Changing the Past

by Thomas Berger

  “Why the jokes?” asked Kellog. “I could just tell her, couldn’t I?” Putting his talent to this sort of use would seem to demean it.

  “Soften her up,” Riggins said as they went through the swinging doors into the basement corridor. “Girls listen to guys who make ‘em laugh.”

  Kellog had noticed this, to a degree, but he had not arrived at Riggins’ theory of the so-called softening-up process. Being entertained was another thing than being manipulated…or was it? After classes he lingered at the corner of the schoolyard, where Riggins had assured him Betty Jane could be encountered on her way home, and when she came along he said, “Hey, Betty Jane, did you ever hear the one about the big fat lady who went into the department store and asked the floorwalker where she could buy talcum powder? Now, this guy was bowlegged, see, and he said, ‘Walk this way.’” Kellog bowed his own legs and demonstrated. “So the lady said, ‘If I walked that way, I wouldn’t need the powder!’”

  Betty Jane frowned. “That’s pretty smutty.”

  “Are you kidding,” Kellog asked in false indignation. “Talcum powder?”

  She shook her head. “You know very well what I mean, Jack Kellog. You’re getting quite a name for yourself with these off-color jokes.”

  “Come on, don’t you have a sense of humor?” He was conscious of a newfound feeling of power. He had no memory of having addressed a girl to her face when he was alone with her, and though other homeward-bound students were nearby, he and Betty Jane were isolated from them at the moment.

  “I certainly do, but I don’t care for anything immoral. It just lowers a person.”

  Her prissy little mouth annoyed him, and he did not find her very attractive in the first place. He liked long blond straight hair with a sheen, and hers was short and dark. Her eyes seemed small, her complexion was too pale, and whereas his ideal was big jugs with an otherwise slender body, she was stocky, and her chest was thick; her tits were actually undersized, so far as he could tell from the Argyle sweater. Why Riggins was so stuck on her Kellog could not have explained. But he was irritated now by her criticism, and he remembered his mission.

  “Look, I don’t care what you think about me,” he said to her petulant profile as they started up the sidewalk. “What I’m supposed to tell you is that Gordon Riggins likes you a lot.”

  She stopped and stared at him. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “Well, dammit,” Kellog said. “What’s wrong with you? This guy told me to say it, and I have, and that’s that, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You don’t have to curse,” Mary Jane told him. “I was just asking. Never, never have I given Gordon Riggins any reason whatsoever to think about me. I hardly know who he is. Is he that stupid jerk who is practically illiterate in class?”

  This appealed to Kellog’s natural malice. “That’s pretty much on the head of the nail. I hear when he was born, the doctor lifted him up and slapped his face.”

  Betty Jane giggled at this, though she said, “Oh, you’re so awful.”

  “He’s so dumb,” said Kellog, “he thinks Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is a post-office box.”

  Now Betty Jane shrieked. “See, you don’t have to be dirty to be funny.” She had the most grating laugh he had ever heard, though naturally he liked her better now.

  “You know, he asked me to lend him a dime and said, ‘I ain’t had a bite all day.’… So I bit him!”

  When her laughter was done, she asked, “Oh, my gosh, where do you get ‘em?”

  “Gordo went to the doctor to have a physical exam, and the doctor examined him and said, ‘You’re sick.’ Gordo said, ‘I feel fine. I want to get a second opinion.’ ‘Okay,’ said the doc, ‘you’re ugly too.’”

  Now Betty Jane laughed so hard that a breath went down the wrong way and she coughed and clasped her books to her chest. “If you don’t stop you’ll give me heart failure,” said she when she was again able to speak.

  “Okay, then,” said Kellog, “I told you what I was supposed to: Riggins likes you. So long, then.” They were coming to a corner, and he had run out of ready material. And even if he had not, he was aware of the need to leave the stage while they still wanted more instead of waiting till they began to long for relief.

  “Where are you going now?” asked Betty Jane. “You live in this direction too, don’t you?”

  “Got to see a guy about a horse,” he breezily answered, using a line he did not understand but had heard on the radio more than once.

