Little Drops of Water: A Mighty River Make

Part I—Short Stories

Kisses Remembered

The heart is a living museum. In each of its galleries, no matter how narrow or dimly lit, preserved forever like wondrous diatoms, are our moments of loving and being loved.

A Natural History of Love, Diane Ackerman, page 337.

Tom, meet my cousin, Maryann, Lynn said. Maryann, Tom, and don’t let his little-boy smile fool you.

Maryann smiled and held out her hand. Pleased to meet you. Where’s your date?

For a few seconds he forgot to reply. He was too busy gazing into her sapphire-blue eyes—wide set and sparkling with tiny points of light, and surrounded by cascading ringlets off ebony hair. Seeing her there was like finding a pigeon-blood ruby in a shovelful of brown pebbles. She radiated warmth and innocent sex appeal. His breath caught in his throat.

We broke up, he finally managed to say. She told me yesterday she has a husband overseas. She didn’t wear a ring, and I didn’t know she was married. I don’t want him coming after me with a gun when he comes home.

I don’t blame you. Do you know Captain John Walters at the air base? He’s married to my older sister.

Yes. I met him at the officers’ club, and I’ve been in a couple of friendly poker games with him. Everybody seems to like him.

He’s from Louisiana, and he plans to live here after the war and help my dad in his business.

What is that?

Dad sells farm equipment all over the state. He keeps pretty busy. He and John like each other, and Dad could use the help.

Tom and Wayne had come for Lynn, Wayne’s date. They met in the living room of her home in Newport, Arkansas. Maryann lived across town and had come to spend an hour or two with her cousin and her aunt. It was late in 1943. World War II was still raging, and Tom and Wayne were instructor pilots at an Army Air Corps flying-training facility nearby. Both had applied for transfer to a combat unit, but so far without success.

Tom had been dating a beautician who worked at a shop next door, and Wayne had first met Lynn when he came there one day with Tom.

Maryann looked directly at him as they spoke, and his heart beat faster. He could feel her magnetism drawing him. Be careful, he told himself. She looks like Miss America, but she’s young. Don’t move too fast and spoil everything.

Let’s have lunch Saturday and see a movie in the afternoon, he finally suggested. I’ll come to your home first and meet your parents.

She hesitated for a few seconds, and he held his breath.

I’d like that very much, but I can’t. I’m still in high school, and my mother has convinced me I’m too young to go out with men from the air base.

I can’t argue against your mother, because she’s probably right. I’m disappointed, but I understand.

* * *

Wayne’s date, Lynn, was five feet five, ash blonde, slender but well developed, and twenty years old. The faint aroma of Chanel number five surrounded her. Wayne was nineteen, stood five feet six, and weighed one sixty. He tried to divert attention from his youthfulness and small size by using Old Spice cologne, drinking too much, and telling ribald jokes.

I enjoy having dinner with him at the officers’ club and going dancing, but nothing more, Lynn once told Tom. I hope my friendship with him will help me meet someone I can really go for.

I’d like to marry her, Wayne once said to Tom, but I’m not sure she loves me. She hasn’t said so, and I’m afraid to ask. She lets me kiss her, but that’s all. She might dump me if I get too serious.

You may be right, Wayne, but I have a problem too. I break up with one girl and right away meet the most beautiful girl in this town. Then I find she’s still in high school and off limits to me. Not only that, her father has a successful business, and my father farms with two mules and simple tools. I’m not ashamed of my family, but I’d be embarrassed for Maryann to see the house where they live.

But you have the advantage of an officer’s uniform: dress green jacket, pink, worsted-wool trousers, lieutenant’s gold bars, and the silver wings of a pilot in the army air corps. You’re six feet two, and you have a friendly smile, wavy brown hair, and a devilish twinkle in your blue eyes. If I looked like you, I’d be the happiest man in the country.

But it hasn’t been so easy for me. I’ve spent most of my twenty three years in an unpainted farm house in Tennessee with no running water, no electricity, no natural gas, and not even a privy until I was thirteen. I grew up shy and poor, and I had my first date when I was seventeen.

That’s hard to believe. What finally got you started?

A girl passed me a note in the study hall at school. A year later I worked full time as a laborer on a bridge-building crew for the county. I gave her a little engagement ring that cost fifty dollars, and I was making ten dollars a week at the time. Then she sent me a Dear-John letter after I had been gone a couple of years in the army. I went two years without a real date.

Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you. Try being as short and ugly as I am. I’m in love with a woman who would dump me in a minute if she could have someone even half way like you. You may have had it rough for a while, but you’ve sure got it made now.

I guess you’re right. My luck changed when I became an officer and bought a car. Since I’ve been here, I’ve had no trouble getting dates, but none of them meant anything. Now I meet someone super special like Maryann, and she’s too young, the war is still on, and I could be sent overseas at any time.

In the months that followed, Tom dated frequently but was never serious. Wayne and Lynn often came with him because neither of them had a car. Many times Tom thought of Maryann and wished she were older.

I hear there are more than a hundred pilots at the air base, Lynn once said privately to Tom. Why don’t you find me one like you?

Because I’m not ready to die. Wayne would kill me, and I wouldn’t blame him. He’s my friend, and he’s crazy in love with you.

* * *

Tom and Wayne got orders to transfer. He found out from Lynn that Maryann had graduated from high school and was working in town. He went to tell her goodbye, and they met in the hallway outside her office.

