"No. What I mean is making love has something to do with love. All we have done so far is share some food. Charlie. We've barely gotten to know each other, much less fall in love."
I sat up, pulled my bra back over my breasts, and began to button my blouse,
"What is this? I thought you wanted to be with
me." -"We don't have the same definition of being with, Charlie." He shook his head. "Why is it all you smart girls are so..."
"Smart?"
"No, frigid," he countered. "Don't say it," he added with his hand up before I could respond. "I know. We don't have the same definition of frigid, "
I smiled. "And I thought you were just another jock."
"Very funny." he said. He stood up. "Let's go downstairs unless you want to go home."
"I think I'd rather go home," I said. He nodded.
"Figured." he said.
The ride home was mostly in silence, but before we reached the gate he looked at me and said, "I suppose you're saving it for a guy with a fat bank book. huh?"
"I don't judge people on the basis of their net worth. Charlie. You shouldn't. either," I told him.
How ironic. I thought as we drove up to the main house. Our new great wealth was not always an advantage after all.
Mommy was actually waiting up to see how my date had gone. I anticipated it.
"Did you have fun?" she asked immediately. Winston was already in bed upstairs.
I shook my head. "No. Mommy. We just weren't right far each other."
"Why not?" she snapped, her face filling with impatience and intolerance.
"Well," I said, fixing my eyes on hers, "when he didn't order any dessert at dinner I thought that was his athletic self-control, watching his diet and such."
"So?"
"But what he expected was that I would be his dessert," I said, and she blinked her eyes quickly and pulled her head back.
After a moment she said. "He seemed like a very nice, polite young man. Grace. You can't be afraid of a little intimacy. honey."
"We don't have the same definition of intimacy, "I told her, and started away.
"What?" she called. I didn't look back. but I heard her mutter. "Damn."
.
Rejecting a popular boy at school can do a girl lots of damage. I discovered. Charlie Packard's ego wouldn't permit him to accept any sort of rebuke. It had to be the fault of the girl, and unfortunately for me I was that girl.
Invitations to go out on dates never
materialized much after that. I had made applications to four-year colleges almost on entering the junior college anyway and didn't care if other students there, especially the boys, liked me or not. At the end of the school year what was important was that I had achieved a full semester's worth of credits and would have that advantage when I began my full college education.
We returned to France for the summer. only Mommy was interested in doing more traveling. I decided to take up the study of the French language and enrolled in a language school in Villefranche while Mommy and Winston did a series of trips, including a week's cruise to Venice. At the language school I became friends with an English girl. Kaye Underwood. She was interested in working in the hotel and travel industry and felt she had to learn French. She did better than I because she took room and board with a French family, which was the best she could afford, but she soon lived by the rule that no English could be spoken in the house. only French.
Kaye wasn't a very attractive girl. She had a round face that looked as if it had never shed its baby fat, and she was at least twenty-five pounds overweight. She wore her hair too short and was not very sophisticated about makeup and clothes, practically wearing the same things every day: a Grateful Dead T-shirt. brown Bermuda shorts, and a pair of well-worn walking shoe
s. When Mommy finally met her she was. I thought, a little too snobby and cold. She actually wondered aloud what drew me to be friends with such a person.