Friday wasn’t the first night I’d ever spent alone in a house. In Greensboro we lived in an eight-bedroom deal that Lydia called the manor house even though it was in town. Caspar supposedly lived with us, but Me Maw was in and out of the Duke hospital so much he took an apartment in Durham. I think he couldn’t face living in the same house as Lydia without Me Maw there too.
For a while we had a live-in maid, but she remarried her ex-husband, and a cook came around in the daytime. Lydia mostly stayed home doing the TV and 10:30 knockout deal, only every few months she’d go social on me and I’d wake up at two in the morning in an empty house. Lydia was basically a binge or starve person when it came to fun.
Just about the earliest memory I have involves waking up in a dark, abandoned house. I must have been four because I remember the Roy Rogers pajamas and I think I outgrew them by the time I hit five. I was asleep in Caspar’s bed.
All my early life I slept on whatever bed or couch was closest when I got tired. Sometimes, it was Lydia’s bed with her, other times I fell asleep under my own single bed. Then there were the five extra bedrooms. I pretended each was a different planet. Mercury was neat because the bed was round and covered by a curtain.
But this happened before rooms were planets. I wet Caspar’s bed and woke up crying. There must have been a dream, I don’t remember. Anyhow, I stripped off the Roy Rogers pajama bottoms and hopped down on the cold floor. With all these beds to choose from, no reason to sleep in a wet one.
But the hallway was really dark, dark as death. Normally Lydia left the bathroom light on and the door cracked so the hallway had a soft glow of security. I wasn’t used to blackness.
I felt the wall, then the wall on the other side. I sat down and yelled “Lid-ya,” but no luck. Pitch black and alone, I couldn’t believe it. Monsters lived in the dark—and slugs and rats, rats who could see me but I couldn’t see them. They would bite my face in a second. Things could take away my arms and legs.
I hollered “Paw-Paw,” which was Caspar, but I didn’t hold out much hope for him. He’d have kicked me out of his bed if he was home.
I crawled down the hall—afraid I’d lose the floor too if I stood—to Lydia’s room but it was a cave. I pulled myself up and stood at the door and cried, trying to will her into place. The steps going downstairs were no better. I had to turn around and slide on my front, one step at a time. I heard a sound and peed again. Somewhere along the way, I took off the Roy Rogers pajama top.
A clock glowed in Caspar’s library, which had been Me Maw’s bedroom the last year when she couldn’t do the stair deal. I pulled some books off the shelves and walked head-on into a globe of the world. In the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator and made light and everything wasn’t so bad anymore. I ate some grapes from the vegetable bin, then rolled into a ball, using my body to block open the refrigerator, and fell asleep.
Lord knows why I remember that.
Maurey’s knock on the door made me jump like I’d been hit by a rock. In three months we’d had four knocks—two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Girl Scout turning cookies, and a guy looking for Soapley. I’d begun thinking the outside world couldn’t touch me while I was at home.
“Let’s try it,” Maurey said when I opened the door. She was real pretty and brunette standing on the snow. Her eyes had blue sparkles, like she was interested in what she was doing.
“My mom’s not home.”
“She and eight other drunks rented a motel room in Dubois when the bars closed last night. They’re having a party.” Maurey let herself in. She had on Levi’s and a red parka. “My second cousin Delores is there. Delores’s husband told her mom in the hope of getting her dragged out, but it didn’t work, and her mom told my mom and I overheard. Delores and Lydia are the only girls at the party.”
“I’m making oatmeal. You want some?”
“Funny how news travels in a small town, isn’t it. Got some coffee? I want to explain the rules before we do this.”
“Do what?”
“Have sex. Why else would I be here?”
I focused on the label on the back of Maurey’s jeans as I followed her into the kitchen. Ever since I was a little boy, I’d wanted to have sex with a girl, even though I didn’t know what that entailed until recently. The main reason I’d wanted sex was because, as I understood it, you got to see her naked. I couldn’t really conceive of a goal loftier than seeing a woman without her clothes. Rubbing myself against one or having one see me naked were somewhat disquieting thoughts that I’d avoided up to that point.
