Every Third Thought

by John Barth

  —Summertime swimming, not in narrow and workboat-busy Avon Creek, but in the wider, relatively cleaner Matahannock River, off a stretch of public sand-mud-andmarshgrass “beach” above the point where creek joins river, just downstream from the larger bridge connecting Stratford proper to the neighboring county. More bathing and aquatic horseplay than actual swimming, supervised in their early grade-school years by Mrs. Prosper or a mother of one of Ruthie’s friends, later by Ruth herself, more or less, in her Big Sister capacity, and on the boys’ own from about age ten, by when the neighborhood deemed its kids capable of trekking unsupervised to and from the rivershore as they did to Bridgetown Elementary, and disporting themselves harmlessly through a sultry tidewater afternoon. No diving from the bridge: a posted prohibition routinely ignored by the older boys. Don’t swim out farther than you can swim back: a rather self-enforcing rule; and Stay out of the main channel: a more negotiable one, since work- and pleasure-boat traffic was lighter on that upstream stretch of river than on Avon Creek and the lower Matahannock, with its numerous other creeks, boatyards, and crab-and-oyster-processing establishments. For these particular pre-teens, however, crawlstroking out to the river’s channel would have bent, and perhaps even broken, the preceding rule. Watch out for skates and sea nettles: the former (a.k.a. sting rays) fortunately not numerous, and generally avoidable if one remembered to shuffle one’s feet when walking on the firm mud/sand bottom (all but invisible in more than knee-deep water), but most unpleasant to be “stung” by—as witness Captain John Smith’s near-fatal encounter with one off consequently-named Sting Ray Point on the lower Chesapeake during his first exploration of the Bay in 1608. The latter the less formidable though distinctly unpleasant medusa jellyfish Chrysaora quinquecirrha, so abundant in dry summers especially (when the brackish water becomes saltier) as to be all but unavoidable except by staying ashore.

  Which, when the nettles were plentiful, the girls inclined to do, especially as they approached adolescence: a cooling dip now and then in the shallows just offshore, where they could more likely avoid being stung; then back to the more-or-less-sandy “beach” to play in its “sand” (not to be compared to the fine Atlantic beaches several hours distant, which the Prospers visited maybe twice per summer with “Gee” sometimes in tow), or merely stretch out on a towel like the older girls, gossip, leaf through magazines, and acquire a tan (more often a red, since only those older girls sometimes applied sun lotions, and SPF numbers weren’t invented yet). Fair-skinned boys simply blistered, peeled, and got the bill some decades later in the form of actinic keratoses, basal-cell epitheliomas, sometimes even dangerous melanomas. Kids from Stratford/Bridgetown’s Negro ward were luckier, Mrs. Prosper once observed, with respect to sunburn if little else. But one didn’t know any of them personally; they had their own small schoolhouse on the far side of town, and their own swimming-place somewhere down near the mouth of Avon Creek. To Ned and Gee and the other boys, the nettles were normally no more than a minor nuisance: In the water as much as the girls were out of it, the fellows romped and splashed one another, played Tag and Submarine, dived off the concrete bridge-piers and, as they got older, illicitly off the bridge itself—even swam a bit in the course of their horseplay, instructed by one another or the occasional parent. Their inevitable, more or less severe jellyfish stings (picric acid burns, actually, Mr. Prosper explained) they accepted like the skinned knees and scraped elbows from other sorts of play, and treated with various folk remedies: rubbing the inflammation with sand, which hurt so much worse that ceasing to do it helped a lot; pissing on it, if the girls weren’t around and if the stream—preferably one’s own rather than one’s buddy’s—could be aimed on target. To add one’s uric acid to the medusa’s picric, they would understand later, might be rationalized as fighting fire with fire; in any case, the fire always won. And now that we have their little weenies out . . .

  —Playing a different sort of “I See Christmas” with Sister Ruth, not at the rivershore but up in the Prospers’ attic at 213 Water Street, across and two down from the Newetts’ 210. “Here we go,” Narrator already imagines his mate sighing, to whom this tidbit will not be news: “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine, et cet. What else isn’t new? And who cares?” She and Sammy, she’ll remind him [her two-year-older brother, killed in a Vietnamese helicopter crash back in the high 1960s] played Doctor a few times before they sprouted pubic hair, but does she write poems about it?

