“It’s all right with me,” he said.
“What is the point, Lois?” Barbara was at the edge of her seat.
“What I plan to show you is that patterns of behavior that are reinforced by society can be changed, even totally reversed.”
“I believe you, I believe you,” Barbara said. “Put your shirt back on.”
“I’m not revealing anything that Bernie hasn’t seen before,” Lois said, looking directly at Bernie. She leaned back in her seat, her left arm over the top of the chair, her right elbow resting on the chair arm. Her posture pulled her breasts tighter, the nipples pressing upward. Bernie leaned forward. His mouth watered. When he licked his lips, Barbara automatically licked hers.
“It still isn’t right, Lois.”
“And I know exactly what Bernie has between his legs. I know how his penis is pressing against his underwear right now, pushing into an erection.”
“Lois! I don’t believe this,” Barbara said and looked down at the floor. She kept shaking her head.
“But she’s right,” Bernie said, his smile returning.
“Oh, God!”
“I mean, our bodies are common. Some of us are smaller or bigger, fatter or thinner, but there’s nothing unique about any of us. We all are having the same predictable reactions here. I’m sure your nipples are hard and erect, Barbara.” Bernie turned to her as though he expected her nipples to be clearly outlined against her blouse. Barbara put her head in her hands and looked down between her legs.
“Oh, Lois.”
“Well, aren’t they?”
“Sure they are,” Bernie said quickly. He wasn’t sure what Lois was intending, but he liked the direction of the conversation and he feared that Barbara’s hesitation might bring everything to an end.
“You shut up, Bernie Rosen. You don’t know anything about me or my body.”
“Oh, no?” Bernie said, his voice rising.
“Barbara, for crying out loud! I thought you were going to be adult about this. I thought you were interested,” Lois said. She glared at Barbara, who raised her head slowly and faced Lois as though she were coming under a spell. “I mean, if Bernie’s willing to be a participant …” Lois added, turning to him.
“I am, I am.”
“After all, it’s just an experiment.”
“An experiment?” Bernie said, disappointment clearly in his voice. “How do you mean?”
“An experiment in behavior—physiological, psychological, and sociological. Our social mores are a product of all three.”
Bernie smirked. Somehow this girl was making an exciting event seem educational. Despite her nudity, he felt his erection begin to wane. He was beginning to lose interest. And besides, there was nothing really attractive about her. The way her rib cage protruded, that little line of hair running down her chest, the morbid whiteness of her skin with those little blue veins crisscrossing everywhere …
“What do we have to do?” Barbara asked. The note of hysteria in her voice was now absent. She swallowed hard.
“Well, first I’d like us all to just get completely naked,” Lois said, standing up again and unbuckling her jeans.
“Completely? All of us?” She looked at Bernie, who looked lost now.
“Naked?” he said. This idea revived his excitement. “Well, well, well.” He rubbed his hands together and widened his eyes. Barbara bit her lower lip and then sent her tongue out over it.
“If we do it quickly, we won’t think so much about it, right, Bernie?”
“What? Yeah, sure,” he said. He stood up and took his shirt off roughly, practically tearing the collar. Lois stepped out of her jeans and slipped off her panties. She hung them over the corner of the vanity chair but left the jeans on the floor. Bernie stared at her pocket of pubic hair and then worked frantically at his own belt buckle. Barbara stood up but stepped back as though she were thinking of a retreat.
Bernie slid his pants down and then goose-stepped out of them, while Barbara simply fingered the top two buttons of her blouse. Bernie’s erection had created a large bulge in his briefs. For a few moments Barbara could do nothing but stare at it; and when he peeled off his underwear and his penis snapped out from under the descending garment, she was fascinated by the thickness of the stem of his prick.
Lois, on the other hand, was all business. She was seated again, her legs crossed, a pad of paper in her hands. Her posture and position, combined with Barbara’s hesitation and failure to take off even a sock, suddenly made Bernie feel stupid. He sat down quickly and crossed his legs to hide his pulsating erection, but the tip of it peeked up and over like a tiny animal, frightened but curious.
“Will you hurry up, Barbara,” Lois commanded.
“But what are we going to do?”
“This has to be done step by step,” Lois replied in an uncharacteristically patient tone of voice. “If I describe everything at once, it will lose its validity.”
“I don’t think I want to do this.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Barbara! You’re not being fair to either Bernie or me now. We thought you were with us.”
“Yeah,” Bernie added, still quite unsure what it was he had agreed to do. “It’s unfair.”
“Well …” She undid three blouse buttons and then turned quickly to Bernie. “If you say anything about this to anyone …”
“Barbara, we’re all adults. Can’t you try?”
“What am I going to say?” Bernie asked. He raised his shoulders for emphasis. “I don’t even know what’s going on.” Bernie’s sincere innocence encouraged Barbara and she took her blouse off and unzipped her skirt. She stepped out of it and then reached around to unfasten her bra. Her large breasts and heavy shoulders made it difficult.
“Need help?” Bernie asked.
“No, thank you.” The bra was finally undipped. When her breasts fell forward, Bernie’s eyes widened. He uncrossed and crossed his legs, but he couldn’t give his erection the breathing room it needed. Barbara sat down, pulling her panties over her knees and dropping them to her ankles.
