FIRST DATE

MAY-MALIBU, CALIFORNIA

Malibu in the month of May is as beautiful as Malibu is beautiful year round. Each month has a warm, bright sameness.  December, January, and February may have a cool feel of summer gone, or maybe a grey tint in the atmosphere, but the season differences actually play more in nature, the arrival of the Monarch butterfly, their cocoons on the eucalyptus trees and then the emergence of thousands of new butterflies.  The dead jelly fish that wash ashore by the tide or the purple slugs that do the same and that the scientists come out and harvest at low tide on a sunny afternoon.  These are the noticeable changes as the year passes.

The young woman bent over the flower garden reaching for more dried blossoms to deadhead from the red geranium bush.  There were pink and dark pink and red bushes.  They were lush.  Their dark green leaves filled in and pushed the flowers up and together.  The leaves were varied greens, soft and impossible not to stroke and pull.  Nasturtium grew prolific beneath the geraniums and covered the ground until they met grass.  The grass grew to the patio’s cement.  She stood up and took in the salty breeze while looking at the horizon, the blue and pink  horizon with the pier off to one side and moored boats bobbing with the sway of the water.  It was afternoon light and a summer’s heat was turning cool as a blue porsche pulled up in front of the trailer that belonged to the girl’s mother.

A tall, handsome man stepped out of the porsche, walked around the front of the car and up the step, “My name is Tom.  I am Gary’s friend.”  Gary worked around the trailer park which everyone called-the cove.  Garry lived in a trailer with his wife and two kids.  They were in their early twenties.  “Oh sure, I know Gary, the young woman said.”  He had helped her mom with repairs on the trailer a few times.  “I am Candy.”

“Well, I wondered if you’d like to go to a movie? I am actually a projectionist in a movie theater in Santa Monica-but I have the night off and a good movie is playing tonight, I think that you would enjoy seeing it.”  “Sure,” she answered.  Her heart was racing.  This would be her first date.  She had turned 15 last week and that was the magic age to be allowed to-go out.  “Well, I will be back for you about 6-o.k.?”

Six came and she and her mother were waiting inside.  Her mother had a pot of hot coffee on and was moving around the kitchen, a little woman in a little kitchen.  Candy was sitting at the bar between the kitchen and living room.  “Do I look nervous?” she asked her mom.  “You look great, honey.”  She was wearing her new jeans with a purple velour top and expensive sandals.  It wasn’t an extremely warm evening but still not cold.  She looked beautiful because she was young, she was untouched and she had the innocent trust and happiness of a young person just beginning to be aware of her attraction to the opposite sex.  There came a knock on the door and Tom came in and made pleasentries with the mother.  He shared information about his family, his sisters. His mother had passed away two years before and his father left, in a divorce.  “If you will give me your driver’s license please, I will jot down information about you."  Candy’s mom requested.  He reached in his wallet and  handed the license to the mother.  Candy began to feel odd.  She hadn’t seen this coming.  Both Tom and her mother looked at her with smiles on their faces.  So, with business taken care of, the couple left the trailer on their date, her first date. It was a pleasant date and they planned for another soon.

The following day her mother told her that she didn’t want her to go out with boys her own age.  That she was afraid that her daughter would be with a gang of drunken kids on Highway 101 and get in a fatal accident.  Someone could get killed and likely it would be her.  She thought this over.  There were no teenagers living in the cove only a younger boy and an older one that was away in the service, overseas.  The valley kids came over in the summer and on Holidays but it was like they existed in separate castes.  So Candy gave this new rule no more thought.

“And Candy,” her mother added, “if you become pregnant, don’t be afraid, just come home and we will take care of it.”  (Many mothers in this culture and in this era-the sixties- were putting their girls on birth control.)  But this mother was older and torn about what to do.

Tom and Candy dated over a period of two years.  Tom would marry and divorce another woman during this time.  Candy would date many men until she would marry at twenty and stay married for twenty years, raising children until the divorce.

At age 83 Candy died napping under a warm California sun, slightly inebriated.