That Night

Alice Bloom: It was the summer everyone thought the Russians were going to invade Long Island any minute and President Kennedy was going to Berlin to head them off. Sputnik had been around the world ten times and Mr. Rossi, our neighbor, swore he saw it fly right over his back yard. But I had other things on my mind that summer. And so did everyone else on our block. The Meyer twins were always fighting about something. They’d do just about anything to get Catherine and Barbara’s attention. They were always teasing me. Mickey was the worst. Once behind the Rossi house, he said he wanted to kiss me, then he spit in my ear. Kathryn was right; I didn’t know much about it. But I read everything I could. Modern romance, encyclopedias, even stuff that took a whole month to get in the mail. But still I felt like it was so big secret everyone was in on, except me. Except sometimes, late at night, when Sheryl came home. Right after she moved in last winter, the boys started coming around. They all wanted her to go steady, and to be their girl, but she wasn’t interested. If I could just be her for one night, even for just one minute. I found out everything about her, that she played the same song every night, “Ruler of my Heart.” I knew that every Friday after school she’d buy a brand new scarf at Wolman’s. That she put her favorite perfume on every night before she went to sleep. It was Ambush. That she thought Brenda Lee was alright because she turned down a date with Ricky Nelson. And that JFK was the coolest catholic she knew, outside of her dad. And that a nun at Mount St. Mary’s slapped her in the face with all her might and she didn’t even cry. That she never slept in anything at all, even in the middle of winter. She didn’t know me or my name, but I wanted to laugh her laugh, and dream her dreams.

Alice Bloom: Burger balls!

Guy: What’s the matter? Girls from St. Mary’s don’t drink beer?
Sheryl: We’re afraid you wouldn’t know what end of the bottle to suck.

Alice: I thought that if either of my parents died, I’d die too. That if they’d stopped breathing they would draw me back inside, like they once told me, they kissed each other and breathed me into life. But Sheryl still lived, that she put on her shoes and socks and combed her hair. All with her father dead. Seemed more surprising to me than anything else in the whole world.

Rick: What’d they say? Time heals all wounds. God had his reasons. Maybe he does, doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.
Sheryl: It’s a mortal sin to say that.
Rick: It’s a sin to believe anything else.

Sheryl: Hi. My name is Sheryl, Sheryl O’Connor. And my dad died. This is stupid. I don’t want to do this! Okay, here’s something. Um, tonight this old guy, I don’t even know who he was, but he was telling me that my dad was young he was this really great dancer. And all the girls at the Copa used to hang on low riders. I would have loved to see that. I never saw my daddy dance before, not really.

Rick: Just because they are your parents, doesn’t mean you got to love them.

Kathryn: Oh my god, it’s the loonhead from the Strike and Spare.
Barbara: He’s kind of cute… for a greaser.

Sheryl: It’s so horrible that ppl you love can die like that, that they can just disappear.
Rick: Yeah, but just because they’re gone doesn’t mean you have to stop loving them. You never know when you might see them again.
Sheryl: Where?
Rick: On the other side, that’s where. You gotta keep your options open, right.

Alice Bloom: I couldn’t see if Venus was in the sky that night, but it could have been. After that night, they were inseparable. I saw them everywhere, like at the Strike and Spare, she’d hang around all afternoon waiting for his break. Sometimes they’d even hang out on her lawn, when her mother wasn’t around. No one was happy about it. Mr. Bell said that if he had one of them in the neighborhood, he would have never left Queens. And Mr. Rossi, he heard they all had records and he’d call the cops if it kept up. But me, I didn’t care if they all had been in Sing Sing, I wanted them to stay around forever. The best of all was when he would bring her back, and park down the block, not to wake her mom. And it would just be us, in the middle of the night, in the darkness.

Alice: Doing what?
Mickey: You know doing it. Bangin’, Buffin’, Ballin’, the sex thing.

Max: Alice castrated Mickey!

Alice: Dad said it was over, like Polio in the Iron Lung. Sheryl’s mom put her foot down. Rick wasn’t allowed to come around anymore. And I had to apologize to Mickey Meyer and go to his birthday party.

