ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Well, there will be more of Cedric and a lot more of Marilyn to come, so she isn't gone yet.
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The Hidden Lives of Virgins
- Thread starter ChrisGibson
- Start date
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
HELLO, HOPE YOU'RE ALL HAVING A BRILLIANT EVENING
FOR ANYONE WHO HAD GROWN UP IN Jamnia, and known anything about Colonel Foster, to look on one’s class roster and find the name Foster was to hold your breath and call on the name of Jesus... or Allah or Krishna. Pick your deity of choice, please. The night before Cedric’s first class, he had annoyed Marilyn by spending the dark hours talking to the ceiling, imagining just how he would tell the Colonel’s son off. When he learned the boy was quarterback as well as youngest son of the infamous Colonel, it was all over. There would be no end to his conceit.
But the first thing anyone noticed about Kevin was his tendency toward un-conceit. He made a science of something that had not, hitherto, been a word. On the field there was no one who could throw a tighter spiral, catch a quicker pass, run more touchdowns. He was at the center of every conversation when the football team was gathered together. But he was always a quiet center. He was always nodding his head and grinning generously when told a joke. He didn’t often make them. When he did, it was in a mumble and he looked surprised if anyone actually laughed.
His teachers, Cedric included, were impressed by the simple fact that he liked to put his hand up and actually answer questions. That his answers were usually right was icing on the cake. He always grinned when he got the right answer or when someone said he’d made a good point. It was like he’d never done this before and he was at once pleased and ashamed.
Cedric believed that Kevin lived in his own head more than most kids. True enough, everyone possessed his own private universe, but usually it was incomplete and shaped by whatever other people told them about themselves. It begged permission of the general population to live, and survived on the ideas of main consensus.
Kevin seemed to have no idea of what he was to other people. He wore shorts often and they showed his long legs with their short down of brown hair. He had strong hands that were murmured about in front of mirrors in the girls’ bathroom and very blue eyes, wide like lakes and tilted like an elf’s. His ears were a little pointed. He had Indian blood like ninety percent of the white population, and it gave him sharp features. Kevin was generally one of those people whose face was so striking that you either thought he was ugly or irresistible. Usually people who thought he was ugly came around and this was because of the eyes. When he looked at someone he smiled, and when he looked at someone, he really looked at someone. Some girls could not forgive his hair, which was spiky and brown and ordinary. But then he would pick up a pencil, say something and look into her eyes and the hair was forgiven as well.
Then there was the matter of Race Cane. Race was short for some Arab name; at least this is what was told. She could have been pretty. The fact that she was in band could have been forgiven. Her hair was too straight, though this was all anyone could say. She didn’t have good posture. That might have been another thing that kept her from being pretty. And she wore those thick, ugly, ugly glasses. But since the end of Freshmen year it hadn’t mattered, because Kevin of the glorious eyes, the mild swagger and the low, mellow voice (or mumble) had set his affections on her. Kevin was very near sighted, and hated his glasses, which he carried with him, but hardly ever wore in public. In Aileen’s house, they could read books, wear their glasses and in general be dorks together. At heart Kevin was a huge dork who happened to have marvelous—though myopic—eyes, and be able to play football. Race would hang out of the bandstand with her drums at the Saturday football games, and Kevin would run across the field after passes and mouth, “I love you!”
It was all very sweet up until sophomore year.
Then Aileen Lawry entered the picture.
AILEEN LAWRY WAS A BITCH and for a long time this was simply all that Race had to say on the matter. It was years later when Race had gotten her own strange revenge that she realized Aileen had not been quite as conniving or victorious as she had appeared. But throughout high school, and in the years that followed, Race hated her like angels hate hell. Yes, she was pretty. She was very pretty and head cheerleader. On top of that, not a bad brain. She wasn’t one of those stupid cheerleaders or, for that matter, one of those annoying trailer sluts who thought she was funny when she was just mean. Aileen had an acid tongue, but she didn’t often employ it, and usually not on other girls. Never at a girl who was down and unpopular. Hence never at Race. Race would like to have thought that she and Aileen could have been friends... in another life, in another place if, maybe, they had other bodies... If not for Kevin.
Aileen Lawry lived in a house with her divorced mother who was reputed to have been a nut job, and a bit of a slut and her mother’s two crazy sisters, one who told fortunes and lived in the garage with her no count husband, and another who may or may not have been a lesbian. That part wasn’t clear. What was clear was that her home life wasn’t right, and she had no business sticking her nose in the air, and letting those glorious golden brown tresses shake behind her as she tossed them through the halls of Jamnia High School. Aileen acted as if she was royalty instead of descended on one side from a bunch of drunken Irish off of 11th Street and trailer trash blown out of West Virginia on the other.
On a day when Race wasn’t around, Aileen had caught Kevin Foster’s eye.
Actually what had happened was that Aileen had a phenomenal head for English. She loved Shakespeare half way by accident. Aside from her mother and Cedric driving books and plays into her head, over the course of time on Windham Street, Aileen learned to identify with a good drama, sensing that she lived in one. English was Kevin’s blind spot, however. He was a brilliant analytical thinker—which meant calculus would be no problem for him. For Aileen it was an impossible class.
So one day, walking out of Shakespeare, Kevin had cleared his throat and ventured to speak to her.
Aileen had told him to come on over. She would help him.
The first night as he was leaving, placing his books in his book bag, the eyes came up.
”If you ever need any help in any subject.”
“She’s awful at math,” Ida said. “You sure you don’t wanna stay for dinner?”
“No ma’am. I gotta be home.” Kevin said to Ida. Then to Aileen. “You should have told me. I’ll come over...”
“Come over Wednesday,” Ida had said, stirring the pot.
And that was all that was to be said.
Mondays and Wednesdays English. Tuesdays and Thursdays were math.
“He’s cute,” Aunt Meghan said.
“Cuter than me?” Uncle Harv demanded.
“No one’s cuter than you, baby,” Meghan told her husband. But she didn’t sound very convincing, and Uncle Harv didn’t look convinced either.
Kevin had been coming by the house about a month when Aileen said:
“Why d’you squint so much?”
“I wear glasses.”
“No you don’t.”
“I should,” he said.
“Why don’t you get some?”
“I have some.”
“Where?” Aileen cocked her head, pulling one leg under her.
“With me,” Kevin told her. “Right here.”
“Then put them on.”
And because Aileen was Aileen, she added, “Ninny.”
He did, and she threw back her head and laughed.
“See,” Kevin protested moving to take them off.
“No!” Aileen almost shouted. “No,” she touched his face. “They make you look... dignified.”
Her hand stayed on Kevin’s cheek. He leaned in to kiss her. She held his whole face and pulled it toward her, and his hands hooked into her hair.
Still, this business was not commitment. And Kevin saw no reason to bring it up to Race.
Neither did Aileen. But then, she didn’t really know Race existed.
Here began a time when two young, not unattractive, and—in truth—quite horny people began to do everything they could short of sex. Ida had said that Mondays and Wednesdays were English, Tuesdays and Thursdays were math, but really there was a little sex ed thrown in at the end of each session, and Fridays were completely devoted to it.
There were too many people at the house on Windham Street for the kids to carry on, and so they ended up messing around at Kevin’s house.
“My daddy would kill us if he knew,” Kevin told her, hot with desire. The way his eyes glowed, it seemed he was gloating rather than confessing a frightening truth.
One day they were making out. He was on top of her when suddenly Kevin groan-murmured, “Aily!” worked down his pants, and then, before she could orient herself, pulled down her panties.
“No, Kev,” she muttered.
“I’m sorry,” he told her, as if he truly were. And then he started fucking her.
She bit down on his shoulder and put a clawed hand in his back while Kevin shuttled on top of her and hit her again and again, his face taking on an almost angelic look. Then—suddenly—his body tensed, his eyes flew open. With a groan like someone who’d been hit in the chest, he collapsed on her.
When she came home that Tuesday night, the kitchen on Windham Street was full of the smells of onions and meat and seasonings. Cedric and Marilyn were sitting at the table sipping glasses of dark wine.
“What happened today?” Ida asked.
“Nothing, Mama,” Aileen replied, and ran upstairs to shower, convinced that her mother would smell the loss of her virginity if it was not washed away as soon as possible.
AFTER THIS, RACE FOUND OUT FAIRLY QUICKLY that things had changed.
Kevin, having gotten some for the first time, told no one, but he planned to get it again. He would sneak up on Aileen in the bushes and wrap his arms around her. There were public displays of affection. Him wrapping his arms around her, kissing her on the cheek. Giving her his ring. It was a Confirmation ring, class rings didn’t come out until next year. Him, deep kissing her. The ease with which he had publicly dismissed Race was amazing. He would pay for it. But not today.
And he loved fucking Aileen. He loved hearing her make noise. That was how he got good at it. He paid attention to her. He asked her what felt good, what did not, where he should put his hands, told her where he wanted her to place her hands on him. And he talked dirty. He hardly talked at all in public, but he was the youngest of five kids, none of them living at home, and most days the Colonel was gone and his wife was passed out with a glass of wine in the den. So they could make love loudly. All of this was heaven until the day Aileen did not come to school. She didn’t come the next day. Kevin came over to Windham Street, concerned. Aileen was in her room. When Kevin moved to touch her cheek she slapped the shit out of him.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded.
She slapped him again.
Kevin, approaching his sixteenth birthday, thought Aileen looked marvelous angry. The more she slapped him the harder his dick was getting. He envisioned himself asking her again and becoming so excited he’d throw her down on the bed and fuck her.
So he grinned, not only because the whole thing turned him on, but also because he knew it would piss her off.
“What’s wrong?” he said again.
She slapped him. He threw her down and they fucked hard. She was quiet. He tried not to be loud. When it was over Aileen pushed him away. Kevin reached for her.
“You goddamned fool,” she told him. “I’m pregnant.”
Kevin just stared at her waiting for the punchline.
At last she said sat up, naked, and said, “You’re the punchline. Asshole.”
Cedric was in a quandary as to what to do. When Marilyn came home the next day, he wanted to let her rest, but she picked up on his mood immediately.
“What’s the problem, Ced?” she demanded from her bed. “I can tell it’s not me.”
Cedric told her about Kevin and Aileen, and then Marilyn said, “Well, I thought...” then she amended. “No, I never thought anything was going on at all. Well, I still don’t see what the problem is.”
“But—”
“Cedric, you think through stuff too much. You think everything is one of your plays,” Marilyn accused him. “The Colonel can’t make Aileen have an abortion. He doesn’t know her.”
“But he can tell Kevin to—”
“Then you just tell Ida! Ida would shoot the Colonel, Kevin, and Aileen before she ever let that happen.”
Cedric stood before the bed feeling quite stupid. That’s what he told Marilyn.
“And you should feel stupid,” his wife told him. “Now turn off the light and let me go to sleep. And when I wake up, make me some of that good tomato soup. You gotta treat me right, Ced. You know I can’t get out of bed for at least four days.”
