I studied Dad’s face, looking for clues as to whether or not he might have proposed to her while they were in Michigan. No, I decided, he would have told us if he had. But he was sure getting ready for something big. He’d fix our house up first, then ask her.
It’s stuff like this, I guess, that makes me nervous—where it’s not just what you do that makes a difference, but what someone else decides. I could stay away from deep water for the rest of my life and do just fine, but what if someone threw me in? Dad and Lester and I could buy new furniture for every room in our house, but what if Miss Summers still said no?
It helped that Pamela had invited Elizabeth and me for a sleepover that evening. The hardest thing about having a secret fear is keeping it secret, and I was afraid if I stayed around home that night, Dad would worm it out of me somehow. He’d go right to the phone and sign me up for swimming lessons at the Y, and I’d be petrified.
Way back in my brain I have this memory of someone taking me to swimming lessons. There was a tall skinny instructor in a gray bathing suit who threw rubber-coated horseshoes into the water. The deal was that when she said go, we were supposed to see who could jump in the water and pick up a horseshoe first.
I jumped in, but all I remember was the way I coughed and gagged as the other kids splashed around. I never did put my head under. The next time I went for a lesson, I wouldn’t even go in the water, and then I didn’t go back at all. Maybe that was about the time Mom got leukemia, and I suppose after that, the fact that I was afraid of the water was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
Life is never perfect, I thought, as I rolled up my pajamas and stuck them in my overnight bag. Maybe all the gorgeous girls we were so envious of last year had secret worries too. Maybe all the while they were leaning against their lockers, looking into their boyfriends’ eyes and kissing, they were worrying about things like mating and jumping off the deep end. Maybe mating is like jumping off the deep end. What did we know?
I went across the street to get Elizabeth, and then we walked to Pamela’s. We hadn’t been spending the night much at Elizabeth’s. Her mom’s expecting a baby in October and still throws up in the morning, which is not exactly the kind of thing you want to hear while you’re eating your pancakes.
In fact, this was the first time we’d been together overnight since the three of us went to Chicago to visit Aunt Sally, and Pamela got groped on the train. Elizabeth was shocked that a man made a pass at Pamela, and then she was embarrassed because she was shocked. For Elizabeth, with the beautiful dark hair and long eyelashes, life is going a little faster than she wants it to, and she has to take giant steps now and then to catch up.
“My folks have gone to the movies, so we have the house to ourselves,” Pamela told us at the door.
She has this incredible room that looks as though it were decorated by Coca-Cola—bedspread, drapes, wastebasket … When you lie down on her bed and the springs squeak, you almost think you can hear Coke fizzing somewhere in the background.
We played cards for a while, ate pizza, and then Pamela brought out this bottle of stuff that’s supposed to make your hair shiny, and we practiced putting it on one another’s hair and brushing two hundred times. We’d start to brush, but then someone would begin talking and we’d lose count and have to start all over again.
“Isn’t Glo-Shine what they advertise on TV—the girl with the shiny hair and all the boys around her?” I asked.
“Sort of like lightning bugs,” said Elizabeth. “One starts flashing, and they all gather round.” Elizabeth can be funny when she wants to.
The strangest thing happened, though. As we were all brushing, Pamela must have forgotten what she was doing, because her brush slipped down past her chin, onto her shoulder. She absently brushed her shoulder, the way she used to do when her hair was long. She did have an amputation syndrome!
We were debating whether to watch the late movie or go to sleep, when Elizabeth said, “Listen, you guys. I brought something over … I thought maybe … well, maybe I could read parts of it to you.”
She was sounding pretty mysterious. I’d never seen her quite that way before. Her face was pink, the way you look when you get out of the shower.
“What is it?” asked Pamela.
“Something I found on my parents’ bookshelf.”
I could feel my eyes opening wide.
“Do they know you have it?” Pamela asked.
“N-no. But it was right there. I mean, anyone could have taken a look. I’ve got to get it back by morning, though. I don’t want them to find it’s missing.”
