The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  I did some of those things, Peter confessed. And felt properly creepy.

  What I did, once, said Kate, was let Poonie and one of my second-grade girlfriends talk me into playing doctor with them.

  God be praised, said gratified Peter: common ground at last between Talbot and Dorchester.

  It was at my girlfriend’s place on the Wye: a gorgeous spread next door to Wye Plantation, with a swell gazebo down by the river turned into a playhouse for the younger kids. The day before had been Heather Foulke-Stoughton’s seventh birthday—

  Marveled Peter Heather Foulke-Stoughton. My little nurse-patient down in Hoopersville was Sue-Ann Sagamore’s gum-cracking girlfriend Ramona Mae Pinder. Heather Foulke-Stoughton! Excuse me.

  If Willy had been in on it, K declared, or it’d been Poonie tout court, I’d never have agreed. But the Foulke-Stoughtons were very high-carat even by Gold Coast standards, and I had a crush that fall on red-haired Heather, which is why I’d been allowed to stay over till next day. I forget how come Poonie was there, but he was. The daughter of some doctor-friend-of-the-family had given Heather Foulke-Stoughton a play nurse kit for her birthday, which her mother confiscated right away: Our kind weren’t supposed to aspire to the taking of temperatures and the changing of bedpans. Inappropriate items of that sort were passed on to the help, from whom Heather Foulke-Stoughton wheedled this particular item back, so that we could check it out in more detail. I doubt whether I’d’ve done the same; but Heather Foulke-Stoughton was a girl both willful and a touch intimidating. Green eyes and freckles. I allowed myself to believe with her that we had a right to know what exactly was so terrible about the thing she was being denied.

  Uh-oh.

  Yeah. So of course after half an hour of taking turns with the stethoscope and the bandages and candy pills, Doctor Baldwin is ready to move on to more interesting areas of internal medicine. So is spunky Heather Foulke-Stoughton, who is currently the patient: Having bound me and Poonie with the usual oaths of reciprocity, she peels out of her undies and presents herself for our examination. Poon’s in second heaven; I’m reasonably titillated but ever more alarmed as Heather Foulke-Stoughton keeps upping the ante. When she insists that we both check her out all over with the stethoscope, it’s my heart I hear. She makes a urine specimen for us while we watch, in an empty champagne glass that somebody left in the gazebo and the maids missed. When Poonie says Nurse Sherritt, we’d better have a look at this patient’s hiney, Heather Foulke-Stoughton bends over the edge of the picnic table and spreads her own cheeks for us. Heather Foulke-Stoughton graduated from Wellesley summa cum laude and married an Alsatian beer-baron’s son and divides her time these days between Strasbourg and Monte Carlo, but her little gray-pink seven-year-old A-hole is fixed forever in my mind’s eye: the first I’d seen up close. Tidily puckered, I report, and clean as a whistle.

  My turn next, and I was close to tears. I had a strong feeling that Heather Foulke-Stoughton went as far as she did ‘cause she knew I’d have trouble doing the same, and that she and Poon were more interested in examining me than I’d been in examining her. But a promise is a promise: I dropped my drawers; I made my pee; I let them count my pulse between my legs. And when hiney-time came, I bent over that table and spread my nervous cheeks.

  Stroking his new lover’s handsome upper arm, Peter Sagamore said Kiddie porn is not a medium I relish. All the same, I wish it had been me instead of Poonie Baldwin there in Heather Foulke-Stoughton’s redheaded gazebo.

  Said Katherine Sherritt The point of this episode of this story is that in the interval between patients, Doctor Baldwin’s imagination had been at work, with the result that whereas red-haired Heather Foulke-Stoughton’s high-carat anus got no more than an intimate visual inspection, mine got its temperature forcibly taken. The manufacturers of kiddie doctor-and-nurse kits apparently know better than to include thermometers, but resourceful Poon had spotted a box of Crayola crayons in the gazebo and, without letting the patient know it, had evidently signaled his intentions to the nurse. When he said We’d better take Miss Sherritt’s temperature, Heather Foulke-Stoughton held me chest-down on the table while Poonie pushed a forest-green crayon halfway in. It hurt, man, and I yelled loud enough to scare them twice: The main house wasn’t all that far from the gazebo, and even Poonie at that age wouldn’t have wanted to really hurt me, only to make me say Ouch. He was playing sadist the way he was playing doctor.

