“Is it okay if Carol sleeps with me?” I asked Dad when I told him they were coming.
“If it’s all right with Carol,” said Dad. “I’m going to put Sal in my bedroom, though, and I’ll put up the cot in the dining room for myself.”
“Sure you want to do that, Dad? Have her snooping through your things?” Lester asked.
“Everything that’s important to me is in that trunk in the attic,” Dad said. “I’d rather have Sal confined up in my bedroom than give her the run of the downstairs. She’d be up at the crack of dawn making biscuits.”
A week later, I had just finished hosing off the front porch and was mopping it dry when a cab pulled up, and out got Carol and Aunt Sally.
“Hi!” I yelled, throwing down the mop, and ran out to give them both a big hug.
“Alice, you’re looking gorgeous!” Carol said, and we both laughed, because I was barefoot, with my jeans rolled up to my knees.
“So are you!” I said, only Carol really was gorgeous. She’s on the tall side, with hair about the color of mine—more strawberry, maybe, than blond—and she has really green eyes. She was wearing a pant and jacket outfit, and a scarf of a million colors around her neck.
Dad and Lester came out of the house, and when Carol saw Les, she dramatically held out her arms and cried, “Lester!”
He fell right into the act. “Carol!” he said.
She rushed into his arms, and he bent her backward almost all the way to the ground like they do on a dance floor.
Dad sort of chuckled, and Aunt Sally stared, but I laughed. Some people are real live wires, and Carol’s one of them.
“Carol, how lovely you look!” said Dad, when she was upright again. “And, Sal, how are you?” He hugged them both. “How’s Milt?”
“Just as stubborn and wonderful as ever,” Aunt Sally said. “He talked about coming, but decided that somebody ought to stay home to feed the cat.” Then she hugged us all again. She said she was going to cook supper, Dad said she’d do no such thing, we went inside and ordered takeout, and then sat around the dining room table eating pork lo mein and cashew chicken.
“My, you’ve certainly fixed up the place since we were here last,” said Aunt Sally. “New furniture and all! Ben, you’ve got excellent taste.”
I almost wished she hadn’t said anything, because part of the reason Dad bought good furniture was that he’d started dating Sylvia Summers. But for once Aunt Sally showed some tact and didn’t bring it up. She focused on Lester instead.
“Lester,” she said, scooping out the last cashew from the little white carton, “what is a handsome man like you doing unattached, I’d like to know?”
Aunt Sally has felt for some time that Lester’s too flighty when it comes to women and that he should pick one special girl, not just “jump from one to another,” as she put it.
“Easy, Sal. He’s only twenty-one,” Dad said genially.
“And still in school,” I put in, “which he will probably be for the rest of his natural life, because after June, he’s going to graduate school.”
“I didn’t say I was in a rush to see him married, but I’d think by now there would be one special lady in his life,” said Aunt Sally.
“Same here,” I said. “That’s what we’re all wondering.” I grinned at Lester.
I could see the corners of his mouth twitch the way they do when he’s about to make a joke, and he looked across the table at Carol and said, “Oh, but there is!”
“Oh, Lester!” said Carol, her voice breaking just a little.
Aunt Sally looked quickly from Lester to Carol, and I laughed again. The thing about Aunt Sally is she never seems to know when you’re joking. Dad told me once that Mom had a great sense of humor. Maybe she got it all and her sister didn’t get any, but Aunt Sally’s sure fun to tease.
“I heard that one of your old girlfriends got married,” Aunt Sally said. “Ben sent me a picture of Alice in her bridesmaid’s dress, and I’ll confess, I was a little surprised you let Crystal get away.”
“She had a greater love for another man. These things happen,” Lester said. “More egg rolls, anyone?”
“What about that other girl, the one who works for you, Ben?” asked Aunt Sally.
“Marilyn Rawley,” I said helpfully.
“Yes, what about Marilyn?” Aunt Sally just wouldn’t shut up. “Are you still seeing her?”
“I was until Carol reentered my life,” said Lester.
“Be still, my heart,” said Carol, and Dad and I laughed again. This time Aunt Sally laughed a little too.
But it was later, when we’d finished eating and had spread our photo albums on the dining room table, that the joke began to build. Lester was sitting at one end of the table, Carol around the corner from him, and every time they came to a picture of Lester, Carol told him he looked handsome or virile or studly or something. Every time they came to a photo of Carol, Lester said she looked beautiful or voluptuous.
Aunt Sally alternated between falling silent every time they complimented each other or talking too loud and too fast. I went along with the joke by pretending to take it seriously and stopped laughing out loud, even though I was cracking up. It was hard to tell just what Dad was thinking. I guess he was a little puzzled, a little embarrassed, but he figured—hoped, anyway—that it was all in good fun.
After a while Lester and Carol and I migrated to the living room, leaving the photo albums to Dad and Aunt Sal, who knew a lot more of the relatives than we did.
Lester chose an old Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy DVD to put in the DVD player. He and Carol sat on the sofa and I sat cross-legged in the recliner, enjoying their jokes and comments about as much as I did the movie itself.
