Keeping Secrets

by Sarah Shankman

  “There.” He’d pulled his steely blue revolver out of its holster and set it on the edge of the blanket. He smiled an Elvis smile at her. “Let’s just hope that we don’t roll over on that thing and blow our peepees off.”

  Emma laughed, but inside she shivered. She was a little afraid of guns. But now that push had come to shove, she was afraid of J.D.’s cock too. To hide her nervousness, she reached for her favorite weapon, her tongue.

  “Did Maylene tell you it was okay to be doing this with your cousin?”

  While Emma was talking, J.D. pulled her down toward him and busied his tongue on her pink nipples.

  He stopped long enough to grunt, “Forget Maylene.”

  “What’s the matter, J.D., ain’t your little preacher’s daughter girlfriend giving you what you want?”

  “Hush,” he ordered, his voice thick with authority and lust. “Not so sure you are my cousin,” he said and wished he hadn’t, but then he had been provoked. He flipped the lightweight long- limbed Emma over on her back. He bet he knew something that would shut her up. With a swoop, J.D. buried his mouth between her legs, an act which Emma had never even heard of before.

  “What?” she asked, but within moments there were other noises coming from her that you couldn’t exactly call words.

  “Are you ready?” she finally heard J.D. asking from somewhere that seemed very far away. He could have been standing over in the middle of the cotton field or neck deep in the black bayou sludge.

  Little arrows of electricity were shooting back and forth between her bones. But ready? For exactly what?

  She opened her eyes then, just in time to see J.D. start to roll what had to be a rubber onto himself. Though she tried to stop herself, she couldn’t. Emma leaned her head back, and the sound of her laughter ran up the trunk of the cypress tree and bounced out over the deep dark water. Where it landed, a silver fish jumped.

  “What’s so funny, sister?” He was sitting on top of her now, having lost the impetus to do what he was about to do. “What’s so fucking funny, baby girl?”

  But he was laughing, too, and inching up toward her, laughing, laughing all the while.

  “Here, darling,” he said, having peeled the condom off his now soft self. Into her open mouth he inserted his cock.

  Emma blinked her big blue eyes at him, once, twice.

  “Suck, precious,” he said. “Pretend it’s a lollipop.”

  So for the second time that day, Emma experienced something completely brand-new. Her tongue explored the hardness wrapped in velvet. J.D. encouraged her with cooing. Emma congratulated herself on being such a quick learner.

  “Now stay with me,” J.D. said, probing inside her gently, then with more force and rhythm, with first one finger, then two. Emma relaxed. This was old familiar territory, one of Bernie’s drills.

  Then J.D.’s mouth lowered again and joined his fingers playing. Emma’s mouth opened, too, and her ululation had no words. She was a holy roller seized with the spirit, speaking in tongues. J.D. needed no translation. He had heard women sprawled beneath him speak this language before.

  He could read her, even if she didn’t know what she was saying. Ready, ready, ready when you are. J.D. leaned back between her legs again, gently probing, pushing, this time with his cock.

  “We’re gonna take this slow and easy, baby. Breathe deep. Come on, now, don’t hold your breath, breathe deep. Trust me. It’s not going to hurt.”

  She did. She flinched, then fluttered with his coaxing, his gentle hands, his steady pressure, fluttered just like an unbroken filly, twisting, tossing her head, and before she knew it she was there, over the finish line, now that wasn’t so bad, was it, he whispered, and they were riding together across meadows into a land Emma had never known.

  And when it was over, because the excitement of his conquest made J.D. quick-like-a-bunny quick, they rested for just a moment, and then started, slowly more slowly this time, cantering, then galloping, before they raced home together once more.

  * * *

  “Where on earth have you two been?” Rosalie cried when, much too late for excuses, they joined the rest of the Norris clan gathered in Miz Robinson’s backyard for a postfuneral feast. “We’ve been worried sick, looking all over the place for you.”

  “J.D. took me to get a fried pie,” she answered. She knew she ought to be feeling guilt and shame, on so many levels she couldn’t count them even if she uncrossed the fingers she held behind her back. But all she felt was trembling joy—well, and there was that one question.

