The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Aha! A hit!

  “Those ‘bombs,’ as you call them, my dear young lady, happen to be what’s keeping you in your unending supply of Villager blouses. Or out of them, as it appears at the moment.”

  Even then I suspected that more was at stake here than my passion for the ever-muscular Joe Bob Sparks. The Major and I were enacting the ancient sexual drama in which a daughter makes the break with her father, her true love since infancy, by taking a man her own age. The script had been written centuries ago, and we were merely stepping into the parts required of us. Women typically married men very much like their fathers. So said the Psychology 101 text at Worthley, at any rate. If a woman chose someone unlike her father, it was a rejection of him, consciously or not. Well, there could be no one less like the suave haughty Major than Joe Bob Sparks. Unless it was Clem Cloyd, who entered the picture later as a potential son-in-law for the poor beleaguered Major. No youthful romance was ever as pure and innocent as it seemed. The choice of partners was always a commentary on one or both parents on each side.

  “I didn’t ask to be born!” I informed the Major, in response to his pomposity about paying me my clothing allowance.

  “Oh, go ahead and wreck your life!” He stomped from the room. Reconsidering, he paused at the door and explained wearily, “You’ve got to get away from Hullsport, Ginny. You’re going to college in the North if I have to hogtie you and ship you up there. You’re not one of these people, and you can return only when you’ve learned that.”

  “What am I then?” I shrieked. “You’re not one of them maybe. But I am! This is my home!”

  He shook his head, perplexed, and closed the door behind him. Then he opened it and said, “I don’t want to alarm you unnecessarily, Virginia. But you are aware, I trust, that lovers’ lanes attract psychopaths of all kinds.”

  The news that Joe Bob and I were going steady spread around school like the plague. Friends kept coming up the next day to look at the black onyx ring. I’d dripped almost an entire candle behind the stone to make the ring fit. It stuck out an inch and weighted my arm down as I walked, just as Joe Bob’s wrist weights did his. If I had slugged someone with that fist, my unfortunate victim would have had the crest of Hullsport Regional High School embossed on his jaw for life, like the Phantom’s victims in the funny pages.

  At lunchtime as all we students lounged in the fold-out seats in the gym idly watching intramural basketball games, Joe Bob’s and my friends cheered in unison, “Hi, Ginny! Yay, Sparks! Hi yay! Ginny, Sparks!” All the girls cheered shrilly. The boys whistled with their fingers and stomped their feet and hooted knowingly and yelled to Joe Bob, “Gettin’ much, Sparky?” Joe Bob smiled an enigmatic smile and raised our clasped hands high into the air in a victory salute like a prizefighter and the referee. We were now one of the officially established couples at Hullsport High.

  That afternoon in study hall, as I sat distractedly sketching breasts in the margin of my Latin notebook, the boy behind me dropped a note in my lap. It was in Joe Bob’s childlike printing: “Meet me in the darkroom at 2:25.”

  At 2:22 I went to the study hall teacher’s desk and requested a bathroom pass. The teacher this period happened to be Coach Bicknell, a huge muscled man in his forties with a gunboat gray crewcut and squinty eyes, and the inevitable non-neck. His massive chest and shoulders narrowed to a slim waist and hips, so that his silhouette would have looked like an ice cream cone with arms, and with a cherry on top of the scoop for a head.

  “Ah want you back here in five minutes,” he growled, narrowing his eyes to ominous slits. “Ah don’t want any smokin’ in there.”

  “But I don’t smoke.”

  “That’s what you all say.”

  “But I don’t.” Admittedly and inevitably, I had smoked, sneaking here and there for those stolen puffs, made doubly delicious by being prohibited by every adult in sight. But with Joe Bob in training, it seemed simpler just to go along with his perverted notions of bodily well-being.

  “Don’t get smart with me.”

  I looked at him in amazement. He’d never liked me. In fact, he’d never been that crazy about any of the girls at school, and especially not the ones who dated his athletes. But he’d never before unleashed hostility on me, the daughter of Major Babcock.

  Playing it safe, I said briskly, “Yes, sir.” And took my pass and walked out.