“What is it?” asked Pamela.
“A story.” Elizabeth opened her bag and pulled out something wrapped in a pillowcase. I took a look. Tales from the Arabian Nights, it read on the cover. Unexpurgated edition.
2
ABYSSINIAN SOBBINGS AND OTHER STUFF
TO TELL THE TRUTH, I’D ALWAYS THOUGHT that Arabian Nights was a movie. Maybe I was getting it mixed up with Aladdin or Lawrence of Arabia, but here was this thick book that Elizabeth put on the bed in front of us, and if you looked closely at the cover, you saw that this man was surrounded by half-dressed women, and the places they had their hands …!
“Have you read it?” I asked, truly astonished.
“P-parts,” said Elizabeth.
“All the good parts, I’ll bet!” Pamela said, smirking.
“It’s a story!” Elizabeth said again. “Well, it’s a lot of stories, really, but one of them is about this sultan whose wife is unfaithful, so he kills her, and then he kills all his slave girls and concubines and …”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “He kills his wife because she’s unfaithful, and he’s got concubines?”
“Well, this was long ago,” Elizabeth said. “Anyway, he ordered his vizier to …”
“His what?”
“His servant, Alice, to bring him a new slave girl every night, and then in the morning he’d kill her, and finally there weren’t any girls left except the vizier’s daughters. One of them, Scheherazade, had collected a thousand stories, so she begged her father to let her go to the sultan and somehow she’d stop the killing. The father let her go, and each night she started telling a story but never finished it, and the sultan got so interested that he’d keep her alive the next day, and then she’d begin another story, and finally the sultan didn’t want to kill her or anyone else.”
“So?” said Pamela, still looking at the book. “What are these people doing on the cover?”
“That’s … that’s what I was going to read to you,” said Elizabeth.
Pamela and I hopped into bed like two little kids waiting for our bedtime story. We heard the Joneses come home and turn on the TV downstairs, but we waited patiently while Elizabeth pulled a chair over by the bed, turned on the lamp, and placed the book on her lap. It was then I noticed she’d put paper clips on some of the pages. She began reading:
“‘… And as we were about to take ship again, we found on the beach a damsel in tattered clothes, who kissed my hand and said to me, “Oh, my lord, is there in thee kindness and charity? I will requite thee for them.” Quoth I, “Indeed I love to do courtesy and charity, though I be not requited.” And she said, “Oh, my lord, I beg thee to marry me and clothe me and take me back to thy country, for I give myself to thee. Entreat me courteously, for indeed I am of those whom it behoves to use with kindness and consideration.…“’”
“What does she mean?” I asked.
“A virgin,” said Pamela knowingly.
“Oh,” I said, and Elizabeth continued:
“‘“… and I will requite thee therefor: do not let my condition prejudice thee.” When I heard what she said, my heart inclined to her.… So I carried her with me and clothed her and spread her a goodly bed in the ship and went in to her and made much of her.…’”
I looked at Elizabeth. Her cheeks were pink, but she was already searching grimly for the next paper-clipped page.
?
??Is that all?” asked Pamela.
“Don’t you have any imagination?” Elizabeth shot back.
I’ll admit I was intrigued, but Elizabeth was already on to something else.
“‘… So the damsel took a sash of Yemen stuff and doubled it about her waist, then tucked up her trousers and showed legs of alabaster and above them a hummock of crystal, soft and swelling, and a belly that exhaled musk from its dimples, as it were a bed of blood-red anemones, and breasts like double pomegranates.…’”
I tried to imagine double pomegranates, whatever they were, and wondered if my breasts would equal even one.
Elizabeth’s fingers fairly flew to the next paper clip. Pamela and I were having a wonderful time, but Elizabeth had the look of a girl waiting for the dentist:
“‘… She put her hand into his breast, and it slipped down, and her entrails quivered and desire was sore upon her, for that women’s lust is fiercer than that of men, and she was confounded. But when he never moved, she took his ring from his finger and put it on her own and kissed his mouth and hands, nor did she leave any part of him unkissed.…’”
“Even his …?” said Pamela.
