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read
Windchill Summer
and
Cheap Diamonds.
    After Jimmy, I started dating a boy I’ll call Rex. Rex and I went steady as well, when all I really wanted was to be free and date a lot of guys, but he kept on putting his ring on a chain around my neck, which felt more like a dog leash. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I finally went along because it was easier than arguing with him. Nobody else was asking me out anyhow. Rex was jealous and big and was a star football player with a reputation for being somewhat of a tough guy.
    Then a boy named Jerry came to visit his aunt and uncle for the summer. He was from California and had actually surfed, which was a huge deal at the time, as the Beach Boys were at the height of their fame, and the Mamas and the Papas’ monster hit “California Dreamin’” made us all long to go to, or at least
know
somebody from, California. He wasn’t in the least afraid of Rex. Jerry and I went to the drive-in with another couple, where
A Summer Place
with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue was playing. Sitting in the backseat with Jerry was such sweet torture. I wouldn’t let him kiss me, as I was going steady, and I guess I thought if we didn’t kiss it wasn’t really cheating, but we would almost kiss, our lips getting so close we could feel the heat. It was exquisitely painful. Then we stopped at a gas station on the way home, and while the attendant was filling up the tank, Rex happened byand saw us. What bad luck. I can’t remember if actual blows were exchanged or not, but there was a fight of sorts.
    After that, there was no reason not to kiss Jerry, so I did and fell hard for him, as only one can at fifteen with an older boy of seventeen. After the summer, he went back to his family, who had by then moved to Kentucky, which was not nearly as glamorous as California, but he promised he was going to come back at Thanksgiving vacation and we were going to run away to California and get married. I didn’t take it too seriously, and I frankly don’t know what I would have done if he had pulled up in the yard and said, “Hop in. Let’s go,” but I did desperately want to see him again. One day, right before Thanksgiving, the letters we had been exchanging every few days just stopped. My old boyfriend Rex dropped by to give me a cryptic message. “Have you heard from Jerry?” he asked, smirking a little.
    “Not in a while,” I said. I never was any good at lying.
    “Well, I just wondered. You might want to call him.” That was weird. He seemed so happy about something.
    I got Jerry’s father on the phone. In those days, it would never have occurred to me to call a boy, especially long distance, but I was really worried. “Could I speak to Jerry, please?” I asked.
    “He’s not here.”
    “Where is he?”
    “He’s gone to get his marriage license.”
    “Oh,” I said, when I could finally speak. “Well, can you give him a message for me? Tell him Barbara Davis called and said for him to drop dead.”
    What an ugly thing to say to his father! But I was so angry I didn’t know what else to say. I never spoke to him again, but years later I heard that he became a professional wrestler and then a preacher (or maybe it was the other way around). He and the girl, whose name, I think, was Barbara, had four children and are probably still married, and I thanked my lucky stars it wasn’t me who bought that license with him.

Five
    I had known the boy who would become my first husband, Larry Norris, most of my life, but we weren’t friends, as he was two classes ahead of me and had gone steady with a girl in his grade named Sharon for most of high school. He was popular, a good football player, a track star, and an all-around athlete. Sharon wore his little gold track shoe on a delicate chain around her neck, and I remember being a little envious of it. Then she fell in love with a boy named Bill and broke up with Larry, breaking his heart. She and Bill got married, and Larry