Eloise

It was summer, and I was at a neighborhood park which bordered the banks along Seven Springs Creek when I first noticed her.  The city had built a covered pavilion for the park, hired a college student to supervise activities, and installed a ping pong table, horseshoes, and other games to keep us all entertained during the summer.  There were also swings, slides, and a jungle gym,  I had been going to the park daily to do chin-ups on the jungle gym - and had worked my way up to twenty or more. 

All the kids in my neighborhood began frequenting the park, that summer, and the attendant, a college girl living nearby, did a really good job of planning activities for us.  But my favorite activity (besides doing chin-ups) was playing ping-pong. 

We had a system of champion and challenger in ping-pong.  Anyone could challenge you.  If you won, the loser yielded to the next challenger.  You could play as long as you could win,  When you lost, you went to the bottom of the challenger queue.  I got pretty good, and there were only a few kids who could beat me occasionally, and only one who could beat me consistently - but he only showed up occasionally, so I stayed at the table a lot, fending off challengers.

Eloise would often challenge me.  But instead of just beating her, I found myself very much enjoying our interaction, and I would deliberately prolong our games, foregoing any slams so we had more time together.  She was a pretty good player also, and maybe she did the same.  Our games tended to last a very long time - so long, in fact, that other challengers would get bored and leave - giving us even more time together. 

I was 16 and she was 12, going on 13 when we first met.  She was too young for me to entertain romantic thoughts, but she was old enough for me notice her, and appreciate the promise of what she might develop into.  All that summer, she and I tended to be at the ping-pong table, playing long games.  While I continued my near-daily chin-ups routine, it was ping-pong with Eloise that became my incentive, and the sight of her would light up my eyes. 

Then one day, along about the end of summer, she wasn't there.  For several days she wasn't there.  I asked one of her schoolmates what happened to her.  The reply was that she had moved away to another town.  Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, I felt a loss, and I found myself missing her.  I walked by the house where she used to live.  It looked forlorn and empty.  I walked up to the door and knocked on the door - nobody answered.  I peeked in a side window and saw the house was bare - completely empty. 

~ ~ ~

It seemed like A year had passed, but maybe it was only months or weeks.  It was well into Fall.  The air was cool, and I was riding my brother's bicycle, delivering telegrams for Western Union.  I had just delivered a telegram in the colored part of town.  We were still segregated then, but Western Union only hired white boys, and colored people got a lot of telegrams - maybe twice as much as white people, so I delivered a lot of telegrams to the coloreds.   

Anyway, I still had one last telegram to deliver, and I decided to take the most direct route, which cut down a street that went through my enemy's territory - a bigger, older kid I had a fight with before.  I had broke my hand on his jaw, and had to stop fighting, but promised him we would take up where we left off as soon as my hand healed.  He was considered a hoodlum and a thug by others, and some of my older sister's friends warned me he was dangerous. 

But I wasn't one to back down from anyone trying to push me around.  I wasn't afraid of him, though I wasn't eager to take on him and his little gang at the same time.  We had met in town once after the fight, and he tried to crow that he had bested me, but I reminded him that he had only felt the power of my left hand, and not my more powerful right hand - that as soon as my left hand healed, I would demonstrate my right to him.  That seemed to put him out of sorts.  His face lost its braggadocio, and he stepped back as if I might just do it right then.  I had hit him really hard with my left hand at the fight - so hard it staggered him back a couple of steps and stunned him.  I think he still remembered the force of it. 

But I digress.  Back to the story, I didn't see anyone I didn't like as I rode down the street.  But near the end of the street I saw a girl playing basketball with some other kids - sort of half in the street.  She looked familiar, and I slowed down and looked a little more intently.  Then she saw me, and waved for me to come over.  It was Eloise, and I was so glad to see her.  I could see that she was also glad to see me.  It was like a light came on in both our eyes.  We chatted a short while,  I told her that I had missed her, and that someone had told me she had moved out of town, which made me very sad.  She showed me where her house was across the street.  I told her I had to go so I could deliver my last telegram and get back to Western Union before my allotted time ran out. 

Then she put her hand on mine, looked in my eyes, and said to come see her.  It was genuine look of something more than friendship, maybe budding love.  And I promised I would.     

~ ~ ~

It wasn't long, maybe a few days at most, before I showed up on her doorstep.  I think we were in a holiday season, so school wasn't an issue, or maybe it was a weekend.  She introduced me to her mom, and her older brother and his wife, and later on, her father came home and I was presented to him.  I expected some resistance from them because I was a few years older than her,  However, if they had any such concern, they did not voice it, nor did they show any.  Her mom was a pretty woman, already showing gray in her hair.  She seemed a happy person, and seemed to genuinely like me, and perhaps proud her daughter had attracted me.  Her dad seemed old and tired, and though he showed affection for Eloise, seemed disinterested in me.  From what I was told, he was a roustabout in the oil industry.  They obviously were among the lower middle class, struggling financially, much like my own family. 

