"Can virgins use Tampax?" I asked.
"Only if they're female. Or women, or something like that," my best friend Russell replied, checking his summer tan and flexing each of his biceps in turn as he leaned back against our kitchen door. It was after school the first week of senior year in high school, and my gang and I were having a snack, looking out at the small back yard and the palisade fence the neighbors had built at the top of the rise behind our split level. Each of us had four Keebler Pecan Sandies and a glass of milk in front of him, on napkins, courtesy of me, Simon Jeffries. We were very neat in our house. Squared away, as a military family ought to be.
"You know, Sime, yours is the only house where this goes on," Egan said. Egan was our resident sociologist, the son of a professor at George Washington U. He would sometimes sit through an entire after school session without saying anything and then, as we were just about to go our separate ways, distill our behavior and dissect our motivation. His reward for this, more often than that, was a few knuckle sandwiches for his insights, with several of us holding him face down while one or two others made fists--the middle finger pushed out by a thumb underneath--and ground them briskly into his ribs and vertebrae. He seemed to think it was worth it, and we enjoyed punishing him, so everybody was happy with the arrangement.
"At everybody else's house we go into the kitchen," Russell agreed, "and see what they've got around for sandwiches and we make our own. Then we dump the dishes and stuff in the sink and head out to adventure. Here, you sit us down like a little Betty Crocker and everybody gets three or four cookies and a napkin to put them on. And their beverage of choice as long as it's milk, because your family doesn't let you have soda. Then you want to talk sports instead of girls and sex, because you memorized all those career batting statistics during your misspent childhood and you don't want to admit that baseball has been superseded by more profound concerns." He did an inside-out knuckle crack and cut a fart to emphasize his point.
"Like menstrual cycles," I said. "And the name of the pink area around the nipple."
"Aureola," Egan quickly responded, spelling it for us.
"Durn Tooting," Oz chimed in. He was the clown in the bunch and he liked asking for Fig Newtons, so he could say "Durn Tootin." It was his slogan, based on the cookie commercial. He was short and had a round head and freckles, not to mention ears that jutted out so that he looked like Alfred E. Newman, the cover boy for Mad magazine. Sometimes we would work up a locomotive cheer of "Durn tootin', we like fig newtons," for him. He had told us he was working on a new act, not quite pulled together yet, which was good, because those cookies were getting a little stale.
"I'm thinking of naming my dick," Russell said. Egan reached back and grabbed him by the shirt front, putting his face six inches from Russell's and saying "It's called Dick or it's called Peter, and that's the end of it. What are you, a Communist or something? What country are you from, originally? Or you can call it Willie, after Willie the Conqueror, like those fancy nancy British lads."
"The girls name them, that's what I hear." Russell pried Egan's hand loose and moved away. "They give them names, like Pepperoni and Mushroom."
"I want a pizza ass. God knows I do." Oz. We all shot him the finger, but the man had done it once again. It was worthy of respect. He beamed at the rest of us, enjoying the score, glad to be back on the board.
"What name were you thinking of? Pickle Breath?"
"No, Happy Man," Russell responded.
"You mean Little Man," I said. Everybody hooted at Russell and made jerking off motions, thumbs and forefingers coiled tightly to demonstrate the mini-sculinity of Little Russell.
"Will you guys change the subject!" Egan responded. "Thinking about this subject is starting to give me a hard-on, and then I won't know what to do."
"Shut up, Egan," Russell replied. "You wouldn't know what to do with a hard-on if Maureen herself was upstairs here in Simon's parents bedroom stripped naked under a sheet!"
"Do you think Maureen does it?" I asked. "Do you think she and Tommy are doing it? And anyway, it's areola." Maureen was five feet four and had thirty six D bazookas that we had nicknamed Kilimanjaro and Annapurna. All of us were in envy of Tommy, but he was a secret agent, sharing nothing with anybody, and it didn't look like there would be any cracking of that nut. This was the Sixties, and girls were supposed to be virgins until they got married, although a few of them got married because they "had to." This was also before the famous Supreme Court case of Griswold v. Connecticut, so getting condoms meant running a gauntlet of beady-eyed and disapproving pharmacists and checkout ladies who were likely to be friends of your parents, or fellow churchgoers, or otherwise affiliated with the forces of oppression whose only goal was to keep teenagers from enjoying their first sex and the last free days of their lives.
There is nothing easier than going to high school, if you don't worry about ever having to use your "mind." What little is left over between your ears after the hormones have done their Apache rain dance can hardly described as a mind anyway, so I guess the message is that you're lost from beginning to end, if you're anywhere near normal. Aunt Helen found me in that condition at the age of seventeen, and I'm forever grateful to her. This story is first and foremost for her.
Getting up in the morning is a teenager's worst nightmare. If you're a girl, you wonder if something unspeakable hasn't happened during the night-- maybe your sheets are stained and you're going to have to wash them out in cold water and run them through the dryer, which will mean you won't have the time you need to get your makeup on and your hair exactly the way you want it, for once in your life. Or your breasts haven't grown during the night the way you wished and prayed that they would, or they grew too much and now your clothes are starting to feel like a straitjacket and you can hardly breathe without worrying that two or three buttons on your blouse will fly off and make a noise the whole class will hear and you'll be embarrassed and probably have to transfer to another school, but the story will follow you and you'll never be allowed to be happy. Or that your girlfriends don't really like you for yourself, but no one will tell you that.
If you're a guy, the unspeakability confronts you directly, this missile pointed at your face, pulsing with your heartbeat, shrieking undeniability and letting you know it's going to take some time to deal with, although honestly not all that much time. Meanwhile, your parents are going to be asking you what you're doing in there taking a 45 minute shower, and from the gasps in your breath when you try to answer them they will know that you are stroking yourself, driving yourself crazy, building up such a charge that you are afraid you are about to make a noise like a lion when he's nailed his kill. And then you reach the point, the all consuming point, and you stuff a washcloth in your mouth and let Old Faithful do its work. After that you reassemble yourself, try to find your toothbrush, and admire the come you shot onto the mirror over the sink in the family bathroom, using your forefinger to shape it into a heart with an arrow drawn through it before you clean up after yourself, using the same washcloth and making sure to rinse it thoroughly so your mother can't gather any evidence to confront you with.
A lot to go through, to say the least. This business of being a human being is bizarre in so many ways as it unfolds. And unfolding is the secret of success in life--not the peeling of the onion, but the opening of closed, convoluted spaces--like brains and sexual parts, coiled extravaganzas, explosive devices, the sprouting of seeds, the opening of flowers, the bursting of an idea. Not that there's much resemblance between the two--blood supply in the brain is the basis of life, and when all that blood goes down there to pump up the apparatus, any meaningful sort of thinking comes to a dead standstill. At this age, some people go three or four years without having a coherent thought or being able to respond to a question more complicated than "Can you spell your last name for me?"
This girl named Amanda had been driving me crazy. She loved me like a brother, it seemed, and I loved her in entirely different ways, ways I wanted to show her with my mouth and my hands and anything else I could put in contact with her. She looked just like an angel. Fine light brown hair wreathing a Pre-Raphaelite face, tall and leggy and smart and funny and with a little mustache that tickled when you actually got as far as kissing her. She kissed sort of like a parakeet nibbling on your lip. Plus, I didn't like her breath--she seemed to have trouble digesting some vegetables--but since I was in love with the idea of her, rather than the real seventeen year old human female whose quirks and oddities my rose colored glasses smoothed away, I did wonderfully at overlooking those minor issues. The realist in me, however, eventually said the thing with Amanda was going nowhere. She would talk about Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth until the sun came up and you would go home with the memory of two or three of those Brussel sprout flavored parakeet nibbles and a crotch ready to explode in more colors than the Sunday supplement. I needed a girl who was ready for some action. It was time to look around, now that the summer was over.
The problem was simple. My first steady girlfriend, Dorothy with the beautiful breasts and the facile fingers, had left for Italy, abandoning me to my own devices, which were few and simple at this point in my life. I didn't miss her all that much--she was always talking about how after we went steady for four years we could get married the summer before our senior year in college and about what china and silver and crystal she wanted to register us for. All of this was way ahead of my schedule for myself, in addition to which I'd just read where Bertrand Russell said marriage should be, if it were to be at all, a series of five year contracts, renewable if both parties agreed. That seemed more advanced than anything Dorothy was coming up with.
But I did miss the things she did for me in the front seat of my parents' car after the Catholic Youth dances, when we would go down to the road by the power company substation, unpaved, quiet, with cars spaced about twenty feet apart on Friday and Saturday nights and nobody paying any attention to anyone else. One time a car rolled down this lovers lane late in the evening at a high rate of speed, its lights on high beam, spitting pebbles and rocks off the unpaved road against the rocker panels of the cars, sounding like machine gun fire from a North Korean MIG attacking a defenseless village, and Dorothy and I were wrapped around each other full tilt, with our hands going, our lips and tongues locked in tender entwinement, and when the car came ripping through I thought she had bitten mine off. My tongue. It was just a contusion, but it made me skittish about the idea of oral sex, as you can well imagine. It even made me skittish about French kissing, for a day or two, but I overcame that with will power and hormone therapy.
Nevertheless, Dorothy had beautiful smooth skin and lovely perky breasts with full brown nipples that exploded in my mouth the first time I tasted them, and her pussy had felt like the road to Valhalla, a consistency like mead, the fermented brew of the Norse gods, the one night she had let me touch it, the night before she left for Italy. That memory helped provide scores of self induced orgasms, none of which made me feel much better ten minutes after they were over. I didn't realize then what a cosmic insight I had been afforded on that subject, not that it would have made any difference whatsoever.
I was into the Norse gods at the time, always wanting to be different. The Greek and Roman gods they taught you about in school were much too ordinary, and not nearly tragic enough, for my operatic soul. I listened to The Drifters' "There Goes my Baby," and Clyde McPhatter "A Lover's Question" and Sonny Till and the Orioles "Crying in the Chapel." I'd never heard a note of a Wagner opera, but the Norse gods, like the kings and queens of black rock and roll, were the ones who knew how to sing the blues. They wiped each other out and screwed each other over, brother killing brother, and finally they did themselves in--a cataclysmic ending that made you think of what people were saying would happen if the USA and the Russians ever unleashed their full nuclear arsenals on each other. "Better dead than red," was the slogan, but I'd never even been laid, so I guess my patriotism was already a little adrift of mainstream thought in this area as well as others.
So, after getting a regular hand job from the sweet Dorothy every Wednesday afternoon and Friday and Saturday night with my favorite tunes played low on the car radio, her disappearance was really more than I could bear on my own.
I didn't just want to go for any girl, certainly not--after Dorothy as my first strike I thought pretty much any girl I wanted could deliver the same level of enthusiasm and service, something to build on. But Amanda shot me down in flames, without doing much of anything except giving me these turnip flavored parakeet kisses. I was bewildered, bereft and horny all the way out to the rings of Saturn. Meanwhile, the world was divided into two categories, the girls I wanted who didn't acknowledge my existence, and the girls who gave me tons of signals but would have subjected me to endless abuse from my pals if I'd ever been seen with them. It's not easy being me at the best of times, but this had the looks of a drought of unparalleled proportions when bumper crops should have been the order of the day.
The Dolans were my parents' best friends. At least Tom Dolan, Uncle Tom as I had called him from the time I was three and he was helping me sail steamships in the bathtub at Christmas time, was my father's best friend of many years. Tom was a lovable leprechaun of a Bronx Irishman, diminutive and always snappily dressed, with aviator shades before they became a la mode and a neatly trimmed brigadier mustache to offset his thinning hair. He and my dad had been through two tours in Germany with Army Intelligence and now they were back working in Washington. The intelligence corps isn't very large and you tend, if you're in it for a career as they were, to run into the same people over and over again. We hadn't seen Tom for several years while my father was teaching at the Intelligence School at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, but now they were reunited at Fort McNair, on the DC side of the river across from the Pentagon, which they derisively nicknamed The Panic Palace. Their name for the CIA nearby in Langley, not far from where we lived and in our school district, was unprintable. The intelligence folks were always separated from the rest of the army, since part of their job was spying on those folks to see who from the Communist bloc they might be associating with. This was America in the early 60's, at the height of the cold war and still quivering and shaking from the chain reaction of fear and betrayal Senator Joseph McCarthy had put in motion.
We lived in the town of McLean, five miles across the river into Virginia, still half farmland but increasingly being subdivided and occupied by families of civil servants, professionals and service people. I had a short wave radio on which I listened to stations all around the world. If you sent in a letter describing the program you had heard, they would send you a souvenir acknowledgement card. When the card from Radio Moscow arrived, my father had a bird. A bird of unimaginable proportions. He took me out on the front porch and explained that for all he knew our house was bugged and that for certain his mail was monitored and that he knew this event was sure to show up on his 201 file and perhaps cost him a promotion to colonel. I loved my dad, but this seemed ridiculous and unfair. I also knew, however, better than to argue with him under the circumstances as he kept strumming the postcard from Russia with his middle finger while he held it at its edge in his other hand, breathing deeply in a really scary way I'd never seen before.
While we'd been apart from Uncle Tom, he had found himself a wife from among the cocktail waitresses who worked the officers' clubs and lounges around the many military establishments in Northern Virginia. Tom was the definitive gay blade and confirmed bachelor, but he was also approaching 45, so getting permanently hooked up to a woman 20 years younger with a pretty face and a body that just wouldn't quit must have seemed like the best idea in the world to him, or so my dad intimated when we asked him about his relatively new bride.
Helen--I was instructed to call her Aunt Helen--was almost 5'4" in her bare feet, although the first six months I knew her I never saw her without heels. She was a girl from Myrtle Beach with honey brown hair, trim and busty, as they say, and in the summertime her favorite outfit was a "sun suit," a two piece outfit consisting of skintight short shorts and a bandana halter top pulled up over each breast and tied behind her neck. She wore her hair up in a French twist most of the time and favored open toed sandals with fluffy pom poms on the toe straps and three inch heels, her toenails done in one of the hundred pinks or reds cosmetic companies must make their easiest money from.
If it was later in the day, you were likely to find her in a tight sheath skirt and a blouse with maybe one more button unbuttoned than was ever otherwise seen at that time. She liked attention and knew how to get it. When the Dolans were over, as they were three or four times a week, for cocktails or dinner or to watch some sports, it was hard not to peek at her thighs to see if, as short and tight as her outfits were, you could catch a glimpse of panty or maybe even, holy of holies, a little bit of curly brown pubic hair. I never did, but I also never failed to look whenever I was given even half a chance.
I was surprised my mother didn't have more of a reaction to Aunt Helen when she came on the scene. Stout, stern and unforgiving, my mother's hair was gray, not in any premature sense but because warships are gray. She stared out over her hawk's beak, eyes constantly searching the vicinity for something to disapprove of and correct forthwith. But Aunt Helen's provocative looks stirred no rolling of eyes or puckered lips of disapproval from her. Uncle Tom was like a son or a younger brother to her. She idealized him--he could do no wrong. He could even make her laugh. He could even make her laugh at a dirty joke told in front of children at the dinner table. Which was part of why we loved him, and having him around, so much.
We were having Friday night dinner--the Dolans were normally at our house for dinner Friday nights, or we were at theirs. Martinis and highballs had been poured and drunk by the grownups, Knorr's or Lipton's dry onion soup mix had been stirred into a pint of sour cream and set out with carrot and celery sticks and Fritos on a serving platter and laid to waste as the alcohol or teenage hormones fed the appetite. Now we were sitting down at the table. I was taking orders for iced tea or water. "Kitty, have you heard this one?" Uncle Tom began. My mother had just settled into her chair and was checking the table to make sure nothing was missing or in the wrong place. She looked up and smiled expectantly.
"Three dogs are sitting in the waiting room of a Beverly Hills vet. After a while they start up a conversation about how they come to find themselves there. The basset hound allows as how his family has a white color scheme in the living room, white rug, white sofa and chairs, white tables. His problem is that when he goes into that room, he can't help himself, he has to take a leak on something and this happens over and over. They haven't been able to break him of it, so they're sending him off to be put away."
"Oh, no," I said. Uncle Tom put his hand up. "Easy, Simon, it's a joke, my boy. The second dog, a Scottie, confesses that this is exactly what's in store for him too. His master has a collection of rare books and stamps and there's nothing that brings out the chewing urge in him like a leather binding. Last week he went on a rampage and did $5,000 worth of damage." Uncle Tom paused to let the full magnitude of five thousand 1960 dollars sink in.
"So the two of them look at the third dog, an Afghan hound as it happens, and say what about you, what's your story? He tells them he lives with a former leading lady of the silver screen, one whose name they would all know. 'So yesterday,' he says, 'I'm lying on the bedroom rug and she comes in and drops her clothes on the bench in front of her vanity and takes a long shower. The shower stall has a clear glass door and I watch her soap herself up and rinse. Then she goes to the bed, pulls down the spread, lies down and starts rubbing her hands all over, and I do mean all over, her body. So I just couldn't help myself. After a minute or two of this I jumped up on the bed and covered her, if you know what I mean.' Wow, say the first two dogs, so it looks like you'll be in the van with us, huh? No, says the third dog, I'm actually here for a manicure and a trim!"
My mother burst out with a whoop of laughter and covered her face with her napkin. Several additional cackles followed, then some choking sounds. My father was looking at the ceiling, laughing silently, his body rocking back and forth in an attempt to control an outburst of laughing. I looked at my plate and did my best to find the appropriate chuckle for that joke under those circumstances, far from easy. After a minute, her body still shaking, my mother pulled down her napkin and wiped her eyes.
"Oh, Tom, God bless you. Oh, please don't make me laugh again. I'm afraid I'll burst a button or something."
"That's not what we normally think of as doggie style," my father added, only to find his remark met by a glare from his wife that said can't you see there are children present, meaning me. "I'm sorry, hon," he said. "I got carried away there. Sorry. Who wants a baked potato. I dug them out the back yard myself this morning before work." This was a better suited vein for his humor, but what amazed me the most was that if anyone else had told that joke I was sure my mother would have burned them to a crisp with a silent stare that felt like it would never end and came from ground zero of an atomic bomb test. There was a lot about women, even my mother, that I was nowhere near understanding.
Uncle Tom loved to bait my father, and he in turn man enjoyed the good will that always went with it, plus the fact that it restored my mother's good humor. "Would you perhaps, John," he said, "like the loan of my entrenching tool, shovel to you civilians, wherewith to extricate yourself from the crater-—bomb crater John--that your most recent attempt, lame attempt, at humor seems to have created? The tool in question was entrusted to me under circumstances I am barred by law from discussing. Suffice it to say it has served me well when I've found myself in a tight corner, rare though that might ever have been."
Uncle Tom stretched and rolled the syllables as he spoke, like a Gilbert & Sullivan Yeoman of the Guard. Killarney or New York were his preferred accents, but he was born for the stage and could adapt to speech rhythms and accents of many different sorts. Once he called our house pretending to be a Chinese vendor selling garbage disposal systems. It was only when he promised me a year's supply of free garbage if I signed up during the phone call that I knew who it actually was.
The dinner was broiled flank steak, French fried homemade onion rings, light and fluffy, and string beans that tasted as if they had been disinterred after long burial at sea. My mother was an uneven cook--that's the best way to describe her efforts in that area. She lived and died with the pressure cooker, a heavy cast aluminum three part covered saucepan that could reduce even the most muscular bundle of carrots into something you could turn into baby food with a white plastic spoon from Dairy Queen in less time than it took to open a new tub of margarine and put it in the wood and gingham holder that made it appropriate to put on the table for company. Three things that worked fine and two others, in this case the beans and some underdone Pillsbury Pop N Serve rolls, that made you wonder if Russians or school dieticians were in on the caper. It was pretty much that way at every dinner. As I bit into my warm, slightly soggy, miniature Pillsbury croissant, dripping with something butterlike but not exactly the same, I couldn't help but think about the dog joke and start wondering about how Aunt Helen might look, stretched out naked on a bed with her hand between her open legs. She hadn't said a word during this whole exchange, but I couldn't help noticing that the hand nearest Uncle Tom had been under the table throughout the joke and well into dinner.
American government was my favorite class this year. I had Physics, where my buddies and I sang Ray Charles songs in the last row of the lab tables while the teacher's back was turned ("Other arms reach out to me----Other lips smile----TENDERLY"--we would crank up on "tenderly," but just below the sound level the teacher could be sure he was hearing. Did we know our physics or what?). And there was German Three, where we pretended we could swoon at will over the nuances of Goethe and Schiller, and the teacher was so glad to have a third class to teach and get paid for it that she gave us all A's. We had English, we had solid geometry--secants and tangents and descants galore, sine curve waves and cosines out the wazoo. But American government was the best.
"Out the wazoo?" Russell asked. "What kind of expression is that. How do you define a wazoo? Is a wazoo definable? Help me get started on this." Today we were at his place, making ham and cheese sandwiches and seeing who could gross the others out the most in terms of what kind of salad dressing we put on them. I was using creamy French, which looked like the winner so far, with chopped pickles.
"Woo, woo, woo wazoo," Oz intoned, and we backed him up with a short burst of "Durn Tootin We Like Fig Newtons" in counterpoint and harmony. Everybody grooved, Murray pretended to play the drums and hit his imaginary big cymbal with a flourish to signal the end of the riff. Murray was the musician and chessplayer of the bunch. He was a prodigious worker and an even more ferocious eater, even though he was no bigger around than a broom handle. His sandwich was nearly half a foot high.
"Whooze to noo the wazoo?" Murray asked. "Whoze to git down on his fookin' knees and khiss the beautiful darling until she reveals all her secrets? Who?" Murray's current masquerade was as a Scot, the offspring of William Wallace or Robert the Bruce or the Earl of Orkney, Grand Marshall of the Outer Hebrides. We suspected he got more than he shared about with us, a true Scotsman. He had a steady girlfriend, Kim, so you had to draw certain conclusions. But he was good with a jape and a jig, and so we let him live. He owns a BMW dealership now near Dayton, Ohio and has been to all the Super Bowls but one. With Kim, as it happens.
So why American government? Because Miss Murphy was the teacher, a tall, big bosomed blonde with a Masters from Georgetown, only a couple of years aout of school herself, and she was said to be "doing it" with the star defensive tackle on our football team--Dave Vincent, a black-haired six foot five two hundred and forty pound pile of meat and sinew, most of the meat being between his ears and, from what can only be called rumor and locker room talk, between his legs. Dave broke bones on the field of combat--three or four would-be all star running backs had been carted off the turf during his tenure at left defensive tackle. His brother Jason, blonde and with the perpetual smile of the big man on campus, high school style, was the center on the offensive line and a class officer. You might see him in the shadows of a dance in the cafeteria after a game, low colored lights and crepe streamers hung through the lighting fixtures, Frankie Avalon and Fabian on the PA system. Jason would be nibbling some sophomore girl's neck, some girl in a white sweater with a gold circle pin fastened high on the left side, around where the adjustment cinch on her bra would be. They would be talking mostly about the people on the floor or the game that day, but his hands would be all about her and you knew this was only the beginning of his moves. The Vincent boys had a healthy dose of testosterone and not enough upstairs to be self conscious about it.
The thing between Dave and Miss Murphy was believed to have started over the previous summer, when Dave was taking a makeup class and also doing odd jobs for the principal. The grapevine had it that he was frequently seen coming to or leaving her garden apartment in Vienna, 8 miles away, although you could never find anyone who knew it first hand.
Nevertheless, the practice had developed, in American government class, of passing notes speculating on the doings of this pair, anatomical suggestions, although probably not, in retrospect, very well informed or accurate ones. This was not the first set of rumors that had followed our version of Lady Godiva. Last year the seniors made a pact that if Miss Murphy ever asked to see one of these notes the recipient had to eat it immediately. There was even, as you might expect among high school boys, a contingent who behaved so ostentatiously that they were bound to get caught, just so they could be seen by their classmates gobbling the note and saying "It wasn't anything really, Miss Murphy." She had more or less caught on that something was afoot, and if the rumors about her and Dave were true she must have known what the note passing was all about, but she took the high road and kept her cool.
This activity helped relieve the tedium of our passage through the balance of powers and our federal system of government. It also provided a welcome relief from sitting there wondering which girls in the class were having their periods and if there was any way you could tell for sure, as well as why that might matter in any way, shape or form, as my mom would have said. Being visited with the mental image of Miss Murphy having her bra taken off by the ham-like hands of Dave Vincent while watching her write "bicameral legislature" in solid caps on the blackboard (something that happened to me more often that I would ever have been comfortable admitting) tended to bifurcate your thinking in a way that not even a full reading of the Emancipation Proclamation could rectify.
I did care about truth and justice, though, in my few lucid moments. Near the end of junior year I had written an editorial for the school paper, "The Cavalier," observing the shortcomings of an education entirely among white people. We were in the Virginia of "Massive Resistance" to the Supreme Court's edict in Brown v. Board of Education. What that meant was that there were two parallel systems of education in the state. I had gone to schools run by the Army overseas and a lot of my good friends had been colored and Indian kids, in school, in Little League and elsewhere. There was no doubt that the schools for colored kids got short changed, and I thought any idiot ought to know that and had said so in almost so many words. That got me a lot of cold shoulders and colder stares from many of my classmates after the editorial, but it did make me feel like some kind of major social reformer and got me the benefit of the doubt in a class like Miss Murphy's. The idea that I was a deep thinker with a social conscience meant that I only got no-brainer questions from her and was free to let my eyes roam around the classroom and see who among the young ladies might look interested in knowing me better, an item of the highest priority at the moment.
But where was the new Dorothy? Man does not live by bread alone, nor should anyone get to know his own right hand too well in his tender sprouting years. These thoughts competed with my efforts to grasp the subtleties of the separation of powers as expressed in the Constitution and the Federalist papers.
The one thing I pretty much knew for sure was that Marjorie, the Queen of the Hop from our class, was out of bounds. This broke my heart, because she was smart as well as gorgeous. But she was also pinned to a guy who had graduated two years ago and was about to become a sophomore at U VA, a new brother at Sigma Alpha Epsilon, no less. This was Brad, the former captain of the basketball team and Marshall of his senior class, a heavy hitter and one of those guys who was 25 at the age of 15 and could drive left-handed and unloosen a girl's bra in the same motion he used to pull her close on the bench seat of his dad's Oldsmobile 88, as he had told more than a few people when he was a senior and I was a sophomore.
You can't compete with that attitude, or accomplishment--at least you can't if you're still getting a hard-on when you shave, driven by the feeling of the razor just clipping your skin, the delicate balance between grooming and pain, the stretching of the skin to let the Gillette Blue Blade, now changed to Super Blue Blade in a stroke of marketing genius, do its job. My dad was right wing, but he forbade me to buy Schick products, the main competition. They were still in the control of Nazis and weirdos, as far as he was concerned. I took his word for it; Gillette was a sports sponsor and I liked the outline of where you put the blade on the razor. It reminded me of the shape of a woman's vaginal arrangement, from what I had seen in the books. Well, sort of reminded me. Many other things did too.
Whatever Marjorie had going for her was beyond my station in life. I had mostly respectful thoughts about her. Eve, with the pink blouses and the red bras underneath, was a different subject altogether, although it looked like Oz was moving in and you don't do that to a friend. Advertising deserves recognition, particularly creative advertising. But Eve had already been laid by who knew how many guys, according to the word. Marjorie, if she'd progressed that far, had left it in Charlottesville on the big spring weekend at the Boar's Head Tavern, I was sure. There was no room for me at that inn. Brad of all people, a phony as far as I was concerned, although if I had looked into my heart to see why I felt that way it would have been because he presumed to be the guy of her dreams instead of me and seemed to have pulled it off.
Marjorie was a type. The early maturing beautiful blonde girl with perfect teeth who gets grabbed up by some senior stud when she shows up at the beginning of sophomore year. She had everything going for her, including the ability to lean and cling without losing her separate identity. She was an ornament, but so was Cleopatra, her real life equivalent Liz Taylor, and, in her own way, Catherine the Great, of course.
Life is more complicated now, at least outside the South and the Heartland. Marjorie, these days, would be drafted for the varsity softball team or the abortion rights debate squad--not that there's anything wrong with that, as they say, and lectured to avoid public displays of affection. Then, she was an ornament to Brad and a good time, high-spirited girl with energy and a smile. You couldn't see nipples through bras then like you can now, so to look sideways and see Marjorie silhouetted against the window that let out onto the football field did nothing but tease my imagination, tease it almost to the point of paralysis except that the pulse had mobility all its own. My data was limited but my curiosity was boundless.
"Which is the only state to have a unicameral legislature? Simon?" From out of the dark that would be enclosing me if I were much smaller and inside Marjorie's panties Miss Murphy's voice descended on me, full of purpose.
"New Hampshire, isn't it, Miss Murphy?" My luck held—we had only heard this piece of information several times during each previous year of high school. She liked me and would give me the softball questions under the guise of widening class participation. She had no interest in showing me up. What she needed was someone who could advance her curriculum, if you know what I mean. I was happy to do that, and happy to be re-arrested by involvement in the class. Marjorie was too much for me in every way. I needed to reduce my aspirations to someone like Debra or Laurie, the twins who were co-editors of the school literary magazine, "The Old Dominion." They were small and skinny and they certainly had their dweebish aspects, but they also had that look in their eye that said "Hot on request." Dorothy was bathed in that look the first time she worked my zipper, and for that and reasons too manifold to catalogue, it was a look that was precious to me. Or--Janey or Debra or Laurie might work out. They were fun to be with, and I didn't know them all that well, but this was a storm and they were, to say the least, ports.
As far as Debra and Laurie went, the usual twin questions occupied me. I knew I was safe from Miss Murphy for the moment. Perhaps some version of the twins. I needed to talk it over with Egan and Murray and Russell and possibly Oz. At least the general subject. The last thing you would ever want to do was discuss specific girls. The advice that came back would be some combination of random ignorance and primate-level suggestions. I had learned a thing or two in high school, and one of the keystone items was not to rely on your friends' advice and insights where "love" issues were concerned. Friends of either sex. It was too personal and the knowledge quotient was woefully low.
Every Saturday morning it was my job to mow the Dolan's lawn. But not before ten. On the Friday nights they didn't get together with my parents, Uncle Tom and Aunt Helen frequented the officers' club buffet at Fort Meyer and did the dance thing, their night on the town. Most Saturdays he and my old man played golf and Aunt Helen slept in.
So quiet was critical to my proper function as a lawn boy. Uncle Tom had bought the mower, then suggested that if I would cut his grass, and of course my own family's, I could use the mower to do other lawns in the neighborhood for pocket money to buy gas and burgers and shakes at the Hot Shoppes drive inns for my dates. Uncle Tom was a kind and generous man. It was a good deal all around. My father's army pay didn't leave a lot for non-essentials. We had stretched to be able to afford this split level house for $24,500, and everybody had to make do.
The plots in our modest subdivision were mostly half acre, which meant that I could get a lawn done just about every day after school before it got dark, and twice a day on weekends. At two dollars a lawn, I felt like Andrew Carnegie, and I liked parading around the neighborhood in my bathing suit, sneakers, and one of my father's old army undershirts. We didn't call them tank tops in the early '60's. California hadn't been discovered yet.
Today was bright and sunny, an early fall day still warm enough to be summer. Everything had a smell to it. The Cheerios I poured radiated the smell of toasting and Middle American good will, the bananas I sliced on them gave off the slightly sharp odor that disappears when the sugar of ripeness sets in. To me that's when bananas are at their best, when they almost bite back, not when they slide around in your mouth like so much overcooked Kraft dinner. On the way over to the Dolans, I stopped in our side yard where we had planted a line of rose bushes when we moved in and scraped about forty Japanese beetles off the plants into the peanut butter jar half full of kerosene I kept stowed next to the brick chimney. The peach and raspberry scents from the different roses, and a softer, musky fragrance that was harder to place, reminded me of standing at the gym door, taking tickets for a varsity basketball game, the powerful amalgam of scents you would feel waft by you as the girls came through, and particularly the cloud of scent that accompanied the varsity cheerleading squad as they led our valiant squad in to do battle with the Generals, or the Rebels or the Presidents or the Admirals.
I screwed the lid back on the beetle jar. Once a week, usually on Sunday evenings, I tipped the dead beetles into the garbage can by the kitchen steps before carrying it down to the curb. They sank when they were alive and floated on the surface when they were dead, something I didn't understand, but the simplicity of their dying was satisfaction enough that I didn't feel the need to inquire further. I confess I took pleasure in dunking them while they were mating. What they did to the rosebushes and the flowers was criminal, and there were tons of them to be controlled.
The Dolans lived less than a block away, on the next cross street two houses down from the corner, a yellow house, smaller than ours because they had no children, and with a narrow sloping yard. That yard was a bitch to control the mower on if the grass was slick or if I'd let it grow too long--because of bad weather, or because on certain days it could be much more important to play both sides of the latest Coasters or Fleetwoods single fifty or sixty times, alone or with some of my pals, behind the closed door of my room. Uncle Tom never pressed me about these irregularities. He knew everybody has things they need to do at only certain times.
The side door to the garage was unlocked, as always. I slipped inside and closed it quietly behind me. Again the smells. Gasoline, pine boards stacked in the corner curing in the air for some conceived but unexecuted handyman project of Uncle Tom's, blended with the haylike smell of grass cut earlier in the week and stuck in the tire treads and under the housing of the mower blade. The wet smell of cement.
I needed a wrench, I realized, an adjustable wrench to reset the height of the wheels on the mower. It had been a rainy week and if I didn't raise them I would scalp the lawn by cutting down below the green to the yellow and white base of the shoots. It was like cutting nails down into the quick, leaving an ugly result and one that would grow out unevenly as well as being painful. My own wrench was at home on my dresser, next to my pocket knife and the bowl of foreign coins I had amassed over the years to remind myself how many places I had been for one so young.
Uncle Tom had a full set of tools--that I knew. He enjoyed using them and had actually taught me more in that area than my father, who was raised in a city apartment and army barracks and always seemed out of place and annoyed at the small tasks that go with being a householder. The tools were nowhere to be seen in the garage area, so I forged on into the basement rec room, a spare place with brown linoleum squares covering the floor, several spiral rag rugs laid out across them, a leatherette couch and an end table with a lamp on it. No one spent much time down here; in the Dolan home you talked in the kitchen or watched TV in the living room, so this was just surplus space. An ironing board was set up in the corner, next to an old console radio with a circular dial.
Under the stairs coming down from the kitchen, set into the pine paneling that covered the room's walls, was another door, with a black iron thumb latch to keep it shut. Where else, I thought, pleased at my logic and perseverance. A storage closet. I opened it and pulled the string to turn on the bulb hanging from the ceiling.
There was no toolbox there, either. What I did see was a pile of magazines and books, neatly stacked next to some packing boxes and olive drab footlockers stenciled in white with Uncle Tom's name, rank and serial number, together with his latest overseas post. I took the magazines out with me to the couch and sat down to see what they were all about.
I was as familiar with Playboy as any other red blooded American teenager. Not that I bought it, that would have been too expensive and too embarrassing. But the fathers of a couple of my friends had subscriptions, and we would gather at Russell's or Egan's house to hoot and holler about the size and shape of the breasts of this month's Playmate and speculate about what we'd like to do--nothing very imaginative, to be sure--and rag each other about our fantasies. It was an event, of sorts, but less than erotic. In those days, pubic hair and explicit depiction of genitalia was not even in Hugh Hefner's mind, and certainly not in his magazine. Such was not the case for this stack of magazines in Uncle Tom's closet.
I was dumbstruck. There is no other word for it aside from dick-whipped, and we're not going there. These magazines, in black and white, put all pink nipples and airbrushed ivory backsides way over toward cartoon land. They had names like Photographer's Delight and Lucky Pierre and the Nun. Some were in English and some were in French or German or some oriental language in ideograms. Uncle Tom had traveled extensively overseas as a soldier. He had Hummel figurines and Noritaki china and Belgian lace in the living room and dining room and kitchen, and this exotic erotica was what he had in the basement closet.
That they were all in black and white didn't matter in the least to me. TV was black and white, and so were half the movies we saw, and usually the better half at that. "Psycho" and "High Noon" were in black and white. Black and white emphasized the reality of what I was looking at, next to the pastel unreality produced by Hefner & Co. I could supply the colors with my imagination, or more precisely these pictures left nothing to the imagination. One book was nothing but pictures of the same woman, a dark haired mature woman who had a face something like Ava Gardner but with wider hips, slightly lopsided breasts and a bit of a stomach. She was naked, moving through a series of poses--cupping her breasts toward the camera, lying down and spreading her legs, turning with her back to the photographer and leaning over to smile upside down between her legs, almost like a clown in a circus act, but not like any circus act I had ever seen. I had heard the expression "vertical smile," but a picture really is worth a thousand words and this picture was worth a thousand and one.
The next one was even more interesting. It also involved one woman, a different one from the first book, another brunette, with full lips and black knee length stockings on. There were four "stories," involving four different men. In each episode, the two began fully dressed--she opened the door, they embraced, she unbuttoned her blouse while he watched, he kissed her right nipple, the one farther from the camera, she opened his zipper, she got down on her knees and sucked his dick (SUCKED HIS DICK!!!!), then they were undressed and she was holding his item while he put his finger inside her. Then he was on top of her in bed, seen from the foot of the bed and showing some particulars I had previously only speculated about, then behind her in profile so that you could see part of his dick as it went into her, then she was kissing his limp and presumably satisfied member, and finally saying goodbye to him at the door with a polite handshake and cheek smooch. Four stories with exactly the same poses. Forty pages in all. It was hard to think of them as poses.
I couldn't imagine people let themselves be photographed doing this. Women especially. I had heard about blow jobs, and I had even walked in on my parents a couple of times when I came home unexpectedly around the age of ten, finally figuring out that there must be more to that wrestling they were doing than met the eye. With Dorothy it had all been above the waist for me, except for that one blessed time at her oasis. The idea that a woman would do this with four different guys, all in front of a photographer and who knew who else, had me shaking and bewildered. My mouth was as dry as a bone but water was the last thing on my mind.
