Chez Cordelia by Kitty Burns Florey Page A

under our chins. We used to feed Cheez-Its to Snowball, who crunched obediently over his own napkin. Claire and George would often sit on the sofa behind us; they seemed endlessly amiable, boundlessly kind, superhumanly patient with Danny and me and our lame adolescent jokes, uncomplaining when our raucous teasing of each other drowned out the TV—for that was the form our friendship took when it first got off the ground: teasing and insults. Claire would ask Danny to pass her a couple of Cheez-Its, Danny would reply yeah if I can get them away from El Piggo here, I would say who’s calling who a pig, look at him, his mouth is full and both hands too, Danny would interrupt oh yeah Fatty? well all I can say is when we were out in Billy’s boat the other day it wasn’t my end that sank down like a rock, and I’d give him a punch on the arm, and he’d say my father always told me never to hit a lady but that doesn’t apply to you, and he’d punch me back, and Claire would say where’s my Cheez-Its? and we’d hand her the bag and start giggling and punching each other again while Starship Enterprise shot through space toward impossible dangers.
    I had watched Danny’s attitude toward me slowly change. We still didn’t talk much, except to fool around. I could see in the punches we exchanged, in the teasing, and in his broody brown eyes the dawn of something even I didn’t fully comprehend (though I comprehended it better than he did). I thought he was the handsomest boy in town, like a tree in autumn (a red maple!), with his flaming hair and brown wrists and long bones. Sandy Schutz didn’t agree; she didn’t like his freckles. “I’ll bet he’s even got freckles—you know—all over,” she said with a simulated shiver. I hadn’t thought of that, but I began to, often. By this time I was over John Lennon. I was fourteen or so, about the age Miranda got over Byron. I was ready for a more local, less speculative and pure passion.
    Danny was it. It took a couple of more years of following him around and letting him punch me, but by the time we were sixteen we were going steady. I don’t know what finally did it—hormones, probably—and I can’t recall how I advanced from silent companion to girlfriend. I do remember the first time he kissed me. We were fishing off the pier down by Billy Arp’s, and Billy went inside for something to eat, and I baited Danny’s hook for him (I always did; he was squeamish), and he flung his line out and then he kissed me—crookedly, without preamble or embrace, and fast, before Billy came back. It wasn’t so much a kiss as a coded message: things will be different between us now, there’s more to come. Then a fish tugged on his line, and Billy returned, and the shock and thrill of being kissed became irrelevant, and disappeared. There was just the fish and the sea and Billy with a bag of pretzels. But the message lingered on, and from then on things were different between us; and there was more to come.
    It was the typical adolescent pilgrimage along the paths of love and sex, starting with kisses, then better kisses, gropings, then better gropings, and all the rest of it. We made love the first time in Danny’s living room, in front of the TV, while George and Claire were at a bowling banquet. It was late spring, the windows were wide open, and there was a warm breeze bringing in all the Saturday-night sounds of Main Street. On the TV, the Yankees were creaming the Red Sox. And when Danny and I rolled apart at last, and he told me over and over again that he loved me, the secure, serene happiness I felt was something new to me. I had never been happy in quite that miraculous way before, and in spite of all my years of practical dreaming I had never expected—not really—that my long dream would, quite precisely and literally, come true.
    After that, besides making love