Chapter 18: Opening A Present

Saturday, December 18, 1971

I went over to Jeana’s about 5:30 on Saturday to pick her up. I had made reservations at a steak house in Timonium for 6:30. The dance was at the school, from 8:00 until 11:00, and then the party was at Ray’s afterwards. His parents were away for the weekend, which was like leaving the hen house unlocked and inviting the foxes over for a free chicken dinner. He would cover for us.

“Well, don’t you look dashing!” commented Mrs. Colosimo as she ushered me inside. “Louis, doesn’t Carl look handsome!” she called to her husband in the living room.

He looked at me, with the confused look most men do when responding to their wife’s questions which don’t require a response. “Yes, very nice. Welcome. Come on in, Carl.”

“Thank you. Here, Mrs. Colosimo. I wasn’t sure if I would get a chance to bring this over before Christmas, so why don’t I give it to you now.” I was holding a large foil wrapped package, and she took it with considerable curiosity.

“Thank you. What is it? Jeana will be down in a moment, I’m sure. Take your coat off.”

“Thank you.” It was a chilly evening, like most December evenings in Maryland, cold but no snow. A white Christmas was a rarity here. Snow normally didn’t start until early January. I had worn a trench coat and dark leather gloves along with my trademark fedora. I peeled them all off, leaving me in my suit.

“Oooh, you really do look cute! Too bad there’s only one of you. Do you have a brother?” she teased. Mr. Colosimo gave a laughing snort.

“Yes, but he’s quite a bit younger than me, and I don’t think he’d be able to handle a sophisticated lady like yourself.” That got hearty laughs out of both of them.

Mister Colosimo went to the stairwell and yelled up the stairs. “You’d better get a move on, Jeana. Carl is putting the moves on your mother!”

“Hold on! Give me a break!” came bellowing back down the stairs.

I grinned at her parents. “You might as well open that up now and figure out what you’re going to do with it.”

They gave me a curious look, and Mrs. Colosimo tore open the foil wrapping. Inside was a large poinsettia plant in full blossom. “Oh, it’s beautiful!” she exclaimed.

“My mom is always getting poinsettias for Christmas. If you take care of them, they will keep blossoming for weeks and weeks,” I commented.

“I know. My sister grows them. This is very nice. Thank you,” she replied.

“Then ask her what to do with it, because that is the sum total of what I know about flowers.”

Just then the click of high heels announced that Jeana had joined us. I turned to face her and whistled. “Wow! Don’t you look good!”

“Thank you!” she said, blushing.

“Turn around.”

Jeana pirouetted and I whistled again. “I repeat, wow!” Jeana had gone with a bright red cocktail dress, nicely tight on her buxom frame, with a U-shaped neckline front and rear, and short enough that it came several inches above her knees. She was wearing sheer hose and matching red pumps. “We won’t be able to dance, since I’ll be too busy fighting the other guys off!”

“You look pretty nice, too,” Jeana replied.

Her mother agreed. “He’s pretty cute.”

I glanced over at Jeana’s father, who had an amused expression on his face and was rolling his eyes. I just gave him a good-natured shrug. I had dressed nicely tonight. The only school dances you needed to be formal for are the proms, otherwise, a suit was sufficient. In those days you wore a suit and a tie to a school dance, and the girl wore a dress. By the time my own children were going to school dances, the dress code seemed to peak out at ‘clean.’ They looked the same as when they went to school.

Tonight, I had on a dark charcoal gray suit with an understated plaid, and a hint of a red thread in the plaid. Dark charcoal suits are good for any formal occasion. I had a brand-new black dress shirt, which for the time was rather daring, and a bright red tie to go with the plaid. Black dress socks and black wingtips finished it off. I thought I looked good, but when I was with a girl as gorgeous as Jeana, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest. Nobody would be looking at me, except her, and she was who I wanted to look good for.

Jeana looked exceptional, with just enough makeup to offset her dark complexion and add a splash of color to her lips. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small Christmas paper wrapped jewelry box. “I thought about waiting until Christmas to give this to you, but I decided tonight might be better.”

“What is it?” she asked excitedly.

“You’ll never know unless you open it.” I handed it to her, and she quickly tore the Christmas wrapping off. Inside was the jewelry box, which stopped her in her tracks. She opened this much more slowly and stared inside.

“Ohhhh...” I had bought Jeana a gold necklace, with the centerpiece being a pair of gold hearts that were linked. “It’s beautiful!” she whispered, as much to herself as to any of the rest of us.

I took it from her hands. “Here, let’s see how it looks.” I touched Jeana on her shoulder and had her turn away, and then reached around and did up the clasp from behind. She could see what I was doing in the reflection in the mirror in the foyer. Her breathing stopped as I draped the necklace across her throat.

“It’s gorgeous!” she exclaimed. The next thing I knew she had whirled around and thrown her arms around my neck and was planting a major league kiss on me, right there in the foyer with her parents watching. I glanced over at them; her mother was amused, her father not so much. I held my hands up in a pleading fashion, to say, ‘Hey, don’t blame me!’ After a moment, Jeana’s father cleared his throat loudly and tapped his daughter on the shoulder, and she released me. The look in her eyes didn’t go away, though, which I thought boded well for later.

Jeana’s mother loaned her a good coat and a scarf, and I put my trench coat back on, and I escorted Jeana to my car. Once inside, she turned to me and said, “Do you really want to go to the dance?”

