The Americans, Baby

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I don’t mind smelling of you,’ she said, which wasn’t true because she used powder to cover any smell.

  He came from the shower dripping and pulled her towards the bathroom. Her knees came together as she tried to pull away – squealing and laughing.

  ‘Into the shower,’ he ordered, laughing but dead serious.

  He dressed and went to his study to prepare his lessons for school. She could see him sitting at his desk dressed in his Cuban army shirt he’d sent away for.

  After she dressed she decided to stay and clean up his flat.

  He came out to the kitchen as she was washing up.

  Grinning, he said, ‘Making the place respectable?’

  She wondered what was wrong this time.

  ‘You’re so middle class,’ he said.

  ‘But you said I was working class,’ she said.

  ‘Really you’re just a peasant – with middle class aspirations.’

  She went on with what she was doing. Actually she liked being called middle class. But she wouldn’t tell him. Every time he accused her of being middle class he would think he was hurting her but she’d be secretly pleased.

  ‘Why do you have to make everything political?’ she said, resting, both hands in the hot washing up water.

  ‘Everything is political,’ he said quickly.

  ‘Yes, but can’t we just have a rest now and then?’

  He kissed her on the side of her face. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I guess I’m pushing your political education too hard. No more politics today.’

  ‘I just remembered that I made an appointment for you to see Geoff – he’s the doctor you met at the meeting – remember?’

  She listened to him say it, wondering about it, and then said, ‘Why?’

  ‘To get you on the Pill.’

  She felt like falling head forward into the sink. He’d been on about this before. Why did they need the Pill. She’d been going to bed with him for three months and hadn’t got pregnant. He pulled out.

  He came over to her and turned her around. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ she said.

  ‘Surely you don’t object to the Pill?’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she said, pushing away his hands, ‘stop trying to make me do things all the time.’

  ‘But for Christsakes this is only taking the Pill.’

  ‘I don’t like pills,’ she said stubbornly, ‘any sort of pills.’

  ‘But you don’t want to become pregnant,’ he said loudly. He was heading towards being angry.

  ‘I’m against pills,’ she said.

  ‘You can’t be “against pills”,’ he said.

  ‘I can be if I want to be.’

  ‘You can’t be,’ he screamed, ‘you can’t be “against pills”.’

  She’d had enough. She left the dishes in the suds and pushed past him.

  He followed her to the bedroom. ‘I just want to know,’ he said, with his bitingly quiet voice, ‘what special information you have about the Pill that medical science doesn’t.’

  She felt trapped in the conversation. He kept putting words in front of her like road blocks. He often forced her to answer questions she didn’t want to answer or which were the wrong questions anyhow.

  ‘You only take pills if there is something wrong with you,’ she said, ‘and there is nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘Yes there is,’ he said, grabbing her again, ‘you’re likely to become pregnant, that’s what’s wrong.’

  He’s going to shake me again, she thought.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with that,’ she said. ‘That’s the way the body’s supposed to be.’

  He went over to the wall and leaned against his arm, facing the wall. He’s despairing, she thought. Good. She started putting her things in her bag.

  ‘You’re being illogical,’ he said without turning away from the wall. She could tell he was ‘controlling himself’. He was worse when he was ‘controlling himself’.

  ‘I don’t like the idea of my insides being fooled about with,’ she said, a hairpin in her mouth. She brushed her hair, feeling fairly calm and very logical. But she knew she couldn’t win.

  ‘Don’t talk with hairpins in your mouth,’ he said irritably. She was surprised he could tell without looking.

  ‘The Pill has been thoroughly tested on Puerto Rican women for five years – thanks to capitalist drug companies and American foreign policy.’

  ‘It might be all right for the Puerto Ricans.’

  She finished her hair and added, ‘Has anyone ever taken them all their life?’ She felt smug. ‘How do they know if they’re safe until they do?’