  Why not, love? A Petrarchan sonnet, say, its Octave describing in memorable tropes the bold lad’s “Jimmy” (or whatever you-all called it; that’s what Gee’s mom called his timid tool, when she needed to name it) and the sort-of-scared but notuninterested lass’s “Susie” (ditto, changes changed, and those blue-crab nicknames stuck); its Sestet the delicate—one hopes it was delicate!—hands-on inspection of each’s by the other? In the case in hand, so to speak, all quite innocent, actually, as one hopes it was with the young Todd sibs: first the three D’s (a Dare, a Display, a bit of Demonstration), then the four or five T’s (Touch, Tweak, Titillating Tickle or Two). No harm done, and a thing or two learned, by Gee anyhow, up in that wintry attic among rolled-up summer rugs and stacked cartons in some appropriately literal Christmas season, 1939 or thereabouts: he and Neddy in maybe fourth grade, Ruthie in seventh, the three of them parentally dispatched to find a certain box of colored light-strings with which the Prospers (unlike the Newetts) traditionally decorated their screened front porch and entrance doorway. “Long as I can remember,” saucy Ruth surprised them by announcing, “you guys’ve been saying I see Christmas, right? Well, take a good look, and then it’s my turn.” To the boys’ considerable dismay then, she yanked down and stepped out of her step-ins (robin’s-egg blue, as Narrator recalls, though he may be supplying their color from other, later initiatory experiences), hiked up her skirt, and thrust virtually into their faces the first female pudendum ever seen by George Irving Newett, almost though not quite too embarrassed to look. But “Look!” the bold girl demanded, and look they did: not merely at its ever-so-interesting frontal aspect (which didn’t after all seem totally unfamiliar; Gee guessed he’d maybe seen photographs of nude female statues, but he didn’t recall their having had that fascinating little crease up the middle), but at the betweenand-under part as well, which she insisted they squat down and inspect close up—no poking, though, or she’d kill them both! They duly did, Gee at her orders not only looking at the curious pink puckers between her thighs, but (she gripping his wrist to guide and if necessary restrain him) lightly Touching, Tweaking, and Tickling them, as her brother was not allowed to do.

  “Okay, now tit for tat: Let’s see what you’ve got to offer.” Her own undies snugly back in place, she knelt before them on the dusty boards, hands on her hips, and became the Inspector instead of the Inspected. The boys, having more than once ministered to their sea-nettle stings as aforenoted and enjoyed backyard pissing contests when no one was about, were not unfamiliar with the sight of each other’s male equipment. To display it under present circumstances was a quite different matter, but they gamely did: unbuttoned the flies of their corduroy knickers and (avoiding each other’s eye, but not a glance at each other’s business) fished out their limp, pink-and-cream-colored little—

  “Penises,” Ruth Ellen Prosper declared, looking from one to the other with an expression of mild disgust. “Pricks. Dicks. Cocks. Now skin ’em back.”

  Do what? Ned Prosper evidently understood what his sister meant, and boldly obliged. Can it have been that George Newett at age nine remained unaware of the operation (never mind the names) of foreskin, prepuce, glans penis? Unlikely; but on a similarly wintry day nearly seven decades later, what he remembers is his having been too mortified to do more than stand there, pinching his penis between right-hand thumb and forefinger practically in Ruthie’s face and wiping his suddenly sniffly nose with his left (on which—distinctly!—he caught the scent of her private parts from when their roles had been reverse
d) until, “If you’re so set on seeing it,” Brother challenged Sister, “peel him back yourself.” Which to G. I. Newett’s fascinated appall she daintily did: exposed for her close-up scrutiny what a dozen years later the then college-age pals, laughing and shaking their heads at the recollection over mugs of frat-house beer, would call “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”2 and then dismissing it with a finger-flick and a brisk, “Okay, you pass.”

  “Do I have to come up there and find that Christmas stuff myself?” Mr. Prosper inquired up the stairwell.

  “No need, Dad. We’ve got our hands on it right now.”

