by Matt Dean
Chapter 22
Afterward, as they lay in Doris’s bed with Boys in the Trees playing endlessly on repeat, John Carter rehearsed a delicate question in his mind. Once, on their fourth or fifth date, when he’d gotten himself tongue-tied, he’d tried to make a joke of it by saying, “Words aren’t my forte. Music is my forte.” What he’d actually said was, “Words aren’t my music. Forte is my forte.”
Now he thought he had better dive in, or he’d never ask what he wanted to ask. “Is it ever acceptable to ask your partner—?” He cringed. “Not partner. That sounds gay. The person you’ve had love with—made love with—or is it—?”
“Are you asking did I come?”
He looked away. In a small voice, he said, “That, too.”
“Oh, John Carter.” She sounded miserable. She rolled onto her back.
He tucked the covers under his chin and stared up at the ceiling.
“Not counting going steady with Trey Turner in the seventh grade,” she said, “which was just passing notes and one kiss with no tongues, I’ve had three serious boyfriends, and this is the part I hate most.”
“The sex part?”
Smiling a little, finally, she kissed his shoulder. “I love the sex part, actually. But getting from the before-sex part to the having-sex-on-the-regular part—that’s what I hate.” She sighed. “Up till now we’ve been doing kind of a dance.”
A dance, he thought. Yes. Exactly.
For weeks, she’d been doing all the choreography. Two steps forward, one step back, and—surprise!—a sudden slide to the left. The anticipation, and even the occasional frustration, had been mostly—or almost—pleasurable, though at times John Carter had wondered if she might be one of those purity ring people, if she’d promised God she’d wait for marriage, and what he’d do if that were the case.
“Now, like bam,” she said, “we’re in the land of squishy noises and dampness and self-consciousness, but we still have to pretend there’s some mystery. We still have to close the bathroom door. I still have to sneak out of bed before you wake up and check my eyeliner.”
“Why would you do that?”
Sighing, she said, “Being a girl is exhausting.”
Because he didn’t know what to say, he said nothing. He pulled her toward him and kissed her, and just like that, he was hard again. He ruffled her pubic hair, at first barely brushing the ends of the curls with his fingertips, but then combing his fingers through it.
Suddenly, Doris lifted herself off him. She stepped into her panties and scooped up the rest of her clothes. There was tremor coming up from below, a rumbling. The garage door opener.
“Is that—?”
Doris nodded. “Mama’s home.”
“Already?”
“Well, yes. It’s after five.”
“After five?” He tumbled out of bed and scrambled around on the carpet. Where had his boxers gone? “When did that happen?”
“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said. “Twice a day, it gets to be five, and then after that, it’s, you know, after five.”
“We were just— Your mother. Cripes.”
He peered under the bed. Maybe he’d accidentally kicked his shorts under there. No, not there. When he got up again, Doris was laughing, covering her mouth with her hand.
“It’s not funny!” he said. His face went hot. “Moms can, like, smell things.”
“One, my mother doesn’t go around sniffing people, and two, we’re both adults.” She pulled on her T-shirt. “We don’t have to pretend we don’t have sex.”
“Where the heck are my drawers?”
Doris stripped the covers off her bed and there, wadded up at its foot, were his boxers. Blushing, he stepped into them. When he put on his shirt and jeans, they felt tighter than before, as if he’d grown a size.
Doris opened the door.
“Where are you going?” John Carter said.
“Simmer down,” she said. “I have to pee.”
After she’d gone, he sat on the bed. And sat. And sat. How could it take so long for a girl to pee?
But wait. Somewhere in the house there were voices. Female voices. He crept to the door and listened through the crack. Doris was out there somewhere, talking to someone.
He stepped into the hall—and onto the black-booted foot of a uniformed policewoman. For a second or two, he stood with most of his weight on her toes. In a blur, seeing but not seeing, he glimpsed the shine of her badge, the blue of her blouse, the cleft of her pale chin. They both cried out in shock. Her voice was somehow lower than his, a woof against his squawk.
Doris appeared, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Oh, hi. I see you’ve met Mama.”
“This must be your young man,” Doris’s mother said. “John Hancock, is it?”
John Carter began stammering his name, but Doris interrupted him. “She’s teasing you.”
“I’ve heard of starting off on the wrong foot,” said Doris’s mother, “but this…”
John Carter looked down at her feet. “I’m so sorry about that, Mrs. Park. Did I hurt you? I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“No harm done.” Mrs. Park clomped her feet on the carpet. “Steel toes. And please don’t call me Mrs. Park.”
“Alice?” he said.
“Certainly not. Officer Park will do.”
John Carter swallowed and nearly gagged on his own spit. “Officer Park. Yes, ma’am.”
Doris swatted his arm. “She’s still teasing you. Come help me.”
Taking him by the hand, she dragged him through the living room to the kitchen, where there was a woman in a tight ponytail and a canvas apron. She’d just shoved something into the oven, and now she let the door clap shut. “How ‘bout ya?” she said.
“This is my auntie,” said Doris. “Her name’s Bridget. We all call her Biddy, and she’ll be absolutely charmed if you do the same.”
Bridget regarded John Carter darkly from under her eyebrows. She brandished a large knife. “If you call me that, they’ll never find your body.”
“Okay,” John Carter said. “Good to, um—”
Taking a cutting board from a nook above the stove, Bridget began shredding a head of iceberg lettuce. “If you want to get along in this bunch, don’t believe a word anyone says unless you confirm it with three other sources.”
