A Stranger on the Planet

by Adam Schwartz

  Paddling back in to shore, I asked Sarah what she was going to do about Mom.

  “What about her?” Sarah replied.

  “Isn’t she going to know that you’ve already had your period?”

  “Not if I don’t tell her. Next month I’ll just pretend it’s my first time.”

  “Do you think Mom is really going to marry Eddie?” I asked.

  “Jesus, I hope not,” Sarah said. We had not received a letter from her in the nearly two weeks we had been on Cape Cod, and we knew this was a bad sign, as if she was hiding something. We looked at each other, then away, realizing that our mother was probably doing something mad. We could help each other in small ways—she could pluck a hot dog off a platter for me, I could help her dispose of her bloody sheets—but we both felt helpless and alone floating in the middle of that vast black pond.

  Back in the house, Sarah went into the bathroom and took some of Hortense’s sanitary pads. But in our room we were faced with the problem of a bed without sheets—something we hadn’t thought about in our excitement. Still feeling heroic, proud that my idea of drowning the sheets had relieved Sarah of her sadness, I offered to put my sheets on Sarah’s bed and deal with the flak from Hortense.

  “What are you going to tell her?” Sarah asked, as I removed the sheets from my bed.

  “I’ll tell her I had a wet dream.”

  Sarah laughed as she helped me fit the sheets onto her bed.

  “A really massive one,” I added. “I’ll tell her that I was dreaming about Mathilde and just couldn’t control myself.”

  “Seth, stop it,” Sarah protested, laughing even louder. “You’ll wake Seamus.”

  “Oh, Mathilde, you don’t know how those heavy black sweaters turn me on!” I said, pulling the sheet tight on my end. Sarah fell onto the bed and put both hands over her mouth to stifle her laughter. I lay down next to her and said in a faux French accent, “Oh, chéri, you get me so hot when I watch you roll down your pantyhose at the beach.”

  Seamus woke up looking stunned and puzzled, then joined us in our laughter.

  The next morning I looked in the refrigerator and didn’t see my old plate. Hortense didn’t call for me to shower with my father. After he and Hortense ate breakfast, he summoned Sarah and me into the living room. We sat on the couch; he sat facing us in a hard-backed chair from the kitchen. I was certain he had already discovered that the sheets were missing, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

  “Hortense and I have been very disappointed in your behavior,” he said to us.

  Tears immediately welled up in my eyes. Sarah looked away; perhaps she couldn’t bear to be reminded of how much I loved our father, a love, we both knew, that would never be returned.

  “Haven’t you been enjoying yourselves here?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Can you tell me why?”

  “You don’t pay any attention to us.”

  He stared at me for several seconds, his expression teetering between exasperation and concern, as if weighing what it would cost him to acknowledge my pain.

  “What about you, Sarah? Do you feel the same?”

  “Yes. You’re cold and distant. I don’t know why you wanted us to come on this vacation.”

  “I see,” he said. “‘Cold and distant.’ I see.”

  Sarah and I just stared at him. “All right then,” he said, placing his palms on his thighs, as if something had been settled. “We can all try to do a little better.”

  Later that morning, when we went down to the pond, my father called me over to look at the newspaper with him. That night, men were going to set foot on the moon, and my father showed me illustrations in the paper to explain the science of the moon walk. He told me about how the lunar module would detach itself from the spaceship and then orbit the moon thirty times before it landed in the Sea of Tranquility. He explained that the moon had no atmosphere and very little gravity. “A boy like you would weigh only about twenty pounds on the moon.” I knew this was his way of responding to my complaint that he didn’t pay attention to me, but I wanted love, not scientific explanations. I kept looking away.

  “Aren’t you interested in this?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “No?” he repeated, incredulous.

  “I’m not interested in science.”

  “Fine,” he said, lacing the word with anger. He snapped the paper open to another page.

  For a couple of moments I gazed out across the pond. On the far side was a small white sandbar. At that moment the sandbar looked like an oasis, a strip of white beach, unexplored terrain where I could be completely alone, away from everything. I went over to the canoe and began dragging it down to the shoreline.

  My father asked me what I was doing.

  “Going to the moon.”

  He told me to stop, that I wasn’t allowed to use the canoe.

  “Too bad,” I said. “I already have.”