Lester and Carol are the kind of people who sort of feed each other lines, and if one of them starts a joke, the other can finish it. We were talking about the different kinds of kisses you see on the screen, and every time we came up with a new one, Les and Carol would demonstrate, really exaggerating, making me laugh. They’d gone through the John Wayne kind of kiss to Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable to James Bond, and they were demonstrating the Alan Alda kind of kiss when we noticed Dad and Aunt Sally watching wordlessly from the dining room.
“And then there’s the lip-brushing style, like this,” Carol told me. She put her hands on Lester’s shoulders, slowly leaned toward him, and brushed his lips a couple of times with her own before they kissed.
Dad and Aunt Sally got up from the table and came to stand in the doorway, looking disturbed.
Lester and Carol took in the situation immediately.
“Dad, Aunt Sal,” Lester said, looking as serious as he could without laughing, “Carol and I have something to tell you.”
Carol took over. She reached for Lester’s arm, put her cheek against his shoulder for a moment, and said, “Les and I are engaged. We can’t keep our love a secret any longer.”
Aunt Sally plopped down in a chair, looking dazed. Was it possible, I wondered, that she thought they were serious?
“You’re … you’re cousins!” Aunt Sally gasped. “You can’t marry!”
“Oh, we’ll find a state where it’s legal, Mom,” Carol said.
“Or we could elope,” added Lester, his voice cracking a little, the way it does when he’s trying not to laugh.
Dad still didn’t say anything. I think he figured that if he just shut up and listened, he’d know whether to worry or not.
“When did you decide all this? Carol, you never said a word to me!” Aunt Sally continued.
“Oh, we’ve been writing back and forth,” Carol said, “and Les writes the most beautiful love letters!”
Aunt Sally jerked around and glared at Dad as though it were all his fault.
“Don’t look at me, Sal. I’m in the dark here,” Dad told her.
Aunt Sally faced Lester and Carol again. “Have you set a date?” she asked.
She did believe them! I laughed out loud, and Aunt Sally turne
d on me next.
“Did you know anything about this?” she asked.
“Only that I get to be one of the bridesmaids,” I kidded, looking serious again.
“And don’t forget to give me your measurements, Alice, so I can order your dress,” Carol said, winking at me.
We kept it up for the next five minutes until things got so outrageous that Aunt Sally began to guess, and Dad looked relieved. We never came right out and said we’d been teasing, and I think Dad wished we hadn’t started it in the first place.
I couldn’t help but feel a little bit sad for him just then. The trouble with being part of an “in” joke or an “in” crowd is that there has to be somebody who’s “out.” And you never know how that feels, I guess, until it happens to you.
2
PILLOW TALK
CAROL WENT OFF TO HER CONFERENCE the next day. Dad went to work as usual, I went to school, and Lester went to his classes at the university. When Les and I got home that afternoon, Aunt Sal had baked a pie and a few dozen peanut butter cookies. A note on the table said she was off to the store for yeast.
“Do you get yeast infections from yeast?” I asked Lester.
“Don’t look at me,” said Lester. “That’s a female thing. We jocks just itch.”
We each had a couple of cookies and chugged down a bottle of Sprite. Then I said, “When you were kidding around with Carol last night, did you feel anything?”
Lester wiped his mouth on his sleeve and raised an eyebrow at me. “What do you mean, did I feel anything? Did I fondle her, do you mean?”
“No, I mean, did you feel lust?”
“Lust? Who are you, Queen Victoria?”
“Sexy. Did it excite you, Lester? Do I have to spell it out?”
“If you mean did it turn me on, sure, a little. Do you mean did I want to throw her on her back and make mad love? No.”
“But isn’t that what grown-ups worry about—that sex ed classes will excite us so much, we’ll all bolt from the classroom and head for the bushes or something?”
“I’ve got news,” said Lester. “There’s nothing that takes the excitement out of sex faster than a sex ed class. Listen, kiddo, if I did everything my impulses told me to do, I’d go make love to the cashier down at the 7-Eleven, tell off my philosophy prof, shoot the guy who almost sideswiped me on the beltway this morning, and I would have gotten rid of you years ago. Held your head under water or something.”
“Thanks, Les, I love you too,” I said.
When Aunt Sally got back from the store, she said that yeast was for baking bread. After that she was going to make brownies, then applesauce and a pork roast.
“And after that,” joked Lester, “the world!”
It was different having Aunt Sally and Carol around, even though they only stayed for five days. I wasn’t the only female in the house, for one thing. After dinner, when Dad and Aunt Sally stayed at the table talking, Carol and Les and I would do the dishes or watch TV or kid around in the living room. I figured this is how it would feel to have a dad and a mom, an older brother and a sister. It wouldn’t just be Dad and Les studying me at the table each night, waiting for me to say something stupid. We could concentrate on Carol for a change.
I was sure concentrating on Carol. I’d pushed my clothes from one side of my closet so Carol could hang hers in there, and emptied two drawers of my dresser. Carol got up really early each morning, even before I did, and after she took a shower, she’d come back to the bedroom, slip off her robe, and put on her panties and bra.
The first morning I had my eyes half-closed, but when a twenty-five-year-old woman is standing stark naked in front of you, I think you’re allowed a peek.
