Lion's Share

by Rochelle Rattner

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t know. Not this time.” Jana set her glass heavily on the table. “It’s hard to explain, but I think the pleasure I was feeling might have been familiar. Maybe I felt it with Dr. Waters, too. Maybe his kissing my stomach might not have been so terribly wrong.” He wasn’t doing anything to me that you weren’t trying to do, she wanted to scream. If Dr. Waters was wrong, then you were wrong, too.

  “What he was doing was wrong,” Ed assured her.

  She flashed on Sharma sitting at the table when they’d had dinner with Marilyn and Andy last week. The lace collar of Sharma’s blouse had fallen open across her newly formed breasts. She had beautiful, firm breasts but wore them on a child’s body, with no awareness of their power. And Sharma was thirteen, three years older than Jana had been that year she went away to camp. Was it any wonder she’d been so confused by Dr. Waters?

  Sharma might be too young now, but by the time someone like Ed came along to fondle those breasts, you could be certain her mother would have explained the experience to her. Sharma would never feel guilty if her body responded, responded … Responded how? Jana wanted to say normally.

  Sharma wasn’t here. Marilyn wasn’t here. Dr. Waters would only be here if she let him in. The dim fluorescent light hummed and flickered over the counter, reminding her that Ed was the only person in the room with her. There was nothing to be afraid of. If Jana could say the words, all the fear would vanish. “The only thing that was wrong, perhaps, was that I was too insecure to trust my enjoyment. Maybe it was a form of self-punishment: mentally I was pleading with my parents, ‘Take me out of camp, even though I haven’t told you what happened, and I promise never to enjoy being touched or kissed again.’ Is such a thing possible?”

  Ed slid his chair back. Stared at her. Suddenly her face became grained with age. Her jaw seemed to move on its own, like a Charlie McCarthy puppet. “Well, he started it, with his ‘don’t ever tell anyone about what we do here.’ How was I supposed to react? He frightened me. And I was even more frightened, I think, because I enjoyed the experience, while he was hinting that it was forbidden.”

  Ed stood behind her now, gently massaging her shoulders. “Hey, take it easy. It’s all right to realize that.” He bent over and pressed his cheek against hers. “Everything’s okay now. I’m not that doctor.” Hugging her, feeling her close to him, made her real again. “You’re upset today, that’s all,” he continued softly. “You’re still feeling the effects of Dr. Barbash’s examination. I know how hard it must be for you. Honest, I know.”

  Jana was on her feet, returning his hug, letting her body make itself small in the folds of her lover’s. This was the comfort she had wanted from her parents, making the world right again. But she’d never even let them know what happened.

  Jana massaged both temples at once with a paint-stained hand, then drew her fingers slowly and firmly along her forehead until they met in the center. She was working with oil, which meant she had to keep the windows open—ever since she started getting sinus headaches three years ago, she’d become sensitive to the fumes. She’d also fallen asleep with her head on Ed’s chest last night, inhaling the stale odor of his cigarettes, which didn’t help her sinuses any. It was too cold to think straight, but she kept layering colors on the painting in front of her, determined to torture herself.

  A postcard of Matisse’s Odalisque with Magnolias was tacked to the top of her easel, and Jana had spent the past two days trying to merge those lines with her mirror-image. “I’ll bet a woman that large would be easy for Dr. Barbash to examine,” she thought wryly as she extended the stomach curve. Oh, screw it! She’d tacked that postcard up to remind her of Ed’s grace, not to torment herself with fat-woman imagery. But there was no use kidding herself—if Ed had been fat when she’d met him, she’d probably have used his physique as an excuse to reject him.

  She’d been trying to convince herself that Ed’s caring was enough to carry her through all her fears, including the suddenly resurfacing memories of Dr. Waters. Now it seemed as if the longer they were together, the more frightened she was becoming. Frightened by what Dr. Waters had done to her body years ago. Frightened by the blockage discovered in her vaginal tract only yesterday. Well, at least there was something that could be done about the present—alleviation, answers, could be as close as the paint-specked telephone.

  “I don’t remember, Jan,” her mother said. “That was a long time ago. I told the doctor I didn’t want to hear the details, I just wanted to have the child. It was a difficult pregnancy. You were supposed to be a cesarean, they didn’t think I could carry you full-term, but you came out before they were expecting you.”

  “But Mom, if you used DES, they must have told you. I went to a gynecologist, and she discovered a blockage in my vaginal tract. She can’t explain it, but there’s a good chance it was caused by DES.”

  Her mother gasped, then asked if she was in much pain.

  “I’m feeling fine. There’s a mucous discharge, but they tell me that’s to be expected.” To be expected when a woman becomes sexually active, she added silently.

  “Well, you must have been having problems if you went to a doctor.”

  Jana braced herself. She knew it would come to this—if she called her parents to ask about the DES, she would have to explain about Ed. Frantically she tried to think of the proper words. Dr. Barbash had explained that gynecological problems aren’t only found in people who are sexually active, but she’d just told her mother she was feeling fine. She lowered her voice as if they were finally sharing a secret. “I wanted birth control pills,” she stated flatly. She stopped herself before she said the rest, that she couldn’t get the pills because she was too old now.

