“I didn’t cross my heart and hope to die.”
She saw the pain in my eyes. It didn’t seem to bother her. Her blue eyes were as cold as the garage man’s had been. Now that I think about it, she probably smiled. Or maybe I’m remembering wrong, or lying again, or one of my headmates has taken over the keyboard.
“But it’s okay, we can still play,” she said, seeing the fallen look on my face. Did I still have to love her because I’d crossed my heart, even if she didn’t love me?
“I’ll tell you some secrets, then,” she said. “Here’s the best thing about love: You can still pretend like we’re in love, the way grownups pretend.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Sally and I sat cross-legged on the warped plywood floor of the doghouse. The sun was falling into late afternoon, shining through the gap in the roof like electric light.
“What’s this about grown-ups pretending to love?” I asked.
“If they loved each other the way people on TV do, they wouldn’t hit each other or yell at each other.”
“I thought they loved each other because they had to, because they were married.”
“But we loved each other because we wanted to.”
I noticed she said “loved.” Past tense. My heart fluttered like a house bird let out of a cage, discovering its wings only to slam into window glass and fall dead. Or maybe peck at its own reflection. When you’re that young, you can’t come up with clever metaphors, which is why you save your autobiography until you’re older and need money. Or someone has a gun to your head.
“But love also has to do with the squeaky bedsprings,” she said. “You’ve heard them, haven’t you? How they squeak over and over and over and sometimes you can hear your parents yelling like they’re hurting each other, but they don’t sound mad?”
I nodded. Just another of night’s mysterious noises, along with faraway trains and the wind rustling through the cornfields and mice gnawing behind the walls and monsters breathing under the bed and a little person inside your skull. So the squeaking had something to do with love?
She continued, spreading out secrets like grape jelly on white bread. “You ever notice how your parents are happy the morning after the bedsprings squeak? Mine at least get through breakfast before they get mad at each other again. Because sometimes my mom burns the eggs or Daddy has a headache from drinking too much. Or Mom says she needs grocery money and then asks if he wants to have fun tonight.”
I nodded again. I was remembering the bedsprings and how they used to squeak a lot back when I was younger, almost every night it seemed. But now the bedsprings only worked every week or so, mostly on Friday nights.
“And that’s got something to do with what’s between people’s legs?” I asked.
She sighed and looked at me like I was a third grader. “Haven’t you seen your parents naked?”
My mind flashed back to when I was very young, when Mother would take me into the bathtub with her. She would rub soap in my hair and laugh and splash water on my back. When she stood up to towel off, I saw a patch of black hair between her legs, frothed with white soap bubbles. I only knew it was a dark, secret place, one that had parts that didn’t show. A place you knew was wrong to think about.
And walking down the hall and passing by the bathroom, seeing Father out of the corner of my eye standing over the toilet. And my eyes, despite my trying to look away, automatically going down to his hand that held the big red thing. I had something that hung down, too, but Father’s must have hurt, it looked so monstrous and swollen and angry.
“I’ve seen naked people,” I said. She wasn’t the only one who could pretend to know everything.
“Well, men have what they call a ‘babymaker.’ Like what you’ve got, except you’ve got a little boy thing. It’s called a pee-pee now, but it’ll grow up to be a babymaker, too.”
My head was spinning, and my invisible friend was rattling the closet doors in the Bone House, looking for a place to hide. How did Sally know all these things? And did I really want a big red babymaker? If I didn’t, was there any way to stop it from happening?
Sally went on, smug with the knowledge of grown-up secrets. “And women have muff pies. That’s where the man puts his babymaker and then seeds crawl out of his babymaker into the pie and then little babies grow. And they have a hard time squeezing the babymaker into the pie, because it’s so big, at least my daddy’s is. And that’s what makes the bedsprings squeak, because they have to fight to get those baby seeds planted.”
My mouth hung open, airing out the base of my brain where this new information was settling. Babymakers and bedsprings, and all this somehow tied in with love. This stuff just got scarier and scarier. “But that means they would have a baby every time the bedsprings squeak.”