I met you only once, he said, and the timing was wrong for us. But I think you’re wonderful, and I’ll never forget you. I have my orders to leave today. The war is still on, and we may never meet again. I hope you don’t mind, but I had to see you and say goodbye. Then he used the tips of his fingers to press gently upward under her chin, raising her face to his.

You’re so beautiful, he whispered. She hesitated at first, but then her trembling lips, full and soft and warm, opened as they met his for a long, slow, pulsating kiss. She made no effort to end it, and he reluctantly tapered off with a series of little baby kisses before finally withdrawing.

Goodbye and good luck, he said. I wish things could have been different.

He walked to the end of the hall and stopped to look back. She was still standing where he left her. They waved to each other as he went out the door. Leaving her there was painful, but he knew it was the right thing to do. He had to leave in a few hours, the war was still on, his future was uncertain, and it wouldn’t be fair to complicate her life any further.

He thought of that kiss often and wished he could see her again. After the war was over and he was out of uniform, he went to her town and called from a phone booth to ask her to join him for lunch.

For a few seconds there was silence on her end of the line. I have to say no, she finally said. I’ve been seeing someone, and I’ve promised to marry him. He’s not like you, but his family is in business here, and I won’t ever have to leave my home town. He worships me, and my parents love him. If I backed out now it would destroy him and my mother would never forgive me. It took me months to get over that kiss with you, and I’m still trying to forget it. I’m afraid to see you again—I have too much to lose.

Then all I can say is goodbye and good luck. He’s a lucky man, and I hope you’ll be very happy. He went back to his car and drove out of her town and out of her life. The best he could offer her was nothing compared to what she already had, and it would have been cruel to try to disrupt her future.

If we had kissed again and if in a seizure of passion she had gone somewhere with me for a couple of hours, he thought, it would have been like sampling one fabulous confection from a box of Godiva chocolates and knowing I could never have another one. That would have been even worse for me.

A couple of years later, he found some pretext to call Captain Walters, and the information operator provided his business number. At the end of the conversation he asked what happened to Maryann.

She’s married to a local boy, and they’re doing well. He works in his father’s business, and they have a little boy. She asked me once if I knew what happened to you. Did you two date when you were here?

No. I saw her only twice. I thought she was really special and asked her out. She declined because she was still in high school and her mother wouldn’t approve. I was disappointed, but had to admit her mother was right. I was older and a little on the wild side then. If you wish, you can tell her I’m doing manual labor on a dirt farm in Tennessee.

In the years that followed, the memory of the kiss stayed buried in his subconscious. Now and then it surfaced and reminded him.

It’s better for her, he told himself. "She’ll have a stable marriage, financial security, and the comfort of raising her children near her family and her friends. That was what she wanted most, and she couldn’t have had it with me.

Tom had the freedom to pursue his own interests, to travel to foreign countries, and to achieve more success and recognition than he could have hoped for. And best of all, he was free to marry his soul-mate when he finally met her.

"It has been more than sixty years now, and I can barely remember what Maryann looked like," he thought. "I’ve been lucky, and I wouldn’t go back and change anything if I could. But I still remember that kiss now and then. Maybe it’s partly because she said it took her months to get over it.

But the kiss I remember best was the first one with Linda, my wife and the love of my life. I met her through a mutual friend. We met twice for coffee or a drink, and later we had dinner together. When we left the restaurant, we shared a kiss in my car before leaving the parking lot. We were like two rivers flowing in the same direction and finally joining to form one stream. I had often heard the lyrics to Stars Fell on Alabama That Night, a love song about the magical effect of a special first kiss. After that kiss with Linda, I understood what the song writer was feeling. Nothing in the past would matter, and I would never want anyone but her.

Julia’s Choice

"Humming bird, Humming bird should be your name.

Too restless to settle, too wild to tame."

From a recording by Les Paul and Mary Ford, 1955.

She knew Brad was trouble, but he was drop-dead handsome. You’re weird, Julia. If you weren’t so beautiful I wouldn’t waste my time with you.

Don’t rush me, Brad. We’re not even engaged.

Brad was quarterback and captain of the Tyler, Texas, high school football team, class of 1980. He had many girls after him, but he was tired of easy conquests and thought Julia was a challenge. Several boys had pursued her, and the rumor went around school that she couldn’t be had. Brad wanted to prove them wrong.

With enough patience, persuasion, and persistence I can get any girl, Brad often boasted.

Not Julia, the 225-pound linebacker had said. You’ll have to marry her, or at least get engaged.

Baloney. I’ll bet you a case of Budweiser I’ll have her in bed within a month.

You’ve got a bet. Just don’t lie to me or I’ll break both of your legs.

He looked at her in the moonlight:

I heard that you know about the bet I made. I had no idea you would be so hard headed. You’ve cost me a case of Budweiser, and now my buddies are laughing behind my back.

They were both seniors, but Brad was a year older. He had been a year behind since first grade, because his birthday came in October and he couldn’t start school in September with the six-year-old kids. That helped him in football, since he had several additional months to grow bigger and stronger.

The football cheer leaders follow you around like lost puppies, Brad. I doubt that you are suffering.

I’m not sleeping around. I want you. We’ve been dating a long time, and any normal girl would have given in long ago. I want you so bad right now it actually hurts.

"You’re tall and good looking and you are a football hero. You’ve broken the hearts of several girls that I know. But you’re like the humming bird in the old song, ‘too restless to settle, too wild to tame.’ You tried