Heidi

In high school, the narrator, a self-proclaimed nerd, had an improbable romance with a popular girl named Heidi. They had a close-knit group of friends and enjoyed being together. Despite their different social statuses, they started dating. However, the narrator suggested keeping their relationship a secret, fearing ridicule from others. This upset Heidi, but they stayed together. During their senior year, they faced opposition and nasty remarks from classmates. Despite this, they stayed together and became rebels against the social order. When they graduated, the narrator went to college and Heidi met someone else. They broke up, and the narrator was left feeling clueless and heartbroken. The narrator then experienced a long period of romantic drought. Hi, this is David Roberts, author of Sparks from Culture. It's June 1st. She was popular, I was a nerd, my improbable high school romance. Heidi was my first and only high school girlfriend. She disparaged herself to be with me. I used disparagement in its original sense, to marry or have a romance with someone of a lesser rank. This was 1979, and Heidi and I were like characters in a John Hughes movie, before John Hughes movies even existed. Just like those 1980s movies that defined high school, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, the hundred kids in our grade at the Riverdale Country School had long been irrevocably sorted into casts. In our case, Heidi was a beauty and I was a nerd. Once in the boys' locker room, I witnessed a cool kid, long hair, lacrosse stick, later a veterinarian, dress down a fellow nerd. Quote, you're not a jock, you're not a brain, a nod toward me. You're not a druggie, no girl will look at you, you're nothing. That day in the locker room, witnessed that awful verbal evisceration of a fellow nerd, I was glad I'd been spared. I was glad as well to learn that cool kids, such as this future bet, considered me a brain among nerds. Still, I was never invited to any of the cool kids' parties, which were the only parties I was aware of. Heidi was pretty, thus popular, long dark hair and a pleasing symmetry of features. Her natural place was with the jocks and the cool kids. She had dated the older captain of the football team, the quarterback. He was handsome enough to later become an accomplished on-air TV journalist. His name was Billy McGowan, which became for me the only possible name for a football captain. Heidi and I had a mutual school friend named Andy, whose home cast was with me and my fellow nerds. But unlike me, Andy wasn't shy. He had the gift of a keen Irish wit, and he would consort with anyone in the grave, regardless of their cast. Andy was friendly with Heidi, and in the summer before our senior year, Andy included Heidi in gatherings of our small group of nerds. She found us amusing or interesting, and we became comfortable in her presence. I don't know what we spoke about, but I know we spoke with the undue authority of precocious 17-year-olds who'd read a great deal more than we'd lived. We offered no opinions, only pronouncements. I talked the most. Early that summer, Andy took me aside to tell me that Heidi liked me, as in liked liked me. It was the most astounding, thrilling piece of news I'd ever received. Along with my thrill came fright. I had zero experience with girls, so I had no idea to do with this scarcely believable information, no idea how to proceed, and I was too embarrassed to ask anyone. Appearance and its close cousin coolness have been the sorting mechanisms in high school, so there seemed to be a tremendous incongruity in Heidi being attracted to me. Just three years earlier, in eighth grade, I'd overheard a girl say of me, quote, how could anyone possibly be uglier? And that prior year, I'd heard that some mysterious electorate of boys had sorted the girls in our grade and ranked Heidi as fourth most attractive. I wanted to go out with Heidi, but even with Andy's assurance in hand, I was still too afraid to ask her. So Heidi, who'd had boyfriends, initiated our first date. We went to Adam's Apple, a restaurant and disco, which shared ownership with Tavern on the Green, and was decorated just as garishly. Drinking age back then was 18. IDs were not checked, so we drank. Over dessert, I made an emphatic conversational point by thumping my palm down and ended up catapulting a fork onto an adjacent table. God bless Heidi, she thought it was hilarious. Fool that I was, I didn't kiss her that night. So she had to initiate our first kiss. It was the first time I'd kissed a girl. I remember the taste of that first kiss, electric and delicious. In the summer, we could be boyfriend and girlfriend away from the social glare of Riverdale, one of the good private schools on a large campus in the nice part of the Bronx, just above Manhattan. Our grade was virtually all white, and almost everyone lived on the Upper East Side, or at least I assumed they did. Unlike the John Hughes movies, differences in wealth didn't seem to me to be a factor at Riverdale. I was aware of some prominently connected kids, the daughter of a bishop, the son of a media mogul, the niece of a famous writer. Perhaps others were aware of wealth differences. My family had a very large apartment, and some of the kids who came over must have noticed. There was one kid who asked me incessantly how many square feet our apartment was. I had no idea, and the question embarrassed me. I lived on 73rd and Park, and Heidi's family lived in a large townhouse on 69th Street, close to Central Park. That summer and during most of our relationship, we needed her home because it offered us privacy. Living with my two younger brothers, ages 9 and 11, we had no hope of privacy in my home, no matter its size. I had no basis of comparison, so I didn't realize how lucky I was to have such a sweet and kind first girlfriend. Of her own volition, Heidi would bake chocolate chip cookies for my little brothers, something they still remember. She was aces in their eyes. Heidi was an accomplished artist, but not a natural academic student. My talents were the opposite. When school started, and I was forced under