“Shut up, Pamela,” I told her, and Elizabeth continued:
“‘… after which she took him to her breast and, laying one of her hands under his neck and the other under his armpit, fell asleep by his side.’”
I was still concentrating on the quivering entrails, but Pamela was clearly impatient: “It’s nothing but foreplay,” she said.
“It’s what?” asked Elizabeth.
“What you do before you have sex,” said Pamela.
“How do you know so much about it?” I asked her.
“My father subscribes to Playboy,” said Pamela.
Elizabeth and I fell silent in the presence of such wisdom.
“Well, do you want to hear any more or not?” Elizabeth said, and looked so ready to close the book that we had to beg her to keep going.
“I’ll only read one more thing,” she declared. “This is the last:
“‘The damsel told Noureddin to spend thirty of the dirhems on food, wine, and flowers, and the rest on silk of five colours. She cooked the food and ate and drank with him, entertaining him with talk and wine till he became drunk and slept, then arose and fashioned a beautiful girdle of the silk. When this was done, she removed her clothes and, lying down beside him, kneaded him till he woke and, finding beside him a girl like virgin silver, did away her maidenhead. They enjoyed each other that night with Cairene motitations, Yemeni wrigglings, Abyssinian sobbings, Hindi torsions, Nubian lasciviousness, Rifi leg-liftings, Damiettan gruntings, Upper Egyptian heat, and Alexandrian languor.’”
Elizabeth stopped reading, and her cheeks were as red as the Coca-Cola logo on Pamela’s wastebasket. From the look on her face, she was still mulling over the maidenhead, but I was struggling with the Yemeni wrigglings, while Pamela had probably progressed past the Abyssinian sobbings and was all the way to Upper Egyptian heat.
There was an embarrassed silence in the bedroom. Obviously, there were whole categories of sexual conduct we knew nothing about.
Pamela must have been thinking the same thing. “Do you suppose they teach it in eighth grade?” she asked.
Maybe those gorgeous girls we saw flirting with their boyfriends in the halls had already taken the course, and the ones who spent their lunch hour in the library hadn’t. Or maybe the ones in the library were reading Arabian Nights.
“I guess we won’t know till we get there,” I said. I was still amazed at Elizabeth. So was Pamela, and we watched her as she snapped the book shut and stuck it back in her overnight bag, her face still burning.
Reading from Arabian Nights didn’t come easy for her. In fact, it was probably as hard for Elizabeth as swimming in deep water would be for me, because her own life was about as far from Arabian Nights as you could get. At Elizabeth’s house, when you go in the bathroom, for example, there’s a little decorated box with a lid that holds the Kotex. Everything personal is tucked away out of sight. No wonder Elizabeth went through that spell once of not being able to eat in public—in front of boys, anyway. A girl who pretends she doesn’t sweat, menstruate, or go to the bathroom could hardly be expected to swallow and digest.
But on this night there was something else about Elizabeth that seemed different, and then I realized what it was. She was angry. Angry at Pamela and me.
“What’s the matter, Elizabeth?” I asked finally as she plunked down her shoes and pulled a short gown over her bra and pants.
“Nothing,” she said, and stomped off to the bathroom to brush her teeth.
When she came back, Pamela said, “Well, if you’re not mad at us, you’re mad at your shoes. You’ve kicked them out of the way three times.”
“Why should I be mad?” Elizabeth answered. “You’ve been after me for as long as I can remember to be more … more vulgar, so now I was vulgar and I hope you’re satisfied.”
“Vulgar?” I said. “Elizabeth, all we ever tried to get you to do was to lighten up a little about bodies and sex without having a spaz every time we mentioned it.”
“Well, okay, I’ve lightened up, so don’t say I never talk about sex. I talked enough about sex tonight to last all year, so just shut up.”
She turned out the light and crawled onto the cot over by the wall, leaving Pamela and me in the double bed.
