Chapter 14: Reawakening

Just before Labor Day, I was offered another promotion. I declined. Dave moved to another company and my new regional manager and the vice president were not willing to make any accommodations. They wanted me to move to Chicago. The answer was simply ‘no.’ My daughter was entering high school and I would not pull her away from her friends, her master, or her home.

I realized quickly that refusing a promotion under the new management was tantamount to writing a suicide note. They had others they wanted to move up and I was in the way. I resigned.

For the first time in seven years, I was unemployed.

After Dave left the company, we began seeing each other occasionally. Just dinner between friends. I found I was more comfortable with him than any man I’d ever been around.

“Janet, I would never breach the trust between a manager and employee so I’ve never mentioned how much of a personal ... uh ... respect I have for you. I like you. My travel and drive in my job has never let me really develop a relationship with anyone. This new job still requires some travel, but for the first time, I can really choose my own base,” Dave said. “I was wondering ... Would you be okay with me settling in this area? I don’t have any great expectations but I find I’d like to be closer to where you are. Maybe we could see each other more frequently.”

“Dave? Do you mean you’d like to be dating me?”

“Yes. I do. I mean that’s what I mean. Janet, we’ve been in a reporting chain and then friends for seven years. I’d like to be more than just friends. I’m not rushing or anything but I’d like to be where we have the potential to develop into something more. If you’re interested. No pressure or anything.”

“Dave, I haven’t had a boyfriend since college. My daughter is fourteen years old and has told me that she plans to go out with her classmates in some kind of dating group. I don’t even remember how this is done,” I said as we stood beside our cars in the parking lot. We’d just been meeting for dinner. It wasn’t really a date. At least at the beginning. Now I found my heart racing. “I ... uh ... isn’t it customary for a boy to kiss his girlfriend after a date?”

Dave looked up at me and smiled. Yes, up. He’s two inches shorter than my six feet. It wasn’t awkward. Our lips met. Our arms wrapped around each other. We held the kiss for longer than was strictly necessary for a good night kiss, but it didn’t become passionate. I had a long way to go before I was ready for real passion, but when I got in the car to go home that night, I had a boyfriend.

“Hello, Janet. It’s Marilyn Frost. I was wondering if we could get together for coffee one day this week. Or lunch? I know we haven’t been particularly close even though our children have been friends in school but they’ve signed this dating agreement and, frankly, I want to meet the parents of all the kids who signed it.”

At the end of the first week of school, Whitney had proudly shown me a handwritten agreement and said there were fourteen kids in her school who had signed it and were going to be going out together. When pressed, she said, “Like football games and school dances.”

“Whitney, you’ve been friends with most of these kids ever since we moved here. I know you enjoy their company. But are you ready to be dating? Really?”

“Not like that, Mom. But we can all go out together and have fun and the agreement says no one puts any pressure on anyone else. I’m not ready for that kind of pressure. I have too much to do with my martial arts and basketball. Mom, I haven’t even had my first period yet. But Brenda and Liz, Brian and Doug, and all the others wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me when we’re together.”

My daughter’s confidence had soared over the summer. She looked me straight in the eye and I could tell that before long I’d be looking up at her. I tried to maintain some small amount of parental authority.

“You still need to let me know whenever you are going to be with your friends and where you’ll be going,” I said firmly.

It was a relief when Marilyn called me the next week to ask about going to lunch. I’d just accepted a new position as financial manager for Brookside Publishing, a company that was expanding its market from trade catalogs to non-fiction books focused on the real estate and building industry. It wasn’t a national powerhouse like the bookstore chain I’d just left, but they allowed me a complete inspection of their financial reports before I accepted the position.

“Marilyn, I’d love to meet with you. This week is a little tight since I just started my new job, but could we meet for lunch at Muffeletta on Tuesday next week?”

“That works well. Do you mind if one or two other mothers meet with us?”

I envied mothers who had husbands with good jobs and were able to devote all their time to being mothers and wives. It just wasn’t the way it was for me. It wasn’t that way for the three women who met with me on Tuesday, either.

Marilyn Frost worked at the Times in the circulation department. She’d spent the first six or seven years of her married life as a housewife but, like so many of our generation, found that farm life was not enough to either support the family or keep the interest of the wife. Evelyn Gordon was a preacher’s wife and didn’t work outside the home. On the other hand, I learned an incredible amount about life in the fishbowl and how involved she was in her husband’s work. It seemed the churches they served assumed they were paying for both husband and wife in the name of the man.

The surprise to me was Doris Trane. I’d not met her before, even though I knew her son Lionel had been hanging out with the group of friends who signed the dating agreement ever since they started junior high. Whitney mentioned him often in her ravings about basketball. Doris was even taller than me! And she was also a single mom, though it was sadly because her husband had been killed while evacuating embassy personnel soon before the fall of Saigon.

“I thought it would be good to have mothers of both boys and girls meet to get our different perspectives,” Marilyn said. “Personally, I’ve been curious to get to know all the parents in the group. But in talking to a few others, we also thought we’d try to back each other up.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“My daughter is one of the least developed in the group,” Evelyn answered. “But she’s also very talkative to her parents. I think she’s only two months younger than your daughter, Janet. Anyway, she was talking about how all the kids went to the dance after the football game but that some didn’t really know how they were getting home until others volunteered rides with their parents. We thought we might be able to coordinate things like transportation if all the kids were going out together.”

“Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Whitney said there was only one person on the agreement who had a driver’s license and a couple who had older siblings that helped,” I said.

“One of those is my son Lamar,” Doris said. “It’s one of the reasons I wanted to be included in meeting other mothers. Some people might not feel comfortable about having a black man drive their daughter home from a dance.”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t think it is any different than, say, Carl’s brother Bill driving them home. But I can see where some might be prejudiced or something.”

“With the kids in high school, there are going to be more after school events, as well,” Doris continued. “Lionel and Lamar have told me that your daughter is likely to be on the JV basketball team this year.”

“I’m not sure yet how that came about. It seems that some of the coaches at the basketball camp Whitney went to this summer got together to put pressure on some schools who had female athletes without a program for them to participate in. I was informed by Principal Darnell that after a great deal of discussion—which I interpreted to mean arguing—the school board had agreed that this year a female student would be allowed to try out for a sport on equal footing with males if parents signed a waiver of liability and permission form. It was a little frightening but I signed.”