  Remarked Peter Sagamore Forest green.

  Perpend that detail, Katherine instructed. I pulled the crayon out myself, ashamed of my crying but very much afraid that the thing would break off in there and I’d have to be taken to a real doctor. When it was out I threw it away and piled into my panties and out of that gazebo, but not without registering that the color of that Crayola thermometer had been dark green. Nurse and doctor were full of apologies and fears that I’d tattle, which of course I didn’t. Soon enough we all made up and went riding on our junior bikes, me somewhat gingerly.

  So Poonie never had to deliver.

  He’d have been more than happy to, I’m sure, since it was just us girls. What he did deliver, some days later, was a P.B. LOVES K.S. note written in forest-green crayon, which he teased me by claiming was the same he’d taken my temperature with. It would’ve been like Poonie to comb the Foulke-Stoughton’s gazebo for that crayon. He carried it around with him for a while after; he would take it out when other kids were around and claim that forest-green Crayolas had a particular fragrance that he liked.

  Old Poon, said Pete, has a definite down-county streak.

  He also from that day forward declared to his parents and my parents and the other kids that he was going to marry me when we grew up. The years pass, and with them, we would have imagined, all recollection of that interlude in Heather Foulke-Stoughton’s gazebo. My mortification at which, I forgot to say, was compounded by Poonie’s telling Willy about it, who teased me in his usual oafish way for a week or two. Poonie’s ongoing crush on me became a standing joke in Talbot and Kent Counties, more at his expense than at mine. Even Willy couldn’t mock him out of it.

  Observed Peter That bespeaks some character, no? But it’s time for me to fade out of this narrative.

  Okay. I never doubted that in his peculiar way the boy was attracted to me. And I’d better emphasize that he wasn’t a creep: Poonie was lively and witty and bright and a good dancer, and after puberty he grew lean and sort of handsome. He knew how to charm the grown-ups with his manners, and it was flattering to be so adored year after year, even though when dating time came it was usually other boys I went out with. But sometimes I dated Poonie, and we always enjoyed ourselves. With me, at least, he was less aggressive about making out than some of the boys I liked better. He would make me say Stop, the way he made me yell Ouch in the gazebo; then he would not only stop but apologize and quit trying for that evening. It may be of mild sociological interest that, as a group, we Gold Coasties were not sexually precocious by the standards of U.S. public high schools in the Nineteen Fifties. With a few exceptions, the boys who scored scored with public-school girls. Going steady was discouraged both by our parents unanimously and by our separation after puberty into girls’ and boys’ schools, many of them boarding schools. On weekends and school vacations, we did a lot of dancing and a fair amount of petting in cars and boats and rec rooms and gazebos, but while blouses were unbuttoned and bras sometimes undone, nearly all of us kept our legs together. A lost world.

  Up through lower and middle school, Poonie’s nickname had been so little more than Willy’s joke that we scarcely remembered what it referred to. However, when we all went off to our various upper schools, my brother became the aggressive whoremonger, drunk, and general scapegrace that he remains, and Poonie was his steadfast sidekick. How much poontang they actually snagged—that was the locker-room verb then in fashion—may be debatable; the stories Willy brought home from boarding school to Nopoint Point had more to do with the pursuit th
an with the score, or with Willy’s making out in the backseat while Poon passed out in the front. He wrote to me regularly—Poonie, I mean—and I usually wrote back. We were in fact old friends. Despite his declarations of love, I regarded Poon as a wayward but basically decent older brother, less willful and less obnoxious than my real one. Mom and Dad, too, were inclined to sympathize with him and blame his lapses on Willy’s influence, which they felt responsible for but couldn’t do much about. My brother was impervious to discipline. To get closer to me, Poonie invited my criticism. I’d tell him to drink less and behave himself better, and he’d go through the motions of self-reform, but quickly lapse into his excesses—excessive apology included.