I could feel my penis inflate like a helium balloon being filled right off the tank, pushing against my bathing suit. Finally, the second time through this particular book, I had the presence of mind to slip my trunks down around my ankles, slide them off and push them aside with my foot so I could settle into the couch and get at my equipment. It was awkward holding the book with one hand and keeping it open so I could get the full view of each page. The book was only about eight inches high and six inches wide, so if I arranged my thumb and little finger at the proper spread across the top, I could get the whole enchilada in front of me and have my other hand free for my favorite friend.
This was torture. I wanted to take in all there was in each picture just as much as I wanted to zip through the pages so fast it would turn it into a movie. Saturate myself with the plenitude of sex, the multiplicity of orgasm, the movement of the spheres. I was masturbating two or three times in any twenty four hour period at this point, so the idea that grown ups had similar appetites, and put them to use on the real thing, was something I could connect with all too easily.
It made me wonder, right in the middle of all this, how the world got through the day, if this was how much sex would be out there for me in my adult life. And I just one among millions.
I was so completely absorbed in my contemplation of these mysteries that I nearly jumped out of my skin when Aunt Helen sat down next to me. I hadn't heard her coming down the stairs or across the rec room floor, barefooted and wearing a sheer white nightgown with lace shoulder straps, which I saw now in the time it took me to tear my eyes away from the sixth and seventh pictures in episode three. I always had the gift of becoming absorbed in whatever book I was reading, to the exclusion of my family or the other kids in the room at school, leaving the world and all its troubles for the dream of print. This one was a wet dream, but it was at least as absorbing as the other kind and she had caught me totally off guard.
"What have we here?" she said, sliding onto the sofa next to me. "A little research by our star student? Simon! What's that I see in your hand?" I tried to mash my hard-on down like it was an accordion paper lantern, but she took my wrist and pulled me away from myself. "What a lovely thing you have," she said. "Here. Let me show you something."
Before I knew it, she put her head down in my lap and I felt her mouth slide over the head of my penis and halfway down the shaft. I came at once and she choked but didn't let go. I felt her mouth and tongue still sucking, milking me of whatever was left there. She let my hand go and slowly pulled up to kiss me on the lips, sliding her tongue into my mouth. I could feel myself start to get hard again already. I was sitting there with my hands held up in the air like someone who had just been nabbed in the middle of a bank robbery by a cop he hadn't seen, elbows bent and fingers spread apart to show that I was unarmed and prepared to surrender and do my time. She slid her mouth around to the side of my head and put her tongue in my ear. I could smell liquor.
"Well, aren't you the hot one. I love those magazines and I see you do too. Whatcha got there, big boy? What's that I see down there. Come on, baby, I'm all yours." She grabbed one of my hands and pushed it against her breast. Her breast was too big for my hand to encompass and softer than Dorothy's. I knew she was large there for a woman her height, but this was more than I had expected. I could feel her nipple swell against my palm and before I knew what I was doing I had pulled the shoulder strap down and had it in my mouth, the left one because I always like to be different, and I was licking and sucking for all I was worth and more. This was the part I knew, and I was determined to show her that she wasn't dealing with any neophyte, even though that would have been the one word in the dictionary that would have described me best.
"Oh, Simon. Oh definitely," she said. "Do you eat pussy too, sweetheart? Get some of this. Get it while it's hot." I had no experience with the connection between alcohol and horniness, but an idea was starting to form somewhere in a part of my brain I felt very distant from at the moment. But that fleeting realization was wiped away as she pushed my head down into her lap and beyond, having contrived to lift the nightgown so that before I knew it my mouth was wandering in this hairy furrowed swamp filled with tastes and aromas I had never encountered before. I puckered my lips and kissed whatever I came into contact with, feeling her fingers twirling my hair, sliding down my back under my t shirt while I bumped my nose against her pubic triangle, finally hearing her giggle as she twitched.
"You're right. Save some things for later. Let's not rush ourselves. You're seventeen, right? There's a lot of miles ahead on the road for you, Simon. Enjoy them as you go." She pulled me up and looked me in the eye.
"Would you like to fuck me? Fuck me right here and right now? Say yes. I want that cock of yours right where it will do the most good. Right now."
I would like to say that at some point during the ten or so minutes all of this took I thought about Uncle Tom, or worried about what he would think about all this, but the only thing on earth during that whole time was Aunt Helen and her body and me and my body and the nightgown and the couch and the rug under my feet. It was like going into shock, like falling from a high place and you don't think about your family or say your prayers or even scream, you just freeze in wonderment that this could be happening to you at this particular moment in this particular way. Somewhere inside you know it will end, and you also have a feeling you can't focus on enough under the immediate circumstances that it will end badly. But it is all so far beyond your control, and the sensation is so beyond anything you have ever experienced, that it seems as if your life has stopped right there and will never start again--that you will be exactly where you are forever. And not a bit unhappy at the prospect.
"Aunt Helen—-whoa!!! What is this about?" Finally, I managed to muster some words as she first pulled off my shirt and then slid her nightgown over her head. Her nipples were the size of marbles and reddish brown and they protruded in a way that made them seem to glow. As she slid down onto the couch on her back, pulling me toward her, I caught a glimpse of her pubic hair, a chestnut reddish brown that shocked and surprised me. I thought it was all supposed to match. Over the years I've learned that there are many different ways this result can come about, some more natural than others, but at the moment I was just stunned, although not enough to cause any reduction in the tumescence that had newly and affirmatively revisited my joint.
"You're going to fuck me is what's going on, because I asked you to and because you're a good boy and because your cock has gotten hard again and a hard cock knows what it has to do even if its owner doesn't. You do know how to fuck, don't you?" She was smiling at me and she had me right on top of her, pushing her hips up toward my erection, joining her eagerness to mine.
I would like to say I pulled myself together and remembered what it said in the books we passed around in my circle, Love Without Fear and other learned sex manuals of the time, and plunged myself forward manfully, but that wasn't what happened at all. It must have been the fact that she was experienced as well as half drunk, and also it is the truth that women like it much slower than most men do, but over what seemed like half an hour but was probably less than a minute, my blind eye found its way to hers and I slipped forward into heaven.
"Oh, God that's good. Oh, you have such a nice cock Simon. Give it to me. Give it to me hard." I was confused. This was as hard as I got and it felt plenty hard to me. I felt her pulling away and pushing against me and then I got the idea and the rhythm. As she pulled my mouth down to hers and screamed into it I shot a dozen rapid fire injections inside her and all the way to China.
"What are we doing?" I asked as soon as I had breath to speak. "What's going on here?"
"We're fucking, dear, or at least we were. That was nice. Very nice. I must be your first. Tell the truth. It's important to be honest. God, my head is killing me. What a night last night." I heard footsteps on the stairway and started to jump up, feeling so frightened that I started to get hard again. She grabbed me around the back and wouldn't let me go.
"Don't worry, Simon. That's just Dukie. Tom's on the golf course with your dad. They were gone over an hour ago." Dukie was their fawn boxer dog, named almost as a joke because he was the runt of the litter, flop-eared and with a pushed in muzzle that made him resemble Barry Fitzgerald, the little actor with the bowler hat who looked like a leprechaun and played in all those movies set in Ireland or New York City. Uncle Tom said he might be a German boxer, but he was the most Irish looking dog he ever saw, so he had to own him. Dukie came down the stairs, skidded on the linoleum, looked at us and then sat down and tilted his head.
"Hi, sweetheart, come to Mama." Aunt Helen said, pulling her hair back and twisting it. "Come here." As the dog approached us, Aunt Helen started to pull herself out from under me, and as she did we both noticed that I had gotten hard again. But she persisted in separating. "Hold your horses, stud. Can I pick them or what? Simon, you're a wonder of nature. God bless America!! Don't go away."
As I sat there on the couch she got up and walked toward the dog, scratching the top of his head and ears and talking to him quietly. "Is he hungry? Did mama and papa forget to leave him out any kibble? Well, hold on just a second, sweetheart, and mama will take care of her baby boy." As she stood with her back toward me I found myself focusing on her ankles, her Achilles tendons of all things, noticing how callused they were from the straps and heels of her shoes, and how different from the rest of this first fully naked, completely upholstered in plush, woman I had ever seen in the flesh.
A moment later I found myself wondering if there was such a thing as a five base home run.
That night was the first football game of the year, against our hated rivals from Fairfax--farmers and country boys, and usually much better at football than we sons of bureaucrats and professionals. But every once in a while we put together a team that could do the job. This was our year. Elliott Makepeace, the best athlete in our high school in the last 10 years, was our quarterback and free safety. He had led the team the previous year in touchdown passes and pass interceptions and this year we had two Samoan brothers--their father worked for the State Department--who each weighed about 250 pounds and provided Elliott with pass protection or running room, plus the Vincent brothers. We were a football machine, Turfmasters extraordinaire.
When my father came back around three from his golf game with Uncle Tom I was stretched out on the sofa in our rec room, watching Oklahoma play Notre Dame. Notre Dame had the dark jerseys on our black and white TV. I had my fingers down the front of my jeans and was swigging on a long neck Pepsi.
"Digging for gold?" he said with a smile that wasn't quite a leer. "Did you get the Dolans' lawn mowed all right?"
"Did." I was into minimalism and low effort.
"Did you edge the sidewalks?"
"Didn't. Hate edging. Tool broken."
"Which was it?" he said. "Broken tool or lack of enthusiasm?"
"Broken tool results in broken enthusiasm. Oklahoma has won 47 in a row?"
"Yeah. Wilkinson is some coach," he said. "What's the score?"
You could have come in and told my dad that you had just robbed a bank and shot three people, and if you followed it by asking him whether the '27 Yankees were really a better team than the '34 Cardinal Gashouse Gang with Dizzy Dean, at least two hours of discussion would ensue before he asked you what was that about the bank you said when you came in. You didn't want to overdo this stuff, but at the right time this knowledge was pure gold.
I had mowed the lawn, finally, and come back and taken a nap. Actually I had lain on my back on my bed staring at the ceiling and asking myself what had just happened and why and what it meant and would Uncle Tom find out and shoot me or was this part of the mystery of women. I also resisted the urge to masturbate as it came over me more than once. This was a new sensation for me. I had never seen any reason not to give in--an erection was a signal that something needed to be done and I knew just what that something was. Now, suddenly, I started thinking about saving it. But what if this was just a once in a lifetime thing and Aunt Helen started acting as if nothing had happened and it turned out to be another three years before I got laid again. I reflected on the odds of that and thought it had to be a needless worry. There was nothing I could do about what had happened but feel lucky. It had been fun and hotter than the center of the sun. It had been unbelievable. I could still smell her on my body and my hands, which brought my anti-masturbation vow to an end. Then I fell asleep until my mother woke me to help bring in the groceries and I'd remembered the Notre Dame game and come down to watch it and then my dad came in.
"Who are you going to the Fairfax game with?" he asked as we watched the Sooner band form a steamboat on the field, complete with rotating paddle wheel, and play "It's a Treat to Beat Your Feet on the Mississippi Mud" with a lot of brass and drum emphasis in the arrangement.
"Russell and Oz and Egan and Murray." The phone rang and I dashed over to pick it up. I listened for a couple of minutes as Russell outlined the plan for the evening.
"Actually, Dad, can I use the car? It turns out there are eight or nine of us going and even with Russell's station wagon we'll need two cars." He nodded and then jumped in the air and swung his fist as Notre Dame scored on a sweep around right end. We were Catholic, so we were Notre Dame fans. Our co-religionists were in the driver's seat now. And so was I. Russell and I traded out the passengers and arranged a rendezvous point. I would get Marjorie, Eve, Oz and Janey if she was coming. Janey was reputed to have four different sets of falsies, for sweaters, for blouses, for shirtwaist dresses, plus a pair to double up with if she went out on a date. None of this was true, I was sure. She was just abundant, and the other girls were jealous. Janey was in bounds. Three years was too long to wait for a second bite at this apple, especially now that I knew what I knew, whatever it was.
Tyson's Corner, now a space-age city of the future full of glass towers, defense contractors, high priced stores and ritzy hotels, was a red dirt hill surmounted by a radio tower and a cement block building where you could get your cattle or deer cut up, or buy meat in bulk if you had one of those eight foot Amana freezers that looked like cryogenic coffins. Most families had them, particularly the service families who had to drive 20 miles to the nearest army commissary to get the subsidized prices. Our two cars linked up at the corner of Chain Bridge Road and Loudonville Pike and we set out for Fairfax, home of the Rebels.
Ingenious planning had resulted in Janey sitting in the middle next to me on the bench seat of our Chevy, with Marjorie riding shotgun and Oz and Eve in the back. The adjacency of Janey's thigh and mine and the way we bounced against each other as we drove was starting to give me a semi-soft-on that would be trouble if I didn't concentrate on the road ahead. The radio started playing "Oh, Donna" by Richie Valens and all the girls sighed and the guys groaned.
"I hate that song," Oz said.
"But it's so sweet," Eve replied.
"Saccharine, you mean," I said. "It sets a new record for smallest vocabulary in a song over three minutes." A proper round of hooting and hand waving greeted my remarks and I started looking for the turnoff road to the high school.
"So what do you hear from Brad, Marjorie?" Janey asked the question with a funny tone in her voice. Mocking, I would have said, although the pecking order was such that for Janey to mock Marjorie was unusual and pretty much out of bounds. Marjorie wasn't a mocker, she was pretty four square, although that's easy when you're a goddess.
"Brad and I broke up last week," she said. "Don't tell me you didn't hear that."
"But he's so cool," Eve said. "A college jock."
"A college jock with a townie girlfriend in Charlottesville," Marjorie responded. "I went to pick him up to go to the beach last week and, being the thoughtful person I am, I got his family's mail from the box and brought it in. I couldn't help noticing this envelope--onionskin lilac stationery. And perfumed, too, addressed to Brad in very elaborate handwriting."
"You can always tell," Eve said. "What did you do?"
"I opened it, of course. Very carefully. One of the benefits of not having your nails too short. I was patient. So of course by the time I got it open I could hardly read it because my heart was beating so fast. And I was right. The first thing I saw was how much she missed his hard muscles and...."
"Other hard assets?" Oz was quick as always. Everybody laughed and I spotted the turnoff and signaled so Russell could follow me. The last time we played at Fairfax none of us was old enough to drive.
"So you're on the loose?" Janey said.
"Free and easy. Good riddance to bad rubbish." I was impressed with Marjorie's self-possession as she uttered those words. The calm with which she said it, the absolutely even tone of her voice and the fact that she allowed the cliche to form itself around Brad rather than herself, sent a small shot of lightning through my brain.
I found the parking lot and turned in. Key Club members in blue and white sweaters were waving the cars into place on the practice field. There would be a good crowd. The main parking lot was full. I saw the lights go on over by the stands and heard the bark of cheerleaders. It was still as warm as summer. They would sell a lot of soda tonight.
"You're a peach, you're a plum and you have a nice pair. I like the way you get my banana in the air," Oz muttered in my ear as we followed the girls toward the ticket takers. Oz could smell the action level, the psychic garlic in the hot dog of the event.
"Ray rah ree," I said in reply. Brad was a jerk. I had always thought so and now I knew it for sure. I wondered when I would be seeing Aunt Helen again, and under what circumstances. And Uncle Tom. Not something I was looking forward to, the Uncle Tom part.
"Ray Rah Ree. Kick 'em in the knee. Ray Rah Ras! Kick 'em in the other knee." Our team was rolling up and down the field like an open umbrella in a high wind. Elliot left, Elliot right. Jump pass over the middle for a first down. The four brothers rode herd on the Fairfax linemen and Elliot twisted and spun their entire secondary into a self-made hangman's noose. It was 39- 3 at halftime. Us.
The tension around the hot dog wagon was a little more than I wanted to feel--sore losers, these Rebels, so I asked Russell how things were going with his bunch.
"My back seat is messed up and I don't know how to fix it. My mother got a box of groceries stuck in there sideways and completely jammed the mechanism that flips the back seat of the wagon down," he said. "I don't know how I'm going to get out of this."
"Out of what?"
"It's supposed to be tonight. Me and Alice. We lose our virginity, hopefully with any luck that is, if you can believe what she's saying. How can I get that done with a back seat that won't lay flat?"
"Plant your pivot foot?" I asked, analytical to the last. What did I know? And who was he to profane this day of my days when I had gotten laid for the first time. Alice was a piece, no question about it. Large melon-like breasts, and hips and thighs that were a drum and bugle corps all their own. Red-headed, to add to the sweetness of the agony, or vice versa.
"You can take her back to your place," I said, evaluating the angles and the vectors, based on my new large store of knowledge. Large in the sense that any number compared to zero is large by definition.
"Non-starter," he says. "No way she gives it up at my place. Get a brain. Auto back seat, church balcony after choir practice when everybody's gone, or maybe if I could catch her cleaning up after Home Ec when the other girls have left. But not at my place. What about her place? What do you think?"
"Are her parents home?"
"I don't know. Did she say anything about that that you heard?"
"Not that I remember. Are we the rulers of Northern Virginia Division I white boy high school football or is Elliot Makepeace a genius?"
"(C): all of the above. Write Harvard on my ticket, God, I'm passing through there on my way to glory. We should break a hundred."
"And you get laid," I said. "You dip the dingle. And, as you know, once the dingle is dipped, it stays dipped."
A fist fight erupted around the edge of the refreshment tent but the teachers and monitors broke it up before anybody got hurt. Russell and I crashed shoulder pads, even though we weren't wearing any, and headed back to our seats.
After the game, a hundred or more of us formed a conga line back to the parking lot, mostly seniors, but a lot of other kids from the school too. We were chanting "Our team is red hot! Your team ain't doodley squat," and "Touchdowns, touchdowns, touchdowns boys. You make the touchdowns, we make the noise," and other more pointed and ingenious cheers involving Fairfax and Ex-Lax. The worm had turned into an anaconda. Sixty six to three was a score to remember. And we hadn't been trying to run it up, either. We were just that god-damned good. I was glad I wasn't going to be around next year when Elliott and the Vincents were gone.
You could feel the surliness steam out of the Fairfax fans as they silently watched us parade like Union troops through Richmond in 1865. High school was the end of the educational line for most of the students here--no community colleges at that point. Like all Southerners, they took their football as a religious matter and a lot of the graduates came back for games like this. Large tattooed men in T shirts with cut-off sleeves stood with folded arms along our way. Best be gone, I thought.
We arrived at the lot and the line broke up. People drifted toward their cars. It was hard to leave the field of such a momentous victory, but it was also important to get things in gear, not only because of the ominous presence of the Rebel faithful, but so that we could grab a parking spot at the nearest drive-in and load up on double-deck burgers, shakes and onion rings, the orders we would call in through a big clunky microphone of the sort they hang on your window at the drive in movies. If you got there too late, you would end up having to "tool" around at a crawl, talking back and forth to the other kids and hoping you'd be lucky enough to get an empty stall before you had to "peel out" to get more gas. Everyone would have settled on one radio station, making the drive-in sound like a rock and roll beehive, resonating with Fats Domino or Eddie Cochran or Jerry Lee ("Rita Mae, Rita Mae, Your body's gettin' in the way") or of course Elvis.
"Head 'em up and move 'em out," Oz shouted, quoting the tagline from "Rawhide." "Let's geet these dogies to Dodge."
"Or Plymouth, Mass or Pontiac, Michigan," I said. "OK, young ladies, are we ready to roll?" The seating arrangement was the same, and as we pulled into the line of cars crawling toward the exit I found myself wondering whether I could engineer things so that I dropped Janey before I dropped Marjorie. If I did and then struck out with Marjorie, would that make such an enemy of Janey that the avenue to her and those love-hungry gazongas would be forever closed to me? A troublesome question.
I also found myself thinking back to Aunt Helen and the basement and all that had happened there, seeing it from some kind of distance I couldn't understand. It was like the difference between a flower on the stem, a rose bursting into bloom, and a pressed blossom, an aster or a violet you find between the pages of a book, dry, faint in its scent, crumbling if you touch it. And this was less than twelve hours after I had entered the land of the non-virgins. Sex is so overwhelming when you're in the middle of it that the fall off, the half life, seems to be correspondingly short, I said to myself. Maybe that's it.
Thinking in nuclear terms was second nature to us now. There wasn't anyone with half a brain who hadn't learned all about the way the atom bomb and nuclear fission and radioactive isotopes worked. Some of the radioactive trace elements produced by the explosion, like strontium 90 and cesium 135, would last several millenia and find their way into the grass and the milk of cows and the milkshakes at the drive-in, but most of what made the explosion so powerful turned in an instant to pure energy and was gone. I wondered which trace elements from this morning would inhabit me. Certainly guilt, although Aunt Helen had a lot more to do with the way things had gone than I did. Maybe I would find that I could only do it in basements with older women? Improbable, I decided—no matter what I was or wasn't thinking consciously, old Dead Eye had a mine of his own.
I could feel Janey's hip squeeze against mine again as we pulled out onto the highway, enticingly warm and evidencing the combination of soft and firm that only female flesh can offer. I was amazed that I could even think about sex again so soon, but I knew what was going on with me and my body, at least in a general sense. It had gotten all too familiar over the last year or two.
After our refueling mission at the drive-in was finished we dropped Oz and Eve at her house. They lived fairly near each other and Oz said he'd see her to the door and walk home from there. Everybody kept a straight face and we pulled away from the curb without looking back to see if she asked him in. The three of us in the front seat all looked straight ahead and said nothing. Bobby Darrin's "Queen of the Hop" was on the radio, a great sock hop song you could jitterbug to and still have a conversation with your girl and the other people around you, or just get into it and work it hard. It had kind of a trance-like quality the way the words worked with the beat, like it almost danced itself. We let ourselves get lost in the groove.
Janey lived on Georgetown Pike, over by Chain Bridge, and Marjorie lived out Great Falls Road in an area where they had three acre zoning and houses standing alone deep in the woods, not half acre parcels like where my family lived. I could play this either way. The logic of the seating, Janey still next to me, was to drop Marjorie first and then loop back with Janey and take my chances there. Anything else would look awkward and provoke conversation and resentment. I resigned myself for the time being, admitting that this was not such a horrible fate, and accepting that whatever Marjorie might have in store for me could wait for another day. We pulled out onto Westmoreland Road and turned in the direction of Great Falls.
About a hundred yards down the road a car pulled up behind us and flashed its high beams a couple of times, then left them up. In my rear view mirror I could see the McLean High sticker and our Highlander symbol, complete with kilts and bagpipe,that I had put in the back window. The car behind passed us and slowed down. Then another car, also using its high beams, pulled up behind us, creeping nearer as we rode along so it was no more than five or ten feet behind us.
"What's going on here," Marjorie asked. "What are these people doing?"
"I don't know," I said. "Let's just pull around them and get out of here." But as I pulled into the passing lane, the car ahead of us sped up and the one behind us closed off the space we had been in. We were trapped on the wrong side of the road. I looked across to see who was driving the other car and recognized the starting halfback from the Fairfax team. He was also their star forward on the basketball team, so I'd seen him at close range often enough to know him instantly. I waved at him to back off and he gave me the finger. I looked up the road and saw it was still clear. Then I looked back at his car and saw it was full of guys. The one I could see behind the driver had a plaster across his nose as if it had been broken. From his neck and shoulders I guessed he might be one of the linemen our guys had spent the evening shoving into the dirt. I thought I could guess who else was in the car, although knowledge in this case didn't look like it would translate into power.
I hit the brakes and slid to a stop. Before I knew it the driver of the first car hit his brakes too. All four doors of his car burst open at the same time, followed by its occupants. There were five of them, all big, much bigger than me. I slammed my Chevy into reverse and started burning rubber, going backwards and looking over my shoulder to see where I was heading and whether there was any more traffic coming up the road. Janey screamed and started to cry.
"Don't let them get us, Simon. Don't let them," she shrieked. I couldn't pay any attention to her as I buzzed backwards down the road, trying to keep from going off into the ditches on either side and keeping half an eye on the Fairfax guys thundering up the road after us. I saw the other car make a U turn and start heading in our direction.
I hit the brakes again, hard. The runners were about thirty feet up the road from us. I shoved the gearshift back toward "Drive" and hit the accelerator pedal, aiming directly at them. Both girls shrieked. "Simon, watch out. Watch out." I couldn't really tell whose voice was whose, trying as I was to calculate the space between the guys on foot and the oncoming car, trying to see if there would be enough room for me to squeeze through. I could see a chain in the right hand of one of them, and another one with a baseball bat, he was waving as he ran toward us.
I aimed for the middle of the pack and they parted like the Red Sea. The driver of the other car had to veer off into the ditch to keep from hitting his own guys and we sailed through a hole even bigger than the ones our line had opened all evening long. I let out a yell of triumph as we went by and then I heard something hard crash against one of my rear fenders. Oh shit, my parents will be pissed, I thought, but the adrenaline was so overpowering that it buried the thought in an instant. Janey was crying and Marjorie had her arm around her, comforting her, and was trying to get into her purse with the other hand to get a tissue. Our eyes met for an instant and I saw that she was as whipped up as I was, and she was laughing and her face was glowing with excitement.
"I want to go home," Janey sobbed. "Simon, please take me home. Oh, God, that was awful. I was so scared. You could have killed somebody."
"Or they could have killed us," I said, surprised at my stern reply. "Do or get done. Anyway, they were football players, so I figured they would be quick enough to get out of the way. Plus, they're from Fairfax, so how much of a loss would that be?" I looked at her and saw she thought I was serious, so I patted her on the thigh and said "Just kidding, really. It's okay." Then I turned onto Chain Bridge Road and headed for her house to drop her off.
Great Falls Road was like a bulldozed line through the deepest forest, straight as a string, surveyed and built by the WPA during the Depression to let people drive from DC up to the park at the falls, the Great Falls of the Potomac. The legend is that Washington threw the silver dollar across there, although he could have played centerfield for God in the vast confines of heaven and still not had an arm good enough to cover the distance to Maryland. The engineers in the 30's were working on their skills and on getting things right, "totally squared away," as various military people like to express it. So they built this road with the precision of an airstrip, in part I'm sure because the President or Harold Ickes Sr., the Secretary of the Interior and consequently responsible for parks, would come out from time to time to see how they were doing and they wanted to show him first class work. Especially Ickes, who bothered to look and had what they called then a "gimlet eye."
Great Falls was the first and only road I've ever done 100 miles an hour on. Russell watched the speedometer and I kept my eye on the center stripe like Craig Breedlove or Chuck Yeager until he said "Okay" and then I let off and breathed a big sigh of relief. That was junior year. Tonight the moon was high enough in the sky and full enough that a healthy glow accompanied Marjorie and me as we cruised up the highway. Her family's house had been built years ago and I had never seen it, just heard about it from various people. It sat back at the end of a long winding drive through some fenced-in pastures and inside a grove of hundred foot high oak trees. The road turned several more times and then you came on a gravel driveway, semicircular and enclosing an island of grass and flowers. The island was big enough that the trees stood back and let the moonlight in, randomly hitting the planes and volumes that this place spoke to me in. I came to a stop just as we entered the clearing, moonstruck I suppose, and housestruck and treestruck and girlstruck. Certainly girlstruck. Above all else.
I caught my breath. "I've never seen anything this beautiful," I said. "This is amazing. Has your family owned it forever?"
"Just for a hundred years," she said. "It is something, isn't it? I love it, but it's nice to see through new eyes again how wonderful it is--what a lucky girl I am."
"Are you happy?" I asked, not knowing where the question was coming from. I wondered if it was a foolish question, and I wondered what I would think of her answer.
"I am, actually," she responded. "It seems strange, when you're supposed to go through all this teenage agony, but yes I am. And you?"
"I don't know," I said. "I have good friends, those guys you know, and my family isn't totally crazy. My mother is a story all her own, but we try not to mess each other up too much. Do you think there's such a thing as a purpose to life?"
"Would you like to kiss me?" I looked at her. Until then I had been staring out at the garden and the moonlight and working as hard as I could not to look in her direction. The sight of either her face or her body, any part of her body, any feature of her face, would have been too much for me and I didn't know, didn't have the slightest clue, what would be the thing that would give me what I wanted most--closeness to her. I had no such definition in my head, but I did feel the tension of the situation--my tension, so far as I could see. She seemed perfectly at ease. I had a bone in my pants that a paleontologist would have coveted, and nothing, nothing had happened between us yet. I looked and reached over and her eyes were lively and full of fun.
Fifteen minutes later, twenty at the most, twenty wonderful minutes of one long kiss punctuated only by our need to refill our lungs, Marjorie suddenly broke away and held me at arm's length.
"What a night!" she exclaimed. "Wow! Simon, you're a great guy and a great kisser. Not to mention a great driver. So few boys know how to kiss. Really. But you've got the knack. Don't ever lose it. And call me tomorrow. I had a wonderful evening. Thank you."
With that, she pulled up the door handle, blew me a kiss and ran across the island and up to the door, where she turned around and blew me another kiss before she went inside. I sat there looking at the space she had just vacated. I felt the blood rush back to my brain as well, but that helped not at all. I would have had a better chance of moving if I'd been struck by lightning.
Like all things, this feeling passed and I realized that if I sat there any longer she might think I was hanging around hoping to get some glimpse of to her going to bed. It was after midnight. I started up the car, turned into the driveway and then backed around so I could head out again. To go all the way around the island seemed like an intrusion, a violation of some code of conduct that was part of that house. Until you were invited to circle the driveway, you kept your distance. I was still on fire from those kisses, but where was there to go but home?
Where indeed? I took the slow, roundabout back way back, driving past the houses where various of my friends and classmates lived, but either the lights were off or I couldn't muster the will to go up to the door and knock and see who might be home. For all my stalling, it still took me no more than half an hour to get back.
As I eased up the driveway and slid quietly out of the car, I flashed on where else I could go. I slipped the keys in my pocket and started walking over to the Dolan's house. So far this was my lucky day. Who knew but what I might get lucky again. Tom could be asleep, freighted by the three or four Manhattans he liked to tuck into every evening, and Helen might be awake. Aunt Helen. I had better not forget to keep her name the way I had been taught to say it. At the worst they would be asleep and then maybe I could go home and get some sleep too, although at the moment I was wide awake and not feeling anywhere near done.
The basement door was open, as always. I shut it quietly behind me and looked over at the couch as if I expected Aunt Helen to be there waiting for me, wearing, or not wearing, the same nightgown from this morning. I wondered if her day had been as eventful, all things considered, as mine had been. Hard to imagine.
I climbed the stairs from the basement one slow step at a time, bracing myself against the wall with my fingertips to avoid tripping or stumbling and giving myself away. I wondered what my story would be if Uncle Tom showed up to see what that noise was. Something about teenage hunger and a box of cookies. My mother was notoriously strict when it came to sweets. He would laugh and we would sit down at the kitchen table and I'd tell him about the game and the car chase and he'd tell me about some parallel escapade from Germany in the days not long after World War II when he and my Dad ran wild over there, two guys just barely 25. I wondered if there would be frauleins in the story.
When I got to the top of the stairs I saw Dukie getting up from his bed by the back door, shaking his hindquarters and wagging his tail, his ears back and down the way a dog does if you're installed in its heart. I scratched his ears and rubbed his back and told him it was okay, he could go back to sleep, and nudged him back in the direction of his cushions. Luckily he was only half awake and he took my signal. As I started toward the rest of the house I found myself settling into a crouch, like a burglar. But I wasn't a burglar at all, I thought. And how would it look if someone came out and found me stooped over and creeping around? I should stand up straight, the way my mother told me to do fifteen or twenty times a day.
Then again, what exactly was I? What was my status in the house of these people, dear friends of my family? A thief of some sort--that was hard to deny. But wasn't it like in that Shakespeare play where they talk about a woman's virtue--what had I taken, really? Uncle Tom wasn't missing anything, was he? But I mean I had fucked his wife, or been fucked by her, which was really the same thing, no denying that. These questions were hard to focus on at this particular moment, especially as I found that the closer I got to Aunt Helen the more noise, psychic noise and physiological noise, the disturbance that lurked behind my zipper started giving rise to.
Through the dining and living rooms there was no sign of anyone. The lights were all off. I heard sounds coming from upstairs. Maybe she sensed my presence in the house and was coming down to meet me. I took off my shoes on my way to the stairwell behind the far wall and turned the corner onto the plush carpeted stairs, long, furry off white Angora carpet on the stairs, soft on my bare feet, tickling a little. I crept up slowly--what was I getting into--but there was light upstairs and I knew they had two bedrooms, on either side of the bath.
The master bedroom was at the head of the stairs and as I slid my head up past the top of the last step I could see Uncle Tom mounted behind Aunt Helen, holding her buttocks in both hands and pounding away like a blacksmith. I couldn't see either of their faces but I could hear, now I could hear clearly what had been muffled by distance. She urged him on, and moaned and wailed. It was nothing like our coupling, nothing like it. She shrieked and put her face down into the pillow and shrieked some more. He came with a roar like a bull. I thought my eardrums had been burst. I lay flat on the stairs, feeling the drumming of my heart. I had seen enough. More than.
Two hours later I was lying awake and staring at the ceiling. The unpurged images of day recede, Yeats wrote, but mine refused to. The kaleidoscope of events, the sight of what looked like normal marital human sex, the shine in Marjorie's eyes, the feeling in my groin that refused to leave me alone, the constellations, signs of the Zodiac, and Orion and the Dippers shining in quiet gold connect-the-dots tracery on my bedroom ceiling, consumed me. Dorothy and I had put those stars up. It was her idea, based on being out with me one November night around Thanksgiving and us talking about the stars and what was what in the heavens. I should have a sky in my bedroom, she decreed, and actually brought the materials and the design over one Saturday afternoon and we put them up. I thought it was dumb at first, but it's great, in fact, to look up like that and see how free nature is, even from the shape of a few stars, and how constrained we are except in our imaginations.
I thought of all the little boxes on our street, and on the neighboring streets, the houses with their rooms, and all the people there, sleeping or not, lying looking at the ceiling, fucking, or staring dazedly at the wall while taking a leak half asleep, standing or sitting. I thought of the refrigerators of all those houses, the heads of lettuce and bottles of salad dressing, and eggs. A zillion eggs just in this ten block radius, I thought. By a statistical freak, all five hundred women in those houses could right now be turning over from their left sides to their right sides in their sleep. Probably not, but I liked the synchronization my image afforded me, seen as an overhead shot with cutaway roofs, like the compound eye of a bee, the multiples. Like Busby Berkeley or Esther Williams movies.
I wondered if Helen was asleep now. Whoa. Aunt Helen. How could she want that much sex? I laughed inside when that thought ran through my mind. I had been ready, even after my workout with her and jerking off over the memory of it, to go however far I could get with Janey or Marjorie, either one of them, if things had fallen out that way. Maybe she has a male sex drive inside a female body, I thought. That would be weird. I couldn't masturbate. No matter how often I tried to take the quick and easy way to finally fall asleep, my friend told me no. Laid doggo. Enough was enough, for one thing, not to mention that my first encounter with doggie style sex had turned out to be something that on recollection struck no spark down below.
On Sunday I slept very late and watched pro football. I called Marjorie a couple of times, but there was no one home. I took a drive out to her house but turned around and came back before I was halfway there.
Monday rose like Monday always does. Parts of my sheets were stiff and my pubic hairs were knotted by the cords of semen pumped out during what must have been a humunguous wet dream. When I got out of bed my dick hung at half mast, glued to some pubes, dangling like a puppet. I'm the puppet, I thought, and this is the puppetmaster. Maybe I should call myself Pinocchio. But this thing I was attached to was no kindly Gepetto. I couldn't remember the name of the wizard, plus I knew that this line of thinking was getting me nowhere. Marjorie would be there in class and I had to make sure she knew I had tried to call.
"Are you feeling all right, Simon?" my mother asked as she slid my breakfast onto the plate in front of me. Two fried eggs in the center of pieces of toast--she made the hole in the bread with a biscuit cutter and fried all the pieces up together. Other days it was soft boiled eggs that you could dip the toast into. There was some bacon left over from my dad's breakfast and I got that too.
"Sure, Mom. Why do you say that?"
"Because I know when something is wrong with my son, no matter how he tries to hide it and pretend otherwise. Simon, you've been doing exactly this since you were two years old. If I don't recognize it by now, what kind of mother would I be?"
I put a piece of egg and toast in my mouth and chewed, washing it down with a swig of milk. I wiped my mouth with the paper napkin she had folded into a triangle next to my fork.
"You're right, Mom. I should know better than to try to pull that stuff on an eagle eye like you." I told her the story of the Fairfax guys and the car, and the whack on the back fender. I had remembered to take a look at it yesterday when I got back from my drive, doing my best not to dwell on the negative, since that for sure would be what I would get from her and possibly even from my dad. It was a crease about six inches long. Thank God he had missed the tail light. None of the paint was gone, but if you knew it was there, it was ugly enough that it needed to be fixed. My mother was a terror when it came to neatness and cleanliness and everything being in apple pie order. She believed that she was in a life and death struggle with chaos and low class behavior, and felt that if she just kept the effort up, she could keep them both on the run.
"That's frightening, Simon," she said. "Why didn't you tell Dad and me about it yesterday?"
"I sort of forgot about it for a while, Mom. I really didn't want to remember it, to be honest. Plus, I think I like that girl Marjorie, the blonde that was dating that guy Brad who goes to UVA. They broke up and I took her home after the game. I think she likes me too. She's a peach." I thought about Oz's cheer at the football game and smothered a chuckle, bananas, plums and pears. Need to keep serious.
"I'm glad to hear that, Simon," my mom said, "but what is this about the fender?" Stay true to character, Mom, I thought. Keep focused on the hole and not the doughnut. That was her fatal flaw, the relentless way she attacked problems, so that everything ultimately defined itself as a problem, because that was the only way she could interact with it, or with anything, it sometimes seemed.
