It was summer, as I suppose it tended to be. I was living with my mother, who had taken a job as a secretary with the city’s minor league baseball team. She was a high school teacher by trade, so money was nonexistent during the summer months. For the rest of the year, she complained about how much she hated teenagers.
I had enrolled in community college after graduating high school, then dropped out after the first year to work. Now, a year after dropping out, I was on the verge of leaving home for a state school a couple of hours away. I had found a room with an attached porch in a house with three other transfers, and my father had reluctantly agreed to pay rent. He and my mother had been divorced for several years, and he had a lot of concerns about the two of us living high on the hog. “What kind of mansion are we talking about here?” he asked me, and I assured him it was really just an old, sagging house with an attached porch.
But I still had three weeks left of work at the mall, in a lingerie store called Angelina’s Whisper, a rip-off of Victoria’s Secret. All the same, if you worked at Angelina’s, the other mall employees seemed to think you were really something—that you had a lot of sex, that your underpants were always wet, that your skirt slid across your ass so smoothly because you were wearing something satiny underneath. Maybe this was true of my co-workers, Evelyn and Mina, but I wasn’t interested in lingerie. I tried it on once and it made me look like an idiot.
In particular, the guys at the pizza place across from Angelina’s seemed to pay a lot of attention to us. They flirted more with Evelyn and Mina, who were both married and knew what they were doing, but also with me sometimes, if the mood struck them. I wasn’t all that good at flirting. Renaldo, who owned the pizza place, told me I should smile more—that my smile was bella, and that boys no like no smile. So I would smile at him and he’d say, “Thatsa good!” which I didn’t get, since when I duplicated the smile at home in the mirror I thought I looked tense and miserable. One day I said, “Renaldo, isn’t it possible that a person who isn’t smiling could feel fine on the inside?” He shook his head, and seemed extremely disappointed in me.
Every day we went to the pizza shop for coffee, Coke, pizza, and salads. Evelyn and Mina flirted with Renaldo and his son Bert, while I went after the new part-time guy who didn’t look Italian at all. He had blond hair and icy green eyes that were spaced a little too far apart. He was well-built, and I pitied him the plastic food-handling gloves that cut off the circulation in his meaty hands. Whenever he waited on me, he removed them and handled my food personally, which I took to be a sign of intimacy. Though Evelyn and Mina agreed he was handsome, they ignored him out of respect for me, as I had set my sights on losing my virginity to him before heading off to school.
“I just saw your boyfriend,” Evelyn said one afternoon, returning from the pizza place with a cup of coffee. She was short and slim, though when she looked in the mirror, seemed only to see a big butt. “I told him you wanted him,” she added solemnly.
“You did not,” I said. We were standing behind a glass display case, on top of which sat the cash register and the pale blue tissue paper we used to wrap purchases.
She laughed. “Of course I didn’t.”
Part of me wished she had been serious. “So what do I do?” I said. “How do I get him to ask me out?”
She shrugged. “Just keep going over there, I guess.”
Mina, who had been straightening the racks, came over carrying a black teddy on a hanger. She was stout and had long brown hair she vowed never to cut. “What do you think?” she asked us, holding the teddy up in front of her.
“Cute,” Evelyn said, then turned her attention to a list of markdowns we planned to tackle that afternoon. Mina had recently lost favor with Evelyn after attending a party at Evelyn’s house and showing off how her husband could remove her bra through her shirt-sleeve. “I must’ve accidentally sent out the wrong invitations,” Evelyn had grumbled the next day. “You’re invited to an orgy!”
But Mina was oblivious. She took the teddy into the back room, where we hid things we didn’t want the customers to lay their hands on.
“Okay,” I said finally. “I’ll go over there and get a Coke.” I opened my purse and took out my wallet.
“Ask him his name!” Evelyn called after me as I made my way past the racks of teddies and bustiers, the tables stacked with jewel-toned underwear and velvet slippers.
Directly in front of me, as I entered the mall, was the shoe repairman. He was a tough-looking guy who had a crush on Evelyn, and to whom she brought all manner of pumps, whether or not they needed fixing. Her visits to him increased when she and her husband were fighting, though she denied any emotional attachment on her part. To the right of the shoe repair was the toy store. I had had a brief fling with one of the sales associates there, Doug, in July, but ultimately it had come to nothing. It seemed to Evelyn that he must be gay, and that this was why he had broken it off with me. She had a lot of faith in me, Evelyn did, so I said nothing about having called Doug incessantly once it was over, crying and howling even though he told me to leave him alone.