  It was generally accepted among the parents that the boys were merely sowing more than the usual crop of wild oats. There was ample precedent in our set for piled-up sports cars and country-club punch-ups and nights in the drunk tank. More particularly, it got to be assumed that eventual marriage to me would straighten Poonie right out, and that Poonie’s straightening out would have a good effect on Willy. None of this was put baldly, but it was so consistently in the air that I got the habit of thinking that way myself. Very few of us married till we were done with college, and the end of our college years seemed so far away that it was easy for me to put off thinking clearly about what we were more and more taking for granted.

  Dear God, the innocent fifties! Why didn’t it ring bells in my head that Poonie Baldwin was overdoing his contempt for queers, who were as unfamiliar to us as Martians in those days? And with all the traveling and reading I’d done by the time I went off to Radcliffe, how come I didn’t laugh when he did the old number about being driven to booze and easy pick-ups because I held out on him? The answer is that I really cared about him because our families cared about him. We even cared about Willy Sherritt, whom we didn’t like—and Porter Baldwin, Junior, with all his failings, was a likable fellow in those days, and very popular.

  Also patient: He had been officially after my virginity for at least four years before I let him in, at the end of my second undergraduate year. I’d dated a number of boys who’d turned me on as Poonie never did, but somehow it worked out that not one of them wowed me enough for long enough for me to want to go to bed with him. This was still only Nineteen Fifty-nine; not many of us saved it for our wedding night, but as a rule we didn’t fuck unless we thought we were in love. Poonie had just graduated from Penn and was on his way to law school; in a week we’d have both been back on the Shore for the summer, but he came all the way up to Cambridge to propose that we get engaged that weekend and marry when I finished college. Every year he got more sensitive-looking; that spring he was especially attractive, in a vulnerable-looking way, with his new dark mustache and his ash-blond hair, and that weekend in Boston he was charming. This could have waited a week, I told him; but he admitted he thought his chances were better away from where we’d grown up together. When I turned him down as gently as I could, he started crying, right there in Lockober’s Restaurant, where he’d been putting away a lot of champagne to get up his nerve for the proposal. I took him back to my dorm on Linnaean Street—still against the rules in those days—and to cheer him up I promised to reconsider his proposal over the summer.

  The boy went into a fit of gratitude: weeping all over me, kissing me up and down—and begging me to go to bed with him. By some odd reasoning it seemed to me that since I wasn’t ever going to marry him, I ought to give him what he’d been after for so many years, and that’s what I did: a sort of go-away present. Poon had trouble getting it up, he was so excited; then he came right away. My whole deflowering took less than a minute. Afterward he kept gravitating to my ass, begging me to let him kiss it even though he didn’t deserve to, et cet.

  Remember, it was my first time out: I had expected more attention to other areas—but then, I’d expected a number of things that hadn’t happened. I let him go to it, till I found out that it wasn’t my buns he was after, but my asshole, with his tongue. When I turned him off, he made his usual apologies and asked me whether I remembered what we’d done when we were kids in Heather Foulke-Stoughton’s gazebo. I guess I hadn’t, till he mentioned it; he not only remembered every detail, but managed to turn the story into a disarming explanation of his eagerness to get back there again. If you knew Poonie, you’d understand.

  Well: A week later, back home for the summer, I found out from Jack Bass that what had been itching me like crazy for the past couple days was crab lice. You really can get them nonsexually, Doctor Jack told me, from a bedspread or a toilet seat or a laundry bag where your underwear gets mixed in with somebody else’s. I told him not to bother; that I’d got mine in the usual way, and that he’d better check me out for clap and syphilis while he was down there. Then I called up Poonie Baldwin in a grand rage that got grander yet when he hemmed and hawed and finally confessed that he’d been scratching himself since the day before he came up to Cambridge, and had found out two days later that he and Willy and four other guys had all got the crabs from a fraternity-house whore in Philadelphia. He hadn’t told me, he said, because he’d been busy praying that he hadn’t passed them on to me, and he was afraid I’d have nothing to do with him if he told me to check with my doctor right away after I’d given him my virginity. His phrase.

  You’re right, I told him, and hung up. That should’ve been that. But it was summertime, my last summer at home, and all our old crowd would get together on the weekends at Nopoint Point or this yacht club or that for the sailing races, and Poonie was simply contrite about what had happened. No more sex, but we got to be friends again, and he tried hard to watch his drinking when I was around. By the time he went down to law school at Emory and I went back up to Radcliffe in September, I’d forgiven him, and he was pressing again for us to get engaged.