"I guess we should look at it when Dad comes home tonight," I said. "It didn't look that bad, but I don't know how you'll feel about it." I did know, but I didn't want to be rude. "I'll pay for it out of my lawn money if it needs to be fixed."
She nodded in agreement and went off to pour herself another cup of coffee and start loading the dishwasher. I kept plugging away at my breakfast, plotting how long it would take me to get my books ready so I could trot over to the highway and hitch a ride with one of my school friends.
Most of them had their own cars, old jalopies of one sort or another. We didn't have the money for even a car for my mother, much less one for me. My dad got one from the motor pool every once in a while when he knew she needed it for the day, and there was always Aunt Helen and her car, since the two men rode to work together a lot of the time. I liked to stand on the shoulder of the highway and thumb a ride, even though school was only a mile away and most days I could have hoofed it there in less time than it took for someone I knew to come along and pick me up. It was an image thing. Arriving by foot as a senior was low qual, to be avoided at all costs.
Today it was Egan. He looked glad to see me, abnormally glad, I thought as he gave me a big hello and slapped me on the shoulder when I slid into the front seat next to him. He drove a big red and white Dodge, almost new, with red leather upholstery and tail fins and a thousand pounds of chrome on it. It was his uncle's, but the uncle was overseas in Saudi Arabia with some government agency and so the car had come to Egan. It looked a little like a Flash Gordon space ship with whitewall tires and spinner hubcaps.
"What's up, Flash?" I said, and waited. Egan was a motormouth when he was on. He had only two speeds, silent and torrential speech.
"You won't believe it, Sime. You won't believe this. Guess what happened at the CYO dance Saturday night?"
"After the football game? I forgot there was a dance."
"Yeah. And I had nothing better to do so I went. You know that sophomore girl with the amazing jugs, the one whose father is in the Navy? Her mother's Filipino or something--her name is Dee Dee?"
"The girl with the long fingernails she's always working on with an emery board, she wears her hair in a ponytail?"
"That's the one. She was at the dance too, and guess what?"
"You danced with her?" Egan was also notoriously shy, inaudible when the opposite sex was in the room. We called his shoes Groucho and Chico because he was always talking to them when he should have been setting up his moves with the femmes.
"Don't be a toad. Yes, I did dance with her. I danced with her several times. You should see her jitterbug. She's very light on her feet and she likes to do these twirls. We got pretty good together after awhile. And they played "Still of the Night" and "In the Chapel in the Moonlight" too, so we got to do some slow dancing too. It was hot, amigo."
"Is this romance I smell in the air? I would say she's about the right speed for you--sophomore, new to the school and not aware of your well-deserved lack of a reputation."
"Shut up, Simon. Let me tell you something, Mr. Erroll Flynn swashbuckling romancer of the ladies. You want to hear something? Listen to this. I take her home. She tells her fat girlfriend to go home with some of the other girls. While we're driving we talk about how much fun the dancing was and how we hammered those baboons from Fairfax. Now, I don't want to come on too strong or anything and do something presumptuous like taking her up that road by the power station...."
"Of course not. It would look ungentlemanly. She might get the right idea about what's on your mind." We turned into the driveway that led up to the school. Would Egan get to the point or was this a story without a point. I was beginning to wonder. I checked my watch. Ten minutes before home room.
"So we pull up in front of her parents' house--not in the driveway but down at the curb. It's dark, where she lives. Not too many streetlights. So I decide what the hell, I have to kiss her. Why not?"
"Good man. Good thinking." I thought about how lame this was, but you don't cut the legs out from under a dwarf. I wondered what Marjorie was going to be wearing today. I realized that I had no idea what she usually wore--she had been entirely on another planet until Saturday night.
"And then this girl shoves her tongue in my mouth, halfway down my throat, right off the bat before I can even get my right arm around her. I thought I was going to choke. It was all I could do to breathe."
"Way to go Eeg. Hefty, hot and hearty. Like Lipton tea. Do tell."
"Wait. Wait, wait, wait." Egan pulled into his assigned parking space in the lower lot. He grabbed me by the arm.
"I haven't gotten to the best part yet. Hear me out. So we neck and grope for a little while and I get some tit. I get some tit, man. Not bare tit, but she lets me squeeze her. I had a bone that was bursting my britches, man. I don't have to tell you. We're smooching and grabbing and the first thing I know she whips my zipper down and dives in and pulls it out. Pulls it right out! And then she says no, let's do this right and starts tugging at my belt, and the first thing I know my pants are down around my ankles and she's got my dick in her hand."
"You're putting me on! Egan. Go baby!" I was glad for him. He'd always been a slow developer. Maybe hanging around with me was rubbing off on him. Or maybe it was just nature taking its course. "And then?" I said, with the ghetto drawl and high pitched ending the Coasters use in "Along Came Jones," one of my favorite songs.
"And then along came Jones," he said, on cue. "Or in this case along came her fingernails. She held me with one hand and tickled my balls. Jiggled and tickled them and stroked them while she was working my dick."
"The way you do it yourself," I said. He gave me a look that reminded me that the boundary of privacy about some particular things is different for each person. And Egan was basically shy and private. Then he flashed me a grin.
"But better. Better in every way. I don't know how she could keep all those things straight at one time, kissing me and working my dick like that. Those fingernails. I thought I was going crazy."
"Practice makes perfect," I said, and regretted it immediately. "I mean, she didn't learn it nowhere." I saw the look on his face. It wasn't a happy one. "Maybe she has a brother she practiced on." How to make it worse, Sime. How stupid! As soon as I put my foot in my mouth like that he took his hand off the wheel and dived at me, murder in his eye. I grabbed him in a bear hug and squeezed his arms until he settled down.
"I'm sorry, Eeg. You know I didn't mean it that way. Maybe they're just wired differently. Well, how about you? Senor hand job! Go to the head of the class. Or at least the hand of the class." We both laughed and the tension eased. We hit each other on the shoulder to show the problem had passed. I punched him in the chest to show him how much I respected his new level of experience and he punched me back in acceptance and we laughed some more. I had better watch my mouth and my attitude, I thought. Being a quick thinker is useful, but it can also get you in trouble. I knew that somehow or other the things fomenting and festering in my own mind had made me be rude to him. I would have to keep a better eye on myself as things went forward and evolved. Cool had to be the rule.
Millicent Dexter drove a sky blue three year old Buick LeSabre two door coupe--that is, there was no post between the windows for the front and back seats, a new achievement of post World War II automotive engineering. The car had a black fabric top which was a little frayed around the edges and a few dings in the paint job. Millie, our school librarian, weighed at least 240 pounds and probably more. Her five foot eight frame, draped in dresses involving large floral print patterns and muted colors, made her look as if she were an overstuffed chair or a sofa being moved on a dolly from one room to another.
Like all librarians, she wore her hair up and had Ben Franklin glasses that she hung around her neck on a chain plated with gold and set with a few glass beads, with clear plastic alligator clips at the ends to hold the specs. Millie's idea of making a contribution to the cause of secondary education was to dragoon the more promising students into being library assistants during their free periods and after school, then philosophize with them between handing out assignments to dust the encyclopedias, water the philodendron and inspect the card catalog for rude or offensive notes written by prankish students. She even liked to have tea while she held court, like some Boston Brahmin lady, although all of us knew that she had her degrees from California State Teachers' College of Pennsylvania. Not that anyone cared about that. She was, in many, many ways, a larger than life presence, and one of those members of the faculty who define what high school is all about. She never missed a football game, or a basketball game of either the girls' or the boys' teams.
Up to now, I had managed to avoid being caught in her dragnet. My lawn mowing job and last year's spot on the newspaper meant that I had no time after school, and I reinforced my protection by making it a point never to use the school library for any purpose whatsoever. Whenever I needed some book for an assignment I would either get one of my friends to take it out for me or go down to the town library, or else drive into DC to use the big old city library that reminded me of a Roman bath, although I had never seen a Roman bath. I also had special privileges at the Library of Congress that my dad had arranged through his office. His people frequently did research looking for Communist influences in current periodicals and books, so it was easy for him to list me as an adjunct researcher and get me credentialed. Cites to Library of Congress materials looked great in footnotes to term papers, and every once in a while you actually learned something from those particular sources.
So I had a photo ID with the seal of the Library of Congress on it. Lacking the presence of mind to think of it in advance, or perhaps afraid of what my dad might think, I had failed to get a phony birth date inserted so that I could drink in DC. Alcohol wasn't much in my thoughts, though. The guys I knew who were into it liked to brag about how many Country Club Malt Liquors they had belted back the previous night before throwing up and passing out in the back of somebody's '51 Ford or on somebody else's rec room couch if their folks weren't around.
I had run with these guys a little when I first came to town, driving around six to a car after Catholic Youth dances and watching them guzzle the stuff while we looked for mail boxes to stuff cherry bombs into. They made a great noise and it was fun to see the mouth of the box blow open from the explosion of the firecracker. My job was to light up Lucky Strikes and puff on them until they were short enough to serve as fuses for the cherry bombs. Since then I've always liked the smell of Luckies, but the experience itself--with the cigarette smoke, the smell of puke from the previous weekend's escapades and the hoppy aroma of a newly popped can of malt liquor--have conspired to keep me forever free of cigarettes. So that's one thing I credit the Catholic Church for. Not that we were ever very good Catholics, my family, but those rides are forever connected in my mind with where the church misses the point, as it so often does.
The main thing I had against Miss Dexter, as everyone called her, was that she had led the campaign the previous year to change our school's mascot and team name from Eagles to Highlanders, on the grounds that a school with a Scottish name should be consistently Scottish. I had thought about suggesting that we call ourselves the Hobgoblins, after the Ralph Emerson remark that a foolish consistency was the hobgoblin of small minds, but Oz turned that into small minds being the consistency of a foolish hobgoblin, which ruined it for me. She won her point in a school-wide vote. What tore it for me was that we lost our fight song--"Eagles born and eagles bred, and when we die we'll be eagles dead, so hoorah for eagles, eagles, hoorah for eagles, eagles, hoorah for eagles. Eagles rah. Rah." How could you improve on the "eagles dead" part? I thought, and we didn't. We had some fruity fight song with references to William Wallace and the power of bagpipes. So I boycotted her with determination, but not in a confrontational way. Stay below the radar is always the better game.
Today, however, wasn't my lucky day. I had heard she was gunning for me on some account, and as I came zorching through the side door to the school with only a minute to spare before I was due in home room, an arm like a linebacker's reached out of the alcove that sheltered the double doors of the library and clotheslined me. I caught my breath and looked around to see Miss Dexter's bulk and her prominent, ironically eagle-like eyes fixed on mine.
"Well, Simon, isn't this a pleasure," she said. "We don't see enough of you around our library. What's been keeping you away?"
"Miss Dexter, I'm about to be late for home room, if you'll be so kind as to excuse me." This looked bad right off the bat.
"That's all right, Simon. I'll write you a note of excuse. You know they'll just be talking about the Fairfax game anyway, and I saw you were there. Wasn't Elliot glorious? And that offensive line. The Swiss guards of the Pope provide no better protection! Come on in. There's something I've been wanting to talk to you about."
I followed her sheepishly into her office, saying hello to Janice, Russell's girlfriend, who raised her eyebrows and formed her mouth into a perfect 0 to demonstrate her astonishment at seeing me in these premises. All of this served to remind me to ask Russell if he had overcome the station wagon back seat problem and done the deed. Janice looked no different, but neither did I, and look at the last forty eight hours of my own life.
Miss Dexter motioned me into the seat next to her desk, the seat where she could reach over and grip my wrist, which to my horror she immediately did. It felt like a ten pound weight and I could feel my fingers starting to tingle as her grip cut down their circulation.
"Don't think I don't know you've been avoiding us, Simon," she said. "Don't think I don't know what you're up to, and don't give me any line of malarkey. Your absence is beginning to undermine my authority. Everyone knows you're one of the bright ones here, and everyone knows that the library is not on your list of haunts. Would you like to try to explain this little game of yours, or would you like me just to get straight to the point?" I shrugged. "Whatever you want, Miss Dexter."
"Well, here it is. We're running a reading contest now, with prizes, to get the new school year off to a rolling start. The names of the entrants include all the best students, with the notable exception of yourself. Simon, today your name goes on that list, and I will expect you to do your level best, which I know you will, to win one of our prizes. We have a prize for quality, and a prize for quantity. That's to encourage reading generally, because if you have quantity, sometimes you get a little quality thrown in, or you become better at reading, which is one of my major interests in life, to propagate in others some small portion of the joy I've found in the printed word. You are a candidate for the quality prize. Although of course there has to be a quantity of quality, so to speak, to win that prize." She laughed a little, largely through her nose, at her own wit and I used that brief moment to twist my arm free, making it clear that I wasn't going anywhere.
"So, it won't do to read Oedipus Rex or War and Peace and call it a day," she continued. "The contest started three weeks ago and ends the Monday before Thanksgiving. As of now, the leaders have read in the neighborhood of 20 books each. Upon finishing a book, all you have to do is fill out a 3x5 card with the book's name and author, a brief synopsis of what you read and learned, and your name. Any questions? Now that you're a contestant, I will watch for your submissions, and if I perceive a lack of effort I will call you out of your classes and oblige you to do detention in the library, reading of course quality works of your own choice. I'm not Joseph Stalin. Or even Mrs. Stalin, for that matter." She laughed a hearty laugh that reminded me of the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, grinding my bones to make her bread.
"No, Miss Dexter, I think I understand. I'll do my best not to disappoint you." At this point it seemed much better to play ball than to get snippy with her. Cut your losses, I always say, and she clearly had the upper hand in this situation, along with a clear desire to use it. I wondered if Miss Dexter was a virgin, a thought that grossed me out thoroughly as I imagined being trapped alone with her in the library as dusk rolled in, having her corner me in the stacks and relentlessly absorb me into her, amoeba style, while she quoted Ovid or Shelley or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. That image destroyed my defenses and I found myself thinking again about Aunt Helen and Uncle Tom, naked on all fours on their double bed and me peeking up at them over the rim of the stairs.
I wouldn't see Marjorie until government class, after lunch. I thought of stuffing a note in her locker vent about how I had tried to call, but realized I didn't even know which locker was hers, and anyway that would sound defensive, which I wasn't. I was just slightly out of my gourd because there were too many things going on, too much to process, and no one to talk to. I couldn't tell my pals, my gang, about what had happened and what was going on. I just couldn't. It was too far outside of their experience, just as it was outside of mine. It was also not my secret to tell, I realized. Talking to my parents was completely nowhere on the screen, and for most issues of this personal type I had come to rely on Uncle Tom. So much for that. Hunker down, I told myself. Bury yourself in something that will distract you. On my way out of the library I had been thinking that I would need to get started on this reading contest or there would be some kind of major crap descending on my head, so I grabbed a book off the return desk and waved it at Janice before I left so she could put my name on the card. No violation of library rules, that was something I didn't want to risk. When I looked at the title I saw it was called Love, by someone named Stendhal I had vaguely heard of, or maybe not.
Sitting in the back of Physics class between Oz and Murray, I pulled the book out of the front pocket of my notebook and scanned the contents. I saw that the chapters were short and that the book itself was only about 200 pages long, although the print was small. I noticed I had the abridged edition, which pleased me to my bones. Dexter would never know that part, at least not from me. My eye fixed on a chapter titled "On Jealousy" and I found myself turning to it. Murray was taking good notes, as he always did. It was the fifth day the teacher was covering the ins and outs of the Milliken oil drop experiment, which proved either the size of the atom or the speed of light, I wasn't sure which because each class in this subject left me nearly exploding with boredom. I would get Murray to explain it to me at lunch or after school.
"When you are in love," I read, "no matter what you see or remember, whether you are packed in a gallery listening to political speeches or riding at full gallop under enemy fire to relieve a garrison, you are always adding new perfections to your idea of your mistress, or finding new and apparently ideal ways of making her love you more.... Though this habit persists, the moment you become jealous it produces an opposite effect. Far from giving you sublime joy, every perfection added into the crown of your beloved, who perhaps loves another, is a dagger-thrust in the heart. 'This delight,' cries a voice,'is for your rival!'"
This guy didn't know the half of it, I thought. Walk a mile in my shoes. Who was my rival and where did love come into it? Brad was nowhere, or at least he seemed to be gone from the scene. There was no rival and there was no jealousy. I would see Marjorie in government class and things would go forward from there. Maybe there was some other part of the book I should turn to first. As I thought this I knew I was doing my intellectualizing best to avoid the real issue. Uncle Tom was my rival and I was jealous of him, that was why I had turned, like someone hypnotized, to these particular pages, to this chapter.
But I wasn't in love with Aunt Helen. She would always have a special place in my life, that was for sure. She had relieved me of the burden of my virginity without my having to lift a finger or make a move, without having to endure any kind of rejection whatever. She had greased the skids, so to speak, of my initiation. Being inside her was like taking a salted ear of corn on the cob and spinning it on top of a stick of butter while you devoured it, and there was just you and the corn and the butter and the salt and the spinning and spinning and spinning. In my house, you had to cut a pat of butter and dab it all over the corn before you ate it, that was the only permissible way, using cute little plastic corn holders shaped like ears of corn themselves. Not no more, I thought. Being with her was like finding yourself surrounded by hot fudge the texture of velvet--wet, quilted velvet. I had to stop myself. My hard-on was becoming uncontrollable. I was amazed my classmates couldn't hear it roar.
"Since jealousy is the greatest of all ills, you can find a pleasant diversion in risking your life," I read. That was the way I had felt creeping around in the Dolan's house the other night. What if Uncle Tom had heard me and I had gotten myself shot? I had read not so long ago about some guy named Woodward, some rich society guy out on Long Island, up in New York, whose wife had shotgunned him when he came into their bedroom very late one night. "Because then your thoughts will not be entirely embittered by the process described above and you will be able to play with the idea of killing your rival." This was getting ridiculous. Who did I love? I loved the idea of Aunt Helen giving me everything she had to give. I couldn't be jealous, because I didn't love her. Did I? Also, she had her obligations and commitments of some sort or other, although that part was sort of fuzzy to me right now. Lust and fear were the main emotions I was feeling. How different was that combination of feelings from love? There was always the idealization factor, as Stendhal pointed out--a woman who cheated on her husband and a girl who opened her boyfriend's mail, equally ideal as it looked from where I sat right now. I had always loved Uncle Tom, from as early as I could remember. My parents were only children, and he was the closest other relative I had, even though we weren't really related. And I wanted to love Marjorie. I wanted that so much it was beyond description. Marjorie.
"What's that, some porno?" Oz whispered to me. "Let me have a look." I waved him away and shut the book. So much for the classics. I would have to get back to this book, though. There was also a chapter called "Concerning Fiascos." Maybe I could learn something useful there.
Marjorie showed up in government just before the bell. I had been in my seat for ten minutes, during which I figured out that I knew the location of the seat she sat in, and that I didn't know what I would do or say when I saw her. Dave Vincent and Miss Murphy worked around the classroom with purpose and efficiency to set up the exhibits that would accompany our Parliamentary re-enactment of the motives behind the Stamp Tax, the thing that set America free and that was to be our major learning experience of the next three or four weeks. I had a small part as James Otis, standing around looking thoughtful--"Very well said," was my line in response to some long-winded John Adams palaver. The real historical Otis went crazy, probably because of Puritan sexual repression or because Adams wouldn't shut up. I had to dig deep to stay out of the way of a major part, but Otis worked to get me out of the other episodes in the weeks to follow. Nowhere was she, Marjorie, to be seen.
I sat near the door in government, near the posters of the Dec of Ind and the Const and Magna Charta. It's hard to abbreviate Latin. Miss M and I had an unwritten understanding that I could leave whenever I wanted to, as long as I came back before too long. She knew that I had a penchant for stirring it up if I was bored, and she seemed to have figured out that having it stirred up in this class was a waste of a good opportunity to gaze over Dave's strong shoulders and narrow waist, his jet black hair and rugged profile. A person functioning in a trance is a wonderful thing to see, especially as they complete their ordinary tasks and deal with necessities and basic English syntax. We got along fine. Class was never less than fun, on one level or another.
The buzzer rang and Marjorie surged in along with fifteen other members of the class. We made brief eye contact and smiled and then it was who's missing today and would the students playing the parts in our re-enactment please assemble by the window side of my desk. I shambled up, catching a glimpse of Marjorie's rear as she sat down. It looked beautiful. Shrouded in a tight skirt with a side zipper, the play of her buttocks and her thighs registered on my Richter scale at a number not previously known to science. I felt on track. I said my line to myself seven times and tried to work my shoulders to the rhythm of the speech. Fail-safe. My body would speak the words even if my mind turned to stone or salt when I got Marjorie in my vision from the front, the front of the room, that is. The room was suddenly undersea, and then it wasn't again. Sign to take a deep breath. This one I know from my childhood. Just my symbol system at work, safety net, level two.
Dave played George Washington, strong and silent, and hair pulled back in a short ponytail. We got the clothes from the drama department. He even had a three cornered hat, like a crown. I liked this simulation. I got to stand up and move around, pretend to look out the window like I was thinking, and roll my eyes at Marjorie. She laughed, and then she turned to Charlotte, her best friend, and whispered something behind her hand that made them both laugh.
"I tried to call you yesterday, but there was no one home." I caught her just outside the door. She and Charlotte were in conversation.
"We went for a picnic up at Great Falls. My family. I forgot to tell you. Hey listen, was that some Saturday night? You were so brave!"
Charlotte laughed when she heard that. She was a big girl, big across the board, tall, full breasted and broad shouldered. Long dark hair, falling past her shoulders in waves, held back by a black bandeau. She liked black tight skirts too, with the side zipper and the kick pleat, although hers was a nubbier fabric than Marjorie's, and her nylons were darker. "I hear you guys had the time of your lives," she said. "Or nearly ended your lives! How's Janey, speaking of?"
"She's okay, poor girl," Marjorie volunteered. I talked to her yesterday. From a distance, she recognizes that it was a great adventure."
"Although it didn't seem like it at the time," I interjected.
"It could have gone wrong," Marjorie said, taking my elbow. "But we had Simon here behind the wheel, and he was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. You should have seen them run and dive for the weeds and the bushes."
Her head thrown back in laughter, the two girls laughing together, gave me the chance to look, for the first time really, at Marjorie in her entirety. Eye contact, smile, breast glance, butt glance, waist, leg glance, and crotch glance if possible and not too obvious--that's the once over. She scored 112, on a scale of 100 where 85 was honors. At the moment, I was too busy to review my math. But I knew what I knew.
"Would you like to go out on Friday," I said. "Go to a movie, or something?" She had stopped laughing while I was framing the question.
"I would like that very much," she said. As they walked away, Marjorie blew me the softest and slightest of kisses with a casual half turn of her neck. Her entire face was involved in the gesture of the kiss in a way I couldn't begin to catalogue.
Three forty five was the time I usually got home. Two lawns to do today, both small ones, two dollars apiece instead of the usual two fifty. Weather was holding. In three or four weeks it would switch over to raking leaves. Nobody was home. My mom had left a message taped to my bedroom door. "Call Aunt Helen," it read. "She needs your help with something. Dinner at six sharp. Love, Mom."
I froze and got hard all at the same time. There must be two of me twined together, I thought. I wondered how that worked. Aunt Helen. Good God. Should I call first? What should I wear when I went over? l could put on a different T shirt and maybe wear socks. Anything less would be disrespectful. But what if she wanted to do it again? What if she didn't? Which was worse? March to your fate, I thought, and face it like a man, which you are, sort of. No further questions entertained. Would Uncle Tom be there with a gun? That was a stupid question. Uncle Tom was the nicest man in the world. He had a heart as big as all outdoors and he was the soul of kindness. He didn't have a mean bone in his body, which made his survival in the Army, my father told me, a miracle of unparalleled proportions. The perpetually wistful look on his face--or would it be a smile, a wry smile, flashed in front of me like the Cheshire Cat as I walked over to the Dolan's. Alice in Wonderland, that would qualify as quality, I thought. We had one at home. Get through it tonight. Two of those books down, many to go. Index cards.
"Hello, handsome hunk of young man," she said when I walked into the kitchen. She had on a yellow sun dress, bare shoulders and white buttons up the front of the floral tracery, honeysuckle, that supplied the contrast to the rest of the outfit. Yellow bow in her hair, pulled back. A Manhattan sat next to her on the kitchen table and a smile that was two parts shy and three parts hungry adorned her face.
"Hi," I said, and stood, stock still, just inside the door. "How are you?"
"I'm fine, Simon, just fine. And yourself?"
"Fine too," I said. "Very, very fine." There are centuries that lasted less time than the minute I stood there before we exploded toward each other, kissing and talking all at once.
"Oh, Simon, I'm sorry. Don't let me do this to you." She kissed me again when she said it. I could feel her breasts against my rib cage, soft and firm in a way that only breasts can be. I kissed her with the full eighteen years of enthusiasm I had brought along. My hands went around behind her and before I knew it I had one of them under her dress and up inside her panties. She was wet and the fire of it was like a bullet in my brain. I pushed her back against the table top and slid my way between her legs, pulling the panties down with the hand that was already down there, helping her raise her legs so I could get them off, pulling down my swim suit and rocketing inside her. Rocketing.
It was six thirty by the time I got home. A blue plastic plate of macaroni and cheese, broccoli and a well done hamburger patty lay at my place in the kitchen.
"We waited for you," my dad said. "Like one pig waits for another."
"What happened, Simon? Where were you?" My mother stacked my father's plate on top of hers without getting up out of her seat, and lit up a Pall Mall filter from the pack in her housecoat pocket.
"Two lawns, Mom. Monday is two lawn day. The frammis wasn't working right. I had to keep adjusting the gas/oil mix on the engine. It must be something about the changing weather."
My father smiled at me when I said the word frammis. We both knew my mom had no clue when it came to engines, and whenever something mechanical was wrong with our car, my father always blamed the frammis. In auto shop last year, I learned there was no frammis in a car, and finally got the joke.
"Did you help Aunt Helen with her problem?" I poured some ketchup around the hamburger with a slow swirl of the bottle, cut the burger in half, and enfolded the remainder in a slice of Wonder Bread. Chewed and answered yes.
"It was something she couldn't reach without getting up on the kitchen counter, and she was afraid she would fall."
"What? Like a bud vase or something? What does she keep on top of her cabinets?"
"Trade secret, Mom. I promised her I wouldn't tell. She didn't want you gaining a competitive advantage."
This new wise guy in me was a little hard to throttle back. Three acts of sexual intercourse, one at the kitchen table and two on the living room rug, in combination with the energy it took to move my butt afterwards and actually get the lawns mowed, seemed to be giving rise to a lippy new me that I wasn't sure I knew as well as I should, considering that he was inside my head working my mouth. I also wasn't sure he was the kind of good will ambassador our country would need going forward into the second decade of the Cold War.
"How was your day, Dad? Catch any Comsymps? Cancel the tickets of any fellow travelers?" Still too flip by far. I thought I remembered the term "cocksure" and here it was in the flesh.
"We came across some pictures of Stalin drinking the blood of Baptist missionaries," he said, "although they proved to be in black and white, so it's not as compelling as it might be for propaganda, but I make up the news, I don't propogate it, so to speak. I did get to take the photos to the Pentagon personally and see a bunch of old friends there."
"No, seriously, Dad. Did you get in a full 18 or did darkness catch you at the turn?"
"What's your homework situation tonight, Simon?" That meant I had asked enough questions about his golf game.
"Oh, by the way, Simon. Egan and Russell called, and some girl." That was my mother, at the sink.
"Some girl?"
"Yes. She didn't leave her name. She said she'd either call back or see you in school tomorrow."
"Oh, I forgot," my father said. He hit the woodpecker on the head and it dipped down and brought up a toothpick. On our kitchen table we had a painted metal red-headed woodpecker on a hinge. His beak had two little spikes at the end. When you pushed his head down into the hollow metal log he sat on the end of, he always came up with a toothpick or two. Rarely otherwise. My dad pushed the toothpick between two of his molars on the upper right and registered a smile of satisfaction.
"I was waiting for Simon, so I didn't have to repeat the news. Tom got orders today. From the Panic Palace." That was the name he and his unit used for the Pentagon. "He's going to Okinawa for six months. TDY and no dependents allowed. They have some anti-American group they let the Russians whip up over there. He's supposed to help get them arrested and out of the way of the master plan. He speaks some Japanese, our Tom. Tom San. Aregato and Yamamoto. That was how he got lucky. Our government at work." TDY meant temporary duty, according to some Army scheme of abbreviation I could never understand. "Helen stays stateside," he added. "So I guess we'll be seeing even more of her for the time being. He leaves on the eighth of next month, believe it or not."
We were up in my room with the door closed, playing records. It was Wednesday after school. No lawns on Wednesday this week, somehow. Russell, Oz, Egan, Murray and I were sitting around the room working through my collection of 45s. I had a box-shaped blonde wood Emerson record player with a speaker built into the front. It sat on a brass wire stand in the corner of my room and played at 78, 45, 33 1/3 and 18, the last for talking books. I wondered if there was a possibility of contest credit for playing books while you did your homework. My 45 carrying case, with a brown plastic handle and a metal clasp that held the two parts together, like a flip top cigarette box, sat on the floor next to it, with records spread all around. Coasters, Drifters, Everlys, "Running Bear" by Johnny Horton, "Shop Around," by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Right now it was "Charlie Brown" by the Coasters. A perfect high school song. "Who, me? Yeah, you," we all shouted at the appropriate moments.
It had been Marjorie who'd called, to say that going out on Friday was okay with her parents. I was surprised she still asked her parents, then wondered if maybe that was an excuse to call me. Who could say, at this point? We talked that night for about an hour when I called her back, before my dad came up and gave me the cut throat sign and the five minute signal. Last night we talked for nearly the same length of time. I already couldn't remember what the conversation had been about--school, classmates, teachers, family, religion, politics, how bad the food in the cafeteria was, except for the shepherd's pie and the sloppy Joes. I made her laugh when I wondered whether they had a special buyer for meat who had a genius for locating cuts with the maximum amount of gristle and fat, laced so tightly through the portions that if you tried to cut them out you ended up taking out most of the edible part at the same time. We were going into the District to see a movie, we'd decided. "La Dolce Vita," an Italian movie with subtitles being shown up on DuPont Circle. I didn't know anything much about it, except that the newspapers had said it was great, but if I was going to come across at a level of sophistication worthy of a girl who had been dating a college guy, I was going to have to crank it up past the John Wayne, Rock Hudson level. That much I knew.
I hadn't seen or talked to Aunt Helen in the meantime, which was a relief, in a way. About an hour after I had arrived there on Monday she said that we needed to talk, but that it wasn't a good time right then, because she wasn't sure when Tom would be home. I didn't think she knew about the transfer when she said that, but who could be sure? I was terrified at what might happen when he went away. With a sexual appetite like hers, I might end up with a hernia or something. I thought about dying of a strangulated hernia with a scream in my throat and a shit-eating grin on my face. "Sexual appetite" was a term I had learned out of one of the books we smuggled back and forth from our parents' bedside bookshelves. This one was called Love Without Fear, by somebody named Van De Velde, a Dutch professor or something. We read the Kinzey books too, but since technique was what we lacked, not appetite, those weren't as interesting to us as you would have thought. We wanted How-To, not Why. Why was obvious. Because. Also, she might get pregnant, a thought that I didn't know how to connect with but that had loomed up over my shoulder this morning and yesterday when I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with shave cream on my face and my dick in my hand. I found I couldn't come, no matter how I tried, including, today, using the shave cream as a lubricant. This turned out to be a bad idea since it was menthol, and while at first the thrill had been something special, the burning soon became the too much to bear and I had to throw cold water on myself to get things under control. I remembered later, while I was sitting in second period English and my dick was still tingling, about the summer camp trick where someone put some Ben Gay into a tube of KY jelly in the camp director's nightstand. Lots of things are funny or not funny depending on whether or not they happen to you.
Aunt Helen was a married woman, so she must have some tried and true methods of dealing with this issue, I thought. Russell insisted on putting on "Runaround Sue," and everybody started going hey, hey, heyheyheyheyhey. What with our racehorse screwing, she and I hadn't had the time to address this issue, but it was starting to bother me more and more. A lot was bothering me.
"So what's up with Marjorie, Sime?" Russell asked. "Gonna make it over to the movie shack and catch some "Pillow Talk"?" Doris Day should be at least good for some feelies, right?
"Did you know there's a Jamaican actress named Doris Day-O?" Egan asked.
"As soon as you see her, you want to put your banana in her boat," Oz responded immediately. "Her cli-toris is also named Doris."
"Clit- oris," I said. "Did you guys rehearse that on the way over?" There was no possibility of this being spontaneous. I knew these guys too well.
"Came up during gym class," Oz said. "And we modified it for you. Custom job." They hummed simultaneously, invoking the famous "hum job" that everyone talked about without having a clue what it was or how it worked.
"I'm forever grateful," I said, hearing the needle touch the outside groove of the record and preparing myself for another chorus of hey heys. If you left the stacking arm off to the side, the record would play as many times as you wanted it to or could stand. One afternoon we had played "What'd I Say" by Ray Charles something like thirty five times, over two hours of heys and hos, before somebody finally called uncle.
"No, we're going into DC. To see a foreign film. Something with some class."
"I'd like to be another Wallace Stevens," Egan began. "And rise above the common roil of clods. Because to be a Stevens evens... me up for being balled up with you odds." Everybody hooted and told him to send it to "The Old Dominion." Clod was the name nerds used for geeks and other dullards.
"She's a classy girl, that Marjorie," Murray said. "Beautiful and smart. Good luck, Simon." Right, I thought. I need some good luck now. Or something. I wasn't sure what.
"Is it too early for The Happy Organ'?" Russell wondered out loud, "by Dave Baby' Cortez, folks. Ladies and gentlemen, our theme song."
"Never too early," I said, thinking that if there was a God he must have some wicked sense of humor, which of course being God he could do because contradicting himself was just another manifestation of his omnipotence. When you're an adolescent you find ideas like that running through your brain, hopefully never to return. "Who has the Physics assignment? Let's get on it!" 'The Happy Organ" was an instrumental, so we pulled out our books and started humming along as we liberated our slide rules from their holsters. We called them "slide tools," of course, just like we called one of the cheerleaders named Rosaline Tueller "Rosie Tool." If we had known about premature ejaculation, we would have found a classmate to name "Quickie Dick," after Nixon. That was the way it was.
Dinner was no better than I expected—-Mom had majored in chemistry in college but somehow precise measurements of the amount of water to the amount of frozen mixed vegetables didn't do anything to keep them from tasting like grass that the wind had blown out of my lawnmower and into the back of my throat. Tonight at least we avoided he hot dogs sliced lengthwise, filled with Velveeta and covered with a bacon strip that was broiled until the cheese ran all over the place and the bacon was half burned and half raw. Meatloaf was the order of the day. "Where are you going Friday night, Simon? Do you need the car?"
"Well, what are you guys doing, Mom? First and foremost?"
"No, dear, thank you for your thoughtfulness but no. Tom and Helen are coming over. We'll be home. By all means take the car. That wasn't butter you put on your roll, sweetheart, was it? Butter's reserved for the baked potatoes, honey. You know that."
"I'm trying to be different and free, Mom! Abandon the Hawk clan! Come to eat with the rest of us Americans!"
"Don't be rude to me, Mister, or I'll smack you into the middle of next week! Watch what you say to your mother!" One of the many terrifying aspects of my mom was how she could turn on a dime from the Statue of Liberty into The Face of Communism Itself Wreathed in Flames from Hell.
"Mom! Peace, peace, peace. No sweat, Mom. Where do I sign?"
Dad still wasn't home. He and Uncle Tom were presumably out celebrating the transfer and maybeworking what few geishas lived in the District for all they were worth. It was probably nothing as exotic as that but I found that part of dealing with the guilt feelings I was having involved imagining Uncle Tom with a love life on the side that would have worn out Casanova.
"Mom," I said. "What was the highlight of your day?"
"Having dinner with you, Simon. That's the honest truth."
"While you were preparing this delicious repast, Mom, you didn't enjoy the pure preparation mode, soul-satisfying and beyond anything that either enters your mouth or confronts you across the table as we speak?"
"Simon, darling, don't be melodramatic. Your father's out, and he will remain out. We both worry about that, let there be no miscommunication around that issue. But we have to work with the tools we are given."
"What would cheer you up the most, Mom?"
"A good night's sleep, sweetheart, eight full uninterrupted hours. Something I haven't experienced in years, for one reason or another. Thank you for asking."
No more than thirty seconds later, the door burst open and here were Tom, Uncle Tom, and my dad, arm in arm, singing a drinking song in German and cheerfully invading the house, sliding sideways through the door and whirling each other around like cyclotrons. Like Cossacks, I thought--that would be more accurate--but they moved so fast and I was so determined to distance myself from them as human beings—another mechanism for holding guilt at bay, so I coughed up that simile in place of the one that followed it, and the one after that.
I could remember many dinners like this. The Army life is a drinking life. Liquor is cheap and available and everybody drinks and smokes. From time to time my dad would not show up for dinner, then make an appearance at some advanced hour, on no particular schedule, lit up like a Christmas tree and smelling like he'd ridden home in the back of a beer truck. By and large he was a happy drunk, although not always. Retirement parties, parties to celebrate a promotion or a posting overseas or a birthday or some regimental occasion, or the appearance in town of an old war buddy on special assignment, or pay day parties if there wasn't anything else. There was no shortage of opportunities to party, and these guys covered them with dedication and enthusiasm.
"Did you cannibals leave us anything to eat?" my dad asked. He undid the front of his Eisenhower jacket, turned one of the kitchen chairs around and sat down. Uncle Tom did likewise. They had their hats, their garrison caps, folded into their belts, showing their insignia of rank on the lower left, below the fold. I liked the uniforms, the webbed belts and brass buckles and so forth. Being in the Intelligence Corps, they frequently wore plain clothes, but I liked the uniforms better, because they stood for something, I thought, and I liked the battle ribbons they wore. They made me proud.