  The darkroom belonged to the Camera Club but was in constant use for assignations of all sorts. It was double-locked, but there were some two dozen copies of the keys floating around school. I knocked softly. The door opened slightly. Joe Bob reached out and pulled me into the dark.

  It was so unutterably black that I couldn’t even see his Juicy Fruit-stained teeth as he talked.

  “What’s up?” I asked, as he pinned me against the door. His erection poked at me through his chinos as he covered my face with wet kisses.

  “It’s awful,” he wailed.

  “What is?”

  “Coach has grounded me for bein’ out after curfew last night. I’m not startin’ in next week’s game. And he says I shouldn’t see you any more until after track season.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I wish I were.” We held each other tightly, engulfed in waves of self-pity.

  “Oh, Joe Bob, what can we do?” I moaned with a grimace copied from Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind.

  “He says you’re ruinin’ me. He says he doesn’t understand what I see in you.”

  “Oh yeah?” I snarled, with a sneer copied from Elvis Presley in Bikini Beach Party.

  “He says you’re out to sap my strength.”

  “He does, does he? Are you going to take that from him?”

  “But what if he’s right? You know that if I don’t play well this year, I won’t get no scholarship offers next year. And if I don’t go to college, I can’t coach.”

  I pondered life as the wife of an unhappy Hullsport shoe salesman and balked. “We’re no good for each other, Joe Bob. Coach and the Major are right.”

  “Your father? What does he have to do with it?”

  “He was waiting up when I got in last night. He said I was wasting my time on you.”

  “Oh yeah? Are you going to take that from him?”

  “But what if he’s right?” I asked miserably, thinking of the attractions of a college career in Boston.

  “Look, ain’t no coach tellin’ Joe Bob Sparks how to run his life. Not your father neither. Borrow your father’s car tonight. Tell him you’re going to the library or somethin’. Pick me up at the end of my block at seven.”

  “Okay,” I purred. We held each other with the devotion of the thwarted. Then, to be sure that the ground he had gained last night was still his, he reached down and ran his hand up my skirt. This time, for variety, he pulled down the top of my panties and placed his pitching hand over my pubes and dipped his finger in and out of me, like testing bath water prior to plunging in. His wrist weight was cold against my pubic bone.

  “I’ve got to get back,” I informed him regretfully. “Coach has it in for me today. Now I understand why.”

  “Do whut?” Joe Bob muttered distractedly.

  “Coach. He told me to be back in five minutes. I have a bathroom pass.”

  “Oh. Well, see you tonight,” he whispered as he let me out the door, his crazy grin taking a lascivious turn.

  That night, ensconced in the Major’s black Mercedes with his gilded initials on each front door, I pulled over to the curb at the corner of Joe Bob’s block in the Sewanee Acres development. He was crouched behind some boxwood, glancing around furtively. He hopped in quickly.

  “Where to?” I asked, as Joe Bob lay down on the front seat so that he couldn’t be seen. “Our spot?”

  “No,” he whispered. “Out the river road. I’ll tell you where to turn.”

  We rode in silence, parallel to the murky river, the Major’s poison factory flashing past on the opposite bank. I kept glancing in the rear-v
iew mirror to see if we were being tailed by Coach. “Where do your parents think you are?” I asked.

  “I said I was meetin’ Dole down at the Dew Drop.”

  “Did you warn Doyle to cover for you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you trust him? Do you think he might turn you in to Coach?” Doyle, Joe Bob’s best friend, was the other halfback, the other forward, and the shortstop for the various Hullsport Pirate teams. Their friendship was heavily tainted with competition.

  “Do whut? Dole? Well, I just got to trust him. It’s the only way I can see to do it.” He rose up carefully until his eyes were at the level of the car window ledge. “Second left,” he whispered.

  As we headed down an unfamiliar dirt road, Joe Bob sat up and straightened out his maroon and gray letter jacket and sighed with relief. The road was rutted, but the Major’s expensive car floated along oblivious.

  “Left here,” Joe Bob said in his normal voice, the hushed mumble a doctor would use to discuss the prognosis of a terminal patient with the patient’s family. The road dwindled to a muddy turn-around, which was littered liberally with the inevitable used condoms and empty beer cans. I shut off the lights and the motor. As I looked up from the dashboard, I saw the Crockett River before me, framed by low-hanging trees.