  ‘If we had to test everything for a lifetime we’d never use anything.’ He flopped on to the bed. ‘How are we going to have a good sex life if you don’t take the Pill?’

  For once she seemed to be winning.

  ‘Didn’t people have good sex lives before the Pill?’

  He didn’t reply. She sat down next to him on the bed.

  ‘I suppose you could have a diaphragm fitted,’ he said tiredly.

  Oh my God, she thought, oh my God, what’s he going to have done to me now? She saw him and his friends holding her down on the bed and fitting something into her.

  ‘Don’t tell me you have objections to diaphragms too?’

  She felt tears coming. It was too much for her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, beginning to cry, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ She cried, burying her head in the pillow.

  ‘You don’t know?’ He sounded truly amazed. It made her uneasy, as she cried. She hadn’t meant to amaze him. She didn’t know what to expect when he was amazed. Sometimes he shook her. Some of the longest lectures she’d ever had came after she had amazed him. She thought she had better keep on with the crying.

  He reached over and put a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Didn’t your parents tell you anything? Haven’t you read anything?’

  She could just imagine her Old Man putting his shovel in the toolshed and sitting there in his blue singlet to tell her about ‘diaphragms’. Her mother would have had him on a charge. And as for her mother, she knew about ten words and ‘diaphragm’ wasn’t one of them. It nearly made her laugh but she kept on crying.

  ‘This is all so basic,’ he said. ‘I just assumed you knew. You weren’t a virgin when I met you.’

  He made it sound as if she’d been on the streets. ‘I’ve only been to bed with two other men,’ she lied, crying. She’d slept with five or six men if you counted Kim. She felt frightened then for herself. Sex seemed to be getting out of control. Perhaps she was a whore. And she’d never really worried about becoming pregnant. Perhaps she couldn’t have babies. She began to sniffle, because she mightn’t be able to have babies, because he was getting at her, because she felt she was becoming a whore, because she didn’t know anything.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he said softly. ‘Sex is nothing to be ashamed about or frightened of.’

  ‘You frighten me,’ she said, holding on to him. ‘And you make me feel ashamed.’

  ‘I don’t mean to,’ he said. Then he said, ‘You understand, don’t you? About becoming pregnant?’

  She nodded, but felt wildly that he would ask her to explain it. She didn’t really know the words. She guessed, though, that she knew.

  ‘The diaphragm is made of rubber … a rubber disc … a round rubber disc which fits inside you and stops the sperms from reaching the egg.’

  She shuddered. Rubber, disc, sperms and eggs. Gawd, was that what happened?

  ‘So you understand,’ he asked, turning her face towards him. She nodded and buried her face again in her arm.

  ‘The Pill, on the other hand, stops your periods and …’ he stopped, she didn’t look up. Then she sensed he didn’t really know how the Pill worked. It surprised her. But then she thought, good.

  ‘The Pill is more complicated … chemically,’ he said, clearing his throat.
r />   ‘You put the diaphragm in before fucking,’ he added.

  Not in me, you don’t. She tried to imagine herself putting anything ‘in’. She wanted only to be taken to bed and for it all to happen in the dark without her having to worry about it.

  ‘What did your parents use?’

  As if she’d know. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think they used French letters.’ She’d heard about French letters at school. A boy had shown her one on the end of a stick but she hadn’t known what was done with it.

  Someone knocked on the door. She was relieved.

  Drying her eyes, she made herself up. She tried to look as if she’d just arrived at the flat, hadn’t stayed overnight. She took as long as she could. She heard Kim talking to his friend Carl. What a drag. She closed her eyes for a second or two and then walked in.

  ‘Dell and I were just having a talk about contraception,’ Kim said. ‘It’s amazing – she knows nothing.’

  Mentally she stabbed him with a kitchen knife.

  ‘It’s a bit late,’ Carl laughed.

  She stabbed him too. He wore a Cuban army shirt like Kim’s. And long hair. She thought he really didn’t like women.