To the left, on the other side of the shoe repair, was the pizza place. It was an old mall, and so far no one had taken the time to establish a food court; there was just Renaldo’s Pizzeria and a sub shop farther down. As I approached the service counter, which faced onto the mall, I saw Green Eyes waiting on someone at a second counter inside the restaurant. I waited patiently for him, playing with the snap on my wallet. Green Eyes saw me but acted like he didn’t. This was just another aspect of our intimacy; he would wait on everyone else in line before me so that at last we could be alone.
Renaldo popped out of the kitchen for a moment and told me to smile, but I ignored him. He went back in and as the door swung open, I caught a glimpse of Bert, wearing a white paper hat and stretching out pizza dough with two fists. He winked at me and I winked back, which was probably not what Evelyn would’ve done, though Mina might have.
“Hey,” Green Eyes said, ripping off his food-service gloves. His fingers were blue and he kneaded invisible dough to get the blood flowing again. I watched him and thought that if we ever went on a date, I’d want him to dress exactly like this: khakis, a white T-shirt, and a white apron around his neck.
“Hi,” I said.
He turned his body sideways to the counter and leaned toward me on one elbow. We were very intimate now. He touched my wallet. “What can I get you?” he asked.
I said he could get me a Coke. He nodded, but made no move for the drink machine.
“You like working over there?” he asked me, glancing toward Angelina’s.
I shrugged. I had no idea how to act with men. From what I could gather you were supposed to be alternately rude and mocking. Never nice. “Yes,” I said, managing something closer to shell-shocked.
“Make you horny?” he asked.
I laughed. You were definitely supposed to laugh a lot. “No!” And protest loudly.
“Really?” he said. He seemed sincere.
I was at a loss. “It would make me horny if it was Victoria’s Secret,” I said finally.
He laughed. “Yeah, well. Either one works for me.”
“Could I get that Coke?” I said, suddenly hitting my stride.
He went and got me a Coke. I paid him and he tickled my palm with his fingers as he returned my change. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Gilda,” I said.
He nodded.
“What’s yours?”
“I’m Jonathan,” he said. Then he added, “I’m thinking of asking you out. I’ll let you know what I decide.”
As I had proven with Doug, I was not so easily thrown off the scent. “Just hurry up,” I told him, zipping my change purse shut. “I leave for college at the end of the month.”
At home that night, I told my mother about Jonathan. We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating cereal for dinner. “He’s after me,” I said casually. Never in my life had I discussed boys with her, probably because there had been so few to discuss.
My mother, who had had a bouncy Dorothy Hamill haircut since the 1976 Olympics, shrugged her shoulders. Her own boyfriend, Roscoe, was twenty years older than she was. She had met him through a single-parent group, and had selected him as her steady because he was the thinnest man there. Roscoe had several grown children who seemed to like my mother better than him, and he owned a sailboat, which had capsized earlier that summer. My mother, an avid swimmer, had had to save his life, though she seemed irritated about this. In her diary she confessed that he was impotent.
Now she pushed her cereal bowl aside, a few bloated Puffed Rice drifting aimlessly in the gray milk. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s nice to feel wanted.”
I nodded confidently. “Oh yeah.” I was eating Cap’n Crunch, which represented adulthood to me, as I had bought it with my own money. My mother didn’t believe in sugar cereals.
She lit a cigarette and exhaled up toward the globe light that hung from the ceiling. In a fit of courage, I grabbed the pack of Kools and lit one myself. My mother laughed dismissively. “You don’t smoke,” she said.
“Sure I do,” I said. “Watch.” I then demonstrated my inability to blow smoke rings, though clearly I could inhale without choking.
“I stand corrected,” my mother said at last. She herself blew a perfect smoke ring, then invited me to feel free to smoke in the house. “No use sneaking around,” she told me.
