by Tim Sandlin
“Gin rummy. I owe Maurey three dollars and twenty-five cents.”
“No, we weren’t,” Maurey said. “We were trying to have sex, only we couldn’t do it.”
I had two kings, two aces, and a possible five-card straight in my hand. The straight was all hearts. I could fill it by picking up a six way high in the pile, but that meant possibly eating about ten cards, and Maurey only held three, one step away from rummy. It constituted a tough decision.
“Why were you trying to have sex?” Lydia asked.
“So we won’t be dopes later when we’re old enough to do it for real. I wanted to know what it feels like before I hit puberty, and I figured Sam would be more popular and get more dates if he could please girls. He hasn’t been all that popular so far.”
“How about yourself?”
“I don’t have to please boys to get dates.”
Delores sat up and leaned her elbows on her knees, nipping off my panty shot. “What seemed to be the problem, honey. Wouldn’t the little weinie stand up?”
I decided to pick up the pile. Not much to lose at that point.
Maurey wasn’t paying attention anyway. “It stood up, but we couldn’t figure where he should go in from, then he squirted.”
Delores tsked with her tongue. “Prematures, I bet. I hate the prematures. Ray used to have them the worst I ever saw. He came in a movie house once when the wind blew up Marilyn Monroe’s skirt.”
As I discarded one of the kings, I made it a point not to look at Lydia. “Your turn.”
Maurey pulled the king and rummied. “Sam didn’t come instantly or anything, but he kept grinding down there without going in.”
Lydia blew a column of smoke at her. “Your mom and you have little chats like this?”
“My mother thinks I’m still a child, sweet thirteen and never been kissed. She won’t even let me use hair spray. If I ever said sex in front of her I swear she’d faint.”
“Then why are you comfortable talking premature ejaculations in front of me?” Maurey and I stayed quiet. I don’t think either of us knew what ejaculation meant.
“Oh, Lydia, give the kids a break,” Delores said. “I wish I could have asked my mother questions back then. I’d never have married Ray if I’d known the first thing about doing it.”
Maurey looked Lydia in the eye—made me nervous. Neither one of those two were women to be trifled with and I could feel their little bitch-alarm systems kicking into high wail. “Sam told me that you two have great communication and trust because you don’t treat him like a kid and he doesn’t treat you like a mom.”
Lydia stared her right back. “He doesn’t stand a chance, does he?”
“Not that I can see.”
No one said much, so I shuffled. Then Lydia smiled real big. “I imagine at his age fucking you is worth what he’s bound to lose later.”
“I like to think so,” Maurey said.
I had no idea in hell what had just happened, but whatever it was was over. Something had been decided and Lydia and Maurey both seemed happy with the results.
Delores pointed the codeine bottle at Maurey. “Were you well lubricated?”
“Lubricated?”
“Wet,” Lydia said. “Did you get excited and was it nice and wet down there?”
Maurey thought awhile, but I didn’t need to. “She was dry as the blanket. Should we have used water?”
Delores snorted. “Water don’t make it. The wet comes from within the woman.”
“Is that what put out means?”
“More like ooze out.”
“Where does it come from?”
Delores looked at Lydia who gave her an eyebrow shrug. I was to learn quickly that even people who have regular sex don’t usually know what’s going on. Lydia spoke. “When the girl gets excited, this dampness just shows up, then the guy can go in.”
Delores said, “Dampness, my ass. When I’m ready you could wring me out like a washrag.”
“Don’t be crude,” Lydia said. “We’re teaching the children a beautiful and precious act and it shouldn’t be connected to crude ideas.”
“My ass,” Delores snorted.
“How does the woman get excited?” Maurey asked.
Delores leaned back so her skirt rode up again. “I just think about doing it and I start leaking.”
“But I’ve never done it before so I don’t know what to think about.”
“I use gin,” Lydia said.
Delores considered. “I’ll use Vaseline if that’s what it takes.”