protest to take art in order to graduate, she tried to help me with my art projects, i.e. help me cheat by drawing them for me, but she had too much talent to pull it off. She just couldn't draw badly enough. Summer was over, and the start of our senior year at school loomed. I suggested to Heidi that we keep our relationship a secret. I feared that her cool friends would ridicule her for dating me, and then she would dump me. More so, I feared being ridiculed myself for daring to be in a relationship with someone beyond what I merited. When I suggested secrecy, I hid my real reasons. Instead, I left it vague, telling her that remaining clandestine would be fun, like a game, but she immediately assumed it was because I was ashamed of her. We were in the park at dusk. She pushed me away and started to cry. I told her that I loved her, that it was my mistake, and that there was no need to keep it a secret. I'd underestimated her. School started, and we got the result I'd feared. Guys made nasty remarks to me about Heidi. They hurt, but I ignored them. I still remember the identity of those classmates. The half-life, the grudges of a writer, are much slower than a normal person's, and some grudges last forever. The nastiness of those boys came from jealousy, and whether they knew it or not, it came as well as a reaction to a revolutionary threat to their social order. If a nerd, even a brainy nerd like me, could have Heidi as a girlfriend, then what did it really mean to be a jock or to be cool? Heidi also got blowback. She told me she asked one of her best friends if she could see how Heidi might think I was cute. Her good friend, initials EA, said, David Roberts, come on. You have to be kidding me. But Heidi and I stayed together throughout our senior year. On school nights when we didn't see each other, we'd talk on the phone for hours. The opposition to our romance bound us together as rebels against the system. She would tell me gossip about all the cool kids, mostly about who else was in a real relationship like ours. Very few, actually, which made us feel superior and closed in our little pod. I don't remember Heidi and I discussing what would happen when we graduated. She didn't plan to go away to school. I was headed off to UPenn. I just figured that somehow we'd stay boyfriend and girlfriend, that somehow nothing would change, that I had no need to do anything to preserve or advance the relationship. That summer, I worked on Wall Street for my uncle's investment bank. Heidi worked as a camp counselor where she met a fellow worker, her boss, an older guy named Cliff. He was already in his 20s. She told me that Cliff had asked her out. She asked me what she should do. I was completely unprepared in both experience and maturity to answer that question, so I resorted to a facsimile or disguise of what I thought being a tough guy was all about. I told her she should, quote, do whatever you want. Maybe it was the answer she wanted to hear, or maybe she wanted to know how committed I was. In either case, it's a moment I look back on with wonder at how I could possibly have been so utterly clueless, so utterly stupid. When Heidi told me it was over, we were in my parents' living room, the largest and most formal room in the apartment, many seating areas to choose from. She sat near but not next to me on one of the sofas, and when I tried to move over and put my arm around her shoulders, she removed herself to a facing chair. She told me that Cliff had asked her to marry him and that she was considering the offer. I realized then that for quite a number of weeks, Heidi had been avoiding seeing me. She'd used various excuses that seemed plausible at the time. She had a big heart, and it must have been hard for her to tell me she was moving on. I took the news as I thought a real man should, with a minimum show of emotion and a vibe of, sure, if that's what you want. Inside, I felt great sorrow until I quickly buried the feeling away as deeply as I could. As an adolescent in constant fear of being mocked, I had developed the skill to suppress any specific unpleasantness. Instead, I left myself with a general and undifferentiated sense of dread. So I arrived at college without having the security of a girlfriend back home. There, I convinced myself that my senior year had been the exception to the rule that had been established in my first three years of high school. No girl would ever want me. Then began a long and painful romantic drought that lasted for two and a half years until my next and final pre-marriage romance, which involved a different type of disparagement. Come back next week for that. Question for the comments. How does your high school experience relate to what I've written? It's the end of the post, but I do have a writer's note, so continue listening if you'd like to hear it. It is a blessing and a curse to excavate the feelings of a long-ago past romance. A blessing to understand myself better and examine what happened with the benefit of 45 more years of experience and a lot of therapy. A curse because reliving these emotions is bittersweet. A curse also for the writer's spouse because if the writing is any good, the spouse may feel the writer's long-ago passion come off the page. She may think he is searching for something that's missing in his current life. That's far from the truth in my case, but once released, a piece of writing becomes alive and malleable in the hands of whoever reads it. In other words, my wife, Debbie, we met in 1984, were married in 1985, read a draft of this post and was hurt by it. Debbie is the editor and final arbiter of all posts I sent. She initially interpreted this one as an expression of my regret rather than an attempt to relive something I hadn't thought about for over 40 years. My daughter, Lauren, 36, to whom I often turn for guidance in these matters, helped me understand exactly how my writing struck a nerve with Debbie. The pain already felt and addressed, this post is going out with Debbie's permission, with the stricken out words of with Debbie's infinitely loving blessing. The end. Thank you very much for listening.