“Go tell Aunt Molly the old grey goose is gone;
she died in the meadow, the old grey goose is gone.
The gander …”
How stupid, she thought.
*
The sound of pre-digital alarm clocks would go off at six am, or earlier, in the June-gloom Southern California marine layer rolling in each morning, and by seven a.m. various training classes would begin. With bright shining faces they were all in their places complaining of the ungodly hours but not too loudly lest they be cut from the training program and be sent home, a bizarre possibility full of implied failure, compliments of Peace Corps administrators.
Robin was thrilled to be part of the laughter and gestures of the group, and quickly succumbed to the grand exhibitionism of the new and still exotic responsibility that was just beginning. She would pretend to be startled, and girlish jump, at every tepid touch from one of the more bold male volunteers. And still desiring to be part of the in-crowd, weird laughter of familiarity, unreal, would surface on her lips and fill the acquaintanceship of the big deal gentle poking of her ribs, an act of intimacy as close to her breasts as common etiquette allowed. Weird with informality was her friendly reaction to the newly recognizable fellow travellers’ probing intimacy.
How embarrassing, she would think to herself; she had never behaved so stupidly before, never allowed anyone to poke her ribs, or anywhere else. Though unsure that her newly acquired PCV behaviour was acceptable, she did conform to the magic of being part of the group, of starting out as an equal, of not having to display all past baggage, good or bad; in effect, she shut her eyes and travelled incognito, in spite of the silly PC psychological testing. She desperately wanted to prove to herself, her best friends, and above all, her daddy back home that she wasn’t a freak, a nerd, or a geek loser; that she could make lots of friends like everybody else could. She would have done anything and everything to fit into the PC group and not be cut from the program, an event that might be construed as unforgivable failure by herself and all those around her. There was incomprehensible fear to have volunteered two years of your life to do noble work but to have some indifferent bureaucrats question your commitment. Worse, the unfathomable possibility of being removed from the program because of incompetence was particularly scary.
Five days into training, a disturbing storm swept through her body and mind: to be cut from the program would mean devastation; it would amount to smudging her ass black for the rest of her life; she had to go to Ethiopia. She knew very little of Ethiopia but suddenly she felt that her future as a productive human being passed through the highlands of Ethiopia.
It was a turning point in her young life, though she was too young to realize that imposing training programs, like stupid schooling, was simply one of those recurring events that are common but insignificant in life. She buckled down and made the PC training particularly significant, envisioning it as something full of the excitement that somehow would trash her insubstantial past and push her to grasp on to a most exciting future. So she excelled in everything the program called for, and poking of the ribs be damned. She had to go where her life could find a new start, a new continuity, and out of nowhere Ethiopia beamed quixotically at her. She became a best Volunteer not to be cut from the program. And with all her beauty, who could deny her?
It was on this road taken that she met her future husband David Calder, Dave to the group, whenever he would honkytonk on the lounge piano in Myra Hershey Hall, where the group had been housed. Immediately she had recognized that he was everything she wasn’t. In any other environment she would have pissed on him and walked away. Dave was one of those good looking boys whose rosy face was a pass to any convention. But for Robin, the ethical road having been cleared of compunctions by the need to fit, the ghost that might have protested to a more acceptable choice for a companion had been conveniently effaced out of the moral mind by the need to go to Ethiopia, and if plucky Dave would claim her as his girlfriend, he being a critical member of the training social group, then she would be in with everyone, including the daunting Big Daddy Peace Corps.
For several days she side-stared Dave, literally for the fuck of it, trying to find some unique quality in him, but to her dismay, all she could see was a vague immaturity, that in her mind, echoed nothing more than surface deep ‘nice guy’, but which somehow mysteriously led her to the sure and easy way to Addis Ababa, which at the time, was exactly what she was looking for.
It was another first for Robin to cautiously move in a continuous direction towards bubbly Dave who easily bounced around Royce Hall with his groupies, male and female, always in attendance. The guy wore sneakers before his time, which turned Robin off, but she found it curious that she attracted him. His head turned when she was around. His lustrous blue eyes, like a baby’s, evoked nothing but mother’s love for the world, and she had to admit they were sexually enticing. He was not the one that played the staid Aunt Molly tune on the piano; he was histrionically jazzy, which she likewise found amusing. Already his hairline had begun to recede and the crown of his head had lost most of his strawberry blond hair, “indicative of larger than normal amounts of testosterone”, his female friends would be in awe of him. Between his tennis shoes and his red nylon wrinkle-free windbreaker that reflected brightly on his white face, Dave took all the Peace Corps girls’ breathe away. But to Robin, he was an easy mark. He was too easy not to pass up, still an adolescent, and Robin was much smarter than he. She supressed all feelings of indifference and charged to charm Dave.
“Hey, Dave, you want to come up and see my bed?” one spied, brave, alone, afternoon moment, Robin teased that Peace Corps laughter at sparkling Dave.
Everybody wanted to see Robin’s bed.
It was that easy.
“What about your roommate?”