  So where am I? Ah, yes: at G.I.N.’s worktable all these winters later, making note of at least three more items from this early season of his and (the late!) Ned Prosper’s story, out of the many prompted by that recent solstice-vision:

  For starters, their early discovery of books as a source of extracurricular and sometimes even curricular pleasure. Those “Big Little Books,” e.g.: hardcovers the size of half a brick, text on their left-hand 3” × 4” pages, black-and-white illustrations on their right, retailing the adventures of Dick Tracy, Tailspin Tommy, Tom Mix, Terry and the Pirates. Also a larger, radically abridged and expurgated edition of The Arabian Nights, handsomely illustrated by Maxfield Parrish. Plus innumerable comic books, more pictures than text, whose literally colorful depictions of Superman, Batman, and the rest drove Big Little Books off the market. And, as the pair graduated cross-creek from Bridgetown Elementary to Stratford Junior High and at Ned’s parents’ urging frequented the Avon County Public Library, the shelves of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and Victor Appleton’s Tom Swift novels. Stories, stories, stories! Much as they enjoyed watching Saturday-afternoon double features at Stratford’s Globe Theater and listening to radio serials like The Shadow (“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows . . . ”), in those pre-television, pre-video-game days it was stories “told” in printed words that most appealed to them—the silent, privileged transaction between Author and individual Reader (the boys regularly swapped books, but never read aloud to each other). Good old print: a shared early addiction that by their college years would become—unreservedly for Ned, halfhopefully for his sidekick—a calling, a true vocation....

  Second, Ned’s habit already by sixth grade of proposing something—an illicit dive off the Matahannock Bridge, maybe—then saying, unless Gee said it first, “On second thought, we’ll be in hot water if Ruthie squeals on us,” and deciding finally, “On third thought, that damn water’s too cold today: Let’s go splash Ruthie and her friends instead.” Or, on a wartime waste-paper-collection drive with fellow members of Bridgetown Boy Scout Troop #158, “Let’s see what old man Thorpe [a local news dealer] has for us in this pile of stuff,” and upon discovering therein a discarded trove of coverless Spicy Detective pulp magazines illustrated with line drawings of naked women in erotic peril, “On second thought, let’s cop a couple of these for later,” and having done so, “On third thought, to hell with the war effort: Let’s go work on our Jack-Off merit badges.” Whereupon, as the Nazis overran Europe, shipped its Jews off to extermination camps, invaded the Soviet Union, and poised to invade Great Britain, and as Imperial Japan, having surpriseattacked Pearl Harbor, extended its military dominion in the Pacific, Ned Prosper and George Newett practiced masturbation in the afore-described attic of 213 Water Street, the empty former woodshed of 210, and other secluded venues. It was his friend’s “third thoughts,” G.I.N. noticed early, that the pair most often acted upon.

  And finally (regarding things Third and Last), Retired O.F.F.-Prof Newett is reminded of his Prosper-pal’s predilection, even back then, for remarking Last Things, a habit that by his undergraduate years would become a virtual obsession:

  “Last time you’re gonna see me in these stupid corduroy knickers and kneesocks! Long pants from now on, or bare-assed!”

  “Last ride on our dumb old junior bikes: Race you to the bridge, Gee!”

  “Last day of Miz Brinsley’s fifth grade. Boo-hoo! Whoopee!”

  “Last week of vacation; better make the most of it!”

  “Last year of President Roosevelt’s second term!”

  “Last day of the 1930s!”

  “Last birthday before we’re teenagers. Let’s do Stupid Kid Stuff!”

  “Better get some sledding done while we can: Last day of winter coming soon!”

  Indeed. And almost seventy years later, as Senators Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois campaigned exhaustingly against each other to be either the first female or the first African-American presidential nominee, the winter of C.E. 2007/08 ran its unhurried, inexorable course, and at least two dwellers on Planet Earth began to wonder, vis-à-vis G. I. Newett’s narrative-in-utero, “Just what the fuck is this, pray tell?”

  Thus asked one of them, Poet/Professor A. Todd, of the other, her palms-up husband, who, as he not infrequently did, had requested that his mate please take a look at the paperclipped pages that she now tossed back into his lap. Responded he, “That’s what I hoped you’d help me figure out.”

