by Mel Bossa
Chas, of course, sneered whenever he saw Eileen and me together. But Chas sneered at anything I did. At my reading, at my idling about on the rubber raft unadventurously tied to a stake on the beach, at my looks, at my voice, at my attitudes—in short, everything about me.
Not that it kept him away from me. Just the opposite. I would be walking somewhere, and he would just pop out of some bushes and follow me, making critical comments and telling me all the “terrific” things he and the Muller boys had done or were planning to soon do, none of which involved me. Or I would be out on the little dinghy in the river, and Chas would dive into the water, swim out to me, lift himself dripping into the boat, and dare me to go with him to the Pritchard property, or he would find me fishing quietly and challenge me to a foot race, or he’d find me half asleep in my hammock and rouse me to go play stick ball with the Muller boys.
I never said yes, and he never seemed to mind that I didn’t. He always said that I was a jerk and would casually go off by himself, adding as a parting word, “Suit yourself.”
Yet, little as I let on, Chas’s words and taunts did have an effect on me. I was extra careful not to see Eileen two days running so I couldn’t be accused of liking girls’ company better than boys’. I did learn to swim across and back the little river, if only to prove to myself that I could. I looked at myself differently undressing at night, wondering if I would ever be as tan or muscular as Chas was, as grown-up looking. I even used to stop on Atwood Avenue, off Cheyne Road, just before the highway turnoff, and stand awhile, looking to make sure I wasn’t being watched, before taking a dozen or so steps down the wooded-over dirt road that Chas told me led to the Pritchard house, set back a hundred yards from the avenue and so overgrown that you couldn’t even make out the masonry on the retaining walls alongside the path.
When one day Chas came back with a cut over one eye from a fight with Rudy Muller—a fight he wouldn’t explain—he stopped going up to the mill and hung around Grandpa Lynch’s house, even more insistently in my way. He acted as if he hadn’t anything better to do than to intently and curiously stare at me, following me from place to place, doing whatever I did or even doing nothing at all. Already feeling suspicious and slightly eerie by the books I’d been reading that summer, I found myself more and more disturbed by Chas’s interest in me—so much so, at one point, that I decided I would rather go around with Grandpa.
It was easy enough to attach myself to Grandpa Lynch, and fun too, even though, old as he was, he seemed to take forever to do anything or go anywhere, and it was often a real chore to understand what he was saying, as he often spoke without his false teeth and usually so slowly, I’d forget what he’d just said and be unable to make sense out of single sentences, they took so long unfurling out of him. Still, he took me to places I’d never been: his favorite fishing spots upriver; into the next town, to Scituate, where he had many old-timer friends; for walks off the regular roads; up into the hills; to Indian burial grounds; and once even to Petaquamsquett Rock, where the Nansquett Indians had signed a treaty with some colonists, a treaty treacherously broken two years later when the settlers murdered the entire tribe one night by stealth. If I listened hard enough and could manage the required patience, I could learn everything from Grandpa Lynch, as he seemed to know everything there was to know—historical, biblical, medicinal, mechanical, scientific, or political. We soon became close companions, even though his actions were subject to whims of age so arbitrary, I never could understand them, and he would follow up days of hiking and talking to me with days when he held himself aloof from me, not even leaving his little study for dinner, untouchable, unreachable to me except for my nightly kiss.
All that—like almost everything else in my life—changed the night Uncle Al and Aunt Linda moved into Grandpa Lynch’s house, and Chas moved into my bedroom.
Chapter 4
“What do you do with Eileen?” Chas asked, half leaning out of his bed, just inches away from my head.
“Do? Nothing.”
“You must do something. You’re with her all day.”
“Nothing. We talk.”
It was a miserably hot night—and worse, it seemed, because the sun had beat down on the room all day, there was no comforting night breeze, and horseflies the size of Brazil nuts were buzzing thunderously on the screen windows, trying to get in.
“Talk? About what?”
“Nothing. Books. Stories. People.”
I would say anything to shut him up. I was exhausted and dying to get some sleep. His insistent whispering so close was worse than the heat, the flies, and the lack of a breeze.
“Do you kiss her?”
“No!” Disgusted. That ought to stop him.
“Did you ever kiss anyone? Not your mother or father or Grandpa either.”
“Sure,” I said, vaguely remembering a party some months before around the block from where we lived. Boys and girls had coupled off into a dark basement littered with large unused furniture. We had blankly and almost blindly kissed each other until we were breathless and panting.
“Who?” Chas asked. He was sitting on the edge of his bed now, his interest audibly intensified now instead of lessened.
“Some girl. No one important.”
“Did you feel her teats?”
I tried to remember. “Yeah.”
“What were they like?”
“I don’t know. Small. Soft.”
“Did she like it?”
“What? Kissing?”
“No! Touching her teats?”
“I guess.”
“Did you let her touch you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t.”
I turned over and moved closer to the wall. The wrong move. Instead of Chas going back to sleep, he came into my bed. I could sense him almost touching my back. He whispered closer now, his breath steamy against the back of my neck.
“Did you touch her?”
“I said I did.”