  “Be careful,” her mother whispered after what seemed an interminable silence.

  “We are, don’t worry.”

  “When are you going back to the doctor?”

  “She’ll have the results of the Pap smear next week. If it doesn’t indicate any problems, she wants me to make an appointment in a few weeks.”

  “You’ll call me as soon as you know anything?”

  “I will, I promise.” Jana pressed the phone to her ear—her mother wanted to know this time. Everything was turning out differently than she’d expected. There was no screaming, no tantrums, only adults caring about each other. It was almost like speaking with Ed.

  “You don’t think you’d rather come home?” her mother asked. “You’d probably feel better if you could rest and let someone take care of you for a while.”

  “Ed’s here,” Jana heard herself saying. “I just wish it were easier for me to accept being cared for. I’m finding it difficult to make a commitment to another person, even when I’m feeling good,” she continued, slowly. Could Marilyn have been right? Was it possible her parents had done something to make her not only ashamed, but afraid of sex?

  “I always wanted to do everything on my own, too. Everyone thought I’d never get married,” her mother said. “Pop liked to call Daddy ‘Last Chance Replance.’”

  “You never slept with anyone before you were married, did you, Mom?” Jana made it sound as if she were joking.

  “Not on your life.” Her mother went on to talk about Marty, a guy she’d dated when she’d lived in Chicago. Her roommate was dating a close friend of Marty’s, and it was arranged that they’d all go to a movie. When they came back to the apartment afterwards, the other couple went into the bedroom and closed the door. “Finally it got late, and I told Marty I was tired. I asked him to please go get his friend so the two of them could leave. Poor Marty had to explain to me what they were doing in there. They obviously assumed we were doing the same.”

  Jana couldn’t believe her ears. She’d never seen her mother this open or honest before. But she’d never steered the conversation in this direction either. “No guys ever forced the issue?” she asked.

  “Never. Or if they started to, I was too innocent to know wha
t was happening,” her mother laughed.

  “I know the feeling,” Jana laughed back. But the laugh was cut short. She closed her eyes, sucked her breath in. She’d been desperate to talk to her mother about this—the talk with Ed had eased the desperation, but still … “Somebody forced himself on me once,” she said, softly. “I never told you about that, did I?”

  “What do you mean ‘forced himself on you’?” her mother’s voice rose a pitch. “When? What did he do to you?”

  “Oh, not forced himself exactly—he kissed my stomach, around that area. When I was a child.”

  “It was that doctor, wasn’t it? That doctor who took care of you at camp. What was his name White, Walt, Waters?”

  Jana would have gasped if she could have gotten air from somewhere. She felt a hot flash, the kind her mother used to complain about. “Waters,” she whispered. Then: “How did you know it was him?”

  “I should have realized. I told your father at the time I suspected something. When am I going to learn to trust my instincts?”

  “But how? What would have made you suspicious?”

  “It just didn’t seem right, you spending half the summer in the infirmary.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you ask me about it?”

  “I didn’t want to frighten you. You were a little withdrawn when you first came home, then school started and you seemed fine. I kept thinking that even if something had happened, if we didn’t bring it up you’d forget about it.”

  “You never stopped to think that it might come back to haunt me later?”

  “You seemed fine.”

  The phone appeared to go dead. Jana searched the silence for memories of her childhood, something to reassure herself that her parents had been looking out for her. She thought about how her mother would sit on the seesaw with her when no other kids were around, trying in vain to shift her weight so Jana could go up and down.

  “I guess maybe I would have liked to talk to you about the experience, but I didn’t know where to begin,” her mother said, breaking the eerie silence. “You didn’t have an understanding of right and wrong, sexually. If I’d tried to tell you to never let anyone touch your genitals or expose himself to you, and you’d already been subjected to that, you’d probably have thought I was blaming you.”

  “But, Mom didn’t it ever dawn on you that I might have known it was wrong? Dr. Waters implied as much—he kept telling me how important it was to keep this our secret. You never realized I might have been blaming myself all these years?”

  “No, I never realized that. Don’t forget, you’re talking about twenty-five years ago. It wasn’t like it is today—sex simply wasn’t discussed among the people we associated with.” There was that interminable silence again, then: “Your father and I were doing what we thought was best.”

  “I know that,” Jana said, half to herself. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that her parents hold different values than she does—at least this time they weren’t attempting to impose them. They were all doing what they thought was best.

  Until now, her parents had been the only ones to love her, and she had rejected their love as obligatory. Maybe, thanks to Ed, she was finally learning how to love them back. “I know that,” Jana repeated. And if she stayed with Ed long enough, she might someday believe it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Power and Light

  “LOOK, MA, no hands,” Ed teased, holding the tip of his cock against Jana’s belly button, letting it peek inside. Night after night, she would lie on her back while he went to the bathroom to wash, fascinated by the pleasure she’d been able to give so easily. Now that he’d come, she could relax and let his fingers fulfill her, confident she had nothing more to fear tonight.