"It's your lucky day, Jeff Jeffries," my mom said, getting up from the table and walking over to the stove. "Simon, get your father and Tom some silverware and napkins, will you please, sweetheart? It's meatloaf and baked potatoes, gentlemen. Ketchup and A-1 on the table. And succotash. Frozen, not canned. What mess sergeant ever treated you half as well?" You could see that this early arrival by my dad, in pretty good shape all things considered, helped to improve my mom's mood. One night last year my dad had forgotten that we kept the front door unlocked until he got home. When he couldn't find his keys, he scaled the outside of the house and tried to work his way in through their bedroom window. This was a cakewalk in comparison.
"Tomas, will you be joining us?" my mother asked. "Or is Helen keeping something warm for you?"
"Doubtless, Kitty dear, but if I have some of your meatloaf first, along with a fine Idaho spud baked to perfection by your loving hands, I will be fortified thereby to the extent necessary to participate in the benefits of the said warmth of the said Helen. Raincheck on the succotash, milady if you please. I know you understand." My mother reached over from the stove and ruffled his hair, what there was of it.
Jesus, I thought, does anybody around here think about anything but sex? As that thought passed through my mind I started giggling. Coming from me! Uncle Tom thought I was laughing at his joke.
"What's this, Simon," he said, running his hand back across his head with one hand and reaching over to punch my dad in the shoulder with the other. "We're not embarrassing you with this grown up talk, are we? You don't want your old Uncle Tom to come down with some rare Hawaiian disease like lack-a-nookie, do you?"
"Aren't there vitamins you can take for that, like for beriberi," I said, not exactly knowing why, but knowing I had to respond in some way or other. For some reason I couldn't understand I found myself thinking of the yellow leather pumps with pom poms on the toe strap that Aunt Helen wore sometimes in the summer when they came over. I was seeing in real time her putting them over my shoulders on the way to you know what.
"Sure," Tom said. "First and foremost, there's vitamin P...." Before he got any further, my mom smacked him on top of the head with the flat of her hand.
"There are limits, Captain Dolan, observed by gentlemen when ladies are present, if you are forgetting yourself, as you most certainly are." She put plates in front of the two men and returned to her seat, taking an ashtray from the open shelves of the china cabinet behind her chair. "I left mine upstairs. Does either one of you fine specimens happen to have a cigarette to spare?"
Tom reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and produced a pack of Pall Malls. I liked the red package and the English script. Lucky for me I can't smoke, I thought. The first time I'd been to a CYO dance after we moved to McLean, when I was in ninth grade, I tried to make a good impression on the guys when the band took its break by accepting a Camel, confessing that it was the first one I had ever smoked. They liked that, the honesty, and coached me in how to light it up and so forth. Then, to show my mastery of the subject, I inhaled a lungful of smoke representing about half the contents of the cigarette, and spent the next twenty five minutes coughing, retching, wheezing, being pounded on the back and drooling all over the hood of the CYO president's '54 Mercury before I could get my breath back. That was enough for me, and everyone respected both my effort and my decision. We would sit out on the football stands sometimes at the end of lunch break and work a little chewing tobacco, but that did very little for me either except make me dizzy and a little nauseous.
"I better get at my homework," I said. "I have an English paper due tomorrow on Longfellow."
"He's a poet and don't know it. His feet show it. They're Longfellow's," my dad said through a mouthful of meatloaf and potato. "Make sure you get that in there, Simon." I thanked him for the thought and waved goodbye as I headed out of the kitchen. A stack of books occupied the hall table near the stairs up to my room, mysteries my mother had borrowed from the public library. Tomorrow she would take them back, all five of them. She seemed to like Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books, although the one or two I had read didn't really capture my imagination. I had no context to put the behavior in, involving business deals and business offices and country clubs and courts of law, none of which I had any experience with at all. I looked at the books again. None of them was more than about 150 pages long. I slid them under my arm and headed for my room. By midnight when I turned out my light, I was three books to the good and six pages into my Longfellow paper, which I could finish in the morning if I got up early and used my shower time a little differently. Balance and variety, I thought. It was amazing how much ground you could cover if you put your mind to it. I hadn't called Marjorie, I realized, but probably that was okay. I wondered if she was awake thinking of me, or asleep dreaming of me. Or Brad. Then I wondered what Uncle Tom and Aunt Helen might be up to. Tomorrow was another lawn day. It was hard to go to sleep. The stars on the ceiling told me to relax. Giving them the finger seemed stupid, so I did and finally dozed off.
"Women have two types of orgasms, soft and hard. Soft is when the man comes inside her and she comes. That so-called simultaneous orgasm' you read about in your sex books. That actually does happen, sometimes, although certainly not every time by any stretch. Hard is when she has to do it for herself, or get somebody to do it for her, one way or another. By hand or mouth or whatever."
"How do you tell?"
"I don't have to tell. I'm the woman. I know, sweetheart, believe me I do. When I come, how I come, I'm directly in touch with it, inside and out. Not that I worry about it, honestly, but I do know."
I had asked her what was that quiver I felt in her vagina when I ejaculated. Shot my wad. Came. I felt a quiver, a tremor, a spasm of some sort. Some involuntary sort. So I asked.
"Does it have anything to do with conception?"
"You mean fertilization?" Aunt Helen responded. "You mean the idea that your sperm would fertilize my egg?"
"Well, I don't mean you and me. I mean in general." What was I doing having this conversation, at 4:30 in the afternoon, with a naked woman in her husband's bed, licking the back of her knee and working my way down to her toes. None of this made any sense to me but somehow I kept finding myself in situations like this with her, and who was to say no?
"In general. That's good. Very good. Worthy of you, my young bundle of erectile tissue." She stretched and rolled over. "What if I did get pregnant, Simon. Have you thought about that?" She slid her hand across my shoulder and up my neck and wove her fingers into my hair. Like a bareback rider hangs on by the horse's mane, I thought. She ran her nails across my scalp and I felt myself begin to get hard again. I still had a good-sized lawn to mow and Uncle Tom could be home as early as five. Now that he was getting organized for his transfer, he had no real day to day duties and had announced to my dad that he would be keeping his own hours, more or less, if he could find anything more worth while to do than sit around in the squad room and tell tall tales to the recruits about the old days overseas. Who knew what that really meant? I was sure I didn't want to be the one to find out.
"Is that possible?" I liked the idea of looking her in the eye with this question as I was positioning myself between her legs for one last go. It helped make up for my lack of nerve on many other issues. I was getting my boldness by reflection, like a mirror of Aphrodite. I couldn't wait any longer. I pushed in and gasped. Moaned. Sighed. Went to work. She lifted her legs and pulled my head down next to hers.
"Not any more," she said. "Two ectopic pregnancies. Oh, God, that feels good, Simon. Oh, do me, Simon. Do me, do me, do me! This is where you're safe."
My mind was an exploding balloon, scatters of latex everywhere across the sky, much more air than matter, gone more than seen. I bit her neck, nibbled. Tasted. Held her shoulders down with the palms of my hands. Felt her rise against me and whip me around inside her like a Mixmaster on high speed. Exploded. Bounced against her. Shook. Felt it again.
"Hard or soft?" I said.
"Hard," she said. "The one before was soft. Sometimes it's a fine line." She twitched again.
"What's an ectopic pregnancy," I asked. Why didn't I know this.
"The egg gets fertilized inside the tube from the ovary to the uterus and plants itself there, in the tube. It can't grow there, poor thing, I mean it does grow but then it explodes from the pressure of the tube and that's all she wrote."
"For the pregnancy?" I asked.
"For the pregnancy and the tube," she said. "We're all limited to two, women are, so when those are gone, the whole issue goes away. You've heard of a woman having her tubes tied. I can't have children, Simon. That's what I'm saying. God tied my tubes. So if I can't, I might as well make the most of my situation, mightn't I? See what I mean? Makes perfect sense, right?"
"Nothing makes sense to me at the moment, A..." I started to call her Aunt Helen, then realized how bizarre that sounded. This was as close as we had come to a conversation since things started up. It felt like if we talked about anything the whole situation would change dramatically, and I for one wasn't nearly ready for any change in the gloriousness of what I was feeling so lucky to experience. Very few dots had been connected so far, I thought, of the total picture. Some, but not many. I didn't know if I was working out a merry go round, a giraffe or a picture of Mt. Vernon in cherry blossom time.
"If I don't do what I have to do, I'll be in trouble," I said, rolling over onto my back and shaking my left leg. It had gotten numb somehow. Pins and needles. I hadn't noticed before. She leaned across and stuck her tongue in my ear.
"Go mow your lawns, Simon," she whispered. "I'm done with you for today, and I would think you're done too, as far as the good you can do me, darlin'. Mister Stud." Most of the time she had no accent, none that I could detect, but from time to time she slipped into her native South Carolina drawl, like she was taking a bath in some warm slippery water after a long day in the fields or the factory.
Erskine Caldwell, I thought. That's where that image came from. Tobacco Road. I had read that book the previous night after spotting it in the family bookshelves down in the rec room, which was really the TV room. Another one under 200 pages and one I had wanted to read since I was twelve but never managed to be brave enough to take off the shelf. Great sleazy cover. A sexy woman in a flimsy white dress wrapped around the corner post of the board porch of a shack beside a mud road, with a shirtless guy in overalls and whiskers eying her from the doorway. The book got me so worked up that I read two other Perry Masons before I could get to sleep. Today with Marjorie had been fun. We more or less rubbed noses in a stairwell after government class. I kissed her, but she pulled away.
"Don't get me started, Simon," she said. "Save that for when we're alone. Tomorrow night."
I still wondered why I didn't feel more guilty about what I was doing with Aunt Helen, or scared. But mostly the guilty part. I was just so fascinated by how direct she was, no game playing, and by what I was learning. Also, how could I give this up? Really. It had to be part of human nature. There was a reason for this. I wondered again if Uncle Tom would shoot me. Like jealous husbands catching their wives in the act are known to do. I couldn't imagine it. I didn't want to spend too much time worrying about that anyway. I was the cautious, thoughtful type. I paid attention to what was going on more than most of my friends did. He would be gone in not all that long. Keep your cool, I said to myself. My life so far had involved living in 20 different places in eighteen years, so I knew that things changed in ways you couldn't control or predict. This probably made me more passive than someone who lived in the same place and knew only the same people, but I thought it also helped me be more aware of what made people tick. Since I was always the new kid, there was no way I could get what I wanted by pushing for it. The best method involved watching people, figuring out what they wanted, giving it to them and building up a bank account of trust and gratitude that you could tap into later, or if you couldn't, then you had learned something important about that person and moved right along.
Aunt Helen had lived in the area for about two or three years before she hooked up with Uncle Tom, she told me. She had come to DC right out of high school to be in a big city. These were the days when Atlanta and Miami were regional burgs, sweltering in the pre air-conditioning period before the term Sun Belt had any currency. Small change towns. All over the South they rooted for the Redskins. She ended up doing sales clerk jobs and then moved over to cocktail waitressing. That suited her just fine in a town with a lot of presentable men, in and out of uniform, and not very many available women. I asked her why she had married Uncle Tom and she said it was because he was sweet and made her laugh and was crazy about her. "He still is," she said, "and I love him too, in my own way. I truly do." Most of the men she ran into were totally into themselves and their jobs, and power of whatever sort. Tom loved to have fun. He still did--he was the soul of fun--but he was 49 now and she was only 27, and he drank every night, which meant he passed out or went to sleep most of the time, leaving her awake and feeling short changed. Five years of marriage had passed and where were they now? There was a lot of difference between them, age-wise and otherwise.
"You think I'm a middle aged lady, Simon," she had said, "but I'm only nine years older than you. I may have a few more miles on me than most women my age, but I'm young enough to feel young. And don't ask me why I'm doing this. I just am, so okay. That's the way I look at it. Tom doesn't get hurt and I don't feel penned in and cooped up. Now give me a hug before you go."
"Try this one," Oz said in the hall after home room. "Egan and I worked it up while we were helping with the homecoming float--pretty cool, I would say. The Eagle sits on the Highlander's shoulder and approves of the mascot change. He vows to be faithful and committed to the cause. I'm not so sure this will work--we have a remote control airplane hooked up to the Eagle and it's supposed to fly in a circle around the float, anchored on some wire the Highlander has in his hand. Many moving parts. Much potential for wrong result. But if you don't go for the gold, how will you ever get enough Miller High Life?"
Miss Dexter had caught me again today. I went into the library to stuff my seven index cards into the box and she leaped out like a leprechaun, a 250 pound leprechaun in a damask rose dress and two inch heels, and accosted me.
"Simon! How good to see you. Are those index cards I see in your hand? Does this mean we have an actual contest? That my favorites will be prodded forward by your competitive spirit? How many cards do you have there? It looks like quite a lot."
I shoved the cards into the slot as fast as I could. "I'm trying my best, Miss Dexter. This contest is certainly an interesting idea." She looked like she might want to talk some more, so I backed out the library doors, like a guy in a western movie who has the drop but doesn't know where some bullet might come from to take him out for good--one hand behind me, feeling for the clean escape. She'd had a quizzical look on her face, but I liked the idea that the sound of the index cards clacking on the bottom of the box had hit her where she lived. I smiled and waved and high-tailed it like a fox with a mouthful of feathers leaving the chicken coop.
"So what's this you were telling me?" I asked Oz, returning to the present. "What was that noise you were making?"
"Our poem," he responded. "We were in there, beavering away on the float, and what should come to us but the following:
I sock to her my big hard cock
A man a-mount am I
I cock my eye to eye my cock
My spirits liquefy. "
"Not bad so far, right?" he said with an inviting tilt of his head. I agreed.
"Then check this:
A happy, happy, happy man, a happy man am I.
My chances multiply. My jism starts to fly.
A happy man am I."
"Her eyeballs for to fry," I said. "Not bad in some ways, but it's a little like listening to a Munchkin deliver the Sermon on the Mount. Speaking of mounts, how much time are you spending, being a-mount, if I might ask?'"
"It doesn't amount to too much, actually," Oz said with a sheepish grin. "Eve is holding out on me. I thought she already banged the whole senior class from last year, but maybe that was the word from the other girls. You know how vicious they can be, especially with someone who's popular. But she's giving me the runaround. She made me put my hands behind my back to kiss her good night last Friday night."
"You got a kiss? On the first date?"
"This is Eve, Simon. Remember? Eve. Do we have a quiz in math today? Somebody told me that. Russell, I think. Tell me it isn't true."
"It isn't. I'm lying. We do. Feel better?"
" A happy man am I," he said, flipping me a discreet finger, and melted into the crowd of girls in white blouses and black sheath skirts and guys wearing chinos, with heinie binder buckles between their back pockets, and button down shirts, waving goodbye over his shoulder, as Munchkin-like as ever. My mind drifted into "Do me, do me, do me, do" all the way to my seat in home room.
I was turning myself inside out in my mind. I was going out with Marjorie tonight. To the movies in DC. In the family car. I knew how to get to her house, way out Great Falls Road, and I knew where the theater was located in DC. Would there be parking on the street or would I have to find a garage? I'd done that once before, last year with Dorothy, and it had cost me nearly a week's worth of lawns. Ten dollars. Before I even paid for the movie. But if Dorothy was worth four lawns, so by God was Marjorie. I would take my entire money clip with the singles and fives from a year's worth of lawn work and bring it with me, I thought. To be ready for anything. The clip was sprung from all the singles it held, but it was a nice metal, with a dull but clean finish, and it had a French five franc piece that weighted the top part of the spring and helped hold the money in. Given to me by Uncle Tom. Two Christmases ago. After he went to Paris on a job for my dad.
Next, I thought. Holding hands right off the bat or only as the movie progressed? Then I found myself wondering what she would be wearing. It was still warm enough that the girls were wearing sleeveless blouses, some of them. This meant that if you had the right angle during a class like English, where there was no need to pay much attention, you could get an angle and see the trimmings on some bras, see the little ornamentation around the edge of the panel where it joined the cup. I never understood why the view of a shaved armpit and some fabric could be erotic, but it was. Another place you might be able to touch, if you got lucky, was to trail your fingertips up along the smooth muscle in the back of a girl's arm and then work your way down to paydirt. But tonight would be cooler than the day. Maybe she would wear one of those Angora sweaters that drove me crazy just to look at. So soft and fuzzy and tactile. Like a flashing neon sign saying "don't you wish you could touch this." Those sweaters contoured so perfectly across the breasts of any reasonably well endowed girl. Maybe I would get my hand up under her sweater later, after the movie and the stop at Hot Shoppes, and slide it along her side and reach up around behind her, where the two little eyelets that held the bra together lurked like the Promised Land. Maybe. All this was too much for me. Better put it on the shelf for now. I had a huge smile on my face when I walked into German class. Frau Zinger asked me what was making me so happy and I told her I had finally mastered, I thought, the proper emphasis in the pronunciation of "Jawohl!"
As the day wore on I found myself thinking more and more about this evening. Our first real date, although the way last Friday night had worked out must count according to some system or other. I knew I could pull into the scenic overlook on the George Washington Parkway up over the banks of the Potomac, a favorite spot for necking couples. You could look down and see Washington spread out before you, all that white marble and limestone and enough lights to make it seem like a cross between the imperial city and a sci-fi movie set, and up along the river it was dark enough that there was a lot you could do, because the parkway cops didn't come along too often and when they did they just cruised through the area behind the parked cars to let people know they were around, but they never got out.
Marjorie had dated Brad for two years. How far had that gone, I wondered. How many times had she pulled into that space with him at the wheel? What had gone on between them in that car, or at her house, or down in Charlottesville? What right did I have to be jealous, considering what I'd been up to with Aunt Helen, I asked myself, but reason provided no singing sword to slay this dragon with. Everywhere I was going, he had already been. Or had he? What difference did it make? That question made no difference either. I was insecure where she was concerned. Socially she was clearly a lot more mature than I was. That the same thing would be true sexually, except for the miracle of Aunt Helen in my life, was only logical. Logic sucked. I tried to suppress a mental image of Brad's tongue making an all too familiar circuit around one of her nipples, just before turning to the other one, but the more I worked against it the more powerful it became. Stendhal had provided a good analysis of what went on when you were smitten, as I was, but he was so sophisticated and continental that his main message seemed to be that there was nothing much you could do about it except be amused at your own predicament and hold murder in your heart. I found it hard to be amused, and I've always been a lover, not a fighter, so it was back to square one. I went into the boys' room and jerked off in my favorite stall, where someone known around school as "The Master of the Baiter" had drawn several surrealistic versions of guys jerking off, surrounded by the cheerleading squad doing high kicks with no panties on.
"Simon, if we could have your attention for just several minutes out of this hour?" I jerked back from staring out the window at a cloud that looked like a white bra, 36C, and tried to focus my attention on Mr. McDowell, our flamboyant English teacher and chief advisor to the drama club, and to his question. It was all I could do to keep from sputtering with laughter when I realized it involved Moby Dick, but I had already finished the book to make room for the contest. I managed to pull an answer totally out of my butt involving the parallels and differences between evil in nature and in mankind, provoking a look from Mister McD that suggested he knew I couldn't have come up with it on my own but appreciated the extent to which I had nevertheless elevated the discussion. It seems like in life most people lack for enough interesting things to do, and that deprives them of energy and a certain life force. Where I was, busier than a mustard paddle at a weenie roast, the energy abounded.
Combing my hair after dinner in front of the mirror I noticed a huge zit had erupted on the far right side of my forehead, near the hair line. It had a white tip on it as far across as the head of a safety pin and was lumping up like a small anthill. Usually I could feel these eruptions as they were coming on because of the stretching they exerted on my skin, but this one had arrived by sneak attack. I probed and examined it, manipulating the swollen part and scratching and squeezing a little at the tip to see if any fluid emerged.
This was the age of brown Clearasil, so called "flesh tone," but as much the color of flesh as flesh tone Band-Aids, which look about as much like flesh as a banana looks like the sun. I remembered last year when I had an outbreak of zits, probably related to my anxiety over Dorothy's departure. I walked into home room one May morning with dabs of Clearasil on about eight or ten spots all over my face and Russell looked up at me and said "If the foo shits, wear it." Tonight I was going out on the biggest date of my life, in half an hour in fact, and I was about to sprout a horn from my forehead like a mutant rhinoceros. As I stood there in front of the mirror I could feel it grow by about thirty percent. By the time the movie got over it would be the size of the Jefferson Memorial, a dome of pus right under my skin, right where Marjorie would want to lay her hand, to brush back my hair, possibly in connection with a kiss, but instead she would hit it just hard enough that I would either, if the mass had hardened and enlarged in the meanwhile, wince in pain and recoil like someone who's been hit in the chest by a bowling ball launched from a howitzer, or else her gossamer touch would be just enough to wangle it loose and she would end up with some extremely pleasing and attractive zit goo slathering across her well manicured fingertips like a freshly squashed night crawler. Another tarantella on the tightrope of romance. I had noticed that Marjorie took very good care of her nails. She wasn't loud and splashy about it like some girls--she only wore clear polish. But the shape of her nails and the condition of her cuticle were items that hadn't escaped my observation. My grandmother ran a beauty parlor back in Kentucky, so I knew more on these issues than one might suspect. Zit goo was not on the recommended list from Elizabeth Arden or even Revlon. I needed to act decisively or my life would be ruined.
"Those people lead such empty lives," Marjorie said as we walked back to the parking garage after "La Dolce Vita." The movie had overwhelmed me. I had never seen anything like it--the energy, the decadence, the explosion of sex and the violence of the papparazzi and the offhand rapid-fire way people dealt with each other had sucked me in like the mouth of a tornado. I didn't know which end was up or what to think. Even more amazing was that in a movie so filled with sex and nudity, more than any movie I'd ever seen, the effect was exactly the opposite of what I had expected. When I'd been going out with Dorothy, we'd hold hands during some John Wayne or Gregory Peck movie, some good guy takes out the bad guys story, but only after the right amount of suffering and getting beaten up and double crossed and so forth, or some Alfred Hitchcock movie like North by Northwest or Vertigo, and as soon as she started tracing her fingers across my palm, up would go the flagpole. I learned to keep my handkerchief in my front pants pocket so that as things wore on and she did her magic, undoing my zipper and dipping inside, cupping my erection with her fingertips and the heel of her hand against the front of it and teasing me to ejaculation, there would be no muss or fuss, just the first of several shots I would fire at the target of pleasure during the course of an evening out with my first big-time girlfriend.
Here, women danced around more than half naked, Anita Ekberg as much as falling out of her scoop neck dress any number of times, Mastroianni riding on the back of a woman as she crawled around on all fours--and my pal the groundhog had stayed in his burrow. Marjorie and I had held hands at the beginning, in a friendly, relaxed way. Her hand was cool and slender and touching her skin made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I remembered the first few times I had shaved and how the sensation of the razor had given me an instant erection. This was similar but different, maybe because of the experience I had gathered between then and now. But while the feeling of her hand in mine made it harder to breathe at first, there was no explosion of sexuality or direct physical reaction. After a while, the film took over and I found myself sitting next to her, not touching and not unhappy about it. To put cheap moves on a girl this fine during a movie this colossal was something even I could see as out of line. I wanted to see it again, try to figure out what had happened, give my mind time to absorb and digest the huge phenomenon that had just flashed before me. I knew I had loved it, but I knew most of all that there was much more there than I had been able to absorb.
Marjorie seemed much more collected than I did, with her remark about the emptiness of the lives. I handed the claim check and the money to the attendant and waited for him to retrieve the car. I touched the side of my forehead. The zit explosion had spattered a good half of the bathroom mirror, including one solid gob the size of the tip of a candy corn kernel. I hated candy corn anyway, so the association was no loss to me. A combination of ice and Clearasil applied steadily during the drive out to her house had done the rest. I wiped away the small residual crustiness that had seeped out during the movie and turned in her direction with what I thought of as a smile, to the extent I had any ability at this point to control my expressions.
"What do you mean, empty?" I asked. "They never stopped. It was just one thing after another. Nobody even seemed to stop for sleep."
She leaned back against the wall next to me and arched her back. She had on a blue cotton blouse that buttoned down the front, with pleats running down from the shoulders to the waist across her breasts, which stood out even more as she changed her posture, and a tan light wool skirt with accordion pleats that rustled and swayed when she walked. She shook her hair and wiggled her neck.
"I'm not talking about quantity, Simon. I'm talking about quality. What were they doing, those people? Nothing. Running around, riding around, hopping from party to party. And the one man who seemed to care about quality, that man Steiner who played the Bach piece on the organ, he gave himself up to despair and killed himself and his children. Don't you think he could have done better, that all of them could have done better? I do, for sure."
"You can't trust anybody," I said, followed immediately by these words in my brain--"You stupid oaf, what did you say that for? What is that about? Is that responsive in any way?"
"I don't agree with you, Simon," she said. "I can trust you and you can trust me. We have that much to work from. Don't you think so?"
"Yes, absolutely," I said. Saved by the belle. "That was stupid of me to say. I don't know what I meant."
"You're nervous, that's all, and disoriented by the movie. I don't know why it didn't affect me the same way. Maybe you were more open to it than I was." The tuck of the pleats on her blouse lined up precisely with her bra straps. How organized is this girl, I thought.
"I loved it, but I found it very confusing," I said. "To say the least." The car jockey reappeared and I helped Marjorie into the passenger side. She took my hand and slid in, swinging her legs up after her. The pleated skirt folded across her knees and draped along the edge of the seat. As she smoothed it under herself to keep it clear of the door I could see the outline of her thigh, round and full, cushioned and sculptured by the upholstery. It sang a song to me I had never heard before, but that I was determined to learn. As I walked around to my side it occurred to me to wonder how she knew I was nervous. I didn't think I'd showed it at all. I also wondered about this trust notion. If she thought we could trust each other, and I knew what I knew about myself, what did that say about her? Or did it say anything? The movie started to seem simple and straightforward compared to what I was dealing with.
The Hot Shoppes at Roslyn was packed. There were no parking spaces for curb service and the line at the door was fifty people long. Why did people not mind waiting, I thought. They acted as if they had all the time in the world, that today would be theirs forever. I had two women, six lawns and a reading contest to cope with, not to mention an academic load, getting into college and a mother who never stopped trying to make me better than I felt like anyone in history had ever been or needed to be.
Control yourself, I thought. Time is a tool, not a master. That was one of my mother's aphorisms, along with stand up straight, a job worth doing is worth doing well, and that's not funny, cute or smart, and you have no one to blame but yourself in any way, shape or form. She had others, but those were the ones I heard the most often, every day, in fact, or almost every day. Sometimes more than once a day, so she kept her average up there among the league leaders at all times. My mom wanted the best for me, I understood that, sort of, but she did have a way about expressing it that was a touch strange. Then I remembered. A Touch of Strange, by Theodore Sturgeon. Weird book, like its title. Sci fi. Egan had recommended it to me and I'd knocked it off over a couple of days early in the school year. During the period of the contest. Another index card, to be dropped in the box on Monday morning along with two more Perry Masons and a couple of books of poetry. Short books, but books nonetheless.
I turned to Marjorie as we finished our circuit of the place. "What's your pleasure?" I asked. "Do you want to park and wait in line, or should we head up to Lee Highway?" There was another Hot Shoppes there, although we tended to avoid it because it was usually full of Washington & Lee types with greased back ducktail haircuts, tight "pegged" pants and bomber loafers. Bombers were the shoes with the extra thick foam rubber soles to make you look taller. We focused on the extra thick part when we thought about W&L, and they knew it, so steering clear was generally the better option. I laughed to myself at generally, since Generals was their school nickname, although we referred to them as the Marginals. I tried to think of alternative parking spots on the way home to Marjorie's from that location. The two I knew of were a little far into the woods. I didn't want to send the wrong message at this stage in our dating. But I knew I would think of something. There were a lot of subdivisions just going up in the area, so it was almost impossible not to find an adequate hideaway.
"Why don't we just drive up the parkway and stop in one of those overlooks," she said. "I'm not really that hungry. My mom made fried chicken and mashed potatoes and biscuits for dinner, so my stomach feels like a balloon already. What if you just go in and get a couple of milk shakes to go and we'll take them with us? I'd like a chocolate one, please. Actually, what about a black and white? Chocolate syrup and vanilla ice cream. I'm sure they'll do it if you ask."
There was just a short line for take out. As I debated whether to follow suit and get the same kind, or strike a blow for independent thought and get my regular chocolate shake, I marveled again at how organized she was. In eighth grade I'd had a sort of girlfriend who was the teacher's pet because all her work was so neat that it looked machine made. She had a pencil bag that would have done credit to the US Navy in terms of being shipshape--separate compartments for pens, pencils sorted by the hardness of their lead, a separate bag for paper clips and her tiny Swingline stapler with the red plastic top, plus the little cardboard box with extra midget staples. When we were alone and I tried to get a kiss or a hug she would always be straightening my collar or picking stray hairs or lint off my shoulders while she was turning her cheek to avoid a full lipped smacker. Never once did she have the boldness, however, to pick any of those offending items off anything below the level of my armpits. I hoped Marjorie wouldn't turn out to be another Judy.
On the other hand, her prompt suggestion of skipping the eating and heading straight for the necking was a positive sign, to say the least. I remembered her remark in the stairwell yesterday. Or was it force of habit, I asked myself. Was this how she and Brad had operated? Was I just the new Brad?
We got a good space at the overlook. There were only three or four cars this early in the evening. A benefit of skipping the Hot Shoppes ritual, I realized. I had already finished my milk shake driving up the parkway. We'd had fried Spam and frozen mixed vegetables for dinner. Along with the Pillsbury Pop'N Fresh dinner rolls. They were my mom's favorite. She said she believed they added the touch of elegance that we were otherwise missing. I thought what she liked was to bang them down on the edge of the kitchen counter and watch the container burst open. I was starved. I wished I had ordered a burger and some fries to go with my shake. Marjorie leaned back a little against the door on her side and started sipping through her straw.
"Isn't it beautiful, Simon? How far you can see, and how smooth the dark makes things?" After she said that she turned and looked at me.
"What do you mean?" I asked. "About the dark, I mean. I guess I understand your point. You get black and white, so it's one thing or the other, and you lose all the details and variations. I love to look down on the Mall and the monuments and memorials, the way they seem to glow with this ivory light. I like the Lincoln Memorial especially. I was born in Kentucky, so Lincoln means a lot to me."
"Yes, Simon, I know. I remember that editorial you wrote last year about integration. It brought tears to my eyes. I don't know if I ever told you that, but it was a very brave thing to do. I really admired it."
"The system is so stupid, and so wrong. I guess if you grow up with it you might not notice how unjust and unnatural it is, but overseas everybody goes to school together and to come here and see this--I just had to say what I thought."
"That's what I meant about the people in the movie tonight. There are so many things wrong with the world that could be fixed if people would just make the effort and think about something other than themselves and their own pleasure. Those people went looking for pleasure. They worshiped pleasure but what they found was pain. And emptiness. That's what the movie said to me."
"I know you're right," I said. "I guess it was shallow of me to get taken up in the excitement and the strangeness. It was so amazing, what went on. I never saw anything like it. Have you?"
"No, of course not." She shifted positions a little and stretched her hand along the back of the seat. Her fingernails shone a little in the half light. She had a gold wristwatch on a narrow leather band just below the cuff of her sleeve. I looked back at her face. Anyone would have thought she was beautiful. Smooth regular features, nose just the right size, no bushy or plucked eyebrows, high forehead and a strong jaw line. The light from DC came in the window behind her, creating a slight halo effect but giving enough light to let me see her features and expression. Like Grace Kelly, I thought. I felt almost like I was watching another movie, the glow from the screen bathing my face. I reached across and took her hand in mine, then brought it to my lips and held it there for a moment. She made no move toward me, just smiled and pulled my hand back down to where hers had been before, letting our fingers remain together.
"That's what makes you special," she said. "You're a gentleman, and your values don't seem have to do with jobs and cars and conspicuous consumption. You have leadership qualities. But you're not an organization man. I tried that, and look what I got." This reference to Brad was not what I was looking for in terms of where I wanted the conversation to go, but I admired her honesty, not to mention the fact that I was soaking up all this praise. Most of my life so far had involved doing something and then having someone else pick it apart and show you what was wrong with the way you had done it, parents, teachers, people whose lawns I mowed. Even my pals. Well of course your friends aren't going to build you up, although with them you know it's just the monkey brain taking over.
"I want you to write my recommendation for college," I said. "I think you'll get me into a much better school than Mr. McDowell or General Rumsen could ever do, and they're the teachers who like me the best."
"You'll get into a good school, Simon. Those qualities of yours will shine through, one way and another, and the place that sees them will be the right place for you to go. I believe things work like that, that it's more about finding where we fit than making things change to fit us. Do you want to go out of state?"
"I do," I said. "My parents say we can't afford it, but I'm not all that crazy about the Old Dominion, to tell the truth. It's still part of the South and I'm a Yankee, I guess, for lack of a better word. I think I'll go north somewhere, if I can. What about you?"
"Same," she said. "There are so many good schools in the North. Not that there aren't good schools in the South, too, but I've spent my whole life living in that house and being taught all about Virginia. We had Virginia history in third grade, sixth grade and eight grade, aside from tenth grade, where we had American history from the point of view of how it affected Virginia. I know more about Robert E. Lee than he knew about himself. What's college about if not to show you something new?"
None of this was what I had planned. In my heart I knew that my plan had been nothing but a fantasy where Marjorie did an Aunt Helen on me in the back seat. What was I thinking? Well, of course I knew what I was thinking, but all of this was fine. Until now. I couldn't take it any more.
"Marjorie, you're killing me. I can't stand this. I'm crazy about you. Come here." As I said this I moved toward her and pulled her hand back so she could wrap it around my shoulder. The smile on her face before she parted her lips to kiss me broke my heart. Broke it entirely. Her hair felt like silk under my fingertips.
We kissed and necked, if that's what it was, for a good hour or so. I never got inside her blouse. I never even got past her neck and shoulders. But I couldn't have cared less. The taste of her lips, the smell of her perfume, the feeling of her tongue and mine doing a dance, a slow dance, a long slow dance that never wanted to end, that went on and on, the feeling of her hand along my arm, along my neck, the crush of her body against mine, the texture of her skin, her wonderful beautiful soft lovely skin, the smooth strength of her back as I ran my hands across it, the rise and fall and rise of intensity as we kissed and held each other, all of it was from another world. Not that I didn't try a couple of times to make some move, but she stopped me, gently and firmly, and pulled my hands up to her face and kissed them and put them alongside her neck and head to get me to cradle her that way and kiss her some more and then some more again.
"We'll have a lot of time to know each other, Simon. No need to rush." Her breath was short and hurried, like mine. There wasn't enough oxygen in the world to sustain this fire, to keep our bodies going the way we were going at it. "Every element, every part of this is so wonderful. Why be in a hurry? You're a very good kisser. Show me how good a kisser you are."
At last, in spite of myself, I came. No touching, no rubbing, no grinding pelvis against pelvis, just a complete overload that had to find an outlet, the only outlet available. Every cell in my brain was full to overflowing and finally there was no place for the feeling to go but down south of the border into rebel territory. I shuddered and groaned, totally embarrassed at my inability to control myself. Marjorie giggled, just a little.
"Why Mr. Sex Bomb," she said. "Mr. Hot Pants Jeffries. I'm sorry, I didn't realize you had gotten to that state. I didn't mean to provoke you." She giggled again and smiled sweetly. I usually think giggles sound stupid, but I loved the sound of hers at that moment.
"You didn't, huh? Then what was that smooching all about. What did you think was going to happen. I told you that you drive me crazy." My embarrassment went the way of my erection. I kissed her again, and then again. For a while we just sat and looked down on the scene, Marjorie's head on my shoulder, my arm around hers. The clock on the dashboard showed it was nearly one. "My Dad's nickname in high school was The Sheik.'" I said. "After Rudolph Valentino. I found it in his yearbook." Why was I telling her this? Why not? I felt like I could say anything to her and it would be just fine. Everything was just fine.
"Well, the apple didn't fall far from the tree," she responded. "Simon, I need for you to take me home. It's been a wonderful evening. I'm so glad you asked me out. I couldn't be happier. But tomorrow is homecoming and I've got to be up early to help with the arrangements for the game and the dance. We'll go to the dance together, won't we? I told everybody you asked me, but I know that two dates in two nights must have seemed presumptuous to you and I'm glad we went out just by ourselves first. It was the right thing to do." As I sat there, my underwear stiffening, I felt nothing but how lucky I was. This time she let me see her to the door and there was another kiss that would have lasted until morning if she hadn't taken my shoulders and pushed me gently away.
"My parents heard us pull up. Gravel driveway just for that purpose. My dad told me so." She pushed the door open and blew me a kiss as she closed it. I blew a kiss at the door, caring not at all how ridiculous that was. I loved that door. I loved everything about this wonderful girl.
It wasn't until I pulled into my driveway that I thought of Aunt Helen and the fact that tomorrow was Saturday. Golf day for Major Jeffries and Captain Dolan. I was surprised at how small a stain my ejaculation had left, the size of a half dollar on my chinos, or even less. It had felt like all the lava from Vesuvius when it happened, but I remembered reading in one of those books that it's usually no more than a teaspoon's worth. What did I want, I asked myself, lying in bed, trying with my usual lack of success to fall asleep. What did I have was maybe a better question, a better place to start.
What would this thing with Marjorie turn into? She seemed to be settling in without hesitation to a sort of "going steady" relationship, which was what all of us did--form up into couples like our parents until somebody had a fight or got tired or frustrated and then we broke up and found somebody else to go steady with as soon as we could. It seemed strange to me that most of us could be so comfortable with a system that rigid, but since it was working for me at the moment who was I to re-engineer teenage society? It also felt strange going to sleep without getting myself off again, but now that Aunt Helen was on the scene it seemed even more wrong to squander my mojo. Plus, there would be more of Marjorie tomorrow night after the dance. How much more and in what form was impossible to say. If you're gorgeous, you hold all the cards--even I knew that. But I trusted her. She had told me that I could and that was enough.