  “Well, for starters, is it meant to be a novel or a memoir or what? How much of this silly stuff really happened?”

  “Don’t ask me; I just work here.” Shrug. “Shit happens. And now I remember that I forgot to include a certain memorable First among all those Lasts.” Namely, that it was on the afore-noted Last Day of fifth grade in Bridgetown Elementary that Yours Fictively George Irving Newett made his literary debut, in the form of a naughty poem about their stern, fat, and busty teacher. Scribbled in #2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencil on a torn-out sheet of blue-ruled composition-book paper as Miss Brinsley, standing before a large wall map, held forth on global time-differentials and the inversion of seasons between Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and meant to be passed surreptitiously over to Ned P. but noticed and pounced upon by its eagle-eyed subject before its recipient could finish reading it, Gee’s aabb quatrain was spun off from an anonymous one considered funny by male Bridgetown fifth- and sixth-graders when shared orally at recess-time. The original:Old Henry went to the burlesque show.

  He sat right down on the very front row.

  And when the girls began to dance,

  POP! went the buttons on Henry’s pants.

  In Gee’s longhand version:

  Miss Brinsley sneaked into the burlesque show.

  She sat way back on the very last row,

  And when the boys began to cheer,

  POP! went the snaps on her brassiere.

  “Let me get this straight,” now said Amanda Todd. “You’re telling me that as late as 1941, at least a few fifth-grade boys in Bridgetown, Maryland, imagined that female sexual arousal involved mammary engorgement?”

  “Some of us must’ve. What did we know?” What Narrator knew, and now reported, was that the formidable Miss Brinsley had been unamused. Crumpling the poem-script without expression and tossing it into her desk-side wastebasket (from which its author would manage later to retrieve it, he being assigned blackboard-erasure and trashcan-emptying as supplementary penance at that school-day’s close), she had sternly summoned him to the front of the classroom, pronounced him guilty of indecency and illicit note-passing, ordered him to bend forward over the desk, and directed the poem’s interrupted first reader to come forward and administer five hard whacks to the poet’s posterior with a large wooden paddle kept prominently on display in a front corner of the classroom to discourage misbehavior. Why five? Opinions differed in subsequent playground discussion of the incident, some maintaining that it was one whack for each grade, others that it was one for each line of the already much-repeated quatrain plus one for good measure, and others yet that it was one for each snap-hook on Miss Brinsley’s bra (more than the usual number, Ruth Prosper would inform us from her more knowledgeable perspective on such esoterica—but then, think of the size of Miz B.’s . . . boobs!). Author’s punishment having been smartly delivered by Reader, at
Subject’s order the tables were then turned and three whacks laid by Scurrilous Sender upon Ready Recipient’s backside, Miss Brinsley explaining to both and to the class that accessories to any misdeed, while perhaps less guilty than its perpetrators, must bear their share of responsibility.

  In a put-on Eastern Shore drawl, “Sounds to me,” Mandy allowed, “like yer ole Miz B. there was right smart of a teacher.”

  That she was, if a less than lovable one: She even explained to us the difference between Accessories Before and After the Fact. And we knew our Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn long before we discovered Henry Miller’s naughty novels in college days.

  “Which however I believe were first being published in France at just about the time you tell of. And what did Future Fictionists Prosper and Newett take away from this experience, other than sore derrières?”

  Didn’t hurt all that much, actually, in the physical way, and more of a scalding embarrassment to G. I. Newett, who knew he’d be in deep shit at home when word reached his parents, than to Ned P., whose folks, being educators themselves, were as a rule more understanding in the Classroom Mischief department. To all hands’ surprise, however, there were no further unpleasant consequences. For whatever reasons, Miss Brinsley chose not to report the incident to either set of parents. Nor did Ned’s sister “tell on them” when she quickly got chapter and verse, so to speak, through an extracurricular grapevine that extended from Bridgetown Elementary up through Stratford Junior High, where she was in eighth grade. She merely shook her head in disgust, promised much worse retribution than a mere handful of hiney-whacks to anyone who dared write such shit about her, and made the gossiped bra-hook-number correction mentioned above.