Author's note:
This is a taste of college life in the late 1960s. All characters were over 18 and very real to me. Names have been changed to protect the reputation of the (now) grandmother heroine of my story.
A late-night phone call was no surprise. Ann would frequently call me after a night out with friends to regale me with the fun she had. Sometimes the wine would make her giggly-silly. It was great fun to take advantage of her 'condition' and get her laughing uncontrollably over some sarcastic remark that I'd make. This call started similarly. Ann's girlfriends were saluting several 'dead soldiers' from the Boone's farm brigade when the conversation devolved into quips about what everyone's first time was like with a man.
"You wouldn't believe what Sally did in the back seat of Jim's VW!" said Ann. "That woman is over six feet tall and it sounded like she ended up twisted like a pretzel with a leg sticking out of both sides of the car. When it was time to 'do it' Jim had his head out the sunroof and Lynn was looking at him through the back window," Ann laughed.
"Oh, that's going to make a great commercial for Volkswagen," I said jokingly.
"And Lynn got her underwear caught in the zipper of a sleeping bag on a camping trip. She and John decided to get into one bag and zip it up. When they couldn't unzip the bag past Lynn's panties, John wiggled around to Lynn's crotch and chewed a hole right at her pubes," she giggled. "Every time they have sex now, she asks Jim if he wants to
zip it
? Lynn says she's going to frame the 'holey' pair as a trophy of her first time."
Ann and I chuckled at the stories about a clumsy hammock scene and how sand from the beach can make for a raw memory...not to mention 'raw' body parts. All of these stories made her laugh... except her own story. She didn't have one. I could tell from the long pause and the shakiness in her voice that telling her friends that she was still a virgin shifted the conversation into not-so-funny comments about why that was still the case. Ann wasn't laughing. Drunk girlfriends turned into mean girls and Ann was hurt.
If tears could be detected on a phone receiver, then mine would have been soaked. The call ended rather abruptly with Ann exclaiming, "I'm coming over. I'm coming through the back door."
My room in the fraternity house was right next to the door. It was nice to have easy access to the outside but more times than I'd like to remember the noise of late-night, coming-and-goings would keep me awake. I didn't sleep all that much during active 'door times' so I learned to crank the headphone volume just a bit and make the disturbances evaporate into whatever tunes were spinning on the turntable.
Ann and I first met in one of those long class registration lines, waiting to get a computer punch card that meant an addition to our college schedules. It was a friendly meeting between two shy freshmen. Polite conversation followed with complaints about trying to find classes at the right time. That scenario repeated itself three times that same day.
It turned comical when she asked, while in the third line of students, "Are you following me around?" "Keep this up and people are going to start talking about us!" She joked.
Considering my height and how short Ann was, I responded, "No, I'm just looking for a short shoulder where I can lean and rest my elbow." Ann took no offense at my reference to her 5-foot 4-inch frame and we began a friendship that lasted our entire college careers.
Ann was a cute coed. She had warm brown eyes and a sweet smile that was framed nicely by her shoulder-length brunette hair. I loved her sense of humor. She could flirt with the best of the shy people and that matched my personality well. We both preferred comfort over style and I always thought we looked like a well-matched, Mutt and Jeff pair...me being the taller
Mutt
and Ann being the attractive, but shorter,
Jeff
.
It was after 2 am when Ann showed up at the door. I had the headphones off and had rolled on top of the waterbed, half-snoozing and wondering if Ann was just blowing steam or if she was coming over to talk.
Her knock was a familiar one from her coed visitation times to the fraternity house when she would wind her way down the hall yelling, "Girl on the hall!" It was way past visitation hours and there would be no yelling or walking down the hall...just a familiar rhythmic knock.
It wasn't all that rare for Ann to sneak in the back door. Although not frequent, it wasn't unusual for her to be in my room and for us to talk until the wee hours of the morning.
OK. We didn't always just 'talk'. At parties, we would dance to near exhaustion and retreat to my room to cool off. We did talk a lot. We also loved kissing each other...and Ann was an exceptional kisser. There were boundaries that we simply didn't cross. Caressing a breast would attract a forearm to push the offending hand away with a mild, verbal grunt of a warning accompanied by a slight head shake. I often wondered if she knew just how much her kissing aroused me and suspected from some of our more intensive lip-locks that Ann was equally aroused.
Ann moved quietly through the back door and pushed past me as I opened my door so she could get into my room undetected by others. Her thick sorority jersey draped almost to the hem of her cut-off jeans. The flip-flops, though, were a bit unusual. The 40-degree outside temperature made the total ensemble seem out of place. I had no sooner closed and locked the door when Ann wrapped her arms around my neck and said, "Will you hold me for a while?"
Those were the only words spoken by my normally chatty friend. I did not say anything and wrapped my arms around her in a familiar dance-like embrace. We stood like that for several minutes until Ann wrapped a leg around my sweatpants and whispered, "I'm a little chilled".