When We're Ready

1. Manimal Attraction


   Alicia McDonald was a witch. Of that at least I was for certain. I've
known for almost twenty years. It had to be witchcraft. There simply
wasn't any other explanation. At nine years old, I knew that there was
a lot I didn't know about the world, but on Friday, September 30,
1983, there were two things I was positive about. Girls were gross and
Manimal was the coolest show that was ever on TV. The next day, Alicia
McDonald moved in next door.

   I remember that my brother Tim and I were in the back yard playing
Manimal. I was three years older, so I got to be Jonathan Chase and I
made him be Tyrone. Make believe games most worked out like that. I
was nine and Tim was six and I basically told him what the story was
and he did his best to keep up. We were just about to embark on the
next great Manimal adventure when I heard a soft voice coming from the
side of the garage.

   "What are you guys doing?"

   It was definitely a girl. Sure, some people might be fooled by the 
red hair cut short just below her ears, barely combed and shoved under 
a backwards baseball cap. The tussled bangs falling out over her long
slender face. Some people might have been fooled by the way she wore
faded overalls with a hole in the knee instead of one of those stupid
flowery dresses, or the fact that there was dirt all over her face and
she was holding a baseball and a catcher's mitt. But I was no idiot. I
knew a girl when I saw one. "Nothing," I yelled at her. "You wouldn't
understand." Then I turned my back and proceeded with my game. I was
positive that when she saw I was ignoring her, she'd get bored and go
away, but she didn't. Girls were so stupid.

   "RARRRR!" Tim was on his hands and knees scratching at the grass.

   "Umm, what are you doing Tim?"

   "I'm turning into a wolf."

   "You can't turn into a wolf. You're Tyrone. Only Jonathan can turn
into things, dummy!"

   "But I wanna be a wolf!" He was indignant. Hadn't he watched the same
show as I had the night before? He was almost as stupid as the girl
was.

   "But you can't!"

   "MOOOMMMMMM!" He ran inside and slammed the screen door behind
him. This was just great, now the whole game was ruined.

   "Brooke is soooo much cooler than Ty is anyway." The girl was talking
again. Worse, when I turned around, I discovered she was actually
giggling at me. My face started to go red.

   "What do you know about Manimal anyway?"

   "I watched it last night," she answered, "in the motel we were staying
at while they were moving stuff into our new house. Wasn't it
awesome?"

   I was confused. A girl watched Manimal? "What's your name?"

   "Alicia. What's yours?"

   "Eric."

   It had to be witchcraft you see, because, no regular girl could ever
be that cool. No regular girl could ever become my best friend. But
that's exactly what Alicia McDonald did. She became my best
friend. She came over every Friday night and we watched Manimal
together on the floor in my family's living room, and on Saturday's we
reenact the previous nights episode in its entirety in our
backyards. She had to be a witch, and she was using some kind of
spell. Some kind of I can be as cool as a boy spell.

   She shared each others pain when Manimal went on hiatus in November,
and we rejoiced together when it returned on its new night, Saturday,
on December 3rd. For the next three weeks we continued our tradition,
now on Sundays. Me playing Jonathan to her Brooke.

   Then there was that day. December 18th. Her birthday. She turned
ten. The heroic Manimal saves his lady detective friend from the
clutches of evil yet again. That when she, Brooke, that is
Alicia... that's when she did it. She grabbed me by the ears and
pulled my head up to her (she was several inches taller than me in
those days) and pressed our lips together. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't
sweet, our noses smashed together in the most uncomfortable way, but
it was definitively a kiss. My first. Our first. I pushed her away and
started spitting, trying to remove both the thought of her touch and
taste of her watermelon flavored gum from my lips. "Yuck! Yuck yuck
yuck! Why would you do that?"

   She stared at me and started crying. She turned and ran away into her
own house. The next day, I found out they cancelled Manimal.



2. Clouds and Cartoons


   As we got older, it became all the more clear that the spell she had
cast over me must have been mystical in nature. In the summer of 1988
we'd spend Saturdays in Columbus Park where Tim and Kyle (Alicia's
little brother) played Little League there, and our families would go
to every game. Around the third inning Alicia and I would become bored
of the game and wander off. We usually ended up lying in the grass
beyond left field and looking up at the sky.

   "What are you thinking about, Brooke?" We were fourteen by now, but we
had never given up our childhood Manimal nicknames.

   "Pepe Le Pew" she answered.

   "What?"

   "Right there, in the clouds" she pointed her finger toward the sky and
made a small circular gesture. Her prestidigitation apparently
extended past amorous charms and into elemental enchantment, because
the clouds seemed to swirl before my eyes, and clear as day, I knew
which clouds she was talking about. The image of the cartoon skunk
hung above our heads.