  “What do you mean we’re not cousins?” she’d asked when it was all over and they’d regained their senses.

  “Nothing. I just said that to make you feel better.”

  “What the hell do you mean—better?”

  “Such a mouth on a young girl. It’s unseemly.”

  “Better about what, J.D.?”

  “About making love.”

  “I feel just fine about that. That’s not what’s bothering me.”

  “Aw, Emma. It was nothing. You know how my momma can be. Especially about your momma.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Well, hell, Emma, it didn’t mean nothing. Once I heard her saying something to my daddy about a ready-made baby, but I think she was just fooling around.”

  No, she wasn’t, thought Emma, who’d had more and more suspicions about what was what as the years passed, which made her feel crazy and wonder what other deep darks they weren’t talking about.

  “I know Momma was just teasing,” J.D. said.

  He knew that she wasn’t. And he didn’t tell Emma what Nancy had really said to Big J.D.: “If I was gonna go off and get myself a ready-made baby like Rosalie, ’course I wouldn’t ’cause I can and have had my own, I wouldn’t get me one that was a half a Jew.”

  “How do you know that she ain’t a whole Jew?” Big J.D. had drawled, then spit from his tobacco.

  “You know,” Nancy had cried, “I never thought about that!”

  * * *

  “A fried pie!” Rosalie was saying. “With all this food here? Why on earth would you do something like that?”

  “I guess Emma just had a taste for something different, Aunt Rosalie, ma’am,” J.D. answered.

  “I reckon.” Goodness, that J.D. had turned into a handsome young man, Rosalie thought, with nice manners too. You’d never guess he was one of Nancy’s boys, might even make something of himself. Rosalie shrugged her shoulders then, not quite satisfied with the answer to her question, but she knew she wasn’t going to get much more. She went back to sharing remedies for constipation with Miz Robinson whom she hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years.

  Then Miz Robinson motioned for Rosalie to turn around. “Oh, I couldn’t,” Rosalie said to Flo, who was standing there with a big piece of lemon meringue.

  “Honey, you need it to keep your strength up,” said Miz Robinson.

  “I guess you’re right.” Rosalie took the Blue Willow saucer. “Thank you, Flo. I don’t mind if I do.”

  She glanced over at Emma, who was heaping a plate with fried chicken, potato salad and mustard greens.

  Flo said, “That fried pie must not have been so filling after all.”

  “Ordinary’s never been good enough for Emma,” Rosalie said. “I guess she’ll always have a taste for fancy things.” Having polished off her pie, she licked her fork and put it down. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t even know that girl, I swan.”

  6

  Two weeks later in that November of her seventeenth year, Emma was tromping in the woods with her boyfriend Bernie Graubart and his father, Herman. They were on the Graubarts’ home place, two hundred acres of pine, oak and sweet gum that Bernie’s mother, Mary Ann, had inherited from her father, Mr. Tim. It was good land for hunting and fishing.

  Each of them was ruddy-faced in the crisp air of a cool Saturday afternoon, and each carried a rifle thrown over a shoulder. Ahead of them, her russet-and-black flags flying, race
d Bernie’s Gordon setter, Molly.

  “Look at that dog snuffling all over the place as if she had good sense,” Herman said. “She’d point an egg-salad sandwich as soon as a quail.”

  “And we’re about as likely to shoot one, too,” said Bernie.

  “Are we out here to hunt or to run our mouths?” asked Emma. “If you-all don’t shut up, there’s not going to be a bird left in twelve parishes.”

  Herman grinned. There was almost nothing Emma ever said that Herman didn’t want to hear.

  The first time Bernie had brought this long, tall blonde home, Herman had fallen in love—and the feeling was mutual. Sometimes Bernie watched the two of them, Emma’s bright head tilted toward his father’s frizzle of gray, and wondered whether he wasn’t getting in their way. Except, and now it was Bernie’s turn to grin, as of two weeks ago he knew lots of things about Emma that his father didn’t. For it was then that he’d become Emma’s lover.