I felt we had solidified something in that moment—we had agreed that I was an adult with my cereal, my prospective boyfriend, and finally my vice. I don’t know if my mother knew I was still a virgin; frankly, I don’t think she gave it a second thought. In the sixties, she had started a fund for women to obtain safe abortions. She was liberal in that way; sugar cereals made a greater impression on her than sex. I was fortunate that she had passed some of this attitude on to me, though I had ultimately failed to become promiscuous. Instead I was halting and quiet, with a wit that only Evelyn really knew about. It was this highly ineffective combination of character traits—insecurity and sexual liberation—that had left me “intact,” as Mina called it, at the ripe old age of nineteen.
That night my mother, Roscoe, and I all went to see our hometown team play ball. My mother got free tickets for all the games, and they weren’t nosebleed seats either. Tonight we sat behind home plate, Roscoe on the aisle, since the medicine he took for his heart made him pee a lot. I caught a foul ball with my old softball glove and, at the end of the game, had the guy who hit it autograph it to Jonathan.
It was slow at Angelina’s the next day, so we all joked around with the baseball, stuffing it down our shirts and walking around like we were really something, even though we were lopsided. “Just keep your bra on,” Evelyn warned Mina as she removed the baseball from beneath her blouse, and I could tell all had been forgiven concerning the party.
I took the ball from Mina and passed it back and forth between my hands. “It’s warm,” I said.
Evelyn said, “Gross!” She didn’t like anything to escape from her person, or to hear about how it had escaped from somebody else’s: no sounds, no fluids, no smells, no temperatures. I think she wished she were invisible. Often I wanted to tell her she looked pretty, but I knew it would only make her mad.
“You gonna give Jonathan the ball?” Mina asked me. She winked.
I looked at Evelyn. “Do you think I should?”
She shrugged. “I can’t tell you what to do.”
“I’ll give it to him,” Mina offered. “I’ll point out the autograph and tell him it’s from you.”
“Excuse me!” Evelyn said. “She’s about to leave for college, not high school. She has to give it to him herself.”
“So you would give it to him,” I concluded, though it came out more like a question.
Mina thought it over and said, “You know what? Yes!”
I wasn’t talking to her and we all knew it, though no one said anything.
Finally Evelyn said, “It’s up to you.”
“But what would you do if you were me?” I pressed her.
“Give it to the shoe guy,” Mina said.
Evelyn ignored her. “What have you got to lose?” she said.
We all laughed then, three women in the business of sex.
I carried the baseball in my purse. At the pizza place, Jonathan had a line of customers three people deep. I waited a few minutes, then, when it seemed to be taking too long, made a move to leave. But Jonathan saw me and called out, “Wait! Gilda! It’ll only be a few more minutes.” The people in line turned around to look at me, and I smiled. When they were facing the counter again, Jonathan announced, “I’m thinking of asking her out. I’ve just about decided.” He winked at me then, and I mumbled—quite involuntarily—“Idiot.” The woman in front of me, who was carrying a bag from the half-price shoe store, heard this and told me, “Follow your instincts. My son goes to high school with him and I’m telling you, he runs with a fast crowd.”
Fast I needed. It was the high school part that surprised me. I thanked her for the advice nonetheless.
When it was my turn to order—when Jonathan had stripped off his plastic gloves and taken his sideways, leaning posture against the counter—I said, “So you’re in high school.”
He turned red.
“What grade?” I asked.
He straightened up and fetched me a drink from the machine. “I’ll be a junior this year,” he said.
“So, a sophomore,” I said, mulling it over.
“No,” he corrected me. “A junior.”
“Until school starts, you’re technically a sophomore.” I had just made that up, but he seemed to believe it.
“So?” he said, giving me change for my drink. He always undercharged me about twenty cents.
I shrugged. “It’s cute.”
He leaned in again, bringing his face close to mine. “Hey,” he said, very softly, as if neither of us was wearing clothes. “The thing is, I was lying to those people. I’ve already decided. I decided a long time ago. I want to take you out.”
I thought about the baseball in my purse. It seemed all wrong now.
“I want to take you out before you leave for college,” he persisted. Then he picked up my Coke, which had a clear straw sticking out of it, and took a sip. He handed it back to me and, when I wouldn’t take it, set it down on the counter. “If you can drink from this, you can sure as hell kiss me, right?”
“Get me another one,” I demanded. He was really bringing out the best in me.
“No,” he said, his breath oddly fruity.
We exchanged phone numbers then, and agreed he would pick me up at seven-thirty that night.
