When Eric met Sam

Michael Pierce woke up early in the morning and went straight into the shower, his enthusiasm almost uncontainable. Today he was going to visit university campuses with his daughter Stephanie who had done excellently in high school and earned a full bursary from KPMG to study accounting. They had visited three colleges yesterday and the whole time Michael had done nothing but stand back and be impressed as his daughter chatted to students and student advisers about what to expect from university life. Stephanie was the second one to wake up, followed by her mother Jo-Ann, who draped on a gown and headed downstairs for her first cigarette.

The last one to wake up, as always, was Eric. He awoke at seven a.m., leaving himself only thirty minutes to get ready for school. He achieved this by quickly freshening up in the bathroom and having a cup of coffee that was three quarters milk so he could drink it immediately in one sip. His style of doing things grated on his parents, who, every time they tried to talk to him about taking things more seriously, were met with some clever remark that aggravated them further. They were running out of patience with him and were fast approaching the point of giving up on him, and for Eric that day couldn't come soon enough. He kept doing things his way, putting in the absolute minimum amount of effort, like the homework that he hurriedly stuffed into his bag, a book report that he had had two weeks to do that he had only done last night, about a book that he had made up by an author that he had made up.

The journey to school in the morning was usually made in silence, but on this morning, with Michael being so excited, Eric and Jo-Ann had to sit in the backseat and listen as he asked Stephanie one question after another.

"Have got everything you need for today?" "Are KPMG going to be e-mailing the bursary approval letter today?" "Do you have all the documents that you need in case you decide to register today?"

They were all questions that he already knew the answers to, his only reason for asking them was to once again confirm for himself that his daughter was going to university, a fact which Eric knew and which made listening to his father's questions all the more unbearable.

“Eric, Kate’s going to be taking Jacqueline for her swimming lesson today, so she’ll come and pick you up from school today,” Michael said to his son when they arrived at his school. Michael was so focused on his day with his daughter that the alternate arrangements he’d made for Eric’s transportation had slipped his mind, it was only now when it was time to leave him at school that he remembered.

“Okay,” Eric said, exiting the car without saying goodbye.

With Eric having exited the car, Jo-Ann was left to endure her husband's excitement all alone. The atmosphere in the car bothered Jo-Ann for different reasons than it did her son. It all started a week earlier, when the topic of Stephanie’s future came up for discussion in the living room. Jo-Ann, who hadn’t finished high school, was marginalized from the outset as what was meant to be a family discussion was quickly monopolized by Michael, the authority in the house on education having been a teacher for twenty-five years. Every time Jo-Ann attempted to make the slightest contribution Michael would quickly shoot her down and leave her feeling deeply insulted. The final straw came when, after hours of listening to her husband go on and on about chartered accountants and their handsome salaries, she decided it was about time a different viewpoint be introduced to the discussion.

“Stephanie, it’s important that you not only think about the money, remember this is something you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life, you need to make sure it's something you’re truly passionate about it.”

Unable to believe the incredibly fatuous nature of this comment, Michael set aside any consideration he had for his wife’s feelings and wasted no time pouncing on her.

“Jo-Ann, please, don’t sit there and talk rubbish and put stupid ideas in Stephanie’s head, the days when you could waste time pursuing your passions are long gone; these days you go for the money. I mean look at Jolene, she’s only twenty seven and already she’s a partner at KPMG and a multimillionaire; she bought a house cash, she bought a BMW cash, she travels all over the world, isn’t that what you want for your child?”

The condescension and authoritativeness in his voice was simply too much for Jo-Ann. She left the living room and went to sit alone outside on the porch where she attempted to assuage the humiliation and exclusion she was feeling with nicotine.

That night the decision was made that Stephanie would study accounting. The next day Michael and Stephanie submitted to KPMG the bursary application documents, and now all that was left was for Stephanie to select an institution of higher learning.

One week on and Jo-Ann was still smarting from the 'family discussion' they’d had, and her subsequent exclusion from all things university related had only made her feel worse. She sat alone in the backseat of the car feeling tense and upset, just waiting to be dropped off at work so she could get away from all of this university business.

* * *

It was while his mother was standing outside the VW dealership where she had worked for fifteen years holding a cigarette between her trembling fingers during her lunch break that Eric first saw Sam. He was standing on the road outside of the house where his cousin took her swimming lessons when she came walking along the road all by herself wearing the uniform of his sister school.

