Memoir: Neckties

Neckties

I remember being in the fourth grade at St. Malachy’s Catholic School in Brooklyn. In the 1950’s, the girls and boys all wore neckties. They were part of the school uniform. Mine consisted of a navy blue jumper and a white blouse, a blue bowtie and a little navy cap, with white socks and blue loafers and a navy blue belt. The boys’ neckties were long clip-ons. The girls wore bow ties. Mine was wrinkled and shapeless from lying in a heap on my dresser at night, right along side my beaten-down cap.
We thought we were cool if we broke little rules, and how we wore our uniforms was one way we asserted ourselves. Neckties dangled limply from one side of open collars. Worn-out hats hung from hairpins, stuck as far back on our heads as our hair could provide, so as to be virtually invisible from the front. They hung like little rags among the curls our mothers burned into our hair with "permanents." Every year you got a new uniform, but it was always the same. We took all the liberties we could with our uniforms, but there were other things the nuns really would not allow, about which no liberties could be taken. One of those things was kissing.
Kissing was not allowed. In fact, anything that could be remotely construed as sexual contact was strictly forbidden and fatally sinful. Not that anybody ever told us that. We just knew. At twelve years of age I had never had a date. For one thing, my parents never would have allowed it, and for another it was probably sinful even to think about it. I had never given it a serious thought.
One day Danny Parker asked me to go to a basketball game. A big kid basketball game at the Junior High School. It was a big idea. It was too big a thing to say yes or no, so I just stared at him and we left it at that. I kept it a secret from everyone, even my sister who knew everything there was to know about me.
It was a secret that we were meeting, even after we got to the game. It was something we did surreptitiously, casually, as if we weren’t really doing it. We almost didn’t sit next to each other. We were not overtly having a date. It was something like a date, but it was definitely not a real date. But we did end up sitting next to each other and at some point Danny put his hand over on top of mine and held it. I ignored it, but I didn’t move my hand. Then suddenly he turned around and kissed me on the cheek. Just like that. Smack dab, I could feel my face and neck turn bright red with embarrassment. I know it did because I could fell the heat rise up in my cheeks and my ears burned like they were on fire. I did nothing, just froze in place. I didn’t even acknowledge that it had happened. I didn’t know how I was supposed to act.
The other kids immediately went to teasing us both. "Danny kissed Roseanne, Danny kissed Roseanne" they started to chant in a singsong sort of way. "Danny kissed Roseanne," as if it was big news. The basketball game was still going on in the gym, but all I could think about was how to disappear. I wanted to be innocent again. I got angry and I got up and walked away, stood on the sidelines of the game where nobody else was standing, and pretended not to know any of them. My outside innocence had been taken away. But even worse than all the teasing was what happened the next day at school.
First thing in the morning I was called to the principal’s office. And there in a chair outside her door was Danny, finger slap marks all over his cheeks, red-faced and crying. The principal met me at the door. "Did this boy kiss you?" she asked. I was too scared to lie. Then she took me into her office for a lecture about how boys are, and how girls have to be careful to guard our virtue or those nasty boys will take it from us, and once it’s gone there is no getting it back.
On the principal’s desk was Danny’s necktie. Looking at it, I wondered what it was doing there, and what did it mean to have your necktie taken away? Reflexively, I reached up and fixed mine. Looking at Danny’s necktie laying there in a heap, I started crying.
I got sent back to class, but we didn’t see Danny for hours. When he did show up, he was pale and sorry looking. For the next few weeks he didn’t get recess and he had to stay after school for detention. I never went to another basketball game at the Junior High School, and Danny never spoke to me again. I never knew why.