“Risk it, David,” she said as she led him to her room.
Robin locked the door behind her even though she knew that her roommate had an extra class that day and was at least an hour away.
It was more for Calder than herself.
She undressed quickly and stood tall in front of him smiling all her tantalizing purity to the lucky Dave. Her white nakedness shined like a Grecian statue in the twilight of Southern California afternoon. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to fuck at that moment as much as she felt she had to. She wanted to get it over as quickly as possible; what the fuck was the big deal? A tear came to her eye as he fucked her to a quick, silent climax. In his lucky afternoon he was never aware that it had been her first time, that he had deflowered a most beautiful girl. When he finished, she was surprised that it hadn’t hurt; she went and showered, and when she came back he had left the room.
And that’s the way it’s done.
*
“You mean to say, Robin, that all through high school and four years of college you stayed a virgin?” Kitty had asked in disbelief one day years later.
“Yeah,” Robin said to her trusted best friend, “and it still pisses me off that I had saved myself for so long only to have been plucked by an insensitive asshole like Calder,” she confessed about her now transparent husband in that strange laughter that was becoming more masculine with age.
“Oh, Robin, I’m so sorry; we never knew,” commiserated Kitty. It would have smacked of pity except that Kitty had a keen sense of sarcasm.
“What a bull-shitter you are, Kitty,” laughed Robin who never really needed Kitty’s expressions of sympathy.
“Of course you never mentioned anything about your sex life before, though we all assumed that you had to be doing it with somebody, from junior high times even, because you’re so beautiful, and we all thought somebody was corking you, because you’ve always been so secretive …”
“’fess up, Kitty, when was your first time?”
“I won’t tell you!”
“I bet you all thought it was my cousin …�
��
“Well, no, we thought it was your uncle; you know, the thin nosed lawyer,” and they both laughed.
“I won’t tell if you don’t tell,” said Kitty.
“At our age, we brag of such boosts, Kitty, so do tell,” said Robin.
“I’ll tell the others to call you Miss Chastity from now on,” giggled Kitty.
“Screw that scene, Kitty. After the first time all other times become only one other time. And I can truthfully tell you, Kitty, that there were many, many, other times. Every night the trainees would pair up and fuck their stressed-out brains. Whom you paired with was not ever an issue; we were all one great, big, happy family. It was almost incestuous. We fucked each other like kindergarten children playing in the toy-room.”
“What about the Peace Corps people? Didn’t they know what you were doing?”
“Sure they did. Some of the younger, gamier instructors, including the Ethiopians joined in the nightly fun.”
“Is it true what they say, Robin? That once you go black you never come back?”
And once again Robin’s mind wandered to the days of Addis Ababa, the ‘new flower’ days and to the tall and slender lover, Taferra, who simply would not fade away and whose huge loving eyes, over the years, continued to look into her heart; and each time she would have given anything to be with him for one more time.
She stupidly looked over her shoulder hoping to see his childlike face.
For two Peace Corps years he had been her beloved, courageously giving every sweet cell of his body and soul to her, but she always withholding, racially resisting, out of fear of his non-white skin.
“Hey, cuckoo bird; are you still with me?”
“Bullshit, Kitty. I went black, but I never left white, and did marry white, as you know,” Robin wistfully recalled.
“I was just wondering,” Kitty dissolved her curiosity.
“And let me tell you. The fucking didn’t stop with the training period. For the next two years we continued to fuck each other without concealment, thanks to the free condoms, courtesy of the Peace Corps. And every so often, we would stop by the Swedish Hospital in Addis Ababa to check our levels of syphilis and gonorrhoea.”
“All right Robin, that’s enough of the bullshit. I now think you’re pulling my leg. There’s just too much fucking in your story!”
Robin couldn’t stop laughing at her friend’s innocence. Sure she had exaggerated a bit, but Robin had never fucked as much as she did as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
“You know, Robin, Myrna’s sorority stories are no different than your Peace Corps stories; while you were fantasy fucking away in the PC, everybody was fantasy fucking each other in her sorority as well. You’ll never hear those kind of stories from me, though,” summed Kitty with a bit of phlegm in her voice.
“Well, what are friends for?” said Robin, after a moment’s exasperating delay, thick with discord, her eyes still focused on the sweet eucalyptus odors of Addis Ababa. They were masculine words, loaded with heavy feeling and short of friendly sentiment. They came out forcefully between Robins teeth and blew Kitty emotionally dry. She didn’t know why Robin said what she did about ‘friends’, the way she did; for her, friendship was a corny great big hug, an act of confessional openness. It wasn’t something to choke on. Friendship for Kitty was not a point of one-upmanship for selfish gain; it was an act of binding people in pleasure. She felt as if she somehow had offended Robin.
“If you want to know what friendship is, Robin, it’s the deep feeling of pleasure you sense when you are with your friend,” said Kitty.
“Oh Kitty! You are a great friend and I love being with you because you do give me great, great, deep, deep, pleasure,” smiled Robin in all honesty and took Kitty’s hand in hers, all hostility disappearing from her voice.
