Spooked, Jeana hurriedly thrust out the bouquet. "Carl brought these over. Do we have a vase or something?"
"They're very lovely. Well, come along, we can look for something in the kitchen." Jeana and I followed along, trailed by her father.
"Something smells awfully good.", I commented as we entered the kitchen.
"It's Friday and I didn't want to do fish, so I made some manicotti.", said Mrs. Colosimo. "Do you like manicotti?"
"Love it!", I replied. "Can I help?"
This was received with laughter, since the kitchen was totally off limits to possessors of the Y chromosome. I was ushered back out to the living room with Jeana's father, while Mrs. Colosimo prepped dinner in the kitchen and Jeana moved nervously back and forth between the kitchen and the living room.
Mr. Colosimo was okay. He just wanted to get a feel for the guy taking his daughter out. Although he looked like a plumbing contractor out of a bad sitcom, he was actually an executive with an insurance company that had just transferred him to their Baltimore office. Mrs. Colosimo was his secretary. Over dinner, he gently quizzed me about my plans for the future. At one point, exasperated with his daughter's nervousness, he told her to stop having kittens. She grumbled back at him, and Jeana's mom and I laughed at them both.
After dinner, Jeana excused herself to get ready to go out, and her mother asked me, "So, has Jeana shown you her trophies yet?"
"Trophies?"
"She's a very good bowler." Mrs. Colosimo led me into the den, where there was a small glass fronted display rack filled with a number of bowling trophies. That was where Jeana found us.
I smiled at her. "I think I've been hustled. Trophies?"
She gave me the biggest shit eating grin. "Oh? Didn't I tell you? It must have slipped my mind. Come on, let's go!"
"I want you home by ten.", said her father.
"Daddy! No!"
"Daddy yes! Ten!"
"I think we can let her stay out until ten-thirty.", said her mother. Dad snorted and waved us off after I promised I'd have her back by ten-thirty.
"They treat me like a little kid!", complained Jeana as we got into my car.
"They treat you like their only daughter, who is precious to them. Give them a chance. After I get you home by ten-thirty tonight, next week it will be eleven, and the week after that, we'll be able to stay out until the crack of dawn."
She smiled at that. "The crack of dawn! You sure about that?"
"Well, maybe not quite that late, but you get the idea." I smiled over at her as we headed up York Road. "Trophies? Really?"
As I knew she would, Jeana cleaned my clock but good. Why not, she had the first time around, too. This time I had been expecting the trophy case, so I just smiled when I was shown it, and complained about being hustled. We bowled three games and then goofed off around the snack bar. I made sure she was home at least ten minutes early, and then hung around the living room with her until eleven. I got a very nice kiss, no tongue, but very nice, when I said good-bye.
I made sure I called her the next day, just before lunch, to tell her how much I enjoyed our date, and we ended up talking for almost an hour. Needless to say, Hamilton complained to our parents how I was using the phone. I have no idea why he was bothering, since both of them had been through the kitchen more than once and knew I was on the phone. After I hung up, I made some lunch and told my father, "You know, we ought to put a phone down in the family room."
"You know how?", he asked.
"Absolutely." - because I spent thirty years running telecomm networks. No I didn't say that, but I thought it.
Hamilton immediately protested we weren't allowed to do that, and I thought to myself, for once, he's actually right. In those days, practically the entire country's phone system was a licensed monopoly of the Bell Telephone System. You didn't actually own the phones in your house, you rented them from Ma Bell. Until the Eighties, when it was broken up, Bell Telephone ran the entire thing. If you wanted a new phone in a bedroom, you were supposed to call them and they would send out a technician to run the cable and install a phone, for a small fortune.
At the same time, however, it was entirely legal to go out to the store and buy telephone wire and jacks, and even telephones. You just weren't allowed to install them in conjunction with Bell equipment. It was a rule observed more in the breach.
I told Dad what we would need and we went out after lunch and went to the hardware store and picked up the supplies. It was ridiculously easy, run a fifty foot spool of two-pair twisted-pair phone wire to the junction block in the utility room, and then install a junction block in the family room. We spent far more time running the wire than anything else, sneaking it around corners and through the wall, and then up and over a door frame, tacking it down with wire staples as we went. At the end of it, Hamilton once more complained, "You're going to get caught!"
Dad ignored him. I just said, "Well, if we do, we'll know who squealed, won't we?" He skedaddled off to his room in a hurry at that. I looked at my father. "His continued existence strains my belief in both a benevolent God and Charles Darwin."
"Settle down!"
Mom came in just as we finished up, and I lifted the handset and we could hear the dial tone of a clear connection. "Does it work?", she asked.
I couldn't have asked for better timing. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, the phone rang. "Don't know! Let's find out!" I picked up the handset and said, "Maryland Home for Dissolute Women! Dropping off or picking up?"
Dad started laughing, and Mom gave out a shocked, "Carling!"
There was a loud laugh at the other end of the line. Aunt Peg then said, "Carling, you rascal, is your mother available?" Aunt Peg was my godmother and one of Dad's sisters. I loved her dearly.
"She's one of the more dissolute women available. Hold on." I handed the phone to Mom and Dad laughed some more. Mom swung at the back of my head, but I ducked out of the way. Back before I got restarted, in college, it was considered a sign of a real wiseass to be able to come up with smartass answers when the phone rang. 'County Morgue. You stab 'em, we slab 'em!' and 'Murphy's Bar and Cat House. Liquor in the front, poker in the rear!' were always favorites.
Hamilton expressed his disapproval with the phone in a different way. If he answered the call, and it was for me, he simply hung it up and then left it off the hook until somebody figured it out. He was becoming a real pain in the ass!
Chapter 15: The Carl Buckman Experience
Proof that Jeana had enjoyed our date surfaced on Monday morning. Ray and I and a few of our friends were hanging out in the hallway before homeroom, when Jeana came up. God, but she looked good! How she snuck out past her mother was questionable at best. She had on jeans that looked like they had been painted on, black pumps with at least a two inch heel, and a bright red long sleeved knit top that zipped up the front and had a tiny built in hood down the back, and that top was so tight and thin you could count her freckles, if she had any. Conversation simply stopped as she sauntered down the hall. She came up to me and wrapped her arms around me, and kissed me hard on the lips.
I have to admit I was smiling a cat-with-a-canary-dinner smile after I came up for air. Ray looked disgusted. "So, the date went well?", he asked.