Patience is a virtue

Mom was full of truisms. Patience is a virtue. All things come to he who waits. All men want (boys) want only one thing.

Never, ever, under any circumstances, even if you are bleeding by the side of the road, get into a car with a boy you don't know. Even one you do know if he's not a cousin.

Patience was not my virtue. Opposites were. Impatience. Standing by the side of the road with my thumb out tempting fate, but that was later. In high school, I seldom got into cars with boys because what self-respecting boy would want a scaggy, thick glasses wearing, dressed like a frump, pimply girl in his car?

Of course there were the disreputable ones, the ones to whom self-respect was a concept they had no concept of.

That's probably why I found myself in the back seat of Cheryl MacIntosh's Volkswagon at Salisbury beach making out with a very drunk Bobby Whittaker.

Bobby was cute, long blonde hair falling into his eyes, many of popular girls even had been known to get into back seats with him. Kissing was the most I would allow on this sultry summer afternoon just blocks off the boardwalk, with Cheryl leaning on the front bumper, such as it was, scarfing down fried clams and french fries out of greasy take away boxes.

We had been smoking. Cigarettes, not reefer. There were some places even I, the shoplifter, the cheating girlfriend, the loose one in the back seat of the car, would not go. Kissing was as far as I would go with Bobby, who was so drunk, he didn't even push for anything more.

After he fell out onto the ground and stumbled off, Cheryl said, with her been-there-done-that air of superiority, "That's the last you'll see of him, you know."

I didn't care. I had the mark of Bobby Whittaker stamped on my face permanently.

I had had a weakness for boys names Bobby before, and there would be many more to come.

Another time, Cheryl and I found ourselves at a party with some more Bobbies, only their names were probably something else They were from out of town, and we all decided to go for a ride in their car, some kind of 1950's rattletrap, big as tank, only made out of tin. not armor plate. We got to our destination, a club a few towns over, and then when it was time to leave, the car sputtered a few blocks down the highway and died completely.

One of the boys found a pay phone and called his mom, who wasn't especially thrilled at being roused at midnight, to come and get us. I had no choice. I had to call my mom, who I knew would be waiting in her chair by the phone, in the dark, no TV to keep her company, no comforting bottle of scotch. Maybe cold black coffee, waiting for the phone call from the hospital or police she knew she'd inevitably get one night.

I was supposed to be out with Cheryl at a girl's pool party; in fact, we had started out the evening at the girl's house, but those kinds of parties always turned coed, even if the parents assured my mom no boys were invited, just girls having a good time, gossiping and swimming and giggling in their new bikinis in the lawn chairs. The parents would be home, don't worry.

She worried. Rightly so in that boys were indeed present, once the parents left the chilling night air for their TV's, Milton Berle, or Ed Sullivan, or Bonanza, depending on the night of the week, and the girls and the paired up.

No dummies, we weren't interested in freezing by the pool either, so we grabbed our sweaters and loafers and paired off with the boys.

Our boys were from Leominster and they knew a cool place there for folk music. Believe me, I was still the most innocent of boy-crazy girls. And the boys were, in fact, perfect gentlemen. Square, college bound, this was as crazy as they got. Perfect for me, at my stage of arrested adolescence; Cheryl found them boring. But the poolside chatter even more so. So we went to the club, heard some wannabe Bob Dylan imitator, and at a decent hour, well before curfew, were headed home.

The sputtering car put an end to thoughts of slipping in under Mom's radar. I had no choice but to call her, since the boys parents weren't coming for several minutes; it was almost midnight; the car had to be towed and the parents would have to then drive these strange girls homes. They were not happy.

My mom was apoplectic, once she realized I was not raped in a ditch. She lost no time telling me, I was saved by a twist of fate this time, but if I ever did this again, not only would my limp body, misused and maybe even with the life crushed out of it, be the outcome, but a sure heart attack would fell my mother in her prime, leaving me motherless, and worse, in charge of raising my baby sister all on my own.

Naturally, car trips with boys were off my social calendar for a long long time.