I go into the house and look over at the portrait sitting in a place of honour on the buffet. It’s my favourite photograph of Barb.
“Gillian was just as nutty as ever,” I say aloud. “Pushing me into an old folks’ home. Claude plied me with liquor as usual—but he showed a bit of his sentimental side. Still had the framed photo you gave to every member of the wedding party. I was impressed.”
In the kitchen, I take a cereal bowl, a juice glass and a tablespoon and set them on the table for morning. I pour myself half a glass of skim milk, turn out the lights and head upstairs into my book-lined office.
I turn on my computer. One of the rituals of my quiet, solitary widower’s life is to check my e-mail before bedtime. I may not do my banking on-line, and I might do all I can for the preservation of books, but the electronic era hasn’t completely passed me by. There’s one new message, from Patsy Glover.
Gerry died back in 1999 and his widow, Patsy, keeps in touch; she used to phone me once in a while, but now she e-mails me. Lately, she’s been inviting me to her dinner group, which meets every two months. I went once—to have dim sum in a popular place in Chinatown—and the food was fine; it was Vera Kolotylo I couldn’t stand. Since Bud died, she talks more than ever.
I open Patsy’s message:
Subject: Old Familiar Face
Dear Jenkins:
You will be interested to hear that Janie Hunter (née Sinclair) is moving back to Winnipeg. Her son Jason lives here with his family and I guess he’s doing well. They have a big place in Linden Woods. I think Janie may have already moved in with them.
Isn’t she the one who named you The Kissing Bandit?
Maybe we should all get together for a few laughs. You, me, Vera, maybe Fred? Let me know what you think.
Cheers, Patsy.
>
The Kissing Bandit
So Janie Sinclair is back in town after all these years. Janie Sinclair—my high-school graduation date. But it wasn’t Janie who named me The Kissing Bandit.
Back in those often heartbreaking, often exciting days, for guys like me, kissing wasn’t a prelude to something else, it was everything. And when the kiss didn’t happen on Doreen’s doorstep, after days of imagining what it might be like, I despaired of ever having another chance to kiss anyone.
And then, there was this girl in the shadows of her unlighted back door, wanting me to kiss her.
It wasn’t Janie Sinclair. That was years later at the end of Grade Twelve.
It was a girl I ended up with at a church-club dance, just two weeks after Grade Nine grad. I wasn’t in a partying mood. I couldn’t dance very well then, and I was preoccupied with what I’d done and not done on my date with Doreen. I was standing on the sidelines when Louise came over and selected me for a Ladies’ Choice. Yes, Louise, the girl the guys in our club called TB—for Tremendous Bum. I was embarrassed at first, but the church hall was quite dark, and she was wearing a flared skirt that hid her proportions. She was a pretty girl with bobbed dark-brown hair and a slim body. It was only her behind that didn’t seem to fit her but, if she knew people called her TB, she didn’t seem to let it bother her.
The music was slow and Louise moved in close. Some girls just did that naturally, as if being close was essential to slow dancing. She felt good and she smelled good, and she followed whatever step I was making up as I went along. The chaperones, Mr. and Mrs. Swandell, were in the brightly lighted kitchen talking, oblivious to how dark the kids had made the hall.
As the record came to an end, Louise was in no hurry to break from me and, when she did, I asked her if she wanted to try the next one, and she said, “Sure.”
We stayed together for a third slow tune. She held her body closer to mine each time and I could feel her face hot against my cheek. At some point I stopped thinking about Doreen and became fully aware of the female presence right there in my arms.
No one seemed to take much notice that I was dancing every dance with Louise. Most of the other kids were doing some pairing off of their own. Louise and I stuck to the slow dances; when a polka or a schottische came on, we sipped Cokes together.
I knew that dancing with the same girl many times led to certain expectations. When the last record ended, I asked Louise if I could walk her home and she said, “Sure.”
We both lived a long way from the church—in opposite directions. She went to a different school in the southern part of St. Vital. It was a lovely summer night and I could’ve walked miles, I was so optimistic about the way the night was progressing. She didn’t say much as we walked, hand in hand, but I was giddy, and that made me blather on, and she chuckled at my corny comments, even squeezing my arm.