“Do you need a bedpan?”
“Ha. Ha. Go away, Ced.”
WINONA FOSTER WAS NEVER BIG on words. She said nothing now, either. The Colonel seemed more disgusted by Kevin’s refusal to “get rid of the evidence” than the creation of the evidence in the first place. The boy stood in the large living room of the white house on East Crawford Street, and held back tears as his fat old father berated him. It’s very likely that if Aileen had not been under the close surveillance of her mother then the pregnancy would have ended. But Kevin bore his father’s rage with courage because he had to. The matter was blessedly out of his hands.
“And what are you gonna do?” the Colonel demanded.
“I’m gonna marry Aily.”
“And what else? What kind of job will you have?”
Winona spoke up to say, “We’ll support him.”
“Like hell!” the Colonel roared.
Kevin did not know what to do. Sex had made him feel like a man. Now the results of it left him feeling like a little child, and he did not know where to go. He ran out of the house, jumped on his bike and rode around and around. His friends couldn’t help him. He rode to Michael Street and finally he ended up at the Fitzgerald house. It was windy that night. He pushed open the iron gate. It creaked. He pushed his bike through and rested it inside of the bushes. Then he climbed onto the porch and hid between its side rail and the end of the swing.
The next morning, Marilyn—who did not really know the boy—was the first up. She opened the door, woke him up and asked him what the hell he was doing.
Kevin scrambled for words. Marilyn just shook her head and offered her hand. He took it.
“I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m pregnant, you know?”
“I know, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am. I’m not dead yet. You the Colonel’s son?”
“Yes, ma—Yes.”
“You can call me Maryl.”
“Yes, Maryl.”
“I’ll make you some breakfast,” Marilyn said. “My husband’s not up yet. He’ll take you to school. In fact, take off those clothes. We got a housecoat. I’ll wash those for you. The draws too. You smell like cat piss,” she told him.
Kevin changed in the first floor bathroom, and balled up his clothes while changing into the housecoat. The sky was just turning grey with the new day.
“Yep,” Marilyn said conversationally as she went downstairs to the laundry room, followed by the boy, “You’re daddy’s a real asshole. Your mama’s not much either. Pardon me for saying.”
“WELL, NATURALLY HE’LL LIVE WITH us or Ida,” Marilyn said over breakfast.
“Makes all the sense for him to be with Aily. They will be together. You love her?” Marilyn looked squarely at Kevin. “This just wasn’t a roll in the hay? Or the bed? Or whatever?”
“I do love her.”
“Then the two of you’ll be together,” Marilyn said. “Cedric, drop him off at Ida’s tonight.”
They didn’t hear from the Colonel for some time. It took three days for him to get up and leave the white house on East Crawford Street, and cross town to come to the white house on Windham. He walked up to the little stoop and banged on the black door until finally it flew open that evening.
Colonel was about to shout, “Where’s my son—?” when the sentence died on his lips and first Ida, and then Meghan and then Harv and lastly, young Alice, came out with eyebrows raised and shotguns cocked.
“You crazy Irish mother—!” Colonel began.
Ida licked her lips and clicked back the lock.
Colonel turned red, sputtered, and then walked down the path. Climbing into his car he drove away.
Upstairs Kevin and Aileen were holding each other and looking out of her window.
“We’ll make this work, won’t we, Kev?” It was the first time Kevin had ever heard Aileen sound doubtful.
He kissed her on the forehead.
“Sure will. Sure will.”
“I won’t ask how?” she placed her head on his chest.
“Good,” he said, kissing the top of her head again. “Because I don’t know.”
i i i
When the bell rings, Tina is the first out of Rafferty’s door, waiting for Luke. All through class he has been tapping his foot and sending looks toward her, so she knows he wants something.
“What?” she says, a smile on her face as she comes out of the classroom. He is leaned against a locker.
“Let’s skip.”
“Right now? The day’s half over.”
“Then we skip the last two hours.” Luke takes out a short, unfiltered Lucky Strike. “I didn’t think I’d have to talk you into it.”
“You don’t,” she says, offering her arm. “Let’s roll, kemosabe.”
Going down the crowded hall, Tina sees her sister hanging on Bone’s shoulder. Ashley sends a look of pure nastiness Tina’s way.
“Ouch,” says Tina, turning her face to Luke who laughs and bends down to kiss her.
“You’ve got to stop that,” Tina says, as Luke turns left and takes her down the wide hallway with the trophy cases and the auditorium and gymnasium across from them.
“And why?” he says. They come to the glass doors and the smoker’s porch.
“Because it’ll make people think I’m pretty and shit.”
“But you are pretty,” Luke tells her, and kisses her again before adding, “And shit.”
“Where you guys going?” Ian shouts, and it’s then that they see him.
Tina turns around and comes up the few steps. “Man, I’m sorry. I didn’t even you.”
“It’s cool,” Ian shrugs, his lips tightening, his eyes narrowing as he sucks in the last of the cigarette. He exhales.
“We’re skipping,” Luke says, then adds, “Wanna come?”
“No, three’s a crowd.”
“It’s not even like that,” Tina shakes her head. “Well, not yet.”
Luke smacks Tina on the ass, and she shouts.
“Well,” Ian says, “if it’s no big deal, then you could get Roy. I think if I skip, I’d better wait for Vaughan and Kenzie. But Roy would feel like a million bucks if the two of you took him out.”
Tina looks up at Luke.
“That’s a cool idea. Then we can swing by the Factory and get Coconut. People’ll think we’re a family.”
“A dysfunctional family,” Tina murmurs. “Where’s Roy?” she says to Ian.
“In your dad’s gym class.”
Tina nods and heads back into the school.
“Every family is dysfunctional,” Luke murmurs to her departing back. Tina sneaks through the side door of the gym closest to the parking lot. She looks all around the wide fluorescent lit structure. This morning her father is teaching a bunch of pimply faced kids to juggle. Tina looks around them for Roy, and then finds him sitting alone, up in the bleachers. Tina climbs up the bleachers to join him.
“Tina,” the boy says, startled. He reminds her of a cross between Ian and her youngest brother, Ryan, without the affliction and without her father’s pronounced face.
“Me and Luke wanted to know how you felt about skipping for the rest of the day?”
The boy’s blue eyes light up and Tina touches the crucifix hanging from the rosary around her neck. She’s glad she’s come here.
“Where are we going?” Roy says.
“Does it matter?” Tina asks.
Roy grins and shakes his head.
Down below, Kevin is standing in the midst of boys, juggling. His legs are planted wide apart and he is wearing those red shorts and his white tee shirt, the whistle hanging from his neck, the red baseball cap he always wears on his head.
“See, guys,” he tells them. “It’s like this: Toss, toss. Catch. Catch.”
He smiles vacantly to the rhythm of the balls.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Tina says. “This is so pathetic I can hardly watch.”
“I think I’d die,” Roy says seriously, “if I knew I was destined to be a gym teacher.”
Then he is instantly sorry, because Mr. Foster is such a nice man and is—after all—Tina’s father.
MORE TOMORROW NIGHT
FOR ANYONE WHO HAD GROWN UP IN Jamnia, and known anything about Colonel Foster, to look on one’s class roster and find the name Foster was to hold your breath and call on the name of Jesus... or Allah or Krishna. Pick your deity of choice, please. The night before Cedric’s first class, he had annoyed Marilyn by spending the dark hours talking to the ceiling, imagining just how he would tell the Colonel’s son off. When he learned the boy was quarterback as well as youngest son of the infamous Colonel, it was all over. There would be no end to his conceit.
But the first thing anyone noticed about Kevin was his tendency toward un-conceit. He made a science of something that had not, hitherto, been a word. On the field there was no one who could throw a tighter spiral, catch a quicker pass, run more touchdowns. He was at the center of every conversation when the football team was gathered together. But he was always a quiet center. He was always nodding his head and grinning generously when told a joke. He didn’t often make them. When he did, it was in a mumble and he looked surprised if anyone actually laughed.
His teachers, Cedric included, were impressed by the simple fact that he liked to put his hand up and actually answer questions. That his answers were usually right was icing on the cake. He always grinned when he got the right answer or when someone said he’d made a good point. It was like he’d never done this before and he was at once pleased and ashamed.
Cedric believed that Kevin lived in his own head more than most kids. True enough, everyone possessed his own private universe, but usually it was incomplete and shaped by whatever other people told them about themselves. It begged permission of the general population to live, and survived on the ideas of main consensus.
Kevin seemed to have no idea of what he was to other people. He wore shorts often and they showed his long legs with their short down of brown hair. He had strong hands that were murmured about in front of mirrors in the girls’ bathroom and very blue eyes, wide like lakes and tilted like an elf’s. His ears were a little pointed. He had Indian blood like ninety percent of the white population, and it gave him sharp features. Kevin was generally one of those people whose face was so striking that you either thought he was ugly or irresistible. Usually people who thought he was ugly came around and this was because of the eyes. When he looked at someone he smiled, and when he looked at someone, he really looked at someone. Some girls could not forgive his hair, which was spiky and brown and ordinary. But then he would pick up a pencil, say something and look into her eyes and the hair was forgiven as well.
Then there was the matter of Race Cane. Race was short for some Arab name; at least this is what was told. She could have been pretty. The fact that she was in band could have been forgiven. Her hair was too straight, though this was all anyone could say. She didn’t have good posture. That might have been another thing that kept her from being pretty. And she wore those thick, ugly, ugly glasses. But since the end of Freshmen year it hadn’t mattered, because Kevin of the glorious eyes, the mild swagger and the low, mellow voice (or mumble) had set his affections on her. Kevin was very near sighted, and hated his glasses, which he carried with him, but hardly ever wore in public. In Aileen’s house, they could read books, wear their glasses and in general be dorks together. At heart Kevin was a huge dork who happened to have marvelous—though myopic—eyes, and be able to play football. Race would hang out of the bandstand with her drums at the Saturday football games, and Kevin would run across the field after passes and mouth, “I love you!”
It was all very sweet up until sophomore year.
Then Aileen Lawry entered the picture.
AILEEN LAWRY WAS A BITCH and for a long time this was simply all that Race had to say on the matter. It was years later when Race had gotten her own strange revenge that she realized Aileen had not been quite as conniving or victorious as she had appeared. But throughout high school, and in the years that followed, Race hated her like angels hate hell. Yes, she was pretty. She was very pretty and head cheerleader. On top of that, not a bad brain. She wasn’t one of those stupid cheerleaders or, for that matter, one of those annoying trailer sluts who thought she was funny when she was just mean. Aileen had an acid tongue, but she didn’t often employ it, and usually not on other girls. Never at a girl who was down and unpopular. Hence never at Race. Race would like to have thought that she and Aileen could have been friends... in another life, in another place if, maybe, they had other bodies... If not for Kevin.