When Jonathan arrived at my house, I was waiting on the front steps in a black tubular skirt and an army surplus V-neck—the lowest-cut T-shirt I owned. Underneath I wore a bra from Angelina’s that Evelyn and Mina had insisted I buy in order to improve my décolletage, as Mina called it. As much as I had bucked against this purchase, I couldn’t keep from looking down and admiring its astounding effect. My hair, a nondescript brown, was apparently the envy of many of Angelina’s customers due to its curl. “Is that natural?” they’d ask me. When I nodded my head they’d say, “I hate you,” then quickly pat my hand to reassure me this wasn’t true. Otherwise, I didn’t seem to have anything anyone else wanted. Or if I did, they hadn’t mentioned it.
“I would’ve rung your doorbell,” Jonathan said once I had let myself into his car. I ignored him and made a sophisticated production of locating the seat belt in a Buick (my mother always bought foreign). The truth was, I’d never been picked up for a date before and wasn’t exactly sure of where to wait. Also, my mother was out having dinner with Roscoe, and I worried that without her as chaperone, I’d begin the date backward and lose my virginity in the first five minutes. Technically, I felt there was nothing wrong with this. But there was something of the john in me that night. I wanted to pretend for at least a little while that I didn’t know how the evening was going to turn out. “It’s okay,” I said finally, clicking my buckle in place. “The house is a mess.”
I watched Jonathan as he backed out of my gravel driveway, disappointed in his choice of ensemble: a sporty polo shirt and pleated, pressed trousers. At last I could see the high-schooler in him, when it was really the greasy mall worker I wanted. But there was some comfort to be taken from the glare he shot me when I laughed at the orange fuzzy dice hanging from his rearview mirror. He popped the song “Feel Like Makin’ Love” into his cassette deck, and that wasn’t a joke either. Jonathan was as serious tonight as he had ever been at the pizza place. I suspected he really did feel like making love.
“So,” I said, raising my voice above Bad Company, “you’re still in high school?”
“Could you stop bringing that up?” Jonathan asked me.
“Sorry,” I said. It was just that I didn’t have anything else on him, and I really felt I needed the upper hand.
We were passing through the suburbs now, heading for the city, where any self-respecting date would take place. Silently I cursed all the chain restaurants and prefab banks, though I had not known until that particular moment that I even resented them.
“My parents aren’t home this weekend,” Jonathan offered.
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
He drove like someone who had just gotten his driver’s license and was in no hurry to lose it, keeping his hands strictly at ten and two on the wheel and glancing my way only when he hit a stoplight. His old Skylark was slightly jacked up in the back, and I wondered when he would loosen up and start driving it accordingly. At the same time, he clearly wasn’t afraid of the road. It hit me then that we drove somewhat similarly, and might’ve shared the same driver’s ed teacher in school. I opened my mouth to ask him about this, then remembered my promise to keep quiet on the subject.
“What?” Jonathan asked me.
“Nothing,” I said, the beginning of my question still hanging in the air.
He shrugged. “Must’ve been something.”
“It was,” I confirmed.
He laughed. “So what do you want to do tonight? Where do you want to go?”
“We’ll see the new James Bond movie.” Suddenly I had all the confidence of a drunk, except I was sober.
He nodded. Then without looking at me he said, “You look really nice tonight. Even sexier than at work.”
“Thanks,” I said. “To be honest, I actually prefer your work clothes on you.”
He couldn’t believe this. He pulled into an empty bank parking lot, looked down at himself, and said, “For real?”
“Let’s go back to your house so you can change,” I suggested, suddenly thrilled at the prospect of this.
“You’re kidding or you’re serious?” he asked me.
“Serious,” I said. “How far is it?”
He smiled and turned the car around. “Not that far.” He was excited, too, I could tell.
Jonathan lived in a development of two-story ranch houses that I imagined were all pastel-colored in daylight. At night they only looked to be varying shades of white. “I’ll wait here,” I said, when he pulled up in front of his place. Again I feared losing control of myself while alone with him in a space larger than the front seat of his car.
“Come in and watch me change,” he said, cutting the engine and lowering his voice.
“Nah,” I said.
