Bethany: Part XI

Things didn’t play out the usual way after our clinch – Bethany and I didn’t go on to become one of those 24/7 couples, never more than a foot away from each other, who clotted the campus, and in fact in school we were friendly but stayed within out own rarely intersecting circles, barely acknowledging our newfound intimacy. Even on our weekly dates we’d begin as no more than affectionate lab partners, studiously exploring each other’s environments, only later moving on to continue our serious experimentation in the science of making out. We avoided the usual going out itineraries of movies and parties to alternate playing tour guide and tourist, as Bethany revealed to me her Fox Chapel and I showed her my Squirrel Hill, getting to know each other through the formative landscapes of our youth before, inevitably, becoming familiar with the still forming landscapes of each other’s bodies,

And Fox Chapel was like a foreign country to me. Even though I’d gone to school for almost four years there and cruised its lower depths with Heather, the straight side of things was as alien to me as the moon. I wasn’t used to a place that had no sidewalks and no place to walk except through the hedges to the neighbor’s for a glass of white wine or an affair, where the driveways were fancier than the roads and cars were as necessary as legs. In my neighborhood the little old ladies could pull their two wheeled carts up Murray Avenue and find all of life’s necessities, with only occasional bus trips downtown to supply the luxuries.

Bethany was just as wide eyes at all the pedestrians in Squirrel Hill, not just in the stores, but between the stores, the stores themselves not in a strip mall but right on the street, a great many with apartments above in which people (gasp) actually lived. I took her to the bookstores, newsstands and variety stores I’d haunted ever since I could walk, places with who knew what piled in bins or tacked up to the walls. And, of course, the farther down Murray you got the more yarmulkes there were, the more side curls, bagel shops, mezuzahs and kosher food signs appeared – for Bethany it was like the National Geographic. As a Hungarian Catholic she was considered somewhat exotic in Fox Chapel, but in Squirrel Hill she was just another goy

For my part, I appreciated the inevitable cruises through the Fox Chapel’s sylvan beauty, and the disingenuous street names – White Faun Lane, Hickory Hill Road, Nantucket Drive – many of them only big enough for one house, thereby doing away with the need for house numbers, which in any case seldom got into three figures. I appreciated the Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor and the Hallmark shops that were Bethany’s favorite childhood destinations, but they usual didn’t seem worth the trip, and the whole time I couldn’t help thinking that living in a suburb, wealthy or not, would quickly drive me batty.

I even dipped a reluctant toe into the world of school spirit, participating in the decoration of one of Bethany’s beloved floats in the company of several enthusiastic, giggling girls and a few forever panting nerds, but found my more creative decorative suggestions declined, if not derided.

We shared the landmarks of our brief lives, the grade schools and churches we’d both grown up in, all in all making a very sober, serious and by and large successful attempt to do exactly what I’d proposed in the beginning – to get to know each other. But there was another shadow agenda, one that emerged only in the dark when it was almost time to take Bethany home. Her caresses and kisses were fervent then, much more fervent than our mutual affection warranted, an affection that neither of us pretended was more than friendship, and I slowly realized that she was trying to provide herself with the one part of her education that she’d neglected – the physical grammar of love. In the same way she was determined to take in the parts of Pittsburgh she’d missed before leaving town for college, she seemed equally committed to losing her virginity before becoming a freshman again.