“Now what?” she asked, quickly folding her arms over her enormous bosom.
Lois looked up from her pad. Both Bernie and Barbara stared at her, completely attentive, unable to turn away. Her eyes burned with purpose. Her face, white and still, was as magnetic as death.
“We’ve got to get used to one another’s bodies,” she said. “We’ve got to overcome social and behavioral patterns that cause us to have certain predictable responses.”
“I don’t understand,” Bernie said.
“You will.” She was so certain that he believed it. “All right,” she said, “we stand and we walk around each other. We look at each other closely, but we don’t touch and we don’t hide ourselves in any way from one another. Drop your arms to your sides, Barbara,” she commanded sharply. Barbara did so immediately. Bernie tried to swallow but found he couldn’t. Lois stood up and took a step closer to Bernie. He looked up at her, his gaze moving slowly over her bony knees to her pocket of rather thick pubic hair, onto the thin line of it that traced a route to her belly button. “Stand up,” she said.
Bernie did so. His erection was so stiff and thick it began to transmit a slight ache. He wanted to touch it or press it against her, but he was afraid to move an inch closer.
“Get up, Barbara, and keep your hands to your sides.” Barbara did so, but she kept her gaze forward. She bit her lower Up and sent her tongue out over it. “All right, everyone look long and hard at everyone else, but keep your distance,” Lois warned.
Bernie turned to Barbara, who looked up instead of at him. The rolls of fat on her body had layered along her lower back and over her hip bone. Her backside was flattened by the hanging weight. She appeared to have no waist. For a moment Bernie felt more disgust than sexual arousal. He looked back at Lois, but she, being the other physical extreme, offered hardly more erotic interest.
“This is just like a nudist colony, huh?” Bernie said.
“Yes, Bernie, in a way. Nudists have overcome a social pattern. The point is that nudists get along very well without having continual sexual intercourse. Can you imagine how funny it must seem to them to see people pay so much money to get into topless shows?”
“Yeah, I never thought of that.”
“Did you ever wonder why this society has such a need for these sexual perversities?”
“No,” Bernie said. He smirked. He couldn’t believe it, but when Lois spoke, it was as if neither of them were naked before the other. It was only Barbara’s exaggerated breasts that created any sexual excitement at this point. He turned to her again and shook his head in appreciation.
“How long do we have to stand like this?” Barbara asked.
“I think the time has been sufficient. Now, we’ve got to get used to one another like this.”
“When do we experiment?” Bernie asked.
“This is all part of it, but I want to build us to a point where we can turn ourselves on and turn ourselves off.”
“Like a faucet, huh?” Bernie said, smiling.
“In a sense. If you both cooperate, I will bring your sex drives and my sex drives under control. I … we will be able to manipulate them at will; therefore the expression: Turn off and turn on.’ ”
“That’s incredible,” Bernie said, but the more Lois talked, the more his interest began to falter.
“It’s simply a matter of imprinting.”
“I don’t know if I want to do that,” Barbara said.
“Oh, sure you do. It will make you a stronger person. It will make us all stronger. Now, we’ll begin today by doing things we would normally be able to do fully dressed.”
“You mean this is going to take more than a day, this experiment?” Bernie asked.
“Of course. We need reinforcement. You’ll see. Now we’ll sit around and talk, maybe watch a little television, or perhaps play a game of Scrabble.”
“Huh?”
“We want to all relax, Bernie,” Lois said. “That’s most important. Try to block the sexual thoughts from your mind.”
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this.”
“Of course you will,” Lois said with determination. Her eyes were so gripping and her tone of voice so self-assured that he simply nodded. “Let’s all sit down,” she said. Everyone did so. “Now, Bernie,” she said, her face softening, but her posture remaining stiff, “what are your plans for after graduation?”
For a long moment Bernie Rosen felt disoriented. The two young women with him were totally naked. He could reach out and touch nipples, caress breasts, stroke ass. He could bury his face in pubic hair and nibble at vaginal lips—things he had fantasized often. Just recently he had tried to get at Barbara Gilbert’s breasts, and now here she was, naked and beside him, less than an arm’s reach away. Yet Lois Wilson’s tone of voice and commanding presence changed the effect of it all. Was there something wrong with him? He really didn’t understand what was happening, and it was happening so fast.
He was amazed at how his penis had shrunken, retreated into itself. Was he really going to sit naked with two naked girls and act as though they were all dressed? Even though he was disappointed about the immediate rewards, he was fascinated by the event. Lois Wilson opened up whole new possibilities. She was making him question his very sexual being.
“After graduation?” he said. He looked down for a moment, recalling some of the long discussions he had recently had with his father. “I was thinking about going into accounting,” he said.
Lois Wilson permitted herself a half smile. It was going well. The first session was going just as she had planned.
5
Martha Gilbert turned off the floor lamp in the living room and gently shook her husband Joe’s shoulder. He blinked quickly and sat up on the couch.