“No, because of the blood. Haven’t you ever seen the blood between your mother’s legs?”
I hadn’t, but I had seen little paper wads in the toilet, with streaks of blood running from them and down the inside of the toilet. Sometimes after the squeaking, now that I thought about it.
Sally said, “Because the blood washes away the baby.”
I was struck with the image of a hundred bloody, tiny babies floating around in the toilet bowl. Then I was wondering if the babymaker was so big that it hurt the muff pie and that’s what made women bleed. But I didn’t dare ask Sally about it. She already thought I was stupid. Better to learn all I could while she was still willing to share her secrets.
At least now I understood the reason she didn’t want to love me. She probably thought I was going to grow a babymaker and hurt her. She probably thought I was going to make her bleed.
And, even worse, I saw why Mother was afraid of Father. As if his boots weren’t bad enough, he had other weapons he could use on her.
“So you have to be in love to try to make babies?” I asked.
She laughed at me, peeling my skin as if I were an apple, then cutting to the core. “Of course not. Babies are mistakes. Who wants to carry a baby around in their belly?”
I marveled at Sally, sitting there rich with exotic wisdom, her thin legs crossed in a pretzel of white hose, clutching Angel Baby, her coppery pigtails bobbing with delight as she ridiculed me. She was beautiful.
“But you have to be married to have babies, don’t you? Or to make the bedsprings squeak?” I asked.
More laughter. “You silly boy. Remember that day your father called in sick to work, and your mother went downtown to do the shopping? She asked my mom if she wanted to come along, but my mom said she had housework to do. I didn’t see you around anywhere.”
Of course not. I wasn’t going to stay in the apartment all day with Father, though he was too sick to put his boots on. I came to the nest with a couple of comic books. When it came down to Batman or a possible beating, even a dumbbell like me made the smart choice.
“Well, your mother was gone all morning, and your father came over to our place. He gave me a whole dollar to go buy some candy. Then I knew something was up. Has he ever given you a dollar?”
“Are you kidding?”
“So I snuck around the back of the apartment, outside my mom’s bedroom, and I heard the bedsprings squeaking. And my daddy was at work down at the plant, so I know it wasn’t him.”
I shuddered at the thought of Father squeezing his big babymaker inside Sally’s scrawny mother. It must have hurt her a lot.
“How come your mother let him hurt her? She didn’t have to let him, since they weren’t married,” I said. Or maybe she hadn’t let him. Father had ways of getting what he wanted.
Sally sliced me again with the knife edge of her laughter. “It doesn’t hurt, stupid. It feels good. That’s what love’s about. It doesn’t have anything to do with being married. It’s about sharing secrets and holding hands and kissing and then playing babymaking.”
My hand went to the spot on my cheek Sally had kissed the night before. I tingled with the memory. A leaf fell from somewhere above,
from one of the big straight hickory trees that bordered the junkyard. It feathered through the hole in the roof, landing on the back of Sally’s neck. She reached up, thinking it was a bug, and batted it away.
While she was leaning back, I glanced between her crossed legs at the shadow under her dress.
“How come you kissed me last night?” I asked.
“Because I loved you.”
“Like boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“Yes. Real love, like grown-ups.”
“But now you don’t love me?”
“Not anymore. I just wanted to see if I could get you to love me. I did it all the time back in Pittsburgh. I had a different boyfriend every week.”
How could somebody love so many people so fast?
“Did you kiss them all?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to know the answer. I wanted my kiss to be special.
“Of course. That’s why all the boys wanted to love me.”
“Did you...do anything else?” I tried to picture her naked, in bed with a boy, making the bedsprings squeak. I could only picture her with a big patch of soapy black hair between her legs.
Her voice dropped to a sneaky whisper. “I Frenched them.”
“Frenched?” I was picturing Napoleon, whom I had read about, trying to put his babymaker into Sally, his big pointy hat falling down over his face.