  “Well, say,” said Betty Jane, a slight flush washing her freckles, “maybe we’ll meet again I don’t know where or when.”

  Kellog grunted. Now he had to pretend he really did have some important business elsewhere. He might go to the drugstore and buy some zinc oxide to put on his pimples (it was of little effect but you had to do something), but in recent weeks his acne had been clearing up, and the reason could not have been that he was beating his meat any less nowadays. Yet here he was, talking with a girl in the flesh, and sex was the last thing on his mind. Thick ankle-socks above dirty saddle oxfords and below a skirt of plaid wool was not a costume that evoked lust. His taste was for black lace underwear with long garters and high heels; tits upthrust and compressed to form a deep cleavage not far below the chin, in a brassiere strained to the breaking point; glistening scarlet lips; and a smoldering cigarette in a long holder of black onyx.

  “I’m going to drink Canada Dry,” said he, “starting in Toronto.”

  Betty Jane laughed dutifully at this, but she had been claimed by a new solemnity. She came closer to him and said, sotto voce though no one else was near enough to hear, “I don’t approve of drinking myself, but my father’s got some wine down cellar and there aren’t any of them home right now.”

  “There’s your chance, then,” said he, “and next time anybody asks if you’re drinking any more, tell ‘em you’re not drinking any less.”

  She failed even to smile at this, saying in a very small voice, “Come on, if you want.”

  So having really nothing else to do, he persisted awhile longer in her company. She lived behind a green lawn in a two-story house with a wide porch full of wicker furniture in good condition and not unraveling like his grandma’s. This was one of the better streets in town. Kellog had not previously been aware that her family had more money than his, and learning this now, he felt he had still another reason to feel superior to her. He needed all the self-assurance he could muster, for if he had not even walked a girl home from school, he had assuredly never entered an unoccupied house with one. Nor, as he tried to keep from reminding himself, was he experienced at “drinking,” though the word was so frequently to be heard in his jokes. He had had a sip of homemade grape wine from his father’s glass before recent Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. He loathed the filthy, sour smell of beer and had yet to taste any kind of spirits except blackberry cordial, which was not all bad but would have been better without the acrid alcohol content.

  There they were in the Hopper basement, a very neat place as contrasted with the Kellog cellar, newspapers in tied stacks, no stink of damp, and a very modern, clean-looking furnace equipped with an automatic stoking device that fed coal into the fire when required. Jack noticed only the things that reminded him of his own chores at home, but it was spring now and no heat was on.

  Betty Jane led him to a corner cupboard and opened the doors, saying, “There you go.”

  Inside were to be seen some pickles in Mason jars, strawberry jam with a disc of paraffin between the maroon contents and the metal lid, and a bottle of dark-brown glass bearing a label on which was printed: “Sherry.”

  His hostess snatched up the bottle and thrust it at him. “C’mon,” said she, “we’ll pick up the corkscrew in the kitchen and go up to my room.”

  Kellog had to speak fast. He had never held a corkscrew in his hands, let alone used one to extract a cork, a process he had never paid much notice to when depicted in the movies except for the
time that some comedian had pulled from a bottle a cork that kept coming and coming and when all the way out was magically longer than the bottle from which it had issued. To do that kind of stuff you had to have a lot more resources than were available to a high-school kid in a little hick town.

  “Naw,” he said now, sneering. “I hate sherry. Too weak.” When, years later, he discovered that the cork in a fortified-wine bottle was topped by a knurled cap, requiring no extracting tool, he still did not regret having missed the drink, for had he taken it his reason might have been impaired for the succeeding forty-five minutes.

  “I’m real sorry,” said Betty Jane. “Because that’s all there is.” She smiled as if she knew something he didn’t and closed the cupboard while taking his hand with her free one. “C’mon, I’ll show you my room.”

  The route upstairs was a blur to him, and they arrived at their destination much too soon. Her hand was not even soft and smooth, and he withdrew from its clutch as soon as he could. Her room had some pink girl’s stuff in its decor and a stuffed animal or two. Unlike him she apparently did not have to share it with anybody else (he had an older brother who appropriated the better of every alternative: position of bed, dresser-drawers, etc.)—except a tiger cat, who on seeing them leaped off the bed and slunk under it.

