Susan Fishman (Orlins)
Here is what I wrote in an early draft of my memoir (eventually edited out):
My girlfriends and I were under the impression that a girl's horniest time of the month was midway between menstrual cycles. The nearest weekend to this midpoint we called make out weekend, and we always prayed someone good would ask us out. Fred Rosenberg, a high-ranking regular on my crush list, invited me to the movies for one such Saturday night.
Fred was an intellectual, a non-conformist, a beatnik (to the extent that someone not old enough to drive could qualify as beat), yet even some cheerleaders were dying to go out with him. Everyone said Fred looked just like Paul Newman. I used to say, "I wonder if people tell Paul Newman he looks just like Fred Rosenberg." The resemblance was in the blue eyes and square jaw, but what drew me to Fred was the gap between his two front teeth.
On our date, his mother drove us downtown to see "Sunrise at Campobello." Afterwards, we walked to a bench in Rittenhouse Square where Fred preached existentialism and quoted writers with French names. I waited impatiently for that moment when he would put his arm around me. However, he never made his move.
A couple of years later we both entered University of Pennsylvania. One afternoon I visited Fred, who had his own apratment and who was smoking the first marijuana I had ever seen. I declined the offer to join him, but watched with fascination while he inhaled with loud sucking noises then held his breath till he coughed.
Ten years later a college newsletter arrived at my apartment in Washington, D.C. with an entry from Fred. "I'm at Lewisberg Penitentiary serving a four-year sentence for armed robbery. Would like to hear from classmates, especially Susan Fishman." I gagged in horror at the turn his life had taken; then my stomach did a flip when I at the notiont a heartthrob from my high school years might have harbored a crush on me all this time.
When I finally tracked him down, he was in a halfway house in New York City. We agreed to meet at a restaurant in the West Village. When Fred spotted me walking down Greenwich Avenue, he strode up to me, flung his arms around my hips, and ran down the block holding me high in the air. His few remaining strands of hair were long and straggly and his skin was gray. Those heartbreaker eyes no longer focused and penetrated. We shared a beer, he told me how hard it was to kick the drug habit, I paid the bill, and that was the last time I saw or heard from Fred.
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