“It’s a kind of kiss. Come here and I’ll show you.”
I slid over beside her, my heart beating faster than squeaking bedsprings. I closed my eyes. I felt her warm breath inches from my face.
“Wait,” I said, opening my eyes. Her eyes were closed and her dark eyelashes twitched like dying butterflies. Her lips were curled up like Angel Baby’s and were shining with saliva.
“What is it?” she asked impatiently.
“If you don’t love me anymore, why do you want to French me?”
“Because it’s fun. It feels like something I’m not supposed to do. And it makes me tingle. And that’s what grown-up love is all about.”
“What if I don’t want to be Frenched?” Now I was afraid of kissing her. I had already braced myself for the horrifying thought of loving Sally, like boyfriend and girlfriend, and I had run through a hundred dead-end hallways of the Bone House to get to the one thing I knew. That it felt good to be loved, even if it was scary. And now she was taking it back.
“You crossed your heart, remember?” Her voice was high and squeaky as bedsprings, she was so angry. “So you have to love me or hope to die.”
“But you just said kissing didn’t have anything to do with love.”
“You’re getting kissing mixed up with babymaking. And if you don’t kiss me, I’m going to tell your parents about this place.”
She nodded at the doghouse walls, her pigtails bobbing. The sun had sunk lower in the sky, the orange sunset lighting up the honeysuckle blossoms. The flowers glowed like Christmas lights on the vines that crawled down from the roof. Their sweet smell hung thick in the air. The world was candy.
I wondered if she was cruel enough to tell on me, and I decided she was. I thought of my father, bringing his boots down on the flimsy rotten walls until the outside world poured in like rain. I thought of my mother, her face lined with worry because her son was hiding out with a girl and probably doing bad things that made Jesus sad. But mostly, I wanted to feel that tingle again.
“Okay,” I said, and then her lips were on mine, her tongue sliding into my mouth like a fat earthworm. I put my tongue up to stop hers, and it tangled briefly in the steel wires of her braces, and I imagined us locked together as the sun went down and then our parents finding us like that. I frantically worked my tongue free and she pressed her palms against my chest, pushing me onto my back.
She straddled me, on her knees with one leg on each side of me like a ten-gallon cowboy riding bronco on a half-pint pony in a clown’s rodeo. I quit struggling, letting my tongue lie still as she explored my teeth. Her dress rode up to her waist, and she was rubbing her white-stockinged thighs against me in a familiar rhythm.
The rhythm of bedsprings.
I was helpless against the attack. My stomach clenched like one of Father’s fists, but inside the tightness erupted a small hot fire. My mouth tickled where her slick tongue probed like a snail poking out of its shell. She was moaning like the garage man had when he had leaned on me. Love, or kissing, or babymaking, or whatever this was, was like ejecting from a rocket ship.
I felt a tingling down in my pee-pee and I was afraid it was about to grow into a big red babymaker.
I tried to push Sally away, because she was putting her muff pie down near my pee-pee that was trying to be a babymaker. My chest was tight and vomit tickled the back of my throat. I didn’t want to have a babymaker and I didn’t want it to make Sally bleed. I didn’t want to have to love her anymore.
But she wasn’t letting me up. Her eyes were closed and she rocked back and forth, just like those old people did on the porch down the street, except they sat in chairs and she was sitting on my belly. And her tongue flickered as if trying to find butterscotch candy down my throat.
And the more I thought about my pee-pee and trying to make it not turn into a babymaker, the more it tingled. Sally was rubbing over and over and over and I felt something was about to happen, something as mysterious as the early stars that I could see through the hole in the roof. Something as dangerous as the boots. Something as weird as the junkyard incident. Something I’d remember the rest of my life.
Something...something...
“Richard!” my mother called, from somewhere just a few yards outside the nest.
