There is no excellent beauty which hath not
some strangeness in the proportion.
— Sir Francis Bacon
When I worked for Continental Insurance, a group of us went to Texas to visit a company that wanted to sell us computers. Our hosts took us out for drinks, and we sat quietly rating the entertainers as they took the stage. One girl had a face that was perfect – she was absolutely movie-star , Miss-America beautiful.
I hadn’t thought about it consciously before, but I said such perfection made me a little uncomfortable, and I would need at least one defect for such a girl to be “real.” One of our hosts said “So, for you, a 10 is a 9 with a broken nose?” I thought about that, and about Mary Ann, the first girl I ever asked out on a date, and told him he was correct.
As an example of “generous features”, the first time I saw newslady Maria Bartiromo on television was around 1995, before she ruined her beauty by getting her nose “fixed”, something done by insecure women who don’t appreciate what it means to be unique. Before that, she was a perfect example of a woman blessed with “generous features.”
Maria was doing the stock market reports on CNBC. She had everything right – the big eyes, the Mediterranean nose, the full lips. I watched her whenever I could, absorbing everything about her. I remember thinking “Man, if only she had been around when I was in high school.” Then I remembered – she had been around, in a sense, but she moved away. Her name was Mary Ann Potenza.
She lived a half block from Vince’s but never came to the store; her aunt did all the shopping. Her house was behind the house of one of my friends from the corner, so we knew each other to see. We both went to Orange High; she was a sophomore and I was a junior. One day I saw her in the hall, got up my nerve and asked if she’d like to go to a movie with me sometime. She said yes.
I wasn’t old enough to drive, so everything happened on foot. The day of our date, I walked to her house the long way around, so I wouldn’t have to go past Vince’s and get quizzed about where I was going all dressed up.
When I got to the house, her younger sister opened the door, but the two girls looked so much alike that I didn’t realize for a moment that the sister was not Mary Ann, and wondered why she looked sort of unkempt and was wearing blue jeans. Then she said “I’ll tell her you’re here” and I said “Okay, thanks.” Her father was lying on the sofa reading and gave me a half-wave without sitting up.
We walked up High Street and then over Main to the Embassy. I suppose I should remember what movie was playing, but my mind was too busy. Did I buy popcorn? Yes, probably. After a while, I tried putting my arm around her shoulders like you’re supposed to in the movies, and it worked; plus she moved over even closer. Did we hold hands walking back? I want to say yes, but when I was older and tried holding hands walking with a different girl, it felt new and weird getting our fingers lined up right, so probably not.
When we got back to her house, we held each other for a minute and had a soft, sweet, slightly open-mouthed kiss. I walked home thinking about that.
The word of our date got out, and the next time I went to Vince’s I was greeted with “Hey! Secret lover!”, and serenaded with the first few bars of the syrupy “Once I had a secret love” song. They were just jealous.
A few weeks after our date, she came up to me in school and said she had to say goodbye, her family was moving to Sherwood Forest. I had no idea of where or even what that was, except for the place Robin Hood lives, and I was too flustered to suggest we stay in touch somehow. And that was the end of a good thing that never had a chance to grow.
Searching now with newspapers.com, I see that Sherwood Forest was a new single-family housing development in Mountainside. So her father moved his family out of Orange, a town already in decline, to a town that is still one of the 10 best in the state. Good for him.
I also ran across her mother’s obituary notice, from 1993, and in the list of survivors I saw that Mary Ann had married a nice Italian boy and was living in Poughkeepsie, New York. Good for them, too.