You can learn a lot just by looking, you know. For one thing, I learned how to put on a bra. When I put on a bra, I just hook it behind me. But when a grown woman with huge breasts puts on a bra, she slips the straps over her shoulders, then leans over and lets her breasts fall into the bra cups before she hooks it. So that’s the way you get your nipples where they’re supposed to be, I thought. Half the time I put on a bra and my nipples are over or under where I want them. I couldn’t wait to tell Elizabeth and Pamela all I was learning.
Carol, of course, didn’t know I was watching her, and I don’t think she would have cared if she knew. She’d put a couple of squirts of cologne between her breasts, and talcum powder beneath them. I figured maybe she had learned how to drop her breasts into a bra and powder beneath them by watching other women do it, just the way I was watching her.
At night she’d pull on a silk nightshirt that came halfway down her thighs, or maybe a long T-shirt, and then she’d crawl under the blanket and we’d tell each other stuff, and I decided that before she and her mother went back to Chicago, I would ask the question I’d been wanting to know ever since I was nine years old, practically: What is sexual intercourse really, really like for a woman? That’s why I couldn’t ask Dad or Lester.
Still, how do you just come right out and ask a question like that? Lester says I’m a social ignoramus—I just blurt stuff out. So I tried to think of a way I could ask it tactfully.
The first night that Carol and I shared my bed, we talked about all the crazy things we could remember that Lester had done when he was growing up. Carol told me about the time he stuck a vitamin pill up one nostril and couldn’t get it out, and all day he dripped purple snot. The second night we talked about trips we’d taken, places we’d been. Our best vacations. Stuff like that. Carol, of course, has been lots and lots of places, and I’ve hardly been anywhere, so she did most of the talking.
The third night I tried to get the conversation on weddings. I figured if we could talk about that, I could steer it around to honeymoons, and if I could get Carol talking about honeymoons, then we could talk about sex. I mean, I read somewhere that the average woman has sexual intercourse 3,948 times in her life, and I have a right to know what I’ll be getting myself into. But we didn’t talk about any of it. Carol talked about her job instead, and I fell asleep in the middle.
The last night, I knew it was the only chance I’d get to ask my question. So when Carol said something about her ex-husband, the sailor—about the kind of music he liked—I said, “Carol, maybe it’s none of my business, but why did you get a divorce?”
“Because he was a jerk,” she said.
“Then why did you marry him?”
“Because I didn’t know it then. I thought that as soon as he quit the navy, he’d settle down. Well, he didn’t. He went right on being a sailor.”
“What do you mean? He kept going out to sea?”
“He was out to sea, all right. He was out to lunch! He’d go off for a couple of days at a time with his buddies, like I’d always be waiting for him when he got back. Well, one day he came home and I wasn’t. We got married too young, Alice. I married him because he was cute. And ‘cute’ is about the least important thing in a marriage, take my word for it.”
“What is important, then?”
“Hmm.” Carol adjusted the pillow behind her head. “I guess what’s important is that you feel pretty much the same about the really big things—children and religion and politics and money—and that you respect each other’s differences about the rest.”
“Is sex a really big thing?”
“Sure. Though some people feel it’s more important than others do.”
“How do you know how important it’s going to be?”
“I guess you just talk with each other about it—get to know each other really well before you marry. If that’s all a guy seems to think about, and you don’t share a lot of other stuff together, then that tells you a lot about him right there.”
I swallowed. “Carol, what does intercourse really, really feel like for a woman?”
There. The question was out. The room was awfully quiet.
“The first time, you mean?” she asked.
“Well, yes. That too.”
“Uh … Alice, you do kno
w how it’s done, don’t you? I mean …”
“I know what goes where,” I told her. “But how does it feel when a man’s penis goes inside you?”
“Well, for some women it hurts a little the first time. Maybe the first couple of times. After that it doesn’t. It feels pretty good, actually. It’s exciting to feel yourself opening up for a man, and nice to have him kissing you.”
“But you spend your whole honeymoon in pain? Is that why people go away somewhere and lie on the beach?”
She laughed. “Not exactly. Besides, so many girls use tampons now that they’ve already stretched themselves a little down there. A honeymoon’s sort of a vacation after all the work of a wedding. It used to be that a man and woman felt self-conscious and shy right after they were married, so they went off to be alone where people weren’t always watching them.”
“Okay, but what’s sex like later? When it doesn’t hurt anymore?” It was easy to ask questions in the dark, I discovered.
“Such questions!” Carol said.
“You’re the only one I can ask,” I told her. “I’ve always wanted to know. Pamela and Elizabeth do too. All we know is what we see in the movies, and the movies make it look as though a man and a woman are having a fit together.”
Carol laughed again, then rolled over and faced me in the darkened room. “Forget movies, Alice. They aren’t much help. It looks so easy in the movies. A man and woman climb in bed and make wild love and they both come at the same time and—”
“What does that mean?”
“An orgasm. A climax. A peak of excitement. If you’ve ever masturbated, you already know what it feels like.”
“So how is real life different from the movies?” I asked.
“Whew! These questions really are getting embarrassing,” she said.