Her house was a modest bungalow. She led me through the gate and around to the back. There was no outside light on. My eyes had adjusted to the night and I could see a look on Louise’s face, one I’d hoped to see on Doreen’s and hadn’t. Expectant. Louise looked at my mouth and moved close to me as if we might be going to dance.
The kiss was as natural as our first dance had been. Just as she had placed her arms and her body and her feet in the right place for me on the dance floor, she now placed her lips perfectly. Everything seemed right about her lips: the warmth, the softness, the taste, the malleability, the scent. There was this complete willingness on her part to be close, closer than any girl had ever been to me. That in itself was exciting, never mind all the new and pleasant sensations.
I wanted to say something. I broke from her to say, “I had a terrific—” but she interrupted me with her mouth. She wanted to keep on kissing.
And so I kissed her and kissed her and I didn’t care if her bum was bigger than it should’ve been because, up to then, I’d never had such a good time.
Most of the summer lay ahead of us and, without discussing it, we seemed to know we both wanted more kissing. There was something mysterious about Louise; she didn’t say much, but I sensed that she knew a lot about intimacy. I’m sure she could tell I was inexperienced and that wasn’t putting her off—in fact, she seemed delighted to be the one who was breaking me in. What we needed was a place. I came up with the idea of meeting at the church. I helped out at the Sunday services that summer and I had a key to the room where the choir members and I kept our vestments. There was a risk that Reverend Halliday or our janitor or someone else might show up, but that made it all the more thrilling. Louise and I met among the surplices, and we’d kiss our faces off in the dark. We didn’t go about it the way couples do in movies these days, chewing each other’s lower lip like cannibals. Louise was good at applying the right amount of pressure, so that my lips could sense the texture of hers. She’d use her tongue—barely the tip of it—as kind of a tantalizing surprise. We’d get feverish, and I suspected that Louise wanted to do more, but I was happy to kiss. And kiss.
We’d meet for an hour or less, and I didn’t walk her home afterward—at least, not all the way—because I didn’t want to get home later than expected. My parents knew nothing about Louise.
I didn’t tell my friends about her, either, not because she had a large behind but because she had a reputation. For the same reason, I didn’t want to go out on a formal date with her and be seen in public with her. We met on those nights after the choir had practised and left, and she seemed happy with that. Maybe she was meeting another guy on other nights, a guy who was “putting the blocks to her,” as Claude would say. I was so wrapped up in the intrigue of our clandestine meetings, I didn’t worry too much about anything else. And Louise was always at the church when I wanted her to be, ready to kiss.
But she wasn’t the one who named me The Kissing Bandit.
We stopped seeing each other when fall came. I think it was because we were back at school. Or maybe she lost interest in me because all I wanted to do was kiss. Or maybe I was scared away by her wanting more.
And then there was Trudy. Trudy the tease. Anytime anyone mentioned the Winnipeg Flood of 1950, I thought of her.
When the flood came in the spring of 1950, we—my parents, my brother and I—had to move out of our house. Those were the days before the floodway. The government relied on dikes, and some suburbs were sacrificed to save downtown. St. Vital, where I lived, was one of those suburbs.
We were lucky to have a place to go to. The Mooneys, friends of my parents, were headed to Kansas City for a few weeks and they offered us their three-bedroom apartment downtown. There was a condition: We’d have to look after their sixteen-year-old daughter Trudy, who couldn’t miss the rest of Grade Eleven. To enable Trudy to keep her own room, Allan and I had to squeeze into Mrs. Mooney’s sewing room.
I hadn’t met Trudy before. George Mooney, Trudy’s father, and my dad both belonged to the same veterans’ club, and our mothers had met at the club’s social functions. Trudy hit it off with my mother, mostly because of the meals my mom made. Mom whomped up eggs and sausages and pancakes for breakfast, where Trudy never expected more than a piece of toast with cinnamon sprinkled on it from her own mom.
