Strong women at a distance

P.A. was the first girl I wanted as a girlfriend; I was six, she was five. One summer day, she and her family moved into Number 8 three doors down.  I can still smell her sweat and the rain in the pores of the suede Davy Crockett jacket she didn’t take off all summer long.  She had crooked front teeth, hard puffy cheeks and long blond womanly hair, the cleanest longest stroke-able hair, and she could beat me up. T.M., who I wanted as a girlfriend in third grade, had hair with body and glow like a model’s. Taller than I, superior in every way, I loved the way her lips parted when she wasn’t speaking; I never got close enough to hear the sound of her voice. On an eighth grade school bus trip to the Cloisters, I sat four rows in front of C.E., whose hand I yearned to hold and squeeze. She was always pretending she was a party girl, laughing with a mean hysteria, her darting black eyes not quite crossing mine, a thin bossy Jewish Gina Lollobrigida, a tiny girl, crushing me with coldness. E.C. in high school social studies forgave me my moony adoration by ignoring it and making smart, ironic jokes. In college acting class, M.W. was not pretty and her voice was piercing and I wept in my dorm room pillow when she wouldn’t let my Romeo kiss her Juliet’s lips, to swallow her up with my romantic mouth. I don't know to this day what she thought of that mouth.