  “Bernie, would you watch where you’re going!” Emma snapped as he stepped on the heel of her old sneaker.

  “Sorry.” But then to prove he wasn’t, really, he poked her in the fanny. She turned and waggled her tongue at him. In answer, his desire rose like sap inside his faded jeans. Things had been going like that since the day after Emma came back from her grandmother’s funeral. She’d dragged him off to a girlfriend’s family fish camp as if death and burial were the ultimate and irresistible aphrodisiac.

  “I’m not waiting a second longer for the Fund to ransom my virginity,” she’d said, running one hand up and down the front of his Levis as if she knew exactly what she was doing. “Forget the Hotel Monteleone. This’ll have to do.” Then she’d dangled the keys to the fish camp in front of him, and thirty miles, thirty minutes and four beers later they were standing on the steps of the empty cabin on Bayou Coupee and Emma was fumbling with the padlock.

  “What’s the hurry?” he asked.

  “I’ve got to pee. Bad.” Then the lock popped open and Emma raced past pine paneling, green plastic sofas and mounted fish trophies. Two minutes later she had taken care of her business. “Now,” she said, “I’m going to take care of you.”

  And for the next two hours, she did. It crossed Bernie’s mind that she went right ahead, on past that boundary they’d never crossed before, as if she were on familiar ground. But he knew she couldn’t be. You could count on Emma to have done her research. She’d probably learned all this from books.

  Because Bernie knew that, for all her mouth, Emma hadn’t even had a date when he met her the year before, their last year at West Cypress High. But that didn’t mean she was shy or ugly. What he didn’t know was that until she spotted him on the basketball court she simply hadn’t found anything closer to what she was looking for.

  He had turned from his locker one day to discover the same tall blonde girl who screamed his name when he made a hook shot almost standing on his right foot. Bernie took a long look into her eyes, noted her profile, and wondered whether it was possible that in West Cypress there was another person who might actually be Jewish.

  “What are you staring at?” she’d asked.

  “Why are you following me?” he countered.

  “Because I want your body,” answered Emma, whose already-sharp tongue was impossible now that she’d read Catcher in the Rye. Underneath her bravado and her pink crew-neck sweater, however, her heart was pounding.

  Bernie snorted, then leaned against his locker, stalling. Was this what Herman called seizing opportunity by the foreskin? Not that he imagined that this girl had one.

  “You got it,” he said. And that was pretty much that. They parked in the last row of the Star Drive-In the following Friday night and began on a course of serious exploration.

  But Emma’s lust for Bernie’s body was nothing compared to what she felt for his father Herman.

  She was following Herman now this bright cool fall afternoon as he blazed the way into the deep piney woods, his white baseball cap, as always, planted firmly. His bright-blue eyes, like Bernie’s, like hers, sparkled behind PX-pink plastic glasses.

  Herman Graubart, a Polish Jew, had been career U.S. Army, was now retired and had begun a whole new career as an auto mechanic. He had his own shop in West Cypress, worked when he chose and on what he chose, which did not include Volkswagens, Mercedeses or any other German vehicle.

  “They are beautiful machines,” he’d say, “but I did not escape the Nazis to repair their automobiles.”

  Bernie didn’t know a trench from a hole in the ground. He didn’t know how lucky he was to grow up in the United States, full of American vegetables from his father’s garden, and now grown taller by almost a whole foot than any Graubart had ever grown before. He didn’t know how important it was to learn everything you could, because, as Herman the career soldier who was a pacifist knew, it was knowledge, not force, that could free you.

  Bernie would rather go out with his friends and drink beer and shoot baskets than read or listen to what Herman had to say. Well, let the boy enjoy himself. He was young. He needed to sow his wild oats.

  Which, Herman thought, watching his son saunter through the woods, he’d finally begun to do. Look at that step, he thought, that grin, that swagger. The boy was finally getting laid. By Emma, lovely Emma, whom he and Bernie loved.

  Suddenly, off to their right in the woods, Molly snuffled, yowled and took off, tail flying, through the brush.

  “A coon!” Emma exclaimed.