CHAPTER SIX
Sally froze, locked above me like a TV wrestler waiting for the referee to count to three. I was lying on my back looking up at her, afraid to breathe. My pee-pee didn’t feel like it wanted to be a babymaker anymore. It felt like it wanted to crawl into a cold dark refrigerator and wait for halftime of a football game.
Mother called my name again.
I strained my ears, listening for her footsteps and the swish of weeds as she discovered the nest and looked inside. The blanket of night had almost completely covered the sky, giving me a small hope of not being found.
“Richard, I know you’re out here. It’s way past dinnertime, honey.”
Sally leaned her mouth to my ear and one of her pigtails tickled my nose. “I thought this place was a secret,” she hissed.
“Sssh,” I said, but I knew it wouldn’t be our voices that gave us away. It would be the pounding heart, spilling out and carrying like the beat of voodoo drums across a black jungle. Or maybe the scarring screech of a jet plane crash landing. The fifty-megaton explosion between my legs. Something like that.
Mother shouted my name again, this time farther away.
Sally relaxed over me as if her bones had failed, her body sagging onto mine like a water balloon. Our pulses raced each other, working faster than bedsprings in the dead of night. I had found yet another way that love could be scary.
Sally rolled off me and smoothed her dress. She picked up Angel Baby and all I could see of their faces was the outline, twin shadows against a darker background. The feeble moon was trying to rise, but it must have been as tired and drained as we were.
“I tore the knee of my stocking,” she said, her voice as cold and faraway as the dull stars or dead fish on a beach or a mole in a winter cornfield.
“Sally...” I searched the night for words. I still love you? Want to know a secret? Will you climb on me again?
“Tell your mother you tripped over a tree root and fell,” I finished.
Her soft sobs filled the doghouse. Had I hurt her? I don’t think I had used my babymaker on her.
“Are you bleeding?” My tongue was as dry and thick as an old board.
She snorted, blowing bubbles of laughter out of her nose. “Richard, you’re such an idiot.”
She was stomping with words. They hurt worse than boots. And I wish, sitting here typing,
I could walk through the years and stomp back. After all, I’m the one who gets to tell how it really happened. But even now, this seems the best way to remember it. Yes, this will do.
“I’m going home now,” she said, and I could sense her pout even if I couldn’t see it clearly. Her voice dropped and her words slithered out like snakes. “This is a secret.”
I could still try to be brave. “I won’t tell anything.”
“Cross your heart and hope to die,” she said, and she was telling me, not asking.
But I wasn’t falling for that trick again. No more hoping to die, no matter what. She waited in the silent night that poured as smothering and heavy as maple syrup. Or blood from a savior’s palms. Or maybe just plain old smothering silence, the kind you hear in your head if you stop and really listen and everyone in the Bone House is asleep and not snoring.
“I never even loved you at all,” she said. “I was lying. I just wanted to make you kiss me. Like I did all those other boys.”
And I still had to love her, at least until I could figure out a way to uncross my heart. If love was going to be such a hot-and-cold ball of confusion, a strange mix of pain and pleasure, a tangle of limbs and tongues, then I didn’t want to love anyone again for a long time.
But suddenly I was beyond the reach of her sharp weapons of hate, weapons that stabbed places even the boots hadn’t touched. I was shrinking into the dark place in my head, hiding from this new kind of pain. She could not longer touch me, I was safe in a dark hall of the Bone House, looking through the eyes of my secret little friend, the secret that no external love would ever make me reveal.
“Wait,” you must be thinking, “how come you’re telling me this now?”
I’ll let you in on the secret, if not her, because I can tell you’re starting to trust me despite my warning. We’re in this together, so you might as well have all the facts. Besides, I think I’m starting to love you.
Sally crawled out of the doghouse toward the weed-choked hole in the fence, her knees making crackling sounds on the crusty ground. My little friend sat alone in the dark, alone but not alone, because I was there with him. We were bound together more tightly than any lover’s knot or hangman’s noose or those silly contortions newlyweds do over the wedding cake when they’re trying to toast their future divorce.
Scott Nicholson Library Vol 1 Page 66