Aileen Lawry lived in a house with her divorced mother who was reputed to have been a nut job, and a bit of a slut and her mother’s two crazy sisters, one who told fortunes and lived in the garage with her no count husband, and another who may or may not have been a lesbian. That part wasn’t clear. What was clear was that her home life wasn’t right, and she had no business sticking her nose in the air, and letting those glorious golden brown tresses shake behind her as she tossed them through the halls of Jamnia High School. Aileen acted as if she was royalty instead of descended on one side from a bunch of drunken Irish off of 11th Street and trailer trash blown out of West Virginia on the other.
On a day when Race wasn’t around, Aileen had caught Kevin Foster’s eye.
Actually what had happened was that Aileen had a phenomenal head for English. She loved Shakespeare half way by accident. Aside from her mother and Cedric driving books and plays into her head, over the course of time on Windham Street, Aileen learned to identify with a good drama, sensing that she lived in one. English was Kevin’s blind spot, however. He was a brilliant analytical thinker—which meant calculus would be no problem for him. For Aileen it was an impossible class.
So one day, walking out of Shakespeare, Kevin had cleared his throat and ventured to speak to her.
Aileen had told him to come on over. She would help him.
The first night as he was leaving, placing his books in his book bag, the eyes came up.
”If you ever need any help in any subject.”
“She’s awful at math,” Ida said. “You sure you don’t wanna stay for dinner?”
“No ma’am. I gotta be home.” Kevin said to Ida. Then to Aileen. “You should have told me. I’ll come over...”
“Come over Wednesday,” Ida had said, stirring the pot.
And that was all that was to be said.
Mondays and Wednesdays English. Tuesdays and Thursdays were math.
“He’s cute,” Aunt Meghan said.
“Cuter than me?” Uncle Harv demanded.
“No one’s cuter than you, baby,” Meghan told her husband. But she didn’t sound very convincing, and Uncle Harv didn’t look convinced either.
Kevin had been coming by the house about a month when Aileen said:
“Why d’you squint so much?”
“I wear glasses.”
“No you don’t.”
“I should,” he said.
“Why don’t you get some?”
“I have some.”
“Where?” Aileen cocked her head, pulling one leg under her.
“With me,” Kevin told her. “Right here.”
“Then put them on.”
And because Aileen was Aileen, she added, “Ninny.”
He did, and she threw back her head and laughed.
“See,” Kevin protested moving to take them off.
“No!” Aileen almost shouted. “No,” she touched his face. “They make you look... dignified.”
Her hand stayed on Kevin’s cheek. He leaned in to kiss her. She held his whole face and pulled it toward her, and his hands hooked into her hair.
Still, this business was not commitment. And Kevin saw no reason to bring it up to Race.
Neither did Aileen. But then, she didn’t really know Race existed.
Here began a time when two young, not unattractive, and—in truth—quite horny people began to do everything they could short of sex. Ida had said that Mondays and Wednesdays were English, Tuesdays and Thursdays were math, but really there was a little sex ed thrown in at the end of each session, and Fridays were completely devoted to it.
There were too many people at the house on Windham Street for the kids to carry on, and so they ended up messing around at Kevin’s house.
“My daddy would kill us if he knew,” Kevin told her, hot with desire. The way his eyes glowed, it seemed he was gloating rather than confessing a frightening truth.
One day they were making out. He was on top of her when suddenly Kevin groan-murmured, “Aily!” worked down his pants, and then, before she could orient herself, pulled down her panties.
“No, Kev,” she muttered.
“I’m sorry,” he told her, as if he truly were. And then he started fucking her.
She bit down on his shoulder and put a clawed hand in his back while Kevin shuttled on top of her and hit her again and again, his face taking on an almost angelic look. Then—suddenly—his body tensed, his eyes flew open. With a groan like someone who’d been hit in the chest, he collapsed on her.
When she came home that Tuesday night, the kitchen on Windham Street was full of the smells of onions and meat and seasonings. Cedric and Marilyn were sitting at the table sipping glasses of dark wine.
“What happened today?” Ida asked.
“Nothing, Mama,” Aileen replied, and ran upstairs to shower, convinced that her mother would smell the loss of her virginity if it was not washed away as soon as possible.
AFTER THIS, RACE FOUND OUT FAIRLY QUICKLY that things had changed.
Kevin, having gotten some for the first time, told no one, but he planned to get it again. He would sneak up on Aileen in the bushes and wrap his arms around her. There were public displays of affection. Him wrapping his arms around her, kissing her on the cheek. Giving her his ring. It was a Confirmation ring, class rings didn’t come out until next year. Him, deep kissing her. The ease with which he had publicly dismissed Race was amazing. He would pay for it. But not today.
And he loved fucking Aileen. He loved hearing her make noise. That was how he got good at it. He paid attention to her. He asked her what felt good, what did not, where he should put his hands, told her where he wanted her to place her hands on him. And he talked dirty. He hardly talked at all in public, but he was the youngest of five kids, none of them living at home, and most days the Colonel was gone and his wife was passed out with a glass of wine in the den. So they could make love loudly. All of this was heaven until the day Aileen did not come to school. She didn’t come the next day. Kevin came over to Windham Street, concerned. Aileen was in her room. When Kevin moved to touch her cheek she slapped the shit out of him.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded.
She slapped him again.
Kevin, approaching his sixteenth birthday, thought Aileen looked marvelous angry. The more she slapped him the harder his dick was getting. He envisioned himself asking her again and becoming so excited he’d throw her down on the bed and fuck her.
So he grinned, not only because the whole thing turned him on, but also because he knew it would piss her off.
“What’s wrong?” he said again.
She slapped him. He threw her down and they fucked hard. She was quiet. He tried not to be loud. When it was over Aileen pushed him away. Kevin reached for her.
“You goddamned fool,” she told him. “I’m pregnant.”
Kevin just stared at her waiting for the punchline.
At last she said sat up, naked, and said, “You’re the punchline. Asshole.”
Cedric was in a quandary as to what to do. When Marilyn came home the next day, he wanted to let her rest, but she picked up on his mood immediately.
“What’s the problem, Ced?” she demanded from her bed. “I can tell it’s not me.”
Cedric told her about Kevin and Aileen, and then Marilyn said, “Well, I thought...” then she amended. “No, I never thought anything was going on at all. Well, I still don’t see what the problem is.”
“But—”
“Cedric, you think through stuff too much. You think everything is one of your plays,” Marilyn accused him. “The Colonel can’t make Aileen have an abortion. He doesn’t know her.”
“But he can tell Kevin to—”
“Then you just tell Ida! Ida would shoot the Colonel, Kevin, and Aileen before she ever let that happen.”
Cedric stood before the bed feeling quite stupid. That’s what he told Marilyn.
“And you should feel stupid,” his wife told him. “Now turn off the light and let me go to sleep. And when I wake up, make me some of that good tomato soup. You gotta treat me right, Ced. You know I can’t get out of bed for at least four days.”
“Do you need a bedpan?”
“Ha. Ha. Go away, Ced.”
WINONA FOSTER WAS NEVER BIG on words. She said nothing now, either. The Colonel seemed more disgusted by Kevin’s refusal to “get rid of the evidence” than the creation of the evidence in the first place. The boy stood in the large living room of the white house on East Crawford Street, and held back tears as his fat old father berated him. It’s very likely that if Aileen had not been under the close surveillance of her mother then the pregnancy would have ended. But Kevin bore his father’s rage with courage because he had to. The matter was blessedly out of his hands.
“And what are you gonna do?” the Colonel demanded.
“I’m gonna marry Aily.”
“And what else? What kind of job will you have?”
Winona spoke up to say, “We’ll support him.”
“Like hell!” the Colonel roared.
Kevin did not know what to do. Sex had made him feel like a man. Now the results of it left him feeling like a little child, and he did not know where to go. He ran out of the house, jumped on his bike and rode around and around. His friends couldn’t help him. He rode to Michael Street and finally he ended up at the Fitzgerald house. It was windy that night. He pushed open the iron gate. It creaked. He pushed his bike through and rested it inside of the bushes. Then he climbed onto the porch and hid between its side rail and the end of the swing.
The next morning, Marilyn—who did not really know the boy—was the first up. She opened the door, woke him up and asked him what the hell he was doing.
Kevin scrambled for words. Marilyn just shook her head and offered her hand. He took it.
“I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m pregnant, you know?”
“I know, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am. I’m not dead yet. You the Colonel’s son?”
“Yes, ma—Yes.”
“You can call me Maryl.”
“Yes, Maryl.”
“I’ll make you some breakfast,” Marilyn said. “My husband’s not up yet. He’ll take you to school. In fact, take off those clothes. We got a housecoat. I’ll wash those for you. The draws too. You smell like cat piss,” she told him.
Kevin changed in the first floor bathroom, and balled up his clothes while changing into the housecoat. The sky was just turning grey with the new day.
“Yep,” Marilyn said conversationally as she went downstairs to the laundry room, followed by the boy, “You’re daddy’s a real asshole. Your mama’s not much either. Pardon me for saying.”
“WELL, NATURALLY HE’LL LIVE WITH us or Ida,” Marilyn said over breakfast.
“Makes all the sense for him to be with Aily. They will be together. You love her?” Marilyn looked squarely at Kevin. “This just wasn’t a roll in the hay? Or the bed? Or whatever?”
“I do love her.”
“Then the two of you’ll be together,” Marilyn said. “Cedric, drop him off at Ida’s tonight.”
They didn’t hear from the Colonel for some time. It took three days for him to get up and leave the white house on East Crawford Street, and cross town to come to the white house on Windham. He walked up to the little stoop and banged on the black door until finally it flew open that evening.
Colonel was about to shout, “Where’s my son—?” when the sentence died on his lips and first Ida, and then Meghan and then Harv and lastly, young Alice, came out with eyebrows raised and shotguns cocked.
“You crazy Irish mother—!” Colonel began.
Ida licked her lips and clicked back the lock.
Colonel turned red, sputtered, and then walked down the path. Climbing into his car he drove away.
Upstairs Kevin and Aileen were holding each other and looking out of her window.
“We’ll make this work, won’t we, Kev?” It was the first time Kevin had ever heard Aileen sound doubtful.
He kissed her on the forehead.
“Sure will. Sure will.”
“I won’t ask how?” she placed her head on his chest.
“Good,” he said, kissing the top of her head again. “Because I don’t know.”
i i i
When the bell rings, Tina is the first out of Rafferty’s door, waiting for Luke. All through class he has been tapping his foot and sending looks toward her, so she knows he wants something.
“What?” she says, a smile on her face as she comes out of the classroom. He is leaned against a locker.
“Let’s skip.”
“Right now? The day’s half over.”
“Then we skip the last two hours.” Luke takes out a short, unfiltered Lucky Strike. “I didn’t think I’d have to talk you into it.”
“You don’t,” she says, offering her arm. “Let’s roll, kemosabe.”