  “This is beautiful,” I informed him, connoisseur of parking spots that I had become in recent months. I had to hand it to Joe Bob: He knew how to pick scenic settings for our indiscretions. “Why haven’t you brought me here before?”

  “Do whut?”

  “How do you know about this place?” I was picturing other girls than me sprawled half-dressed, or worse, across the front seat of Sparkplug.

  He shrugged and grinned and chomped furiously on his Juicy Fruit. “Well, I like the other one better. Since you and me found it together. This one here gets pretty crowded later on at night.” He unsnapped his letter jacket slowly, slipped it off and dropped it into the back floor. “Let’s get in the back,” he suggested. “Don’t have to wrap yourself around the gearshift.” He grinned at me dementedly.

  To make a long story short, in time, we were both completely undressed, our modish outfits lying in a heap on the back floor. Inspired by the excess space the Mercedes back seat offered over the front seat of Sparkplug, I was lying spread-eagle on the leather seat. Joe Bob was kneeling between my legs; his miraculous erection, finally freed, pointed at my nose as he rifled his chino pockets with desperation.

  Finally, in triumph, he dropped his chinos and held up a small foil packet. I had seen the packet, or an identical one, before when I had taken money from his wallet to pay for his milk one night at the Dew Drop while he was in the men’s room. But I was only just now beginning to grasp its significance: Its contents would be the only thing standing between me and early motherhood. I chewed my lower lip nervously. Joe Bob tore off one end of the packet and began pulling the balloon-like object onto himself, like a housewife donning rubber gloves prior to washing the dishes. Something slimy dripped onto my stomach.

  When it came right down to it, I wasn’t absolutely certain that this was what I’d had in mind all these months. French kissing --yes. Heavy petting- — certainly. Finger fucking — by all means. But the actual Act itself — that was perhaps carrying things too far. These being the days when one screw tended to commit you for life, college in Boston was suddenly seeming like a lot to sacrifice, even to as true a love as Joe Bob’s and mine so obviously was. After all, girls dropped out of Hullsport High every day to go off and give birth to illegitimate babies. And what about respect? Would Joe Bob still respect me if I went all the way with him, I asked myself as I raised my head and looked up at him where he knelt between my legs struggling with his rubber. Would I become like my old grade-school chum, Maxine Pruitt, who hung out with Clem Cloyd and his ratty crew at the Bloody Bucket, and whom Joe Bob and his friends referred to with snickers as “Do-It’ Pruitt” ? And what about training? What had Brother Buck said about fornication? Flee fornication, he had instructed the Teen Team for Jesus, of which Joe Bob was president. I had hoped and expected to be swept away at a time like this beyond all possible rational objections. It wasn’t happening. My brain was churning out objections at an incredible clip.

  Resolutely, I propped myself up on my elbows and said, “Joe Bob wait a minute. Let’s discuss this.”

  “Do whut?” he gasped. “I never took you for a cock tease, Ginny.”

  A car pulled up behind us. “Oh no,” I groaned. This was it. The lover’s lane psychopath the Major had warned me about had arrived. Almost more upsetting than the prospect of my impending rape and mutilation was the necessity of acknowledging that, once again, the Major had been right.

  A whirling light bathed the trees and the swift river in eerie flashes of red.

  “Oh God,” Joe Bob moaned, gallantly snatching up his jacket from the floor and tossing it to me as I scrambled to a sitting position. Joe Bob grabbed for himself the first thing he came to in our tangled pile of clothes, which was my navy blue wraparound skirt. He threw it around his waist just as two flashlight beams swept through the car. His sheathed erection, though wilting fast, still poked my skirt out like a suspended pup tent. He opened the door and climbed out bravely.

  One of the patrolmen shone his flashlight into Joe Bob’s anguished face. “Well, well, if it in’nt ole Joe Bob Sparks hissef! Sorry to interrupt your ball game there, feller!” He guffawed. The other trooper guffawed too.

  “Don’t you guys have somethin’ better to do” Joe Bob asked.