"Look at it all you want. Come as close as you feel like. I'm not embarrassed, I've lived with it all my life, in one form and another, honey. It's who I am."
The golfers had gone out early and my mom had headed off to Mount Vernon to help run a tour for new officers' wives in Northern Virginia. The first sensation I had on waking up was that I wasn't alone—all five senses agreed. It was a quarter past eight and here I was in my own bed, staring up at Aunt Helen's pussy. She had spreadeagled herself across my face, the double bed that had been my parents' before they got their new bedroom set, and after she put her tongue in my ear to make sure I was good and awake she had invited me to get better educated about the mysteries of femaleness and femininity.
"Nobody ever said I wasn't fun, Simon. I'm as much fun as anybody could ever want. Maybe more. Take a good look. This is what you want, every minute of every waking hour, sweetheart, maybe every other minute, no not nearly. Get up close and personal and make yourself at home. See what you can learn." She rolled over onto her back and I slid down to preserve as much of the view as possible.
She had trimmed her pubic hair. As little attention as I had been paying, as little looking as I had been able to do between her legs, I could see that clearly. And that wasn't all. I could see the folds enclosing other folds, and the contours and indents that made up the entire production. She put a hand down and slowly separated her labia with her forefinger and ring finger, then with the middle finger she started stroking, teasing, what I realized must be her clitoris. It was tucked away but she brought it to prominence. All the while she lay with her head propped up on the pillow, watching me, saying nothing. Her eyes, brown with golden flecks in them I realized for the first time, never left my face. It was hard not to look back at her, as fascinated and consumed as I was by the display she was giving me. Her face got more flushed and she slowly raised her legs and slid her middle finger into the slot, the glistening slot below, pushing in and pulling it out, slowly, slowly stirring her innermost self. The head of my dick was throbbing, pulsing with a heart rate of at least 180, twitching.
"Do you need to be invited, Simon? Take what's yours. Be a man. Don't you think I wouldn't rather have you in there than this finger of mine. It's a poor substitute for what you have, what nature gave you to give me. Come here, baby."
When she said "baby" I felt myself suddenly wilt. It was as if a plug had been pulled in my mind and all the pressure in my groin had swirled down some drain. I went to half mast and then limp.
"What's the matter, Simon? What did I say? What happened?" The look of distress on her face matched what I was feeling. What had happened? She sat up and reached over for me.
"Baby. Something about baby," I said. "It's like you stuck a needle in me and all the air went out."
"Why is that, Simon? You know I can't have any. We don't have to worry about that, sugar. Was that what it was?"
I thought about it for a few seconds.
"No, it was just so--the way you said it. Like it wasn't me, it was just anybody. Who is baby? Baby is nobody. It's everybody. It's just whoever happens to be there when you have your legs open and want something to fill you up." It was hard for me to say this, but I knew it was true.
She laughed and pulled me to her. I started to feel the erection come back in spite of myself. What else was new? Don't confuse yourself by thinking you're in control of your chemistry. It had been like that since I started into puberty, like having a pogo stick planted in the middle of me, bouncing up as soon as it went down.
"Oh, Simon. Don't be such a wusseroo. Of course it wasn't just anybody. It's just something people say. Don't be such a tender turnip. You know you're not the first man I've slept with. Why do you want to worry about what's in the past? Simon, let me say something to you. When a man and a woman are together, it's just the two of them. We all want sex, it's wired into us. We all want it a lot. Men want it in a different way than women do, but if you're honest with yourself, anybody knows it's just like food or water. It's basic to our nature.
"But that doesn't mean it's indiscriminate, or that one person is the same as another, interchangeable body parts. Not by any stretch. It's a term of endearment, that's all. When I'm with you, I'm only with you, you alone, and every time is different and every person is different. In a million ways. More than you can imagine or catalogue. A million, million ways. There's only one you and me and there's only one us in a special and singular time. And that person you're with at that time is beautiful. Their beauty is on display and it's there for you to find. You can say anything you want and you can do anything you want, and the beauty will come out at you. There's no need to hold back. I think it's pretty great, and as crazy as I felt watching from my kitchen window to make sure your mother was really gone, and slipping up your front porch steps at eight in the morning, I wouldn't be anywhere else on earth than right here with you."
She put her hand on my cock... I never called it a cock before but now there seemed to be no other word for it. As soon as she did, pop went the weasel. I eased her down on her back and my hips slid against the insides of her thighs. Now that I had a sense of the landscape, I had no hesitation. I hit her dead center with everything I had and she let out a long sound, a sound I had never heard the like of, a cry, a shriek of pleasure so strong it was pain, of pain so intense it consumed itself and only the pleasure was left, the shared pleasure, the connection in the blood.
"That's it, Simon. That's it. Oh, God yes. Fuck me, fuck me hard. Give it to me. Give it to me baby! Give it to me now!" She was riding me with her legs even though I was on top of her. The horse and the rider were one, her grip around my back as she dug her heels in to squeeze me deeper and deeper into her. I thought of Marjorie, from nowhere, but the thought wouldn't hold, I was too far in, too much where I was to be anywhere else.
"What did the stewardess say to the handsome passenger?" It was Russell. On the phone. I knew he wanted a ride to the game, but my mom had the car.
"I give up," I said. Aunt Helen had gone home. I had done two lawns and collected extra money for edging the sidewalk, a job I hated so I charged extra for it. And I had taken seventy five Japanese beetles off the rose bushes. At the moment I was reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce. This was the kind of book you could inhale almost in a single breath. The phone had rung eight or nine times before I heard it.
"Would you like some of my TWA coffee or some of my TWA tea?"
"I don't get it." He was my best buddy, but he could also be a pain.
"TWAT, you moron! Twat. Cunt. Bush. Gash. Poontang. Pussy! Furburger Junction! The crease that brings release."
"Oh, yeah. Funny."
"What's the matter, Sime? Did Marjorie shoot you down last night? Did you come away empty handed? Did she? Cough it up for old doctor Russell. Many fish in the sea if that one won't bite. She has great teeth, by the way."
"She's a beautiful girl," I responded. "A terrific and completely outstanding girl. Shut up! No, the date went great. Better than dreams. She's super. This is for real."
There was a pause as we both considered what "for real" might mean and he thought how he could poke a needle into the concept at my expense. Gently, the way friends do it.
"Let me change the subject," I said, cutting him off before he could fully sharpen his dart. "What's up between you and Alice? I mean what went down? Or who? Did you ever get the back seat open in your mother's wagon? You've been so busy with Homecoming that I've hardly seen you. If you can't tell me, who can you tell? Cough it up."
There was another pause--I let it ripen. I had my hook in him. Thrust and counterthrust. I could wait. I sat back on the couch and scratched my crotch, sliding my own fingernails along the loose skin. Not the same. As I was gaining, I was losing. Or maybe there actually was a limit to how much sex I could absorb in any given day. I tweaked my nipples, the way Aunt Helen had done. Same result. Not the same.
"It's a sore subject, Simon. Okay. Shut up yourself. Okay, here it is. We were all set to go last week. I even figured out how to fix the seat, even though it took something like half an hour, right? That was part of the problem. Things cooled off. We had to start again. She had time to think."
"So? No go?"
"She said she would if I promised to marry her. Right after graduation."
"What, is she crazy? What did you do?"
"I told her we were too young to be making those kinds of promises." Silence again filled the phone line.
"You didn't just promise and go for it? Fool?"
"Simon, if I'd done that, what? She would have told all her girlfriends. And they would have told everybody else in the school--and at the YMCA and the church and the grocery store. And her parents would have found out and I would have been dead. Fuckin' dead. D-e-d dead. You know that's what would have happened. It was killing me, man. What am I saying? Believe me. I had the rubber out and everything."
"And what?"
"And she started to cry and said if we were too young for that, we were too young for the other thing, and I took her home and we haven't spoken since. A single word."
"What are you going to do? What about the dance?"
"Back on the stag line, I guess. So close. So close! My fucking mother and her fucking groceries. Do you know what it was? A packet of her fucking Rye-Crisp fell out of the grocery bag and got wedged in the release mechanism or whatever that son of a botch thing is called. A packet of Rye-Crisp between me and Wonderland. Rye-Crisp crumbs."
Alice, I thought. Wonderland.
"You're still the king of my hearts, though," I said.
"Screw you, Simon. Screw you. For that, I'm liable to make a move on Marjorie at the dance tonight. More than one."
"You do that and you'll be picking up your teeth with a broken nose." That didn't sound right. "Broken arm, I mean."
"Aren't we the fierce defender. Must be that Kaintucky blood. Kill, hillbilly!"
"Russell, why did you call? What do you need?"
"A ride to the game. Can you get your car? I'm a senior. I can't show up on foot. Can you pick me up?"
Russell lived six miles from school and I lived less than a mile away. I understood.
"My mom's in Mount Vernon with the Officers' Wives Club."
"Peachy," he said. "What do we do? That means you've got a problem too, although I guess you could slip through the woods like you used to and no one would know."
"Call around," I said. "Someone will come through. Then call me back and I'll go with you." I had options and he didn't. Thanks Russell, I thought. What are friends for.
"I appreciate your help more than I can say, so I won't" he said. "But okay."
"I'll send you my bill," I said. "Don't forget to call." I picked up my book as I heard his end of the line click off. Sixteen chapters, one football game and a homecoming dance to go. Plus Alice in Wonderland. CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
Paper streamers hung from the rafters of the gym and from the baskets, retracted so that they hovered overhead like alien spacecraft, the lights dimmed, little tables off to the side where the stands were pulled back into the wall, couples swirling around the floor as the band played "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White." Without the trumpet solo, the song was less than compelling, but how many uptempo slow dances were there that a band like this, five guys who had graduated three or four years ago and called themselves Pickett's Charge, could play. They wore white tuxedo jackets with brown piping and brown pants and several pounds of Brylcream in their slicked-back hair, along with white bomber loafers with thick pink soles. It was a semi formal, after all.
We had sent the Hammond Admirals to sea in a leaky boat. Our offensive machine had punched holes in them all day long and we had another lopsided win, 37-6. We were ranked number 12 in the area and this result would only boost our standing. Elliott would be All-Metro, and maybe a couple of the linemen too. The best of times. Marjorie nestled in my arms as we made the circuit of our area, near midcourt. The Eagle-Highlander controversy had been minor, one guy buzzing the field at halftime in a Piper Cub with a streamer containing the "Eagles born and Eagles bred" words, and the model airplane dressed up like an eagle had defied Oz's predictions and been a huge hit. Cheers of "Our team is red hot, your team ain't doodly squat" had knit the social fabric back together and even though some of us sang the new alma mater and some the old, it was a great day to be alive, crisp and clear and on the way to being in love with a capital L.
Her body pressed against mine started me thinking about later in the evening. Would we be stuck on a plateau, a delicious plateau for sure, or would we march through Georgia like Sherman? Where was she in her mind on this? "How'd you get so cute?" I asked her.
"Born cute," she replied, laying her cheek against my shoulder. "Got cuter and cuter. What's your excuse?"
"I have none. You're my excuse. What's that perfume?"
"Shalimar. The mysterious East. You like it?"
"Very much. It suits you." The band switched over "The Wanderer," all four or five chords of it, and we opened up into a jitterbug. I was born with two left feet, but all I had to do was shift my weight from one foot to another more or less with the beat and Marjorie did the rest, her skirt spinning and wrapping itself around her as she did her twirls out and back toward me, bouncing off and spinning out again. The mirror ball in the rafters spun its colors across the floor. "Autumn Leaves" was the theme and the homecoming committee had trained colored gel spotlights on the ball instead of the usual white. Russell had caved and was dancing with Alice. Maybe she would relent. At least he wouldn't end up with Mary Fivefingers, the date of last resort. I thought I spotted Egan with that Dee Dee girl, but he was pretending to be invisible so no one would notice he was hustling a sophomore girl with wheelbarrow hogans. The band switched to "Where or When," part of their Dion and the Belmonts set. I leaned over and kissed Marjorie on the temple, feeling her return kiss on my neck. She was my girl. I was in heaven. More heavens lay ahead. Who could think otherwise?
"Hi, Simon. Nice to meet you. I've heard lot about you. This is lucky." Mr. Fredericks reached over to hug and kiss his daughter as he shook my hand. "Hi, Sweetie. How was the dance? Did you have a good time?"
How did I get into this, I asked myself, darkness all around. What was he doing up at this time of night, past one in the morning? We had stayed to help take down the decorations and dry mop the gym floor, and total up the receipts and put away the sodas and what-not. Marjorie was co-chair of the committee for the dance.
Wasn't that enough good behavior for one evening? Enough swivel-hipped cha cha cha while your mind was dwelling on the way her thighs outlined her crotch when she moved back and forth. Her sweet crotch. Was this the reward I was due?
Once we got all the work done, she had looked at her watch and said "Hey, Simon, why don't we just go back to my house? My parents will be asleep. I could nibble your earlobe on the rec room couch, huh? We could dance, just the two of us all alone. That would be fun. Don't you think so?" All the way out, feeling her leaning on my shoulder, watching the headlights forge a path toward my fondest dreams, I asked myself about nibbling and dancing. Was she being metaphorical? Was it really my earlobe she had in mind? Was the possiblity of a horizontal mambo in the cards? I had a rubber, which I'd lifted from my old man's nightstand. He bought them by the dozen and they lasted a long time so there was no way he would be missing it. Fortune favors the prepared dick. Or was my brain so saturated with sex that I could look at a Yield sign and see it grow pubic hair, if I let my mind run free. Soft curly blond, a misty veil.
He was a tall man, over six feet, with a full head of gray hair, wearing brown leather slippers and blue and white striped pajamas under a plaid flannel bathrobe. The Campbell plaid. The fat book in his hand helped make him look like someone who would smoke a briar pipe and send telegrams dispatching other people, people he had never met, on missions they might or might not return from. I realized I didn't know what kind of work he did. It had never come up between Marjorie and me, or talking about her with my friends. For all intents and purposes she had just come into my life a little over a week ago. A week!
"Hi, Daddy. It was great. Lots of people came and the band was majorly good. Did you hear about the game? We killed them."
"That's great, Pumpkin." He smiled and turned his back, walking toward the rear of the house.
"Do you guys want something? Something to eat or drink? Why don't we go out to the kitchen and I'll make some hot chocolate. I suppose after a big affair like that you'll be all revved up. It'll help you sleep."
He continued without waiting for an answer and led us across the vestibule toward the back of the house, pulling on the kitchen light cord as he walked over toward the refrigerator for the milk. It was a big country kitchen with heavy oak furniture, old fashioned stuff, and cabinets with glass fronts, showing crystal and china and food, canned goods and cereal boxes and spices, bottles of oil and vinegar and cannisters on the countertop next to the stove. I looked at Marjorie to see if I could get a clue as to what was going on, but she was at home and comfortable in her element, for all I could tell. Maybe that was part of having a vagina, that it let you stay calmer about this sex stuff than you ever could be when you had this bouncing flagpole always looking for another Iwo Jima to raise itself on. Bad metaphor, but clear thinking and a throbbing erection have most likely never gone hand in hand. Another bad metaphor. It's also true that you never know what's going on behind another person's forehead, but she had to be at least a little less than perfectly happy that we weren't getting any dancing in the dark, any couch time, any nibbling. Had to.
My eyes wandered the room, checking the weavings that hung on the walls and surveying the books arranged in the alcove of the bay window that looked out on the back lawn and into the woods beyond. An arm chair was positioned next to the window. What a place to read. My eyes, at first riveted on Marjorie's beautiful backside as she reached up into the cabinet for mugs, focused instead on the titles to see if there was any low hanging fruit I could pick off for an index card. I spotted On the Road. Definitely. Everybody said it was great. I would borrow it. Easily less than 250 pages. Bueno.
Part of this must have been my survival instinct, because when I looked around I saw her father watching me with the gaze of a hawk. A minute earlier and he would have been able to watch as I tried to use my x-ray vision to reveal what lay under her skirt. All I could do now was pretend I wasn't looking at Marjorie and see what I could catch out of the corner of my eye.
"What do you think of the Ten Commandments, Simon?" her father asked, turning to spoon the cocoa into the saucepan.
"He can take them or leave them," Marjorie interjected. "But no, Simon, go ahead and tell my dad what you think of the Ten Commandments. I'm interested to know myself."
"They're all right, I guess." No way I win a shootout on the Ten Commandments with this man. I wondered if he was some kind of religion professor. Either that or CIA. We had a lot of them because of Langley nearby. We had Ricky Ames. Aldrich. Voted wittiest in the senior superlatives two years ago. His dad worked at the CIA. If Marjorie and I hung in there, I thought we had a shot at cutest couple.
"And what about Lawrence Welk? Is he okay too?"
"Kind of, yeah, I guess." Now I got the game. "Actually, Lawrence Welk is not too okay. I mean if you like that sort of stuff, I guess it's okay. Free country."
"If you like it, you would like it. Very good. Thanks sweetheart." Marjorie was holding the mugs so her dad could pour the cocoa in. I went over to take my mug. The veins in her hand traced a love knot, her tapered fingers slid across mine as she handed it to me. Time seemed to stop.
We moved to the table and I helped Marjorie into a chair and sat next to her. It was a round table that seated about six, with a lazy Susan in the middle of it, holding condiments, paper napkins and the like. Her old man sat down sort of across from us.
"I actually think the Ten Commandments are pretty okay myself," Mr. Fredericks said. "Although, the reason I asked is that I heard a joke today about Moses coming down from the Mount with about 25 commandments. The Israelites go crazy and send him back up to renegotiate. He returns a couple of days later and everyone comes out, giving him the fish eye and he says I have some good news and some bad news. I got it down to ten. That's the good news. The bad news is Number Seven is still in there." He laughed and slapped his thigh, snorting a little and shaking his shoulders. Adultery. I got it. Funny.
Did you ever get the feeling of someone reading your mind and knowing exactly the kind of bullshit you were pulling, whatever it was. Little kids have that feeling all the time. I was too old for this. I wanted everything in neat separate compartments, for as long as this was going to go on, whatever "this" was. This fucking of Aunt Helen. And by Aunt Helen. And the pursuit of Marjorie with the same end in mind.
Marjorie giggled too, a moment later, when she reached number seven in her count. It was so sweet to see her eyes flash and her nose wrinkle up. Even the way she drank her cocoa was delicious, not dainty and not common, sort of matter of fact and letting herself taste it and smile at what a good world it is. Should I tell a joke back? Why did the little moron throw the clock out the window? Because he wanted to see time fly. Forget that. What about a knock knock? The only one I could think of was the chicken named Marmalade. Marmalade me, who laid you? Never. I glanced at Marjorie and then back at her dad, feeling that the expression on my face was that of a criminal about to confess, tired of hiding the truth. When had I ever had such fun before? Maybe when I dropped the anvil on my foot in shop class sophomore year and broke three toes.
"You should have seen Simon jitterbug, Dad." I could see she was straining for conversation as well. What were the permissible subjects? "This is the first time we've danced, and we got all these twirls and turns going--I think we should go on tour, or at least enter a dance contest somewhere. What do you think about that?"
"Do you guys do flips and splits, like the Lindy hoppers of my youth?" He was still smiling, at least his mouth was, but his eyes held no twinkle, no dance of the fairies of mirth. This man would sit up with me for as long as it took. He would walk me out on the lawn at 6 a.m. to let me feel the dew between my toes and smell the air warmed by the dawn sun, then walk me to my car, wishing me well, if that was what the situation required. He would fall asleep on Marjorie's lap if he had to. He knew as well as I did what the game was, and he had the home court advantage. I was screwed. And not screwed at the same time.
I looked into the cocoa swirling in the bottom of my mug. Face the facts, Simon, I said to myself. There will be other opportunities. The substitution of reality for fantasy helped me not at all. I wanted to press my body against hers. I wanted to taste her mouth, feel her cheek against mine, see if I could get to second base, or even third. The feelings were there, but the opportunity... I looked over at the kitchen counter and saw a rolling pin nestled in a bracket on the wall. I could wander over there, pick it up, sneak around behind him and coldcock him. Short of that, I was cooked. I faked a stretch.
"Well, thanks very much for the cocoa, and very nice to meet you, sir. I guess I better get... rolling. I've got a bunch of work to do around the house tomorrow and my mom will be raising the roof if I don't get on it first thing."
"You're not mad, are you? I hope you're not mad. I didn't think he'd be waiting up like that." We were standing next to the car. Marjorie had walked me out, reaching to take my hand as we left the house and now we were standing next to the car and each other.
"Why, he didn't wait up when Brad brought you home?" As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them, but the paralysis of regret kept me from saying so. She looked at me. Her lip started to quiver.
"Don't do that to me, Simon! Don't do that to me! It's not fair. Brad means nothing to me. You're the one I care about. Nobody but you. No one else." She started to cry.
"How do you think I feel? Ask yourself that. How stupid do you think I feel to bring you home after the homecoming dance and promise you all those things I promised, and you were so nice to stay and help and never sulked or got smartass about it. I wanted those things for myself too, what I promised you. And to have it messed up like that and have my father telling Freudian slip sex jokes the first time he meets you." She started to sob and clenched her fists and tried to hit me.
"You make me so mad I can't stand it. How do you think I feel. I'm so embarrassed I could die."
I grabbed her hands to stop her. She was out of breath and her chest was heaving, heaving to regain her breath and heaving with emotion. She was so beautiful. Her tear stained cheeks, her open mouth, the cloud of her beautiful hair, done specially for the dance, struck by the moon and the stars. I grabbed her face in my hands and crushed my mouth against hers. I shot my tongue between her lips like there was no tomorrow. I swirled her around so she was up against the car, leaning into her soft, sweet, firm body, hard as a rock pushing up against her, never letting go of her head, letting my body work its will against her, feeling her pubic bone against my erection.
I pulled back. I had to control myself. Had to. It was okay to go crazy, but this was too precious. I kissed her cheeks, kissed her eyes, kissed her hands. "Oh, Marjorie, I'm sorry. I was about to go insane in there. And I couldn't get anything from you about what was going on. I thought you were just okay with it all, like everything is okay, everything is fine. We'll have more time, like you said last night. So it doesn't matter."
"You don't know me, Simon. Most of the time it's better to be quiet and watch and see what's going on, and give yourself time to make up your mind and understand what's happening. Your mind is so fast you don't need that, or you don't think you do. I think you sometimes get yourself in trouble that way. I avoid that kind of trouble. I'm a watchbird. Watching you." She smiled and reached up to give me another kiss, a soft kiss like the opening of a rose. How wonderful is this, I thought, compared to anything I had in my imagination, my simple-minded one track plans and schemes. To be standing in the starlight with your best girl, in the fragrance of her being, in a kiss that moved and held, held and moved like lava across a plain, pushed ahead by the pressure of the volcano, coming from the center of the earth, the molten core.
"Simon, you're excused from home room this morning. Miss Dexter sent me a note asking that I send you down to the library." Mr. Morgan, my homeroom teacher, pulled out a hall pass and put it neatly on the corner of his desk, lined up exactly parallel with the front and side edges of his desk. He taught geometry, and I guess it was in his soul. Why not a yellow star and a ticket to Bergen Belsen, I thought to myself. Enough melodrama, my better self replied, and this is Dexter, not Hitler. Proportion is the music of geometry, Mr. Morgan had told us in tenth grade. Balance through harmony. Even though we heard it a little too often, it did ring true, so true that none of us in my gang had been able to come up with a parody that was a patch on the original. Proportion, balance, harmony. I took the pass and went to see the warden.
"Simon. Good morning. Did you have a good weekend? I saw you at the dance with Marjorie. She's a lovely girl. I assume she's over her infatuation with that Brad Bellingham. There was less to him than met the eye. I'm surprised it took her this long. First love, I suppose. It has a life of its own." The Dexter x-ray eyes wandered off to the window and out over the parking lot. It was hard to imagine who her first love might have been, but clearly there was one, and a layer of wistfulness still surrounded it. I softened a little. Maybe I had been unkind in my attitude toward her.
"But that's not why we're here," she said, coming back to herself with a jolt. She took a pile of index cards from the gray steel table next to her and rapped them on her desk to even them up, like a cardsharp about to launch on a game of high stakes poker. Even without looking I knew they were my contest entries. What had I done now?
"I wanted to discuss this with you, Simon. I'm seeing a pattern emerge here and I'm not sure I like it." She shuffled through the deck, about twenty cards in all, separating them into two piles, then taking each batch and evening it up again.
"The butler did it. Poison. The nurse did it. Overdose. The insurance agent did it. Steering wheel was jimmied. The nephew did it. Suffocation with a pillow. The wife did it. Bad cooking. I assume that last one was a joke to see if I was paying attention, Simon." I shrugged and tried not to smile. This was not a place or a time for smiles. Better to wait for her to state her case. Marjorie had a point about watching and waiting. I flashed back to how I had almost hit a tree leaving her driveway Saturday night because I was leaning back out the window to blow her a kiss goodbye.
"Now that's a happy smile, Simon. Are you enjoying yourself? Do you think this is funny?"
"I'm sorry, Miss Dexter. I wasn't smiling at you."
"Of course not, Simon. And I'm not smiling at you. What am I supposed to do with these entries? I don't get this kind of problem from Debbie or Laurie."
The twins. I'd forgotten about them. They never came to games or dances—I thought they must be dating each other at some high school none of the rest of us knew about, but really I knew they were at home reading and tightening their braces. It was amazing those girls didn't starve to death considering the random way their teeth protruded between their dry pink lips. I'd read in one of the sex books that some men fear the female sex organ because of a sense of 'vagina dentata,' which means 'down there' she has another full set of teeth. Since you almost never get to look inside down there, even if you wanted to, that made sense, to be afraid, but why did these girls wear it on their faces? "What's the matter with them, my cards, I mean?" I had almost forgotten about them as my competition, which I think was part of the point la Dexter was making.
"These are all the same book. How do I know that you aren't just reading the beginnings and ends of these? Eleven Perry Masons. Is that what this contest is about?"
Maybe there was a god. "I don't know what this contest is about to you, Miss Dexter," I said. "To me, it's about reading books. I read those books, and honestly I resent the idea that you would accuse me of cheating. You know I didn't invite myself into this, but I didn't see anything in the rules that said only books with the Dexter seal of approval were eligible." I couldn't believe I was saying this. It was as if my mother had climbed into my head and was coming out my mouth. I wanted to tell her this kind of accusation wasn't funny or cute or smart, too, and that she had nobody but herself to blame. But, as my mother's son, I knew better than to think of that as a winning move. I crossed my arms to wait for her reply, then realized I needed to press my advantage.
"Anyway, what do they teach us about in literature. Patterns and paradigms. How there are no new stories. How the only two stories anybody has ever written are a stranger comes to town or somebody goes on a journey. Erle Stanley Gardner may not be Dostoevsky, but Perry Mason is as big a hero as anybody in Crime and Punishment. Who caught more bad guys, the inspector or Perry?"
Silence reigned for a moment. "I take your point, Simon. I don't entirely agree with it, but I take it. The rules are the rules, and if one wants to spoil one's mind reading trash, I suppose a book is a book, at the end of the day. I suppose. Next year the rules will be different. But let's not change horses in midstream." She pulled herself up out of her chair and walked over to the bookcase on the far side of the room, taking down a bookend that was a bust of Lincoln and blowing the dust off it. "That's what they told Lincoln when he replaced McClellan as Commander, you know. Not to change horses in midstream. But we're not Lincoln, so let the order of battle stand." I thought I was through, so I started to pull myself up out of my own chair, when a motion of her hand shoved me back with the force of Dave Vincent knocking a runner three yards into his own backfield.
"One more thing, Simon. One more thing. I notice, to give you credit, that you have also read some very good books. Indeed, great books. Alice, Tao Te Ching, Stendhal, Portrait of the Artist, Wallace Stevens, Amy Lowell, a personal favorite of mine, by the way. I notice also that each and every one of these books is what is commonly referred to as a slim volume. A thirty four page book. A seventy one page book. A fifty seven page book. Is this a practice you intend to continue? Are there any books on your list, any good books, that you expect to total more than 200 pages?" She inspected the other Lincoln bookend, finding it to her satisfaction, and turned to face me.
"What say you, Simon Jeffries? Answer my question, if you would be so kind."
This is what it must have been like in the Spanish Inquisition, I thought. You think you've escaped the rack, and they put you on the ducking stool and hold you under. Steady, Simon, I thought. This is a woman who weighs more than the Redskin backfield. There has to be a land mine here. Watch what you say.
"Well, Miss Dexter," I said after a minute of thought, probably more than a minute as I tried to show her how seriously I was taking her question, "that raises an interesting point. The contest has a prize for quality and one for quantity, so something about this must have been on your mind when you made up the rules. You want people to read, but you know that peoples' tastes and aptitudes are different, so you created the two prizes. Maybe for you the lowest you will go is Book of the Month Club, but for a lot of people, mysteries and sci fi and westerns is as far as they ever make it, and they are happy with that. My parents are that way, and I don't think that makes them bad people." A low blow, the thing about my parents, but this was war, a war for survival. She wasn't showing me any quarter, why should I hold myself to a different standard?
"I mean if you want to tell me that I can learn more from Ayn Rand than I can from Machiavelli, I'm not sure I would want to agree." I started to say something about weightiness, but caught myself just in time. She was listening. What else was there to say? Something positive, please.
"I mean there's quality and there's quality," I said. "Some of it comes in big packages, for sure, Tolstoy, Dickens, John Dos Passos, George Eliot I guess although I've never read her. Thomas Hardy, same. So let me take your point. What if I promise I'll expand my horizons and not restrict myself to the skinny books. But I get to read stuff I like as well as stuff you approve of. What about that? Is that a fair deal? Don't forget I got a late start in this contest, and if I'm going to be in it, I'm in it to win it." I got up out of my chair and watched her face. It was okay. She reached out to shake my hand.
"That's fair enough, Simon. Well, I'm glad we had this talk." She kept hold of my hand as she escorted me out of her office and to the front door of the library. "And I'm glad you're in the contest, even though it's given me some insight into a little weasel that seems to dwell in your breast and that I hadn't observed or heard about before. Do you have any thoughts of becoming a lawyer, possibly? Ummm? It might be a profession your talents are suited for, that or politics. Tell me, where did you find Tobacco Road? I don't know whether that's in the quality or the quantity basket. Time will tell, I suppose. It's almost like a schizophrenia in you, Simon, like one of those braided breads the German bakeries had in Pennsylvania where I went to school, dark and white,interlaced. A very complicated flavor when you ate it."
"It's a complicated life, Miss Dexter," I said, wishing I had the nerve to put Lucky Pierre and the Nun on my list but knowing that quitting while you're ahead is part of winning, along with not asking for trouble. Trouble will find you. It always does.
"So what's her name, this new girl you're seeing?" It was between school and lawn mowing time Monday afternoon. Aunt Helen and I were in bed, their bed. Uncle Tom had been sent up to New York for a briefing on his new assignment and wouldn't be back until tomorrow or the next day. She was smoking. This was new to me and I wasn't sure how I felt about it, but I really didn't see how I could tell her not to--it was her house and I was getting mine, wasn't I? My mother had started to look at me suspiciously when I came home, smelling my hair and asking me if I had taken up cigarettes. I just told her some of the other kids were doing it but not to worry about me. She said she'd heard her brother tell that to their mother, too, but it was a story she couldn't get behind. There was nothing on my breath but teaberry gum. I reminded her about my smoking adventure in 9th grade, but even that didn't remove the suspicious look entirely from her face. It was a look she fell into almost automatically.
"She's not new. She's been in our class the whole time. She broke up with her boyfriend a little while ago, at the end of the summer. We've just gone out a couple of times." I looked at the ceiling, thinking about shifting over onto an elbow and surveying the contours of the situation, but I didn't want to betray my nervousness.
"So what's her name, our little princess? Marge, did I hear you say to your mother the other day?" She threw her leg over mine and used her big toenail to scratch my instep. It felt good. I wondered how she knew.
"Marjorie, not Marge. Marjorie."
"Is she pretty?" I thought of Marjorie as I had seen her leaving school today, crisp ironed blouse and tight black skirt, hair pulled back in a French twist, smiling and waving to me and blowing me a kiss as she got in somebody's car and rode off with her girlfriends.
"I think so." She slapped me with the back of her hand, hitting my shoulder harder than I expected. It stung.
"Not as pretty as you, Aunt Helen. That's the correct response, youngster. Not as pretty as you by a long shot. Not as sexy either." She slid down the bed and started fluttering her tongue toward my private region. I felt myself react some and then some more.
"How pretty is she now, Simon?" she asked. She bounced her nipples against my dick, sliding her breasts up and down, back and forth. My own thing was bouncing back. She took it in her mouth.
"Not as pretty as you, Aunt Helen. Nowhere near. Not even close."
******************************
"Your parents are having a party for us, for Tom's going away. This Friday night. Will you be there? They'll probably need you to help. It should be quite a bash." This alternating of sex and conversation was starting to trouble me. We would have sex and be moaning and screaming and squealing and thrashing around and then five minutes later I'm telling her about Christmas when I was five and Uncle Tom got me a couple of fancy German steamships for the tub and how he had brought commodore's hats for both of us and then the whole thing ended up in a water fight, with us laughing and splashing each other until the whole bathroom was ankle deep in water. And in the meanwhile I'm looking at her body, lovely and round in the right places, peeking at where I've just been, and she's laughing and clapping her hands at the story I'm telling like she was five years old herself.
"He is such a sweet, sweet man. A boy's boy," she said, laughing and wiping the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. "He can be the most fun. Not that you aren't fun. You're a whole lot of fun, Simon."
This whole business of being in bed with another naked person was problematical from a bunch of different points of view. How were you supposed to behave? Once the kissing and grabbing and feeling and consummation were done, it was like being at a tea party without having been to etiquette school. There was still plenty to look at it, learn and take in, the shape of her nipples, the way sometimes you could see the pink flesh of her inner lips flashing at you from within the thicket between her legs, the way one body part ended and another began without any signal or demarcation. "Make yourself comfortable," she had said when I showed up today, like a student for a piano lesson. "Hi, Simon, I'll be with you in a minute. Why don't you go on upstairs and make yourself comfortable."
I had gone upstairs like she said, without a clue as to where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do. I ended up sitting on the top stair, my shoes and socks neatly arranged on the next step down. She laughed when she saw me there, and when she got close enough she launched herself at me, landing on top of me and knocking me over on my back, laughing and growling and biting me on the neck. I discovered in no time, as we were rolling around on the carpet, bouncing off the guardrail at the top of the stairs, that she had no panties on. We did it once right there on the floor, half our clothes on and half off. It had been three days. At least for me. Making yourself comfortable, she told me, was to get the way your mother brought you into the world, without a stitch on.
Now here we were and all I could feel was how uncomfortable I was, or how comfortable I wasn't. It wasn't the same as being shy, I was more than happy to show my stuff. It seemed to be pretty good stuff, from the reaction I was getting, and since a raging hard on was the most embarrassing part of my anatomy and that part seemed to be pretty okay with her, what was there to worry about? It was the problem of how you satisfy your curiosity, or just relax in the moment in the midst of plenty, when you've been mystified and craving and obsessing. The key to female attraction was the contrast between display and hiddenness, at least it had been up until now, all the secrets, the secret way to the secret place.
I had gotten conditioned to living off whatever peeks and glimpses I could get. It's part of the game the sexes play. Like the way girls are always pulling down their bathing suits to make sure their butts are covered when they get out of the pool, or how they seem to have this radar about when you're trying to get a free shot at them with your eyes. You think they don't know you're looking and then suddenly they whip around and give you the eye like what do you think you're looking at, mister? It's always the same look, fierce. Because you're not looking at them on their terms, and with their permission, and so you are supposed to remember that the permission comes with a price tag of some sort or other. I always thought there must be secret classes the mothers give about all this stuff because it's so consistent among them, even down to the look and that something they do with their mouths. All this had become so automatic with me, the game of hide and peek, that I even found myself reading magazines, normal magazines like Life and Look and The Saturday Evening Post and Parade in the Sunday newspaper, and looking down the cleavage or up the dresses of the more attractive women in the photographs and even the drawings. I was so suggestible I could even be teased by the inanimate and artificial. How to be myself under these conditions here, I thought, naked in bed with a naked woman, and then I thought how, if I latched my lips around the nipple closest to me and sent my hand on a journey to the fountain of youth in the midst of her everglades, I would become more comfortable at once.
"You know what the worst feeling in the world is?" Russell asked, leaning over the back row of the football stands to spit his tobacco juice onto the cinder path below. "A wet willy."
"What about a double wet willy?" Egan asked, quick as always. "And is that actually worse than farting in your own face while you're doing sit-ups in gym?"
We were cutting German class. Oz came up to me at my locker and said "Wir machen schnitzel nach der Fussballverein ausgefahrt." Schnitzel was a cut, and ausgefahrt was the way Oz ended all his sentences in German. It ended in fahrt, so he felt he was playing his role as class clown. He also thought it was funny, and sometimes it was. Frau Zinger would be cool--we would make something up about student government or interfaith council and she wouldn't even require a countersignature. Class was better when we weren't in it, as far as she was concerned.
Russell had bought a plug of Red Man and invited us all outside to try it. It was a beautiful October day, high clouds and the trees starting to turn, the smell of burning leaves annointing the air.
"Nobody could ever pull a double wet willy," Oz said. "It would be too much to get your fingers in both earholes at the same time."
"But what if two people did it, separately, on a coordinated basis? Teamwork." Murray raised his index fingers, hooked them together and shook them at us in a congratulatory and threatening manner.