  “Probably an egg-salad sandwich,” said Herman.

  “If you have so little faith in Molly, why’d we bring her along?” she asked.

  “To enjoy the exercise and the woods, just like us.”

  “You mean we didn’t come out here to hunt?”

  Bernie was stepping sideways, about to light out after the dog. And Emma was hoping he’d go, for there was something she wanted to talk to Herman about, if she didn’t lose her nerve.

  “Why should I hunt when I haven’t lost anything?” Herman answered.

  Bernie made a rolling motion beside his ear with one forefinger, indicating to Emma that his poor old father was nuts.

  “Says who?” asked Herman.

  “Says me,” Bernie called. Following Molly’s track, he was gone.

  Herman leaned against the trunk of a sweet-gum tree, pulled a pint bottle of schnapps out of his old fatigue jacket. “Have a sip.”

  “You’re a terrible influence,” she teased, tilting her head and letting the clear liquid warm her mouth, her throat.

  “Best you’re ever going to have.” He pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “Who else around here is going to teach you anything?”

  “Don’t my A’s from State count?” Smart mouth, she thought, but if you’re so clever, and she reflected on the thing that was on the tip of her tongue, why didn’t you figure it out before? “Herman,” she started, and then she stopped. Anyway, Herman was already continuing.

  “Humph,” he grunted, for Herman had no respect for the Louisiana state educational system. “Bunch of rednecks call themselves professors. You have to take that goddamned course, ‘Americanism versus Communism,’ don’t you? Curriculum a cross between Oral Roberts and Orval Faubus. Come on.” And then he stomped off on a trail that only he could see.

  “Hey, what about Bernie?”

  “Bernie knows his way home. He’ll come when he’s through running after that stupid dog.”

  That stupid dog, Emma thought, whom Herman cosseted and spoiled as much as he did her and Bernie.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Didn’t I tell you I was going to show you something?”

  Emma shook her head.

  “Then you need to learn to listen.”

  “Watch it, old man,” she teased, and goosed him from behind as earlier his son had goosed her.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself!” But his eyes were twinkling. “Shhh. Now listen.”

  They moved softly, their footfalls little whispe
rs through the brush, but clear as drumbeats to the creatures who made the woods their home. Birds called the news to their fellows farther on who had not yet cocked their feathered heads to the crackling twigs. “They’re coming, they’re coming,” Emma imagined they said. “With guns, with loaded guns.”

  She and Herman would never shoot a bird. The quail hunt was a joke, an excuse to get out in the autumn air, walk, talk and, if they felt like it, blast some tin cans to kingdom come.

  In between the bird calls there were long deep silences, more still even than those she and Herman often shared in the Graubarts’ living room, their chairs pulled close, the smoke of their cigarettes spiraling up toward the pressed-tin ceiling after one of his lessons.

  “You know nothing,” he’d begin, and then he’d pull out his beloved Encyclopaedia Britannica which every three years he read straight through, then started over with Volume I. He told her Jewish history, customs, stories of growing up in the Warsaw ghetto, though he waved her off when she asked about religion, for Herman was not a religious man.

  How strange, Emma often thought, that when she looked down onto the basketball court and zeroed in on tall, curly-haired Bernie Graubart, she’d found the only other half-Jew in all of West Cypress High, maybe in all of West Cypress—and with him had come Herman. What were the chances of her looking for a boyfriend and also finding a Jewish father, more of a father, in many ways, than Jake? Was it luck? Was it fate? Or was it genetic?

  He taught her about the world too. “The French,” he’d say. “No, before that, but we’ll start with the French. This,” he pointed to a map, “is Laos. This is Vietnam.”

  When Emma could absorb no more, they’d sip schnapps, and Herman would put his favorite, “Scheherazade,” on the record player.

  Now they were in a part of the woods where Emma had never been before. Just ahead she spied a little clearing, to one side a small fire circle, charcoal within blackened stones. Beyond it stood a sloping one-room shack, its rotting wooden walls camouflaged beneath green moss and mold. It was like a fairy tale, something out of Grimm.

  “Is this yours?” she whispered.