would lurk in the woods between our places and wait to see if they were there. If they weren’t I would come out into the open and we would play basketball, kickball, ride our bikes around the neighborhood, go to the creek and jump rocks. Sometimes we’d play indoors or watch tv shows I wasn’t allowed to watch at home, like Batman. Sometimes even when the boys were over I’d come by and they would tolerate me, especially if they were wrapped up in what they were doing, like the time one of them had found a discarded Bic lighter with fluid still in it, and they were planning to meet in the basement and “burn things.” They were so excited they didn’t care who was there. The boys had a different code, a way of playing with each other and relating that I hadn’t learned, the boy code that boys learn about interacting. Later when school started our parents decided Jonathan and I, and sometimes the boys from the neighborhood, would ride our bikes to school together – exciting!
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At school we were eventually put at the same table together, along with another boy Kai, whose parents had immigrated from Germany. We three were at the top of the class and the teacher wanted to give us accelerated work to do together. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. I felt the three of us were a team, inside and outside class, that we belonged together.
Although we were best friends and seemed totally on the same wavelength, our parents were very dissimilar. His father was, as many in the neighborhood, a doctor, and was conservative and quite strict. His mom was just the opposite, a warm, girlish type with fluffy blonde hair who kept house and lavished affection on Jonathan and his younger sister. She was almost like one of the kids. The father was quite competitive and pushed his son to be the same. He was of the type who hated it if Jonathan ever cried and told him, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!” He also would bait Jonathan’s younger sister, who was five, saying that my hair was so much longer and more beautiful than hers and asking her, “Don’t you wish your hair was more like Clemdane’s?” This made me really uncomfortable. My mother was very outspoken back then and had some hobby horses she liked to rant about. One of them was nutrition, and I remember several times when she and Jonathan’s doctor father would stand at the border of our properties arguing about whether sugar was harmful or not. Oddly, my mother was the one saying processed sugar was terrible for you and the doctor said he liked three heaping teaspoons of sugar in his coffee every morning and it was completely harmless!

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At some point when I was 7 or 8 I realized I loved Jonathan and decided this must be what being in love must feel like. I was dying to tell him. For some reason I was sure he felt the same way. This is first and last time in my life I have assumed something like that! One day, out of the blue, Jonathan told me he was going to tell me the name of the girl that he loved. My heart started beating crazily at this point and I thought he was going to say me, but he was being coy about it. I was nervous about the moment when I would have to say the words, “I love you, too” back to him. But I wanted to hear it, so I said, “Okay, go ahead.” He blushed and looked down, suddenly looking very nervous. He said, “Okay, maybe I’ll just show you her initials.” “Okay,” I said, thinking he was being very roundabout about telling me he loves me, but feeling a surge of tenderness towards his bashfulness. He had never acted like this before. Thinking he was just going to blurt out the initials, I was surprised when he said, “Let’s go to my house” and took off at a fast clip. I ran to keep up, wondering whether he was trying to pretend he had never said anything and maybe when we got there he would say, “So, want to watch tv?” But I was wrong. We went into the house, I said hi to his cheery Mom, and we went up to his room. He went to a shelf with a book on it and maybe I looked pretty confused because he said, “I’ve written her initials down her.” I was thinking, “Boy is this elaborate! He’s actually written my initials down in a book!” I held my breath and he held the book as if gathering the courage to show me. Then he showed me. He had written, “FFM.” My heart sank and I felt frozen for a moment. All of my hopes were crushed and I felt humiliated that I had thought it would be me. I also had no idea who “FFM” was. I tried to act casually puzzled and not show him how sad I was. “Who is FFM?” He looked at me as if I was an idiot. “You really don’t know?” I shook my head and I guess after the initial tension had broken he now felt a bit more confident about saying the name:

                  FARRAH FAWCETT MAJORS

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