He didn’t move. He was staring at me, and this was making me a little bit shy. I kept my eyes glued to the street in front of me, Persimmon Place. “You’re really—” he began, but he didn’t finish. He started over again and said, “I’m feeling really lucky to be here with you.”
“Why?” I asked. “I thought you had to think so hard about asking me out.”
Jonathan laughed. “That was Renaldo’s idea,” he said. “Renaldo said he could tell you wanted me, and to take things nice and slow.”
“Meanwhile, I leave for college at the end of the month,” I reminded him.
He struck his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Fucking Renaldo!” he said. Then he said, “Be right back.”
While he was gone I decided I loved him. I envisioned the two of us on my attached back porch at college, where I might even think about putting my bed. Me with a boyfriend from home! He would come and my roommates would tease me about robbing the cradle, though secretly they would covet him. Jonathan might give them the once-over, but because they would all have straight hair and bras that could not perform miracles, he would never succumb. And the more Jonathan saw of the world, the more his focus upon me would narrow, until finally, in an odd twist of fate, I would suddenly become traditional and marry the first man I had slept with.
He emerged from the house moments later in a snug white T-shirt, frayed khakis, and a pair of no-frills basketball shoes. When he got in the car, I mussed his blond hair until he was the picture of an employee.
“You want a slice of pizza?” he asked me.
We laughed as he started the car, and I rewound the tape to the beginning.
We got to the movie theater during previews. It was hard to see in the dark, but we managed with Jonathan leading the way. The seats were the tall kind, like in an airplane, and we sat in them without touching for several minutes. The movie opened with men jumping out of planes, then chasing each other through the air. Teeth were gritted against G forces; parachutes were engaged in the nick of time. At the sight of the first attractive woman with whom Bond would surely make love, I leaned over and kissed Jonathan full on the mouth.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.
We kissed again. I touched his thigh through his khakis, and imagined the intramural sports he must have played to get the muscles feeling that way. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered again, and suddenly I liked that he was in high school, so appreciative, so grateful for the feverish pace of my seduction. I imagined he thought this was the real world talking to him now, and that surely he would be the one to learn new tricks tonight, and not the other way around.
We stopped kissing and tried to return to the movie, but it was impractical. I had missed several scenes and felt disoriented. “Who’s that?” I asked Jonathan when a new character appeared on-screen, and he put his tongue in my mouth for an answer. “Should we go?” I whispered in his ear.
“Maybe we’d better,” he said.
I was all over him in the car on the way home. I confessed I was a virgin and he laughed and called me a liar. “Liar!” he said again, having a terrible time keeping his hands on the wheel. He wanted at least one down my shirt or under my skirt at all times, and I eventually pulled away, worried for the trips to my college he wouldn’t be able to make without a car or his driver’s license. I left him alone like that, shirt un-tucked, pants unbelted and unzipped, erection peeking out from beneath the waistband of his shorts, reaching impressively toward me in the passenger seat.
But Jonathan had abandoned all safety. “Come back!” he yelled frantically. “Get the hell back over here!”
I was all over him.
We went back to his house, where he said we could drink from his parents’ liquor cabinet and roll around on their water bed. I might’ve felt more comfortable at my house, but there was always the chance my mother and Roscoe had ended up there. They slept together even though he was impotent, and my assumption was that he still did things for her. I thought briefly about how my mother had not wanted me to sneak around, but as liberal as she was, that probably just applied to smoking cigarettes.
Jonathan’s house was sort of typical, and he seemed embarrassed about this, eyeing me nervously as I scanned the family portraits lining the living room wall. He stood behind a small bar in the corner of the room, cracking ice trays and fumbling the cubes into highballs. “Look at you,” I said, marveling over a group shot that included a longer-haired, bespectacled Jonathan, two sedate-looking parents, and a couple of little boys. I couldn’t imagine my mother hanging such things on our walls. Her idea was to rent original art from the library for six months at a time.
“No,” Jonathan said. “Don’t look at those.”
“What else am I supposed to look at?” I asked him. There they all were, lined up in front of me.
“Over there,” he said, pointing to the brick mantel. “Look at that.”
I followed his finger, which led to a bronze trophy of a young man dressed in a football uniform. “Wow,” I said, noting his name engraved at the bottom.
“It’s stupid,” he admitted.
