“Saved them,” she said. “Why don’t you go in and turn on the TV? I think it’s started. I’ll just be a couple of minutes.”
“I’ll save you a seat,” I said.
Perry Como was his usual self, singing “Round and Round.” I felt uneasy and, as I sat down and watched his show, I thought a guy could learn a lot from Como on how to be unbothered—or at least look that way.
Barbara brought in a tray laden with buns that were smaller than what I was used to but still gave off that irresistible cinnamon aroma. She went back to the kitchen and returned with plates and butter and knives and spoons and sugar and milk and cups and saucers and a teapot.
I devoured one buttered bun and another. “These are terrific,” I said, taking a third.
Sitting on separate sections of the sectional sofa, we finished off the buns as if food was what we were hungry for. Barbara poured a second cup for both of us and, when the show ended, I collected the empty plates and things and carried them into the kitchen. Barbara followed. After I set the tray on the counter, I turned to find her there.
“That was so g—”
She gave me an open-mouthed kiss made up of a mixture of tastes—tea, cinnamon, lipstick. I held her tight, feeling wicked—we’d never kissed in the kitchen before.
“Let’s not worry,” she said. “Let’s enjoy ourselves.”
“I just don’t want you to think—”
“Did you hear me? Let’s not analyze and question and—well, you know how we carry on sometimes. Now, you go downstairs.”
“I was going to help you wash up.”
“We’re going to leave everything. Go, and I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
I went downstairs, not sure why we weren’t going to neck in the TV room or the living room. Maybe she was respecting boundaries set by her parents: If you must neck while we’re away, please neck in the rec room. That’s where we’d been going lately—I’d begun to call it The Neck Room. Well, I wasn’t complaining. We were going to fool around, that was the main thing. My heart was pounding.
I checked myself in the downstairs bathroom mirror: the shirt looked good, except I needed to undo the second button. There, that was better, with a suggestion of chest hair showing. I went into the rec room. It felt dank; I started the fake fire. I sat on the sofa, picked up a Time magazine and leafed through it without seeing a thing on the pages. I wondered what Barbara could be doing. Maybe she was having second thoughts. Cold feet. I stood up and walked around, peeking into the dark room where the furnace hummed. I looked into the Ping-Pong room and on the green table two bats embraced a ball. Suggestively.
I heard her footsteps on the stairs. I hurried back to the rec room and sat down on the sofa, hoping to look composed, as if I’d been relaxing. The click click of her footsteps told me she’d changed her shoes; it wasn’t the sound of loafers, it was—yes, it was definitely the sound of high heels.
Now she entered the room, and she was wearing black pumps all right, and black slacks, and a patent leather belt, and a sleeveless black jersey with a rhinestone pin, and rhinestone earrings, and her lips were moist with brighter red lipstick, and her eyes seemed greener somehow, framed in mascara, and she’d changed her hair so that a lock fell over one side of her forehead. She seemed a little shy about the effect she was trying to create, but she held herself poised. She came to me and she bent over me and kissed me and kept kissing me as she knelt on the sofa beside me and ran her fingers over my face and inside my collar, and she touched her lips to my temple and my cheek and my earlobe and that place where the jaw meets the neck, and lower and lower.
“You wear a stiff white collar at work all day,” she whispered. “When you’re in the office on Monday, think of my lips being here … and here …”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, and I moved my hands over her sweatered back.
I noticed something different. There was no bra strap.
“You took off your—”
“Shhh,” she said, pushing her mouth hard against mine.
I didn’t want to rush this—it was too much of a good thing—I wanted everything to last and last, and we did after all have lots of time, so, as she changed to a sitting position beside me, I moved my hand slowly until it came to where her right breast began and I was astounded by the softness that undergarments concealed. I moved my hand further but still ever so slowly, until the breast filled my hand and I could feel the nipple pushing through the jersey. As we continued to kiss, she tugged one side of the jersey out of her belt and I knew this was an invitation for me to send one hand under the jersey, and I moved my hand so slowly I couldn’t believe my own patience, and I felt how smooth and feverish her flesh was, and there, there, was the curve of the lower part of her bare breast, and the mere touch of it against my fingers sent a hot tremor through me.
“I love you!” I shouted.
“You’re boiling!” Barbara said. “Your face is on fire. Stay there.” She got up.
“Where—”
“I’ll get a cool wet face cloth. Doesn’t that sound good?”
She went in bare feet to the basement bathroom. I heard water running. She was right, I’d never felt so hot. She returned with the wet cloth and a towel and she gently wiped my face and neck and under my chin and into the top of my shirt.
“Ohh, thank you,” I said.
She stopped to dry my face and comb my hair. She said, “I’m so glad you aren’t badgering me to take off my clothes and you aren’t trying to touch me—you know—down there.”
“Barbara, I’m happy just being here with you, you know that,” I said, but I couldn’t wait to get back to what I’d been doing.
“We should thank God for showing us how to respect each other and keeping us rational so that we aren’t tempted to do something crazy.”
I so much wanted to do something crazy or at the very least hold that breast again, but I said, “You’re right.”