Going down the crowded hall, Tina sees her sister hanging on Bone’s shoulder. Ashley sends a look of pure nastiness Tina’s way.
“Ouch,” says Tina, turning her face to Luke who laughs and bends down to kiss her.
“You’ve got to stop that,” Tina says, as Luke turns left and takes her down the wide hallway with the trophy cases and the auditorium and gymnasium across from them.
“And why?” he says. They come to the glass doors and the smoker’s porch.
“Because it’ll make people think I’m pretty and shit.”
“But you are pretty,” Luke tells her, and kisses her again before adding, “And shit.”
“Where you guys going?” Ian shouts, and it’s then that they see him.
Tina turns around and comes up the few steps. “Man, I’m sorry. I didn’t even you.”
“It’s cool,” Ian shrugs, his lips tightening, his eyes narrowing as he sucks in the last of the cigarette. He exhales.
“We’re skipping,” Luke says, then adds, “Wanna come?”
“No, three’s a crowd.”
“It’s not even like that,” Tina shakes her head. “Well, not yet.”
Luke smacks Tina on the ass, and she shouts.
“Well,” Ian says, “if it’s no big deal, then you could get Roy. I think if I skip, I’d better wait for Vaughan and Kenzie. But Roy would feel like a million bucks if the two of you took him out.”
Tina looks up at Luke.
“That’s a cool idea. Then we can swing by the Factory and get Coconut. People’ll think we’re a family.”
“A dysfunctional family,” Tina murmurs. “Where’s Roy?” she says to Ian.
“In your dad’s gym class.”
Tina nods and heads back into the school.
“Every family is dysfunctional,” Luke murmurs to her departing back. Tina sneaks through the side door of the gym closest to the parking lot. She looks all around the wide fluorescent lit structure. This morning her father is teaching a bunch of pimply faced kids to juggle. Tina looks around them for Roy, and then finds him sitting alone, up in the bleachers. Tina climbs up the bleachers to join him.
“Tina,” the boy says, startled. He reminds her of a cross between Ian and her youngest brother, Ryan, without the affliction and without her father’s pronounced face.
“Me and Luke wanted to know how you felt about skipping for the rest of the day?”
The boy’s blue eyes light up and Tina touches the crucifix hanging from the rosary around her neck. She’s glad she’s come here.
“Where are we going?” Roy says.
“Does it matter?” Tina asks.
Roy grins and shakes his head.
Down below, Kevin is standing in the midst of boys, juggling. His legs are planted wide apart and he is wearing those red shorts and his white tee shirt, the whistle hanging from his neck, the red baseball cap he always wears on his head.
“See, guys,” he tells them. “It’s like this: Toss, toss. Catch. Catch.”
He smiles vacantly to the rhythm of the balls.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Tina says. “This is so pathetic I can hardly watch.”
“I think I’d die,” Roy says seriously, “if I knew I was destined to be a gym teacher.”
Then he is instantly sorry, because Mr. Foster is such a nice man and is—after all—Tina’s father.
MORE TOMORROW NIGHT
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was an excellent portion! I am enjoying this story more and more as it unfolds. Aileen's pregnancy was a surprise. I am interested to see what happens with her. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow! Hope you are having a nice night!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Well, this story is as much about the past as the present, and as much about the parents as the kids, so there is a lot more to reveal as it goes on, and everyone has a story. You will certainly learn more about Aileen and Kevin tomorrow night. They are so much more than Tina and Mackenzie's parents. But then all parents are. I'm glad you're enjoying the story. I always love your comments. Have a great evening.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
TONIGHT, MACKENZIE HAS SOMETHING TO SAY
IDA, CEDRIC AND MARILYN SIT AROUND the table drinking ginseng and passing back and fourth Kevin’s transcripts. He looks eagerly at them, looking critically over his grades.
“Do any of the schools you’ve applied to know about the kids?” Ida says.
Kevin nods.
“I don’t know why you shouldn’t get in,” she says. And then, “And when they know about the kids and still these grades and everything.”
“But what about Aily?”
Ida dismisses her daughter. “Oh, she’s a smart girl.”
“And the kids,” Kevin says.
Finally, in irritation. Cedric looks at the boy. Madeleine begins to cry, and Marilyn, rounding out with a new pregnancy rises to take her daughter out of the cradle.
“Do you want to go to school?” Cedric snaps, and at the look in the boy’s eyes is instantly sorry. This is all Kevin needs, another Colonel. His voice softens. “I mean... every time we look at schools you have a reason not to go.”
“Aily’s pregnant again,” Kevin says.
“Well, we know that,” Marilyn murmurs, sticking a teething ring in her daughter’s mouth. “Now knock that shit off, Mad,” she murmurs.
“It’s twins,” Kevin says. “Again.”
“It’s the Colonel’s fault,” Ida said.
“Everything cannot be blamed on the Colonel,” Cedric tells his friend as Madeleine climbs onto his lap.
“The Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam and the gas shortage can be blamed on the Colonel,” Ida differs, getting up to get a beer from the refrigerator. “If he hadn’t insisted you all get married right away,” Ida said, slamming a beer in front of her son-in-law, “Would you all be getting ready to have your third and fourth child before high school graduation? I don’t think so.” She shook her head, broke open the beer, and swilled down half of it in one gulp. “And him a damn Presbyterian too!” she said though none of them knew what this had to do with anything.
Ida belched for emphasis.
“Now I was thinking,” Cedric said, “that a school like Citeaux or McCleiss has married student housing. So’s Notre Dame, I think.”
“I could live there? With the kids?” Kevin looked dubious.
“Yes.”
“Even Saint Clare’s,” Ida said, and Cedric and Marilyn nodded, partial to their alma mater. “The apartments around there are cheap and so are the boarding houses. They might as well be married student housing.”
Kevin looked overwhelmed by it all. They shut up.
The door came open and there was the noise of Meghan, Harv, Meghan’s boy shouting and running around the house like a hooligan, and the baby’s crying as Aileen, fat and tired looking, pushed the girls ahead in their twin stroller. Kevin went to her. They were a knot of conversation and then Kevin walked Aileen up the stairs and put her to bed.
When he had come down, Ida said, “I don’t want you and all them kids going back to the apartment tonight. It’s too small anyway. Why don’t you stay here tonight?”
Kevin nodded.
“I don’t know about studying... Being a college student and all and being a father. It’s... It’s a lot of work.”
Cedric, looking over Kevin’s grades and accomplishments, tried to hide the dismay on his face. Marilyn was a little more blunt.
“If you can play football, go to school, maintain a job at the gas station and still find time to make two more babies, surely you can handle school.”
Kevin was upset. “It’s easy for you to talk about having babies. You all were twice my age when Madeleine was born.”
Kevin was sorry for saying that, and so kept on talking to cover it up, to save him. “I’ll go down the road to Belmont. Take classes there. When I can.”
He looked around them, a little hurt. “What?” he said. “You think if I go to Belmont I’ll just end up being some dumb old gym teacher at Jamnia High School, don’t you?”
None of them said a word.
Suddenly there was screaming from upstairs. They all looked up. No one moved. It seemed like an eternity later Meghan came downstairs looking like hell, her coat disheveled, her son hanging on her left hip.
“Hurry the hell up, Harv!” she shouted.
“Ida,” Meghan said, “that girl’s in labor again.”
“THIS PLACE IS THE COOLEST!” ROY insisted, following Luke and Tina past the second curtain, and swinging on a rail that hung above the ramp they were walking. Coconut padded behind them, her feet making the steel walkway clatter.
“And no one ever comes to visit you?” Roy marveled as he caught up with Luke, walking beside Tina.
“Tina comes to visit,” Luke said. They made a turn and were walking down a long hall with locked, overly varnished old doors.
“But not until a few weeks ago,” she said.
“And you can come and visit me,” Luke said.
“I can?”
Luke was overwhelmed by the gratitude in the boy’s eyes.
“Your home can’t be so bad,” said Luke Madeary, “that you could possibly think of this as a treat.”
They headed down a long flight of stairs and into a concrete floored warehouse, stacked with boxes, large frosted and boarded glass windows filling the space above so that it resembled some industrial church.
“Mom’s nice. But home sucks sometimes,” Roy said.
Tina and Roy followed Luke to a large metal door that looked like the opening to a metal cooler, but Luke shook his head when they came to it and said, “Tina, you and Roy get on one side, and I’ll get on the other. I’ll push. You pull. Best as you can.”
They agreed and struggled for a little bit before finally, with a groan, the door gave way and Tina and Roy had to hop back.
Tina was shocked by a blast of early autumn air, and Roy stood at the opening onto the old train yard, wrapping his arms about his skinny frame.
“Wow,” he said.
“Everything impresses you, kid,” Luke noted, not unimpressed at Roy’s ability to be impressed.
“It’s so... Look at all the boxcars!” Roy said.
“And none of them go anywhere,” Luke told him.
There were four tracks full of old boxcars: Union Pacific, Moo and Oink, CSF, trains hooked together, some abandoned, many rusted, others graffitied. Spaces of weed popped up between them, and beyond them were weeds and small bushes. To their left the noise of the traffic of Michael Street whizzed on, but there wasn’t too much traffic in the middle of the day in a small town on the Ohio border. Beyond the bushes Easerly Street threaded its humble way through town with small, spaced out, out of luck houses.
“It would be so cool to live here,” Roy said.
“I wouldn’t advice it,” Luke told him.
Coconut barked as if in sharp agreement.
“How do you do it?” Roy looked up at Luke.
Luke was about to say Luck when he caught Tina’s expression and said, “People are good to me a lot.”
Roy was about to ask if he ever wanted a home where he wouldn’t have to be afraid, and wouldn’t have to live with just Coconut, but he sensed that this was asking too much, and that maybe there really wasn’t such a home after all.
“I used to look out at those trains,” Luke said, “and want to go some place. But they don’t go anywhere anymore.”
Tina wanted to say, “Let’s go some place,” but she didn’t know where they could go and be home in time for dinner.
Suddenly Roy said, earnestly, “I hate Jamnia.”
That night when Tina and Mackenzie came home together, Ashley was humming some nonsense song in a pleased voice that told Tina something was right for her and wrong for the rest of them. Aileen was standing over the stove, stirring her perpetual pot. Tonight the smell from it was chili. Tina came behind her mother and was about to talk when Aileen put up a hand—she was still in her work clothes—and said, “Don’t talk to me, Martina. I’ve had to deal with your father, and he’s very upset with you right now.”
Tina had that old familiar sinking in her stomach just in time for Kevin to come downstairs with a look of disgust on his face. Tina looked to Mackenzie, who looked equally doubtful.
“You are in such trouble, young lady,” Kevin told her. “You are grounded for a week, and I don’t want you using the phone or going anywhere.”
Before Tina could open her mouth to say, “Not even the Fitzgeralds?” Kevin repeated, “Anywhere.”
Tina was about to ask what this was all about when suddenly she knew.