I shrugged and moved on to another family portrait. The older ones had been taken in front of autumn-scapes and fake bookcases, while the newer ones were backed with the same cloudy blue as a school picture. It seemed the portraits were arranged chronologically, so that the more I moved to the right, the better-looking Jonathan got. He resembled his mother more than his father, though unlike Jonathan, her features did not add up to beauty. It struck me then that it was this that embarrassed him.
“Don’t look at those,” he told me again. He was opening and closing cupboards, clinking bottles, stirring drinks with his index finger.
I sighed and turned my attention to the various bouquets of dried flowers dotting the room, the homespun knickknacks his mother had either made or picked out. And while it seemed clear that I would never meet this woman—Jonathan would see to that—I still believed her son and I could get married.
“Here,” Jonathan said, coming up behind me.
I took the drink from him and we stood in the middle of the room, guzzling gin and tonics.
“Too strong?” he asked me.
“God no.”
“That’s right,” he said, taking my experience into account. “You’re nineteen? Twenty?”
I nodded at both. I would turn twenty my first week at college. “I’m a virgin,” I reminded him.
He laughed and some of his drink sprayed out his nose. “Stop saying that!” he said.
We finished our drinks and took off all our clothes, leaving them in a heap in the middle of the living room. Jonathan looked me up and down and since I was drunk I said, “I can’t help it if I’m beautiful.”
“Shit!” he said. “Wait until I compliment you first.”
“Why should I?” I said.
He tried to find an answer but couldn’t, and this got us both laughing. When he stopped he commanded me: “Go find my room.”
I turned and headed for the stairs, and he followed me at a short distance, saying, “Look at that ass! That ass!”
“Where the hell is it?” I asked when I got to the second floor.
“Left,” he told me. “Now turn around and walk backwards.” I did and he said, “Look at those tits!”
I got dizzy then and fell into a wall, and Jonathan ran to catch me, easing me onto the carpet, which was where I wanted to be. A plaque proclaiming HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS fell on the floor beside me, and Jonathan snatched it up and said, “Don’t look at that.”
“Where’s your bedroom?” I asked him.
“Right here,” he said, tossing the plaque in a linen closet. I had fallen down in front of his doorway.
I nodded and started to get up, but he said, “No, no, you’ll hurt yourself.” Instead he gripped both my ankles, swiveled me, and dragged me into his room on my back.
Now we were really laughing, and I worried slightly that this was no kind of first memory for me. We should stop kidding around, I thought, and take this thing more seriously. “Jonathan,” I said, hiking myself up on my elbows. He had his back to me and was fishing around for something in his dresser drawer. The walls were painted some dark color, and pennants hung above his bed. A pompom dangled from one of his bedposts, though it did not occur to me to attach it to a cheerleader. “Jonathan,” I said again.
He turned around and let loose an accordion of condoms, like a proud father with a wallet full of pictures. “I want to do it in every room!” he announced.
“Pick one room!” I demanded. “I’m a virgin.”
He covered his ears and sang, “La la la la la la la I can’t hear you!”
“One room!” I told him, when he could hear again.
He ignored me and slipped a condom on. I made a move for his bed but he said, “Stay down, stay down,” lowering himself onto me.
“Ow,” I said, though nothing had happened yet. I was preparing myself.
“Are you ready?” he asked me, then he kissed me between my legs for a few minutes. “You’re ready, you’re ready,” he whispered when he came back up.
“Ow,” I said again.
“Could you stop saying that?” he asked, pushing himself into me, trying to find the right spot.
“Go easy,” I said.
“Stop laughing,” he told me.
“Did it pop yet? Did you pop it?”
“You can’t say things like that,” he warned me. “You have to say something sexy, like my dick is big and hard.”
I told him his dick was big and hard and it made him laugh. “Okay, don’t say that,” he said. He flopped onto the carpet beside me and gave up trying to make love for a minute.
“I told you,” I said.
“You’re just tense,” he countered, getting his second wind. “Okay, stand up.” He got up first and held out a hand for me. “You need the water bed. That’ll relax you.”
“Leopard print?” I said as we walked into his parents’ bedroom. I waited for him to tell me not to look at it, but he didn’t. It would’ve been kind of impossible since nearly everything was leopard: the bedspread, the pillows, the rug.
“Lie down in the middle of the bed,” he told me, and I did, creating a small wake.