“Let’s get down on our knees.”
“What?”
“That’s the way you talk to God.”
“Can’t we—”
“Come on.”
She knelt beside the sofa and bent her head and held her hands together under her chin like a praying little girl. I’d never seen this religious side of her, but I had to admit I wanted to thank somebody for letting me caress her bare boob after all these months. I knelt beside her.
She said, “Do you want to say it?”
“Oh … I …”
“Come on.”
“Okay. Let’s see—um—thank you, thank you, Lord, for giving us the desire we have for each other … and … and for giving us the wisdom to guide us and govern that desire.”
“Amen,” she said. “Oh, Jenkins, that was beautiful!” She turned to me and, with us still on our knees, she pulled me to her and whispered, “You touched one, and the other is jealous. Will you touch the other one, please? Please?”
In those days, petting—as the Sociology books called sexual touching—was not foreplay. Petting was an end in itself. By that summer, Barbara was a registered nurse, working full time and living back at home, and part of every date was devoted to petting in The Neck Room. Sometimes I was content to feel one breast from outside her sweater or blouse. Or I’d put my hand inside the sweater but outside the bra. If she was wearing a blouse, I might unbutton it enough to let me slip my hand onto the breast but again outside the bra. Often, if she was wearing a blouse, I’d kiss her throat and undo a couple of buttons so that I could kiss the skin above her cleavage, the place that blushed so tellingly in our petting sessions. Or she might do what she started to do back in February—disappear for a few minutes and take off the bra and leave the blouse or sweater on—and now she was bold enough to do that kind of thing when her parents were home, but usually after they’d gone to bed. Sometimes I wanted to feel the contour of the breast, the smooth curve below the nipple. Sometimes I wanted to hold the breast and marvel at its spongy malleability. I loved the fe
el of the bare breast in my hand, but I could get almost as great a kick out of feeling the breast in the bra, the fullness pushing out against the lacy fabric. Going into the blouse from the top and going into the blouse from the bottom seemed like two completely different experiences—and different again when I undid all the buttons and approached either breast sideways. It could be fun, too, to open the blouse when the bra was still on and reach around and unhook the bra and watch and feel the effect, how the bra kind of went limp and I felt like a liberator, releasing twin maidens from captivity. These moves required me to sit beside her—on one side or the other, it didn’t much matter, as long as both of us were comfortable—and both of us would have to swivel from the waist to face each other, and, if I was on her right, I used my right hand and went into the blouse, if that was what she was wearing, and felt the breast furthest from me, the left one; and if I was on her left, I used my left hand and went into her blouse—a little more easily because women’s blouses, the opposite of men’s shirts, opened that way, the right side of the blouse overlapping the left—and I felt the right one, which might in fact be a little different in size and shape from the left one since most women’s torsos weren’t symmetrical, but it seemed to me that Barbara’s right breast felt exactly the same in my left hand (which, come to think of it, wasn’t an exact replica of my right) as her left breast did in my right hand, and one was just as sweet and lovable as the other. It was another matter if she was wearing a sweater or that slinky black jersey of hers, since the only way in was from the bottom—at her waist—which was awkward and not nearly as efficient for the task at hand (ironically, the prim blouse was thus more amenable to getting at her boobs than the slinky jersey). The process could’ve been simplified if Barbara had taken off whatever top she had on, but this was made impossible partly by the chance that her parents might come downstairs at any minute—though they almost never did—but mostly by Barbara’s not being ready for that kind of intimacy. And all of these manoeuvres took place from sitting positions because lying down together was still out of the question, but I did sometimes fondle her when we were standing up, though that never seemed as satisfying for either of us. The only exception had come one night in April, after a party where we’d both had lots to drink.We were saying good night in the breezeway, and when Barbara turned to go in, I pulled her back to me from behind, my hands clasping her breasts and my mouth all over her neck, and I thought how naturally my hands fit her breasts in that position, as if men’s hands were made to fit women’s breasts that way, like a sort of human brassiere. Of course, on a given night I might skip the breasts entirely and feel the curves of her caboose, especially if she was wearing slacks. But that wasn’t easy when we were sitting side by side. It worked best when we were in a standing position facing each other. On a night when Barbara didn’t want me to leave and we stood at the door with our hot mouths and bodies jammed together, it felt good to hold the cheeks of her bum in my hands.
Part of the fascination with petting was curiosity. The first thirty-five times or so, I was finding out what a girl’s body felt like, and after that I was finding out what Barbara’s body felt like, and how it compared with the (precious few) others I’d touched. It eventually became clear that what was important to find out was how my touching her body made Barbara feel. This was contrary to the way Claude or Bud or Gerry talked; as far as they were concerned, a guy did things to a girl for his own gratification, no matter what they made her feel like. Though Barbara and I never discussed it, I thought it was good to try to figure out what method of touching I wanted to repeat and what method she wanted me to repeat. What I think excited Barbara as much as anything was participating in something naughty.