She had the looks of someone who would be instantly dismissed as a nerd: she was short, wore glasses, had her hair tied in a small neat ponytail, had small ears that stuck out ever so slightly, and walked inelegantly with her thumbs jammed tightly under the straps of her backpack. Her eyes, however, were deep, luminous pools of blue that, when their eyes met, rendered Eric oblivious to every other thing.

Eric had no experience with girls, as a child he had been too shy and lately, with him being so busy, a girlfriend was a distraction he could ill afford. There was something different about this girl though, enough for him not to be okay with leaving her to walk away from him forever. A large part of him was afraid to go to her, but those fears were allayed when she looked up from the ground to look at him and their eyes met for a second time and he saw that this was not someone of whom he needed to be afraid. With this courage in hand he went after her, having no earthly clue what he was going to say to her when he reached her.

“Hi,” he said to her nervously when he reached her. Standing next to her she was quite a bit shorter than he'd originally thought, which threw him slightly.

“Hi,” she responded, just as nervously. Just like Eric she was doing this for the first time and was experiencing intense anxiety.

“I’m Eric”, he said, shakily proffering his hand.

“I’m Sam,” she said, tentatively accepting it.

“Sam…is that short for Samantha?” He asked, desperate.

“No, it’s just Sam.”

“Sam,” he said reflectively, regarding her.

“What?” Sam asked, feeling self-conscious and off-balance.

“Nothing, it’s just that it suits you perfectly, it’s cute.”

“Oh, thanks,” Sam said bashfully; she never received compliments about her looks, and the sincerity with which he'd uttered his made her incapable of stopping herself from becoming red-faced.

With the introductions now dispensed with the conversation was taken a hold of by a lull from which neither Eric nor Sam had the conversational skills to extricate it. They ambled on in painfully palpable silence until Eric—deciding that since he was the one who’d initiated this verbal exchange the responsibility for moving it forward belonged to him—blurted out the only conversation advancer he could think of.

“So, Sam, do you have a boyfriend?”

“Really? Just like that?” Sam asked, taken aback by his forthrightness.

“Well, logically I figure if you answer ‘yes’ it means you either have a boyfriend or you don’t and you’re giving me the brush off, and if you answer ‘no’ then it means we can move on to figuring out the next step.”

Eric’s directness, while peculiar and jarring, was welcomed by Sam. She was also keen to move on to figuring out what came next and putting the awkwardness behind them.

“In that case no, I don’t have a boyfriend.”

Sam liked Eric. Like her he too had larger than usual ears; his tall, lanky build had an interesting listlessness about it, and she could see intelligence in his brown eyes.

“So…what does come next?” She asked cautiously after another, although shorter, awkward silence.

“You know I’m really not sure; I think we’re supposed to make plans to go on a date or something.”

"Okay, erm, can I give you my phone number and you can call me later when you've thought of something?"

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"Okay."

Sam quickly retrieved from her blazer pocket a scrap of paper and a pen and wrote down her phone number for him.

“So when do you think you’ll call?” She asked as she handed him the scrap of paper.

“Sometime tonight,” Eric said as he accepted it.

“Call after nine-thirty, my mom’s usually asleep by then.”

“Okay,” then, noticing something strange, he asked, “Is this your home number?”

“Yeah, I don’t have a cell phone,” Sam confessed.

“Me neither, I can’t stand them,” Eric responded, happy to learn that Sam wasn’t another teenager whose cell phone was their entire life.

They snickered for a moment at their uncoolness knowing that the time for them to depart each other was now upon them, enjoying the level of comfort they’d reached which two minutes ago had seemed unattainable; whereas then they were eager to expedite things now the moment of departure had come disappointingly soon.

“Guess this is goodbye then,” Eric said.

“Yeah, you'll call tonight?”

“Yeah.”

With that Sam turned away smiling bashfully and continued her walk home with irrepressible excitement bubbling inside her. The wait for Eric’s phone call was going to be interminable. How she was going to keep herself together until then she didn’t know, and concealing her uncharacteristically high spirits from her mother was another problem she was going to have to deal with, but for now all Sam wanted to do was drink in the once implausible reality of a boy taking an interest in her.

* * *

Later that night, with Michael and Stephanie having completed their three day, six university tour, it was time for one final family meeting to decide which one Stephanie would be pursuing her accounting studies at. Michael surged into the living carrying an armful of binders and with three swift movements cleared everything off the coffee table and put off the TV after grabbing the television remote out of his wife’s hand. Wanting to catch the rest of the episode of The Bold and the Beautiful she’d been watching up until her husband’s rude entrance, Jo-Ann quickly left her seat and made for her room, not prepared to sit through another stomach-churning discussion about Stephanie’s university studies.

