50/50 Exercise #6: Getting There First

This morning he told me, “I have never been in love on Valentine’s Day before.”

When I hung up the phone, I tried to weigh those words against the measure of my own memories of Valentine’s Day. I thought of elementary school, of making valentines for our mothers. We crafted lopsided hearts of red construction paper folded down the middle, outlined in number-two pencil, and cut out clumsily with blunt little scissors. (The green-handled lefty scissors never cut worth a damn.) For decoration: borders of white paper lace, globs of Elmer’s glue, magic markers, and stickers depicting bouquets of flowers and bow-and-arrow-wielding cherubs.

My thoughts wandered to the paper “mailboxes” that we made in class one year—manila folders glued shut at the ends to form a pocket, then decorated with mosaics of colored paper and personalized with our names scrawled in crayon. We hung them from the front edges of our desks with Scotch tape, and then wandered around the room filling each other’s mailboxes with prefab valentine cards. My mother bought boxes with hundreds of cheap cards to choose from, and I sat at the kitchen table selecting the perfect goofy pun or cute animal for each classmate, then signing my name and addressing the tiny white envelopes in my neat, uphill-slanty printing.

We were so young that all of us were expected to give cards to everyone else in the class, regardless of gender. I don’t remember anyone—children, parents, or teachers—thinking there was anything wrong with that arrangement. But I remember the care with which I picked out a card for my best friend, John W., a sports enthusiast with a sense of humor that was always a year ahead of mine. I recall the apprehension I felt in trying to find a card to please John M., the tall blond boy who years later would lead our class in the 50-yard-dash, the President’s Physical Fitness test, and every other measure of athletic prowess.

That “free love” attitude they allowed us in first or second grade must have contributed to the confusion I experienced later, when it started to become clear to me that girls were supposed to love boys and boys were supposed to love girls.

My mind drifted to junior-high school Valentine’s Days. Cards weren’t cool, and only girls went to the trouble to make romantic gestures—and mostly just the “in” girls, at that. Those girls all dated jocks. February 14 was a day shot through with arrows of envy and loneliness. I envied the boys all the attention they received from the girls, and I envied the girls the freedom to advertise their adolescent desire with red and white carnations on the lunch table and hand-made posters taped to locker doors. The rest of us kept our adolescent desire to ourselves.