When I was twelve years old I became the unwitting hypotenuse of a sixth grade love triangle. At a right angle across the spreading gap from me were the long-time love of my life Colleen Clark and her new friend Judy Bessinger. I was too blissfully involved in my own romantic fantasies to think that the subjects of my affection did not return my feelings in kind. My heart was etched with embarrassment one afternoon in a painful moment that stays with me like a kinescope hidden in a drawer of something far away but very real.
* * *
I had been in love with Colleen since kindergarten, when we launched our relationship with exquisite naked-dancing in her mother’s bathroom. Behind the button-locked door we felt for the first time in our awareness the warm ease of skin across our equally flat chests, our round little child bellies, our inner arms and thighs. The part of me that was different from Colleen remained in place, unnoticed, but our peach-fuzz stood on end as we tingled with delight.
It seems to me now that the most pleasant times of my childhood were spent playing Barbies with Colleen in her room. My mom was busy with my baby brother, and Colleen’s mother had a sick husband and two toddlers to care for. We never fought or made noise, so they left us to ourselves.
For six years there were no other girls Colleen’s age on our block. I had four or five other boys to play with, but Colleen was isolated. For her I was the next best thing to a best friend. But to me she was my future wife. We played and joked about when we’re married. I don’t think Colleen believed it would ever really happen. I just assumed it would.
As I moved on through elementary school, I played Little League and basketball and ran with the mob of boys on the block, but I continued to play with Colleen. The other kids didn’t seem to notice or care how much time we spent together, but my parents did. I always thought of her as My Girlfriend, because that was the label my mom and dad used. We were cute. Mom and Dad teased us, but they were pleased by our unusual relationship. Most kids—our brothers and sisters, other kids on the block—thought the opposite sex had cooties. But Colleen and I were comfortable together, and when we showed off, holding hands and walking arm in arm, the adults loved it. I think now that young parents in the early sixties had a lurking fear of their kids not “turning out right.” Heaven forbid that we should be fruitcakes or lezzies. This unspeakable fear was dispelled every time they saw us being the miniature couple we knew they wanted us to be. But the best part for me was with no adults around, playing house with Colleen and Ken & Barbie in Colleen’s room.
Colleen’s father died at the start of our sixth grade year, at about the same time Judy’s family moved in. Colleen and I never talked about her father—sickness and death were too scary.
Colleen latched onto Judy immediately and they began spending most of their time together—time I would have spent with Colleen. When I was with both of them at the same time, even just walking home from school, I felt like I was playing a game with rules only they understood. I was exhilarated, but confused and embarrassed, too young to see what was happening. I floated along with my feelings.
That winter Colleen and I played house a few more times, but it wasn’t the same. Colleen’s smile seemed different. It gleamed like she knew a breathtaking secret. Since that one naked morning we had never really gotten physically close. We played and talked and pretended. I was more physical wrestling and playing football with the guys than I ever was with Colleen. But each of those last few times we played in her room, she would find some pretense to have an argument with me and we would end up play-fighting on her bed. I remember she had that smile of secret knowledge all the while we “struggled.”
During that sixth grade year, as the way we played changed, my feelings about Colleen changed as well. I began to feel a need to state my intentions. I was unsure what those might be, but I knew they involved going steady, getting married, and something called sex. I started by making our relationship official. I gave her a steady-ring-on-a-chain I bought at the strip-mall jewelry store with my own stolen money. Trembling and breathless, I gave it to her one afternoon at the end of Easter vacation.
I pulled the stainless steel bauble from my pocket without preamble.
Here.
Does this mean we’re going steady?
I guess so.
Neither of us was ready to start kissing and I didn’t know what else to say, so I quickly suggested that we go outside with the other kids. Only then did it become real to me that everyone would see what had always been private. I wavered between being proud, wanting all the kids to see, and hoping she would keep her shiny new token hidden in her blouse with her training bra. But the uproar among the kids over Colleen’s steady ring, which she ended up taking off and swinging around her finger like a sling, was no more than over somebody’s really cool agate shooter. We heard a couple of choruses of “Two Little Lovebirds Sitting in a Tree,” then everything was back to normal. I played along, but I knew things had changed.
And I knew the change was inspired by the arrival of Judy Bessinger.
* * *
Judy was Colleen’s foil in many ways. While Colleen was round-faced and pink, the bangs of her bright blonde Dutch-boy cut straight above dark eyebrows and clear blue eyes, Judy’s skin was Hessian olive, her face long and lean, with lank ringlets of nut-brown hair falling about searching black eyes.
