Chapter 12

When I picked Alice up at her office late on Wednesday afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised to see that she'd forsaken the usual pantsuit combination for an extremely feminine-looking bright yellow sundress. Whether she had worn that all day at the hospital or changed into it during the past half-hour, she was bound to turn a few heads on the way out of her office. The hospital was a crowded place, full of people who knew Alice.

I had a feeling they were going to get a brief look at a New, Improved Alice. The dress wasn't particularly short, but Alice's legs were, indeed, particularly long, and they looked sensational, all the way from the full skirt's hem to the tiled hospital floor.

As usual, we went out for dinner. I'm not a very innovative date-planner, and I love good food. But this was much nicer than our post-Saturday-night-game repasts. For one thing, there was a better class of restaurant available to us at 7 p.m. on a Wednesday.

"You look sensational," I told Alice as the waiter seated us.

She blushed deeply. I guess she was a virgin at taking compliments, too.

"I know all we ever do is go to dinner," I said, smiling, "but I think we need to have a new strategy for our little times together."

"A strategy?"

"Yes. You've been fretting about reaching your thirties without having partaken of some of... life's experiences. I think what we ought to do is go back in time, and give you a chance to make up for it."

"You have a time machine, then?"

"Well. It's kind of a crude one. But I've been thinking about it. I think it'll work. First of all, save a little room, here, in this restaurant, for dessert. We won't be having dessert here. We'll go to another place I found."

Alice dutifully watched what she had for dinner. She likely would have anyway, without being told by me. I consumed my usual bounty, but I knew what I was capable of, dessert-wise, and didn't worry about it. We had a pleasant, routine time at the restaurant. I wasn't trying to impress her. I'd decided, long ago, not to try to impress Alice, but to just try to be myself, whoever that was.

I was kind of hoping that might impress her.

I drove far into the Northern suburbs after dinner, arousing Alice's curiosity but saying nothing about our destination. When we finally pulled up in front of a drive-in hamburger joint, she just gave me a look that said, "OK, now what?"

The waitresses were on roller skates at this place -- old-fashioned clamp-on skates -- and the decor was the late 1950's version of art deco. Never mind that Alice and I had grown up in the 1990s. Everybody recognized that the real "Happy Days" for teens went back to a more distant era.

It must be true. They said so on television.

"This is as close as I could get to the 'Malt Shop, '" I explained to Alice. "I want you to pretend that you're a teen-ager again, and we're on our first date. We're going to a movie at the drive-in, but first we're stopping here for a sundae, or a Malt."

"It looks pretty authentic to me," she said. "Did you really do this kind of stuff, growing up?"

"Never mind what I did, growing up," I told her. "You and I are going to do some historical reenactments. This is the first of several I have in mind. You are -- oh, you're sixteen tonight. And I'm a little older. Eighteen, maybe. A real man of the world."

"My parents wouldn't have allowed me to go out alone with a boy when I was sixteen. And certainly not with an eighteen-year-old boy."

"Probably they wouldn't have been too thrilled about my being Black, either."

"Maybe not. I don't think they were bigots, but they were extremely old-fashioned. Still, you could have been the very-white boy next door that they had watched growing up for the past decade, and it wouldn't have made any difference."

"You had a deprived childhood," I told her. "We're going to pretend that your folks were a little more like -- well, like mine were. If you had been their daughter, they would have been a bit nervous, maybe, about your going out on a date -- with a boy who had his own car, no less -- but they'd have let you do it, after a half-hour or so of warnings and reminders, and maybe a few dire threats."

"A boy with his own Jaguar, no less!"

"No, no. This is not a Jag. This is a six-year-old Chevy. It's my Dad's car, borrowed for the occasion. I have my own car -- a 15-year-old Dodge, but it's a rust-bucket, entirely unsuitable for a date with Alice Winslow."

"So. I'm a special date, for you?"

"Are you kidding? Oh, yeah! All the guys at school have been waiting, waiting, for you to get to your 16^th birthday. You've already put them off, telling them you couldn't go out on dates until you were 16."

"And my birthday was -- when?"

"Three days ago," I told her. "I came up to you in study hall on your birthday, and I gave you a single red rose, and asked you out for Friday night."

"And I said 'yes?'"

"Well, no, not right then. You said you'd have to ask your folks -- remember? But you did, and then we both spent an hour on the couch, tonight at your house, talking to your Dad, before he'd let you go out with me... And you've got to be home early. Ten-thirty, you've got to be home."

"But you said we're going to go to a drive-in movie. It's... it's summer. It won't even get dark enough to show a movie until about 9 o'clock!"

"It's not summer! It's late April! I asked you out at school, remember? And it gets dark a lot earlier, in April. We'll be fine."

"I can't believe there is still a drive-in theater in Baltimore," Alice said.

"Well, there isn't... exactly."

"Then what are we going to do?"

"Just enjoy your malted, there. And I'll show you."

We drove to my house from the drive-in Malt Shop and I opened the garage door from inside the Jag and drove it into the garage.

Inside my spotless three-car garage, I had an ancient Toyota pickup truck sitting in the middle bay. The empty bay on the far right was equipped with a 52-inch television monitor, mounted on a high makeshift table, covered all the way to the floor by a dark green blanket.