“We’re going to perform sex now?” I asked.
“After coffee.”
Maurey and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table—a giant wood slab thing with area cow brands burned into the top—and dumped spoonfuls of sugar and about a can of milk into two mugs. I still didn’t like coffee that much, only drank it because I felt like I should. All addictive things are distasteful when you first start out. She blew across the steam and sipped. “You already taught me one thing I didn’t know, Sam.”
“What’s that?”
“Coffee. Now we’ll teach each other something.”
“You think Lydia might come home today?”
She wrinkled her nose and looked closely at the cup. “Doubtful. Ray, that’s Delores’s husband, he says they just sent out for Chinese food and two cases of Schlitz.”
“Where can you get Chinese food at eight-thirty in the morning?”
Maurey dumped more sugar in her mug. “Dubois is a weird place. Think you can get a stiffie?”
I glanced at my lap and thought about Brigitte Bardot. “They seem to come and go. I haven’t figured how to control it yet.”
“Maybe it’ll happen naturally.”
“I’ve heard something about putting it in the girl’s mouth.”
“I’m not doing anything that might make me sick.”
We stared into our nearly white coffee for a while. I was hungry, but I’d turned off the oatmeal and it seemed sacrilegious to turn it back on when I was on the edge of the Great Chasm. This was more important than food. This was what Lydia said grown-ups lived for.
“We’re both virgins,” Maurey began.
“I never said I was a virgin.”
She gave me the evil eye. I bit my thumbnail. “We’re both virgins,” she began again, “but someday we’re going to find ourselves doing it.”
That someday confused me. I thought we were going to do it after coffee.
Maurey continued. “When my time happens, I don’t want to come off like a squirrel, I want to know what’s going on at all times.”
“That makes sense.” I stared at her fingers on the mug. The mug said Fort Sumter and had a picture of an army base on the side. Maurey had the smallest hands in the world.
“So you and I are going to learn about this thing now while it doesn’t matter, so we won’t be fools later when it does.”
“Today’s sex doesn’t matter.”
She stared me right in the eye. “We’re just friends helping each other learn a new skill. Just friends can’t really do it. This is practice.”
“Will we still be virgins afterwards?”
“I don’t know. That’s part of what we’re going to learn, where the line between virginity and nonvirginity really is.”
I’d always understood it as a clearly marked frontier. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s either when you stick it all the way in or when the boy squirts. You better not squirt.” She looked at me suspiciously, as if I was secretly planning to play a trick and squirt in her.
“I won’t squirt. Promise.”
“And no kissing. Kissing is mushy, emotional stuff, and we can’t do it if you’re going to get mushy.”
“No mush.”
We were silent awhile. The refrigerator kicked on. I could hear the toilet running in the bathroom. Downtown, the volunteer fire siren howled. It would continue for a minute while the firemen rushed to the station, then there’d be ten minutes of truck sirens. It happened once a week or so, whenever creosote built up in somebody’s stovepipe and the chimney caught fire.
“I’m not sure you can do it without mush,” I said.
“We can do it.”
“Dot and Lydia both say it takes emotionalism.”
I know Maurey thought I was just trying to trick a kiss out of her, and maybe I was. Unless you count a cheek peck on Janey Silverman in the fourth grade, I’d never kissed a girl. Like seeing one naked, kissing was another goal. It was hard to believe I was going to skip right over all the intermediate thrills and go straight to intercourse.
“You told me your mom had done it with lots of people. It couldn’t have been emotional every time.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know how often and with how many people it was possible to be emotional. “We could try it first without kissing and if it doesn’t work we could kiss without meaning it.”
Maurey looked even more suspicious. “I’ve seen horses do it and horses don’t kiss.”
We went into my room since that seemed to be the place to commit the act. I sat on the side of the bed while Maurey sat in the chair at my desk. She pushed the w key on the typewriter down, then let it up, then back down again. She put her finger on the ribbon and made her print blue.
I held my hands in my lap. “I wish we didn’t have to be naked.”
“I’m sure that’s part of doing it.” She kicked off her snow boots. “Maybe we could leave our socks on. The floor’s kind of cold.”