John Carter bit his lip. “But there are only two of you.”
Bridget turned and looked him up and down. “Quick study.”
“College boy,” Doris said with a grin. She thrust a saucepan and a wooden spoon at him. “Here. Make gravy.”
John Carter felt his throat closing up. “I can barely make toast.”
“You’re starting a food-and-bev job next week,” Doris said. “You can’t be that helpless.”
“It’s Jimmy John’s,” he said. “Not like real cooking.”
“The gravy is over there,” Doris said. “In that tub.” She pointed to the counter, to a stack of plastic containers. “You just heat it up.”
“But stir it,” Bridget said. “If you don’t, it’ll scorch. If it scorches, you’ll be hanged.”
At the stove, John Carter opened the tub of gravy and upended it over the saucepan. Nothing happened. He shook the container and squeezed the sides and spanked the bottom, but still, the gunk didn’t budge. As Doris passed by on her way from one spot to another, she paused just long enough to stab the base of the tub with the point of a butcher knife. The gravy fell into the pan with a splat.
“I’ve never seen gravy like this,” John Carter said.
“It’ll loosen up as it comes to temperature,” Doris said. “Just keep stirring.”
While he stirred, Bridget chopped a red onion. Doris dumped stuffing into a casserole dish.
After a minute or so, Bridget said, “Dodo?”
“Yes, Biddy?”
“Can you explain to your college boy that food heats quicker when the burner’s on?”
Without a word, John Carter lit
the burner. He kept the flame low. No scorching, no hanging. He stirred and stirred.
“John Carter of Mars.” Alice leaned in through the doorway. She’d changed out of her uniform and into a T-shirt and jeans. “Grab me some silverware, would you? There are fourteen of us.”
Doris pointed him toward the silverware drawer. He took the entire cutlery tray into the dining room and followed Alice around the table, laying silverware as she set each plate.
The front door opened. A tall man came in, followed by a teenage girl and a pair of gawky twin boys. The girl leapt into the kitchen and breathlessly reported on the speed of someone’s car. The tall man turned on the TV and punched buttons on the remote. The boys wrestled on the floor. Alice went to greet them all with hugs.
A second group arrived—another tall man, a tiny woman with a pale green flattop, and a girl and boy in black shirts and rolled-up jeans. The men clasped hands and bumped shoulders and began discussing The Game, as if there’d only ever been one.
Chairs were carried from the dining room to the living room. The men settled around the flat-screen. The women gathered in the kitchen. Faces kept passing the dining room and looking in on John Carter. There wasn’t a piano the house, so far as he knew, but he couldn’t shake the terror that someone would ask him to play “Für Elise” or “Over the River and Through the Wood.”
A new couple arrived with two toddlers and an infant. More hugging, more hullabaloo. John Carter fled the dining room. He went to the bathroom and locked himself in and sat for a while on the closed toilet lid. The silverware tray lay in his lap, and it occurred to him that he could never, ever explain to Doris how her mother’s flatware got into the bathroom.
Someone knocked. He set the silverware in the bathtub and drew the shower curtain. When he opened the door, he found Doris waiting for him.
“You were hiding, weren’t you?” she said.
“A little.”
“I know they’re all a bit much.”
“We’re a lot quieter at our place,” he said. “If someone asks you to pass the butter, it practically sets off shockwaves. Once, my dad went off on this riff about gravy boats and how they’re unitaskers and shouldn’t we use the creamer that we never put cream in?”
“Was that terribly controversial?”
“I thought it was funny.”
“Come on,” she said. “We’re ready to eat.”
She led him back to the dining room table. There were so many people, so many conversations going on all at once, that John Carter found it difficult to keep up. The bunch of them were like a trio of bands playing different marches on the same field. He sat next to Doris, who sat next to Bridget, who sat next to the woman with green hair, whose name was Candy. They talked about roller derby, whatever that was.
The iced tea ran out, and Candy went to get more. When she came back, she handed one pitcher to Alice and another to John Carter, of all people. Clutching the sweaty glass with both hands, he jerked his head a couple of times, beckoning her. She leaned closer.
“What is it?” he said, his voice cracking and fading nearly to silence. “Roller derby—what is it?”
Candy frowned at him. He was sure he’d asked the dumbest question in the history of questioning. But it wasn’t that—she simply hadn’t heard him. Turning, waggling her hands in the air, she shushed the nearest Parks. “John Carter’s trying to tell me something. Hush your mouth. Danny, Alex, Biddy, hush.”
John Carter had already blushed so deeply that he imagined waves of red light radiating from his face. When the chatter died away and all the Parks turned toward him—every last one of them, right down to the toddler who’d climbed up into Bridget’s lap—he had to set down the pitcher. Otherwise, he feared the heat of his skin would melt all the ice.
“Roller derby,” he said, and gulped the dry air. “H-how do they—? How do they keep the skates on the horses’ hooves?”
At the other end of the table, somebody dropped a fork, and it clanked hard against a plate. There was an explosion of laughter. The tall men and the twins roared. The girls giggled until hiccups set in. Alice blotted her eyes with her napkin. John Carter wished he were dead. He’d go to his grave without understanding roller derby, but it’d be worth it.
Bridget reached across and patted his hand. “We need to work on your timing, honey. But that was a good one.”
John Carter found that he could breathe again, and he began, ever slowly, to smile. He wished there were piano after all. He’d play “Für Elise.” He’d play “Over the River and Through the Wood.” He’d play “Bad Romance.” He’d play anything anyone wanted to hear.