“Don’t you care about your daughter’s future?” Michael asked her as she was on her way out in his trademark tone of condescension and judgment.

Jo-Ann did in fact care a great deal about her daughter’s future. She worried that her daughter’s single-mindedness regarding her studies was not drive and determination but rather the result of Michael's obsession with chartered accounting which was the product of his niece Jolene's success. The subject that seemed to interest Stephanie most was English, her marks there were well above all her other marks including Math and Accounting. Feeling that her daughter was denying herself the chance to study what she really wanted to study for the sake of satisfying her father's obsession, Jo-Ann had tried several times to talk to her daughter in the hopes of eliciting from her a response that was different from the one her father had spent years drilling into her head, suggesting to her the possibility of a career in journalism or even writing. Every time she did their conversation would inevitably end with Stephanie doggedly averring “I want to be a chartered accountant”. Getting nowhere with the girl, Jo-Ann soon gave up. She excluded herself from the entire university process and left her husband to control their daughter, not a new dynamic in their relationship but on this occasion, with so much at stake, she felt she had to try and get through to Stephanie.

While her father was in the living room neatly laying out the university prospectus binders on the coffee table, Stephanie was in the kitchen making him the cup of coffee he’d asked her to make for him, using the time to go over one last time the argument she’d devised for bringing her father around to her choice of university. The day before they’d visited Westville University and since seeing it Michael had been unable to stop raving about its extensive facilities. Stephanie’s first choice was Glendale College, the school her best friend Laurelle was going to be attending, thus she needed to extinguish her father’s idea of her attending Westville. Heretofore she’d been happy to allow her father to get carried away with his zeal, but now the time had come for her to take control. She carried his coffee into the living room feeling she was well equipped to do so and sat down next to him wearing the same ‘let’s get down to business’ countenance as him, ready to let the air out of him the second he started making the case for Westville University. It took a couple of hours, but by extolling the impressiveness of the head of the accounting department at Glendale University, Prof. Palmer, and making her case for why she believed having the best human resources available to her would be more beneficial to her than material resources like huge computer labs, she was able to disabuse her father of the idea of her going to Westville.

“So Glendale then?” He asked in supportive capitulation.

“Yup, Glendale.” Stephanie responded sweetly, congratulating herself on the inside.

“Okay, so when are we going to go and get you enrolled?”

“Actually I already phoned Laurelle and told her I’d go with her.”

“But we’ve done everything together so far,” Michael ejaculated, feeling like his daughter had just driven a rapier through him.

“I know, but that was all the important stuff, enrollment is simply a matter of filling out a few forms.”

“Oh, okay,” Morris said in retreat, realizing how pathetic he must have sounded with his last remark.

“So when are you going to go?”

“We’ll go the day after tomorrow; after these last two days I want to take tomorrow off to have a rest.”

“Okay then, Glendale it is,” Michael said magisterially, bringing an end to the proceedings for the night.

Having achieved the exact outcome she was hoping for Stephanie quickly left the living room and ran upstairs to her room so she could call Laurelle and give her friend the good news. Michael vacated the living room soon after, grabbing the Glendale file off the coffee table and taking it outside with him to give the prospectus a thorough read-through, freeing Jo-Ann to resume watching her TV show; there were still ten minutes left until it ended and she was eager to catch them.

When The Bold and the Beautiful ended Jo-Ann sat and tried to understand why Michael had admonished her for trying to leave. What took place tonight was nothing more than a shorter version of what had taken place a week ago: Michael and Stephanie talked about Stephanie's university studies while she sat completely invisible to the two of them. The only reason she could think of for him to insist on her being there was so that she could bear witness to how close he and his daughter were and feel how excluded and unnecessary she was. Tonight’s experience wasn’t the total waste last week’s was though; Jo-Ann was happy to see Stephanie not being so submissive and she enjoyed watching Michael being brought down a peg by her. Jo-Ann was proud of her daughter, and hoped that in the future Michael would find himself the victim of further exclusion.