"That would be two single wet willies," I said. "Not a double. It would be a different category. It would be worse, because you would be getting doses of two different salivas in your ears, but you could never synchronize the impact the same as one person could do." As I said this, I could feel my friends starting to plan some sort of group assault, a wet willy sneak attack on someone. Who would it be? Egan took his turn to slide up to the top row of seats and spit. When he turned around he had a gob of brown drool sliding out of the left side of his mouth. This stuff was disgusting. It tasted like apple juice that had been poured over plywood and left to rot to the consistency of wet Kleenex. Or Marcal. And my chunk was hardly even as big as one of those pink parallelogram erasers the girls used. I never saw a guy use one. Not cool. Use the one on your pencil, but never a separate implement. It would be like having one dick for urination and a separate one for screwing. Which was sort of the way females are made, when you think about it, so maybe it all makes sense.
Murray took his turn to go up and spit, and as soon as he did the whole group erupted, slipping like the fingers of a hand up around him to hold him by the shoulders and administer the willy. I gave him a goose to distract him from the real onslaught. He tried to spray tobacco juice on us as soon as he got his head free, but we were too quick for him.
"You bastards," he barked. "That doesn't count. You didn't get me. That was a forcible wet willy." He pushed his little fingers in his ears and pulled them out with a pop, then wiped his hands on his chinos. Murray was often the target, part of his role in the smooth functioning of teenage society. Last week Russell had sneaked up behind him and slid a pencil into the heinie binder strap on the back of his trousers, so that when he sat down it broke with a loud crack and stabbed him in the small of the back. Monkey business, not even a flesh wound. Something to enliven the day.
"Egan, did I see you at the dance?" Oz asked. "Did you do do do it with Dee Dee? Or was that someone else who kept moving to the other side of the gym whenever I came over?" No mention of Eve, I noticed.
"She's nice," Egan responded. "And a good dancer. Lay off."
"The magic words lay off," Oz said. "Lay on, MacDuff. Lay on."
"You know what a Borgward is?" Egan asked, deflecting the conversation.
"Yeah, it's one of those weird German cars."
"No, it's a fart in a bathtub. Borg ward." He said the word with a frog voice, then said it again. Borg ward. He puffed his cheeks out.
"What about you, Russell? I saw you got back with Alice. How did it go?" Even though he was my closest friend, it was him who had gotten the tobacco that was making me sick to my stomach as we spoke, so I was happy to see Oz pop him. The blood lust of this group had not been satisfied by the assault on Murray. If I went up to spit, I would be next. Better to swallow the stuff, even though it was starting to make me feel like I was looking at life from behind a lens that someone kept zooming in and out.
"Did you guys read The Sun Also Rises?" I asked. "I started it last night, and I don't get it why Jake Barnes is so messed up. Why doesn't he just make some moves and get on with his life?" This book predated my promise to Miss Dexter. I was halfway through and not understanding anything that was going on. I liked the matador stuff, but the rest of it was way over my head.
"He got his balls shot off in the war. You're supposed to know that," Egan said. "I read that in some other book."
"How are you supposed to know it?" I asked. "If I had my balls shot off, you can believe I would let people know about it."
"Would you really?" Murray said. "Or would you make it the last thing you ever talked about? You know that guy, Smiley, the car salesman down at the Chevrolet dealer on the way to Vienna? He has no balls." We all turned to look at Murray. What was he talking about?
"Bullshit," Russell responded. "And anyway, how do you know?"
"My dad told me. He was screwing this other guy's wife, out in Pimmit Hills, and the guy came home because he was suspicious and caught him in the act and knocked him cold. When he woke up he was bleeding like a pig and his balls were in his hand, inside a paper towel. It happened seven or eight years ago. They let the guy off. Unwritten law. He doesn't talk about it. Neither would you."
"Why do they call him Smiley?" Oz asked.
"What else has he got to do but smile?" Murray said. "Can't do what comes naturally. It's like calling a guy like Dave Vincent 'Tiny'."
The tobacco juice got the better of me. I turned and blew my lunch through the slot between the seat and the backrest. The tobacco juice came up along with the sloppy Joe and fries and pound cake. It was so disgusting no one made a move at me.
Every day when I went to the Dolan's for the lawnmower the question was the same. Would she be there and what would happen? We both knew that time was limited, so the game was about making the most of it, jumping out of our clothes and onto each other with abandon. Naked. Some days she would be out when I arrived. At that point mowing the lawns, walking back and forth behind the barking, growling mower, an activity that put you in a trance state to begin with, would become a contest of images, between what I was doing and what I hadn't gotten to do. The image was never enough, the taste of yesterday as flat as one of those Hiroshima shadows, engraved in the pavement but no more alive than the person whose last act had been to leave it there.
The episode in the bleachers sent me to their house this time in a state of anxiety even higher than usual. What was I going to do? I prayed she wouldn't be there, that I would be able to avoid the encounter. I couldn't believe I wanted to avoid the fucking and sucking free-for-all we always got into. But my balls were my friends. I wanted to stay closely connected to them. A man in a rage might not even look to see the face of the male on top of his wife before he pulled the trigger or swung the baseball bat or grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed his face against a wall or the bedpost. Uncle Tom had combat judo training, he had proven his worth in bar fights all over the world, according to my dad. He was a sweet, gentle, happy man, but there was some sort of tiger that turned itself loose inside him under certain circumstances, even though I had never seen it. I knew I had been kidding myself about the risk involved, but the kidding had worked, had worked well enough to let me have what I wanted.
She was waiting in the back yard, sunning herself on a chaise longue, wearing a lime green two piece bathing suit and white sweetheart sunglasses, glistening with sun oil. As I rounded the corner she was dabbing some pink nail polish on her big toe. The others had already been done. I realized that my schedule was predictable enough to set a clock by, and that she was making herself pretty for me.
"Hello, Simon honey. How was your day? Did you slay any dragons? Did you bring me any dragon skins for me to make into a skirt?" The mention of cutting made me jump.
"Killed a lot of worms practicing golf in gym class," I said. "It was the dragon's day off." She put the cap back on the bottle of polish, blew on her toes and got up to escort me down into the rec room. The houses were close enough together in this development that we were always sure not to touch each other outdoors, and to make certain the shades and blinds were fixed so that no one could see in.
Fixed. That's the word they used when they castrated animals. "I fixed that tomcat of yours. He won't bother nobody no more." We went in through the basement and she slid her hand up under my T shirt. I missed the familiar eruption in my groin. Nothing was happening. I took her by the shoulders.
"I hate to say this--I know this sounds stupid, but there's something wrong with the mower and I promised Commander Jenkins I'd do his lawn today for sure because he's got company coming tomorrow from out of town and I've got to get the machine to the shop and see what's the matter." She slid her hands down over my butt, squeezing, and down the backs of my legs, reaching up to pull my trunks down as soon as she was on her knees on the rug. I was amazed at my ability to concoct a story so quickly.
"Then maybe just the quick relief of a blow job will be all we have time for today," she said, smiling and reaching for me. "A snack between work and school for a hungry, growing boy." In spite of myself I started to get hard. I held her head in my hands, feeling her hair, touching the edges of her ears and the line of her jaw as she sucked and consumed me, looking and listening all the while, for all I was worth, to detect any sign of the arrival of the master of the house, hardly feeling what was going on down there. The muscles in the arches of my feet turned to rocks, the giant rubber band twisted around my head tightened and tightened until it burst.
"That was fast," she gasped, kissing my thighs and nuzzling me. "We are in a hurry today, aren't we, Simon. Is everything all right? You don't seem quite yourself. Did something bad happen at school?" She had slid the top of her bathing suit down to rub against my legs. Now she pulled it back up.
"No, I guess you caught me a little off guard. I'm just messed up because of the stupid mower. I don't know if it's the blade or the camshaft or what. I hope it's nothing serious." I helped her to her feet and pulled up my trunks. "I'm sorry to be stupid," I said. "There's just a lot going on. We're getting ready for the party and everything."
"Well, okay, darlin', get on your horse and ride that pony for all it's worth. I'll be here for you when you need me and have more of a chance to appreciate me and my many good qualities." I could hear overtones in her voice, sounds that said you don't really care, you don't know a good thing when you find one, don't leave me alone. Other tones as well. I noticed that when you're standing up, you don't really feel your balls, they are so much a part of you and generally out of the way, happily suspended in their sac, that unless you focus very hard, or touch them, you couldn't say for sure whether they are there, or not. I had every confidence, though, that if they were not, I would feel that. For sure. Feel it deeply. She gave me a kiss and a hug goodbye, sliding her tongue into my mouth and letting me taste myself, working her lips across mine. I kissed her back. When I looked back over my shoulder as I crossed the street pushing the mower I thought I saw Duke's face looking out through the storm door at the top of the front steps. He looked sad, even for a boxer.
I put the mower into the trunk of our car and headed out toward Great Falls. There was nothing wrong with it, and I could cut Commander Jenkins' lawn tomorrow. The road felt good underneath the tires, smooth two lane blacktop, making that sticking, unsticking sound the pavement gives off when your tires and the road are warm. Would I stop at Marjories's? Of course I would. No delusions there. The question was what would I say? What would be my excuse for showing up out of the blue like this? I had no way of knowing, but since the only thing in my mind was to move, to go somewhere and do something to get out of my own head, this was where and who I found myself being pulled or pushed toward.
Turning off the highway and riding down the long driveway back toward the trees that sheltered their house, I felt a little like a hired hand, lawn mower handle jutting out the back of the trunk, the lid tied down with clothesline. I had my sneakers on, T shirt and bathing trunks, the same clothes I had walked out of Aunt Helen's house in. They were clean but I felt ratty showing up here looking like this. Marjorie might not even be there. Nobody came out of the house when I reached the circle in front of the house. In the daytime, the trees looked even taller, if that was possible, tilting toward each other, tall pines and cypress and beech, a huge maple turning golden red at each end of the house. I didn't pull all the way up to the front door. That seemed like something reserved for grownups, friends over for a Sunday dinner, the family insurance agent visiting to make sure the policies were what they should be. Was I what I should be? Hardly, I thought. I was screwing my father's best friend's wife. As I sat there, waiting for I didn't know what, I could feel myself on my belly, sliding across the cool slickness of a bedsheet, looking between Aunt Helen's legs and preparing to dive in, dip my tongue the way she was teaching me, touch all the right places, take my time and push her to the point where she would dig her hands into my hair and twist it between her fingers while she shuddered and moaned. How could I leave that behind, walk away from it?
"Well, hello stranger!" It was Marjorie, coming around the side of the house, wearing a red checked halter top with shoulder straps and cutoff jeans, barefoot, her hair back in a pony tail. She smiled and came running over to the car. I was paralyzed. Mr. Hard-on vacated the premises just in time for me to get out of the car and grab her, take the impact of her body against mine. She was solid as a rock, not heavy but firm. We hugged and I kissed her, the most natural thing in the world. She felt like lemon chiffon in my arms, the puckery sweet taste of 7-Up or sweet lemon iced tea conveying itself to me from her mouth. I wondered what she tasted from my mouth, and if she would know the taste when she encountered it. Jealousy again. Guilt. Switch the blame. Self protection. I hated this. The sweetness of a fall kiss, your best girl in your arms, the tall trees as witness, and all I could think about was blow jobs and the secondhand taste of my own semen.
"Come on around back," she said, pushing me away as she felt, I supposed, my ardor wane under the spotlight of self recrimination. "I made some iced tea. Would you like a glass? What a nice surprise. I'm just sitting out on the lawn trying to stay interested in Miss Murphy's assignment. Who cares about the interaction between the federal and state judicial systems anyway? Do you really think she and Dave Vincent are having an affair?"
"That's an injudicious question, young lady," I said, feeling how lame a response that was. "Has anybody ever seen them doing anything that would qualify as being caught red-handed?" The lawn was a patch of emerald, striped with canary shots of sunshine allowed by the trees that circled but kept a respectful distance. You could almost feel the animals watching from the fringe of the woods, like in a Disney movie. There was no wind. Everything was still. You could hear the whisper of occasional traffic out on Great Falls, like surf noise, distant and soothing.
Marjorie went up onto the back porch and poured me a glass from the pitcher, lemon slices floating in amidst the ice cubes. She wrapped it in a napkin and handed it to me.
"Nobody I know has ever seen or heard about any such thing, like them being caught in a smooch, or him being seen leaving her apartment house. It's just the way they stand next to each other sometimes, or how they seem to understand what the other one is about to do or say. Little things, but they call out in a certain way for you to look at them, like there's another version of them standing behind the real one, waving their arms and pointing."
"Do you think, if they were doing something, they could keep it a secret for this long?" As I asked the question I thought of the Soviet spy, Colonel Rudolph Abel, who had lived in Brooklyn and been a Russian agent for something like twenty years until he was finally caught because someone accidentally intercepted his Morse code transmissions and turned him in. My father had told me what tremendous respect he had for the man, even though he was an enemy, because of the discipline and care it must have taken to keep his activities undercover for such an extended period. Almost nobody, he'd told me more than once, can really keep a secret for any time at all. Guilt, pride, the need for attentio or approval, all the building blocks of our own personalities, overwhelm the duty or promise that hatched the secret in the first place.
"I don't know, Simon. Secrets don't appeal to me very much. I'm not much good at keeping them, and I don't think it's something that deserves a lot of energy and attention. Why is it a secret, anyway? Because there's something out of kilter with whatever's going on. And if you put enough time and trouble into making sure you protect that part of your life, what does it do to the rest of your life, the part you could be living normally? I understand people want things they can't have, but with all the good things there are in the world, why make that what your life is about?"
As I looked across at her, sitting on the edge of the veranda, feet tucked up underneath, leaning against a post that helped hold up the roof, I thought how many ways there were to answer that question that I couldn't begin to open up or get into. Not that I disagreed with her. Maybe what she was saying was a little innocent, as innocent as I had been less than a month ago now. Maybe her parents weren't as intractable as mine on some issues--maybe she had never found a taboo more appealing than conventional, normal, behavior. But no profit would come from disagreeing with her now. My own circumstance was bitter-sweet, that was for sure, but not by any means would I have traded what I had gotten into with Aunt Helen for any kind of quiet, conventional, normal life. I tried to think of something to say.
"What's that up in the sky?" I asked. "Are those the missile tests?" While we had been talking, the sun started to take its leave and I could see long trails of vapor made iridescent by the setting sun, two of them, not quite in parallel, engraved on the sky. The East Coast missile tests launched from Wallops Island, down on the Chesapeake, had started to show up several years before, at the end of certain days, on no identifiable timetable. I first became aware of them the fall of sophomore year in an after school touch football game out at one of the pastures where we used to play, now the site of another split level development. Russell looked up and saw two of these trails and missed a pass I threw him that would have gone for a touchdown. This mysterious activity in the sky made you feel part of the Cold War, part of the government effort somehow, and the fact that they threw off bright colors, glowing shades that were unlike anything you saw outside of a museum in those days, helped impress them on our minds.
We got up to see them better, tilting and swiveling our heads to get a good look. My arm brushed against hers and again I was on fire, from the touch not even of skin, but the peach fuzz that adorned her skin, the delicate tracery of filaments, each one endowed, as it seemed, with an electric potential. I knew she had felt it too, It was the kind of thing so small you don't miss it.
A thousand years passed. We stood stock still. I knew in the protocol of the sexes I was supposed to make the first move. As I reached to bring her close to me, she caught my hands in hers, entwining our fingers, and stretched her arms out so that if I wanted to keep my hold I had to do the same. It brought us face to face, bodies just touching, Marjorie looking up at me.
"So what's on your mind, Mr. Simon Jeffries? What are you up to with your latest sneak attack?" The look on her face was serious, with a glint of a smile that did nothing to clarify whether this was mock-seriousness with a dash of humor or the real thing, about to launch something at me I would never be prepared for.
"Would you like to come inside?" she said then, a further twinkle illuminating her eyes before she turned and led me through the kitchen door and into the room her father had come out of the other night, a cozy den with red leather club chairs trimmed with brass nailheads and a large couch, upholstered in some kind of dark red plaid I didn't recognize. I had done a paper in 10th grade on the plaids of the different Scottish clans, but this was some offshoot of one of the major families or made up by a textile designer from Taiwan. The room was unlit, with whatever dusk could supply in the way of illumination coming through the windows on either side of the brick fireplace.
"Now we can pick up where we left off," she said, taking my hand and placing it on her breast. I froze. The fullness and warmth of her body, the flesh straining against the halter, the weight in my palm, consumed me. It was as if I could feel every vein, every cluster of kindness and warmth, the entirety, not just the surface. I squeezed, and she sighed.
"Is that better, Simon? Does that make it up to you for the other night? Does that feel good, lover boy? Cute dark haired tall skinny sweet lover boy."
"No more talking," I said. Her teeth clicked on mine when we kissed, twisting our tongues in each others' mouths as if we were corkscrews, determined to remove whatever stood between us and what we wanted. My other hand on her naked back, pressing her against me, sliding down onto the couch, wedging her against the back of it, sliding my body half over onto hers, feeling with all the different parts of me where she was, where she was clothed and where naked, and feeling her respond, kissing and squeezing me back and working to catch enough air. I went to push her halter up and she slid her hand into my hair and then down along my shoulder and my arm. The elastic texture of her nipple bursting up out from the smooth skin of her breast arrested my fingertips. I had to kiss it, I had to pour my mouth over it and drink in what she had there for me.
"Oh, God, Simon, that feels so wonderful! God! Oh, sweetheart, don't stop." Until that moment I hadn't realized that stopping was part of my plan, but hearing her say that set off a trigger somewhere inside that I would be better off that way. I felt something sink, but I knew I was getting the right information. I hadn't brought my rubber, my one lone rubber, not to mention that I had already been bushwhacked in this place once when her dad had materialized out of nowhere. I was getting warier, by necessity. Plus, there was nothing in Marjorie's behavior or character as I knew it that suggested this was the time and place when she would give up what she had been holding back on.
"I don't think that's what you really mean," I said, pulling her up with me and stretching my arm across the back of the sofa. "This is something we need to think through and not lose our heads over." Without Aunt Helen's ministrations earlier, I never would have been able to pull this off, but now, even though my mind wasn't easy, my head was at least a little bit level for once.
I caught my breath and tried to figure out what to make out of where my instincts were dragging me.
"What was that business about, the other night with your old man?" The best defense is a good offense. I had left there starstruck, and girlstruck even more than before, but that didn't mean I couldn't second guess the situation and see what was there to be learned.
"He just came back from a trip overseas. I didn't expect him until the next day. He was on different time. Simon, I'm sorry. I said so before." The light in the room was blue, purple blue, fighting against all that red. The red and white of her top, as she pulled it back down over her breasts, picked up a rainbow of colors from everything else around, as if it was the absorbent for all the reflections off the leather and the brass lampstands and the polished tabletops of mahogany and cherry. This was comfort, I supposed, not luxury, but it felt luxurious to me, the way everything seemed to be where it was supposed to be, deposited by a superior intelligence, a harmony to the placement of the furniture and objects that must have required fifty or a hundred years of living in a place and that could never be accomplished by any plan.
"Does he not like me, or something?" Might as well go for it, I thought. Marjorie sat up next to me, looking as if she was still disoriented. I moved my hand over to play with her hair. I didn't want to push her away, really, so it was important to show that. Especially after the stunt I had just pulled, which I knew I would have to pay for in some clearcut way the next time an opportunity came along to do some necking, so I might as well make a deposit on the damages right now.
"No, Simon. He likes you fine. He would have said so otherwise. I think he was trying to be friendly. Maybe it didn't come across that way, but he's actually pretty easy. I keep looking for something to rebel about, be a real teenager and irritate him about something or other to declare my independence, but either it's okay with him and my mom or else he manages to convince me without even raising his voice that maybe I would be better off if I did something else instead."
"You're lucky," I said. "My mother has her soft side, but I think she read too many basic training manuals while she was expecting me. A job worth doing is worth doing well. Don't carry a lazy man's load.' How would you like to hear that, day in, day out, rain or snow or shine, sick and well, tall and short, fat and thin? Not to mention the one about feeling sorry for yourself because you had no shoes until you met a man who had no feet."
"Simon, what are you talking about? What is this fat or thin business?"
"No, I'm just making that part up. What I mean is that living with my parents, my mother in particular, is like being trapped in a Chinese fortune cookie factory. Almost everything they say to me is a slogan or a motto or an adage, words to the wise. If I understood or believed half of it, I guess I would be as wise as Confucius, but mostly it's a pain in the butt to listen to. Neither a borrower nor a lender be. To thine own self be true.' Do you want to hear some more?" I liked the way this was going. She was actually listening. We were having fun. I reached over and took her hand and put it to my lips.
"I hope that wasn't wrong, the way I stopped, just now," I said. "I guess I got scared." As I again beheld her, tucked back into her clothes, I started to second guess myself. Should I have just gone for it, taken it as far as it could go? How did you know what the right move was?
"No, that was good, Simon. I know what you mean. At first I couldn't understand, but now that I think about it I'm sure you're right. There are lots of ways we can have fun and enjoy each other's company. The physical part is just one element of the overall. I know boys aren't supposed to believe that, but if we decide we're in love, and things go along like they're going now, we'll have a lot of time together, like if we were to get married, and you can't spend it all making whoopee, I don't think."
"No, but I think there should be plenty of time for whoopee. Never sell the whoopee part short, I say." What was this marriage stuff? Were we in love? I adored her, the more time I spent with her the more I felt lucky, blessed, you name it if it's a good word. I heard a rumble of gravel in the driveway. To be continued, I thought, with a happiness that had not been in me when I arrived, less than an hour ago. I listened to see if I could tell from the sound whether it was a station wagon or a sedan, and asked myself again what was this stuff about marriage. It was a good thing I'd stopped when I had.
The big day came. Friday. The party was tonight. I got up early and did our own grass before going to school. I did it with our old hand mower to keep the noise down and so I wouldn't have to go over to the Dolans. The old mower felt so light I felt like I was flying across the lawn, pulling energy from the ground. I had been avoiding Uncle Tom, although he probably didn't know it since he was so busy taking care of what needed to be done for his transfer. He was leaving Monday.
The people from my dad's unit would be over during the afternoon to put up the tent and set things up in the back yard, kegs, bar, barbecue. They had a mess sergeant they knew from Germany, Ollie Schwank, who made a sideline out of catering these parties. People suspected that a good deal of his profit came from most of his beer and meat being appropriated from the officers' club at the army base--inventory shrinkage--but these weren't people to turn someone else in or ask questions they didn't know the answers to. Not even my mother. All she did was purse her lips and lift her eyes skyward, suggesting that he would get his comeuppance in due time. Marjorie had said she would come over and help. It was the least she could do, she said.
The prospect of introducing your new girlfriend to your parents is always pretty horrible, like getting an enema or having an ingrown toenail opened up without anesthesia. The idea that Aunt Helen and Marjorie would be in the same room for a period of some hours made the parent part of this scene look like a trip to Disneyland.
I had something sticking in my throat, a blade of grass I had inhaled, probably, the fine point finding a home in my esophagus, the remainder of the blade implanted along the mucous membrane, sucked in by my mouth breathing as I sprinted across the lawn. Funny word, blade. It was just a little prickle. These things happened from time to time. Sometimes they took a day or two to go away, making swallowing in the meantime a painful act, the stabbing with each contraction of the muscles in my throat. You never know how pleasurable swallowing is until something interferes with your enjoyment of it. There should be a word for that, I thought, like the word for the little stone in your shoe that feels much, much bigger than it is--the word "scruple" comes from that root, something I had discovered reading Word Power for Persuasive Speech, a vocabulary builder I had hammered my way through between three and five in the morning one night this week when I couldn't sleep. In the past I would have simply jerked off and snoozed off. Now these simple tools of adolescence weren't working anymore. "Laconic" was another word I had learned, a synonym for terse, but more interesting because it came from the name of a Greek city where no one talked much, actually Sparta. I was more concerned with Trojans, not to mention Rameses and Sheik. I needed to be laconic tonight, and not give myself away. I also learned the words "slattern," "strumpet," "harlot," "roue," "rake" and "priapic." The index card had been fun to write since I only used words I had learned from the book. I wished I could see Dexter's face when she read it. Would she find it risible or would she confront the conundrum with laconic stoicism? Would she categorize it as claptrap verging on bombast or would she intuit a scintilla of veracity, withal? Who fucking knew?
As I dressed, the sound of Don Dillard of WDON, our favorite radio station, took my mind off my situation. Word was that Don's only goal in life had been to be a DJ, so his father had bought him a station out in Maryland, and renamed the call letters, for his 21st birthday. It must be nice to have a sense of purpose, of something you wanted to do. Not to mention a dad who had the bucks to make it happen. Plus, as a DJ, he probably got all the female attention he wanted, and without worrying about getting his balls cut off. This morning he was at his best, following up "I Thank the Lord for my Blackland Farm," and "When it's Springtime in Alaska, It's Forty Below," (with a great country bass on the "for-or-ty below" line) with "Love Potion Number 9" by the Clovers, and a version of "Stormy Weather" by the Spaniels, a local group from DC whose lyrics included the lines "Don't know why mama don't bake no apple pie/Stormy weather--porkchops taste just like leather. Keeps raining all the time." I hoped this didn't mean we were in for rain. The prospect of all those people, neighbors, old and new army friends, crammed together in our split level with Marjorie, Aunt Helen, Uncle Tom, my parents and myself was more than I wanted to deal with. But one of the beauties of Don, aside from his encyclopedic knowledge of rock and roll and his deep repertoire of early R&B, was that he played whatever he felt like hearing--no themes, no messages, just a 90 or better for danceability and at least an 85 for musicality. Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" was the only song so far to go north of 140 on both scales, but Ray was, after all, "The Genius" as well as the High Priest. Don came back on, listing the weekend high school football games. We played the Annandale Atoms tomorrow, but they were doormats in the league this year. Our only question was whether we would be able to score more points than any previous McLean team. High school football being what it was, that meant we had to get above 70. Our first year, we had lost to Fairfax seventy three to nothing. Feast or famine, so on the days when you got to eat the bear instead of the bear eating you, you had to eat for all you were worth. With that thought and the swallowing that accompanied it, the scruple in my throat served notice again that I could entertain myself all I wanted, but that as soon as I walked out of my house, the world would be waiting for me.
"Well, the sun goes down, the tide goes out, the people gather round and they all begin to shout. Hey, hey, Uncle Fudd, it's a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi mud, it's a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi mud. What a dance do they do, Lordie how I'm telling you. They don't need no band. They keep time by slapping their hands. Just as happy as a cow, chewing on a cud, it's a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi mud."
The party was in full swing. We had pushed back the furniture and rolled up the rugs and put them in the basement. The ping pong table down there had been converted to a staging area for the barbecue in the back yard and the tent Ollie's men had put up for the bar and the beer kegs. It was set up to be a blast, this party, and even though it wasn't dark yet, Army friends and neighbors were promising to make it a party to remember. Marjorie had arrived an hour early, bringing her own apron and wearing a sky blue skirt with white gores that swirled when she turned, along with a royal blue starched cotton blouse that seemed to emphasize the size and shape of her breasts, although that may be just my own perception. Looking at them now, I wondered how I had been able to get my hands around them when she had put them there the other day. It was later in life that I learned about fluid retention and the way breasts mimic the moon in its monthly course. At the moment I was just confused about that, and a lot else. Other issues were more in the forefront of my mind.
Aunt Helen and Uncle Tom had arrived about a quarter to eight. He was wearing a red aloha shirt and aviator sunglasses and smoking a cigarette out of an FDR style cigarette holder, his hair slicked back, with a highball in his hand when he walked in. Aunt Helen's dress was backless--red, yellow and green print, with the two panels that held her breasts tied behind her neck in a bow. She had her hair up and wore no stockings. Marjorie at least didn't go bare-legged, I thought. Sex on a stick, that was Aunt Helen. No one could mistake it, least of all me. Two sticks in fact, curved and well muscled, sitting on open toed high heel pumps with small leather straps wrapped twice around her ankles and tied with matching bows on the outer sides. What kind of popsicle was she, I wondered. A peach flavored pussy popsicle. It made me laugh, although the sight of her was electric.
Benny Goodman followed the Mississippi Mud. The 1939 Carnegia Hall concert, first time blacks played at Carnegie Hall. Gene Krupa's drums of the jungle and Harry James's horn. Sing, Sing, Sing. Uncle Tom grabbed my mother around the waist and swung her onto the floor shimmying and shaking, like someone had taken her off the shelf and plugged her in, wiggling her elbow and leaning her head back while she danced, like somebody counting stars—you felt like you were seeing it in black and white, it was so authentic. Frank Riley, another compadre from many postings, bowed to Aunt Helen and led her to the floor. I couldn't let myself watch. I had to get out to the kitchen. Marjorie was refilling a couple of servers with party mix, pretzels and Chex--corn, rice and wheat--and peanuts and Fritos, salted and roasted on a baking sheet with tabasco and Worcestershire and scooped into heavy carved wood banana leaf shaped containers, bought on some sojourn in the Philippines.
"I love that music," Marjorie said. "You can't help but want to dance. Dance with me, Simon." She put her arms up and waited for me to slide inside them and take my spot. I bumped her hip to signal it was an up tempo tune and we twirled each other around the kitchen, not much of a space, with the table and chairs and all, but there was room to dance, if you watched where you were and where you went.
She twirled great, the colors of her skirt flashing, pinwheel style, and her feet making precise movements, tapping out a pattern like the rolls in a player piano, the punches in an IBM card--right on the beat. In spite of the apron, she'd worn high heels, also with straps as it happened. The balance she had, double stepping against the rhythm on some of her spins and turns, laying a little back off the beat here or there, made me think of the close border between man and machine, about how if there hadn't been grace like this then the precision it takes to design a car's eight cylinders to purr in harmony at 6500 rpm and higher and match it with a five speed gearbox would never even have occurred to the human mind.
"Would you kids please pass around the stuffed celery and deviled eggs?" It was Mom, a little out of breath and with a couple of strands of hair floating out of their accustomed order. She was smiling. "That Tom could always dance," she said. "You should have seen us in this gasthaus in Heidelberg, when you were four or five. We pushed the tables all together. There were twenty or thirty of us up on them dancing, and a whole bunch of GI's clapping and cheering us on. Those were the days." She wiped her forehead and went to the back door to survey the tent scene outside. The house was already crowded, but under the tent there were just the cooks and the bartender and a couple of small clumps of people. Except for the small bulbs strung over the bar on the far side, the back yard was already captured by dusk.
Marjorie and I loaded up and peeled out of the kitchen to feed the hungry masses. She went down into the rec room and I began to cover the living room, where Aunt Helen stood next to Uncle Tom in a circle of friends, watching him hold court.
"So here he is, Alvin the ace aviator, coming back to base in his British racing green MG roadster after a night out on the town, drinking many many beers and chasing every girl under the age of eighty, but with more luck on the beer than on the frauleins, if you follow me. And he is feeling the power of his machine and the longing in his loins, this brave lad, and commences to rev up and cruise more or less at flank speed in and out of traffic--remember this boy is a jet jockey and has reflexes like a champion boxer. All this fun goes some way toward relieving the tension, but then he sees in his rear view mirror the flashing lights of a Florida state police cruiser." He took a deviled egg, smiled his thanks at me and downed it in one swallow. My dad had told me Tom could swallow three of them while chugging a mugful of beer.
"He knows at this point, Alvin does, that he's about three or four miles from base, and he he's feeling like Mach point eight isn't good enough, he needs to break the sound barrier with a full Mach one. In this mental state he locates the concept that base is like sanctuary in the medieval church. If he can just get back there, he'll be safe. No one can touch him as long as he stays within the confines of the base, and he knows he's shipping out in a couple of days.
"It's a low slung car, and he whips under the pole at the guard station on the way in, then slides over to the curb to catch his breath and survey the situation. As he does, he watches the trooper talking to the shore patrol and sees them start to walk over in his direction. He realizes that maybe he hasn't thought this through as completely as he might have, and he flashes on the fact that they might smell liquor on his breath and know he's three or four sheets to the wind. So he reaches in the breast pocket of his jacket, rips the covers off a couple of sticks of Doublemint and chomps on the gum for all he's worth.
"As they approach, he's getting more and more nervous, and he starts rolling the tinfoil from the gum around between his fingers to help him stay calm. He's looking straight ahead. Out of the corner of his eye he identifies the trooper's hand, the size of a country ham, palm extended, coming in his window. 'License and registration, please, son,' the trooper says. At which point the spirit that made this country great and that burns in the heart of our armed forces takes over. He drops the tinfoil ball in the trooper's hand. 'I'm on a special mission, officer,' he says. 'But this silver bullet will give you some idea of who you're dealing with here.'" The crowd erupted.
This was a new story of Uncle Tom's, one I hadn't heard before, and I had heard hundreds of them. Army life seemed a lot like summer camp or the home of the lost boys in Peter Pan--there was a lot of free time and the opportunities for high jinks and escapades were endless. Peter Pan! That would count. I could do that in a couple of hours. The circle burst out laughing. Aunt Helen made her knees buckle slightly to show how funny she thought it was, supporting herself with a hand on his shoulder. Her nails were painted pink and trimmed and buffed to a brightness that made them look not like part of her person, but like the point where the energy in the air joined the energy in her body, almost like the brightness of an arc light or a welder's torch. I remembered the other day when she was running those nails across my scalp and down my back, turning a massage into an opportunity to get me up for round two. These were not useful thoughts.
"So they take this guy to the old man, the CO on the base, and tell him the story. He's in his pajamas, it's the middle of the night, and he couldn't be less pleased. 'Lieutenant,' he says, 'this was not a combat mission, so I can't decorate you for conspicuous bravery, and this whole thing is too blessedly funny to be taken for as stupid as it really is. I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to let you ride with this trooper the next four days, put you on TDY attached to the state police and let you learn about drunk driving and blood and vomit and broken bones and mangled lives. In the meanwhile you can accompany me as my personal adjutant and perform whatever acts of trivial, demeaning chickenshit I require. I can't think of anything else that is likely to do the trick with a hot shot like you. But I will tell you that I admire your brass. After you get through with that little hitch, I'm sending you right out to Korea.' Shot down seven MIGs and never drove drunk again. That we know of. Runs a squadron off a carrier in the Med with the Sixth Fleet." I wondered for a moment how Uncle Tom could know that the guy never drove drunk again, but no one challenged him—-the moral authority transcended the probabilities, a lesson I meant to remember, although moral authority was far from my strong suit now.
Everybody nodded at the wisdom of the base commander's judgment and took a deep breath thinking about Korea, a place where many friends of theirs had died or suffered, unprepared as this country was for a war like that after the one we had just finished winning in such a big way. Seven MIGs. When I was younger I had played F-86 Saber Jet against MIG 15, with the American plane always winning, always pulling around like in the movies and getting the position where you could blaze away and finish off your enemy. Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow.
Those days seemed far away now. I offered the devilled eggs around, properly dusted with tasteless paprika, and watched a couple of the party goers head back out to the bar to refresh their drinks. Marjorie was bustling up the stairs from the rec room with the party mix in one hand and the stuffed celery in the other. As we passed each other on the short flight of stairs she gave me a smile and nudged me with her elbow and hip in the narrow space. Soft and firm at the same time. A hard worker with a sense of humor. What more could any guy want?
The party kept me busy. I was trying to keep an eye out for when Aunt Helen might make a move toward Marjorie, although I didn't know whether I would try to intercept it or just go up to my room, crawl under my bed and hold my breath, hoping for the best. I heard a crash of glass and a thump on the rec room stairs. One of the old Army buddies, Paul Kron, had slipped and fallen. The crash was barely audible against the music and the chatter, but by the time I got there a couple of the men were helping him up to a bedroom--mine, probably, to stretch him out, loosen his shoes and let him sleep it off for awhile. I had seen this before. It was always the same three or four guys, almost as if it wouldn't be one of our parties without someone falling down and getting carried off--a different kind of war.
When I came into the kitchen again after running some ice up from the basement my mom and Marjorie were sitting, talking.
"Well, what do you think you want to do when you finish college, dear?" My mother seemed all too interested in the answer. I realized that I myself didn't have a clue what the answer might be. Helping my family throw parties, I thought, and letting me explore her secret places for hours and days. But really.
"Teach, I think." Both their legs were crossed in ladylike fashion as they sat on the chrome, vinyl-covered cushioned chairs, the foot attached to each top leg wrapped back around the ankle of the other leg, almost mirror images of each other. A little scary. Must be something they learn in girl school, like brushing back the hair over each ear when they sit down, and the whole bottom and top of the swimsuit routine we've all seen a million times.
"What, teach handicapped children? Or normal kids."
"Normal, if anybody's normal. I'm not sure I feel normal myself, even though I think I am. Handicapped children are too hard for me. I think some people have a special gift or calling, patience, being satisfied with small victories. No, I want to have a classroom full of individuals that I can try to figure out what makes them tick and help them become who they want to be."
"What if who they want to be doesn't look like it's going to be good for them, in terms of adapting and surviving in the world? What would you do then?" My mother leaned forward and made a church of her hands. Here's the church and here's the steeple. Look inside and see all the people--wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. She didn't do that part, but that was what I found myself remembering, how she had taught me that little game.
The two of them were in a world of their own. I was sure they had noticed me coming in, but neither of them was prepared to back out of this conversation or lower it to the level of saying hello to me. I rinsed some dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher. This was amazing to watch. Marjorie was talking to my mom like an equal. Nobody did that with my mom. She was the Commander in Chief. She said jump and you said how high. If you got up from the table and didn't clear your place, when you got to the door and turned to say goodbye she could sink an arrow into you like Robin Hood, drop you in your tracks. She would seem not to have changed her expression, as far as you could describe, but somewhere in that look would be the whirring sound of death if you didn't shape right up, apologize and do an extra chore or two to show your apology was sincere. I was impressed. Agog, in fact, another word from that book.
"I don't think I would feel comfortable making that decision," Marjorie said after taking a minute to think. "I'm not sure I know that one way is better than another, or maybe I'm not sure that we have any business interfering. It's not that somebody else might not know better, but no one else can ever really feel the pain of having your dreams taken away from you."