“How about my shirt? I don’t see why I need to take off my shirt.”
“Why do you get to leave your shirt on but I don’t?”
“Women’s breasts are important to the deal. It doesn’t work if I can’t touch your breasts. All the books work that way. Men’s breasts are just for show, like a belly button.”
“I’m not showing you mine if you don’t show me yours.”
Five minutes and much futzing over buttons and zippers later, Maurey and I stood facing each other, down to boxer shorts and panties—and socks. Hers were red wool, mine white gym socks.
“You’re first,” she said.
“You first.”
We stared at each other. I went into a paranoia streak—what if it was a Wyoming ritual, as soon as I dropped my boxers she’d laugh and run away, or even worse, everyone in GroVont Junior High would jump from the closet and point at me.
“Oh, Jesus,” Maurey said, and she dropped her panties and stepped out. I had to follow. The silence was fairly eerie.
She looked down. “I thought you’d be bigger.”
“I’m not stiff yet.”
She poked at it. “When a horse gets a stiffie, it’s almost as big as his leg.”
“Time to stop comparing us to horses, Maurey. None of it seems to carry over.” I held out my finger and touched the nipple on the end of her tit. Touching a tit was the outer limit of my fantasy life. All my lurid dreams had come true. I was ready to put our clothes back on and eat some oatmeal. “Are you disappointed it’s not like a horse’s?”
Maurey brushed her fingertip through the ball area. “I was kind of scared to have you put something big as your leg up me. I couldn’t see how it would fit.”
As she touched under the ball sac, things perked up. “Holy moley,” she said.
I finally looked at the rest of her below the breasts. Maurey was mostly planes and soft colors. She smelled nice. “You’ve got hair down there.”
“So do you, silly.” She continued running her’ fingernail up and down and I continued to grow.
“I just didn’t expect girls to have hair in that spot.”
“Does it gross you out?”
It sort of did but I wasn’t about to admit it. “No. It’s kind of pretty. How do you see to find the tunnel?”
“It’s in there, only it doesn’t look like a tunnel from the outside.”
“A cave?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I liked the area just below Maurey’s collarbone. That was the prettiest spot to look at, although the breasts were most exciting. They weren’t anything like the Playboy girls. Maurey’s were little pooches in her chest. The Playboy girls looked as if they had football implants.
“Is that as big as it gets?”
“I guess so. How do we put it in the tunnel?”
Maurey kept running her finger around the base. It felt real neat. I was getting used to having a girl see me with my clothes off and I thought this might be something I’d like to do regularly.
“Horses do it standing up with the stallion behind the mare,” she said.
“I told you to forget horses.”
“You’ve never seen anything do it.”
“I saw Soapley’s dog Otis doing it last week.”
“Bet he did it standing up from behind.”
Maurey turned around. Her hair came down almost to the bottom of her neck. Her back was real pretty, prettier than the front. Her little butt cheeks were like molded from a catcher’s mitt. “You have to get up behind me,” she said.
I tried but I couldn’t decide where my hands went. “This is awkward. I can’t see grown-ups basing their lives on this. Maybe you should bend over some.”
I knew it was coming, so I said in unison with Maurey, “Horses don’t bend over.” She laughed at that and the tension wasn’t quite so intense. I learned my first lesson about sex. Always make the girl laugh.
“I’m up too high,” I said. “Your hole’s way down here.”
She flinched. “That’s the wrong hole.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. I think. The hole you go in is the bigger one up front.”
“I’m supposed to stand behind you and go in a front hole? Maybe if you stood on a chair or something.”
“None of the books say anything about the girl standing on a chair.”
“None of the books say anything. They skip this part and go straight to how wonderful it was.”
“Let’s take a break, Sam. Something’s not working.”
“Go get Catch-22. We’ll see how they do it.”
We sat side by side on the bed and read chapter twenty-three, where Nately gives three whores thirty dollars apiece to go to bed with his friends.
“Go to bed,” Maurey said. “That’s the key. Humans must do it lying down.”
“More comfortable than a girl standing on a chair. But I don’t have thirty dollars. You take a check?”