* * *

Eric had been a recluse from when he was a very small child, having recognized early on the place he occupied in his family relative to that of his sister. Growing up his solitude and the invisibility it afforded him had suited him just fine, but at 9 o'clock that night, with thirty minutes to go until it was time for him to phone Sam, his undeveloped people skills were haunting him just like they had been earlier when he'd been talking to Sam on the street. Assailed by self-doubt, he thought more about not calling Sam the more time went by, while at the same time Sam was sitting alone in the lounge with the phone next to her, anxiously waiting for it to ring. In the hours since they’d met Sam had been unable to do her homework, practice the piano or read, and the dinner that she prepared for she and her mother was below her usual standard. Unable to shed her anxiety through force of will, Sam soaked herself in a hot bath, discovering when she emerged from the bathroom and sat down in the lounge with her copy of Terms of Endearment—which she was busy reading for the third time—that her anxiety had not dissipated one bit in the scalding water. Still, she sat and waited for his phone call with irrepressible anticipation. Sam was lonely, she had never been successful at making friends and the sudden, unexpected prospect of a boyfriend was more than her nerves could take.

When the appointed hour of nine-thirty arrived, Sam braced herself for her second conversation with Eric. Her impatience for the arrival of his phone call and her fear of how this conversation was going to go caused her anxiety to become overwhelming, and time became her tormentor. Each second passed with the audible cold thud of steel, the minute hand on the clock appearing menacingly motionless. She waited in increasing agony as nine-thirty became nine-thirty five, nine-thirty five became nine-forty. She imagined Eric sitting and reflecting on their afternoon exchange as he contemplated whether to call her and deciding ultimately that she was too mousy and weird looking to be girlfriend material and was not going to be calling. Nine-forty became nine-forty five, and she became increasingly convinced that her suspicion was correct. At nine-fifty it became the inescapable truth, and she gave up hope of him calling her.

She didn't know how she was ever going to forgive herself for having allowed her expectations to soar to such heights. She felt crushed and humiliated, was on the precipice of a deluge of tears and wanted nothing more than to forget this awful episode. Then, as she was reaching for the lamp switch to put it off before she left for her room, the phone rang, sending her hopes rising up to the same heights she had just admonished herself for allowing them to rise to.

“Hello,” she picked up on the first ring and said eagerly, unable to contain the happiness and relief that his phone call had produced.

“Yeah, hi. It’s me, Eric,” he answered, nervousness and uncertainty evident in his voice.

“Yeah, hi.”

An already familiar silence materialized between them.

Grabbing hold of the phone and dialing Sam's number had drained Eric of his energy reserves, while on the other end of the line Sam, with her surfeit of energy, was concerned about saying too much too quickly and sounding crazy. Having no confidence in their present capacity for conversation they each took a brief time-out, he to replenish his reserves and she to release some of hers.

“Sorry I’m calling so late,” Eric apologized, feeling terrible about the lateness of his phone call.

“Its fine, I was actually busy with something else and wasn’t even aware of the time,” Sam lied, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible.

“So…our date,” Eric said, his words utterly devoid of conviction.

“Yeah, our date. Have you decided on anything yet?” Sam asked tentatively, having perceived Eric’s shakiness through the phone.

He hadn’t, and with time having run out Eric had no options available to him but to make the risky confession to Sam of his revulsion of people.

“Sam, can I be honest with you?”

“Erm, yeah, sure,” she answered, worried by the seriousness with which he’d asked his question.

“I don’t want to go on a date.”

Hearing his words, Sam was crushed for the second time in a matter of a few seconds.

“So, what, you don't want to see me?” She asked, confused and upset.

“No, no, it’s not that, it’s just…”

“It’s just what?” Sam asked impatiently, unable to endure being in this cruel state of limbo.

“I don't like people, in fact I hate them, and I don't want to go to a place where we're going to be around a lot of them which is why I haven't been able to come up with an idea for what we could do for a date.”

“Oh,” Sam said, breathing a huge sigh of relief, “so, what are we going to do then?” she asked with renewed optimism.

“I don’t know. I do want to see you, I just can’t think of a setting that doesn’t leave me feeling nauseous.”

“Well, my mother works a full day on Saturday. I’ll be at home alone, you could come to my house, then it’ll just be the two of us,” Sam offered cautiously.

“That sounds fine, so I’ll come to your house then.”

“Great, just walk to the church that's down the road from where we met and take a right, it’s the yellow house with the roses in front of the boundary wall.”

“Okay, so I’ll see you on Saturday.”

“Yeah, see you on Saturday.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

The four days that they were going to have to wait before they saw each other again was already feeling like forever. During those four days they were going to endure fear, doubt and anxiety, all of which was going to make them question whether they had what it took to go through with this, a question they would only know the answer to when Saturday arrived.