The first time I actually spoke to the freckle-faced girl with the laughing eyes was a lesson in ineptness. One morning she climbed onto the bus and, instead of moving to the vacant seats farther back, came directly to mine and sat next to me. She looked at me with her mischievous sage-blues and introduced herself: “Hi, I’m Alice; what’s your name?” The knot stuck in my throat, but I managed to squeeze out the words: “Manuel; I guess we never met.” I was terrified of her the whole time she sat next to me on that April morning in 1954. Despite all the previous encounters rehearsed in my imagination, I could not find anything to say! But Alice was just weeks away from her twelfth birthday, and she was rapidly developing the audacity of an adolescent eager to play the mating game. In contrast to my clumsiness, she talked to me with easy familiarity, and her tone was even coy at times, as she seemed to enjoy seeing me fumble for words. I was completely flustered when we finally got off the bus, but a feeling of euphoria quickly settled over me, and for the rest of the day I floated in a cloud of airy fantasies. The Alice of my imaginary dialogues had actually sought me out and spoken to me

In the days that followed, we often sat together on the bus, and I gradually began to feel more at ease with her as her frolicsome eyes and laughing voice dissolved my instinctive fear of girls. For the first time in my life, I felt real sexual arousal stirring within me, and I began to indulge in vague romantic fancies about the two of us. For her part, Alice had decided to use her blossoming sexual power to ensnare me. I was only too willing. Without my knowing exactly when or how the “dyad of friendship” unfolded, she guided me through the appropriate steps to that fateful moment when I finally blurted out the threshold question: “Will you be my girlfriend?” She took my hand and wilted me with one of her impish looks. “What do you think?” she asked, and then she kissed me on the cheek and ran off with her friend Carmen, both of them giggling hysterically, as if no other reaction could do justice to my ludic(rous) proposition. She knew I was hopelessly in her thrall.

The next step in the courtship ritual was easy enough, thanks to Alice’s presence of mind. (Once I understood her answer to be “yes,” I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what to do next.) Her mother, Mrs. Bentley, operated a movie theater of sorts—a large tent she had set up on the lawn next to the school, in which she showed movies on Saturday nights, with the help of Alice and her older sisters, Carla and Marilyn. Inside the tent the Bentleys had arranged about a hundred folding metal chairs in curving rows, which were usually filled to capacity. As I recall, the movie screen was merely a large canvass hanging from one of the two-by-fours that framed the tent. A divorcee, Mrs. Bentley also happened to be our bus driver, and the tent where she showed old films was just one of this enterprising woman’s ventures to keep her family financially solvent. Alice invited me to come to the next Saturday-night show, where we could sit together for a “date.” My dream girl’s invitation sent me into paroxysms of joyful delirium. Deep down, however, doubts lingered, and I found it hard to believe that I, the little Mexican cottonpicker, had actually captured the interest of someone as privileged as this beautiful American girl.