Fiction: Deanna, Chapter 1

Deanna: A Story of Love and Change

© 1997, 2017, All Rights Reserved

By Ken K. Gourdin

One

September 21-October 6

I had recently returned from serving a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  That meant that I met the one criterion that a sizable portion of Mormon girls require in a prospective husband.  The problem was that I had never been in love with anyone before—except maybe in my imagination, if you could even call that “love.”

And then it happened.  It was in September on the first day of school—in the school cafeteria, of all places, where she was working at the cash register.  When I saw her, my palms began to sweat, my heart started beating like a snare drum, butterflies decided to use my stomach for an airport, my mouth got desert-dry, and I stammered as if I had never even tried to talk to a girl before—which wasn’t quite true.  I had tried to talk to girls before, usually with less-than-spectacular results.  It was then that I knew that I was in deep trouble.  I mean, the guys in the fairy tales had to make a better first impression than this, didn’t they?  With a first impression like this, it’s a wonder it wasn’t my last.

“Hi, my name’s Deanna.  Call me Dee,” she said.

At that moment, my tongue was so tied I couldn’t call her much of anything.  She was the most beautiful girl I had seen in a long time—certainly one of the most beautiful girls who’d ever actually talked to me.  She had short, curly, dark-brown hair, and the most captivating eyes to match.  Each of them had a single highlight which made them shine like pearls.

“My name’s Eric,” I finally managed to croak, while trying (unsuccessfully) to avoid getting lost in those eyes.  I came back to reality with a sudden jolt.  Oh, my gosh, that’s not my voice, is it?  I asked myself.  I cleared my throat when I realized that it was and added, “Eric Jensen.”

I’m not quite the tall, dark, handsome prince girls say they dream about all the time, I was pleased to note that I wouldn’t have to strain my neck in order to have the pleasure of looking into those beautiful eyes more often.  I have Cerebral Palsy, so I walk with a pair of forearm crutches most of the time.  That also might have had something to do with the fact that I was skeptical that love really existed, and it certainly had something to do with my reluctance where girls were concerned.

Deanna noticed the crutches, and very matter-of-factly said, “I see your hands are full already.  Would you like help with your tray?”  People tend to be quite solicitous of my welfare.  Perhaps they underestimate what I can do for myself, but, if so, it’s an innocent underestimation.  Sometimes—even though I have a “can-do” spirit (or at least a “why-not-try-it?” spirit), I, myself, am not even sure what I can do for myself before I try.

Had the offer come from someone else—someone with whom I wasn’t quite so instantly smitten as I was with her—I might have been slightly tempted to take offense.  In her case, though, I was grateful for the offer, and I milked it for all that it was worth.  “Please,” I said, secretly enjoying our walk to a table—a walk which I deliberately made more leisurely than I might have otherwise.

“Thanks,” I said, as she set my tray down.  “I appreciate it”—and, though I did my best to hide the reasons for this, I did appreciate it, in more ways than one.

“Sure,” she said.  “Any time.”  Hmm, I mused.  I’ll have to take you up on that “offer” as often as I can.  And This thought made me return the smile.

I welcomed the offer of help with my tray on the days that followed, too.  Sometimes, she was too busy to be the one who offered, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed then.  I saw her at a few dances on the Friday and Saturday nights that followed, and she saved a couple of dances for me.  We became friends, but she was interested in someone else, a guy named Scott Williams.  

Working in  the cafeteria gave Deanna the perfect way to get his attention, which would come in handy since she wanted to ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance.  She made a huge sign for this.  On one side, it said

Attention, Scott Williams: Read This!

And on the other side, she had written

Will You Go to the Sadie Hawkins Dance With Me?

Deanna and Scott were both smart enough to realize that he couldn’t turn down such a public invitation without a very good reason, and he didn’t have one.  So he said yes. Guys like Scott had chased me away from girls a hundred times before, but for some reason, I didn’t give up in my pursuit of Deanna even though he was part of the picture. Maybe it was because I didn’t have anything to lose—and a whole lot to gain, because I really liked Deanna.

Things began to turn in my favor one Friday about a week after Deanna asked Scott to Sadie Hawkins.  The Northern Utah University Bobcats had just lost a heartbreaker to a rival school, and I was going back to the dorms from the game.  I passed by the old tennis courts where a dance was being held.  It was supposed to be a victory dance, but there wasn’t much to celebrate after the loss.  It cost two dollars, and there was only an hour left by the time I got there, so I decided not to go.  That decision gave me a great opportunity to get to know Deanna better.

I saw her when I got back to the dorms.  Even though we hadn’t known each other very long yet, I knew her well enough by then to know that something was wrong.  The smile on her face and the sparkle in her eyes were gone.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I broke my date with Scott, and he and his friends are giving me a hard time about it,” she replied.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.  I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it from her.

“Well, I just don’t think he’s the kind of guy I want to go out with.  There are some things I want out of my life and I just—“  She paused.