“No. Down there.” To illustrate, he put his hands around me, across my thighs right under where my underpants stopped.
“No.”
“I did,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” As bored as I could make it sound.
“Yeah! And more. I did more than just touch.” He hadn’t moved his hands and was now rubbing them gently back and forth. I felt more than heard him doing something behind me.
“How does this feel?” he asked. His voice sounded so grown-up that I half turned around to check that it was really only Chas there.
“Take this off. It’s too hot,” he said, doing it for me. “Only babies wear underwear. I don’t. Feel.”
I reached over, languidly brushing the hot skin of his stomach. He gripped my hand there.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“It feels good, doesn’t it?”
“It’s OK.”
“You ever do this before?”
“No.”
“And you never had anyone do it to you?” His voice had risen again, almost to normal.
“That’s what girls will do for you. I’ve had it done a lot. Now you do it to me too.”
“I can’t reach behind me,” I said, and he rolled over me until we were now facing each other. He still held on to me, while he arranged my hand in a loose fist and pushed himself into it. His other arm circled my waist and moved up and down my back, arms, stomach and legs. I began feeling hot and light-headed, cramped yet not uncomfortable.
“How does that feel?” he asked again in a whisper even more hoarse than before. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t feeling right and that he ought to stop it. All that came out of me was a small sigh.
He nuzzled into my neck then. In a second he was trying to kiss me. I wanted to push him off me, but I was feeling so oddly languorous and hot, I couldn’t bring myself to make him stop what he was doing.
“This is a French kiss,” he whispered into my ear.
This time he forced my mouth open and nearly pulled my breath out of me, pushing and rubbing faster and faster against me with his hands. “This is what you do with girls,” he said, and he was moving at such a rate, I thought there was no stopping him.
I was getting dizzy. Where his hands were, I was beginning to sweat and to even feel sore, but he was as maniacally energetic as I wasn’t, and I let him do what he was doing until I began feeling a new sensation, so much like burning needles all over my lower front that I began to gasp and found the energy to push him away for a second.
“Leave it!” he hissed.
“Stop. Let go!” I whispered back.
But he wouldn’t. And now the burning got so bad I began to whimper.
“Don’t. Stop.”
“Leave it! I’ll do it for you.”
I tried twisting away from him, but he still held on to me. Like burning needles all up and down my front, getting hotter, seeming to move in patterns all across my stomach and legs. Until I felt I couldn’t stand it anymore and whispered, “It hurts! It hurts!”
“Now!” he whispered angrily, pushing himself into my hand so hard, I had to hold the edge of the bed with the other hand to get some semblance of balance.
“Ah!” I began to cry as it welled up and out of me. “Chas! It hurts!”
I leaped off the bed, getting away from him by this surprise movement. It came welling up and over me again and again as I stood against the wall, feeling as if I were falling down a flight of stairs. “What did you do to me?”
But Chas lay back panting and writhing around on the bed, oblivious to me.
Finally it subsided, and I reached down and touched myself. Then I was really frightened. It was all wet.
“Blood,” I said half aloud and ran out of the bedroom and into the bathroom.
Seconds later Chas was standing there beside me.
“Look,” I said, feeling terrified. I’d never seen anything like it.
“What’s wrong?” he said angrily.
“Look! You broke it or something. What’s all this?”
“Hush up, stupid!” he said, then closed the bathroom door behind him. He looked down at me, laughing.
“You mean to say that never happened to you before?”
“No. I told you to stop. Look what happened.”
“Never?” he asked. “Never? Never?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he sneered, imitating me. “Come on. Let’s go back to the bedroom before someone comes to see what’s going on.”
“No, don’t,” I said. He’d put his arm around me again.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid.”
“Of what? It’s supposed to do that, dummy. Come on back to bed. I’ll show you.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Don’t be a baby. I won’t touch you. I’ll show you on myself. You want to grow up sometime, don’t you? You’ll have to know about this, you know.”
Patiently—because of my many hesitations—in that next hour or so, he showed me the entire repertoire of activities to be engaged in alone or with someone else. I saw the same thing happen to him that had happened to me, and so I wasn’t terrified anymore. After a while I could even begin to feel the pleasure of his touch on my body again. Then he showed me how to do it to him. Watching his face and hearing his moans made me feel that I had some power over Chas for the first time since I’d met him, and so gave an added edge of pleasure to that which I couldn’t really explain.
“You’ve still got a lot to learn,” Chas said some time later, after turning over on his back to go to sleep in his own bed. “A real lot. And I’m going to show it to you.”
I lay back too, unable to sleep, my mind a jumble of thoughts, my body feeling as though it belonged to someone else. My body felt so odd after so many different new sensations. I was in awe of it: its newly revealed areas of sensitivities, its completely unexpected capabilities. Even more awesome was the ease with which I had been able to produce similar previously unknown sensitivities in someone else’s body.
It was as though the bedroom walls had fallen down on either side of me—I was so exposed. I turned to Chas to tell him all this. But he was already asleep, his light hair curling wildly over his face, his body stretched on its side so pale that it looked like a freshly killed game cat I’d once seen slung across the fender of a hunter’s car.