I got my first successful erections thinking of Judy.
We began to talk on the phone—something Colleen and I had never done.
Speaking into my ear through the phone as I sat curled under the breakfast bar in the dark kitchen while everyone else watched TV, Judy was not a disembodied voice. As she spoke, I could see her more clearly in my mind than I ever could when we were with Colleen or other kids—which was all the time. On the phone we had privacy. She was talking only to me with her froggy little voice, telling me about problems with the other girls, about her parents fighting, her brothers smoking and drinking. The things she told me frightened me some, but she seemed so cool and different and exciting. I would think of her long after we hung up. I would go to sleep dreaming of how it would be to make her happy, to stroke her face, to touch her lips.
I began to write her love letters.
I had never written anything to Colleen—when we began neither of us even knew how to write—but I had become literate by the time I met Judy. I spent one entire rainy afternoon with the only picture I had of Judy, in the school portrait of Mrs. Potts’ class, filling every margin with a scrawl of painful purple prose.
I had just seen the movie The Pride and the Passion for the third time that week on “The Million Dollar Movie” and I was moved. Perhaps not so oddly enough, I related to the Sofia Loren character, divided in her feelings between the long-beloved and admired Spanish revolutionary, played by Sinatra—the Pride—and the dashing Duke of Wellington, played by Cary Grant—the Passion. I wept throughout the final scene as the Duke carried the limp bodies, first of Sofia, then of Sinatra, back into their recaptured city. I was attracted to the idea of these different aspects of love. I could I be in love with two girls at the same time. Love could feel many different ways. I poured my passion out to Judy with my pen.
I never gave Judy the unedited versions of my letters. She got my thoughts and feelings, watered down to the level of a commercial Valentine, in the form of notes passed to her through the hands of other girls in class. At first it didn’t enter my mind that Colleen would read the notes. After all, she was in a different room at school and the girls who passed the notes always promised not to read them. I assumed Judy would never share them with anyone. I didn’t want to think of what Colleen’s reaction might be if she did read them. But Judy pretended she hadn’t even read my notes when we talked on the phone. It was all too embarrassing to discuss. And besides, in my twelve-year-old mind my feelings about Judy were separate from what Colleen and I were to each other—whatever that might have been.
In the midst of a pubescent hormone storm, I was oblivious.
However, as spring approached that sixth grade year, some kind of awareness grew within me. It could have come from clues I picked up when I was with Colleen and Judy together—the conspiratorial tittering, the under-current of whispers. Or I could have just been starting the long haul to catch up with the girls’ march through puberty while slowly getting wise in 1964, taking in the ways of the world by osmosis through the media. Either way or both, my reaction was to panic. Colleen will be jealous. She’ll hate me. I’m too nerdy for Judy. She’ll drop me and I’ll lose them both.
I decided I had to make a commitment to Colleen. By getting her that ring and chain, I chose Pride over Passion. Colleen and I were going steady.
* * *
Mr. Clark had been very sick for a long time. When he died I finally understood why I had only seen him occasionally in his darkened room, through a crack in the door at the end of the hall, and why Mrs. Clark was unhappy all the time. But soon after the funeral Colleen’s mother seemed happier than ever. As the days grew warm, she cut and colored her dark, curly hair to a bouncy blonde halo and she took to wearing short-shorts and halter tops. She would sun-bathe, smiling with cucumber slices on her eyes. In March, when Mrs. Clark’s Greek boyfriend, Ilia, moved in, it seemed like they had known each other for a long time.
None of us kids liked Ilia much. He treated us like the nuisances we probably were. But he was a warm breeze to the Clarks. He rough-housed with the boys and, though he kept a certain distance from her, Colleen bragged about Ilia’s worldly travels and really seemed to like him. I think she liked the way he made her mother laugh. Colleen had never known what it was like to have a happy mother.
The morning of that epiphanous afternoon I had been mowing the Clark’s lawn. A Southern California Saturday in May, the smell of green grass and blue smoke, and the drone of two-cycle engines infused the endless suburban neighborhood. Ilia had been hollering at me and calling me lazy because of a stretch of the backyard lawn that looked uncut no matter how many times I ran over it with the mower. I tried to explain that it was because the ground was uneven and there was nothing I could do. I think by the third time I mowed it Ilia knew I was right, but he made me do it anyway to show me who was boss.