Concepts were flying across the room too fast for me to hold on. “You pour gin up the tunnel?”
“God, no, you drink the gin and get drunk and horny and men think they’re taking advantage of you.” Lydia lit another Montclair off the butt of the first one. She leaned over and dropped the used butt into the sink. I hated it when she did that.
“The Vaseline goes up there.” Delores pointed to what I thought was roughly her navel area.
Lydia finished her Dr Pepper and tossed the empty bottle at the trash can by the back door. It rimmed once and bounced in. “Foreplay is the only romantic way to excite a woman.”
“Kissing,” I said. “I told her we had to kiss because they always do in the books but Maurey said it could be done without romance.”
“It can be done without romance, only it’s not that much fun.”
Delores said, “I can have a ball with somebody I can’t stand.”
Lydia looked at Maurey’s chest. “You haven’t hit puberty yet?”
She shook her head. “Both Smith twins have and they’re treating me like a child.”
I thought puberty was when you could do it and before puberty was when you couldn’t, so none of this made any sense.
“I guess it’s safe then.” Lydia stood up. “If you’re going to play this game, you might as well play it right. Scoot your chair back.”
Maurey looked concerned. “Do I have to undress?”
“That’d be too much even for me. I am his mother, after all.”
“Sometimes I forget,” I said.
Lydia gave me a gruesome look, then she walked to the food cabinet and opened a package of premade taco shells that’d been up there since we moved in. She held it so the slot ran up and down. “Looked like this, right?” she asked me.
“Hairier.”
Delores hiccuped. “I can’t wait to write this conversation in my diary.”
Lydia went over and put the taco shell vertically between Maurey’s legs. “Look at this, Sam. Pay attention.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She ignored the ma’am. “Down here is where you go in. One of you has to grab it and angle it right. It’ll be years before it just slides itself in.”
Maurey nodded, taking in every detail.
Lydia pointed to the bridge at the top of the taco shell. “Right here is a little lump called the pleasure dome.”
“Pleasure dome,” I said.
“Now, don’t go poking right at it, you run your fingers or your tongue lightly around and around the dome and the girl gets wet.”
“Tongue. I thought the girl used her mouth, not the guy.”
“That’s a nasty rumor started by men.”
Delores oohed. “Makes me wet just thinking about your young tongue down there.”
I looked at her. “It does?”
Lydia pointed the taco shell at Delores. “Don’t even think of giving lessons.”
“But…”
“This is for the kids.”
“You gonna teach him how to make her come?”
Her come? Jesus, would the revelations never cease. Girls squirted too?
Lydia shook her head. “Sam’s bright. He’ll figure that one out soon enough. The ability to give orgasms every
time is too powerful a weapon for a thirteen-year-old to deal with.”
Maurey’s eyes hadn’t left the taco shell. “Why didn’t Jo talk about this in Little Women.”
“Two things,” Lydia said. “First, any sign that Maurey is a woman and you stop the game. Got that?” Lydia glared at us. Maurey nodded.
“What’s the first sign she’s a woman?” I asked. No one told me.
“The other is a matter of form. You don’t talk like this in front of grown-ups. At your age, sex is something you sneak around and hide.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Society would fall apart if people were honest about fucking.”
I considered that philosophical stance for a moment, but the idea of a secret weapon that I could use to get girls whether they wanted to get got or not was almost too much. Imagine—high school girls, college girls, baton twirlers, car hops at drive-ins, girl models in the nightie section of the Sears catalogue, girls on TV. I could get Hayley Mills from the Disney movies. I could make Hayley Mills come and, while I was at it, see her tits.
“You want to go in my room and read comic books?” I asked Maurey.
She seemed hypnotized by the taco shell. “Sure, comic books sound like fun.”
Delores picked the cards off the table. “I love crazy 8s. You play crazy 8s?”
Lydia threw the taco shell in the trash, then turned to me. “I always thought you were a little boy. Guess I should pay more attention.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Who?”