Uncle Tom popped into the kitchen. "Kitty, my darling. There's about to be some jigs and reels performed, and I was wondering if you would care to be my partner, fine figure of a woman and sprightly dancer as you are. Not to mention how much it will advance my social standing to dance a hornpipe with a woman as gussied up as you have made yourself for this occasion and the boss's wife in the bargain." He helped her up out of her seat and led her, smiling, toward the other room. I could hear the fiddle and pipes and nasal singing of a record that must have been one of the first pieces of music I ever heard, Irish folk tunes. This was our fifth or sixth copy, the others having been broken in moves or during parties like this one. Either Tom or my dad always found another one. Marjorie excused herself to go to the bathroom and I said I would see her out at the dance hall. I sneaked a little kiss as she got up and passed me. I couldn't help it. She was so gorgeous and self possessed, and I liked the way she had stood her ground against my mom. When I looked at the other door to the kitchen Aunt Helen was standing there, hands on hips and a funny look on her face.
"She's cute," she said, without any particular note of interest. "Want to hear something even cuter?" I could see now that she was a little tipsy, and that the look was a sort of impish smile, not the reaction I would have expected in the case of her catching me kissing Marjorie. She moved over to the back door and opened it quietly, signaling me to follow her. We went down the steps and approached the far corner of the house, away from the bar and the food.
"I was standing by the window and heard something that sounded interesting," she whispered, pulling me by the hand and pushing me close against the foundation with her free arm. She stopped just short of the corner and put her hand to her lips to signal silence. There was no one at the bar, not even the service people. The call of the pipers from the stereo in the living room and the arm wrestling contest Frank Riley was supervising in the rec room had soaked up everybody in sight.
"Then when I was in Tokyo in '47, staying at the Embassy Hotel," I heard a man say. "We'd taken it over for bachelor officer quarters, so you can imagine what a complete free for all it was--Larry Carpenter shows up at my door with a beautiful young Korean girl, wearing a kimono, no less, and barefoot." I could hear the click and pop of a Zippo lighter, but I couldn't make out who the speaker was. A puff of smoke drifted by. Another man said something I couldn't hear. "She must have been about 22 or so. I was all of 28 myself. 'She's yours,' he says, 'I have to go back stateside. My father passed away and my tour is short enough now they don't want to bring me back again. She's some kind of orphan or something.'
"And what am I supposed to do with her? I asked him" the speaker continued, "telling him I was sorry for his loss. 'Same as I've been doing,' he says. 'She's got a futon she sleeps on, rolls it up during the day, and she's yours for whatever you want to do with her. She's hotter than hell,' he says. 'She'll do anything you want and then some. Believe me,' he says. 'You don't want to miss this. I asked her who she wanted me to turn her over to and you were her first choice. Made me kind of jealous,' he says. Then he asks the girl if she would like to give me a blow job and let him watch."
The music from the record was pouring out the window, along with claps and shouts of encouragement. It sounded like my dad, but it couldn't be. I'd seen him a little while ago down at the arm wrestling.
"Carpenter was a pistol. He and this girl must have reinvented the Kama Sutra," the first man said. "She spent the next six months in my room and I'll tell you it was one helluva time. She liked to have me get another guy to come up and share her about one or twice a week. She could bang you into the ground and be asking for more. You want to know a strange sensation, try feeling another guy's cock running in and out of the rear end of the woman who's riding up and down on your thing like there's no tomorrow! That's togetherness!" Both men exploded in laughter. I heard the other man say something about how they had better get back inside before they were missed.
All the while the story had been unfolding I had been standing behind Aunt Helen. As I listened, she pressed herself back against me and slid my hands around her waist and up to cup her breasts. The feeling of those blessed objects in my hand, the press of her buttocks against mine, and then the unfolding of the story gave me a hard on that stretched across three states. As we heard the men clear their throats, I realized that we had no hiding place and would never make it back to the porch before they turned the corner. Aunt Helen grabbed my hand and pulled me forward, keeping herself in front of me.
"Why Jeff, is that you? It's so dark out here I almost didn't recognize you." It was my dad! Holy Christ! Eddie Rogers from Fort Holabird over in Baltimore and my dad!
"Simon and I are just going over to our house to get some more ice," Aunt Helen said, still standing in front of me, lengthening her vowels and sounding more Southern than she normally did, more Bette Davis. I could see my father was off balance and a little flustered but Aunt Helen acted as though we had just cruised around the corner that very second. She sort of swung me around as we walked by the two men, keeping me behind her. For their part, they said OK, sure, we were just going back inside, see you in a little while, don't be too long, and headed back around the corner to go inside.
"Come here, Simon," she said, with a ferocity I had never seen or heard in her. "Come right back around here." She led me to the far side of the chimney, behind the row of rosebushes. The brickwork jutted out about three feet and the corner of the house protected it from the street light.
"Come right back over and fuck me, young man. Fuck me right here. This is a direct order from your commanding officer. God, didn't that story make you hot? Your father!" She untied the straps of her dress and let them fall, pulling my head over to shove it against her breast, sliding it so that her nipple popped into my mouth. She was working at my belt with the other hand, laughing.
"I just want to do this. I just want to do this right now. That's just all there is to it." She had my dick in her grasp, zipper down and dick out. She let go of my head and pulled the side of her dress up, reaching down.
"Okay, big man, it's all ready for you. I'm as wet as the ocean." As she pulled me toward her I could begin to feel how she had shifted the crotch of her panties to the side, so that I slid against and across her clit a couple of times before I could work my way inside her. The tease before delivery, any time you go there. The female flower thing.
I backed her up against the brick wall. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. I shoved it in her as hard as I could. She was right, she was wetter than a swimming pool or a gusher of oil. I was in the sea of love--sweat, saliva, semen and sexual fluids straight from the swamp. The sound of a jig and people dancing and clapping and laughing suddenly grew loud but I knew it was because I just couldn't block it out any more, the way I had been doing during the eavesdropping. We screwed rapid fire to the beat and the clapping, wedged against the chimney corner, our own little buck and wing.
She turned her mouth up and asked me to kiss her. I was in a slush of powder and lips and melted perfume that spun my head around about 80 times every time I drew a breath. I was at the state fair and the deal was to win the big pink bunny. We kissed and I came. Hard, with my hands under her buttocks smacking her up and down on my rod, my staff, my comforter. I could feel the orgasm start right at the base of my skull and run all the way down my spine and across the tight prune-like shrivel of my scrotum before it unloosed itself into the emollient of her mucosa. Between that vocab book and all the reading I was doing about sex, trying to get a handle so to speak on this part of life, I was starting not to know myself even when I was in my own head. She made a noise inside my mouth like a high pitched moan, an exhalation of release.
I felt something hard against my ankle and foot, something that wasn't grass or brick or rosebush. In the little light that could find that dark space I looked down to see the glass jar I caught the Japanese beetles in, hundreds of them floating in the kerosene. I remembered how many of them I had caught in the act of coupling and the satisfaction I always took in raking them into the jar, attached to each other like that for eternity, unable to separate even on the brink of death. This is too strange, I thought, rolling my eyes and trying to put my clothes back into some kind of order before we went and got the ice and rejoined the party. If this is anything like real life, I thought, there's a lot more shaking going on than people let on in their conversations.
We came back through the front door and headed straight for the kitchen with the ice. Aunt Helen had tried to give me a blow job in her kitchen but when I realized how much drunker she was than I had believed, and thought about the amount of time that was passing and the fact that Marjorie, my folks and Uncle Tom were all back at the party, I mustered a no, even though I could feel a tickle from south of the Equator as I heard the suggestion.
"Did we really need that extra ice?" my mother asked, following us in. She gave me one of her funny looks and I gave it right back to her, like I usually did. That generally carried the day and I didn't see why I should let on that this situation was any different.
"Well, Kitty honey, I just thought it would be better to stock up now rather than have to go running over when we did get short. A stitch in time saves nine, my mother always told me. And this Simon is such a good helper, believe you me!" She ruffled my hair with a gesture that I recognized meant one thing to my mom and something entirely different to me. The walk and the air had done Aunt Helen good, probably the screwing had helped some too. She was effervescent, and full of housewifery, bustling about the kitchen stacking dishes and dumping the remnants left on plates into the trash can. She had done a good job retying the bow that held up her dress. You couldn't tell the difference.
"You should have seen that Marjorie dance!" my mother said, her eyes lighting up. "She and your father were whirling around like dervishes. They put the rest of us to shame. You really missed it, you two." No, Mom, you were the one who missed it, I thought, feeling a little rude until the echo of "Marjorie and your father" settled in my head and pushed everything else out of the way. What was he doing dancing with her, the old lech? Whose girl was she? Before I knew it we would all be in bed together, all six of us. Plus a couple of my father's friends from Japan days, no doubt, on deck for a redo of the Tokyo action. My head felt like it was an atom bomb halfway through the chain reaction that would lead to a mushroom cloud, which was maybe okay if you were trying to end a war but not the best thing if you were trying to keep the peace and save all mankind from total destruction, especially yourself.
"Simon, dear, what's wrong?" I was hunched over the freezer compartment, immobilized in what I realized was a semi-contorted position as I tried to pull my mind and my body back toward a common purpose. I don't know how I got that way, but sometimes these things happen.
"Nothing, Mom, just a little kink in my back. I didn't want to move the wrong way until I located it. I'll be all right in a second." Through the open doors of the kitchen I could hear some laughter and applause and the sound of a pitch pipe. That would mean that my dad, Uncle Tom and two friends and partners in crime from our days in Germany would have assembled, by the fireplace, decked out in lederhosen, knee socks and Tyrolean hats to start the singspiel part of the night's celebration. It wasn't so much barbershop harmony as it was a note bending, in and out of key rendering of "Galway Bay," "Two Shillalegh O'Sullivan," "Danny Boy" and "Ja, das ist das Lichtensteiner Polka, Mein Schatz," among others, always to be ended with "God Bless America." These four had been "performing" for as long as I could remember. It gave me a shudder to consider what Marjorie would think. I was sure nothing like this had ever happened at her house in the hundred or so years her family had lived there.
She was on the far side of the crowd, her face flushed and glistening from the dancing, looking around to see where I might be. The arm wrestlers had come upstairs too, for this part of the program, and the living room was packed with laughing, sweaty bodies. I mouthed the word "ice" in response to the question in her look and bobbed my head toward the Dolans' house to explain my absence. I hoped I was convincing, but her lukewarm response did nothing to make me feel better. I tried to engineer my way across the room to where she was and finally made it, reaching around her shoulders to give her a squeeze.
"I heard you were wild, you and my dad. I didn't know you had Irish blood." She laughed a little, helping to ease the knots of muscle that were forming on my skull where smiles are supposed to start, right above my ears, two little buzzing zones that were knotting themselves up tighter than those metal finger puzzles my parents used to give me for Christmas about every other year when I was younger.
"Had to dance with somebody, Mr. Simon the Butler, dutiful sober-sided son that you are. Your dad can really cook it! What's this singing thing about?"
"Would you like to get out of here?" I asked when the foursome stopped to rehydrate their tonsils. Somehow I knew that was the only right question, the only thing to say. It wasn't that I wanted to escape from the singing, but enough was enough. We had done our part and Marjorie and I needed some quiet time alone. She kissed me on the neck and pushed me to let me know I needed to serve as her battering ram to get to where the air was fresh and quiet. The vocalists were gargling theatrically, with some heckling from the crowd to get them going again.
"Well, that was high on oomph," she said as we pulled away from the curb. "That was a lot of fun."
"Yeah," I said, "I think they're heading for the too much fun part, which is a good part to be out of the way of. "
"Really? Why do you say that?" She shifted against the door and stretched her arm along the seat.
"Because I've been there. Believe me, it can get a little crazy. Once we had a fight. Between two guys who were almost like brothers. But they were so drunk that they misunderstood each other about eight times in a row and got in a fistfight and one of them almost lost an eye."
"God! What happened after that?"
"It was agreed there would be no more fighting, ever."
"So that's great, isn't it? And for the army, of all people. And now there's no more fighting at your parties?"
"No. Never. That's done. Over with. Finished. People jump on anyone who starts getting into it like that. But enough other crazy stuff, sometimes anyway."
"That's so wonderful. We don't have fistfights, actual fistfights, but the husbands push their wives, sometimes, at our family get-togethers, and the wives will sass them back like nobody's business, drive them out of the house like a dog after a squirrel. I don't like any of that, although it can be funny, funny sad. I saw my grandmom threaten my grandpop with her cooking fork one time at Thanksgiving dinner when I was seven. She meant it, too. The turkey took a little longer to cook than usual and things got out of hand. I can see the expression on her face like it was yesterday. He got the message pretty quick! It was scary. I didn't like it much."
The road opened up in front of us. I had no idea where I was going and I knew she knew that too. It took no conscious thought to figure it out. We had to talk and breathe and listen to the radio and find our fingers entwined on the seat between us and sit that way, driving and looking around and not feeling any pressure to laugh or not to laugh, to talk or not. Just getting loose like a wet noodle.
"Are you hungry?"
"After all that load of food? Not really. Are you?"
"Not really, I just wondered if you were."
"No. But I do have something you might like. Look at these here." Out of her bag where she had stowed her apron she pulled two sixteen ounce Pabst Blue Ribbons. "Do you drink beer, ever?"
"Not that often," I said. "Where'd you get those? Most times when the guys get together and start in on beer and malt liquor it gets pretty disgusting. A lot of puking and stupid behavior."
"Yeah, I know. But did you ever sip a cold beer with a beautiful girl who happens to like you a lot and look up at the moon and the stars?"
"No, I never did. Is this when I get to start?"
"Well, just as soon as you find a quiet place where nobody would bother us and we could drink our beers in peace. Some people brought the beers. They brought a six pack. I just took two. They thought your family might not have enough and they didn't want to run out. I don't think they will run out, do you?"
"Not on our account," I said, surveying the map in my head as fast as I could while observing the traffic signs and trying to figure out where my driving had taken us to. I might as well have been in High Peru, for all that I could figure out where we were.
"Do you know where we are?" I asked.
"More or less, I think." Marjorie craned her neck to look around in back of us. "Aren't we sort of working our way over to Chain Bridge? Do you want to go down into the District? We had fun there last time."
"How does that work with the beer?" I asked, stupid question, literal-minded earthbound unimaginative clod.
"The beer is not the thing," she said. "Let's go to the Bayou and hear some Dixieland. You didn't get to dance, did you?"
Only in a manner of speaking, I thought. But I would love to dance with you, see you dance, dance with you close.
"There's an opener in the glove compartment," I said. "Why don't you just pop open these two jumbos and we'll head down to Georgetown. Head down to Georgetown." I thought about saying "George down to Headtown," but knew that would play all wrong. Besides which it wasn't really that funny, to be honest. It was only a quarter of eleven, plenty of time left to have fun.
"You know what, Simon?" Every time Marjorie said something, or shifted her position, I found I had to turn and look at her. It was interfering with my driving, but I wanted the full show and to use all the means at my disposal to connect. These planetary shifts of reality, temperature, atmosphere, whatever, one after another, had me dizzy. I needed some firm ground. It was like when I tried out for JV basketball and they were trying to teach me to play pivot. You had to hold the ball with both hands and keep waving it around while you spun, first around in one direction and then the other, keeping your pivot foot planted so you wouldn't "travel," and the other players would zoom by you, cutting across in front and you had to pass the ball to one of them as he headed toward the basket for a layup. I didn't make the final cut, but I respected the kids who could play the game a lot more after I went through that piece of confusion. This was much worse. Among other things, my family's car was involved and I was driving it with an open beer bottle and eighteen was underage in Virginia.
"I appreciate your being ready to go to the Bayou," she said, "but don't let's keep piling things on top of other things." She took a deep sip of her beer--I could see it out of the corner of my eye. I sucked back a slug of mine too. It was nice and cold.
"What if we were to find a quiet place to drink our beers, our well-earned beers," she said. "Just that. Just to relax. No jazz trombones and no lederhosen either. What would you say to that?"
We were at a point on the way to Chain Bridge that was only a couple of minutes from my old parking spot with Dorothy by the power company substation. Do or die? Do.
"I think there may be some place down over here if we don't get lost trying to get there," I said. She said okay, fine.
Five minutes later we were rolling down the gravel road, lights on dim and looking for a space to pull over into.
"This is cute," she said. "I see we're not the first ones to discover it. I think I've heard about this place."
"You were never here?" Obviously not. Didn't you hear what she said, stupid?
"No," she said. "That looks like a good spot," pointing to a space that seemed to have been reserved for us, between a Ford wagon and a Pontiac Bonneville with skirts over the rear wheel wells and mud flaps with pictures of Yosemite Sam on them. Clyde Kelly, one of our hot rodders. I wondered who he was with. The cars kept about a twenty foot buffer zone between them. Most of the action was going on below window level--I knew that from my own experience--but you did like to have some separation, some privacy.
The sky was wide open, no clouds anywhere. We could see a fingernail moon strung in the sky at about ten o'clock, as pilots say, and we were far enough away from the lights of DC that you could see the major constellations. My beer was done, I learned to my surprise when I tilted it back for another swig.
"What's your favorite constellation," I asked. This seemed so totally different from conversation with Aunt Helen, but it wasn't like one situation was natural and the other wasn't. Both were natural and unnatural, in some proportion I would probably never figure out. If I did figure it out, I was sure the women would get together and hunt me down and kill me. I knew deep down that was the basic deal.
"I don't know." She craned her neck forward to look up through the windshield. There was no sound except the crickets and the hum, slow dull hum, of the transformers in the substation. "What's yours?"
"Orion. It's easy to identify and big and has a lot of things going on in it, with the club and the belt and Betelgeuse and Rigel. Those are such funny names that they gave the stars, but the words really just mean foot--Rigel means foot--and shoulder of the giant--Betelgeuse."
Before I knew it I had reached for her and she had slid halfway across the seat, meeting me and hanging a liplock on me that just wouldn't quit. Not that I wanted it to, I didn't in any way. She could stay there as long as she wanted. The kisses where teeth click are the best--complete abandon, putting aside all the wariness and self-protection we get taught from the minute we open our eyes. Why is it sex can be so good? Many reasons, but among them is that it lets you shed that plastic skin, that seat cover that has so little feeling to it, shed it like a sigh of relief and feel like yourself for a little while.
No thinking was going on, no calculating as we mmmmed and moaned, happy to be full of each other, happy to touch any way we could think of. She had done her best up to now to show me she liked me, thought I was hot, believed we could talk and laugh at some of the same things, read each other's minds a little, and now she read my mind at a level I didn't even know was there. The tongues and the kissing and the rolling around, the kicking off of shoes and my socks, the opening of blouses and shirts and rubbing of body against body put steam all over the windows and sucked all the oxygen out of the air.
"Ah," I said. "Ah, ah! Oh God that feels so good. You feel so good. Oh. Oh you are so delicious!" My chest was heaving. I had to come up for air. My hand was on her bottom and she was on top of me, kissing and licking my face, circling figure eights along the ridge of my nose with her tongue.
These were the days before panty hose, blessed days of garter belts and easy access. I slid my hand across the smoothness of her panties. The elastic edge seemed to invite me in, show me the way. Marjorie pressed her mouth against mine again and as I reached to massage her firm smooth butt I felt my fingers slide into wetness and the groove below. I had no idea what I was touching but she whimpered, and whimpered again when my fingers got there, agony of pleasure, electric sound explosions transcending vocal cords that I could hardly hear in my intentness on the sensations that were brushing my fingertips. How did I miss her asshole, I thought, grateful and surprised. It was down there somewhere, I wasn't mistaken about that. I froze. Here I was on the brink and I didn't know what to do. Stop thinking, I told myself as her tongue worked itself back into my mouth and her moans became more urgent--fingerfuck her, you dope! And I did. And I did and I did.
We were in an awkward position. Before long she turned onto her back, cradling her head on my chest, watching my hand dive in and out of her underwear, over the garter belt and down the thick rough curly blonde hair she had been the lucky recipient of, the glow from the mercury vapor lamp by the substation shedding a mist of light through the fogged up windows, an angel's dusting of illumination.
"There," she breathed, seemingly trying to keep her hips from moving even while she was inciting herself with me as her second nature. "There. Yes. Oh yes. Oh. Oh, Simon. Oh. Oh." She quivered and shook, clasping her thighs together and squeezing my hand, twitching, until I felt the circulation start to go. I whipped my fingers around in her like a centrifuge and finally she pushed her own hand down to let me know I could stop. She felt so wet and smooth it was hard to get any sense of how she was made in there. Who cared anyway? I slid my fingers out and kissed her. Kissed her softly.
She moaned and sighed again. Sighed lovingly, if there was such a thing and why wouldn't there be? "Well that was something!" She reached her hand around to pull my face back for another kiss, a smacker, like a cartoon where the lips stretch out like bubble gum and then there's a "POP" that shows up on the screen, between two chipmunks or a pair of lovebirds or rabbits.
"Thank you, Simon. Thank you ever so much. Thank you. Did you like that? Was that fun for you?" Her voice had more of a little girl quality than normal. Usually she had a slightly dusky quality to the way she sounded, a little whisper of sand that stirred me as soon as I heard it, like Lauren Bacall but without the note of whiskey and cigarettes, like the slide of feet across the rosined stage in a soft shoe dance, not mannish in any way.
Sweet earnestness, comfort with her own body, relaxation after orgasm--things I could recognize but had no experience of. When I came, by jerking off or with Aunt Helen, there was orgasm but no release--I could already feel the beginnings of the next explosion starting to gather, as if my body was some sort of rain forest where the burst from the clouds mingled with the vapors pushing up out of the soil to muscle up the next thunderstorm, dense and teeming. How many sperm in a single ejaculation? More than the number of people on the planet, I thought I had read somewhere, or in China or Russia, or something like that.
"I liked it a lot," I said. "Since you ask. I'm also crazy about you. You are so hot and so sweet and so much fun. I can't believe I'm so lucky."
"I feel like I'm the lucky one," she said. Then she put her hand on top of mine as it rested on her belly, and started sliding it down again.
It's important to go into any new situation with as few preconceived ideas as possible, my dad always told me. Never assume someone is your friend, especially, and never assume your eyes and ears are telling you the truth--they are telling you what someone else wants you to believe combined with what you wish was real. This was designed partly to help me follow in his footsteps as a mighty catcher of Russian spies, but also to help make the transition from one base or town or country to another as low on pain as possible as we moved every eighteen months or two years on Uncle Sam's orders. If you didn't believe some kid when he told you he wanted to be your friend on the first day at a new school, then you wouldn't be so disturbed when he led the gang that surrounded you during recess and tried to get you into a fight to see what you were made of. I worked hard at not wanting anything too much, not expecting anything too good, making the most out of whatever there was that I could get without exposing myself to suffering and heartache.
That approach was not doing me that much good at this point. Marjorie was holding out on me in terms of the ultimate reward. Each time we got together I gained some ground, made some further step toward connecting my love hungry dick, the center of myself, to the Holy Grail between her legs. But it was like the paradox of Zeno, where you always advance halfway toward the objective but you're always still halfway away from where you want to be. You could argue that with Aunt Helen on the scene I should be satisfied. More than satisfied. You might even say that from where I sat I could afford to relax and let the situation with Marjorie play out over however long it took. But if you did say that, you would only show how little you understand about how sex works and what's built into the chemical stew we call a eighteen year old brain. I wanted her to be mine, Marjorie, but she still belonged to herself alone, despite all my efforts.
It seemed to me that the path from fingerfucking to actual fucking should be a short and straight one. I made that clear. Marjorie raised the pregnancy issue. When I countered with the prophylactic solution she parried with the broken condom conundrum. These were also the days before mothers took their daughters to the doctor at the age of fourteen to get birth control pills. There were no birth control pills. The broken condom was a show stopper. It wasn't like other situations my friends had told me about, where questions of love and marriage were at the heart of the terms on which a girl would "surrender."
Marjorie was either assuming those things, which was kind of frightening, or else she didn't care about them, which was even more frightening, if that could be. And I couldn't say I loved her, even though I thought I did. For one thing, it seemed cheap. For another, what if she said no anyway? How could I possibly deal with that? And for a third, Aunt Helen and all the hours in her bed, the times we had been together, had found ourselves wrapped around each other like we shared a single skin, were tattooed across my mind and my emotions in a way I couldn't just turn my back on.
To make matters worse, there was something about the combination of getting Marjorie off for the first time, as it appeared I had managed to do, and the earlier sex with Aunt Helen that left me, while we were parked there, feeling much less horny than usual, less needful. I got so much pleasure, the right word, and satisfaction, the other right word, out of helping her come that I felt satisfied and complete in some way that I couldn't exactly describe. Jethro from below the Mason Dixon line actually got quiet for a while and let me rest in peace, with my baby snuggled in my arms, fitting our bodies to one another like in a cocoon while we talked. I explained that late in the afternoon I'd gotten so excited thinking about her, and assuming I'd be stuck helping with the party, that I had to jerk off so I could get my mind back on all the jobs I'd been assigned. She giggled and said how great it was that we could be so open and honest with each other. That made me feel like a perfect shit, but what was there to say or do? After awhile we got ourselves organized and I started the car.
I got her home and drive back to my house, where I tiptoed past the stragglers who had spread themselves across the living room furniture or were propped up against some wall or other in quiet conversation, the music on low by now. Once I got to my room all I could think of was Marjorie, what we'd done and what we hadn't done. I fell asleep hours later, with my hand next to my face, inhaling the myriad and profound complexity of the vapors that clung to my fingers.
It's like picking at a sore or rubbing your eye when it itches--you know that what you're doing is the worst thing you can possibly do but it's also the only thing you want to do, and so you pick and rub. The more intense the pain is, the more you keep doing it. That, somehow, then turns into what you now want next most in the world, and since you can't have the thing you do want most, this pain is what you strive for, embrace and cling to. I woke up rock hard, red and throbbing. This hadn't happened to me in a couple of months now. I didn't even have the heart to jerk off. I just took a cold shower and watched it melt.
My parents had invited the Dolans over for scrambled eggs and bloody Marys to replay and rehash the party. I sat at our dining room table, a place we hardly ever used, pushing my food around my plate and looking at our collection of deer antlers and mountain goat horns on the wall from my dad's hunting days in good old Germany. "South Pacific" with Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin was on the phonograph. "Bali Hai," "Some Enchanted Evening," "I'm Gonna Wash that Man Right Out of my Hair," and so on. I looked at my dad and tried to imagine him in that Tokyo threesome we had overheard him describing. Was he underneath or on top? Was he wearing a rubber? What was the look on his face at that moment? Had he actually touched the other guy in some way? How could he not, but how did he feel about that? I also did my best to minimize eye contact with Aunt Helen. Nothing good could come of that now.
I never understood the attraction of those antlers and now they were less appealing than ever. Mounted trophy heads with glass eyes and hairy bristles sticking out around the lips are worse, I guess, but the classic European way to display these things is to slice out a piece of the skull around where the horns sit and then glue it to some wooden plaque, all bone. These were the horny creatures of the past, come to their demise. I felt almost like I belonged up there with them.
"Some party," Uncle Tom volunteered. "What time did we finally wrap up? Three thirty or something like that? Pretty late for old soldiers like us, Jeff." His grin said he didn't really think so.
"Old soldiers never die, they just fart away, if I remember what General MacArthur told me one time." My dad was folding a strip of his bacon around a forkful of eggs and attaching the end of the strip to one of the tines of the fork before directing it toward his mouth. I wondered if he was still drunk. Reasonable guess.
"No, I don't think you can count the last half hour, Tom. You were trying to teach Marge Riley obscene expressions in Turkish and you fell asleep or passed out in the middle of a 'one balled stepson of a melancholy whore' and almost set the sofa on fire with your forty third Pall Mall of the evening. Do you remember that part?"
"As well as I need to, my good man, which is to say not in the least, I'm pleased to say. That's actually a Danish curse. Are you sure it wasn't Danish I was speaking? Christ, I didn't tell the Queen of Cambodia story again, did I? No? Well that's a blessing anyway." My mother laughed. "Are there different expressions depending on which ball is missing, Tom, the right or the left?"
I took a sip of my Bloody Mary. My parents didn't usually push booze in my direction but my father said I looked like I could use a pick-me-up as much as the rest of them. The combination of wateriness and nasty spices made me wonder again how suited I was for adulthood, or would ever be.
"It must be intoxication by association, Simon, but you don't look much better than we feel. You didn't dip into the sauce last night, did you?"
"I had a beer, that's all. It was okay. I didn't really want any more."
"And how late were you out, Simon?" There was a not very veiled barb in Aunt Helen's question which I wondered if anyone else detected. Their frame of reference was so different from hers and mine that I doubted it.
"Oh, the party was still breezing along when I got home. I just tiptoed upstairs and didn't bother anybody. You guys were having enough fun without me."
"And I'm sure you had more fun without us, you and that sweet girl of yours. What's her name again?"
"Marjorie. Marjorie Fredericks." Which you perfectly well know, I said to myself, so why are you jerking me around like this? Another part of me thought this was good, the jealous part, since it indicated that if there was jealousy, then there would be lots of action after Uncle Tom was gone. That would be as of oh eight hundred hours Monday morning, when my dad would take him down to DC National airport and bid him farewell for the next six months. Action of the type that I craved, to take my mind off what I wasn't getting from Marjorie.
"Speaking of fun," Uncle Tom said, finishing off his Bloody Mary and laying his knife and fork neatly across his plate, "since I spent the first part of the night on the Jeffries' sofa--thank you for not trying to move me, by the way--that was a royal kindness--and since I am also booked for departure in less than 48 hours--what would you say, m'love, if we left the dishes to these nice people and turned our attention to a little packing? If you perceive my drift. Personal effects. A few things we need to get straight?"
"Lead the way, you big handsome hunk of man," Aunt Helen said, looking me dead in the eye and adjusting the side panel of her bra. She stood up for him lead her away, twirling around like Ginger Rogers. In fact, he resembled Fred Astaire in many ways, thinning hair and dapper dress, among other things. But Fred never sang "with a rowley, powley, gammon and spinach," as Uncle Tom did now to the tune of "Froggy Went a Courtin' and He Did Ride," and Ginger Rogers never put her signature style to the bump and grind finish that Aunt Helen flashed at us, winking in what again seemed like my direction and doing a little chorus line kick that showed off her legs as they walked out the door to my parents' applause and laughter. She had a beautiful body, Aunt Helen, no mistake. Beautiful all the way around, point to point, wire to wire, up, down and sideways, every square inch. I had no doubt about what Uncle Tom meant by setting a few things straight.
"You know, Simon," my dad said, stretching and rubbing his eyes, "I'm still a little worn out from last night too. Some night, huh? Great party. I think I might head up and catch some well deserved shuteye if you will excuse me. What do you say to that, Kitty? You look like you might find some benefit from a visit to the arms of Morpheus as well. That's the god of sleep, Simon. Don't do all the dishes. Just whatever you feel like and leave the rest for us after we finish our nap." He pulled back my mother's chair and helped her to her feet.
"Okay, Dad," I said, stunned almost to silence to witness my parents brazenly disappear up the stairs to their room and hear the door click shut. At least they didn't dance their way out.
I couldn't believe it. I'd watched my parents like a hawk from the time I was nine or ten and got the inside scoop on sex from Russell when he found a sex technique book in his mother's nightstand that we spent a lot of time on. Never until now had I seen the slightest clue, the least indication or evidence, aside from my recent discovery of the condoms in my dad's nightstand that didn't seem to diminish in number from year to year, that I could have been produced in any way other than being left in a tidy basket on our front porch one beautiful September morning by a good fairy. And now my first real clue was to watch my dad do everything but drag Mom up the stairs by her hair like Alley Oop the cave man from the comics. It's the most natural thing in the world, but somehow we contrive to make it seem strange, so that nothing is more real to me than my stiff dick and nothing is more alien and strange than yours.
But now, everyone was getting some but me, and rubbing it in my face. Even my parents, for God's sake. And treating me like I was seven years old and didn't know shit about how things really worked. Where was the fairness of that, I thought, standing at the sink, sudsing and rinsing my way though the mountain of glasses and dishes from the night before, and trying to remember not to bang my recurring hard-on against the edge of the counter as I looked for water spots on the Bohemian crystal. Thinking about Aunt Helen, thinking about Marjorie, and feeling like I was losing ground everywhere I looked. Things would have to get on track, and soon. Marjorie had told me her parents were taking her to Richmond for the rest of the weekend to visit relatives, so I called up Russell and asked if he wanted a ride to the game against Annandale.
"Helen! There's some kid here who wants to talk to you. About the lawn or something." It was Tuesday after school.
The crew-cut individual with the government issue khaki slacks, web belt with brass buckle and aloha shirt was my Tuesday afternoon surprise. From the look of his forearms he did a lot of pull-ups. He must be a Marine, I thought. Nobody else does that to themselves to that extent. He was somewhere around Helen's age, twenty seven, more or less. It gave me a start to remember how young she was, all things considered.
"I'll be right there! Ask him to come on in and close the door." Her.
"Are you up from Camp LeJeune or Quantico?" He had hardly more whiskers than I did. Country boy, maybe. Short haircut. He looked me over.
"Pentagon," he said. No further questions. Important guy.
I was under no illusions about what was going on, or about to go on, in this house. I had been "what was going on" for a while now. He bore a resemblance to me that was a little too close for comfort except for the Popeye forearm part and the hair. People might have taken us for brothers, almost.
"Simon, sweetie! We're having afternoon cocktails," she called out, coming down the stairs. "What do you say to a rum and coke. Cuba Libre! We'll drink to freedom from oppression and the justness of our cause!"
"Sit down!" she said. "Make yourself comfortable. I just got out of the shower. We were out in the back looking at the roses, but it is just so humid today, isn't it? I had to cool off. Simon, this is Matt. First Lieutenant Petersen, I suppose I should say, but I prefer Matt. Matt, this is Simon. He's a dear friend and a very fine person. He does lawns for money so he can spend it on young girls."
She was bundled up to her neck in thick yellow terrycloth, a sort of sun in the shade-dimmed room and she was barefoot and had her hair up, thrown together to get it off her neck. Wet strands coiled quickly and pinned with precision, anchored by a sunburst alligator clip of yellow plastic.
"Here's yours," she said, handing Matt a glass with a lime and some carbonation in it, 7-Up or gin and tonic, "and here's yours, Simon. Sit down please, both of you. Exciting, isn't it?"
"What do you mean?" I asked, taking the chair and leaving the seat on the couch next to her for her Marine, if he took it, which he did. He looked me over again, like he was trying to line up the vee on the rear sight with the ball on the front one so he could squeeze the trigger and have done with me once and for all.
"The three of us here, in one room." She tucked her feet up and took a sip from her own drink, a Manhattan, it looked like, although it might have been iced tea. She had some fruit floating around in it. It might be a mixture of the two, if I knew her as well as I thought.
I felt a hundred times my age. The glass in the room, the globes and orbs of the fixtures, the lamps, the stuff on the coffee table and the sideboard, glowed and sizzled and popped. Everything seemed to twirl and display itself for me.
"I met Matt at one of those going away parties they had for Tom," she said. "One of the many, many going away parties my lucky husband inspired by his departure. We just had lunch, Matt and I. We danced. At the party, I mean. Matt's a super dancer. You're a good dancer too, aren't you, Simon?"
With Marjorie I am, I thought. I tried to remember if Helen and I had ever danced. Yes. Once, naked in the rec room. Laughing and carrying on. Shaking everything shakable and laughing like crazy.
"You know I am," I said, smiling and sipping my drink. "Shakable unbreakable." The lime was almost lost in the mix, but the balance of rum and coke and ice was like the three points of the Trinity. Or the Mercedes star, not to be sacrilegious. The three pointed star of Stuttgart. The black horse that was on the city's shield.
We sat there a while longer, circling each other without moving from our places, taking in the breathing and the eye movements, making small talk about the Corps and my plans for college. Matt had gone to VMI. He did a little goof on the parade ground routine for plebes there, barking unintelligible orders and tucking his chin into his breast bone. He had charm. No question.
"Well, boys, who's for love?" she suddenly said. "Simon, get over here and sit next to me. Don't keep yourself at a distance. Come right over here. I have the power to make you happy. You know that very well." She spread her arms across the back of the sofa. I moved over and sat on the other side from the Marine. He looked even more confused than I felt. Aunt Helen rubbed the backs of our necks.
"How does that feel, fellas? Relieve some of the stiffness? I hope not!!" She laughed deep in her throat, more breath than laugh but there was a laugh wired all the way through it. "Oh by the way, Simon, don't worry. Matt's had his shots, haven't you dear? Matt and Dukie both." She ruffled Duke's ears and reached for the belt on her robe. "Who wants to be the one who unties my bathrobe? Don't both of you rush. Let me do it for you."
She reached down with one hand and pulled the belt end, undoing the bow. The robe seemed to relax. She put a leg out through the fold and wiggled her foot.
"Simon and I have had a thing, Matthew. Have a thing. Simon is very dear to me. We have a lot of fun together. Do you think you would like to have some fun too, and play with us?"
My cock was exploding through my bathing suit. "Yes, Ma'am, I sure would!" I heard Matt say. "Ma'am," –- I liked that. The next thing I knew we had her robe open and were licking and sucking her nipples and pulling off our clothes with both hands. The things that happened after that were indescribable, one thing after another as we made our way from the couch to the floor to the shower to the bedroom. She gave me a blow job in the shower while he stood outside the door and did her from behind, her making noises like a roomful of women, that noise women make when they're having sex and enjoying it, a noise like no other. She ran the scales up and down and ran them again. I turned her around after he gasped and shot his load and went to work to add mine to it. I felt every cell of me explode in that space. He was down on his knees kissing her and squeezing her breasts and making animal noises. The clip was long gone from her hair by now. The three of us took turns pushing it back, pulling it away from her face.
We all but collapsed on the bed. I had come two or three times. I couldn't remember. It didn't matter.
"We overheard Simon's father the other night Matt, talking about a scene over in Japan after the big war, himself and a Korean girl and another officer." She was talking to him, licking his chest and starting to fondle him. He was up next. For once I was grateful to have someone else lead the parade.
