In 1942, when WWII was still ongoing, I was in the second grade. I had a boyfriend whom I really liked because he could read. In the first grade the teacher had sent me to the library nearly every day to try to help some recalcitrant boy learn to read. It was an extremely difficult task, and I understand now as a retired teacher that she just wanted that boy out of the classroom. So, my requirement for a boyfriend was that he could read and talk to me about the books that we both were reading. Each morning, Eddie and I walked to school together and talked about our favorite stories. There was no Harry Potter then, but I am sure that had there been, we would have read the entire series. So, Eddie, although he was plumb and half my height, and wore thick glasses, was an avid reader, and I really liked him for that characteristic.
A few days before Valentine’s Day, Eddie handed me an envelope just as class got started. When I opened it there was a small valentine and a note folded in a tiny square. As soon as I read it, I followed the directions in it. It said, “I like you. Do you like me?”
There were two boxes, one labeled yes, the other labeled no. I knew that I should check a box, and I carefully made a big X in the yes box. On the playground at recess, I handed Eddie back the note. Some big boys, maybe fifth-graders, saw me give Eddie the note, and they swooped down on us and ripped the note away from Eddie and ran away.
Very soon those big boys about five of them, circled around Eddie and me, and said to me, “Do you like Eddie?”
When I nodded that I did, one of them said, “Well, you are going to have a baby.”
“I don’t want a baby,” I spoke loudly and clearly, less they thought that I would be in agreement with them.
They just laughed and the spokesman said, “Doesn’t matter what you want. You like Eddie, and you are going to have a baby.”
I could not wait to get home at lunch time, and I ran the whole way bursting in the back door and saying to my mother, “The big boys said I am going to have a baby.”
Mom, always calm and gentle, said, “Honey, what is going on?”
When I told her the whole story, mom said, “You are not going to have a baby. That is not the way it works.”
“How does it work?” I asked.
Then mom fell back on her usual answer to difficult questions, “Never mind, you’ll know when you are older.”
When I returned to school after lunch, Eddie was waiting for me, but so were the big boys. Surrounding us once again, just before they ran away, they shouted in unison,
“Maryann and Eddie sitting in a tree,
K-i-s-s-i-n-g,
First come love, then comes marriage,
Then comes Maryann with a baby carriage.”
I thought, “k-i-s-s-i-n-g. That spells kissing. So that’s it. That’s what my mother didn’t want to tell me. That’s how you get a baby. “
Right away I said to Eddie, “We are not ever going to kiss. That’s how you get a baby.”
“That’s okay,” Eddie smiled at me. “I don’t want to kiss you, anyway. My mom says that how you get a lot of germs.”
That was that. We were friends, and I suppose valentines for the rest of the year, until Eddie moved away when his soldier father came home from the war.
As Valentine’s Day comes again in February this year, I think of that little boy who could read anything anyone put in front of him. He may have been kind of fat and short and wore thick glasses, but even then, I knew that looks didn’t count if my boyfriend had reading in common with me.