  Kellog knew at least one joke that played on the two meanings of “pussy,” but he could not bring it to mind at the moment, and perhaps just as well, for alone in the house as they were, any wrong move on his part might give Betty Jane grounds for a charge of rape. Such stories were always floating around, though it was never possible to confirm one.

  Betty Jane sat down on the bed and asked brightly, “Well, what should we do? Look at movie magazines? I’ve got quite a few. My aunt brings them home from the beauty shop where she works. I don’t know any card games but Old Maid. I’ve got a scrapbook, and also I collect autographs of the famous: so far I’ve got some baseball players’ that my father gave me. I never heard of them but he says they’re real well known. I have written to some of my favorite stars in Hollywood but that was just a few days ago, so they haven’t had time to reply yet, but I am told they sure will.”

  “That’s great,” Kellog said without enthusiasm. He was just standing there.

  She smiled at him. “You have a terrific sense of humor. My father says a person needs that above all to succeed in life.”

  “Uh-huh.” His mind was barren. “I got to go now. My old man will give me a beating if I don’t clean up a lotta junk in the garage.”

  “Are you serious?” she asked. “Your father beats you?”

  “Well, not with a club. But he’ll slap my face off if he feels like it. He split my lip once.”

  “That’s too bad. My father is usually real swell to me. If anybody’s lousy, it will be my mother, though mostly she’s okay. My sister doesn’t act right lots of times, but then later we make up.”

  Kellog looked around the room. “Where does she sleep?”

  “She’s got her own room.” Betty Jane looked at the floor. “Do you really have to go?”

  “I’m not lying,” he said defiantly. “My old man beats hell out of me sometimes.” He understood that he could get somewhere with her at this moment, but he did not know just where or how, and the fact remained that he had always hoped his first sexual association would be with a person he found attractive. On the other hand, he was aware that with his weight and skin problem he was not likely at this stage of life to get access to anybody of the sort he saw in the imagination as he masturbated. It might be either Betty or continued chastity for the forseeable future.

  He sat down on the bed beside her, not yet ready to make the first move, but as luck would have it as soon as he was in place she fell heavily against him. He leaned back, and she descended into his lap, her elbow digging into his crotch. The effect was both painful and arousing. Soon he had the giant of boners, and as she erected her upper body she managed accidentally to press against it. No one except himself had ever touched his closest pal: he was now both jealous and excited to an even greater degree. She put her face to his, and he stopped breathing for fear of bad breath, either his or hers or even both, and did nothing whatever until she gave him a disappointingly light dry kiss, the first he had ever had that was not an element in a game like Spin the Bottle, but it was no more passionate than if it had been such.

  “You meant that about my sense of humor?” he asked. “I really like to make people laugh.” He did not say that though he momentarily loved them when they laughed, he never liked people in the mass. Furthermore, while he feared them when they did not laugh, he had a certain contempt for them when they did.

  Betty Jane was looking at him with feeling. “I guess that’s just about my favorite thing, a sense of humor. A lot of people don’t have any, but I say if you can’t smile at things, then there’s not much—”

  Kellog summoned up the nerve to put a hand on her forearm, at which touch, the first instituted by him, she fell silent. Her prominent sinews did not greatly suggest female flesh, and after an instant he took his hand away.

  “All right,” Betty Jane said submissively. “I’ll do it.” She proceeded gently but firmly to grasp his pecker, which had lost some of its recent tumidity, through the fabric of his pants, and simultaneously horrifying and thrilling him, it quickly became swollen once more. He made no sound, but his facial skin felt flammable. Far from being the Sunday school-goer of Riggins’ innocent assumption, Betty Jane was a shameless whore. He wondered what the world would think of her were it to know that she would willfully misinterpret a guy’s touch of an arm as a signal to play with his dick.