  They were both smoking long thin cigars.

  ‘A perfect example of sexual taboo,’ Kim told Carl, tapping his cigar ash into the fireplace.

  She said the word apparatchiki to herself. And then anti-bureaucratisation. They went on talking about the broad masses and progressivist education.

  She said, for no particular reason, the word apparatchiki aloud; they both looked at her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kim said. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  They went on. They asked her about sex life in Coolamon.

  Sex life in Coolamon.

  ‘No one in Coolamon worried about getting pregnant,’ she said, knowing that it wasn’t true. ‘Some girls got pregnant – they either got married or their mother took it or they had it put out for adoption. The nuns fixed it up.’

  ‘Hellish,’ said Carl.

  She remembered a time then for no particular reason. It wasn’t the first time. Behind the Memorial Hall at the Showground. They’d been at a dance there. Johnny wanted a ‘smoke’. Ho ho. She remembered the smell of beer on him. He’d tried to push her down in the long grass. She’d sort of guessed what he wanted. She’d almost done it. But she’d been worried about grass stains on her good dress. Her Gran called it ‘being given a green gown’. She’d said no. He’d gone a little way off, leaned against the fowl pens and pissed. She remembered listening to the hissing on the ground. He’d come back, doing up his fly, saying, ‘That’s better.’ By then she’d worked out that she could pull her dress right up and the stains would be on the inside. But she’d thought he’d got over it. He hadn’t, and had another go at pushing her down into the grass. This time she had gone down, pulling up her dress as she did. He hadn’t taken her pants off – just gone in around them. It was all over very quickly and then they went back to the dance. She’d wiped herself with lavatory paper. She’d been frightened about grass stains but there hadn’t been any.

  Perhaps she could go back to Coolamon and marry Harry, who had the Shell service station, or one of the Shepherd boys.

  She tried to listen to Kim. He was saying, ‘Stalin presents no problem to me now. Wasn’t it Brecht who said it was a bad society which needed heroes?’

  She swam away from them again.

  Then Carl was leaving.

  There was a silence after he left.

  Kim was looking at her. Oh no. She flushed. Something was wrong. ‘I’d better finish the washing up,’ she said hurriedly.

  ‘You weren’t listening.’

  More trouble.

  ‘I was.’

  ‘You didn’t listen,’ Kim said angrily. ‘We want to tape an interview with you for the paper.’

  ‘Oh, how nice,’ she said. Like hell.

  ‘A case history of sexual taboo.’

  Pooh.

  ‘Kim,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I want to go on seeing you.’ And she rushed into the bedroom to get her bag.

  He followed her. ‘You can’t avoid the issue.’

  ‘Go to hell.’

  So, coldly, he said. ‘All right, go back to the quagmire.’

  ‘Thank you, Kim,’ she said, trying for sarcasm, ‘I’ll send back Owen Muir in the post.’

  ‘Keep it.’

  She tried not to look at. him. He was heading for the study. She went around looking for her things. She hadn’t expected it all to happen just like that. She found herself hoping he’d come back in and coax her to stay or something. She fussed as long as she could. It looked as if he wasn’t so keen after all. She thought of going into the study and saying sorry, but didn’t. Whatthehell. She let herself out. She remembered the dishes in the sink and found herself almost going back to finish them. Crazy.

  She walked out into the street, in the early afternoon. She swung her bag.

  That was that. She hadn’t expected it to be like that.

  A car pulled alongside her before she’d gone far. Without looking, she sensed there were boys in it.

  ‘Want a lift, darling?’

  She kept on walking. The car drifted along beside her. She ignored them, half expecting Kim to come running down the street. She glanced into the car.

  ‘Come for a drive.’

  Three, all with black hair, but not foreign. One of them was rather beaut looking. She looked away.

  They said something else.

  She looked at them again. They were grinning.