“I can’t believe you walked into my class and took one of my students out of it,” he said.
“Can I at least try out for the play this week. After school?”
“No,” Kevin told her.
“Oh, what’s the big deal?” Tina said suddenly. “It’s just a stupid gym class anyway.”
Before Kevin could open his mouth to protest or Aileen could turn around and demand that Tina respect her father, Tina imitated Kevin juggling, and said in a voice like a goon: “Toss! Toss! Catch! Catch!” And then, “Never mind! You don’t have to tell me to go to my room. It’s where I was going anyway.”
“I DON’T KNOW WHY PEOPLE say they can’t tell ‘em apart,” Marilyn shook her head, looking at the three toddlers racing around the floor of the waiting room. “Tina’s the trouble. See. Look at her. Trouble all over.”
Ida came from around a corner and said, with a brightness that, if it wasn’t false, was at least, amplified after hours with her laboring daughter.
“Do my girls want to see their new brother and sister?”
“Yeah!” Ashley said at the same time, Tina shouted, “No!” and Madeleine collapsed on the floor in giggles. Cedric looked at his wife, then bent down and picked up the little laughing girl. Tina, seeing that she was so funny, fell on the floor and began to laugh as well. Ashley came to her grandmother. Ida held out one hand for her and the other for Tina, who stopped laughing, raised herself up and caught on, swinging and singing as she went to the room.
“Now you might have to be a little quiet,” Ida advised Tina.
“Yeah,” Ashley said, placing a hand on her hip.
“Mommy,” Madeleine said from Cedric’s arms, “Are you having twins too?”
“No,” she said.
Madeleine said, rather decisively, “Good.”
There was an anxious nurse on one side, and an anxious Kevin on the other. Aileen looked horrid, with bags under her eyes, and they knew that she wouldn’t be with the babies too much longer. She’d have to rest and they’d have to go back to the nursery.
Kevin lifted up Ashley, and Ida lifted up Tina to look down on the sleeping babies.
“Who’s who?” Tina demanded. Each child was identically small, and identically solemn, eyes rolling under the thin shells of their eyelids.
“Blue blanket is the boy. The yellow one’s the girl.”
“I like the way they smell,” Tina decided. “But I don’t like her.” Tina pointed at the baby in yellow.
Ida laughed. Aileen, exhausted, laughed deeply too.
“Martina!” Kevin’s voice was sharp.
“She’s your sister,” Aileen said. “This one’ll be Lindsay. Like Ashley.” Ashley smiled, pleased. “You’ll like her one day.”
“No,” Tina shook her head clinically.
Aileen ignored this and said, “And this one is an M. The way you’re an M. Martina, Mackenzie. Like his grandfather.”
“I don’t like Grandfather,” Tina told her mother, “but I do like Mackenzie,”
Much to her credit, she never had a hard time pronouncing his name, and she had never gotten tired of him. Not even after sixteen years.
Tina was sitting in the middle of the large, heavily quilted bed, finishing up her western civ when she heard the three times knock, the space, the two knocks followed by three more. She stopped, putting down her pen on the notebook and looking to the crucifix overhead. Since she’d made no noise down below, there was jiggling, and then the opening of a door followed by its close. Footsteps came up from downstairs from the hole near the foot of her bed, and then Mackenzie emerged, the yellow light of the halogen lamp by the right side of her bed shining on his golden hair.
“I just wanted to do something nice for Roy,” Tina said.
Mackenzie nodded. “Ian told me that he asked you to.”
“I didn’t mean to piss Dad off quite so bad,” Tina murmured.
“Yeah, he was a little upset,” Mackenzie nodded, and then lay in the bed beside his sister. Absently she stroked his head.
Tina looked to the night stand on her left side. There was a Holy Bible, a Liturgy of the Hours, a pack of Luke’s Lucky Strikes and a dog eared copy of the Bhagavad Gita.
“Should I become a nun, become a Buddhist or remain a freak and have sex with Stearne and Luke?”
Mackenzie leaned on his side, and screwing up his face, asked his sister, “Is there a fourth option?”
“I sure in the hell hope so,” Tina said. “And I sure in the hell know I better not come home tomorrow night.”
“Hum?”
Tina looked around the rafters of her attic room as if expecting someone else to pop out from them. Then she spoke.
“I have to try out for that play. You know that. Dad might as well have worn a sign on his head that said, ‘Disobey me.’”
“Sometimes,” Mackenzie told her. “I wonder if he doesn’t expect it from you.”
“Disobedience?” The idea was laughable.
Mackenzie nodded.
Suddenly he said, “I’m gay.”
Tina ceased stroking his hair.
When she didn’t respond for a while, he repeated, “Martina, I said—”
“I know,” she nodded her head. “That was just sort of out of the blue.”
“That’s kind of where it comes from,” Mackenzie said. “I’d been meaning to tell you. I wasn’t trying to hide it. Just... Never came up.”
“Does Vaughan know?”
Mackenzie nodded.
“How does he feel?”
“He’s Vaughan.” Mackenzie shrugged. “How do you feel?”
“You’ve got it bad for Linus Roache, don’t you?” she said. “And Rich Tafel. He turns you on, doesn’t he?”
Mackenzie colored, but did not answer.
Tina leaned back into bed, fingering the cross of the rosary around her neck before she began to take it off.
“They turn me on too,” she said, frankly. “Oh, Mackenzie, you’re a really cute guy, you know that.”
“If you’re gonna tell me how many girls I could have...”
“No,” Tina looked a little shocked. “I was going to say, I don’t want you moving in on my turf.”
When the young voice on the other end of the phone said, “Hello?” Mackenzie said, “Oh, Vaughan! I’m so happy. I know it’s late, but I just had to tell you before I went to bed that I talked to Tina, and I told her everything. So she knows I’m gay, and she totally accepts it. I can’t tell my parents, though, because they’d flip. But she was just like, ‘Don’t horn in on my territory.’ And it doesn’t make any difference to her at all.”
There was a space of silence. Then Madeleine said, “Well, that’s nice, Mackenzie. Why don’t you let me get my brother. You wanted to talk to him.... Right?”
Mackenzie, trying to process what had just happened, said lamely, “Right.” He wondered if Madeleine had noticed how he’d actually stopped and whispered the word “gay” so that no one would hear if anyone should happen to chance by his room.
Mackenzie told Vaughan everything he’d inadvertently told Madeleine, adding on how he had inadvertently told Madeleine. Then Mackenzie told Vaughan about Tina being grounded.
“But she’s still trying out for the play, right?”
“Of course,” Mackenzie told his friend.
When they were off the phone, Vaughan came into Madeleine’s room as she was getting her clothes out for the next day.
“So now you know,” he said. “Mackenzie wants to know how you feel about it.”
Madeleine pulled out a blouse, and debated with herself if she felt like ironing it or not. She decided against this and put it back in the closet.
“As long as he doesn’t try to be like Ashley and sleep with Rodder too, I can’t really say I give damn.”
MORE ON THURSDAY
IDA, CEDRIC AND MARILYN SIT AROUND the table drinking ginseng and passing back and fourth Kevin’s transcripts. He looks eagerly at them, looking critically over his grades.
“Do any of the schools you’ve applied to know about the kids?” Ida says.
Kevin nods.
“I don’t know why you shouldn’t get in,” she says. And then, “And when they know about the kids and still these grades and everything.”
“But what about Aily?”
Ida dismisses her daughter. “Oh, she’s a smart girl.”
“And the kids,” Kevin says.
Finally, in irritation. Cedric looks at the boy. Madeleine begins to cry, and Marilyn, rounding out with a new pregnancy rises to take her daughter out of the cradle.
“Do you want to go to school?” Cedric snaps, and at the look in the boy’s eyes is instantly sorry. This is all Kevin needs, another Colonel. His voice softens. “I mean... every time we look at schools you have a reason not to go.”
“Aily’s pregnant again,” Kevin says.
“Well, we know that,” Marilyn murmurs, sticking a teething ring in her daughter’s mouth. “Now knock that shit off, Mad,” she murmurs.
“It’s twins,” Kevin says. “Again.”
“It’s the Colonel’s fault,” Ida said.
“Everything cannot be blamed on the Colonel,” Cedric tells his friend as Madeleine climbs onto his lap.
“The Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam and the gas shortage can be blamed on the Colonel,” Ida differs, getting up to get a beer from the refrigerator. “If he hadn’t insisted you all get married right away,” Ida said, slamming a beer in front of her son-in-law, “Would you all be getting ready to have your third and fourth child before high school graduation? I don’t think so.” She shook her head, broke open the beer, and swilled down half of it in one gulp. “And him a damn Presbyterian too!” she said though none of them knew what this had to do with anything.
Ida belched for emphasis.
“Now I was thinking,” Cedric said, “that a school like Citeaux or McCleiss has married student housing. So’s Notre Dame, I think.”
“I could live there? With the kids?” Kevin looked dubious.
“Yes.”
“Even Saint Clare’s,” Ida said, and Cedric and Marilyn nodded, partial to their alma mater. “The apartments around there are cheap and so are the boarding houses. They might as well be married student housing.”
Kevin looked overwhelmed by it all. They shut up.
The door came open and there was the noise of Meghan, Harv, Meghan’s boy shouting and running around the house like a hooligan, and the baby’s crying as Aileen, fat and tired looking, pushed the girls ahead in their twin stroller. Kevin went to her. They were a knot of conversation and then Kevin walked Aileen up the stairs and put her to bed.
When he had come down, Ida said, “I don’t want you and all them kids going back to the apartment tonight. It’s too small anyway. Why don’t you stay here tonight?”
Kevin nodded.
“I don’t know about studying... Being a college student and all and being a father. It’s... It’s a lot of work.”
Cedric, looking over Kevin’s grades and accomplishments, tried to hide the dismay on his face. Marilyn was a little more blunt.
“If you can play football, go to school, maintain a job at the gas station and still find time to make two more babies, surely you can handle school.”
Kevin was upset. “It’s easy for you to talk about having babies. You all were twice my age when Madeleine was born.”
Kevin was sorry for saying that, and so kept on talking to cover it up, to save him. “I’ll go down the road to Belmont. Take classes there. When I can.”
He looked around them, a little hurt. “What?” he said. “You think if I go to Belmont I’ll just end up being some dumb old gym teacher at Jamnia High School, don’t you?”
None of them said a word.
Suddenly there was screaming from upstairs. They all looked up. No one moved. It seemed like an eternity later Meghan came downstairs looking like hell, her coat disheveled, her son hanging on her left hip.
“Hurry the hell up, Harv!” she shouted.
“Ida,” Meghan said, “that girl’s in labor again.”
“THIS PLACE IS THE COOLEST!” ROY insisted, following Luke and Tina past the second curtain, and swinging on a rail that hung above the ramp they were walking. Coconut padded behind them, her feet making the steel walkway clatter.
“And no one ever comes to visit you?” Roy marveled as he caught up with Luke, walking beside Tina.