She took me to her bedroom so we would be alone together.  I sat down on a wooden chair, and she sat down on my lap, which sort of surprised me.  We didn't kiss and engage in any petting - we were more like two people who just like to be close to each other, but didn't quite know what to do with each other, or weren't quite ready, for sexual overtures.  Her mom came in the room and told her something, but didn't seem to object to us being alone in the bedroom, or to her sitting on my lap.  Eventually, it was time for me to go.  I don't remember exactly how that conclusion came about, but I think it was because it was their dinnertime, and I was one mouth too many for them to feed. 

Over the next year we had dates.  I remember trying to take her to a prom, in my brother's car, but it conked out on a few blocks from her house, and we walked back to her house and called it a night.  I walked all the way home with the news that I had drained the car battery trying to start it.   Another time I remember us driving in that same car while she spotted a girl friend of hers who had married very young.  I told her I would like us to be married, but she said she wasn't ready for that - that she was too young. 

~ ~ ~

Then I graduated from high school, joined the Air Force and moved away.  I was gone maybe six months - which was the interval that I met Mary Ann and  Gloria in Denver.  When I came back, I went to see Eloise.  She was out playing basketball, just like the time I re-discovered her.  I found her growing even better looking than before,  She was filling out and becoming a stunning young lady.  I think we went someplace together, but I can't remember where - just that it was night when I brought her home, and kissed her for the first time.

Then I went away, not to return for a year.  When I finally returned home I was an adult expected to take care of myself.  I found employment as a construction laborer.  It was a job I quickly came to dislike.  Not because it was hard - I was young and quite strong - strong enough to pick up a ten-foot heavy steel road form by myself and toss it on or over a flatbed truck.  But the job paid very little. I worked all day at hard, sweaty labor, and I was always taking directions from someone else -- I was on the bottom of a career ladder leading nowhere. 

When Autumn approached, I drove over to the closest engineering college, about seventy miles away and enrolled.  I didn't have much money, but the college gave me a part-time job serving food in the school cafeteria.  The pay was my tuition and room and board.  It made all the difference in the world, as otherwise I simply wouldn't have had the wherewithal to attend college.

Engineering is a very intense career choice, and between my classes, studies, and part-time work in the cafeteria, I had no time left for dating, not to mention I had no money to spend on girls.  I spent the next three years, including summers, in near celibacy devoted entirely to pursuing an engineering degree.  The only break I took was during Easter break to go to Mexico with my brother and a couple of other college mates. 

~ ~ ~

In my third year of college I got a surprise telephone call.  It was Eloise,  She was graduating from high school, and wanted me to be there for her graduation, and to celebrate later.  I told her I didn't have a dime to my name to take her out,  But she told to come anyway, and not to worry about the money.  I asked if she didn't have a boy friend to go out with, but she replied that she wanted to be with me.

I hadn't seen or spoken to her for a couple of years, so when I saw her at her high school graduation, I was stunned as to how pretty and sexy she had grown.  She had arranged for us to double-date with another couple, and they all wanted to go night clubbing.  I protested that I had no money to be going out, but Eloise just told me again to be quiet and not worry about it.  But I got a lot of dirty looks from the guy double dating with us when he had to pick up all the tabs.  That made me very uncomfortable, because I don't like to be beholden to anyone.  We were dropped off at Eloise's home sometime after midnight.  And Eloise and I had a very long, passionate embrace and a long series of kisses. 

~ ~ ~

I had long contemplated marriage to Eloise, but she had always been reluctant to entertain the idea, being just too young.  The three or four year gap in our ages was just too difficult to bridge.  When I went off to college, it just left me no time to travel home to see her, and we grew apart.  I lost hope that we would ever be a couple.  And something else had intervened in my life.  On a trip to Mexico during Easter break I had met a young Mexican school teacher - Maria.  We had been corresponding and I was discussing marriage with her.

Until Eloise called me to attend her high school graduation, I hadn't expected to see her again.  Now she was back in my life, and I had to make choices.  Would it be Eloise? or the girl in Mexico?  The positive aspect of Eloise is that she probably would have been my perfect mate.  But one thing that bothered me about Eloise was the possibility she would not want to marry until she finished college.  I would be graduating the next year, and I wasn't willing to wait another three or four years for her.  I needed to get a good paying job as soon as I graduated - I was really tired of being dirt poor at college.  And I wanted to be sleeping with a wife and starting a family. 

In late summer Eloise showed up on the college campus and looked me up.  She was with a girl friend, all excited about possibly getting a tennis scholarship,  But I think she was also excited that we might then be in close proximity to each other.  We certainly both had a physical and emotional attraction to each other. 

But she never showed up on campus again, so maybe she didn't get the scholarship she hoped for.  During the Christmas holidays I went to Mexico again and married the Mexican school teacher.

I never saw or heard from Eloise again,  I often wonder how her life turned out for her.  For us, the parallel to the movie "Splendor in the Grass" was all to true, and in a way somewhat as tragic - in that had we ever Married, I think we would have been very happy together.  We just could never close that gap before our paths diverted for the final time.

- Simon Revere Mouer III