Maurey hit me lightly on the thigh. “That’s for whores. Good girls do it for free.”
“And bad girls do it for money?”
“Jesus, you’re naïve, Sam. This next paragraph Aarphy talks about making the high school girls ‘put out.’ I wonder what they put out. I always thought stuff came out of the boy’s body and went into the girl’s.”
We tried it lying down on the bedspread, first next to each other with her back to me, then next to each other with her facing me. Faced together, Maurey got the giggles and we had to stop.
“When Otis did it he got stuck.”
Maurey stopped giggling. “Jesus.”
“They were butt to butt and Otis looked unhappy, but the female was in a lot of pain, made an awful sound.”
“Nobody in a book ever got stuck.”
“Soapley dumped buckets of water on them, but they didn’t unstick for over two hours. Lydia wouldn’t leave the house while they were yowling.”
“What will we do if we get stuck? There’s no one to throw water on us.”
I couldn’t answer that one. My thing lost most of its stiffness and Maurey had to touch it with two fingers to bring it back.
I was hot and it just wasn’t working. “Look. You’ll have to spread your legs and I’ll have to lay in between them right on the tunnel. It’s never going to go any other way.”
“On top of me?”
“Sorry.”
“How much do you weigh?”
“One-twenty-five,” I lied, giving myself an extra ten pounds.
“How can I have a hundred twenty-five pounds on me. You’ll break my ribs.”
“Can you see any other way to do it?”
“I think you’re almost in. Maybe if one of us touched it, gave it a little guidance.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Sam, what are you doing?”
“Uh.”
“Sam, stop grinding.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sam.”
“Ugh.”
“Oh gross. You promised, Sam. You jerk, what if I have a baby now.”
I couldn’t answer. My mind had gone void. Maurey shoved me off and sat up. “Look at this gunk. That’s nowhere near a third of a cup. You promised you wouldn’t squirt and you lied about how much comes out. This is three tablespoons, tops, Sam.” She hit my chest. “You’re cross-eyed.”
I held one arm over my head. “That was fun.”
“We couldn’t have made a baby. None of it went inside.”
“I told you—no kissing, no squirting.”
“I discovered something, Maurey. The boy can’t control his squirt.”
“Look at that. How long before it gets stiff again?”
“Beats me, that was my first time. Do you think we lost our virginity?”
“I sure as hell didn’t.”
“This is hurting, Sam.”
“You’re too tight, are you certain we’ve got the right hole.”
“Your finger’s smaller. Try that.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Down lower, you’re way too high. Hold it, move up. You’re poking something.”
“This isn’t romantic, Maurey.”
“Stop grinding for Chrissake.”
“That’s the only way to force it in.”
“You’re on my hair.”
“It’s coming again.”
“Oh, hell.”
There was a long pause, then a quiet voice. “Smooth move, Ex-Lax.”
Maurey and I were back at the kitchen table, playing gin rummy and not speaking, when we heard Lydia charge in the door.
“Dibs on the John,” she called.
“Hell with that, honey,” another voice said, a raspy female voice. Then we heard a race across the living room followed by the crash of a slamming door and, “Shit. I’m gonna go in the kitchen sink if you’re not out in thirty seconds.”
“Someone’s with her,” I said to Maurey.
“Sounds that way.”
The voice in the living room muttered, “Crap it all anyway,” then a short woman all in white tromped into the kitchen. She stopped at the sight of us. “Maurey.”
“Delores. I heard you were on a roll.”
Delores was short—I’d say five foot even—and petite, but proportionately, she sported a huge set of breasts, way bigger than Lydia’s or Maurey’s. I’m talking out there. And she was dressed like a hooker doing a cowgirl fantasy—white pointy-toed boots, white skirt down to her upper thighs, a white fur vest, rabbit or weasel or something, over a white yoked shirt, and a white cowgirl hat with a peacock feather eye in the dead center. The skirt was held up by a black plastic belt and a turquoise rock of a buckle.
She was chewing gum, of course. “Maurey, hon, I won’t tell Annabel I saw you if you won’t tell her you saw me.”