“Tina comes to visit,” Luke said. They made a turn and were walking down a long hall with locked, overly varnished old doors.
“But not until a few weeks ago,” she said.
“And you can come and visit me,” Luke said.
“I can?”
Luke was overwhelmed by the gratitude in the boy’s eyes.
“Your home can’t be so bad,” said Luke Madeary, “that you could possibly think of this as a treat.”
They headed down a long flight of stairs and into a concrete floored warehouse, stacked with boxes, large frosted and boarded glass windows filling the space above so that it resembled some industrial church.
“Mom’s nice. But home sucks sometimes,” Roy said.
Tina and Roy followed Luke to a large metal door that looked like the opening to a metal cooler, but Luke shook his head when they came to it and said, “Tina, you and Roy get on one side, and I’ll get on the other. I’ll push. You pull. Best as you can.”
They agreed and struggled for a little bit before finally, with a groan, the door gave way and Tina and Roy had to hop back.
Tina was shocked by a blast of early autumn air, and Roy stood at the opening onto the old train yard, wrapping his arms about his skinny frame.
“Wow,” he said.
“Everything impresses you, kid,” Luke noted, not unimpressed at Roy’s ability to be impressed.
“It’s so... Look at all the boxcars!” Roy said.
“And none of them go anywhere,” Luke told him.
There were four tracks full of old boxcars: Union Pacific, Moo and Oink, CSF, trains hooked together, some abandoned, many rusted, others graffitied. Spaces of weed popped up between them, and beyond them were weeds and small bushes. To their left the noise of the traffic of Michael Street whizzed on, but there wasn’t too much traffic in the middle of the day in a small town on the Ohio border. Beyond the bushes Easerly Street threaded its humble way through town with small, spaced out, out of luck houses.
“It would be so cool to live here,” Roy said.
“I wouldn’t advice it,” Luke told him.
Coconut barked as if in sharp agreement.
“How do you do it?” Roy looked up at Luke.
Luke was about to say Luck when he caught Tina’s expression and said, “People are good to me a lot.”
Roy was about to ask if he ever wanted a home where he wouldn’t have to be afraid, and wouldn’t have to live with just Coconut, but he sensed that this was asking too much, and that maybe there really wasn’t such a home after all.
“I used to look out at those trains,” Luke said, “and want to go some place. But they don’t go anywhere anymore.”
Tina wanted to say, “Let’s go some place,” but she didn’t know where they could go and be home in time for dinner.
Suddenly Roy said, earnestly, “I hate Jamnia.”
That night when Tina and Mackenzie came home together, Ashley was humming some nonsense song in a pleased voice that told Tina something was right for her and wrong for the rest of them. Aileen was standing over the stove, stirring her perpetual pot. Tonight the smell from it was chili. Tina came behind her mother and was about to talk when Aileen put up a hand—she was still in her work clothes—and said, “Don’t talk to me, Martina. I’ve had to deal with your father, and he’s very upset with you right now.”
Tina had that old familiar sinking in her stomach just in time for Kevin to come downstairs with a look of disgust on his face. Tina looked to Mackenzie, who looked equally doubtful.
“You are in such trouble, young lady,” Kevin told her. “You are grounded for a week, and I don’t want you using the phone or going anywhere.”
Before Tina could open her mouth to say, “Not even the Fitzgeralds?” Kevin repeated, “Anywhere.”
Tina was about to ask what this was all about when suddenly she knew.
“I can’t believe you walked into my class and took one of my students out of it,” he said.
“Can I at least try out for the play this week. After school?”
“No,” Kevin told her.
“Oh, what’s the big deal?” Tina said suddenly. “It’s just a stupid gym class anyway.”
Before Kevin could open his mouth to protest or Aileen could turn around and demand that Tina respect her father, Tina imitated Kevin juggling, and said in a voice like a goon: “Toss! Toss! Catch! Catch!” And then, “Never mind! You don’t have to tell me to go to my room. It’s where I was going anyway.”
“I DON’T KNOW WHY PEOPLE say they can’t tell ‘em apart,” Marilyn shook her head, looking at the three toddlers racing around the floor of the waiting room. “Tina’s the trouble. See. Look at her. Trouble all over.”
Ida came from around a corner and said, with a brightness that, if it wasn’t false, was at least, amplified after hours with her laboring daughter.
“Do my girls want to see their new brother and sister?”
“Yeah!” Ashley said at the same time, Tina shouted, “No!” and Madeleine collapsed on the floor in giggles. Cedric looked at his wife, then bent down and picked up the little laughing girl. Tina, seeing that she was so funny, fell on the floor and began to laugh as well. Ashley came to her grandmother. Ida held out one hand for her and the other for Tina, who stopped laughing, raised herself up and caught on, swinging and singing as she went to the room.
“Now you might have to be a little quiet,” Ida advised Tina.
“Yeah,” Ashley said, placing a hand on her hip.
“Mommy,” Madeleine said from Cedric’s arms, “Are you having twins too?”
“No,” she said.
Madeleine said, rather decisively, “Good.”
There was an anxious nurse on one side, and an anxious Kevin on the other. Aileen looked horrid, with bags under her eyes, and they knew that she wouldn’t be with the babies too much longer. She’d have to rest and they’d have to go back to the nursery.
Kevin lifted up Ashley, and Ida lifted up Tina to look down on the sleeping babies.
“Who’s who?” Tina demanded. Each child was identically small, and identically solemn, eyes rolling under the thin shells of their eyelids.
“Blue blanket is the boy. The yellow one’s the girl.”
“I like the way they smell,” Tina decided. “But I don’t like her.” Tina pointed at the baby in yellow.
Ida laughed. Aileen, exhausted, laughed deeply too.
“Martina!” Kevin’s voice was sharp.
“She’s your sister,” Aileen said. “This one’ll be Lindsay. Like Ashley.” Ashley smiled, pleased. “You’ll like her one day.”
“No,” Tina shook her head clinically.
Aileen ignored this and said, “And this one is an M. The way you’re an M. Martina, Mackenzie. Like his grandfather.”
“I don’t like Grandfather,” Tina told her mother, “but I do like Mackenzie,”
Much to her credit, she never had a hard time pronouncing his name, and she had never gotten tired of him. Not even after sixteen years.
Tina was sitting in the middle of the large, heavily quilted bed, finishing up her western civ when she heard the three times knock, the space, the two knocks followed by three more. She stopped, putting down her pen on the notebook and looking to the crucifix overhead. Since she’d made no noise down below, there was jiggling, and then the opening of a door followed by its close. Footsteps came up from downstairs from the hole near the foot of her bed, and then Mackenzie emerged, the yellow light of the halogen lamp by the right side of her bed shining on his golden hair.
“I just wanted to do something nice for Roy,” Tina said.
Mackenzie nodded. “Ian told me that he asked you to.”
“I didn’t mean to piss Dad off quite so bad,” Tina murmured.
“Yeah, he was a little upset,” Mackenzie nodded, and then lay in the bed beside his sister. Absently she stroked his head.
Tina looked to the night stand on her left side. There was a Holy Bible, a Liturgy of the Hours, a pack of Luke’s Lucky Strikes and a dog eared copy of the Bhagavad Gita.
“Should I become a nun, become a Buddhist or remain a freak and have sex with Stearne and Luke?”
Mackenzie leaned on his side, and screwing up his face, asked his sister, “Is there a fourth option?”
“I sure in the hell hope so,” Tina said. “And I sure in the hell know I better not come home tomorrow night.”
“Hum?”
Tina looked around the rafters of her attic room as if expecting someone else to pop out from them. Then she spoke.
“I have to try out for that play. You know that. Dad might as well have worn a sign on his head that said, ‘Disobey me.’”
“Sometimes,” Mackenzie told her. “I wonder if he doesn’t expect it from you.”
“Disobedience?” The idea was laughable.
Mackenzie nodded.
Suddenly he said, “I’m gay.”
Tina ceased stroking his hair.
When she didn’t respond for a while, he repeated, “Martina, I said—”
“I know,” she nodded her head. “That was just sort of out of the blue.”
“That’s kind of where it comes from,” Mackenzie said. “I’d been meaning to tell you. I wasn’t trying to hide it. Just... Never came up.”
“Does Vaughan know?”
Mackenzie nodded.
“How does he feel?”
“He’s Vaughan.” Mackenzie shrugged. “How do you feel?”
“You’ve got it bad for Linus Roache, don’t you?” she said. “And Rich Tafel. He turns you on, doesn’t he?”
Mackenzie colored, but did not answer.
Tina leaned back into bed, fingering the cross of the rosary around her neck before she began to take it off.
“They turn me on too,” she said, frankly. “Oh, Mackenzie, you’re a really cute guy, you know that.”
“If you’re gonna tell me how many girls I could have...”
“No,” Tina looked a little shocked. “I was going to say, I don’t want you moving in on my turf.”
When the young voice on the other end of the phone said, “Hello?” Mackenzie said, “Oh, Vaughan! I’m so happy. I know it’s late, but I just had to tell you before I went to bed that I talked to Tina, and I told her everything. So she knows I’m gay, and she totally accepts it. I can’t tell my parents, though, because they’d flip. But she was just like, ‘Don’t horn in on my territory.’ And it doesn’t make any difference to her at all.”
There was a space of silence. Then Madeleine said, “Well, that’s nice, Mackenzie. Why don’t you let me get my brother. You wanted to talk to him.... Right?”
Mackenzie, trying to process what had just happened, said lamely, “Right.” He wondered if Madeleine had noticed how he’d actually stopped and whispered the word “gay” so that no one would hear if anyone should happen to chance by his room.
Mackenzie told Vaughan everything he’d inadvertently told Madeleine, adding on how he had inadvertently told Madeleine. Then Mackenzie told Vaughan about Tina being grounded.
“But she’s still trying out for the play, right?”
“Of course,” Mackenzie told his friend.
When they were off the phone, Vaughan came into Madeleine’s room as she was getting her clothes out for the next day.
“So now you know,” he said. “Mackenzie wants to know how you feel about it.”
Madeleine pulled out a blouse, and debated with herself if she felt like ironing it or not. She decided against this and put it back in the closet.
“As long as he doesn’t try to be like Ashley and sleep with Rodder too, I can’t really say I give damn.”
MORE ON THURSDAY
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Good for Mackenzie! I am glad he came out. I will be interested to see what happens with him. Lots going on elsewhere too but that was my favourite part so that is why I commented on it. Great writing and I look forward to more in a few days!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Matt, friend. thanks for commenting. One of the reasons I post a little less frequently is because you’re my commenter and the person I have in mind when posting, and I know that now you’re working again, so I don’t want this to be another assignment you feel rushed to do, read and comment. After all, if I’m gauging the time right, it should be about six thirty in the evening of the next day where you are.