  She kept walking. One had opened the door. She heard the car radio and it sounded good. She stopped, looked at them again, looked up the street to see if Kim was running after her, and then said, ‘Why not?’ She got in the back. The boy in the back shifted a few tools off the seat and dumped them on the floor.

  ‘There better not be grease on the seat,’ she said, looking at it and wiping her hand over it before sitting down.

  ‘You’ll be right,’ he said.

  She flopped back in the seat. They roared off.

  One said, ‘Beauty’.

  ‘Got a cigarette?’ she asked, for want of something to say.

  The boy in the back already had his hand up her dress. She opened her legs to him as she leaned forward to take a cigarette from the boy in front.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, as he lit it. The boy in the back already had his hand groping in under her pants.

  Jesus Said to Watch for 28 Signs

  Becker could explain why he continued to see Terri – lust. But lust alone couldn’t explain why he ended up with her in the lavatory at Coca-Cola. That had to do with environmental stress.

  He knew he was dying. He knew that being an ocean away from Atlanta and the sparkle, in an alien distribution zone, was killing him. He’d read of cases. People died from being isolated from their intimates and people lost control that way.

  Environmental isolation and stress put him in the lavatory with Terri that frosty Friday.

  In the lavatory, Terri went down on him, he ducking his head below the three-quarter cubicle door so that anyone coming into the men’s wouldn’t see him – one foot braced against the marble wall, trousers around his knees. He feared that they’d see Terri and his feet – to do that someone would have to lie on the floor. That wouldn’t have surprised him. To him anything could happen.

  She’d talked him into it.

  She’d made horny gestures and typed a hot note.

  He’d protested. God be his witness, he’d said, ‘No, Terri, please, Terri, no – leave me alone – not in the office, please. Discretion.’

  But it hadn’t been there. The words had been spoken but were nothing more than a platoon of trembling cadets. His sense of discretion, a vague memory trace.

  She’d gotten him to the lavatory by seduction, but that his will was shot to pieces was not lust but environmental stress.

  He grunted from the
stimulation of her mouth.

  She rested.

  ‘Jesus, don’t stop now – go on – Jesus, go on.’

  When the panting was all over Terri said, ‘Now are you glad you let yourself be seduced?’

  Life had him in its undertow.

  ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  In addition to the Southern Baptist Convention there are 29 other Baptist bodies in the US. They range from the tiny Independent Baptist Church of America, which has only 25 members, to the National Baptist Convention of the U.S.A. Inc. which has five point five million members and is the largest Negro church in the country. All told there are some 25 million Baptists in the U.S.

  And now, Becker thought groaningly, the Baptists of the Lavatory Inc.

  Back at his desk he looked at his crumpled suit and stains.

  Becker, you’re a-dying.

  Then Sam called for him.

  ‘Becker, a member of staff – you won’t believe this – no names no pack drill – has come to me and stated that he saw you in the gents with a girl – one of the relief typists.’ Sam tried to put the question humorously.

  Oh, Sam.

  ‘Sam, you must be joking.’

  ‘I’m trying, Becker, I’m trying.’

  Aw hell.

  ‘Aw hell, it’s God’s truth, Sam, it’s right – don’t ask me how.’ Becker raised both hands. ‘It happened I don’t know how – that’s the living truth.’

  Pain, weariness, despair, disappointment, doom and gloom, packing in around Sam like crushed ice. ‘Becker, I’ve been with Coca-Cola thirty-one years. I’ve been in this country nearly six. I have never …’

  Becker could list the twenty-eight steps which led him to his first trip and his first mixing with drugs of any kind – Old Crow bour bon excluded.

  The first had been during High School when he’d learned to play piano from a coupon course mailed from the back of a comic book.

  The second had been reading the poems of the Earl of Rochester at college.

  The third had been carrying the poems of the Earl of Rochester in his head, after college.

  The fourth had been a semester of Existentialism which led him to ponder destiny and life.

  The fifth had been Course 231, Social Psychology, which had given him a soft-edged business approach.