“This bed makes me feel fat,” I complained.
“Spread your legs a little,” he said, still standing in the doorway.
“No,” I told him.
“Squeeze your tits together.”
That I did.
“Wait here,” he said.
I heard him run down the stairs and come back up again. He was holding a bottle of gin in his hand, and we both drank from it straight.
He got on the bed with me and went down between my legs again. The water bed sloshed with the small movements we made together. It was nice, what Jonathan was doing, and we stopped laughing after a while. I thought he seemed very mature, and full of gifts.
When I was ready again, Jonathan put a new condom on and pushed himself into me, regardless of any resistance. “Oh!” I said.
“Keep going?” he asked me breathlessly. “Can I keep going?”
“Yes,” I said. This was the part that really hurt, the keeping-going, but I felt a certain pride in being able to endure it, in knowing that this would only make things easier for me in the future.
Afterward we went in the bathroom together to clean up. “What’s that?” I asked Jonathan, pointing to a pastel shift hanging over one of the towel racks.
“That’s my mother’s nightie,” he said, grabbing it and wadding it up. “Don’t look at my mother’s nightie.” He opened the cupboard under the sink and tossed it inside.
“Why not?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “It’s a big nightie.”
“So?”
He looked down at himself then and saw the blood on his condom. He touched it.
“See!” I told him, delighted at last to have proof.
“Jesus,” he said. He wasn’t laughing now.
“You were my first!” I insisted.
“Oh man,” he said, and before our eyes, he lost what was left of his erection.
Jonathan was afraid I would leak blood on his parents’ sheets, so he made me sleep on a towel. In the morning, he wadded it up and threw it in the trash, even though it wasn’t stained. We got dressed and he drove me back to my house. My mother’s car was in the driveway and I asked Jonathan to come in and say hello, but he said he didn’t think so. He said he had to go home and get ready for work.
“Me too,” I said.
“You work today?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Then I guess I’ll see you there.”
“I guess so.”
We kissed and for a second I was sorry it wasn’t last night and we weren’t about to do the whole thing over again.
Inside, I was beside myself. My mother wouldn’t ask me where I had been the night before—which I saw as a distinct power play on her part—and I was too shy to tell her, so I smoked three cigarettes instead. I got ready for work several hours too early, then called Mina and Evelyn to tell them it was mission accomplished, and that they wouldn’t recognize me the next time they saw me.
“You’re right,” Evelyn said when I came into work that afternoon. “You walk like you’re trying to squeeze a cash register between your thighs.”
She and Mina laughed at me, and as much as I knew Evelyn was exaggerating, I was glad she didn’t tease me by saying I didn’t look different at all. They both wanted a blow-by-blow account of what had happened—which I gave them—and we laughed all day at the words blow-by-blow, cash register, and Italian sausage. In between customers, we picked out lingerie for me to take to college and set it aside in the back room. When Mina went on break, Evelyn told me privately that she was proud of me for going after what I wanted. “Look at you,” she said, and she poked me with a satin hanger, which was her way of being affectionate.
When Mina came back from break I asked her if she’d seen Jonathan at the pizza place, but she said no. I was antsy to talk to more people about my experience, so I wandered into the toy store next door, where Doug, who had dumped me earlier that summer, was working. “Hi,” I said, sauntering up to his checkout line. The place was pretty quiet. The only time people ever got serious about toys and lingerie was at Christmas.
Doug shoved his hands in the red smock he had to wear, which was probably supposed to get people in the holiday mood, no matter the time of year. It definitely worked on me, but that was only because Doug bore a striking resemblance to an overgrown elf. “Hello, Gilda,” he said warily.
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not after you.”
“Do you need a toy?” he asked me, irritated.
“Oh no,” I said. “I just came to let you know you lost your chance.”
I ran back to Angelina’s then and reported this conversation to Evelyn, who thought it was the best thing she’d ever heard—long overdue.
Next I went to the pizza place to see about Jonathan, but he still wasn’t there. Renaldo told me he wasn’t coming in today. “He’s sick.”
“No he’s not,” I said.
Renaldo shrugged.
“I know he’s not sick,” I said.
Renaldo didn’t ask me how I knew.
“I know because I saw him last night and this morning.”