  The longer she holds onto her virginity, the more afraid of losing it a woman becomes, Jana realized. The longer a woman holds onto her virginity, the more she learns to appreciate that love is more than sex, it’s cuddling, sharing with another person, even doing dishes together: Ed’s explanation.

  “Take a good look around,” Ed told his cock.

  She reached out to playfully push his hand away, then edged quickly away from him. Ed followed. “I thought …” she managed.

  “You thought exactly what I wanted you to think,” he said, softly.

  “I don’t understand …”

  “We have to, dear.” He tried to place his cock against her again. Jana shielded herself with her hands, one clasped over the other. Ed heaved a sigh, rolled onto his back, and took her hand in his, pressing finger after finger gently as he talked. “I wish we didn’t have to do this, dear. But we have to make you large enough for the doctor to examine you.” He wrapped his arms around her. “We’ll try again tomorrow night, okay?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “And I might have to keep pushing my way in even if you protest, but it’s only because I’m as concerned about that obstruction as your doctor is.”

  Jana sighed agreement. “I’ll try not to hurt you,” he whispered, his arms grasping her so tightly that he was hurting her even now.

  From that night on they approached the problem together, more rational than passionate. First he used his fingers to get her stimulated. Then he slipped into what they laughingly referred to as his “raincoat.” He learned to open the foil pack with his teeth and put the rubber on single-handedly. Jana fought to keep her legs raised a little longer, a little higher. They tried a pillow under her lower back, then two pillows. He was certain it would be easier if he could just find the right angle.

  Twice they thought he might have broken through, but when she ran to the bathroom to check, she found no blood. Then the next night they would get in bed full of expectation, only to discover she was tighter than ever. Until at last, on a night not that different from all other nights, the evening of a day when he’d gotten up late and run out of the house so quickly that he didn’t take her in his arms for even a quick hug, he got through: October 14, 1984, two days after her parents’ anniversary. The pain was less than she had expected—less than last summer when her body had been pushed into new positions, or last month when she felt as if she’d been horseback riding and walked with her legs apart for days on end.

  They had a bottle of champagne in the icebox; Ed bought it last summer and had been saving it for this occasion. The cork flew off, hitting the ceiling and landing in the middle of the bed. Giggling to cover their sudden foreignness with each other, they crawled in after it, clinked their glasses, and sat up drinking, hugging. Finally, at three AM they turned the lamp off. Just tonight, Ed wanted to sleep with his arms around her, but Jana still had a hard time getting comfortable when he was that close, and they both needed as much rest as they could get.

  “Being with Ed hasn’t improved my timing any,” Jana thought dryly as she arranged miniature Danish on a silver tray. “Leave it to me to lose my virginity the night before a board meeting.” All the meetings with APL were taking their toll on her, but there was no reason she should be nervous before a meeting of The Paperworks Space board. She knew these ten people well, some were old friends, all unquestionably supported the gallery. She popped a Danish into her mouth, walked over and set the tray on the center of the table, then sat down.

  “I assume everyone received copies of the budget Associated Power and Light has planned for the forthcoming exhibition,” Natalie said as she opened the meeting. “As most of you know, it’s quite a bit more than we originally budgeted. Obviously, if APL wants to go all out with a gala reception, it’s not our place to stop them. What I’d like is input from everyone on ways in which this extravagance can work to the benefit of The Paperworks Space and the artists involved in the exhibition.”

  When no one else spoke up immediately, Gary Jeffreys began. “Sidestepping the gala a bit, I’m more interested in the $31,500 figure for promotion costs,” he said. “APL obviously wants to publicize the exhibition for the exposure they’ll get as sponsors, but there are various ways
that can be handled. If we’re talking in terms of helping the artists benefit from all the promo, then the first order of business might be to insist that all eighteen artists be mentioned on advertising and promotional material.”

  “If they list eighteen names, plus six sites, and the exhibition’s title, isn’t that going to mean more text than the eye can take in at once?” Bill Fitch asked. “I would hope the ad designs would be as aesthetically pleasing as the drawings themselves are.”

  “The list can be printed in undiluted ink on major ads and in a screen tint as background for ads with less available space. That process paces the viewer’s impressions, so not all the information jumps out at him,” Gary pointed out. He and Larry Rivers were the two working artists on their board, selected for the purpose of protecting artistic interests. Gary, put on two years ago, had been Jana’s suggestion, and at the moment she was proud of that decision.

  “We have to remember how insistent APL was that we include big-name draws. I want to be certain these artists don’t get undue attention,” Jana said.

  “More than likely those names will be listed first, but frankly I see that as working to our benefit as well,” Bill said. “If the other names are listed randomly instead of alphabetically, no one is likely to notice any discrimination. If the media wants to focus on the larger names, then there’s not very much we can do about that.”

  “Anything which draws people to the show is fine with me,” Natalie said. “Besides, APL’s promo department went out of their way to get detailed background info on all the artists and plans to deluge the various hometown newspapers. Color stories in those papers will soften the blow a bit if metropolitan coverage focuses on stars.”