The night we went out, nerves brought out the talker in me and the mute in Robert. At the concert, we could focus on the music; now we actually had to deal with each other face to face. Desperate to avoid silence, I jabbered on about anything that came into my head, including why I hated Republicans, believed in astrology and wanted to travel the world before I was 30.
“I must be boring you,” I said finally.
Robert leaned in from across the table. “Not at all.”
My frustration mounting, I wondered when he would speak in something more than monosyllables. When we returned to Cloyne, Robert followed me up the stairs to my room. Feeling anxious and out of my depth, I excused myself to the bathroom. When I returned a few minutes later, he to was sitting on my bed. He stared at me expectantly.
“Wh-what?” My heart pounded in my mouth.
Like a jack-in-the-box caught red-handed, Robert jumped up and hurried to the door. Then he turned around. “Can we still hang out?” His voice was steady, but his eyes pleaded: give me a second chance.
“If you want,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.
To my surprise, Robert came by my room the next day to say hello. True to form, I resorted to doing I always did whenever anything made me uncomfortable. I pretended that our night out on the town—which I couldn’t acknowledge as a date—had never happened.
The summer passed by with a few more casual visits. The conversation flowed more freely between us, but I had also begun to feel conflicted. Robert was so different from me, but in his geeky awkwardness, so much the same. While debate over just how close I wanted us to be raged within me, June became July and then August; then, in early September, and not long after school started again, we decided to hike the Fire Trail in the hills behind Berkeley. Once at the summit, we made our way to the periphery of Tilden Park and began to walk east along Wildcat Canyon Road. Except for the occasional runner, we saw almost no one.
Robert sighed. “It almost feels like we’re the last people on earth.”
Neither of us knew where we were going, but neither of us wanted to go back, so we kept walking. Hours passed; eventually, pines, cypresses and sagebrush gave way to the homes that marked the beginning of neighborhoods neither of us recognized. We had walked all the way from the north side of Berkeley to the outskirts of Orinda. Sweating and too tired to say more, we turned around and began the trek home.
Somewhere on the way back and with eyes looking straight ahead, Robert began muttering softly. “I want that hand. I want that hand.”
Suddenly I realized he was talking about my hand.
An involuntary shiver shimmied up my spine. I looked away as I felt Robert slip his fleshy fingers between my thin ones. When I turned my head in his direction: it seemed that Robert was standing straighter and taller. All I wanted to do was change myself into a little ball and roll down the nearest hillside. My stomach turned violent somersaults instead. Robert did not let go of my hand until we returned home.
Robert and I both lived on the third floor of Cloyne. His room was two doors down from the one I shared with a curly-haired senior named Ellen McAllister. Skirting around the whole issue of what our relationship was becoming, we didn’t go out on dates. Instead we “ran into” each other and whiled away the time afterwards sitting and talking or sometimes playing chess. To my mind—and perhaps to Robert’s as well—we were just friends, even though the hugs we gave each other often turned into unspoken excuses to sit with arms wrapped around each other for hours at a time.
One night after dinner, we were sitting on the floor just inside the door to my room, our backs against the wall, listening to my stereo. I was drowsing in Robert’s lap when an unaccustomed hardness pressed into the small of my back. I leapt up like a skittish cat.
“What’s the matter?” Robert asked.
“I’ve really got to go now.” I stood up, hugged him and watched as he wandered back to his room, a dazed look on his face. I closed the door then leaned against it as though I would collapse.
When I told Ellen about what happened later that evening, her blue eyes gleamed with amusement. “It happens. He probably gets erections just thinking about you.”
“Oh,” I said, my cheeks burning.
Sensing my confusion about what to do next, Ellen talked to Robert the next day. “There hasn’t been anyone before you,” she told him. “You’re the first boyfriend she’s ever had.”
When she told me what she’d done, my jaw dropped. Boyfriend? Where had that come from? But Ellen had only told Robert what had become obvious to everyone at Cloyne except me.
As if to celebrate of our newly named status, Robert dropped by after dinner a few days later to bring me a slice of cake from the kitchen. He immediately told me what someone had said after hearing the cake was for me: “So you’ve done it. You’ve tamed her. Congratulations.” His face glowing with pride, Robert repeated the words in triumph. I told Ellen the story later that night.
“Well, you are kind of a wild thing,” she joked. “And Robert’s bringing food to domesticate you.”
I didn’t laugh.