A Big Little Life Read Free Page A

lie that she had told me a week earlier.
    After taking two weeks to restore my courage, I asked her for another date—only to learn she had a babysitting job that night. She seemed to be sincere, but everyone believed Hitler, too, when he claimed that he wouldn’t invade Poland, and we know how that turned out. I did not think Gerda intended to invade Poland, and I wanted to believe I still had a chance to court her, so I accepted her turndown with grace.
    Because she might have begun to feel stalked if not cornered, and therefore might reject my fourth invitation by setting her hair on fire, I brooded weeks before asking her to accompany me to an event that she was already required to attend. Year after year, she had been president of her school class; therefore, I invited her to the junior-class dance.
    When she declined, claiming to be busy on the night, I appealed to her in what I remember as an earnest tone, although as an honest memoirist, I must acknowledge it was more likely a pathetic whine: “But you have to go to the dance, it’s the junior-class dance, and you’re the junior-class president .”
    “Oh,” she said, “I’m going. But I have to spend the first part of the evening selling tickets at the door. Then I operate the record player for a shift, then I sell refreshments for a shift, and then I clean up the gym.”
    I declared that those were my top four favorite things to do on a date, which left her no way to be rid of me other than to beat me with her purse or scream for the police.
    She smiled and said, “All right.” In her soft voice, those words sounded like a declaration of undying love. Because at that moment nothing was hanging from the end of my nose, I felt as suave as Cary Grant.
    Eventually I would learn that her father, Bedford’s shoemaker, immigrated to the States from Italy and had many Old World attitudes, including the notion that children should work by the time they were teenagers. Gerda actually had part-time jobs at the dry cleaner andthe movie theater, and supplemented those incomes with babysitting. From the age of thirteen, she bought her own clothes or, because she was a good seamstress, purchased the materials to make them.
    On our first date, between selling tickets and spinning records and selling refreshments and cleaning the gym, we found time for only one dance, but we shared a lot of laughs.
    Nevertheless, after escorting her to her door and saying good night, I worried about the impression I had made. I considered racing home to call her and ask for an official date evaluation, but decided I would appear too needy.
    The following day, Sunday, was interminable, as if the rotation of the Earth slowed dramatically. Monday morning, at school, I was lying in wait at Gerda’s locker when she appeared in the hall outside her homeroom. I half expected a polite hello and a claim of amnesia regarding the events of Saturday evening. Instead, she professed to have laughed so much during our five hours together that her tummy muscles hurt the next morning.
    I always assumed girls found dating me to be painful, but this was good pain. We continued to date. And laugh together.
    I asked her to marry me, and she did.
    Shortly after college, and after our wedding, I went to work in a federal anti-poverty initiative for seven months, long enough to discover that such programs enriched those administering them but otherwise created morepoverty. And the low pay extended my penury for over half a year.
    Although Gerda was a bookkeeper with accounting skills and had worked in a bank for a few years, she couldn’t find such employment in the tiny Appalachian town, Saxton, where I taught disadvantaged kids. She took a piecework job in a shoe factory, and boarded a company bus at four o’clock each weekday morning for a forty-five-minute trip over the mountains to the manufacturing plant.
    We were married with a few hundred dollars, a used car, and our clothes. Of the few houses for