“Did you have a nice walk?” Mrs. O’Shea asked pleasantly. “Ready for lemonade, kids?”
2
What I’ve described strikes me now, reflecting on it all these years later, as utterly innocent. Early-adolescent fumblings was all it was; touching, kissing, figuring out how your own and someone’s else’s body worked. And despite my somewhat telescoped history here, it certainly wasn’t all about budding sex between us. Our hormones may have been rushing like the mightiest of rushing rivers, but a twelve-year-old boy can be satisfied sexually quite easily; there was no need for us to move forward especially quickly. Over the summer we became increasingly clever at finding places where we could be alone together, and we took small steps. I can remember quite vividly the first time she touched my erection, running her index finger along it for a brief moment. (“Feels like rubber,” she said. “Hard rubber.”) And I can remember the first time she allowed me to pull up her shirt and actually touch and kiss those breasts of hers which she thought so profoundly uninteresting.
Could there ever be anything better than hovering on the edge of thirteen, with June underway and a sweet little girlfriend to spend the long hot days with?
If so, I’ve never found it.
Summer waned; high school arrived. We were a public couple now, officially an item—“George and Mary” were the talk of the freshman class. In my work as a teacher I’ve sometimes seen young couples that have reminded me of how we were then: they seem to be aware of no universe outside each other. They’re never seen apart, except in such brief periods as their class schedules might require (and they go to great lengths to coordinate their class schedules, too). They finish each others’ sentences, like old married people. It’s the kind of bond that can only come from long periods spent exclusively together, in some kind of total sympathy with each other. It’s not about sex, at least not necessarily, not entirely: some of the most intense couples I’ve seen in school were, I’m positive, not sexually active—or at least, like Sherry and me, not fully so.
It may sound like the pleasant gloss of a quarter-century’s memory, but I actually think Sherry and I made one of the healthiest couples of this type I’ve ever known. We were certainly wrapped up in each other throughout high school, yet we did other things, too. Sherry ran on the track team all four years, partly because she enjoyed it, partly in a struggle to control her weight, about which she was growing ever more self-conscious (somewhat erroneously, really: I once overheard a boy in class describe her, quite accurately, as “cute—kind of chubby-cute—but cute”).
I, meanwhile, was writing—mostly stories, and mostly the kinds of stories I most liked to read: fantasies, supernatural tales. I’d discovered Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, the entire Twilight Zone crew, and could spend endless hours reading or watching their tales and trying to write stories like theirs. Sherry and I no longer collaborated on jokey ghost stories; we’d grown beyond that, and anyway, it became apparent that writing was a genuine passion of mine, as it wasn’t with her. Sherry became my first (often only) audience, but I didn’t share a lot of what I wrote with her: just the very best stories. Something in me couldn’t allow her to see my ill-conceived or fragmentary efforts. I could show her only the finest.
My personality, then, showed itself early. Sherry’s didn’t. She bounced from interest to interest—singing (she was in Choir for a year), drama (she played one of the Witches in our school’s production of Macbeth), swimming, horseback riding, crochet, gourmet cooking...it was a long list. Yet I was always delighted to go to one of her concerts, even if hers was only one of some thirty voices; to see her in a play or a track meet, or to serve as the guinea pig for one of her attempts at French cuisine. It was all wonderful to me. These interests, however, largely separate, also kept us from being too unhealthily involved with each other every minute of every day, which helped keep her parents from being too worried about the relationship.
Though they were a little concerned, Sherry told me. So was Alice, always my mother-surrogate. “Ben,” she said once, “you know I like Sherry—Sherry’s a really nice kid—but don’t you think...well, that you should see some other girls now and then?”
“I’m not interested in other girls,” I said.
Alice smiled and touched my shoulder. “You’re very gallant,” she said.