It bothered me to be suddenly in a household with a girl. For a boy whose Grade Ten peers talked endlessly about boobs, it was distracting to have a pair only a few feet away—on the other side of the wall—when I was lying on my cot. Based on my limited knowledge of what constituted nice boobs, Trudy’s were quite lovely. I couldn’t wait for a chance to tell Claude what a well-stacked clootch I was billeted with. I hoped for a glimpse of her in something less than the clothes she wore to school, but she was fully dressed whenever I saw her, even first thing in the morning when she was headed for the bathroom.
Trudy had beautifully plump Cupid’s-bow lips. I wanted to kiss them, sure that, if she’d let me, she’d be impressed with the technique I’d learned from Louise.
Little was said about Trudy’s dating. I think she’d been given rules by her parents, but I didn’t know what they were. Her getting along well with my mother was likely a factor in her sticking close to the apartment when she wasn’t at school. I heard somewhere that a guy she really liked had knocked up a girl and that put a damper on Trudy’s love life. She openly flirted with Allan, who’d already graduated from university with an Engineering degree, but she barely spoke to me.
Evacuees were encouraged to attend the school nearest where they were staying and, for me, that was Gordon Bell High, Trudy’s school. Mom asked her to walk me there the first day and she did, reluctantly. After that, we tended to avoid each other—until one afternoon.
I arrived home later than usual and found her in the apartment alone. Dressed in her usual sweater and slacks, she stopped me on my way to my room by waving something in front of my face. It was one of the comic books I’d drawn. That was my favourite hobby in those days, drawing my own comics in scribbler-size books of blank paper called Jumbo scrapbooks. Influenced by Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, I was fond of spicing up my comic-book adventures with statuesque women, who wore sweaters stretched tight across their bosoms. I was becoming adept at shading that made the fabric look taut in the right places. Trudy held the book open at one of the pages in which my character Robin Hawk first meets the luscious but sinister Leda.
“Is this supposed to be me?” Trudy asked.
“You took that out of my room,” I said.
“Correction. I took it out of my mother’s sewing room. This is me, isn’t it?”
“Of course not. It’s a character in my comic strip. Could I have it back, please? It is mine.”
“If you want to draw me so badly, you just need to ask.”
“Could I have it back?” I persisted.
“Come and get it,” she said, and she held it on the other side of her, away from me.
“Can’t you just give it to me?”
“Just try and take it.”
“No.”
“Chicken.”
I lunged. Trudy laughed and held the book behind her back. I reached again. This time, I grazed her breast.
“I—I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m not,” she said.
For a moment, I was confused. She was holding her lovely chest up to me, daring me. I bent to kiss her and at the same time put my left hand on her right breast.
“No!” she cried, twisting her face away.
Baffled and embarrassed, I said, “I’m sorry, I thought—”
“It’s all right,” she said, “I just don’t want you to kiss me.”
At last, I grasped her meaning, and I grasped her boob. I didn’t know where to look. The good thing about kissing was, you could close your eyes, but Trudy was forcing me to look at her. I tried to put a serious expression on my face while I fondled her breast, using a motion similar to turning the dial on a console radio. I tried to concentrate on what it felt like, but her eyes and her grin were unnerving.
“That’s—that’s nice,” I said, not even sure if I was doing what I was doing correctly.
“Hey, you’ve got two hands, haven’t you?”
Unfamiliar as I was with this kind of situation, I again knew what she meant, and I placed my right hand on her left breast. It was a bizarre turn of events, and as far from intimacy as you could imagine, but it was a milestone, I had to admit that.
No more than thirty seconds after I’d first touched her, she bolted to her room and slammed the door, leaving my comic book on the rug.
If I thought Trudy and I had a new relationship, I was wrong. She barely spoke to me again, except at dinner when we were with the rest of my family—and once when my dad took the two of us to see our flooded house. In the boat in which we rowed up our inundated street, Trudy sat behind my dad and, whenever I looked back at her, she stuck out her chest, taunting me.
It was an odd experience to tie the boat at our front door and, in rubber boots, step onto the third of our three steps and into the verandah. Dad was relieved to see that the flood water, while filling our basement, hadn’t risen to the main floor, and radio reports assured us that the level had reached its peak and was about to drop.
Trudy took little interest in the state of the house. She hid in a bedroom and, when I walked into it, she stuck out her chest again and gave me a saucy smile, even though my father was not far away. But that was the extent of her playfulness.