“Thanks, Lydia.”
“Go get ’em, tiger.”
As I held her hand and led her away to my bed, Maurey said, “Go get ’em, honey bunny.”
***
So, while my mom Lydia and her new friend Delores sat at the kitchen table playing crazy 8s, Maurey and I exchanged lost virginities. Afterward, we all went down to the White Deck for ice cream, Delores’s treat.
9
This wasn’t the Hayley Mills from Pollyanna. This was the older, more aloof Hayley from The Parent Trap. In fact, both The Parent Trap twins—the long-haired cultured Boston Hayley and the short-haired, perky California Hayley—sat in the spacious backseat of a limousine parked at the Tastee Freeze.
Sam Callahan walked right up to their Rolls-Royce and leaned in the back window. “Where’d you guys go to school?” he asked.
The Boston Hayley put on her sunglasses. “We never talk to common people.”
“Want to see a magic trick?” Sam asked.
“How juvenile,” said the California Hayley.
Then, before they could roll up the window, Sam performed his trick.
The Boston Hayley took off her sunglasses. “What can be your pleasure today?”
“Show me your breasts.”
The girls did as they were told. With their shirts off and their glamorous breasts facing Sam Callahan, they asked, “What may we do next to help you feel like the king you are?”
Sam touched the left nipple on each girl. “Do you know where Maureen O’Hara lives?”
***
“I haven’t gotten laid in four months.” Lydia blew smoke across the table. “My own kid is getting lucky and I can’t.”
“There is a problem we can fix,” Hank Elkrunner said. He was sitting next to Lydia, across from Maurey and me. Maurey and I were playing a game called hangman where you fill in blanks with letters before the other guy draws a hung stick figure. Maurey was in a good mood because she’d aced a test in citizenship that I made a C on. She put a lot more stock in grades than I did.
“You complain of your dry season,” Hank said, “but no one feels sympathy. Each man in this room would volunteer to give you cause to stop complaining.” I liked Hank. He spoke slowly and looked at his fingers when he talked. He hadn’t been at the table five minutes before he told us he didn’t smoke or drink alcohol, just the kind of guy Lydia needed. They seemed real relaxed with each other.
Lydia looked around the White Deck, surveying possible volunteers. Most of the eight or nine guys were dude wranglers on welfare, holing up for winter and waiting for tourist season to kick in. A couple worked for the national park. “I’d rather complain than fool around with these peckerheads. Every one of this rabble is afraid of women.”
Hank had this low, growl-like laugh. You couldn’t really tell he was laughing except his shoulders moved up and down. “They are not afraid of women. They are afraid of you.”
“No challenge in that. Not a man here, this table excluded, that Maurey couldn’t have shaking in his Tony Lama’s in five minutes.”
Maurey looked across at Lydia and smiled. In the last four days since our training session they’d gotten real buddy-buddy. Made me nervous.
Hank picked up his iced tea. “I bet Oly could make you walk the ceiling.”
“Oly is dead, only around here dead people go on drinking coffee for six days. It’s like growing toenails anywhere else.”
This four-months-of-no-sex thing came as kind of a surprise. With Lydia, whenever she leaves the house everyone just figures she’s up to something immoral.
“Dusty Springfield,” Maurey said.
“Heck.” She’d guessed my hangman words. I’d been trying to touch her thigh under the table, and she let me for a minute. Then she picked up my hand and put it on my lap and said, “Keep yourself warm.” She smiled so I figured it was okay to try again pretty soon.
Maurey drew the spaces and the two-line gallows. It felt comfortable, sitting with her and Hank and Lydia in the White Deck—like we belonged for a change. Nobody was pushy or wanted anything. None of the customers avoided looking at us or quit talking when we started. Lydia and I were part of the scene.