Since it wasn’t always convenient for us to indulge in a petting session, when it was convenient, the progression of my moves could be almost the same each time, and the whole experience would seem wonderful all over again. (I’d often lie awake in my bed and marvel that there were many experiences you felt you only needed to have once—like seeing the Eiffel Tower or riding to the top of the Empire State Building—you could remember exactly what it looked like or felt like and you didn’t care if you never experienced it again; while not only did you want to feel your girlfriend’s breasts all the time, you forgot what they felt like the minute you weren’t feeling them and you craved the sensation again as soon as possible.) Petting might’ve proven to be boring for Barbara if I didn’t show some imagination, so I tried to vary my approach. Sometimes I’d skip the suspense altogether and grab her boobs before I did anything else, but I didn’t think she was so keen on that. In summer at the beach, there was the added dimension of a romantic setting; we knew a secluded spot in the bushes where we could watch the sun go down on the lake and not be seen from any cottage, and there was something fabulous about sitting on a blanket, leaning against a tree, and feeling the breasts of the girl you loved while you both stared at the ruby-red sky and its reflection on the water. Just as amazing was to park in some lovers’ lane during a summer storm, and turn her soft nipples into hard pellets while the rain pounded on the car.
Of course, there were occasions when Barbara wasn’t in the mood. She’d let me know how she felt by pushing my hand away or turning from me or giving me a brief closed-mouth kiss. I’d be disappointed—after all, I was always in the mood!—but I’d chalk it up to the differences between men and women. Women were moody. What was more, women had their monthlies, and the word was that women didn’t feel much like petting when they were menstruating. Not that Barbara ever discussed this condition with me.
Then came that night, taking us both by surprise, the night we came close to splitting up over some dumb argument or other. I was heading out the door when I thought I heard her voice, not the harsh voice that had been berating me but a soft voice, calling my name from downstairs. I went down to the Neck Room, where the tri-light had been turned down to low and I found Barbara on the sofa, semi-reclining, the hem of her sheath raised above her knees.
“You forgot to kiss me good night,” she said.
I dropped my coat on the floor and rushed to her. So relieved was I that I knelt in front of her and kissed my way up one of her legs, pushing the hem further back and kissing past the top of her stocking, kissing up her warm bare thigh, finding the scent of perfume there, pushing my nose into the panel of girdle between her thighs, feeling her hand in my hair, hearing her softly saying, “Oh, Jenkins, I didn’t mean any of it, oh, come here, ohh,” and moving my face up to her bosom and kissing the dress material stretched across it and working my way up so that now I was kneeling beside her on the sofa, as I found her hot mouth at last and I tasted Wild Cherry Life Saver and at the same time I felt her hand on the front of my trousers where it had never been before, and the taste and the touch made me wild enough to reach down and rub her where my nose had been and she cried out, “OHH!”
“I love you, Barbara,” I said.
“Oh, God, I hope my parents didn’t hear me!”
She sat up and pulled down her hem and listened for someone on the stairs or someone calling down to see if anything was wrong. When no-one did come down or call, we hugged chastely, letting our breathing settle down, realizing we’d transgressed into what the sociologists called heavy petting.
It was time to buy a ring.
At lunchtime the following Monday, I walked up Portage Avenue to Birk’s, the store that had a reputation for the best jewellery in town. Before I found the ring section, I saw one of my copywriters, Lasha.
She said, “Jenkins, if I’d known you were coming here, I’d’ve got you to do Fisher’s little chore for him.” She gave the good-natured laugh she was known for.
“Fisher gets you to shop for him?”
“Something for his wife, he says. His wife, my foot. You know the girl modelling in the refrigerator ad? That’s Fisher’s latest little popsy. So guess who gets to find her a trinket.”
“Why you?”
“He thinks he�
�s giving me a perk. Take all the time you want, he says. Why are you here? Don’t tell me. I’ll bet you’re making a major move on that sweetie of yours.”
I blushed.
“I knew it!” Lasha said. “Hey, why don’t you let me help you find something?”
Much about Lasha was a mystery—she was of undetermined age and, while I’d heard that her boyfriends were a series of married men, nobody knew for sure—but she had a reputation for excellent taste in clothing and accessories. That’s why she wrote the copy for the fashion ads.
“I want to pick it,” I said, “but I’d appreciate your opinion.”
“Terrific! Okay if I try them on?”
Half an hour later, I had an engagement ring that was slightly more expensive than what I could afford, and I was headed to the phone booth at the back of the store. I took a deep breath and dialled.
The secretary put me through.
“Mason speaking.”
It was customary in certain levels of society back in 1957 for a young man to ask his girlfriend’s father for permission to marry his daughter. The young man was expected to seek the father’s blessing before asking her, though many fellows I knew talked it over with their girlfriends first (to say nothing of guys like Gerry who had to get married). It was perhaps foolhardy for a young man to buy an engagement ring before either the father or the daughter had been consulted but, as far as I knew, the sequence of events was dictated by cultural tradition.
“Mr. Mason, it’s Bob Jenkins,” I said into the phone, trying to sound confident.
“Oh, yes, Jenkins, how are you?”
“Fine, sir. I—I was wondering if I could see you sometime this afternoon.”
“I have a meeting in a few minutes. Maybe later—what’s on your mind?”
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