In Search of Sizemore

One of my favorite books for keeping around the house is Cathy Alter’s Virgin Territory: Stories from the Road to Womanhood. It’s great for picking up when there’s a bit of free time and nothing else to read.

I was paging through it today during an idle moment and I read a story by Betty, a now 36-year old drummer. It was about her first kiss:

He smoked. He played hooky. He was the ype your mom and dad warned you about. He was my brother’s friend, two years older than me and twice as wide. He was really, really fat. Enormous. And I kid you not, his last name was Sizemore. He gave me my first kiss…

I was in fifth grade, and we had just moved to the country. I rode the bus to school. It was the kind of bus where the kids in the back cranked AC/DC and “Highway to Hell” sounded warped and warbly because the batteries were always about to run out. They played it louder than the little speakers could handle, so it sounded all distorted too, like a muffled principal’s announcement coming across the public address system. Kids ran wild, hopping from seat to seat, gossiping, and punching, and pinching.

I was sitting reading The Hobbit when Sizemore yelled, “Hey Betty! Get over here!” So I went over and asked what he wanted. I was scared.

He made me sit on the inside, and he trapped me against the wall of the bus. It was a hot day to begin with, and his huge body pressing into me made me sweat. I cound’t breathe. He told me to give him a kiss. So I did like he said.

His stringy black hair hung down around my face, his fat engulfed my skinny body. But his lips were soft and wet.

I kissed him twice before we pulled up to my house. I raced off the bus, insane, not knowing what I was feeling I ran into my room and shut the door. Then I looked at myself in the dressor mirror and told myself, “I kissed a boy…uh, hey, I have a boyfriend!”

I packed up my stuffed animals, my Barbie dolls, and my glitter stickers, crammed them into a Glad trash bag, and tossed them out onto the curb. Only girls play with toys, and I was all grown up.

He never kissed me again, and I was too timid to approach him. In any event I forgot about him in a week, missed my toys, and wished I still had them. I went back to thinking about horses and saving to buy an Easy Bake Oven.

I heard later that he got religion and went around carrying a Bible and preaching to sinners at shopping malls.

The story made me wonder if Betty and Sizemore ever met up again. If he ever explained to her why he wanted to kiss her on the bus on that hot day. I wonder if Sizemore even knows that Betty wrote about him for her contribution to Alter’s book.

Sometimes I think there are mysteries in life that need explanations. I wonder if Betty still wonders about Sizemore just because she doesn’t understand what he was thinking, or why that kiss had such a dramatic effect on her own image of herself as a grown up.

I hope that someday Sizemore will Google himself, find this post, seek out Betty, and tell her.