Learning to Love
by David Molina
I can hear the last bell of the last day of grade school, sprinting, screaming like banshees, jumping with joy for our freedom, smelling the fragrance of the cut grass, I remember every moment as clearly as yesterday.
My first love, Sandra Foxton, is a year younger than me. It is my 14th summer, the summer before high school.
She is almost as tall as I am, athletic and dark-skinned from sunning in her backyard swimming pool. She has short, black hair, a pixie cut, and striking blue/gray-steel eyes. Her gaze and her smile are free and sincere. At the age of thirteen, she has already blossomed into full womanhood.
She is my first love, a love unexpected and exuberant, intense and yet so pure. We hold hands while we walk together around the block, while dusk turns into night. The stars and the streetlights are brighter than they could ever be after this summer. We hold hands, confiding, laughing, dreaming. I am so very young, a boy, and she is a woman. Without a doubt, she loves me.
Without a doubt, I don’t know how to handle a woman. But hand in hand is close enough that summer.
As the summer fades into fall, I realize I will soon be leaving for high school. I recognize that our summer love will fade as well. I know that fate is not to be bargained with.
I choose to let go our summer love.
I know that it can very well be the best summer and the best love of my life.
It is my choice - letting go of this perfect love. To this day, it warms the memory of my youthful, stoic heart. It is an inevitably sweet, this inevitable goodbye.
Sandra is my first love.
My second love, still a teenager, lasts three years.
Paulina is three years younger than I. I am a junior in high school; she is fourteen. The distance between a 17-year-old young man and a 14-year-old girl is deep and wide. The heat and hormones of my 17th summer make it the perfect time to fall in love with love.
I aim my sights on Paulina.
But before I fall in love with Paulina, I fall in love with her family. I fall in love with her home, El Retiro, a three-story Spanish-style mansion perched at the top of the highest hill in Hacienda Heights. El Retiro will be the dazzling backdrop for the fantasy romance I will create.
Paulina’s oldest brother of the seven children, Manuel, is a Servite freshman soccer teammate. Her father, Manuel Sr., is Doctor Fernandez, a well-respected surgeon. I meet Paulina at the first of many family parties at El Retiro. Dr. Fernandez and his gracious wife, Aurora, host all of Manny’s Servite soccer buddies, including their families.
Month after month, we return to El Retiro. George Magula plays his classical guitar. Paul Delgado, Richard Ceniceroz, and I - Los Magnificos Tres - provide the music for all to sing.
I cannot help but notice Paulina: her brownish-green eyes, dark, glowing, clear complexion, innocent lips. She is completely unaware of her beauty, and clearly unaware that I am aware.
I fall for her.
In such a large group of guests, there is no way I can speak to her one-to-one. It is unrequited love from afar for a year. Fantasy outruns reality, and sweetly so. The stories I tell myself are shared with no one, particularly not with her.
In Spanish culture, a girl’s fifteenth birthday is very special. A quinceañera is a family celebration of a girl’s passage to womanhood. Dr. Fernandez will not be having any such party, perhaps because he cannot face that his eldest daughter will be leaving him one day. He can face surgical complications all day and night, but the thought of daughter complications is too much, too early.
On her fifteenth birthday, I finally throw myself at her. I commandeer my two Magnificos, Paul and Richard. It is my moment to take the matter into my own hands. Even more, hoping into my own arms.
In the early morning darkness we descend the long, steep driveway, clutching a Gainesburger apiece. It is my idea - a mordida, a bribe - to appease El Rey, a Great Dane as large as a horse, and whose bark rattles the windows of El Retiro.
I remember the terse, nervous jokes we whisper to one another during the long approach. We stumble through the blackness. What are by day mere trees and bushes become leering, threatening night creatures. Suddenly, we freeze. A huge, lone sentinel looms out of the darkness directly in front of us. It takes us half a minute to realize that it is a huge, loaned cement mixer, not El Rey, that blocks our path.
After a heated debate, we finally guess which window is Paulina’s. Then, for a moment, we three stand in awe of actually finding ourselves on the morning of her fifteenth birthday. With a deep breath, we exhale the last surge of anxiety and hesitation. The first note cuts like a razor through the silence. We begin to sing.
“Estas son las mañanitas...”
(Mexican happy birthday song...)
Our voices are barely a whisper. The words waver a moment, throats constricted by the cold morning air, and the thrill of actually being in a dream.
It turns out to be just that - a dream. And not the good type.
It turns out that this dream is as foggy as the morning mist. After a few songs, we notice no lights lit, no curtains rustling, no sound other than our guitars plunking, and our hoarse throats trying to find the right key and the right lyrics.
Our Quixotic imaginations fall flat on our faces, as flat as the strings on our guitars.
“¡Ay, qué pinche pendejos!”
(Mexican expletive remark meaning ‘what dumb fucks!’)
So that doesn’t work.
The following year, I visit the house, solo. Paulina and I are allowed to be together alone, and we spend some Sunday afternoons. We have little in common. She is not a conversationalist. Her world and mine float about in different orbits. Still, she is a remarkably beautiful young woman. This keeps things going for a while, but one autumn afternoon, I explain to her that it is time for me to be going. I feel a sadness for what could have been, but doesn’t.
This, my second love, is frustratingly intangible. I owe it all to myself.
For decades after, when her birthday - August 23rd - rolls around, I remember her fifteenth.
Paulina eventually marries a good man and raises two girls. Most likely she is a grandmother. She lives uphill from El Retiro next to the driveway where decades ago we stumbled in the dark and fumbled our serenade.
The score so far - boy with woman: first base (barely). Man with girl: second base (barely). Next up: Man with woman. It won’t end as you think it does.
I am a freshman at USC. I live in a decrepit dorm room with a fat, impersonal introvert roommate. He never says a word to me for an entire semester. I can live with that; however, he sits at his desk blaring country western 24 hours a day. It is a toss-up, whether to shoot him or me. Fortunately, I do not have a gun. Instead, I barely escape insanity and freaking Rawhide Radio. I get my wagon rolling over to Esther Urista’s off-campus apartment.
Esther is a graduate student, five years older than I. She befriends me and writes poetry about how much we have a beautiful friendship despite our age difference.
Qué raro, ¿verdad? tu mente y la mía - todavía posees la inocencia de juventud y al mismo tiempo tienes ya las cualidades que te van a sobrellevar después de que la juventud inocente desaparezca...
How rare that, truly, your mind and mine still possess the innocence of youth and at the same time have already the qualities that will blossom after innocent youth disappears...
This is turning out to be the old Mrs. Robinson maneuver: older woman vs. innocent younger man. She invites me to come over to her apartment one evening. “Make yourself at home...”
Her idea of making me at home is to ly next to me on her roll-out sofa bed facing a mirror. Hmm...
Something’s happening here,
What it is, ain’t exactly clear.
Is this really happening? Here? It is beginning to be exactly clear.
I’m looking up at the ceiling; she’s looking at me. I’m looking at the ceiling.
“Qué es lo que piensas?”
What am I thinking? I’m thinking that I’m not ready to do anything more than thinking about getting out of here. I tell her that.
She is more exasperated than disappointed at this point.
“Fine.”
She turns over; I walk home. Still friends, but not lovers.
At least on my side of the bed.
You can’t hurry love.
You just have to wait.
But it ain't easy, ain't easy,
Like my mama said...