  He banged his newspaper down and came over to me, yanking me away from the canoe by my ear. “I’ve had it with you,” he yelled. “I’ve had it with this thoroughly dreadful behavior.” I headed straight for the pond, dove in, and began swimming away. Except for the ringing in my ear, I felt strong, easily capable of reaching the sandbar. Usually, I had very little awareness of my body, but as I continued to swim I enjoyed the sensation of feeling muscular and light. At some point I heard Seamus crying for me. The dread and panic in his voice echoed across the water. I wanted to turn around to see how far I had come, but I knew that if I saw my little brother, I would feel too guilty to continue. I didn’t look back until I reached the sandbar. They were all so small and far away. My father was standing on the shoreline, his hand to his brow, monitoring my swim. When he saw that I had reached the opposite shore he went back to his chair. I sat down on the sandbar for a couple of minutes, thinking about the one detail of the space mission that had morbidly interested me: When Apollo 11 was returning home, the spaceship had to reenter the earth’s atmosphere at a very exact angle, with no margin for error; if the spaceship missed, it would either be vaporized or boomerang back into space, with no hope of reentry. I couldn’t stop myself from dwelling on the second scenario, imagining the astronauts entombed in their spaceship, knowing they could never go home, just waiting to die.

  On the other side of the sandbar was a smaller pond. I decided to explore and began tracking the bend of the shoreline. Up ahead, about twenty yards away, I saw a girl in a bikini lying on a blanket and reading a book. She waved me over. As I approached her, I noticed a NO TRESPASSING sign. I asked the girl if it was all right for me to be there.

  “No problem,” she said. “That’s my stepfather’s sign. I’m not into private property. I don’t believe in being territorial.”

  She was certainly older than me. Her hip arced gracefully up from her rib cage and gradually tapered down to her shapely legs. She asked me if I had a cigarette. I patted my pockets as if this might be a possibility.

  “Sorry. I left them at home. I just swam across the pond.”

  I asked her what she was reading. She held up her copy of On the Road.

  “I’ve read that,” I said. I hadn’t liked it very much, but when she told me she was reading it for the third time, I said that it was my favorite book too. She asked me what other books I liked. I told her that in the past year I had read Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, David Copperfield, The Metamorphosis, The Catcher in the Rye, and Look Homeward, Angel. My reading habits were the one vanity I allowed myself. I was a poor student but prided myself on being able to read anything that was fiction.

  She asked me what grade I was in.

  “Ninth,” I said. I had just completed sixth grade. I didn’t like to lie and exaggerate—those were my mother’s traits. I wanted to model myself after my father. I believed his life was happier than my mother’s because he was more realistic and circumspect, because he didn’t hope for things he couldn’t have. But I was afraid she would sen
d me back where I had come from if she knew I was only twelve.

  She told me her name was Zelda, that she was going into the eleventh grade, and that she lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  “My father lives in Cambridge too.”

  “Are your parents divorced?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because you told me that your father lives in Cambridge. That means you live somewhere else.”

  “Oh, right,” I replied.

  She laughed affectionately. “Do your parents get along?” she asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “Neither do mine. My mother still has credit cards in my dad’s name, and she runs up thousands of dollars in bills. Then she and my dad get into huge fights over it. My psychiatrist said that my mother’s spending habits are her way of acting out her sexual claims over my father.”

  “Yeah, I think my mother has the same problem.”

  Zelda asked me if I wanted to come in and get high.

  “Sure . . . but what about your parents?”

  “Oh, my mother and stepfather are at some moon-walk party in Provincetown. They probably won’t even come home tonight because they’ll get falling-down drunk.”

  “How come they didn’t bring you with them?”

  “I didn’t want to go,” she declared. “I’m against spending all that money on sending men to the moon when so many people right here on earth don’t have enough to eat.”

  I told her I completely agreed with her.

  Then Zelda stood up, whisking the sand off her beautiful limbs—nut brown and matted with a fine golden down. A sexual shiver went from my gut to my groin. I said that sending men to the moon was the most immoral thing our country had ever done.

  Zelda’s room was on the second floor of a breezy old ship-captain’s house, low ceilinged with wide pine floorboards. She handed me one of her stepfather’s bathrobes, then pulled out a white halter top and a Band-Aid box from her bureau. She pulled on the top and I put on the bathrobe. Then I watched her reach behind and undo her bikini top. It fell to her feet, enchaining her ankles. When she bent over for it, I caught a glimpse of her breasts, white as lightbulbs against her tanned body.

  “Don’t you want to get out of that wet bathing suit?” she asked me.