“What’s in the bottle?” Maurey asked.
Delores’s right hand covered her mouth when she giggled. I’d have given whatever future I possessed to see her naked. “Turpenhydrate and codeine—good drink for when you’re ready to stop drinking.”
“Your turn.” Lydia came around Delores and into the kitchen. Delores whirled and ran.
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
“Who?”
“Hi, Lydia. This is my friend Maurey from school. I told you about her before.”
Lydia opened the refrigerator and pulled out a Dr Pepper. “So you two are getting along now?”
I glanced at Maurey to see if this was true. Her eyes were on Lydia, I think admiringly. She was probably going through the same comparison-analysis I had when I met Annabel.
Lydia perched on the sink with one foot touching the floor. “Sam tells me your mother cuts the crusts off your sandwiches.”
Maurey looked down at the cards in her hand. “Only on holidays, or for company or something.”
“That’s okay. If my mom had cut off my crusts, things might have turned out better.”
There was a short silence that, as the host, I felt obligated to fill. “Things turned out okay anyway. I think. How was your party?”
“Fairly boring. Six drunk yahoos wishing four would go away so they could go manly on Delores and me. Thank goodness for numbers. Wasn’t a cowboy in the bunch had a full set of teeth.”
Delores tottered back in the room, adjusting something under her skirt. “God, I whizzed like a racehorse. I swear, you don’t buy beer, you only rent it.”
At the word horse Maurey and I exchanged a quick smile. It helped that each of us was related to one of the two drunks.
“Sam,” Maurey said, “meet my cousin, Delores. Ray’s looking for you.”
Delores unscrewed her little medicine bottle. “Hell, he found us. Him and a bunch of his logger buddies.” She took a swig. “They come busting in the door of this motel room, I didn’t tell you about the motel room, wanting to save my honor and haul me away, but Lydie’s friends…”
“Nobody was going to lose any honor in that scene anyway,” Lydia said.
“Speak for yourself. ’Nother hour I’d of figured a way.”
“Sure.”
Delores hit the codeine. “A fight ensued. Lydie and me escaped by the emergency ladies-only exit.”
“Bathroom window,” Lydia said. She looked very happy, and not really all that drunk. Her face was flushed and her eyes alive—although maybe she’d been at the codeine bottle herself. “That’s the fourth, no fifth time I’ve had to beat retreat out a can, and it’s always a blood pounder.”
“Always costs me a pair of hose.” Delores lifted her leg to show us. The rip in her nylons went right up past the skirt line. Maurey caught me following it up.
“I need a cigarette,” Lydia said.
From somewhere on her person, Delores pulled out a pack and tossed it. Lydia held the pack out to show me. They were Montclairs. “Look at this, honey bunny. Something’s come out since we left tobacco-land. Some new kind of menthol mixed with cigarettes. Tastes like they soaked the weeds in gasoline.”
She’d never said H-B in front of anyone before. I would have given anything for a gun. “They had that stuff before we left Carolina.”
“You sure? How could I have missed it?” Lydia lit one and took a long drag. She blew smoke out her nostrils. “What I don’t understand,” she began, “is how a woman who smokes cigarettes cured in gas and drinks codeine from a bottle could be related to a little girl whose mother cuts the crusts off her sandwiches on holidays.”
Since Maurey and I had the only chairs and Lydia held down the counter space, there was nothing left for Delores but a cardboard box full of cookbooks. This gave me a great alley shot, so that, miraculously, Dirty Dick perked up again.
“I’m not related to her mom,” Delores said. “Maurey’s father—that’s Buddy—his father and my grandfather were brothers, weren’t they, hon. Her grandpa came here and started a ranch and mine stayed up in Dubois cutting timber. I guess we got the wild hair side and they got the boring. Present company accepted.”
Maurey discarded the five of diamonds. “Dad’s okay. He’s wilder than he looks, he just works all the time.”
Delores’s legs moved and I know she was way aware of me. “Buddy’s more than okay, hon. I’d be kissing cousins with that man any old day of the week.”
Lydia smiled at me. “What’ve you kids been up to all afternoon?”
“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.