Our relationship was not, of course, all peace and light—we were adolescents, after all. There was the occasional fiery argument, the misunderstanding, the hurt feeling, the day or two of silence between us. There were my own issues with Dad: too often I was worked up, frazzled, by his latest shouting tirade against the goddamn Jews, goddamn niggers, goddamn etc. Sherry wasn’t present for these explosions (they never occurred when anyone outside the family was there), though she did tell me once or twice that she’d been able to hear his voice at home through her open window—and she heard him call me “Shithead,” too. At such times she was gentle with me. Her own home life was, as far as I could see, quietly uneventful; she got along well enough with both her parents, though she didn’t seem too attached to either one. In the absence of her own personal drama, she became a support system, a lifeline, to help me survive mine.
Sexually we moved along slowly, which is no doubt the best way. We were sophomores before she would open her pants enough to allow me to slip my hand in, in and down, then up, to feel what a girl was like inside—and to notice, rather to my amazement, that her pubic hair was exactly the same bright neon orange as the hair on her head. It was the first year for oral sex, too—my being on the receiving end, that is. (The other way didn’t happen until senior year.) I’m sure I was frustrated at times, I’m sure I pressured her occasionally, but in memory it all seems to have been a pleasant, slow march together, taking each other at our own pace. Certainly I’ll never forget one afternoon, alone in my bedroom together, the house deserted, her pants open, my fingers deep up inside her, when I realized that she’d closed her eyes and begun breathing fast, making little moaning sounds. Instinctively I moved my fingers faster. A few seconds later she inhaled suddenly and let out a small shriek.
“Oh my God, Ben,” she said breathlessly, after a long time, looking at me with an amazed, even stupefied expression.
What wasn’t perfect was the rest of the world. Dad had decided that Shithead needed to leave his house immediately after graduation. “You’ve never worked a day in your goddamn life,” he declared, throwing back another bottle of beer, “and it’s goddamn time you started.” Alice (who was under no similar requirement; she was welcome to stay as long as she wanted, apparently) tried to go to bat for me, suggesting that I spend the next year at community college, as she’d done, or get a full-time job and save to get an apartment. My father would have none of it. “I was on my own at fifteen fucking years old,” he proclaimed. “I’m tired of this bullshit in my house.”
The “bullshit” to which he referred is no clearer to me today than it was then. I was a kid who worked hard in school, came home on time, didn’t get in trouble for drinking or drugs the way many of my classmates did (though Sherry and I did filch cigarettes from her mother when we were sophomores, beginning a smoking habit which for me would prove lifelong). My grades were excellent—both Sherry and I finished in the top ten of the senior class—but my father radiated resentment toward me, resentment and disgust for me and, I increasingly have come to believe, Sherry’s and my relationship. But who knows? Maybe it was no more than the fact that I’d been growing my hair out since my junior year, hair that would eventually reach to my shoulders. It could have been anything, with Dad. Or nothing.
In any event, during senior year I did get a job as a busboy at a nearby restaurant, and pinched the proverbial pennies. I had no idea where I would go or what I would do—I was seventeen and had no experience of the world. What little I’d seen had been on those family vacations, now many years back, when Dad took Alice and I to Shasta Lake or Reno. Dad bought me a second-hand car my senior year—it
was my graduation present, delivered early—“and one year’s worth of insurance. After that you’re on your own.” He spat it out vehemently. Sherry and I looked into possible schools, scholarships. We were determined to stay together, whether that meant remaining in the area or leaving. Sherry’s parents weren’t particularly pleased about that—they did tell her they thought it was time she went away, saw other people—but how much bitching can any parents do when their daughter is seemingly healthy, happy, and productive? And realistically they couldn’t complain about me or my behavior toward their daughter. I was an ideal boyfriend—respectful, helpful (I remember painting the exterior of the O’Sheas’ entire house a sunny yellow one summer), responsible. But I suppose from their point of view there was just so much of me.