They took a cab to Sooky Rawko’s Bar on Pacific Highway in Santa Monica to meet Sharon and Myrna for vodka martinis, sushi, and sashimi delicacies, and always a half dozen oysters for Sharon.
*
Later that evening as she lay awake next to her husband she couldn’t get her Ethiopian lover out of her mind. Taferra had been a history teacher in the same school she had been assigned to teach English. He was young, no more than twenty five, and he walked with the superior peacock grace that the Amhara people have carried in their genes since the time of Solomon and Sheba. Robin had been amazed by the easy Ethiopian good looks when she first got to Addis Ababa. She, like most other Europeans, was pitilessly abused by the fine features and perfect complexion and colors of the Amhara and Tigre people. They walk with ease and when they sit it’s as if they’re sitting on flowers.
He instantly intimidated her. Tall and Ethiopian skinny, he fixated on her soul the first day he saw her shyly sipping her tea in the teacher’s lounge. She felt his intense presence and immediately understood that inevitably, soon, they would become lovers. The premonition was strong, they belonged together; she thought it was the appeal of the exotic that was unsettling her tummy. She was thrilled at the irrational, which made the prospect of fucking the Ethiopian more appealing, but not for one moment did she forget that she too was beautiful and that he had to acknowledge her presence or he’d be out of luck. She thought it ridiculous the way he carefully covered himself behind his always buttoned-down suit jacket faking it as blazer.
For the first month or so, the strange exchanges were limited to sparse side-glanced eye contact and greetings of “Good morning” and smiling “oops” whenever they bumped into each other in the school’s hallway or stairs. But there was no mistaking the powerful attraction that was sizzling between them. She sensed the delicate beauty of his light brown skin and every day that she saw him she couldn’t shake her persistent longing to be embraced and to be made pregnant by him. They both knew it was a matter of time.
One evening her doorbell rang and when she opened it he was standing there holding a passionate red rose. With a most serious hesitation on his face he waited for some seconds and then unabashedly walked into her life. She was terrorized by his unannounced presence.
He was as much in fear as she was.
“Where did you get a rose in Addis,” she broke the silence, and with those words she immediately became part of the family.
“Addis Ababa means ‘new flower’ in Amharic,” he said. “It was either an apple, or a new flower for the new teacher,” he said, the words trembling on his lips.
He was like a lost little puppy in her doorsteps. She couldn’t stand it any longer and took his hand and led him to her bed. They made up for the long anticipation of awaited lovemaking until the wee hours of the morning and in the end, when he parted, she was certain she was in love with him.
For the next two years he was the not so secret lover for whom she had travelled beyond the sea to Ethiopia. During that time that measured as a lifetime while it lasted, her heart was flooded with love full of tranquillity and cheer. She found the luxury to believe that she was in love with an Ethiopian, a stranger, lovely Taferra. She was enthralled by his gentle assertiveness, which made her forget her faraway American confinement; she was convinced that she had found her soul in his embracing laughter. His skin was beautiful to her touch. His lips and eyes became ancient springs of kindness that always pinned her with their liberating smile. Not until her Peace Corps tour was near the end did she see her white skin resurface again, that hers was not brown like his. She cried that day realizing that the Ethiopia Volunteer thing, including her Taferra, was but a whimsical dream paid by Uncle Sam. It was a lovely love affair that for sanity’s sake had to be extirpated, lovely as it had been, with all the surgical innocence of intercontinental flight detachment.
If Taferra was her special weekend flavoured lover, David Calder continued to be her everyday American lover, full of the playful sexuality that continued uninterrupted from the days of UCLA. And they weren’t the only two for whom she covered he
r bed with passion. She didn’t care. When the opportunity presented itself, often, because she was beautiful, she gleefully bit her lip and uncovered her breasts to another capricious adventure. She was far away from the disapproving eyes of those who might not have approved, like her parents, and she felt free; being sexually desirable was an opportunity not to be dismissed. Hers, too, was every young woman’s fantasized wish for many lovers to attend her infinite appetites. And for her, her fantasies were coming true, far beyond the sea, as she had often imagined as a little girl. She was young and beautiful and what was she supposed to do with her youth and beauty? The days of PC idealistic voluntarism were also of pure uncomplicated sexual experiences as well. It was as nature, and her immense beauty, had intended life to be. The libidinous exploration was a welcomed pleasurable landscapes of audacious freedom to be savored away from the discomfort of parental prying; prurient desires were to be enjoyed before conforming to one, servile, crushing husband in a social marriage of the rich, most often negotiated by daddy and others around her, presumed to last a lifetime. The holy tradition of a wedding that none would be able ‘to do apart’, were thoughts to be visited on a later date, after Ethiopia. And like the new Addis Ababa flower that she had become, she opened up her corolla with its precious petals to show the world what she had, a beauty to be cherished and abducted every time, far, far, away from home, where the deer and the antelope played, and no one could pass judgement on her.
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