"Have a great time at the dance,"
my mom said as I stepped out of the car, replete with a wide-lapelled
velour jacket with my large shirt collar worn on the outside. I looked
down, admiring my tight-fitting Angel's Flight
slacks and black platform shoes. I look just like the guys on Soul
Train, I thought to myself. My hand came up to check that my
puka shell necklace, bought not in Hawaii but at Silverman's disco
clothing store downtown at the local mall, was properly in place.
I was ready for action.

    Cathy's father answered the door. He was a
normal-looking man with a mustache, a dad like most dads in the Midwest,
the kind of guy you could easily imagine being in a bowling league
and enjoying the wide-eyed exploits of Dondi on the funnies page.

    "Well, you must be Paul,"
he said in a casual tone that showed he had greeted Cathy's dates
several times before.

    "Yes, sir, it's nice to meet you."

    "C'mon in. Cathy's almost ready."

    I entered their house. Cathy's mom was at
the top of the stairs, gazing down with a look that said she was trying
to control her giddiness about something.

    "Cathy's almost ready," she said, not knowing
that her husband had uttered the exact same three words to me seconds
earlier. Cathy's father gestured for me to sit on the couch. I complied.


    "So," he said, sitting down heavily in his
armchair. "I see they don't make you wear ties to the Christmas dance,
huh?"

    The thought of wearing a tie to a dance in
1977 was as foreign as wearing pegged pants.

    "Oh, they only make you wear a tie to the
prom, I think."

    "Wow, that's pretty nice. What I wouldn't
give to not have to wear a tie to work. You know, you're lucky you
don't go to Catholic school. They make you wear ties with those uniforms.
He shook his head, his eyes getting the look of a man whose mind was
going back to unpleasant times.

    "They made me wear a tie to school for years.
Man, did I hate that."

    It's always weird talking to somebody else's
parents because you realize how different your life could have been
if you had come out of a different womb. I'm sure Cathy and her family
had heard her dad get spooky over his lifelong battle with neckwear
many times, but for me, a guy whose only goal was to French-kiss his
daughter, the man was starting to creep me out. But I forced myself
to look at him sympathetically just in case Cathy and I fell madly
in love and he was destined to become my father-in-law.

    "Huh, that's too bad," I said, trying to sound
empathetic. "That must've gotten hot in the summer."

    "Oh, Christ. Don't get me started on summer
school." Fortunately, Cathy's mom came down the stairs and
saved me from having to journey any further into her husband's dysfunctional
past. "She's read-y," her mom said in a singsongy voice that announced
she had probably spent most of the afternoon helping Cathy prepare
for this big evening.

    I looked up at the top of the stairs. Her
bedroom door was shut. There was definitely something exciting about
the whole thing, as if I were on Let's Make a Deal and was
about to find out if I'd picked the door with the car behind it. Knowing
how pretty Cathy was in school every day, my heart raced at the thought
of how beautiful she was going to look after half a day of preparation.


    The door opened. Cathy stepped out slowly
with a shy look on her face, a look I had seen on the faces of brides
in so many Westerns, when the innocent farm girl is first revealed
in her wedding dress to her intended. In those movies, the cowboy
always slowly takes off his hat in reverence to her unexpected beauty
and whistles to himself, amazed. I stared up at her. Cathy looked
down over the railing and gave me a coy little smile. Her expression
bore the words, So . . . what do you think?

    So . . . what did I think.

    Zonk, as Monty Hall would say.

    She was terrifying. Whatever she and her mom
had been up to all afternoon should not have occurred. Cathy's normally
soft Dorothy Hamill hair had been sprayed up into a shape best described
as a Nazi stormtrooper helmet. It hovered up and away from the edges
of her scalp like a flying saucer, defying both gravity and attractiveness.
Her face had been made up like a ventriloquist dummy's, with bright
red cheeks and thick blue eyeshadow that said less "I'm your dream
girl" and more "I just got punched out in a bar fight." She was wearing
an ill-advised dress that was very silk-esque and clinging, which
instead of being enticing simply drew attention to the fact that Cathy
had the tiniest bit of gut. The tops of her arms, which had never
before been exposed to me, were now on display and revealed an overabundance
of moles. She wore white pumps with a noncomittal heel that looked
exactly like the shoes nurses used to wear in hospital shows from
the 1960s. And topping off her ensemble was a loosely knit white shawl
draped around her shoulders — the exact same shawl I'd seen my
eighty-something grandmother wear for years. If one could ever hear
the sound of a libido dropping, the thud of mine must have been deafening.


    "Wow, Cathy," I said, forcing myself to sound
like the husbands I'd heard on TV shows. "You look great."

    Cathy gave me a shy smile and descended the
stairs. Her mother delivered her to me as if we were at the wedding
altar, while her father took pictures of us. As we stood together
posing, clouds of Love's Baby Soft wafted off Cathy and assaulted
my nose like the plague that killed off the firstborn males of Egypt
in The Ten Commandments. Maybe I wasn't cut out for this dating thing,
I thought. Because looking at Cathy right then, the last thing I wanted
to do was make out with her.