Later we played in the water for the first time that season in Colleen’s backyard—Colleen and her brothers, and Judy and I, along with two neighbor boys, gliding on the slip-n-slide and lying on beach towels. Ilia broke out the barbeque and Mrs. Clark, in her brand new bikini, basked on the lawn on a chaise lounge in the sun.
I had gone into the utility room to dry off so I could go into the house and use the bathroom. Colleen stepped out through the kitchen door at the same time Judy came in behind me from the yard.
Come’ ere, I want to show you something.
Colleen took me by the arm and turned me toward the adjoining garage. Judy was right behind me as we entered the dimly lit space. The ripe odor of composting grass rose through the dusty air.
Do you know what pussy is?
Judy’s voice held back a squeal as she spoke. I looked in panic from face to face, both smiling maliciously, eyes darting back and forth from each other to me.
Sure I do.
My mind scrabbled to make sense of what they were doing. I vaguely knew about sex and reproduction from children’s apocrypha as well as from the official sex-ed film I’d watched with my mom and dad—and twenty others—just three months ago. I knew that a pussy was the same as a vagina, but I had never even said the word vagina out loud and was sure I didn’t know how to pronounce it. And I had no idea what Judy meant by the word without the article.
It’s your… thing…where you pee.
The girls were not yet old enough for bikinis themselves. They wore girly-modest swimsuits with skirty frills around their burgeoning hips, but their legs and arms glistened in the angled light from the utility room so that I felt as if I was surrounded by a silvery black-and-white photograph.
Colleen stood next to the trash barrel that held the grass from that morning’s lawn job. Topping the full barrel was a newly deposited layer of paper trash—as from a bathroom wastebasket.
Lemme show you something we found.
Colleen picked up an envelope from the trash and offered it to me. I was taut with nerves and I recoiled backward into Judy as if Colleen was handing me a snake. Judy seemed ready for just such a response, because her hands were up and pushing me back toward Colleen and the envelope. I had no choice but to take it.
It was not like any envelope I had seen. It was smaller, and square. Even in the dim light I could see it wasn’t white, but purple or pink, and I could feel that the edges of the long, pointed flap were textured. Between my fingers the envelope made a sound that was a combination of a crunch and a squeak. It was not sealed.
When I lifted the flap, instead of the scathing note I was by this time sure they would now force me to read aloud, I felt some kind of dry, springy substance lining the bottom of the envelope.
Did you know that it was hairy?
Trying not to betray my confusion, I slowly withdrew my hand from the envelope. Judy’s chin was at my shoulder. Glancing over I saw her own nervousness in her excited eyes.
Yeah, sure I did.
All at once, with a sickening clench of my stomach, I knew that somehow this was Mrs. Clark’s pubic hair. It was something older women had. I’d seen the illustrations and heard about “body changes” in that infamous little film. We practiced modesty at my house, but I also remembered catching a glimpse of the mysterious stuff on my mom at awkward moments in the past. How and why Mrs. Clark’s pubic hair came to be in this envelope and what Colleen and Judy expected me to do with it was too much for me to consider at the time.
My forehead seemed on fire, but I could feel water dripping off my swimming trunks onto the cool cement floor and, standing in that little puddle of my own making, I began to shiver, though the garage was hot and stuffy.
My bladder ached as Colleen stepped closer.
Look at it. It’s my mom’s.
I think I almost knocked Judy down when I dropped envelope and ran.
* * *
Colleen kept the ring. It was never spoken of. I spent the next summer developing a passion for baseball. By the beginning of seventh grade Colleen had moved to Anaheim, the next city over.
I saw Judy only when she drove by in the back seat of older guys’ cars.
I tried one more time with Colleen during the seventh grade. I called her on the telephone one lonely night. I do not remember asking her if she’d read any good books lately nearly as well as I remember the lengthy silence that followed that question, and the sick feeling it gave me.
But I did convince her to go on a movie “date” with me. My mom picked her up and drove us to a theater near her house. She was wearing strange new clothes. A short skirt covered with giant cartoon flowers and a clingy sweater that showed off her newly acquired breasts. I wore what I considered “dress-up clothes”— a white dress shirt tucked in to a pair of black slacks. All Colleen's new friends from her new school were there at that matinee. Before the first movie and during intermission she would sit with me for a minute or two while she looked around, then jump up and return a few seconds later with someone else to show me off to as her “old boyfriend.” During the movies we didn’t talk or touch. At times I wasn’t sure if she was there.
That was the last time I saw Colleen. It would be twelve years for me between naked dances.
No comments:
Post a Comment