  Why in the world did I say yes, Peter? I guess because after the crab-lice episode, the man seemed more grown-up than he’d seemed before. He’d behaved himself for a whole summer, while Willy raised more hell than ever. And because Jeanne and Porter Baldwin, Senior, were such dear friends of Hank’s and Irma’s and had always been so good to me. And because no real man had ever managed to touch my heart. I’d had such a happy and privileged life, and I loved my parents and our whole crowd so much . . . it’s as if I was mesmerized, the way people get at the beach sometimes or out sailing on a perfect afternoon. But there has to have been something wrong with me, right? Some kind of vacuum at the center, that made me love the life around Nopoint Point more than I loved any particular man. It was as if by marrying Poonie Baldwin I’d be strengthening the team. I got engaged to Poonie pretending to myself that I would come to love him, when what I really felt was some kind of school spirit left over from Deniston.

  As far as any of us knew, our engagement and Poonie’s law studies really did straighten him out for the next year and a half. He and I didn’t see much of each other except on school holidays; the next summer he was legal-interning in Baltimore, and I took a cataloguing job at one of Harvard’s libraries to see whether I was interested in making a career of it. When we were together we had sex, as they say; it was never terrific, but I guessed it was normal enough. What did I know? Old Poon was a better cunnilinguist than a cocksman, but at least he left my rectum alone. Mainly we danced a lot and made plans for the wedding. He was a very happy and very nervous fiancé; I was pleased because our parents were so pleased. Only Jack Bass seemed less than delighted—the crab-louse business, I guessed, which he had put two and two together about—but he kept his reservations to himself.

  At our wedding reception, the bridegroom overdid it with the champagne, as he did once or twice in Bermuda on our honeymoon, and the bride didn’t get humped till the morning after. By the time we set up housekeeping in Centreville, where Porter Senior’s law offices were, I was already having a few dark doubts. Whether we were making love or just horsing around in our new swimming pool, Poonie had a habit of hurting me—playfully, you kn
ow, but repeatedly—until it really did hurt and I made a noise or scolded him. Then he’d either sulk or go into his abject-apology routine. Soon enough his anal interest reared its head again, so to speak; he called me a prude for not letting him grease me up and go in there. I understood that anal intercourse was considered okay by some broad-minded couples, but so was group sex and wife swapping, which I didn’t have any taste for either. It hurt enough when Poonie stuck his finger in there, which he did as often as he could. Asshole rights got to be such an issue between us that I checked with Jack Bass, who told me very firmly not to let the guy in there more than rarely: No matter what the permissive sexologists claim, anal copulation weakens the bowel action, quoth Doctor Jack, and conduces to rectal infibulation, hemorrhoids, and various kinds of infection. Poonie complained that I wouldn’t do it even rarely, and I realized that I simply didn’t love him enough to take pleasure in doing things with him that were uncomfortable and distasteful to me. I began to worry seriously then that our marriage was a dreadful mistake; but we were still newlyweds, and Mom and Dad and the Baldwins had given us such an elaborate wedding that I was too embarrassed to tell them my troubles. I had to hope we’d work things out.

  Assholes. Since I wouldn’t let him into mine, Poonie kept after me to finger-fuck him in his. In his way, he was as innocent as I was. He thought of himself as liberal-minded and me as frigid; he must have had a few homosexual connections already, but he didn’t understand yet that he was basically gay, and I didn’t realize that with a normal man I’d have shed my inhibitions with my underwear, the way I finally did in the Gramercy Park Hotel. When I said no to him, he got angry and drunk and did the old If You Won’t Do It I Know Somebody Who Will routine. A couple of times he tried to force me, and I really blew up. A couple of other times he went off with Willy to the city for a weekend; he’d come back subdued and apologetic, or else resentful. After three or four months of marriage, we both knew we were in trouble: There was virtually no sex between us anymore; I was beginning to think maybe I was frigid. Poonie regarded himself as normal because Willy was a drunk and a bully too, but the differences between them must have been coming clear; in his heart of hearts he was hoping he was normal.