Wreathed by Curtis Edmonds Read Free Book Online Page A

make it happen.”
    “Darling,” she said, “I love you dearly, but that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”
    “I’m really not interested in your opinion on my dating strategy.”
    “Strategy is the key word. Or lack thereof, in your case. If you just latch on to the first man you come across, you might find yourself making a serious mistake.”
    We’d come to the end of the rural highway, and I pulled the car onto I-295 for the long haul south. “Do tell,” I said.
    “I was wondering when you were going to ask. It was the fall of 1962, and I was a junior in prep school.”
     

Chapter 7
     
    The first time I saw Sheldon Berkman was at a swim meet at Cherry Hill High, in the fall of 1962. He and your Uncle Frank were both seniors; they were on the swim team together. I was a junior, but I wasn’t enrolled in Cherry Hill High that year. Mother caught me smoking a Lucky Strike under the bleachers of the football stadium, and she had me transferred to a girls’ prep school in Philadelphia. The express intent was to give me a better education, but it ended up putting me in the company of some very wicked young ladies with depraved thoughts, at least by the standards of the times. Not that any of us got to act on most of those depraved thoughts, which was quite frustrating.
    I didn’t want to go to this swim meet, but Mother was determined to have a nice family outing, so I went. There I was, stuck in this loud, wet building that stank of chlorine, watching doughy, pasty boys going back and forth in the pool, and not one of them worth thinking any depraved thoughts about. Frank was on the relay team, which was the last event of the meet, so I had to stay through the bitter end.
    And that’s where I saw Sheldon Berkman for the first time. He wasn’t tall, and he wasn’t all that good-looking, and you could tell he would be bald before he was thirty, but he wasn’t like any of the other boys there. Most of them had these strong, ropy muscles from football or baseball. Not Sheldon. He was a swimmer, and he had a swimmer’s build. You watch the Olympics, so you know what I’m talking about. Powerful shoulders. Trim build, not an ounce of fat anywhere. His chest was this V-shape that just tapered right down into his trunks. And they wore very tight trunks in those days. Not the repulsive things they wear now, but they still didn’t leave much to the imagination.
    And I imagined. I had such an imagination in those days. Of course, your generation doesn’t have to imagine anything anymore, but that’s what we had to work with and it was quite enjoyable, for a while, anyway.
    Sheldon noticed me too. But he didn’t have the nerve to ask me out himself, so he used Frank as a g0-between. Frank made the mistake of telling me about it, and of course, I said yes. So the next weekend I was home, we went out. Sheldon had this decrepit old Chrysler, and he took me to the Cherry Hill Mall to see Mutiny on the Bounty . We sat there in that darkened theater, and the whole time we were there, listening to Marlon Brando’s phony English accent, he never tried one time to put his hand on me. It was terribly disappointing. I think he was nervous dating a prep-school girl; either that, or he didn’t have a lot of experience around girls of any sort. Or Frank put the fear of God into him. I never did find out, not that it mattered.
    We went on a couple of dates after that, and never moved past holding hands, so I decided to take action. The next time I was home was over Thanksgiving. My best friend at prep school was named Deanna Ellis—now, she was a hippie, that one. She went to Berkeley and ended up in a commune in Oregon. Anyway, I told her how frustrating the whole thing was getting to be with Sheldon. Her parents lived in Merion Township, and they had this huge house, very secluded. Her parents were taking the family to Hilton Head for Thanksgiving. She gave me the directions and a spare key.
    So, the day after