"It sounded so hot I wanted to try it myself" she said. "Almost couldn't get it out of my head for ten minutes straight since. You know how these ideas take hold of you and won't let go." I'd been so hung up on Marjorie, and on getting back inside Aunt Helen's knickers to compensate for my lack of success in that other area that I'd mostly forgotten about my dad and that conversation. I watched as she got him aroused and licked him all the way down and around. She was playing with his cock and kissing his body and he was making unbelievable groaning snorting noises, blowing like he was trying to keep his head from exploding. She eased up and straddled him, letting out a moan that he echoed as she plunged down on him all the way to the base, balls against butt. She arched her back and ground her hips in a circle. She looked fabulous. Spectacular.
Oh, you beautiful boy, you," she said. "Oh what a nice hard cock. Nice and hard and big." From my angle, I couldn't see the penetration. I'm here, I thought. It's up to me. My option. I moved around behind her, feeling myself start to spring to attention again as I slid down the bed and stood at its foot, one knee on the comforter, taking in the whole amazing scene.
"Is there anything you would like?" I asked.
"Simon, you know what I want. Don't tease. I want you to fuck me in the ass. Gently. Nice and slow. With love. Okay, Matt?"
I wondered what range of answers a person in Matt's situation had to choose from. It seemed to me he had only one, that he was fully done for. I pulled on myself a little to get some fluid going and then spread it around the head, coaxing it forward with my fingertips. It glistened, and when it met her sphincter I slid inside with a slow, firm, solid force. She screamed.
"Oh, God!!! Oh, God that's so unbelievable!! Oh God! Oh, Matt, is that good? Oh, Simon. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God." I could feel him through the membranes. We were rubbing our cocks against each other, thrashing them back and forth and around and in and out and our balls were banging against each other with every stroke. Our voices made a chorus, rising and falling and blowing the top off, suddenly with a pair of spasms, a trio of spasms that shook us like a lightning bolt and left us fused like molten glass.
"Well! You never know what you can do when you set your mind to it, do you? You don't. You completely don't." Aunt Helen was as perked up as a Mexican jumping bean.
"I'm limp as a dishrag," she said, displaying no sign at all that she was telling the truth. "I guess you could say the same about all of us now. Couldn't you?"
We were strewn across the bed like clothes tossed by somebody on their way to the shower because they were hot and sweaty and had an important date in less than twenty minutes. Matt had worked his way back between her legs with his chin and was munching away dutifully. If he had anything left, I had only respect. He was like an engine that keeps turning over after you shut off the ignition. Lying next to her, I reached across and squeezed her shoulder. It filled my hand in the sweetest way. She started playing with his hair, and the next thing I knew she was cradling my balls, not with lascivious intent, but like they were worry beads, rolling them between her fingers.
"Christmas card picture!" she suddenly blurted out, startling both of us out of our respose and laughing like a maniac. "Chain reaction. Where's that damn photographer when you need him? Probably shooting "Autumn Leaves," or some bunch of kittens playing with balls of yarn, instead of something as beautiful as this. Look at us. Remember those books downstairs, Simon? That was the start of it all, wasn't it?"
The reading contest was coming down to the wire. This was the last week, and the results were supposed to be announced at next Monday's assembly in the auditorium. Then it would be time for the delicious fun of SATs and college applications and all the other things that make senior year the one you should enjoy most but least want to remember. Over the past two weeks I had read The Stranger and The Plague by Camus, depressing but noble, and with a lot of short sentences. I had read The Naked and The Dead, which made me cry when I thought about what might have happened to my dad when he was out there in the war in the South Pacific. For relief I read a book from the public library about a matador in which the author described the bullfighter's mistress as having nipples like pencil erasers. So the relief from this change of focus proved to be less than I had bargained for.
I was reading on the john and at lunch in school and in the middle of the night when nothing was going on but the buzzing in my head. I read Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, which I loved, and Chrome Yellow, which I understood about three words of and gave me a headache that lasted almost a full day. I read 1984 and Animal Farm. Hiroshima, all 116 agonizing pages of it, I read twice.
I found I could function on not too much sleep and that homework became a breeze, because getting it out of the way let me sink myself in another book and stop thinking about this insane situation I was in. I read The Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Indian text about a mythical war involving Krishna, who becomes Vishnu, and the Lord Arjuna. "All is clouded by desire," Arjuna said. I found out that in their mythology the key players had many arms and legs and swords and so forth. I started wishing that I had an armory of dicks, lined up in the drawer like a set of Stanley tools, Phillips head for Monday, four inch, six inch, eight inch (!!) and the little stubby one you hold in your palm and work up from underneath with--long and thin is easy in, Russell told me his dad said to him once, but short and thick will do the trick.
My mother said she was worried my reading would befog my brain even further and distract me from schoolwork. And not leave enough time for household chores. She knocked at my door the next evening before dinner.
"Simon? Are you in there? Could you come and help me please?"
No command is stronger than a mild, polite request from your mother.
"What do you need, Mom? Hold on a minute." Sinclair Lewis was eating me alive. His books only told you what you knew already and they took forever. Nobel Prize? Was I missing something? I heaved myself up off the bed and swung the door open.
"Mom! Were you looking for me?"
"In the basement, Simon!"
I knew what that meant. Sheet time. She had her iron, her laundry style special sit-down ironer with the rotating arm that she put sheets, pillowcases and my dad's and my shirts around and through before she touched them up with the hand iron. The basement was damp and close, but there was some light, from the door and from the half size casement windows set in cutouts below ground level, half moons with aluminum corrugation holding back the soil and lined with gravel. Leaf catchers as I always thought of them. Another one of my jobs.
The wicker basket was on the floor next to the ping pong table, which was covered with linens and bedclothes. She was sorting, tossing with both hands, making little piles out of big ones, separating the tasks.
"Mom. Hey. What's up? What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to stop screwing Aunt Helen, first and foremost. And I want you to help me stretch these sheets and tablecloths so when I iron them it won't take me the rest of my life. Grab those pillowcases there. Let's start with them."
"Mom! What are you talking about?"
"You know very well what I'm talking about, young man. Am I blind? Do I fail to notice certain things? Was I born yesterday? I am not, I do not, and I was not. Does that suffice for your answer?"
"Mom! Stop it!"
"You stop it, sir. At the earliest opportunity. Tom is gone, and I have to stand in his place. With a great deal more awareness and stewardship than he ever exercises for himself!"
She laughed. A fierce laugh. A warrior's wife's laugh.
"Do you know something, Simon? You draw attention and you are completely unaware of it. You are beautiful and smart and very sweet. You have a wonderful heart. Your father and I are very, very proud of you. We also pay close attention to you, because you are so precious to us. You, meanwhile, walk through your life, strolling into trees like they weren't there, carrying your music and some sorts of ideas from all those books with you like they were a suit of armor. They are not. No good can come of this."
As she spoke those words I fell into the familiar routine, gathering up and folding the small linens, stacking them by color and size as she did the same, and gathering and smoothing the sheets. We finished that part of the operation and went on to the next. There was nothing more I could say, just do the work in front of me. We held every sheet at its corners and we stretched them, back and forth along each side, setting our strength against each other, leaning back on our heels with clenched biceps, fierce and determined, then the two sides at the same time, to stretch the fibers back to where they had been before the dryer shrank and wrinkled them. Then crosswise, first right against right, then left across left. You had to be thorough. She kept looking at me to see if I would say something or betray anything with a look, but I was solid and blank. Finally she started up again.
"I don't want to embarrass you, Simon, but here's another piece of truth for you. I kissed Uncle Tom last Friday night. Right down here in this room. For a long, long time. We just ran into each other down here by accident and it happened. A French kiss as you call it, although when I was young we called them soul kisses. I love the man. He makes my heart dance and sing. I will always love him. Almost like the way I love you.
"But I love your father first and foremost. My life is a testament to that. All these moves, all this following him from place to place, setting up a new home without him and then taking it apart and shipping it to the next place, also without him because he's already there on his new assignment. So don't mistake yourself in that area. I do love your father. And I've never slept with Tom." She set her body to pull against me as we did the last sheet. I leaned back on my heels to counter her weight. I was enough bigger now than she was that I had to be a little careful not to pull her over and make her lose her balance.
"I will always stand by your dad. He knows that and I'm glad he does. But life is life."
"What is that supposed to mean, Mom?"
"The door opens, Simon, and then it closes. Like it did for Tom and me the other night. If it doesn't close on its own, we need to close it ourselves and go back to the lives we have chosen to live and that have been chosen for us. We're all human, Simon, including you. We accept necessity. You will too. It's not so bad. Who's having more fun right now than us?" She popped the sheet one last time, making it snap up under my chin to emphasize her point and smiling, although her smile was a little on the tight side, to say the least.
"And I will say nothing about this to your father. But I want you to think about what I'm saying, and act on it immediately."
Was this my mom? I couldn't believe the stuff I was hearing. Her and Uncle Tom? I always felt something--more than something. But what was some kissing during a going away party, if you were honest with yourself and knew where you stood? I hoped he had gotten a good feel. My mother was built, if a little roly poly. She could still turn heads. I couldn't believe this was what I was finding myself thinking. Or that she knew about Aunt Helen.
"And one other thing, Simon." She started carrying the linens over to the folding aluminum table next to the ironer. "Whatever you do, don't hurt Marjorie. She's a lovely girl and she doesn't deserve that. See the pearl set before you and know its worth. Be your loving self. That's all I ask."
"You know what I liked best about the party?"
It was late and Marjorie and I were talking on the phone. In my parents house this wasn't easy, since there was only one phone, with a short cord, and it sat on a table with a chair next to it at the corner where the living room and the dining room met. Not exactly privacy at its most private. You had to sit in a knees-up fetal position and protect the mouthpiece so you could speak just loud enough to be heard on the phone but not otherwise, or else lie down under the chair and phone table with your feet sticking out and pray nobody tripped over them while you were too deep into some soul to soul exchange to be alert to the parental presence.
"What did you like the most?"
"I liked your father singing with those other guys, just before we left. The name of the group and the names they used. And the songs, of course."
"You mean the baseball names?" I had been around this scene so long that I didn't even pay attention to that part any more, although it was actually pretty funny when you thought about it.
"Is that what they were?"
"Yeah. They call themselves 'The Applings.' After Luke Appling. Old Aches and Pains' was his nickname. Hall of Famer. He holds the record for consecutive pitches fouled off. Eighteen."
"But those weren't the names I heard." Her voice was soft and creamy. It was like eating ice cream to listen to her.
"No. You probably mean Banana Nose Zeke Bonura. That's my dad's name. He says Zeke had a very high fielding percentage at first base because he never moved his feet, so he almost never made an error. The other names are Losing Pitcher Mulcahy, the real one pitched in Philadelphia, of course, Cal McLish--Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish--holds the record for most home runs on consecutive pitches, four, and his nickname is Buster--he's still pitching--and Bobo Newsome, whose nickname was Buck—he threw a no-hitter the first game he pitched and ended up with a short career and a losing record. If your name was Bobo you'd need a nickname too. Uncle Tom is Buster."
"Simon, that's so funny! At my house the get-togethers turn into discussions about what Moby Dick really represents, you can imagine how much interesting that is, and whether Sinclair Lewis was really a novelist of the first rank, and boring stuff like that. My father's colleagues from Georgetown, but the family occasions aren't much different."
"He wasn't."
"Wasn't what?"
"First rate. Sinclair Lewis. He just said things everybody knew and didn't want to talk about. Anybody can do that. Kids do it all the time. It was a good thing, probably though, what he did. It just didn't take much in the way of genius." I wondered what she was wearing. "What are you wearing now?"
"My nightgown, actually. Since you ask. What about you?"
"Gym shorts and a T shirt. Pretty exciting, huh? I like your outfit better. Are you wearing panties?"
"Simon! No. I'm wearing nothing at all underneath my nightgown, which is flannel and long sleeved and has pink and blue bunnies on it and buttons up to the neck."
"But it's open at the bottom. That's what I like about it most, except for the bunnies. I would like to push that nightgown up and kiss you in all sorts of ways." I was getting too hot. At this rate I'd be sneaking out in the middle of the night and getting shot by Aunt Helen for a burglar or my mother for violating her Rules of Engagement. That would be cute. "You didn't like the dancing we did in the kitchen?"
"Of course I did. I loved it." God, her voice. I wanted to rub it all over myself and get a hard-on eight feet long and launch my payload all the way to West Virginia.
"You're a great dancer," she said, more cheerful than sexy. "I wish we'd had more chance to dance. You know how much I love to. The way you can become the music when it works right. I don't know anything else like that, in my experience anyway. But you were on the dishwasher detail and the beer and soda detail and the ice detail, so how was a person going to dance with her boyfriend in the face of all those details."
Ice detail. "I couldn't really dance in front of my parents and their friends. It would have been too embarrassing. Either we would have had to act like them or they would have started acting like us. Both bad results. Hey! There's a dance Friday night at the CYO. What if I make it up to you then? Why don't we do that instead of going to the movies?"
"Great! Yes, I do know. That sounds terrific. Listen, Simon, I have to go. My dad just came through the den again and cleared his throat. That's my signal. I'll see you in school tomorrow. Sweet dreams, lover boy."
"You too, most gorgeous girl. Hope I'm in them. You know you'll be in mine."
What was nice was how much I meant what I said, and the smile I could feel on my face when I said it. What was nicer was the beautiful giggle I heard just before she hung up.
"Noise during sex--very, very important. Response, communication, affirmation. RCA. If you give RCA, you become the Victor." Aunt Helen was more philosophical than usual today. Our threesome the other day was a hard act to follow, so to speak. Or maybe she was testy because her period was coming on. Without Uncle Tom's potential unexpected homecomings as a backdrop to our activities, some of the excitement seemed to have leaked out of this situation. We'd had sex in just about every square inch of the house. The bed was the best, after all that, and that's where we were today. I let one arm hang over the side and scratched Dukie's ears while I listened to her. I knew my mom was right, and she was certainly more of a force to be reckoned with even than the Uncle Tom of my worst nightmares, but when you're eighteen you're eighteen all the way through.
"And then she becomes the Victrola, is that it?" She swung a pillow at me when I said that, then pulled it up against her breasts and wrapped her arms around it and rolled onto her stomach, wiggling her hips to get comfortable. I had been looking at those lovely pleasure mounds, still amazed at the way the nipples pointed away from each other in a sort of wall-eyed fashion because of the curvature of her rib cage. Before I saw a pair of naked boobs I thought they would point straight ahead, and I remember how mad Dorothy got when I started giggling after she let me see hers. I was laughing at myself and how little I knew, but it certainly didn't come across that way. It took another two weeks for her to let me see them again after that. She made me suffer. It's hard-wired in them, believe me.
"Sugar, some day that smart mouth of yours is going to get you into trouble. Think before you speak. No, of course she's not the Victrola, although that's almost funny, honey. Don't start with me about high fidelity, either. She, me, is your mirror image. We all know that we're opposites of each other, men and women, but I like the mirror as a way of understanding it. Because we all think we look like we do in the mirror, but the mirror has it backwards. You see yourself in a photograph and you think it's not a good likeness because you spent all your life staring into the mirror to see how you look. So you know yourself in a way that's untrue. And no matter how hard you look at a woman, or into a woman's mind, you're going to get it backwards somehow and not know it. If you're smart you might remember that fact from time to time when you're feeling really confused, which is why I'm telling you this now. Someday my idea will come in handy and you'll find yourself thanking me."
"I'm thanking you already," I said, trying to be solemn and hit the same tone she was using. What was all this about? I reached over to get a squeeze of her butt but she swatted my hand away.
"Not so fast. Listen to me, young man. You better believe you should be thanking me, with all I've given you and taught you. You're a wonderful, wonderful lover, Simon. You're a quick learner and you have a sweet touch and I especially like the way you can come twice without pulling out, among other things. You don't know how exciting that is. What I'm giving you here is just the finishing touches."
"What do you mean?" I said, sitting up. She rolled over again and sat up too, taking my hand and holding it up against her breastbone. I had never seen her look quite like this.
"Now, don't act surprised, Simon. You must have known that it would come to this. It had to, one way and another with everything that we have to deal with here. The other day, that thing with Matt, that was my present to you. I've done that with Tom, a couple of times, although never like we did it Monday. He knows he can't take care of my needs all by himself, but I never told him about you or rubbed anything else in his face. I know he knows he's lucky to have someone as good looking and hot as I am, to be honest, and I love him for all his sweetness and his wonderful sense of humor.
"But anyway, that's one of the things about sex--every time is different. Around the world, I read somewhere, people have sex about a fifty million times a day. And there's almost a quarter of a million cases of venereal disease transmitted every day too, so be careful where you go putting that busy thing of yours.
"There's 86,400 seconds in a day, and if the average sex act lasts five minutes, that means at any given moment there's about half a million people doing just what you're doing, letting their juice loose, screwing their brains out. Makes you kind of humble, doesn't it? Puts it in a different perspective. I did the arithmetic after I read something in a book about all this, just to get a feel for it. I don't know that it made any difference in my life, but somehow I felt better knowing."
"So, why are you telling me this?" I asked. "What's this all about? We have sex ed in school, although it's pretty dumb. But why? Does this have anything to do with my mother?"
"No, Simon, of course not. This is me talking, not your mother." I could see she hadn't understood my question, but I could also see how much of a good thing that was. I had almost blown it. Not that I felt all that much better on that account.
"Simon, honey." She was looking at me intently, as if trying to persuade me with her eyes if she couldn't manage it with her words. "That thing with Matt, like I say, that was a special present to a special person. But the world turns and things change. You're going to leave me. I can feel it. I've been feeling it for some time now. I knew it that afternoon you came over and said the mower was broken. You went and saw Marjorie that afternoon, didn't you?"
I nodded my head, too sheepish to say anything. How did she know?
"Well, everything since has been built on what I felt coming from you then. The inevitability. That's why I wanted to get you into those rosebushes by your house, although being a little bit drunk must surely have had something to do with it too. But that afternoon down in the rec room, I just knew it in the marrow of my bones. One minute you were all over me. Couldn't get enough, couldn't spend enough time with me. Then all of a sudden it's blow and go. I don't know what it was in particular, Simon, but you gave me a chill when I touched you that day, and so I listened to my heart and then I knew."
"Helen..." I felt so strange. I didn't know what to call her, exactly. Aunt Helen didn't seem right and Helen didn't either. I realized I had no term of endearment for her, no pet name, like the way she was always calling me sugar and honey and my little pumpkin pie. Saying her name alone made me feel a generation older, and calling her Aunt Helen just felt ridiculous. It was like when you stop saying Mommy and Daddy to your parents because you don't want to be a little kid any more. The new names make you self-conscious but you know you can't go back to the old ones because they don't fit anymore.
"Does this mean we can't get together like this anymore?" My penis had to get a word in, of course. It wouldn't have been an honest conversation if that department hadn't been heard from. And I wanted this to be honest. I wanted to match the honesty she was showing me.
"That's exactly what I'm saying. It's time for us both to move on. Make a clean break and close and seal the record in this case. Hey, listen. If we try to keep it open it will only mess things up, and this has been so beautiful--it really has, Simon--you're very dear to my heart and always will be, and I will always be your friend and be here for you if you need me. But no more pussy from this girl. You know on naval cruises when the fleet goes around to the different ports they have a thing called the PCOD? It stands for "pussy cut off date," and it's so anyone who has picked up a case of something he wouldn't want to bring back to his wife will have time for the symptoms to show up and get himself some penicillin to clear it up. This is your PCOD, sugar plum. So love me one last time and love me sweet and hard, like you always do."
I could see her face twist up and it broke my heart. I sat there like a ventriloquist's dummy, waiting for her to put some words in my mouth to respond to hers. Instead she took my hand and cupped it around her breast and slid her body against mine. I couldn't see her face anymore, just hear the sound of her voice next to my ear.
"I don't want any tears," she said quietly. "I want you to turn me inside out. Do me good, Simon, give it all you've got. Do me as good as you can. Thrash your cock inside me. I want a love-up to remember."
My dad offered me a Pep-O-Mint Lifesaver. He was trying to give up cigarettes for the nineteenth time. Whenever he did, he started in with either Doublemint gum or Lifesavers. I hate Doublemint. It's too strong and to me it has a nasty metallic taste, like chewing the tinfoil wrapper. We had finished a quick dinner and were driving over to hit some golf balls at the school, work on our short irons. Hitting on the football field was good because of the yardage markers. We had a shag bag of about two hundred balls and we would set up targets and keep score and the loser would have to buy the winner a hot fudge sundae or a banana split at Gifford's ice cream parlor down on Lee Highway. The competition was pretty fierce.
"So let me see you do some driving left handed," he said as we came to the stop sign at the end of our block. I was behind the wheel. Aunt Helen was out front pruning some bushes. I beeped and she waved.
"Why is that, Dad?" He was always coming up with something weird like this.
"Well, here's the thing, Simon. You're getting to an age where the girl in your life, I guess it's Marjorie now, will start sitting up next to you when you're out with her. That means that you'll be wanting to put your arm around her while you're cruising along. That's all to the good. I'm all for that. But to take full advantage of the situation, you're going to need to be driving left handed. So my thought is that you might as well practice without the distraction of a young lovely sitting next to you. The last thing I want is for you to end up in an accident because your dick gets in the way of your driving. Who knows? If you get good enough at it, you might even be able to cop a feel while you're at the wheel, if you know what I mean." He gave me an "us guys are in this thing together" smile when I glanced over at him. I winked and smiled back. The fact that this was my dad's idea of sex education made me love him even more.
Good old Dad. He had his own world and I was glad for him. It meant less pressure on me. Mom clued him in on whatever he really needed to know and he was happy to have it that way. So was I. Sometimes, it really is the thought that counts.
"Thanks, Dad," I said. We turned into the driveway of the school and listened to the loose gravel crunch on top of the blacktop. How long ago was it that I was riding my bike to school and doing deliberate spin-outs on that gravel with my friends, seeing who could orchestrate the most spectacular crash.
"Yeah, that's good advice," I continued as we unloaded the clubs from the trunk. As the junior member, it was my job to carry the shag bag while he toted the targets he had made for this exercise. "Maybe if I follow through on this, I can work my way into some serious nookie, what do you think? Ha, ha, ha. Oh, also. I've been meaning to ask you. Do you think the Redskins have a chance to go all the way this year or not? Does this coach know what he's doing?"
The common wisdom held that the reason the priests held the CYO dances on the first Friday night of every month was so they could get the kids coming into confession the next day, because you were expected to take communion on that Sunday, and so they would find out what had gone on and get their own jollies from what they heard. When I was going with Dorothy I asked her how she dealt with confessing what we were doing with each other when we went out parking after the dances. She told me she didn't confess any of those things.
"How can you not?" I asked. "The church says French kissing and feeling up and hand jobs and the kind of stuff we're doing are all mortal sins. You go to Hell and never come out."
"Well, I don't confess it," she said, holding up her head to show how guiltless she felt. "I just don't see how it can be wrong when we feel the way we do about each other." It was my earliest insight into the way the female brain processes logic in the context of sex. That was all the talking we ever needed to do on that subject. I found her advice worked for me just great.
Tonight Marjorie had her hair piled up on her head and with a row of bangs across her forehead. The nape of her neck glistened as she got into the car, the light reflecting off the fuzz that was usually hidden.
"Well, don't you look mah-velous," I said as I walked in the door and we kissed lightly. I knew better than to mess up her lipstick.
"I'm going out with my guy," she said with a smile. "I'm going dancing with my guy." She did a twirl to show off how her dress flared out and then stamped her feet in rhythm like a flamenco dancer, but softly. I thought, not for the first or last time, how fabulous she looked and how lucky I was. I saw that she had no stockings on. By the end of the night I had powerful hopes of getting even luckier. I had stolen two of my Dad's condoms out of his nightstand. Even if he missed them I could tell him I borrowed them for Russell and offer to pay him back. I thought if I put both of them on maybe Marjorie would change her mind. I drove to the church hall left handed, but without copping a feel.
You could sit on the front rim of the stage at the far end of our dance space--it was a gym for the elementary school--and talk and watch the other dancers. These were like the ringside seats on the action, and you had to stake your place out early, which we did. Tonight we had a DJ who liked cha cha cha much more than I did. When you dance fast, you can swoop and twirl and move around. When you dance slow, it's between you and your conscience whether your feet ever move at all. The cha cha cha is totally hands off and phony smiles as you spin pass your partner counting one, two, one two three and trying not to fall over yourself or her. After the first couple of sets we took a breather and sat, dangling our legs over the edge.
"Do you love me?" These were the words I thought I heard Marjorie say after we had sat there holding hands and grooving on the music for a few minutes. My heart froze. I had never told anyone but my parents that I loved them, and my grandparents. Marjorie was wonderful in every way. She was ideal, in my experience, my limited experience. She was always fun to be with, she was hot and smart, she was a wonderful dancer and she had a laugh that made me laugh. I had never thought of the question of love, somehow. Just that when I was with her everything was perfect, or if it wasn't it was usually my fault, and funny in any event when we worked it out. She came from a very good family. I also wanted to have sex with her with every cell of my being, and I knew how good it would be when we got there.
"Yes," I said. "I do. You don't even know how much. And you?"
"I love me too," she said, "and I love you too, too." She snuggled against me, the strength and softness of her body, the smell of her, the drift of her hair. I had to reach around and kiss her. It was a moment that required acknowledgement. We kissed for all we were worth, a minute or more, lost to the world. When we came out, the kids on the floor were standing there looking at us. No one was moving a muscle. I realized that everyone was clear it must have been a soul kiss, and I knew my hand had strayed south of her waist, by a little, during what had gone on. Two mortal sins. Straight to hell. Then they let out some whistles and a little mock applause.
"Where or When" by Dion and the Belmonts and Rodgers and Hart came on:
"It seems we've stood and talked like this before.
We looked at each other in the same way then
But I can't remember where or when.
The clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then
But I can't remember where or when.
Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before and loved before
But who knows where or when."
I helped her down from the stage onto the dance floor. It was a slow, dreamy beat. We moved around the floor like the winners of a contest, letting the others make way.
"I'm glad you asked," I whispered, tucking my mouth next to her ear and pulling her even closer to me.
"So am I, Simon. I love you like crazy, and I know you love me, although a person would be hard pressed to know it from anything you say. I just had to know."
"What do you mean?"
"For certain reasons. You, you're always very cool, except when sex is on the agenda. Then you get to be a regular Romeo, but guys will say anything at that point." She pushed her pubic bone against mine, I thought, as we made a turn. "Any girl with half a brain knows better than to believe a guy when he has his hand in your bra. Any guy. A transformation takes place." She giggled. "The blood leaves the brain and migrates to primitive territory. New Guinea."
"I'm your guinea," I said. "And I'm an innie. How do you know so much? I am crazy about you, you know. I am." The record had ended. After the way the other kids had looked like they were playing a game of Statues in response to our kiss, there was no way in the world I was going to stick around in that room right now. For all I could tell, someone had run off to rat on us to the priest and he would be all over me with his pitchfork and holy water before I knew what hit me.
"Let's go outside, okay?" Her hand in mine felt like Fort Knox. I knew I had the key and the password.
"Why don't we? Yes."
"Well, hold onto your horses," I said. "In a couple of minutes either the kids will be coming out to elect me the new pope or the priests will be here to burn us at the stake." We walked out the front door of the school and crossed onto the island in the middle of the circular drive in front of the church.
"What do you mean?" she asked. "Because of the way we were dancing?"
"No, because of the way we were kissing." I explained the tongue rule and the below the waist rule to her. "And there's lots more rules," I said, "which I won't bore you with."
"I think we should make our own rules, for ourselves. We know what we're doing and what's right and what's wrong," she said. I knew now more than ever that this was love. The lights from the porch of the church and the parking lot played off her hair and her shoulders. The air was filled with vapors from the stand of blue spruce planted along the far edge of the church property to shield it from the road. We stood face to face and kissed again. After a minute I felt something wet on my cheek and pulled back to see the tears on her face.
"Oh, Simon, I'm so happy. You make me so happy. I love you. I want to say it again. I love you. You're the most fun person I could ever imagine. And the sweetest and the sexiest. I want to do everything with you. You know when I knew you were special for me?"
"No, when?"
"That time you picked me up for the football game. You came to the door instead of sitting in the car and honking, and you smiled when you saw me and told me how nice I looked, and when you looked at me, you were looking me in the eye, not checking me out, checking my bod. And I thought what a nice boy he is, and what a great smile."
"Don't think I wasn't checking you out, too." I said, wondering how I could smile now without feeling completely self-conscious and deciding it didn't matter.
"Oh, I know, but you weren't completely obvious about it, like most guys are. That's what I mean." We stood there looking at each other, nothing else to say, it seemed.
"What do you think about the dance?" I asked. I watched her for a moment, watched her breathe. I loved the way she breathed.
"I guess we've danced enough," she said. "We'll have other chances. Lots of them, I think."
We walked toward the car, reaching for each other's hand, letting our fingers twine loosely when they connected.
We got in the car and looked at each other again. Face to face, hand in hand, solemn and smiling at the same time.
"I know a place we can go."
"What?"
"My uncle left yesterday for two weeks in London. He lives a couple of miles from us, over by Tyson's Corners. We could be alone there together and no one would bother us. I have the keys."
I caught my breath and tried to slow down my heart enough so I could find some words to say.
"Which way?" was what finally came out of my mouth.
The silence lasted about a minute. I turned on the ignition and pulled down the drive onto the road. She punched the front of my shoulder and scrunched up against me on the seat. Then she started to giggle again.
"Which way! Which way! He can't wait to get it! He can't wa-ait to get it, this young man. Nothing about how smart this girl is, or how lucky he is to end up with someone so prime. No, no, no, no, no. All he can think of is 'which way,' and how quick, can we get there. Rocket in the pocket, ready for the countdown. He can't wait. Not hardly, he can't." She leaned over and ran her tongue in and around my ear, slowly, so slowly that I could feel General Patton snap, inch by inch by inch, to strict attention, like the fine soldier he was--like it was a time lapse sequence in one of those Disney movies about the way flowers open or turtles hatch from eggs. For a moment she stopped licking.
"Well, hey, let me tell you something, lover," she whispered, soft and close, her voice like a choir of dirty minded alto seraphim, "neither can I. Neither can I."
I was walking on air--turning cartwheels in the air is more like it, when I walked into school Monday morning. I was in love and in lust at the same time, top to bottom, side to side. I picked Marjorie up after her church on Sunday and we went out to Great Falls Park with a little picnic. It was amazing what you could pull off in a meadow at the edge of some woods in the open air--but then again what people manage to get away with in life is one of the things that consistently amazes me, even if it's a rule I try not to live by all that much of the time. I was one happy guy. Happy, happy guy.
The deadline for submissions to the contest was 9 a.m. They were supposed to announce the winners as part of an assembly that afternoon when all the lunch periods were over with. Despite being able to think about almost nothing else besides Marjorie, and how lucky I was and what it was like to be in love, and beside talking to her on the phone for about four hours Sunday night, I had read two more books. Added to the three I hadn't turned in reports on gave me five to add to my final total. Deliriously happy and totally crosseyed with exhaustion.
Miss Dexter was waiting outside the library by the box where the cards went in. She said nothing--just looked at me sort of the way an owl eyes a rabbit in an open field and crooked her finger while waggling her head in the direction of her office. She took the index cards out of my hand and riffled through them as she led me inside, reading the names of the books and my capsule reviews.
"Catcher in the Rye, good. 'Great kid, very funny but also very sad. I was never bored.' I couldn't have said it better myself. Dostoevsky's The Gambler. 'A man with gambling obsessions goes to a German spa and loses and gets in trouble.' Quite true. You didn't notice it was funny, by any chance? It is. Quite. In a manic way consistent with the gambling obsession. But nobody thinks Dostoevsky's supposed to be funny, so almost no one catches how the humor works to underscore the mania. Read it again in ten or twenty years. You'll enjoy it just as much and appreciate it more. Love Without Fear. That's a sex manual of sorts, isn't it? Well, why not. You can never know too much on that subject." She glanced at the other two cards without comment as she sat down and gestured for me to take the chair across from her.
"Well, this represents a good haul and makes for a good finish, Simon. Congratulations. You really have held up your end of the bargain. For once in your career here you took something seriously and it looks like it's produced excellent results." Like many fat people, she was breathing hard from the effort of breathing. It was humid, unusually warm for November. She took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped her face, although she did it in the most ladylike way imaginable. I was impressed. I wondered if she farted in melodies, like those doorbell chimes some people had. Bing bong, bing bong. Get a hold of yourself, Sime. No stray unacceptable thoughts. Keep a straight face.
"We have an interesting situation here, Simon," she said, leaning forward toward me with just a suggestion of conspiracy surrounding her shoulders. "We have winners for the two top prizes. Quality and quantity. Debra and Laurie."
"The twins." I said. "Interesting."
"Isn't it just. And more than a little suspect, I think, as it will appear to the student body. Debra actually read more good books than you did while Laurie, if we are to take their entries at face value, managed to read more good and bad books than you, mostly bad. Now, don't let's get started again on that hobby horse of yours about there being no such thing as good and bad books." She held her hand up in front of me like a crossing guard stopping a presidential convoy to let some first graders cross the road, then stopped to take a sip of coffee from the mug that sat on her desk blotter. "In any event it is not, not, the sort of dimension you want to inject into a contest involving intellect and the love of learning."
"Not unless you want to start a cribbing contest to see who can borrow the most work from other people without getting nailed for it," I responded.
"See, there, Simon, you have it exactly. I suppose that Machiavelli is coming in handy sooner than you thought." I nodded and said I guessed so. Where was this going? She sat there and looked at me for a minute.
"So I've talked to our principal Mr. Hannah and we've agreed on a solution. And I must say your showing up before the deadline on the last day with five more books under your belt demonstrates the wisdom of our decision, even if one of them was the Uncle Remus tales."
Bre'r Fox he don't say nothing, I thought. Bre'r Fox, he just lay low.
"So we're awarding the first prize to you, Simon. The twins will share a second prize, two second prizes, both very nice, identical of course. In retrospect, creating separate categories for quantity and quality was not a well considered approach. It requires too many subjective judgments, as you pointed out to me in your own inimitable way when we discussed your addiction to detective novels."
She swung back and forth on the swivel of her chair, which made creaking noises as it bore her weight from side to side. I had always avoided Miss Dexter because she had a reputation for being preachy and long winded and I hate to be in groups where everybody has to sit around and adore the whatever as a condition of being permitted to remain alive. But one on one she was pretty okay, and you could see how smart she really was and how much she loved and lived her job, lived it all the way through.
"There's one other piece of news I want to tell you, Simon, just because I need to tell someone. Dave Vincent and Caroline Murphy were married over the weekend, down in South Carolina. It seems she's several months pregnant. He always was very mature for his age, and I guess that's true in more ways than one. Another teacher told me. It will come out soon enough, I suppose. I hope it doesn't distract the football team. This is our chance to go undefeated. It's a good thing the team had a bye this weekend. But I just had to tell someone else--the news is boiling inside me. Please keep it to yourself, if you would be so kind. It will be around the school in no time, I'm sure, but I don't want anyone ever to say that I am one to spread rumors."
"Of course not," I said. "That's something else, Miss Dexter-! About Miss Murphy and Dave! Married. Wow! Hey, don't you think the twins will feel jobbed though, with the book contest ending like this? Is it really fair? I'm sure they put in a lot of work." I mean, what did I care about first prize? My life was going just swell, the best ever.
"It's very good of you to ask," she said. "We still make the rules here, Simon, we of the administration, and your reaction about the twins confirmed my own feelings as well as, I'm sure, the feelings of the entire student body if they heard this. They have each other, of course, the twins, and that's more than the rest of us non-twins can say. And they do receive prizes, of which there are only three. By the way, were you ever clear in your own mind, Simon, about which prize it was that you were aiming at?"
"I think quality and quantity are both good things," I said, thinking back over this last couple of months and all the quantity and quality I had encountered, in and out of my clothes, and what wonderful women, in such different ways, I had been fortunate enough to get close to and learn from and enjoy life with, even including Mom and Miss Dexter, and how much each one of them had given me.
"I guess quantity and quality are both important, in different ways," I said, babbling along and having no clue what I was trying to get at in the way of a point. "What it boiled down to was that after the beginning, when I was playing catch-up, I read whatever I wanted to. I read what turned me on and held my interest. That kept me going without too much problem, even with everything else I had to deal with, schoolwork and so on."
She smiled and nodded and waved me permission to leave. "Well done, Simon. See you at two thirty, then. Make sure you practice acting surprised. Pardon me if I don't see you to the door. I have to finish my tallies and make it all come out according to plan."
On the way up to class I imagined the assembly that afternoon--me standing between the twins, looking out to see Marjorie's shining, beautiful, happy, non-virginal face, and blowing her just enough of a kiss to let her know I loved her and not be too corny about it. I also imagined locating Russell and Murray in the crowd and giving a secret, slightly rude, sign to them and to Egan and Oz while I was saying thank you to Mr. Hannah and Miss Dexter. I could see it--holding my hands together with my arms hanging down in front of me, acting a little nervous, slowly curling the fingers of my left hand around my right forefingers and twisting them against each other while I spoke, to let those boys know I had finally scored with the most beautiful, wonderful girl in the world, and to bust them good with the way I gave them the news. My secret, our secret, would be safe with them, the same way their secrets were with me. Aunt Helen would be there in spirit, of course--absolutely, without question. And I would tell her so the next time I saw her. She would always be there for me, in my memory, in my heart. In all the best ways and for more than all the right reasons.
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Beyond that, I owe a debt of thanks beyond measure to my biggest supporter, biggest in every way, Miss Dexter, and in a sense to high school librarians everywhere. Because if she hadn't made me read all those books, and kept me focused on the balance between quantity and quality, I would never have been in a position to write this one. But most of all to Mom, with all the love in the world.
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Page created: November 1, 2009