Elizabeth meant it, too. I knew that she felt she had earned enough points to last her the whole of eighth grade, and she wouldn’t have to say the word “sex” again until the start of ninth. But the real problem, I knew, was that she felt guilty about sneaking that book over here and was blaming Pamela and me for it.
The room was quiet for a long time. Then Pamela giggled. “Alice, what do you suppose Nubian lasciviousness is?”
“Oh, stop it! Just stop it!” came Elizabeth’s voice over by the wall. “Can’t we forget about it now and go to sleep?”
It was hard to sleep, though, with all that on my mind. I waited another half hour to see if I was getting drowsy. Pamela started snoring, and I figured Elizabeth was either asleep or she wasn’t speaking anyway, so when I was sure the Joneses were out of the bathroom, I got up for a drink of water.
In a magazine rack in the corner was a copy of the July Playboy. I stared at the beautiful woman on the cover and was as curious as anyone else to see how she looked naked, so I opened the centerfold.
There was the girl stark naked, sitting with her arms close to her sides so that they sort of pushed her breasts together. Everything looked rose-colored, as though she’d just come out of a hot bath. Her cheeks were flushed, and her hair had little ringlets at the temples. Would I ever look like that without my clothes? I wondered. Not in my wildest dreams.
Not one of us mentioned Arabian Nights the next morning. Mrs. Jones had cinnamon toast and fresh orange juice for us, and Mr. Jones came to the table looking very ordinary, with his hair thinning a little on top. I was tempted to say to him, “How did you like Miss July?” but I didn’t. Maybe you don’t call the Playmate of the Month “Miss” anyway. Besides, ever since Pamela told me that her parents were nudists, I never quite knew what to say to them in the first place.
It was on Thursday night, when Dad was getting ready to do the grocery shopping, that he stood at the door looking over the list and called, “Who wrote pork sausage? How much do you want?”
“I did, Dad. Make it a couple packages, will you?” said Lester.
Dad jotted down something with his pencil, then scanned the list again.
“What’s this? Double pomegranates?”
I swallowed.
“This your writing, Al?”
“Yeah. Pomegranates,” I said.
He looked at me strangely. “Do you suppose a couple will do?”
“Yeah, two would be perfect,” I told him. “I just want to see what they look like.”
3
WAITING IT OUT
“AL
ICE,” CAME PAMELA’S BREATHLESS voice over the phone the next day. “I’m not going to Mark’s this afternoon. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m meeting Donald Sheavers at Wendy’s at two.”
Donald Sheavers is my old boyfriend from Takoma Park. Elizabeth and Pamela and I had met him recently at the mall, and he’d asked for both their phone numbers. I was just glad to have him interested in someone besides me. Donald Sheavers is one of the handsomest guys I ever saw, but he’s also rather stupid. He can’t even begin to compare with Patrick.
He had grown a lot larger than he was in fifth grade. I think Pamela liked his muscles, and Elizabeth was attracted to both the muscles and the cross he wore around his neck. But Pamela was supposed to be Mark’s steady!
“Pamela, someone’s bound to find out sooner or later,” I told her. “What if Mark hears about it? You should tell him yourself.”
“Well, Alice, how do you know if someone’s right for you if you never go out with anyone else?” she said. “Donald’s just … interesting, that’s all.”
“Okay, I won’t mention it to Mark,” I said.
“Or Elizabeth, either.”
“We promised to tell each other everything!” I was one to talk. I’d never even told Elizabeth and Pamela how afraid I was of Mark’s pool.
“Well, let me see first how things go. Then I’ll tell her myself,” Pamela said.
I had scarcely finished reading the comics before the phone rang again.
“Alice,” came Elizabeth’s voice, and it sounded as though she didn’t want her parents to hear. “I won’t be going with you and Pamela over to Mark’s.”
Oh, no.
“Listen, don’t tell anyone, but Donald Sheavers called, and he wants me to meet him at the Orange Bowl at three o’clock.”