Well, Sherry and I took a trip during the Spring Break of our senior year, winding our way in my little brown Ford Capri (she dubbed it the “Turdmobile”) around some of the major areas south of us on Highway 5, Highway 1, Highway 101—we just wandered, really, for nearly a week, with the ostensible notion of checking out colleges. We ate at truck stops and McDonalds and stayed at KOA campsites using her family’s camping equipment. It was marvelous, and in fact it was at one of those campsites outside San Luis Obispo, in her tent, on a lovely spring night with our little transistor radio quietly playing Top 40 songs, that Sherry finally surrendered to me whatever tattered remnants of her virtue that we’d still somehow left intact. Although “surrendered” is hardly the word—she was the instigator, in her gentle way, not I. We were very active that night, and for many, many nights thereafter; mornings, too. I could hardly believe what it felt like to be inside a girl; it rendered everything else we’d done together sexually for the past four years instantly obsolete, at least for a while. We proved to be as compatible in this arena as we were in every other way. We would do it for hours, taking breaks occasionally for water or short naps, then diving right in again. Bodies (and brains) that age are all but insatiable, anyway. And it was then, in those early slow lovemaking sessions, that I decided that there would never be any girl in the world but Sherry O’Shea for me. We’d crossed the final threshold triumphantly. We were soulmates. We were each other’s, forever.
Nor did we suffer any disagreement about our future plans—because when we hit Southern California, we knew that we’d found what we were looking for. I remember driving for hours south on Highway 101, the ocean on our right, green mountains on our left, salty-sweet sea breezes flowing through the open windows of the car, the Eagles or ELO on the radio, Sherry’s damp palm loosely in mine, feeling that there was nowhere better than this, here, now, with this girl. The endless white beaches, the bodies tanning and splashing—it was warm enough for that—the little hot dog stands and boardwalk shops, the deep bright happy sun. We frolicked on those beaches, bought cheap plastic flip-flops and sunglasses, splashed each other in the surf. What’s more, the first town where we stopped, Santa Barbara, had a two-year community college directly overlooking a vast, almost ridiculously beautiful beach. It took us only half a day of wandering the campus and a bit of the downtown to decide.
“This is it,” Sherry exclaimed, grinning and stretching her arms to the sun. “Ben, this is it!”
“It is. Oh my God, it really is!” I looked at her through our sunglasses. We were standing on State Street, the Museum of Art towering majestically behind us, happy locals breezing past us in their sandals and shorts and sun-shirts. “Are you sure, though?”
She cocked her head. “Sure about what?”
“This,” I said. “Me.”
“What are you talking about, Ben?”
I shrugged. “You could do a lot better than me. You could go off to a university. San Francisco State or somewhere. Your parents said they’ll pay for you. They’re not paying for you to hang out with me down here. You don’t have to go to a community college with me and scrape for money. It isn’t necessary.”
After a moment she used her finger to push her sunglasses low on her face. She studied me with her sleepy blue eyes.
“Benjamin,” she said with a little smile, “it’s me.”
And she grabbed my hand, marching us happily up the street.
With that, we became Santa Barbara’s newest residents. Not quite immediately—first came the small matter of finishing our high school careers—but those final months, classes and working at the restaurant, phoning south about apartments, filling out registration materials for college—are a smear of nothingness in my memory. Dad laid off me—I don’t think I was called “Shithead” more than once or twice in those last weeks—and Alice complained, perhaps sincerely, about how much she would miss me.
But I really remember little about this period. My recollection picks up when Sherry and I see the road signs for Santa Barbara coming into view as the Turdmobile rolls down Highway 101, U-Haul trailer in tow. I remember pulling up to the apartment building, stepping out, stunned once more at the rich salt air, the ocean, the tall palm trees everywhere (palm trees!), the pale blue sky. My God, I loved this city. I still do, in memory, though I haven’t been there in over fifteen years and doubt I’ll ever return.