  “Oh, sure,” I said, and shimmied out of the suit underneath the robe.

  She went over to her turntable and put on a Jefferson Airplane record. Then she sat next to me on the bed as she opened the Band-Aid box and extracted a skinny cigarette pinched at the ends. She lit it and inhaled a deep mouthful of smoke, looking as if she was trying to set a record for holding her breath. Then she held the joint out to me. I imitated exactly what she had done, but the smoke scalded my lungs and I coughed it all out. We passed the joint back and forth. It only made me a little dizzy and dreamy; I was far more powerfully affected by staring at her legs, by the sexy blend of scents in the room: lotion, talcum powder, and the marijuana, sweet and pungent. I had never kissed a girl before—I expected a silvery movie screen-kiss—but when my mouth met Zelda’s, I was shocked at how wet and groping a real kiss was. She moved her tongue around inside my mouth. I slipped my hand underneath her halter top and slowly inched it upward, as if the goal was to reach her breasts without her knowing what I had in mind. When my hand finally cupped one, I squeezed and fondled it as if I were testing the ripeness of a cantaloupe. Zelda sat up and removed her top. We embraced each other, her breasts pressing against my partly exposed chest. “Oh, this feels nice,” Zelda murmured.

  “Yes,” I agreed. My mouth moved to her breasts, kissing and suckling until my lips were numb. Then I remembered that I had another hand, a free hand, and I began to move it down Zelda’s belly. She caught it just as I reached the elastic of her bikini bottom.

  “Bummer,” she said. “I’m having my period.”

  For a moment I was perplexed as to why she was telling me this; then I caught on: Her bottom wasn’t coming off.

  I wasn’t sure what came next, so I said, “My sister is having her period too.”

  Zelda looked at me strangely, wondering why I would share that information with her.

  “It’s probably the moon,” she said.

  Then she pointed at my erection tenting the bathrobe.

  “Oh, I don’t think this is because of the moon.” She smiled coyly, opened up the robe, and studied me approvingly. “Far out,” she declared.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Zelda bent down and kissed the tip of my penis.

  Stunned and slightly scandalized, I said, “Oh, that’s all right.

  You don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.” I immediately regretted my words, wondering why I always became polite at all the wrong moments.

  Zelda raised her head, looking at me through her hair, which had partly fallen over her face. Then she moved a mass of it behind her ear, a gesture that filled me with more yearning than I would have thought possible. She moved close to me and kissed my cheek. “You’re sweet,” she said, and placed her hand on me. Until that moment, my experience of sex had come from masturbating to photographs from Playboy or to certain passages in D. H. Lawrence, but that did nothing to prepare me for the wonder of the real thing. It was as if I had been studying a planet through the wrong end of a telescope and someone had simply, kindly turned it around for me. I wanted Zelda to kiss me, or at least look into my eyes, but she just watched herself stroke me. I closed my eyes, felt a tremor in the back of my legs, then heard Zelda whisper in my ear, “Yeah, come, come.” I opened my eyes and saw a pearl white thread glistening across my belly. “That was nice,” she said. I apologized for being so loud. Zelda cupped my penis, but it began to feel like a strange, woolly appendage, a little mouse corpse Zelda was cradling in her palm. As I gradually shrank up, I felt myself becoming shy. I turned over onto my side. Zelda cuddled up next to me.

  “Do you feel sad?” she asked.

  “No,” I replied a little defensively, but that’s exactly what I was feeling.

  “It’s all right if you are,” she said. “Sometimes that happens. Afterward you get sad.”

  Zelda and I spent the rest of the afternoon and night together. We played Monopoly and passed another joint back and forth. She told me that she was pretty much a prisoner at the summer-house because her mother had discovered she had been seeing a twenty-two year old Vietnam vet she had met in Harvard Square. The vet’s name was Zack, and her mother had found out about him after Zelda had withdrawn five thousand dollars of her bat mitzvah money from the bank and given it to Zack so he could privately print copies of his novel to sell in the square. She told me his novel was about a group of Vietnam vets who try to stop the capitalist war machine by bombing factories. So Zelda was grounded for the summer, only allowed off the property to see her psychiatrist, Dr. Feingold, who was spending the summer in Well-feet too. I wanted to tell her stories about myself that were just as lurid, so I told her all about my cruel and bizarre stepmother and then moved on to my mother. I was going on and on about my mother’s most lunatic episodes, but I began to sense that telling Zelda stories about my mother wasn’t enhancing my sex appeal.