Some days later, when the water had receded and the Mooneys were due back and we prepared to return to our home, I came upon a basket of laundry and in it was a brassiere that I knew wasn’t my mother’s. No one was around, so I picked it up. I felt the cloth cups—the same contours I remembered from that afternoon, the same pliability. It dawned on me that it was the bra that Trudy had let me feel. I hadn’t felt an honest-to-goodness boob at all.
Grade Eleven came, and my movie date with Shirley Kernigan, and, after it, we still got along fine at school. She was the same smiley person every day, and she never questioned why I didn’t ask her out again. At times, when I was going weeks without a date, I’d think, Why not give Shirley another try? And then the image of her open eye would come back to me like a Cyclops in a horror movie.
I guess I didn’t kiss another girl until Alice. She was about as pleasant and friendly as you’d want, and she had a trim figure. But her upper row of teeth protruded—it wasn’t obvious until she gave you a broad smile. Her face was pretty when she grinned or looked serious, but the big smile gave the show away, causing guys to rate her low on the date chart.
One night, in the middle of Grade Twelve, the Yarwood High School basketball team, accompanied by thirty or forty loyal fans, was returning from an exhibition game against a North Dakota school. On the way down, I’d sat beside Gerry and the busload of us had raucously sung “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on a Wall” and a bunch of other sing-along songs, but on the trip home, Gerry sat with his girlfriend Patsy and I just happened to find an empty seat beside Alice. Because I didn’t think of her as a girl I’d like to go out with, I felt relaxed with her. She liked to paint in water colours, so we talked about her painting and my cartooning and the game, which our
team had narrowly won. The bus grew pretty quiet, except for the sound of the bus engine and a whisper here and a suggestive chuckle there, and some kids settled into some serious necking. I don’t know how it happened that Alice and I started kissing. I guess she thought, as I did, that it was the thing to do, in the dark, in a moving bus, when a lot of the kids around us were paired off and twisted into clinches. Given how well we were getting along and the lack of bright light, I didn’t worry about what her mouth looked like. I was curious about what it felt like. She didn’t flinch when I leaned over to her. Her lips felt warmer and softer and fuller than I expected. Her teeth were definitely there, but I kissed her as if I didn’t give a damn. She turned her face to lessen the effect of the overbite and, before I knew it, she was fitting the oval of her open mouth to mine at a ninety-degree angle. It was a marvellous way to spend the two-and-a-half-hour bus ride.
But did I ask Alice out on a date? No.
Anyway, it wasn’t Alice who called me The Kissing Bandit. Or Shirley. And it certainly wasn’t Trudy.
Well, then there was Dianne, who would’ve been highly rated if it hadn’t been for her thick glasses. One night, Gerry took me over to his girlfriend’s. Patsy, who was in my room at school, lived way out by the sanitarium, and we went in Gerry’s dad’s car. The plan was that Patsy was going to teach me how to do Arthur Murray’s Magic Step, a way of dancing that could be adapted to almost any tune. It turned out that Patsy thought she’d invite her friend Dianne to even things up, and then she invited four other kids to make it into a party. Since the four others were two couples, it was pretty evident that I was meant to be with Dianne. There was smoking but no drinking—no booze drinking, that is, just Cokes. Patsy and Dianne took turns showing me the step. When I’d perfected it, Dianne and I did some slow dancing together, all eight of us dancing to records in Patsy’s rec room. Dianne and I were still dancing as the others found soft places to sit and start necking. Dianne gave me a look and took me to a corner where we could pretend we had privacy. She was a delicate girl with black curly hair and a clear white complexion—and the thick glasses that got in the way when we were dancing and would surely be a problem in kissing. What I didn’t expect, since the glasses seemed so essential to her, was her taking them off. Removal of the glasses was as sensual to me as removal of her blouse might’ve been, her bare eyelids as sultry as the bare bosoms in Jack’s Sunbathing magazines. The gesture made Dianne seem so submissive, she might as well have said, “Take me, I’m yours.” Funny how easily you can fall into intense kissing when everyone around you is doing the same. We necked and necked and, when we broke for air, she whispered:
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