Our building was on a little hill, a long walk or short drive from downtown. We had two bedrooms, a kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and a magnificent third-floor view of the town and the sea beyond from our living room window. The building was surrounded by lush greenery. It was so much better than any place a couple of community college students had any right to expect that it almost literally took my breath away. “(What can I tell you?” said our landlord, the obese and eupeptic Mr. Bogg. “You got nice faces.”)
We commenced quickly to get to know the city, mostly on foot, which is how to get to know any city. Sherry would grab my hand, a habitual gesture of hers, and lead us on a wander up and down State Street, visiting the Art Museum and the library and the various restaurants and bookstores—Earthling Books was a great favorite of ours, with its quaint enclosed fireplace in the middle of the floor and benches all around it. We visited the County Courthouse on Anacapa Street, a lovely old Spanish-style building—most of the architecture in Santa Barbara is Spanish, adobe walls, arched doorway, red-tiled roofs—and investigated its hushed corridors, its old-style intricate tile work and big murals depicting California’s history and industries, finally taking the elevator to the El Mirador clock tower, leaning over the railings together some eighty-five feet from the ground and taking in the breathtaking, panoramic views of the city. We toured the beautiful Old Mission and the Natural History Museum. We went for drives in the glorious, winding foothills, where the celebrities reside.
But we were serious, too. We dutifully registered for classes and dutifully obtained, with pleasant ease, jobs, such as they were: I managed a great step up in my professional career when I became an honest-to-God waiter at a café on Anapamu Street, only a fifteen-minute walk from the apartment. Sherry did even better, landing a position as clerk at one of the used bookstores off State Street. We worked only three blocks from each other, and, since I generally had the breakfast and lunch shifts, our hours were often similar. I would stop by the bookstore when I was off work and paw through the thousands of old paperbacks, all of them temptingly available at Sherry’s employee discount price, or she would visit me when she finished, allowing me to serve her a little meal at the café while the owner, a big gregarious woman named Mrs. Wade, teased us with questions about when I would make an honest woman of her.
Classes were, for the most part, easy—easy for both of us. We studied, we worked, we read books; I wrote stories on my yellow pads, later revising them on my little Olympia typewriter. I grew my hair out nearly to my shoulders. (Mrs. Wade didn’t mind; she teased that it made me prettier than any girl.) We made love most nights, long into the night. In my memory every day was clear and beautiful, every night cool and star-sparkling, and really, that’s probably not far from the truth.
It’s true that we had very little money. The rent was tough to make each
month, and at least a couple of times we found ourselves literally searching through what little furniture we had for spare quarters. Sometimes we would sell off some of our old books or records to raise a few dollars. But somehow we were never put out on the street, didn’t starve, and even managed some entertainment now and then. It was the kind of life that, at least for a while, is easy when you’re eighteen or nineteen and in love.
But the never-ending scrabbling for cash did begin to wear us down—Sherry particularly. Once, in bed, the night breeze wafting through our gossamer bedroom curtain, she surprised me by saying, “Ben, maybe I should talk to my parents. We’re both doing well in school. Maybe they’d be willing to help us out.”
“We’re doing all right, though,” I said, “aren’t we?”
She sighed, nestling her face against my chest. “I guess,” she said.
But we weren’t. Soon enough—six or seven months after arriving in town—we’d run out of books and records to sell; the last thing we got rid of for money was our TV, which we sold to the neighbor next door; in the evenings we could hear it playing softly through the wall. The telephone service was disconnected, then turned on again when I took a second job, a few hours a week in the college’s cafeteria. It helped, but not much.
Alice came to visit one late-summer day. I remember her standing in the doorway of the apartment—it’s difficult for me to imagine that she was all of twenty-six then—and saying, “Ben, Sherry, what a nice—little—place.” And then, quietly, when Sherry was out of the room: “Ben, do you need me to loan you some money?”
“Why? No. We’re okay.”
“Okay? You don’t have any furniture. And this rug...” She looked distastefully at it.
“It’s just that we don’t have a vacuum.”
Lullaby for the Rain Girl Page 14