“Don’t think he can give them to you?” I asked.

“Exactly,” she finished.

“And how do you feel about that?” I asked.  Careful.  You’re starting to sound like a shrink, I told myself.

“Well, I knew deep down that he probably wasn’t the kind of guy I wanted to go out with in the first place,” she said.

“You think you’re the first person to be fooled by a first impression?” I asked, smiling.  “The past is over.  Learn from it.”

“The thing is that now I’m getting all kinds of flak from him and his friends, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

I nodded because I understood.  Our society has a strange double-standard that says a guy can break a date with a girl any time for any reason.  But if a girl makes a date with a guy, she can’t break it even with a sledgehammer.

“Well, for what it’s worth, you did the right thing, and it doesn’t matter how much flack you’re getting from him and his friends,” I said.  Then I had an idea.  Since she was breaking her date with Scott, maybe this would be a good time for me to make a move of my own.

Every six months, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka Mormons, has a General Conference in which members gather to watch (and to participate in) a series of devotional meetings comprised of advice and counsel from Church leaders about how to be the best Latter-day Saint Christians we can be.

Adjacent to many institutions of higher learning (primarily in the United States but also in other areas of the world, as well) the Church of Jesus Christ has Institutes of Religion where college-age youth may supplement their secular learning with religious study.  I asked, “Deanna, would you like to go watch General Conference on the satellite at the Institute of Religion tomorrow morning?” I asked, and held my breath.

It wasn’t that I thought she didn’t want to watch it.  I mean, it’s just that in areas of the United States in which church membership is concentrated, it’s also available on media outlets owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ and by organizations included under the Church umbrella, such as Brigham Young University, or BYU.  These outlets include BYU’s cable channel, BYUtv, and Salt Lake City’s KSL radio and KSL television.  

In this and other areas where a public broadcast is available, we don’t have to dress up and go to a church building with a satellite downlink to watch it.  We have the luxury of being able to watch it or to listen to it in our own homes, in our slippers and jammies where no one can be shocked by what we look like on Saturday mornings.  Why anyone would give up that opportunity and go to the trouble of getting publicly presentable to go watch it at a Latter-day Saint chapel is beyond me.

“Yes,” she said.

Excuse me, did you say “Yes”?  I thought.

“Yes?” I asked, as though I hadn’t really heard her correctly—and, really, I wasn’t sure I had.

“Yes,” she repeated.

So if I t would be right to call General Conference a date, that’s where Deanna and I had our first.  We took notes, traded whispered comments on the speakers’ topics, and generally had a nice time.  But none of us—not Deanna, not Scott, and for sure, not I—could have foreseen that I had just made the first move in a contest that would be drawn out over months, and which much more would be at stake than a girl’s affections.

* * *

But Deanna’s “break” from Scott was far from “clean.”  It was pretty elastic, in fact.  They made up, and her relationship with him continued to run hot and cold in the next few weeks.  He wanted to take their relationship too far, too fast.  Sex outside of marriage is frowned upon in the Church of Jesus Christ, because sex is seen as a sacred, procreative act in concert with God which allows its participants to create physical bodies in which God’s spirit children may dwell on earth.

Scott would get close, Deanna would push him away, and she would get closer to me, and the whole thing would repeat itself all over again.  I was still on the outside looking in at her social life, but I was too concerned about her to worry about that.  Scott was still competing for her affections—and for a lot of other things.  This left me in the awkward position of trying to give her good advice about how to deal with the situation without sounding jealous—which was hard, because I was.

I went over to her dorm on a few other occasions.  We talked, laughed, and listened to music together.  During one of our visits, somehow, I got painted into the corner of talking about my own social life.  “What ‘social life’?” I asked her.  “Girls go into and out of my life through a revolving door.  I’d hardly call that a ‘social life’.”

Since I was “hard up” to meet girls, Deanna decided to play Matchmaker.  “Are you interested in anybody I know?” she asked.  And I figured that if she thought it was fair to paint me into this corner, it was fair of me to paint her into one of her own.

“No,” I said.  “Not unless you count.”

My secret was out.  This was the first time she had heard anything about how I felt about her, and I didn’t know how she felt about that, so I didn’t press further.  But it turned out that the “please-hear-what-I-mean-and-not-what-I-say” approach wasn’t working well for either one of us.  Scott or no Scott, I thought there might be more to her feelings for me than she was letting on.

You’re just imagining things again, Eric, I told myself.  But I would soon found out that I was right.

* * *

The next weekend, I went with my mom and dad to the small southern Utah town of Birchville to visit my grandparents.  I saw Deanna the Friday morning before I left, but I didn’t see the point of telling her my plans for the weekend.  When I saw her again Monday night, she was upset with me.

“Where have you been?” she asked me.  “I’ve been over to your dorm and knocked on the door.  The light was on, but no one answered.  I’ve been worried sick wondering what might’ve happened to you!”