Sheryl: See, when they like you, they gotta do something crazy. And then six months later he gave me my first kiss.

She said if we were going to chase the night together, I was going to have to change my looks. I didn’t mind, I didn’t mind at all.

Sheryl: He said he had been with a lot of girls before me but I set him straight. I could see it in his eyes. I knew it the moment we met that we would be together forever.
Alice: But who told you?
Sheryl: Nobody tells you, you just feel it. It’s like being on fire. You’re whole body is glowing like your burning up and your heart beats so fast feels like it’s going to burst.
Alice: I knew it! I wish I’d been in love ten thousand times.

Alice: They took me under the boardwalk. He said there was nothing to be afraid of, but I was scared. I wonder if anyone will ever feel about me the way Rick felt about Sheryl. She said that I should make a record about all the stuff that happened that night, about the good and the bad. Then we’d bury it with hers and play it again in fifty years. I couldn’t stop talking. But Sheryl was worried about getting me home and that was that.

Sheryl: You need someone to love you and keep your spirit alive after you die.

They all thought it was over. That Sheryl had come to her senses and forgotten him. I was the only one who knew she would go to him, night after night.

Sheryl: We could have been born thousands of miles apart, spoken different languages, and everything. And never even met/ Nothing else matters, Rick. Not our families, not our friends, nothing.

Rick: Why do I always want to be inside you? I don’t know, it’s just something about being this close all the time. I can’t stand not being with you Sherry.

Mrs. O’Connor: If you really loved him, you’d let him go. That’s what you’re daddy would say.

Alice: Sheryl had said that her mom found out that she was sneaking out to see him and that she was going to send Sheryl away. I had to get to Rick. I imagined him coming for her in the middle of the night, her suitcase would be packed, and he’d throw pebbles against her window, and they’d escape to some island no one had ever heard of. Maybe they’d take me too.

Alice: They said she was going to her aunt’s in California. I couldn’t get to Rick. I couldn’t get to anyone. The next day was the hottest day of the year. The TV said there was a storm front over the Atlantic and it would rain any day. There was no wind, no rain, nothing. You could hear yourself breathe. Or hear your heartbeat if you listened.

Alice: Mom said Rick was in jail for a whole week and they should have charged him with melodrama. Dad said that if he ever came around again, he’d kill him.

Alice: He told me some things, things I didn’t know, like how his dad walked out one day and didn’t come back, and how his mom went crazy and landed in some bug house. He couldn’t stop talking about all the trouble he’d been in after that, because he didn’t care about anyone or anything.

Alice: He sat and he waited. He said she knew he was coming, but I could tell that he was scared. I was scared too.

It’s my whole life Rick, that’s what you’re asking for. I never said I was this tough.

You said nothing else could change it. Once you love someone like that, nothing else matters.




Alice: It would be just the three of us, like that night.
Sheryl: Stop, stop it Allie. You got it all so twisted up! Ordering me around like I’m some God damn princess. Wearing my perfume and listening to my records. I’m just this girl who lives across the street from you and I don’t now. You have to go home.
Alice: But I don’t belong there.
Sheryl: You have a family. You can’t just leave them like that. Because if you did, it would just kill them, it would kill them. That’s all.

Alice: I wanted to call out to them, say good bye or just a “Hey now.’ But it was enough to just see them together, one last time. I thought I was a dead man, but they say things about love and forgiveness, things I was only beginning to understand. Someone said that Sheryl had runaway. Mrs. Carpenter swears she saw her in Manhattan with an older man. Mrs. Rossi said she had an abortion in Mexico and is living in El Paso. But I got a postcard from Salt Lake City. Sheryl said they were heading west and so far things were going fine. And by the way, she’d hope that I buried my record and I shouldn’t dig it up for fifty years.

Alice: The Russians never did invade Long Island and Mr. Rossi turned out to be all wrong about see sputnik flying over his backyard. But I learned some things that summer, things I’d never forget.