   We sat for a few minutes in silence and watched as more cumulonimbus
balls of cotton mist sailed overhead. My mind began to drift and I
wondered what other shapes she was imagining. I thought that perhaps
she'd see hearts or love birds. I dreamed that she dreamed of wispy
cupids above our heads, or perhaps as a passing fancy she might have
seen me up there somewhere. You see, by this time, nearly five years
after we had met, Alicia's spells had become too much for me. I didn't
know if it was some concoction of eye of newt and rats' tails or just
my own growing pubescent hormones, but at fourteen, I was quite in
love with Alicia McDonald. And as a consequence, I suppose, I was
quite terrified of her as well. For a fourteen-year-old boy, the
biggest fear in the world is that the girl of your dreams will find
out you like her. I've had fourteen years since then to think about
that. And you know what? It still doesn't make any sense.

   "Jonathan?" Even though she called me that all the time, I was so
entranced in my daydreams, trying to construct her long thing face out
a passing stratus overhead, that I didn't realizes she was addressing
me at first. "Jonathan?" she asked again.

   "Huh? Oh yes?" I rolled onto my side to look her in eyes. Her real
face was so much prettier than anything I could imagine in the sky
anyway.

   "Have you ever..." she began. "Have you ever, you know, liked someone?
I mean, really liked them."

   "Ummm..." I began to get nervous. How could she know? "I don't
know. Maybe, why?"

   "Well," she was clearly as uncomfortable talking about this as I
was. "Well, I think I like someone. I mean, I think I like them, like
them. And I think I kind of have for a long time. And, well... I'm not
really sure what to do about it."

   I had to think about this for a while. You must understand. The
fourteen-year-old mind doesn't work the same way that of an
adult. This was quite a lot of information to take in at once. And I
must admit, I didn't really understand all of it, but I instinctively
knew what I had to do. A lifetime of watching TV cool guys had
prepared me for this. I had to stay cool. I had to be like Fonzie or
John Wayne. I had to be like Manimal. I decided to offer a supportive
probing question. "Do you think he likes you back?"

   "Yes, well... maybe... I don't know. I mean, I think he does. But I
don't know. I mean, this is all kinda weird for me. All this girly
stuff. I don't know anything about dresses or makeup or perfume or
anything. Guys don't like girls who aren't into that sort of stuff do
they?"

   You want to know the truth? Up until that point and in fact to this
day, I have never once noticed a woman's make-up or perfume. At least
not noticed as the focal point of an attraction. It just doesn't
matter. And really, a pair of pants can be just as attractive as a
dress, if not more so. Yes, I was fourteen, and yes I was more or less
past that phases in my life, but for the briefest instant, I had
remembered my hypothesis from years gone by. Girls were so stupid.

   "I don't know," I told her. "I don't think you really need that stuff
to be pretty." Ok, I was being pretty adventurous here.

   "What should I do, Eric?"

   Kiss me again, and let me put my hand up your shirt?  I couldn't
believe she was really asking me this. I knew I had to choose my words
carefully. Like I said, if I had learned anything from years of
primetime sitcoms, I had learned how easy it is to screw these things
up. "Make sure you're ready and then go for it. When you're ready to
move on, he'll be waiting for you."

   "Thank you, Jonathan." She leaned over and hugged me, then, as if by
afterthought, she kissed me on the cheek. We got up and walked back to
our families.

   The next week, I couldn't find Alicia at the baseball
game. Mrs. McDonald told me that she had gone off for a walk, so I
went looking for her. That's when I saw her French kissing Kevin Glenn
under the bleachers.



3. Auld Lang Syne


   In December of 1993 I decided to come home for Christmas break. The
year before, I had gone to Connecticut with my girlfriend, Angie, to
spend the holidays with her family, but we had broken up in the middle
of October, so my sophomore year I didn't have anything better to do
than spend the holidays with my family.

   Tim had told me that heard my old friend Kevin Glenn was having a New
Year's party. Since I didn't have anything better to do, I decided to
check it out. It was around eleven o'clock and I had just finished my
third beer when I saw her. Her hair was longer now, and she had
learned to wear a dress, but she still had the same long pretty face
that she had had since we were nine. I could almost imagine her in
faded overalls and covered in dirt.

   "Hello, Jonathan," she said to me, as though it hadn't been over a
year and a half since we had last spoke.

   A funny thing can happen when you're nineteen. You've grown and
matured, but in some ways you're still ruled by the same hormones that
began to invade your body in your preteen years. I don't know if it
was the remnants of the spell she had cast on me when we first met a
decade before or if it was the alcohol our underage bodies had
ingested throughout the night, but by the time the clock struck
twelve, we found ourselves in an upstairs bedroom. Our lips locked
together as we rolled around on top of the coats of the party guests
downstairs, which we had been in too much of a hurry to kick off of
the bed. Our tongues rolled together and I could taste the strange
mixture of beer and cheap champagne as we kissed.