“Well, I—ah, er, um, eh, ugh—well, I’ve been staying with my grandma and grandpa down in Birchville.”  I didn’t bother trying to explain why I hadn’t told her earlier about my plans.

“Next time you leave, you’d better tell someone—like me—where you’re going,” she warned.

I raised my hand to swear.  “I promise,” I said solemnly, and I knew that unless I was misreading the signals she was sending me, our relationship had reached a new level.

* * *

The next night, she came over and we talked again.

“Things are getting really uncomfortable with Scott,” she said.  “I don’t like the kind of pressure he’s putting on me.  But with you, I can just relax and be myself, because there’s no pressure.”

“That’s me.  I’m just a low-pressure kind of guy,” I joked.

She laughed.

“You know,” she said, “I was just telling my roommates today—”  She broke off, embarrassed about something.

“What?” I asked.  To say that I was curious about what she was about to say would be a giant understatement.

“Never mind,” she said, studying the floor as though it were a final exam.

But I wasn’t going to be denied.  “Tell me,” I ordered, politely but firmly.

Then she dropped the bombshell.

It wasn’t Gee, Eric, thanks for a nice time.

It wasn’t Eric, I like you.  I’d like to get to know you better.

It wasn’t even Maybe we should go out sometime.

“Well, it’s like I was telling my roommates today,” she began again.  You’re—you’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a guy.”  Then she turned bright red and ran right out the door.  I called her after giving her time to get back to her dorm.

“Have I scared you away?” she asked fearfully.

“Do you really think I would have called you back if you had?” I asked, laughing.  “No, you haven’t.  In fact, I was getting tired of playing games with girls.  I mean, no offense, but we guys usually do most of the work.  We ‘wine you and dine you’”—metaphorically speaking: the health code of the Church of Jesus Christ, known as the Word of Wisdom, prohibits the use of alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, and harmful drugs—“and we don’t know how you feel about us until you’ve made us bend over backwards.  It’s nice for a girl to be up front for a change.”

“It’s nice to know I haven’t scared you away,” she said, relieved.

“Look,” I said.  “Let me tell you my dating philosophy”—I hadn’t really dated enough to have such a  philosophy, but, so to speak, anyway.  “If I like a girl, and if I can work up enough guts to do it”—a big ‘if,’ perhaps—“I’ll ask her out.  If I like her as much as I thought I would after we go out, I’ll ask her out again.  Whatever happens after that is up to her.  I’m not going to worry about where the relationship goes from there.  Let’s just enjoy the trip together without worrying too much about where we end up, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, even more relieved.

“Now that I know where I stand with you, the only thing you have to worry about is what you’re going to say when I ask you out,” I said.

“Hmmm,” she murmured.  I could tell she thought that was an interesting possibility.  After a pause, she said, “You know, this might sound corny, but this this is the first time anyone has ever made it this far into my inner circle.”

“I’ll tread lightly,” I promised.  “You know I would never do anything to lose your trust on purpose.”

“I know.”

“But I hope you’ll be forgiving of me when I make mistakes.  After all, this is new territory for me.”

“I know,” she said.  “Me, too.”

“I’ll let you set the boundaries of our relationship where you would feel most comfortable, and I’ll honor those boundaries, okay?”

“Okay.”

Boundaries.  That word would take on a significance in our relationship that neither one of was even aware of at the time.

* * *

You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a guy.  She didn’t know me well enough to really mean that yet.  There was more exaggeration than truth behind it, but I was still flattered.  It was far and away the nicest thing  anyone had ever said about me—especially a girl, if that really needed to be said.  And I had to admit that it was quite a starting place for a relationship—exaggeration or not.

Not only had I never been involved in a relationship before.  I hadn’t been able to get so much as another date with the same girl.  I was starting to wonder what could be so seriously wrong with me.  Then all of a sudden, here was this girl saying Eric, there’s nothing seriously wrong with you.  As a matter of fact, a lot of things are right with you.  As a matter of fact, you’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a guy.

But it wouldn’t take long for me to learn that in spite of the way she felt about me, Deanna was far from ready to make a serious commitment to me—and only me.

* * *

Later that night, we decided to go for a walk.  It was still warm for early fall in Utah, and the night was clear and beautiful.  We went to the hill behind the fountain and looked at the stars.  Contemplating the Universe and Our Place In It is a wonderful thing to do with someone you care about.  We had another long talk.

“There are some things you should know about me,” she said.  “About my past, I mean.”

I wasn’t sure how comfortable I felt with that kind of openness this early in our relationship, but if she trusted me enough to open up to me, I didn’t want to stop her.  “Okay,” I said.

“Some of the guys I’ve gone out with, they’ve wanted too much, too fast,” she explained. “And I gave them more than I should have because that’s the only way I thought I could get what I wanted in return.”

“Dee, I’ll never ask for more than you should give me,” I promised her.  “I already respect you too much for that.  Okay?”

“Okay.”