  For dinner we ate some cold roast chicken her parents had left for her. At ten o’clock, despite our moral objections, we turned on the television to watch the moon landing. I reached over to hold Zelda’s hand. She didn’t respond—didn’t squeeze it to signal affection, didn’t look at me meaningfully or lean against my shoulder. I understood that Zelda was only spending time with me because she was bored and lonely, but that didn’t stop me from imagining that I might go live with my father in Cambridge and that Zelda would be my girlfriend. After school, we would go to her house and have sex and on weekends we’d go to movies at the Orson Welles theater. Certainly her parents would prefer me—a nice, polite, well-read boy—to Zack, and I was certain that she would come to appreciate my refined literary sensibility. She would read Catcher in the Rye and Look Homeward, Angel and see me as I sa
w myself—an exquisitely sensitive and romantic composite of Holden and Eugene. I’d like to say that I was inspired by the historic event I was watching on the television: If men could actually travel to the moon, then how far-fetched could it be to believe that my father would invite me to live with him and that Zelda would be my girlfriend. But I was so involved in imagining my great new life that I was barely aware of Neil Armstrong setting one foot on the moon and declaiming his famous words. I think the moon landing had the opposite effect on Zelda—it gradually brought her back to reality. She removed her hand from mine and told me I better get going.

  “Do you think your parents will come home tonight?”

  She looked down and shook her head. Then I noticed tears slanting across her face. I leaned over and began kissing her; she returned my kisses, sweetly, softly. This was the type of kissing I had imagined—boyfriend and girlfriend kissing. We made out for about ten minutes. My bathrobe had fallen open, and I pressed my erection against her.

  “Look what’s happened to you,” she said.

  Feeling bolder, I asked, “Can you do what you did before?”

  “You mean this?” she replied, and put her hand on me.

  “No, before that.”

  “Can you say it?”

  I had no idea what the term was, no words for what I wanted her to do. I looked at her helplessly. Then she whispered in my ear, “Blow job.”

  “Blow job,” I repeated.

  She commanded me to lie down on the couch. Then she knelt down next to me and said, “You’re a very lucky boy. For your information, I happen to give the best blow jobs in the world. Zack told me I was better than the professional girls he had been to in Nam.” Then she put me in her mouth, sucking and yanking heedlessly, zealously, as if trying to vanquish my hard-on. When it was over, she kissed the rim of my ear and whispered that I better get going.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “You better go now.”

  Before leaving, I wrote down my address for Zelda. I couldn’t leave with hers because I had arrived and was departing in my bathing suit. I didn’t really think she would write to me, but three months later, near the end of October, I came home from school one day and found a ten-page letter from Zelda in the mailbox. She apologized for not writing sooner, but so much had happened to her. In August, Zack had ridden down to Well-feet on his motorcycle to help her escape. When her mother and stepfather were out, she’d jumped onto Zack’s motorcycle and they’d split, heading north for the concert at Woodstock. On the New York State Thruway they got caught in a massive traffic jam. Then the rain came. She had never been so miserable in her life. She was cold, wet, hungry, exhausted, and Zack was being a complete asshole. He told her to stop complaining so much, that she sounded like a bourgeois bitch, that this was nothing compared to what he had experienced in Nam. When they finally reached the town in which the concert was being held, she had ditched Zack and just begun walking down a street. Someone was selling water for a dollar a glass, and she bought three glasses because she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for more than twelve hours. Zelda was about to buy her fourth glass when a woman in a house across the street began yelling at her neighbor for exploiting these poor young people. She told Zelda to come into her house and that she could have all the food and water she wanted. Zelda said the family was great to her, except for their twelve-year-old daughter, a girl named Mara, who seemed angry at her parents for bringing Zelda into their house. The girl sat in a chair and read a book about astrophysics as if to show Zelda how superior she was. But after dinner Zelda told the girl all about Zack and she became a little nicer. She said that Mara really tripped out when she realized Zelda was Jewish too. Zelda said it was like Mara wanted to be her but looked down on her at the same time. Mara reminded her of me: super straight, very curious, and judgmental (I was stunned that Zelda had seen right through my poses). Zelda spent the night at the family’s house, and the next day her mother drove up to get her. Her parents decided to send her to an all-girls boarding school in Connecticut, which where she was writing to me from. The school wasn’t so bad, Zelda concluded. Some of the girls were bogus, most were sex maniacs, but a couple of them were a real trip.