But to the story, Mackenzie has indeed come out, or at least come out more. Vaughan knew and in a way he released Vaughan from keeping a secret. As the story goes on we’ll see that Mackenzie had to keep coming out. I like how it plays out in this story, but I don’t know if I’d recommend it to a fifteen year old boy now, or at least I understand why so many boys, in fact, don’t come out. I don’t know, this feels like the beginning of a discussion rather than the end. How do you feel about the whole business?
But to the story, Mackenzie has indeed come out, or at least come out more. Vaughan knew and in a way he released Vaughan from keeping a secret. As the story goes on we’ll see that Mackenzie had to keep coming out. I like how it plays out in this story, but I don’t know if I’d recommend it to a fifteen year old boy now, or at least I understand why so many boys, in fact, don’t come out. I don’t know, this feels like the beginning of a discussion rather than the end. How do you feel about the whole business?
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
I get it that 15 is early to come out for Mackenzie and it is hard at that age or any age really but I was happy for him none the less. I completely understand your thoughts about his coming out too as I didn't come out till I was 18 for fear of how I would be treated at school. Its about 4:30pm here so not too late and I only comment when I have the time and don't feel rushed so don't worry about that. As for work it means I comment a bit later some days but reading your writing is a pleasure and I am happy to comment when I can.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I'm glad to hear it. The thing is, I wrote this before Rossford, and in a way, Brendan is an updated and less pure, perhaps more complex, version of Mackenzie. When I did I hadn't seen so much and so everytime I come to a new story the coming out and the queerness is a little different and less simple, and its just interesting seeing how different Mackenzie's journey is from Brendan's or Sheridan's or from Rob or Donovan or Frey or Cade. in the other stories. As for me, I didn't mature till late and so I got to formulate my morality and philosophy about things before my feelings came to the foreground. But Mackenzie's moment is a moment of triumph, and I felt the same way for myself.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER THREE
CEDRIC WAS STRANGELY QUIET THAT evening. It was not a Kevin Foster strange quiet, or even the strange quiet that most men tend to. The quiet was strange to his children because he seemed distracted. For Cedric to be even the littlest bit distracted was something that never happened in the house on 1959 Michael Street. Madeleine knew that this meant he’d gone out to Holy Spirit to visit Mother’s grave. Whenever he came back he left a part of himself in the past for a while. It took a day or so for all of him to catch up and return to the present. What if Rodder died? Madeleine took the thought out like a rotten tooth and played with it. It bled too much, tasted ironish and felt too slick. It was too raw. She put the idea away. Death was not something she wanted to think about.
Death was a surprise, wasn’t it? It must have been a surprise when Marilyn died, but now it was just a fact of life. For as long as Madeleine could remember she’d had a dead mother. Now she looked around the table at her father, who had served up biscuit quiche, her brother, at Mackenzie and Tina. It could be any of them. One day if it wasn’t her first, it would be one of them, maybe all of them.
Usually Cedric would have picked up on her mood and asked what was wrong with her. He might have been a little sharp and embarrassed her, but he would have asked her.
Tonight he did not.
He left the kitchen a mess, which was to say he expected the children to clean it up, and went to his room. The phone rang a little later, and when no one answered, Madeleine, up to her elbows in dishwater, looked to Vaughan, who shrugged, put down the dry towel and, wiping his hands, crossed the old kitchen to pick up the phone near the refrigerator.
“Hello?” Oh? Ian! What’s up?”
They chatted and murmured for a while. Vaughan laughed a few times. Madeleine decided she liked this Ian.
“Yeah. Yeah. I’ll tell him. You could tell him, you know? Well, all right.”
Vaughan hung up.
“Ian Cane,” Vaughan explained, coming back to dry dishes.
“I figured,” Madeleine told her brother.
Cedric went to bed early, which made him wake early. He came to consciousness on the second phone call where Mackenzie was rattling away to Madeleine, obviously thinking he was talking to Vaughan. Cedric found himself sweating buckets in the hot bed of his closed up room.
He climbed out of bed, and opened a window. He smelled funky to himself. He stripped, and let the cool air and the moonlight dry his body, chill it a little. Too tired to change into anything else, he slipped back into the still wet covers.
He remembered waking up in wetness years before. He thought he’d been sweating then. But there was the smell of iron and of the womb. It was a moonless night and Cedric was struggling out of the confusion of half sleep a long time before he learned that the wetness was not sweat, and the time was a little past two in the morning.
He turned on the light and began trembling, but only a little. He took a breath and put the useless side of him away. He stretched out his red hands, his red arms and began to shake his wife.
“Ced,” her voice was weak.
She looked up at him. His naked body from cheeks to neck to torso, to his sex, was red with blood and then, when she understood she let out a little moan.
Cedric turned around to dial up the hospital, and then Ida. Then he went to the bathroom to wipe up. Marilyn was crying weakly in the bedroom. Cedric came in with water and a sponge and a towel and began pulling the nightgown from her. He could not afford to think right now.
“Shush,” he told his wife gently. “Don’t wake Maddy. We don’t have time for it.”
The naked husband wiped down his bloody wife. The whole bed was bloody, but her stomach was still firm with the child. Cedric slipped on a new nightgown and then brought her down stairs. Somewhere in this he had changed into clothes. He slipped his trench coat over Marilyn and then set out into the autumn night. They drove to the hospital.
Somewhere in the early stages of labor, Ralph came. He looked disheveled. His reddish brown hair was uncombed and nappy. There were bags under his hazel eyes.
“Ida is with Madeleine. She came to the house right away,” Ralph said. “Maddy’s in bed, asleep. Gladys is on her way here.”
“Oh, no,” Cedric shook his head. “I don’t think I can handle Mama right now.”
But Cedric does not remember having to handle Mama or anyone at all. He remembers that not long after sunrise two things happened. They were so connected that Cedric always thought of one person as a transition into the other. The idea of the two of them together in the same time and space has always seemed untenable. The doctors came out and told Cedric that he had a wonderful, small son. A real fighter. And they told him that though his wife had also been a fighter, he could not have her.
Cedric remembers Ralph being beside him, and he remembers seeing Marilyn looking tired and a little, yes, proud. She had wanted to bring the second child into the world. He remembers her hair not limp at all, but very alive, a little a mess, and her breasts, under the hospital gurney, full of milk that would not be used. He remembers asking himself what would be done with it? What happened to a woman’s body when she died?
And then there was the child, little and scowling and grey who would outlive him.
It is not Cedric who tells Madeleine that her mother is dead. She cries and cries and cries. The house is not empty for a long time. It seems as if the house will never be empty again and it never is. The night before the funeral, he realizes that he will sleep alone for the rest of his life. It’s poetic to say that, maybe melodramatic. But it’s true. He is past thirty-five now. Many men, he reasons, have lost their sex lives by this age. He will be alone. He will never make love again. The thought sends him into such a tizzy, his body into such a need that he begins to take his clothes off and run his hands over his whole flesh. He makes love to himself, gently and then violently until he comes wet in his hands, a second wetness in his bed with the hastily turned mattress that still smells of blood. He cleans up and then weeps for a long time. The spell is broken. He is awake now. To the terror of living alone, sleeping alone, a dead wife, two children he does not know how to care for, these people he does not know how to throw out of his home or even if he wants to. He is awake to the knowledge that he will be raising these children alone. He cries and cries and cries until the only comfort is to masturbate again. It isn’t shameful. He doesn’t know why people act as if it is. Teenagers always did. When he was a teenager he thought it was. It’s better than a whore. There’s love here. He loves himself, knows himself, comes sweetly to himself, sleeps and sleeps.
At the funeral they sing “Amazing Grace”. It is the first time the baby comes home. His name: Vaughan William Alexander; such a large name for such a small child. But he will have to have large names and a large will if he is going to thrive. Cedric wonders if the boy will make it as he brings the little bundle into the house.
“He looks so serious,” Madeleine says.
Cedric agrees.
That night they all sleep in the same bed. Madeleine clinging to Cedric, Cedric’s arm a cradle for the serious new arrival on Michael Street.
None of them weeps.
IAN DOES CALL the Fosters, as Vaughan has advised. It is Tina who picks up the phone. They chat for a second. “Yeah. Sure. You’re welcome. Alright, here he is.” She hands her brother the phone.
“We’re doing something on Saturday?” Mackenzie says. “Sure,” he says. “Alright. Vaughan’s deciding? Well, I don’t know if it’ll be wild, but it might be weird.”
“You all don’t look like you’d be friends,” Ian tells Mackenzie baldly. “You all don’t seem anything alike.”
Mackenzie shrugs at the foot of his sister’s bed. “We grew up together. Like, literally. One big happy family.”
When Ian thinks of growing up together he thinks of kids he went to school with, or played on the same soccer team with.
“No,” Mackenzie says. “Vaughan’s mother died giving birth to him. Vaughan’s parents helped my mom and dad out when no one else would. So when we were babies my mom used to care for him too. We even slept in the same cradle and stuff. We’ve grown up in the same house.”
“Like brothers?”
“He’s more my brother than my brothers,” Mackenzie tells Ian.
When Mackenzie gets off the phone, Tina takes the receiver and hangs it up.
“He doesn’t know about the whole gay thing, does he?”
For some reason Mackenzie is suddenly a little resentful.
“God, I just met him, Tina. One thing at a time.”
He stretches and yawns. “I need to go to bed.”
“Are you upset with me?”
Mackenzie turns his unintentionally dazzling smile on his sister, and she knows he’ll break someone’s heart.
“No, I really am tired. We can’t all be night owls.”
“Oh, well,” Martina shrugs.
Mackenzie rises, kicks out his legs, and gets ready for bed.
Downstairs, in his own bed, under the window that looks over the side yard, Mackenzie tries to convince himself that he feels the same way about Ian he feels about Vaughan. But this is ridiculous. He can’t tell Ian because Ian would be the victim of his... gayness. He hates to admit it. It makes him feel a little dirty and a little triumphant every time he’s with Ian.
Mackenzie steadfastly refuses to masturbate to the fantasy of losing his virginity to Ian.
Would I still be a virgin if I had sex with a guy? Or does it have to be a girl?
Though it seems Vaughan has recently determined to never have sex with anyone, Mackenzie thinks that only his best friend would be able to handle a question like that.
A STRANGE ARRANGEMENT follows in those days. 1959 Michael Street is never empty. Meghan is in the process of divorcing Harv, and she and her son are over frequently. Kevin and Aileen and the kids end up there all the time. Louise, and her little girl, and the cousins from Crawford Street are constantly bringing food over. Cedric is teaching himself to cook, and as for teaching, he has told Ralph and Ida that he will never do it again.
“That part of my life is over.”
Cedric helps Kevin and Aileen find a place to live that’s not a closet sized apartment over the mechanic’s gas station. There is a little house down the corner. Cedric helps a couple of his cousins get into college and doesn’t mind watching after Meghan’s boy. The secret is that it’s just easier to care for others than it is to wrap yourself up in pain. Ralph comes, or Father Brumbaugh—who isn’t senile yet-and they give him daily Communion. In the cracks of free time, Cedric finds himself writing a new play. He has no idea this is the one that will bring him to the attention of New York, and make the way for his eventual role as playwright laureate of the state.