I had to laugh. “Yes, I do, if simply to show off my beautiful date!” I laughed again and put the car in gear. “And I’m hungry, too! I have this funny feeling that being with you tonight is going to take a lot out of me!”

Jeana giggled at that, and we went to dinner. We both ordered steaks and baked potatoes, and ice teas. Maybe I could have brazened out ordering a drink, but no way Jeana looked 18. I didn’t even try to fake it. After dinner we got on York Road and drove down into Towson. We got there just a few minutes after 8:00.

All the school dances, except for the Senior Prom, were held in the gym, even the Junior-Senior Prom. Only the Senior Prom was held off site, at a night club rented for the evening. As a result, we parked in the regular school parking lot and made our way to the gym. Outside the gym, in the hallway, several folding tables had been set up to block our way, and form a coat room of sorts, with several large coat racks behind it. The dance committee was running the coat room.

Like every other high school dance committee across the nation, Towson High’s consisted of six people - four good looking girls who liked to help, one gay guy trying not to be obvious, and one horrendously ugly guy hoping to use whatever infinitesimal influence he might gain to be able to score a dance with a girl. At the moment, the coat room was being run by two of the girls, Becky Stafford, who I knew (but not in that sense!), and Shelley Talbot, she of Science Fair fame. “Good evening, ladies! You two are looking mighty festive tonight!” I said as I got to the table.

Both girls had on Christmas-themed outfits. Shelley wore a green skirt and red blouse, and Becky had a red dress and green pantyhose. I assume they were pantyhose. Stockings didn’t come back into fashion until the Eighties. They posed for us a second, smiling, and Becky said, “It seemed appropriate.”

Shelley grinned when she saw me with Jeana. “Who’s this Carl? The newest member of your harem?”

Jeana looked shocked at this, but I just smiled and wagged my finger at Shelley. “Be nice!” I turned to Jeana. “Jeana, this is Shelley Talbot. Shelley, Jeana Colosimo. Shelley and I won the Science Fair together at Towsontown Junior a couple of years ago.”

“More like Carl won it and Shelley tagged along,” commented Becky, cattily. Shelley stuck her tongue out at Becky, who promptly returned the favor.

I wagged my finger at Becky, too. “Shelley helped quite a bit,” I responded. I handed over our coats and my hat and pocketed the ticket. “Anyway, the decorations look very nice, almost as nice as you two look, so we’ll be going inside.” Jeana and I thanked the girls and I pulled her away, before Shelley and Becky managed to get a three-way catfight going.

“What was all that about?” asked Jeana after we got inside the door to the gym. She almost had to yell in my ear, since the music was so loud. No way could the doorkeepers hear us.

“Shelley has some mixed feelings about the Science Fair. We won, but she wasn’t invited to participate in some research papers over at Towson State, and I was. She gets a little catty about it.”

Jeana stared at me for a moment. “Towson State? Like, Towson State College? You did a research paper for a college?”

I tried to shrug it off. “I was just one in the group. It was no big deal.”

“How old were you? This was two years ago? You were fourteen? How many papers?” she pestered me.

I took a couple of minutes to explain things to Jeana, but if I was trying to minimize my involvement, it failed. She was stunned that I was doing things like that. Wait until she realized I would be starting classes over there in another few weeks.

We walked around the dance floor, where the standard mix of students was milling about. This early in the dance, not very many were dancing yet. A punch bowl was set up in the corner, with the watchful eye of the Vice-Principal making sure nobody tried to spike the punch.

Suddenly Jeana looked at me with a grin. “Was Shelley part of your harem?”

I groaned at that. I had been hoping that Jeana would have forgotten the comment. “I don’t have a harem!”

“That’s not what Shelley says. Maybe the Carl Buckman Experience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Maybe you need a good spanking!”

She pulled my head down to where she could speak directly into my ear. “Would that be on my bare bottom?” I jerked away from her in serious surprise, as she laughed. “I’ve never been part of a harem before. Maybe I should get one of those harem outfits like in I Dream of Jeannie.” She gave an impromptu belly dance for me, which made me laugh.

It was her turn to get the finger wag. “Just you behave, or you might get both!”

I decided to end this line of discussion. Fortunately, the band picked that moment to start a slow set. Yes, we had a band. In those days, DJ equipment was very expensive. It was a lot cheaper to hire a live band to play, and there were always high school and college age bands that would do covers of popular songs while they worked their way to stardom. That was the theory, anyway. Some were good and some were awful, but loud. This was about average. I pulled Jeana onto the dance floor and took her in my arms.

Back in the day, I had learned some ballroom dancing. Marilyn enjoyed dancing, and while I look like a spastic moron dancing to anything fast, the slower romantic stuff was easy. I also had a bad right knee, from time beyond memory, and I could always use that as an excuse. Nowadays my knees were still good, but I wondered if that was going to last.

The standard slow dance among teenagers is to simply hold each other and rock sideways and twist around. No style, but you get to make out with your girl legally. That was what Jeana and I did through the first song, but during the second, You’ve Got A Friend by James Taylor, I taught her the box step, a simple four beat dance step that made you look like you could actually dance. Jeana was a very quick learner. At the end of the song, a number of people were watching us, and a few clapped. “I didn’t know you knew how to dance!” exclaimed Jeana.

I shrugged. “I’m good at all sorts of things involving moving with a beautiful girl.”