  If she persisted, he would come in his pants, and then there’d be hell to pay at home, for nothing could be done discreetly in his house, being as he was always under the surveillance of his brother and father and mother, not to mention his grandmother, who lived with them and had little to do but snoop. Lucky he was allowed enough time to whack off in the bathroom while pretending to crap. He would never find the privacy in which to wash his underwear and sponge away such jizzum as penetrated to the fabric of his trousers.

  Therefore he removed her hand. Frowning, she stared deep into his eyes. It took a moment for him to register that while doing so she had also gone deftly within her skirt and with two thumbs slipped her white underpants to her ankles.

  “Now, Jack,” she whispered, “take it easy. I don’t have much experience.” She lay back across the bed, the plaid skirt only as high as midthigh.

  Kellog was not sure what was expected of him. Later on, he reflected that Betty Jane may have been inviting him only to some heavy petting—at least, that might be her own interpretation—but thus far in life he had done no more of that than he had fucked. So he smirked now, though with her eyes shut she could not see him, and pulled the pants over her heels so that he could get between her legs; and without removing any of his own clothes, he brought out his rigid member. Funny, though this first time he didn’t even know precisely where the entryway was situated, and got no help from her, he was magically inside her instantly and no sooner there than he ejaculated. And no sooner had he come than he withdrew: in fact, he was still emitting fluid onto her motionless flesh, and so as not to wet his own clothing he eventually extinguished himself, as one might grind out a burning cigarette, onto, into her skirt, without really thinking of what he was doing, though he would have had no regrets if he had thought about it. He was here only by invitation. He found Betty Jane no more attractive than before. Then what obligation could he possibly have?

  She finally opened her eyes to ask, with a certain awe, “Was that it?”

  “Huh?”

  “We went all the way?”

  Already he had returned the horse to the stable. He removed himself from between her legs. “I guess so.”

  She looked down at the semen on her thigh. “I lost my thing a couple years ago, riding my bike, but I still thought it would hurt.”

&nb
sp; If what she was saying was true, he had got himself a cherry, that prize to which all menfolk aspired: you should shatter every maidenhead you could, and finally marry the girl who had resisted all comers and kept her own. That seemed to make sense. But he had little sense of accomplishment now.

  “I really got to go,” he said, standing. “I’ll see you, Betty Jane.”

  “Well, Jack,” said she, “I just hope you’re ready to do the right thing if worse comes to worst.”

  For a few moments he assumed she meant: if her parents discovered that she had brought a boy home to an empty house. Of course she could count on him, if asked, to lie about what they had done together.

  “I’ll swear we were doin’ homework,” said he. To think of this brought back the normal world, and he felt better.

  “I mean making it legal,” said Betty Jane, in a wheedling tone that he hated to hear. She continued to lie there like a victim.

  With a mixture of indignation and panic, Kellog almost howled. “Crysakes, it was all your idea!”

  “Not to go all the way,” she insisted. “I never did that before.”

  “I bet there’s nothin’ you never did before!” he shouted in outrage and got out of there as fast as he could, speeded up by her cries of placation and even her physical pursuit.

  “Oh, don’t go. I’m sorry. I’m not accusing you of—”

  He was out the door and across the porch. Hardly had he reached the sidewalk when Gordon Riggins stepped out from behind a big tree at the edge of the Hopper yard. Kellog had forgotten about Riggins altogether. Gordon had been waiting all this while.

  “So,” Riggins said eagerly, “you did a great job, Jack. You’ve been talkin’ me up for an hour. What did she say? She like me?”

  “Hard to say, Gordo. There might be something wrong with her. I couldn’t get far, frankly. Listen, she’s not all that great-looking. A guy like you could do a lot better.”

  The sober truth was that Riggins, tall, broad-shouldered, and with curly hair and a square chin, was a handsome bastard, a far cry from Kellog with his dumpy figure and bad skin. It was reasonable that a girl would favor the former, but Jack was noticing for the first time what later on seemed to be a rule of human behavior in those days: that the attractive were drawn to those less so; this was true of both sexes. Kellog’s brother, who had gone to college for one semester, assured him that the beauty queens all went steady with ugly guys with big noses, fan ears, or thick eyeglasses. But no doubt they all had great senses of humor.