Laurie Graff - You Have To Kiss a Lot of Frogs

My birthday had always been a big deal to me. An event. It started in elementary school with a birthday tradition in my class that was passed on from Joni Wolf’s older sister, Debbie. We would take a bow used to decorate a package, attach pieces of ribbon to the back of it and put an ornament at the end of each ribbon. If a girl were turning eight, there would be eight ribbons with, let’s say, Tootsie Rolls tied to the bottom of each ribbon. They were theme corsages. Candy, stationery, kitchenware. My favorite was from Rachel Smith the year I turned ten. Ten pink, plastic hair curlers at the ends of the ribbons with a little note saying, “After your birthday I want my rollers back.” But by that time a girl could barely carry the weight of all those corsages, each with ten heavy ribbons and one for good luck. Especially when tent dresses were all the rave.

My mother and I had shopped and shopped until I found the perfect Kelly-green ultrapleated tent dress with white polka dots. When I put it on that morning, I spun round and round in front of the mirror watching the dress whirl. I looked like I was about to take off! I got to school and all my friends had made me great corsages. Bazooka Joe bubble gum, pencils, spoons. So now all of the very lovely, but very heavy corsages were pulling my dress forward, and when I stood up to answer a question, Murray Binder, who was seated behind me, screamed out, “Oooh, look, she has matching polka-dot panties too!”

“They’re not panties,” I turned around and screamed at Murray, totally embarrassed, bent over my dress, supporting it with my arms so the weight of the whole thing didn’t make me fall over completely. “They came with it. It’s part of the outfit.”

“Where’d you get it?” Rina Biller snidely yelled out. “Alex or Bloomie’s?” Rina knew full well that I had not gone shopping in The City at the wonderful and exclusive Bloomingdale’s. Rina knew my mother always took me to Alexander’s in Rego Park, Queens, where I invariably got nauseous from the ringing bells, the sales tables and the fights in the overcrowded parking lot.

“Stop this excitement,” Mrs. Gorsky hollered. “This is stupidity.”

I stood mortified and angry that our crazy teacher was ruining my birthday.

“Take those bows off and put them away. You can take them home at three o’clock. What’s the matter with you kids? Doesn’t anyone care about what’s going on in this world?”

Mrs. Gorsky paused for a moment. I looked at her red hair standing up in the middle of her head like Bozo’s. Her dress came to below her knee. There was a run in her stocking, and her black laced shoes looked like my grandmother’s.

“Quiet!” Mrs. Gorsky went to her desk and picked up a small black transistor radio. She stood in the aisle between rows two and three, kept the radio to her ear and listened. The class was quiet. Watching. I was in the last seat of row three, soundlessly storing my corsages in the empty desk until the three o’clock freedom bell rang.

“No! No!” Mrs. Gorsky let out a scream. “ACHHH, NOOOO!!!” She threw the radio in the floor. We watched it break into pieces, the same as when she had thrown chalk, pointers and once Joshua Morris’s eyeglasses. We were afraid of her. No one would speak.

“The world is insane. My son goes to Columbia. There are uprisings all over the campus. They took over the administration building. He can’t get an education.”

I carefully looked at my corsages inside the back desk as evidence of an innocent childhood. I was only ten years old and today was my birthday.

A week later Bobby Kennedy was shot. Every few years since I had been in kindergarten there were major assassinations. I watched other people mourn John and Malcolm and Martin. But this one, Bobby, felt different. This one felt real, and this one really hurt.

The following year we stopped making our own corsages and upgraded to the local florist. For seventy-five cents, the florist would make a little boutonniere out of a carnation. Now each girl looked like a bouquet on her birthday, but no one toppled over. By the time we went to junior high our birthday traditions had dissolved. It no longer mattered if I shopped at “Alex” or “Bloomie’s.” Girls were finally granted permission to wear pants. With all the marches and sit-ins and antiwar rallies I often felt like I’d never see another birthday. I’d never see another spring. But the world kept ticking and somehow it all kept going.

Looking at myself now while trying on these dresses, I was pleased with the woman who reflected back three times in the triangular mirror. I had grown up and I could do what I wanted, date whom I wanted and shop where I chose. Another spring was ending. Summer beginning. I left Bloomie’s with the perfect dress. Baby blue. Silk. Bare shoulders. High heels. A matching shawl of pale blue chiffon.

My birthday night arrived with torrential weather. Rain. Pouring rain. Thunder and lightning. An emergency at work. A last-minute call.

“Jeans, okay?” he asked.

I looked at the blue silk dress laid out on the bed before I hung it back in the closet. Another time. The rain did not wash out Roman.

“Sure,” I said into the cordless phone as I unhooked a pair of jeans from its hanger. I wore them with a white tank top. A fringe of lace over the bust. A peach cardigan. A yellow slicker. Roman was knocked out by the outfit.

“What outfit?” Rain clothes. I didn’t see. I just felt. Beautiful.

After eating Mexican we walked up Second Avenue. People. Mist. Dogs. Restaurants. A taxi whizzing by.

“Come here, young lady.” Roman pulled me to the side. Fluorescent light from a candy store. A kiss. Not just a kiss. A dissolve. Lips. So soft, hard, so warm, slow. Long and forever and so quickly a change. Between us. Together. Falling together into something else. A burrow that enveloped us.

“Is this how they do it in New York?” he whispered that night.

“This is how I do it with you,” I said. “I will never forget this. Ever.”

I cooked him dinners and he brought wine and flowers.

“I thought I should bring you something else,” he said one night, handing me a bouquet of purple tulips. “I went into Barneys and looked around. I thought, ‘Would she like this belt?’ But then I decided to bring the flowers.”

He helped me memorize a script. Roman hadn’t acted since grade school. It was a good thing! But he loved doing it with me, and I loved sharing my world. He played hooky from work and we explored the city. We’d sit at an outdoor café sipping wine and watching the people pass. Roman was in awe of the city in the middle of the day in the middle of the week.

“I never see this,” he said, sliding his hand up and down my thigh. “I’m inside at work, but the world is going on. The city never sleeps.”

He saw Manhattan as if it were brand-new. I filled up with pride as if I had built it. We went boating in Central Park. We hiked up a path in the park that made us feel like we were backpacking together in Europe. At the top. Looking down on the city. Looking out. Green trim of the Plaza Hotel accented the lake like a picture frame. He stood behind me and moved his hands possessively over my body. I was happy and I told him. And then he told me.

“I’m being transferred back to Boston.”

The weeks that followed were sad. Every great moment slipped into the next and it slipped into time that would move Roman from my present to my past. Unless.

“My agent called today to submit me for a role in a play,” I told him over one of our last dinners. We were sharing a piece of apple pie, drinking decaf coffee and brandy. I went into the bathroom three times during dinner to splash water under my eyes to disguise the swelling from the tears.