  The other patrolman flashed his light down Joe Bob’s massive trunk and lingered in the area of my skirt. ‘That looks real sweet, Sparks,” he said with a grin.

  “Thanks. Look, give a fella a break, will ya?”

  “Major Babcock’s daughter!” the first one gloated, apparently recognizing the initialed car, since I was huddled cravenly out of sight in the corner of the back seat, my knees drawn up to my chest and Joe Bob’s jacket snapped around the whole package.

  “Parkin’s not against the law.”

  “Here it happens to be,” the second one countered. “Hit’s private property. And look at the mess you punks has made of it.” He waved his flashlight arm at the layer of debris.

  “Look,” said the first one, “we’re just issuin’ you a warnin’ this time. Get yourself dressed and go find someplace that ain’t private property for this stuff. But as a piece of personal advice, Sparks, do like Coach tells you.”

  Joe Bob’s head snapped to attention. “Do whut? Did he send you? How did he know?” Joe Bob’s babyish voice was dripping with fear.

  “Naw, he didn’t send us,” the first patrolman assured him. “But hell, son. You’re livin’ in a goddam fishbowl. Everbody in town knows you’ve done been grounded. We’ve got us a stake in you boys. The whole town’s ridin’ on you. Coach wins games. If Coach says be in bed by ten, boy, and don’t mess around with the women, you damn well better do it.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  The patrolmen got back in their cruiser and crept off on their mission of crippling young sex lives. Joe Bob climbed in and sat back, his feet planted well apart and his legs spread so that the wraparound skirt fell open across his lap. His cock was all shriveled and the condom hung on it loosely. I sat silent in my corner, encased in the letter jacket. After a couple of minutes, Joe Bob started groaning.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Blue balls,” he whimpered.

  “Do what?”

  “Blue balls.”

  “What are blue balls?”

  “It’s when you get all worked up but don’t come,” he explained through gritted teeth. I realize now that Joe Bob was missing his calling by pursuing coaching rather than the acting profession.

  “Do what? Isn’t there anything you can do about it?”

  He looked up with a sly expression.

  “The cops said to get dressed and move on,” I reminded him quickly.

  “We
will,” he assured me, rolling off the rubber and tossing it out the window. He scooted across the seat and took my arm. My hand was lost up the giant sleeve of his jacket. He rolled up the sleeve until my hand appeared. He took it and placed it on his penis. “Rub it, please,” he begged.

  I toyed with it half-heartedly, fighting the instinctive aversion that made me wonder during Psychology 101 at Worthley about the validity of penis envy. But God knows, I didn’t want to be responsible for blue balls, whatever they might be. All my repressed Florence Nightingale tendencies flooded me with an aching concern for poor suffering Joe Bob, tormented because of his love for me. In addition, I didn’t want it to get around school that I was a “cock tease” — any more than I relished the prospect of the nickname “Do-It’ Babcock.” What was I to do, other than to stay home alone on Saturday nights while all the other girls in town administered hand jobs at the drive-in? As I grappled with this moral dilemma, wonder of wonder, the bundle of tissue in my hand began swelling. I knew instantly that I’d made a bad mistake.

  Joe Bob reached up under his jacket and inserted a finger between my legs. With his free hand, he instructed mine in how to move back and forth on him. It was similar to milking a cow, which Clem Cloyd had taught me to do years before. There we sat, me engulfed in his letter jacket, my chin resting on my knees; and him, sprawled next to me in my wrap-around skirt, his huge furry chest bare, his head against the seat back, and his eyes closed. Our hands moved with the coordination of clockworks. I suppressed a yawn and pondered the topic of whether I even wanted to go to college, much less in Boston. After all, I could probably get a majorette scholarship to UT…

  Joe Bob was twitching and gasping. He collapsed in a limp heap next to me, his finger slipping slowly out of me. I looked down at him with concern. Was he a closet epileptic or what? “Are you okay?” He lay there panting, without answering. I put my hand on his chest. His heart was beating frenziedly. This was just what I needed — to have Joe Bob Sparks have a heart attack, nude, in the back seat of the Major’s Mercedes on a remote dirt road. I decided, if he had had a heart attack, just to throw myself into the Crockett and be done with it,