“Oh yeah?” Renaldo said. He looked over at his son Bert, who was ladling red sauce onto a round of pizza dough, and they winked at each other. When Renaldo turned back to me, he said, “So how come you no smiling?”
I smiled for him.
“Thatsa good,” he said, but it didn’t sound the way it used to.
Evelyn dropped me off after work and warned me not to call Jonathan. I told her I wouldn’t but it was the first thing I did when I got in the house. “Are you sick?” I asked him, sitting at the little phone desk in one corner of the kitchen so my mother could hear. She was paying her bills at the kitchen table.
“Not really,” he said. His voice was cold.
“Well, should I come over?”
My mother closed her checkbook, capped her pen, then walked out of the room. When I heard the front door open I covered the receiver and called after her, “Wait, where are you going?”
“It’s helmet night at the stadium,” she yelled back. “While supplies last!”
“Wait!” I commanded my mother again, and she did, with the door still open. I quickly asked Jonathan, “You want to go to a baseball game? My mom works for the Chiefs, so it’s free.”
“No thanks,” he said.
“That’s okay, Mom!” I yelled, covering the receiver again. “We’ll pass!” The door shut and she was gone. “So should I come over?” I said, returning to Jonathan.
“It’s up to you,” he told me.
“It’s not that far,” I said. “I’ll just walk.”
We made love again on his parents’ water bed, and this time it didn’t hurt as much. I still didn’t have an orgasm, but I figured that would come in time. Afterward Jonathan said I should probably go, and that he would drive me home since it was dark. We got dressed and went downstairs, where earlier I had kicked off my sneakers. Suddenly I was tired of pretending nothing was wrong, and I started to cry. “What happened?” I asked him. “Why don’t you like me anymore?”
He shrugged. I was sitting on his mother’s flowery couch and he was standing in front of me, jingling his car keys. I could tell he thought it was taking me forever to lace up my shoes. “Huh?” I said, prodding him.
“You handled this whole thing all wrong,” he said finally.
“Why?”
“Because we’re not in love. You don’t give it away if you’re not in love.”
“I love you,” I said, trying to rectify things.
“Tie your shoes, will you?”
I bent over and started tying them.
He said, “You’re desperate, that’s your problem.”
“How do you know?” I asked him.
“I have eyes.”
This got me started on a new cycle of crying, blurring my vision so that I tied my shoelaces in knots. “I’m vulnerable,” I told him. “I’m making myself vulnerable to you because I love you.”
“Stop saying that,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, giving up on my sneakers. “I’ll just think it.” I stood up and faced him. He told me to hold on for a second, then went into a small bathroom off the foyer and returned with a pink quilted tissue dispenser. “Here,” he said, holding the box out to me. “You’re ruining your makeup.”
“It’s already ruined,” I complained, taking a tissue anyway.
“No it’s not,” he said. He took a tissue, too, and worked it carefully around my eyes, which only made me cry harder. I knew this was it, that the next time I saw him he would be colder than ever and there would be nothing I could do about it.
“See,” I said, as he continued to dot my face gingerly. “You still like me.”
“I never said I didn’t like you,” he said.
At work a few days later I came clean with Evelyn. About everything. “I told you not to call him,” she scolded me, but she laid off when I started crying. She did make me promise not to beg Jonathan as I had done with Doug, and I meant it when I said I wouldn’t. For a second she looked as if she were going to cry, too. I thought about hugging her, but I was saving that for the day I left. Finally she looked up at the ceiling and asked God, “Where did I go wrong?” We both laughed at the idea that she could be my mother, and before things got too sentimental, she excused herself to get her heel fixed.
I went in the back room and gathered up the lingerie the three of us had picked out for me. As I put it all back on the racks, Mina said, “No! Not that one!” about a camisole she was particularly fond of. I thought about how much I liked her and Evelyn then, and how much I would miss them once I was gone.
Evelyn had still not returned when I was finished with the lingerie, so I fished Jonathan’s baseball out of my purse and asked Mina if she would give it to him after I left. We were standing behind the cash register like we always did, ignoring all the customers.
“No problem,” Mina said, and I appreciated the way she quickly put the ball into her own purse.
“Do you think I’m doing the wrong thing?” I asked her a few minutes later.
She laughed and shook back her long brown hair, with all its strange layers and broken ends. “Of course not,” she said. “It has his name on it.”