The Dating Game In Bradley Beach

The summer I was 15, I was a sassy, skinny girl who thought I knew everything. Unlike most of the Syrian community who went to Bradley Beach, my parents preferred quieter Long Beach where we scrunched into a house with my sister, Sallee, her husband Joe and my two young nephews, Elie and Leon.

Restless, I began the summer reading and teaching myself to like classical music. Then, I received a letter from my cousin, Loretta in Bradley, who was a year older. It said, “I miss you. There are so many cute boys here and I have a million dates. It’s so great; you have to come.”

My mother disapproved. I was too shy to speak to boys, but I pushed for it and won the battle. I bought a great looking yellow T-shirt with black stripes in a sports store. When I wore it to Bradley, the first words out of Loretta’s mouth were, “What are you wearing, a boy’s shirt?” She, on the other hand, was wearing movie star clothes from her sister’s trousseau.

Bradley was a pleasant town with small cottages and Victorian houses with big porches. Everywhere you went, you met someone from Brooklyn or their relative. After the Friday night meal at my Aunt RaeRae’s, Loretta and I went to the boardwalk. She wore one of her sister’s knockout glamour girl dresses, and I probably wore my childish light blue shirtwaist dress.

She advised me to act “natural” with the boys. Natural was tongue-tied, inarticulate, scared to death. I tried to laugh, “Hah, hah, huh, huh,” to break the ice with myself, but it didn‘t work.

At the boardwalk, 200 single boys and girls from 16 to 35 socialized, while the older folks watched from benches.

Loretta was swept away by one boy or another into the huge crowd, while I was alone on the fringe. An occasional school chum would stop by. They all looked older and prettier, wearing mascara and red lipstick, than at school where they were schlumpy without make-up.

What seemed like years later, Loretta approached to ask if I’d gotten a date for Saturday night—a stupid question.

The next day, the same 200 singles stood near the snack bar on the beach bantering and flirting, while the older folks sat with their lunches of Friday night leftovers, watching the ritual that inevitably ended with several engagements by September. Again, I was dazzled by Loretta in her sister’s clothes, her hair pulled back in a French knot, and her abundant confidence. Again my body was alien to my brain, appendages hung lifeless from my torso. What could I possibly say to anyone?

Mid-afternoon, Loretta bounced over to ask if I had gotten a date for the evening. My scowl was the answer. She told me I couldn’t stay home. “Everyone goes to the Green Grove Nightclub on Saturday night.”

She weaved in and out of small groups until she returned and indicated a gaunt young man in baggy swim trunks. “You’ll go with him.” Loretta was, if nothing else, persuasive.

When the third star appeared in the sky, at an hour when I would normally have been watching Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, I was picked up by my date.

“Don’t keep her out too late,” my Uncle Ralph advised.

The nightclub was lively with the popular Eddie Kochak performing Arabic songs. My date drank, told bad jokes, and pasted his arm around my shoulders. When I couldn’t take another minute of him, a sympathetic girl followed me to the bathroom where I went to escape. But I was doomed to stay until my date was ready to take this immature, humorless creature home. When he did, my Uncle Ralph bellowed that it was three in the morning and I was only 15 years old! My date raced back to his car.

I cried myself to sleep and longed for the little boxy Long Beach house with my nephews who loved me. When I finally did return home and told the story to my family, it became The Lesson. See, smart-aleck Barbara, you don’t always know everything. “But Loretta told me,” I said as I unpacked. On my dresser, something was missing. The room smelled of my new Shalimar perfume, but I didn’t see it in its place.

I was told Elie broke it. This was life at its worst. I would never recover. A miserable weekend and no Shalimar!

But I did recover. I went back to Bradley the next summer and the next, until I was 21. My conversations became smoother, my wardrobe more attractive, and I had my share of handsome dates. As a teacher, I took myself with a friend to Europe one summer, where I not only had flowing conversations, but I had them in French.