I had to lean over him to make sure he was still alive. Then, when I was certain he was breathing, even lightly snoring, I got back into my own bed. Even with the terrific heat, I began to shiver so much that I had to pull on a blanket. I knew I would never be able to tell Chas what had happened to me, and that made me want to cry all the more: knowing I would never be able to express how my universe had changed.
Chapter 5
I was finally able to get to sleep—having to be awakened for breakfast, instead of being up a half hour before, as usual. Bleary-eyed, I noticed that nothing else besides myself had changed in the world. Not even—most surprisingly—Chas. He didn’t refer in any way to what had occurred between us and never gave me any real chance to talk about it, as he disappeared soon after breakfast and didn’t return home until dinner was already on the table. Nor, later on, when we were both in bed, did he say a word about it. He merely made sure the door was closed, then came to my bed with as much heat and intensity as the night before, leaving me shaking and shivering once more, longing for sleep and comfort.
Thus began a curious life for me, split between the daytime—a world of beaches and hikes, ice creams, the library, and fishing with Grandpa—and the night, a world of hot hands, sweating limbs, twisted sheets, desperate kisses and caresses, whispered obscenities, pretended and even some real affections, passions, and hurts. Only later on would I come to see this night world as the tissue of involuntary degeneracy it actually was. For the moment I was so caught up in it by the sudden release of unknown feelings within me, I could think of nothing but of mine and Chas’s pleasure, how to accomplish it, and how often.
Chas’s attitude toward our nights certainly determined how I took them: He was cautious, always closing the door to the hallway, always shushing me if he thought we were making too much noise. But he never hinted at the possibility (later, only later, how well understood!) that what we were doing was wrong. We were merely doing what other boys our age did; something parents didn’t know about, or if they did, didn’t want to know about from us. For all I knew then, it was perfectly natural even when most painful; innocent, even when I was feeling most clearly disgraced. As a topic, our nights were banned from daytime discussions; and, as they only led to more of the same when brought up at night, I had no point of reference, no value system to set them in.
I knew from Chas that he and the Muller boys had done the same. He even suggested that he and I go to their place one day and he’d show me. But he never did. As far as girls doing it also, which he strongly hinted at, it seemed at best unlikely to me, and given what little I knew of their different anatomies, almost irrelevant. Certainly I couldn’t see my sister or his or Eileen (not to mention Mother or Aunt Linda) engaging in any such activities. Eileen especially was so cool and fresh and calm all the time, I believed she could never become so sweaty and frenzied as we did nightly. No, this was clearly out of her range. Whereas the older women were so large, so ungainly, as to make most of our more common methods of mutual gratification impossible to perform.
So there we were, Chas and I, in my new universe, and I couldn’t help but feel he was only partly there. Certainly at night he was—alternately aggressive and tender, bursting with ideas and methods of drawing out or raising up our levels of pleasure to unthought of, unprepared for, all-encompassing tension and release.
In the daytime he was merely Chas, my cousin, with his previous abilities and still unexplained mysteries, with his casualness and taste for mischief that remained unchanged. He was only a boy, a ye
ar or two older than me, and in many ways more ignorant than me, despite his continued scorn and impatience for what he saw as my inferior abilities.
After these nights together had begun, Chas and I were together more during the day, even though this togetherness had little of the depth of connection we made at night. We would be wrestling on the lawn or engaged in acrobatics in the surf. But our physical contact in these daytime activities was merely that: contact, with none of the incredible power that hours later a single fingertip drawn across a sternum or rib cage would produce.
Nevertheless, we were seen as a pair, and this affected those around us. Mother—who’d paid very little attention to me so far this summer (luckily!)—now began criticizing my being away from the house so much and finding all sorts of chores for me to do to stay closer. Janet and Cathy no longer asked me to walk them to the stores on Twill Road after dinner, afraid, I suppose, that I would begin bullying them. Grandpa—who never seemed too much to care for Chas before—now made certain to ask him along on the few expeditions we took in the area. I even had the strange experience of a housemaid, five doors away from ours, rushing out at me into the middle of the street, trying to swat at me with her broom and loudly accusing me of tying her cat to a picket fence.
Most of all, Eileen changed. I began seeing less and less of her because I was seeing more of Chas, but she and I still managed a few hours two or three days a week for an ice cream, a walk to the library, and a talk. Occasions that became almost formal for me, as she grew more distant from me—except for one outburst on her part, when she declared Chas “a bad influence on me,” a phrase I was certain she had picked up from some grown-up and which led me to defend him at great length.
What made it worse was that I knew he wasn’t helping me. I allowed myself to go along with Chas in several dubious adventures. We had a rock fight with some boys our age on a farm adjoining the town and didn’t leave until one of the boys had been hit in the head and was bleeding. We’d gone up to the Indian’s treaty rock and smoked cigarettes Chas had bought in town until we were both dizzy. We took an unannounced and later punished hitchhike ride to Scituate, where we spent all day hanging around trying to make trouble with the local kids, until we’d spotted a Flash Gordon serial at the movies and snuck in, getting home late.
