First Love

Kathy Rosenbloom was my first love. She was short with curly black hair and I first laid eyes on her when her mom brought her to my house a week before kindergarten started. She had a deep voice and a melodic jack-in-box laugh that was either naturally throaty or a result of a lingering chest cold.

She had round dappled cheeks and dimples when she smiled and I took her hand when she visited, though I had never done that with a girl before. Her hands were tiny and bunched and a little coarse, which surprised me because children my age growing up in a middle-upper-class suburban neighborhood did not engage in much heavy labor or farm activities.

A few weeks into the school year I visited Kathy Rosenbloom’s house, which was on a high hill among a cluster of modern split-level mansions. Her house was so large that there was an intercom system that Kathy’s parents used to summon her and her three brothers and which they pointedly ignored.

I remembered a lot of shouting by her parents and the other kids, but not by Kathy, who was serene and seemed to glow in my presence. I didn’t like her house—it was too large and modern and impersonal and the air held certain notes of flatulence—a misty methane miasma seemed to dangle in the air. I suspect now that, as a Jewish household, the Rosenbloom’s diet was not terribly suited to healthy digestion.

Alas, I chased heedlessly after Kathy in the playground and kissed her constantly on the cheek in public, without wiles, and unaware of the rules of courtship and so forth at the age of six. I think I scared her away and, in fact, by the end of kindergarten, the Rosenbloom family had packed up and left and I never saw Kathy Rosenbloom again.

I guess I must’ve scared the Rosenblooms away.