   Its funny, because I remember with exact detail the conversations we
had about a TV show that only lasted eight episodes when I was
nine-years-old, but I haven't the faintest idea how we ended up in
that bedroom together a year later. All I remember is the little
details of our touching. I remember pulling the spaghetti straps of
her party dress from her shoulders. I remember the taste of her lips
and slow journey I made nibbling down the nape of her neck to suck at
the nipples of her not quite B-cup breasts. I remember being lost in
the strawberry smell of her now shoulder-length hair (ok, so perhaps I
do notice a woman's scent just a little bit), and I remember the touch
of her slender fingers and they loosened my belt and reached inside of
my pants. I remember the groping and panting and the awkwardness as
she tried to pull my pants off without removing my shoes, and I
desperately fumbled with her panties while trying not to released my
sucking mouth from her neck. I remember only four words I said to her
that night. "I love you, Brooke." And then I remember her stopping.

   Somehow I knew that I had made a mistake the second I said it. But it
was too late. She had let go and pulled her hand out from my
shorts. She was already repositioning her dress on her chest. I had no
words to speak to her, so I just reached out and put my hand on her
shoulder. It was still slightly damp from the mixture of sweat and
saliva of our abruptly ended passion. She brushed me away and turned
to face me, tears welling up in her eyes. "Eric, I... its just... I'm
sorry, Eric... I'm just not ready." She got up and ran from the
room. I looked at the clock. It was 12:07.



4. Holy Matrimony


   Kyle McDonald got married in the early spring of 1997. My brother, Tim
was his best man. Linda and I were seated about fifteen rows back in
the friends of the groom section. In truth, I don't know that I had
said ten words to Kyle in ten years previous, but we were going to be
in town, and my brother was in the wedding, so it seemed only cordial
to go. I believe we bought them a set of towels from their registry as
a wedding gift.

   Alicia was the third bridesmaid. She looked as bewitching as ever. As
I was seated right next to the aisle, she noticed me as she passed and
smiled. I smiled back. "Who's that?" Linda asked.

   "Just an old friend." I told her.



5. Welcome Black, class of '92


   I don't know what made me decide to attend the reunion last night. My
parents moved to Florida four years ago, and I haven't really stayed
in touch with anyone. Linda and I divorced almost two years ago, and I
haven't really dated much since, so I attended alone. I spent a good
deal of the evening talking to Kevin Glenn. He's in real estate now,
he starting to lose his hair, and he's put on a bit of weight since
his football days. I really shouldn't talk; I'm not exactly in the
pinnacle of high school physical condition these days myself.

   The reunion was as reunions go. The stuck up people are still stuck
up, the nerds are still nerds, and the druggies are, well, what you
would expect of druggies ten years later. I spent about half an hour
talking and dancing with Janet Watson. She says we were in Bio
together in the tenth grade, but honestly I don't remember her at all.

   I was actually surprised when I saw Alicia. To tell you the truth, I
really wasn't expecting to see her. It's not that I was expecting to
not see her, but somehow, I guess I just wasn't aware of the
possibility that she might or might not be there at all. She was
talking to Kevin by the punch and turned and smiled at me. I excused
myself from Janet and walked over to meet her.

   "Hello, Jonathan," she giggled at me.

   "Hi Brooke," I returned as though no time had passed at all. We spoke
for hours. She told me how she had spent time after college in
Europe. How she had nearly gotten married there but changed her mind
at the last moment. She told me how she had gotten her Masters and
started teaching. I told her about my practice, about my marriage
breaking up and showed her pictures of my son, Bill.

   We laughed and drank and spent nearly an hour and a half remembering
Manimal (about 15 minutes into this conversation Kevin decided he had
better things to do, and took his leave). It was 2AM before the
cleaning staff started ushering the last of the reunion class from the
hall. I helped Alicia with her coat. She turned to me and looked me in
the eyes, "Jonathan?"

   "Yes, Brooke?"

   "I'm ready to move on, Eric"

   I smiled. "I've been waiting for you, Alicia"



   I extinguish my cigarette and close the motel window. I turn and see
Alicia still sleeping soundly in the bed, her hair, again short,
tussled and hanging over her eyes. A crooked smile across her long
slender face. I wonder what she's dreaming of Manimal? Pepe Le Pew?
The ingredients for her next magical potion? Alicia McDonald is a
witch. That much is for certain. And in twenty years, I have never
broken her spell.
