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Three early encounters with female aggressiveness.
1. When I was in first grade, there was a girl in my class named Dorothy Hogan. This girl liked me a lot and was not afraid of showing it. In fact, she would deliberately seek me out to walk home with, and then in the course of such walking would embarrass me exceedingly by kissing me in public. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I didn't know how to get her to stop it.
Dorothy would tell me that we were going to get married someday. This caused me to panic: were such things, I wondered, preordained just by one of the involved parties saying it was so? I didn't know! I cast about in my head for arguments against it. Finally, I hit upon a possible impediment: her eyes were brown while mine were blue. (In such wise did I intuit at an early age the miscegenation laws of the time.)
Fortunately, fate intervened to spare me a test of my theory: Dorothy Hogan moved away soon thereafter.
(Interesting isn't it that in time I would marry a girl named Dorothy. Was this a coincidence? Or was it a desperate attempt to recreate that first lost love?)
2. I successfully avoided those sorts of entanglements for several years thereafter. Then in fifth grade I sat next to a girl named Patty Sarch in class. Patty was nearly as aggressive as Dorothy. On Valentines Day, when everyone spent a penny apiece for cards, Patty bought me one for #1.25. It pictured two gophers and, when I opened it up, one of the gophers was revealed to blush in deep pink. Inside it read: 'I gopher you and you gopher me.' I think I myself blushed at Patty's forwardness!
A week or two later I came down with the chicken pox and had to stay home for several days. The class wrote me get-well letters which I still have. Patty's was twice as long as anyone else's. To cheer me up, she told a joke which I regarded as daringly risqué: A wrestler had a match with a much bigger opponent. Just before they began, he said to the big fellow, 'When you toss me out into the audience, could you throw me to that pretty woman in the fifth row?'
As it turned out, fate intervened here too and Patty soon moved away.
3. The next year was sixth grade, and that was the year we all took ballroom dancing classes after school. For the first time in my life I placed one of my hands on a girl's waist, and grasped her hand with my other hand. It was, for me at least, riotously sensuous.
There was one girl I particularly enjoyed dancing with. Her name was Betsy Hull and I had known her since kindergarten. I had never had any feelings for or attractions to Betsy before. But there on the dance floor something clicked.
It was, I am convinced, her dress. Each week she wore the same one, and I got used to it like an old friend. It was velvet, and deep red in color. I loved the feeling of that velvet!
Was my attraction to Betsy or to the material of her dress? Whichever it was, Betsy and I started 'going together.' I'm not sure what that meant in practical terms (I don't recall any 'dates.') Soon things had escalated further, and we were 'going steady.'
The thing is, the pushes to escalate had come from Betsy, who seemed to know about such things. I had fallen in love with a dress and now I was stuck in a relationship I didn't even necessarily want to be a part of!
It was nearly February when Betsy's friends began to pester me at school: 'Whatcha gettin' Betsy for Valentine's Day?' Gone were the idyllic days of the year before when a girl (Patty) would surprise (and embarrass) me on that fateful day with a simple token of her affection. Now, suddenly, the onus was on me to get something for the girl.
And the message I got was: it had to be jewelry. So I went to a jewelry store with one of my parents, where we bought Betsy a friendship ring.
This 'relationship' lasted through the middle of seventh grade. Then one winter evening I took Betsy ice skating on Verona Lake. I was new to this myself, and as a result my ankles buckled horribly. So we were sitting most of the time. Soon enough a handsome fellow in our class came skating smoothly by and asked Betsy if she'd like to skate with him. She accepted, and that was the last I saw of her that evening. The next day she informed me that we had 'broken up.'
When we graduated from high school, Betsy's motto in the yearbook read: 'I never met a man I didn't like.'
P.S. The Dorothy I married was like Patty and unlike Betsy, in this wise: she has always hand-made me wonderful Valentines, and has never thought to ask (nevertheless demand) anything for herself. So I have been very lucky. However, she was aggressive enough to ask me out on our first date!
I think that female aggressiveness must have something to do with an ingrained need to select a suitable mate.
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