“Wake up and go to sleep,” she said. He wiped his eyes with his short, stubby-fingered fists and swallowed to rid his mouth of the bitter aftertaste that lingered from the three cups of coffee he had consumed at dinner. His jowls shook. Weighing one hundred ninety pounds at a height of five feet seven, Joe Gilbert was pear-shaped, with soft round shoulders and thin, bony-kneed legs. Ribbons of varicose veins were mapped along his pale white, hairy legs. There were few sights Martha Gilbert detested more than her husband in Bermuda shorts.
They were personifications of contrast: she was tall, thin, with a schoolmarm’s erect posture. Her face wore a tight spinster’s smirk most of the time. She had married Joe Gilbert early in life and he had moved right in to take over her father’s oil-distribution business. It was her sensible, pragmatic decision that they put off having children during their early married years, and Joe Gilbert rarely contested his wife’s decisions.
He had always been easygoing, soft-spoken, chunky, and unambitious. There wasn’t an old-timer in Sandburg who didn’t remark or believe that Joe had fallen into the best thing possible for himself when he married the daughter of one of the area’s most profitable oil distributors. Martha was a strong, domineering, managerial type. It was only natural for her to assume control of the business. Most people thought she had married a man like Joe Gilbert so she could bolster her overbearing ego.
“What time is it?”
“Nearly eleven thirty.” She turned off the television set, dropping a curtain of darkness over most of the living room. Light from the hall and the den-office spilled through the doorway. Joe Gilbert got up and shook his head.
“Anything important on the late news?”
“Just like I told you—OPEC’s raising the oil prices again.”
“I don’t know how some of these people are going to make it.”
“Well, we can’t continue to extend credit to people like the Bakers and the McGees.”
Joe Gilbert just shook his head. “I’m tired,” he said.
“Tell me something new.”
She followed him out of the room. He hesitated for a moment at the foot of the stairway. They had a two-story colonial with eight rooms. It was one of the finest houses in the area, supporting everyone’s stereotyped concept of what someone in the oil business should be like.
“Left the light on in the den,” he said. He stumbled slightly to the right.
“I’ll get it.”
He paused and then started up the stairs. Martha threw the light switch in the den and turned quickly to leave. She paused, though, because she had caught sight of the small button light on the telephone. They had three telephone trunk lines into the house: one for the business, one for their private use, and one for Barbara’s private use.
Barbara was their only child. When Martha did finally decide the time was right to have children, they had great difficulty because, as it turned out, Joe had a low sperm count. Four years after Barbara was born, they tried again. Their efforts were completely unsuccessful, and eventually they gave up on the idea of a two- or three-child family. Nevertheless, Martha was determined that her one and only child would not be spoiled. Martha wasn’t puritanical when it came to Barbara, but she did try to imbue her with a sense of value and responsibility. She granted Barbara her own phone line only after Barbara agreed to work and help pay for it, whether by baby-sitting or summer employment.
She went to the phone and stared at the light for a moment. It was Barbara’s line. Here it was eleven thirty on a school night and her daughter was talking on the phone. She was violating one of Martha’s most specific prohibitions. Martha was going to turn around and go upstairs to bawl her out. She planned to embarrass her by having whomever Barbara was talking to overhear the chastisement. But she was also curious who that might be. What parents permitted their children to talk on the phone so late at night before school? And what do these kids talk about so much?
She pressed the button down gently and lifted the receiver slowly, looking back at the doorway to be sure Joe had kept going up the stairs. Satisfied, she placed her hand over the mouthpiece and put the earpiece to her h
ead.
“It’s not that I don’t understand the purpose and the value of what you’re doing—”
“We’re doing,” Lois corrected.
“We’re doing. It’s just that … well, do you think Bernie Rosen really appreciates what you’re saying? I mean, all he sees is two naked girls.”
“You saw for yourself, didn’t you? I mean, did his penis soften or didn’t it?”
“Yes, but—”
“And you admitted feeling less sexual stimulation. I know that after a while I didn’t even feel naked.”
“I don’t think I can say that.”
“You will, believe me.”
“I don’t know if I can keep doing this.”
“It’ll get easier.”
“What if he talks, tells other boys?”
“He won’t.”
“How do you know for sure?”
“Because I understand adolescent male behavior. Right now he’s in the midst of a conflict: he’s excited by what we’re doing, but he’s also confused and ashamed. He didn’t score, as they would say. His friends would only mock him. To sit naked with two naked girls for over an hour and not even touch one of them … don’t you see? How can he brag about that?”
“Yes, but … he could make up stories.”
“He could do that anyway. He’s not that creative. Actually, he’s a great subject for my experiment. I’m glad you had that ‘experience’ with him.”
“I don’t think I could ever let him come near me again. Not after today.”
“That’s ridiculous. Besides, we’re eventually going to begin some physical contact.”
“Lois!”
“Don’t worry. I have everything under control.”
There was a long pause, but Martha couldn’t put the phone down yet. She knew they’d hear the click.
“Lois?”
“What? ”
“I … I can’t stop thinking about his thing.”
“His penis?” Her voice was melodic. It was as though she were talking to a little child. “That might be penis envy, or it could be a phallic syndrome.”
Brain Child Page 6