Lydia still cleaned the silverware when we sat down and still called locals peckerheads. She used the word home in the context of North Carolina, and thought Wyoming women little better than galley slaves, but I could see a change. Now, she treated locals more like slightly retarded, well-meaning children rather than cossack rapists with drool for brains. Some ironic humor had entered the situation.
Just that morning I’d heard Lydia ask Soapley what he had under his Polaris and she seemed to understand the answer. Which I didn’t.
Dot brought over Lydia’s hamburger, Maurey’s shake, and Hank and my blue plates—Swedish meatballs, noodles, and green beans. Hank asked for ketchup.
“Got a letter from Jimmy today,” Dot said. “He’ll be home end of the summer.”
Lydia was doing the looking at her teeth in the butter knife number. In it, she stretches her lips out flat so her teeth look like fangs. “The kids tell me Jimmy likes it four times a day.”
Dot reddened and pinched me on the shoulder. I pointed to Maurey. “Her. She’s the rat, I never said a word.”
“What’s Jimmy doing in Vietnam?” Hank said. Hank was the first nontelevision news person I ever heard use the word Vietnam.
Dot propped one hand on her hip. “He says he’s teaching one bunch of monkeys how to kill another bunch. Sounds kind of stupid to me. You want more iced tea?”
Lydia scowled while Dot jacked up Hank’s glass. Southern iced tea came presugared and Lydia took it as a personal affront that nobody in the West could get it right.
After Dot left, I used Hank’s ketchup and caught crap from both the females. “Hank put it on his stuff,” I said.
“Hank’s an Indian,” Maurey said.
“Hank’s a clod,” Lydia said.
Hank just smiled. I flashed on a futuristic ganging-up process where I could be in big trouble.
Maurey sucked vanilla shake through a paper straw. “Hank can shoot a rifle under a horse’s brisket going full blast, just like in the movies.”
“So can you,” Hank said.
“Yeah, but you hit what you’re aiming at.”
“Got k
icked in the head last time I tried that trick.”
Lydia turned to stare at Hank’s head. “It shows.”
For some reason, I was looking a couple booths down, right at Bill’s rock of an Adam’s apple. Oly said something I didn’t hear, then Bill stood up and fell into the jukebox. He stuck for a moment, then slid down.
Everybody shut up at once. Oly put down his coffee cup and said, “Bill’s dead.”
***
Me Maw died when I was five. Sometimes I speculate that Caspar wouldn’t have been such a king-hell hard-butt if his wife hadn’t got cancer and spent seven years being sad and then died. I don’t know. Maybe he was always severe. Maybe that’s why she got the cancer in the first place.
I don’t remember all that much about Me Maw before she died. She wasn’t up much. I remember her smell, a cross between rubbing alcohol and paper matches right after you blow them out. They made me go in the library-turned-sickroom to say good-bye. Her eyes were way in there and waxed paper-looking. When I kissed her on the cheek, she was wet. I was scared I’d get the cancer from touching her.
At her funeral, Caspar, Lydia, and I sat together in front. Neither one of those two showed a lick of emotion. That carved look on their faces was the one I recognize now as the look a kid gets when a coach yells at him for something he thinks he didn’t do, like, “You’re not going to get to me, you asshole.”
I sat with my hands in my lap and watched Me Maw’s face in the box, sure she was going to blink or sit up or something that would freak me out. I wondered if she was wearing shoes. Caspar told me to stop moving my legs.
After the cemetery, we went out for ice cream, same as when Maurey and I lost our virginity. Maybe there’s a pattern.
***
That evening Maurey and I lay on my bed and tried to figure out the death thing. We unbuttoned each other’s shirts, and I had mine off, but the impetus to keep going petered out about the time I touched her right breast.
“I wonder what it feels like to be dead?” I asked.
Maurey rolled over to face the ceiling and covered her left breast with her hand. The eye on my side blinked three times. It was kind of funny, her lying on her back with one breast hidden by her hand and the other one hidden by mine. I never could get over how small Maurey’s hands were. “Cold, I guess.”