Margaret Stearne will be in this play. The Stearne children are in and out of the house, though Cedric cannot tell Margaret’s brothers apart. The ever changing scene on 1959 Michael is a comfort.
But patterns do emerge. The Foster children are there frequently, practically live in the house. Tina and Madeleine are obsessed with their little brothers and each other. Ashley is obsessed with flirting with boys and men. Cedric does not like her, even when she is a toddler, and he tells Ida that she’d better “watch out for that one”. Lindsay is a colicky baby. There is something mean about her even then. Suddenly she will not take to Aileen’s breast, and Aileen has become used to nursing two babies at once. So, one day, Aileen lifts Vaughan to her chest, and beside Mackenzie he takes the place of the twin. They milk together, are weaned together, sleep together, go from house to house together, are watched by their sisters together, and grow up to share secrets together. Even when Mackenzie gets real brothers, this doesn’t change anything. He scarcely notices the last two children. There is no closeness with Lindsay, but only a vague annoyance Mackenzie feels for his actual twin. He is always Vaughan’s shadow, or either Vaughan is his. Even when Mackenzie makes his transformation into a beautiful young man and Vaughan remains himself—or waits on the sidelines to wonder who his Self is—their relationship only deepens.
i v.
Mackenzie Foster is in the library of Jamnia High School during lunch hour. He remembers Vaughan spending the majority of his free time here the year before. Mackenzie has found the most secret table he can. The library is clean smelling, and fluorescent beams give a merciless light to tables populated by one or two loners avoiding lunch who also avoid smokers on the stoop. These kids are hunched together here, not so much learning or studying, as huddling against the miseries of high school life. There are new computers the school board just bought last year and then there are rows of shelves.
Beyond these rows are small study corrals, set each between the long windows that look out over the little untended courtyard at the center of the school. Across that courtyard Mackenzie sees the windows of the hall that leads to the cafeteria where he should be right now. For the first time in his life he really hates high school. He hunches down at one of these corrals to read the book he just brought home yesterday, and has spent the whole morning hiding in his locker face down, under all of his other books. Sitting through morning classes, his heart has thumped and his skin tingled to imagine this book burning a hole through the fragile metal of his locker.
MACKENZIE FOSTER HAS BEEN LOOKING for books. He has always read. Not like Vaughan who was ridiculously ambitious, who taught himself Latin in the sixth grade and spent one summer learning Old English so that he could read Beowulf. But up until now Mackenzie has randomly grabbed books from shelves and most of these have been fiction. For the first time he finds himself gravitating toward long books with names that promise solutions to questions.
At school the subjects are limited. He ends up searching through the church library and then going downtown to the large pink bricked, white pillared library across the street from Windmill Foods, the depressed brick building where his mother works.
He admits to himself what he is really looking for. He checks these books out, wondering if the computer will go off, start beeping and telling him he’s not old enough or the subject matter is too racy. Jamnia is not a small town. It is a town. It’s a city, but certainly no Chicago. Not even a Fort Wayne. People know people. Maybe the librarian will know his mother and father, but it’s just as likely he or she will not. There’s really no reason his mother or father would come into a library anyway. But as the librarian, a man in silver bangles with an elf like face and curly greyish brown locks, scans his card, Mackenzie expects him to ask, “Are you a faggot?”
Mackenzie makes it home, stuffing the books in his backpack, peddling on his bike quickly. Not riding anywhere near Vaughan’s house. The house on 1151 South Logan is the color of raspberry yogurt after the cup’s been opened and eaten and the remains darkened by the day. It sits under elms, with a little enclosed porch and a line of seven windows, on the floor above the two large windows on either side of the raspberry colored square, one Ashley’s room, one Lindsay’s. Once upon a time he wanted one of these rooms and not his that looks over the side yard into the McAlistairs’. Above that is the mansard roof, its sides coming together at one point, a slim brick chimney popping up to the left of the little dormer with its wide window from which Tina does her spying on the world.
Mackenzie rolls his bike along the side of the house, sticks it in the two story garage, and then goes through the back door up to his room. He’s tried to stuff his book bag under his bed. When this does not work he stuffs it under a pile of clothing- ironically enough- in the closet.
Today he has taken a chance and is sneaking one of these books to school.
“HEY, KENZIE!”
Mackenzie almost shouts, and shuts the book close.
Ian peruses the cover.
“The Silence of Sodom?” It’s a plain white book with a little rosary on the cover.
Mackenzie grins.
“Can I see?” Ian asks, putting his hand out.
Mackenzie debates saying, “No”. The best tactic is to be nonchalant. He hands the book over.
“I missed you at lunch,” Ian is saying.
At the same time Mackenzie is touched by this. His heart is actually palpitating for the nearness of the older boy. Mackenzie is also terrified what Ian will make of him if he realizes this, or deduces too much from the title of the book.
“The Silence of Sodom,” Ian reads, “Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism.”
Ian tilts his head, and his dark eyes give Mackenzie a look the other boy cannot decipher.
“You into this stuff?” Ian says, and Mackenzie cannot tell if this is approval, disgust or what. He goes on, his index finger stroking the little bit of black beard under his lower lip. “I’d expect that from Vaughan. Or Tina. I guess you’re a radical too?” he grins approvingly, “That’s cool.”
Mackenzie is instantly relieved. He wants to breathe, to take a series of deep breaths. He wants to collapse onto the floor. Instead he says, “Don’t you all have radical Episcopalians?”
“We don’t need ‘em,” Ian says. “My Dad’s Catholic. I kinda wish I was too. You guys... With that tired old Vatican and shit. You got stuff to fight for. We don’t. It’s just like anything goes. You want a woman priest? Here you go. You want some gay guys getting married? Sure. It’s different with you all. You’ve got an establishment and all, and you’ve got to fight for rights. Do you go to rallies and stuff?”
“No!” Mackenzie wants to laugh hard. He has no idea why. He is enjoying that Ian is so cool, and he’s feeling guilty for watching the other boy stroke the little bit of black beard under his chin over and over again, watching him lick his red lips, smile and cock his head like a model.
“What?” Ian stops talking, Mackenzie has lost the thread of the other boy’s conversation.
You’re cute that way. All confused and everything.
“Nothing,” Mackenzie says grinning, and makes himself stop thinking of Ian Cane this way. God, this has always been the problem and now that they’re becoming friends the problem is up in his face. No one has really asked him what made him gay. How he knew. He’s not sure he does know except that girls don’t turn him on and thinking about Stearne does. Wondering what Rodder looks like naked makes him hard. He wonders if all boys go through this. He thinks they probably do. He and Vaughan never did a “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” but he’s heard of “Elephant Dance” and “Wiener in the Bun”. “Bread and Butter,” and all the sex games straight guys play with each other. So all boys must go through this. Somehow. Some way. And maybe what he feels for Ian isn’t exactly gay. Or not exclusively?
Mackenzie realizes that Ian is watching him, waiting to speak.
“Hum?” Mackenzie looks up, and brings himself back to the present.
“I had come to say Vaughan’s with Maddy and Tina out on the porch,” Ian told him. “I wanted to know if it’s alright for me to sit here with you for a while?”
But it was Ian all along. Watching him in band, thinking about what he might be doing when he wasn’t around. It was actually the unwillingness to picture Ian naked or violate his privacy that made Mackenzie know.
But Ian is still waiting for an answer. It feels like Ian’s been standing over him for an hour, but he just got here about twenty seconds ago.
I wanted to know if it’s alright for me to sit here with you for a while?
Mackenzie nods, trying to nod slowly and seem as if it’s all the same to him. As Ian sits beside him, Mackenzie reminds himself not to seem too cold in his desire to be cool.
THIS WEEK WE'RE DOING SOMETHING DIFFERENT. INSTEAD OF A LARGE WEEKEND PORTION, I WILL BE POSTING A FRIDAY SECTION TOMORROW AFTERNOON. HAVE A GREAT NIGHT.
CEDRIC WAS STRANGELY QUIET THAT evening. It was not a Kevin Foster strange quiet, or even the strange quiet that most men tend to. The quiet was strange to his children because he seemed distracted. For Cedric to be even the littlest bit distracted was something that never happened in the house on 1959 Michael Street. Madeleine knew that this meant he’d gone out to Holy Spirit to visit Mother’s grave. Whenever he came back he left a part of himself in the past for a while. It took a day or so for all of him to catch up and return to the present. What if Rodder died? Madeleine took the thought out like a rotten tooth and played with it. It bled too much, tasted ironish and felt too slick. It was too raw. She put the idea away. Death was not something she wanted to think about.
Death was a surprise, wasn’t it? It must have been a surprise when Marilyn died, but now it was just a fact of life. For as long as Madeleine could remember she’d had a dead mother. Now she looked around the table at her father, who had served up biscuit quiche, her brother, at Mackenzie and Tina. It could be any of them. One day if it wasn’t her first, it would be one of them, maybe all of them.
Usually Cedric would have picked up on her mood and asked what was wrong with her. He might have been a little sharp and embarrassed her, but he would have asked her.
Tonight he did not.
He left the kitchen a mess, which was to say he expected the children to clean it up, and went to his room. The phone rang a little later, and when no one answered, Madeleine, up to her elbows in dishwater, looked to Vaughan, who shrugged, put down the dry towel and, wiping his hands, crossed the old kitchen to pick up the phone near the refrigerator.
“Hello?” Oh? Ian! What’s up?”
They chatted and murmured for a while. Vaughan laughed a few times. Madeleine decided she liked this Ian.
“Yeah. Yeah. I’ll tell him. You could tell him, you know? Well, all right.”
Vaughan hung up.
“Ian Cane,” Vaughan explained, coming back to dry dishes.
“I figured,” Madeleine told her brother.
Cedric went to bed early, which made him wake early. He came to consciousness on the second phone call where Mackenzie was rattling away to Madeleine, obviously thinking he was talking to Vaughan. Cedric found himself sweating buckets in the hot bed of his closed up room.
He climbed out of bed, and opened a window. He smelled funky to himself. He stripped, and let the cool air and the moonlight dry his body, chill it a little. Too tired to change into anything else, he slipped back into the still wet covers.
He remembered waking up in wetness years before. He thought he’d been sweating then. But there was the smell of iron and of the womb. It was a moonless night and Cedric was struggling out of the confusion of half sleep a long time before he learned that the wetness was not sweat, and the time was a little past two in the morning.
He turned on the light and began trembling, but only a little. He took a breath and put the useless side of him away. He stretched out his red hands, his red arms and began to shake his wife.
“Ced,” her voice was weak.
She looked up at him. His naked body from cheeks to neck to torso, to his sex, was red with blood and then, when she understood she let out a little moan.
Cedric turned around to dial up the hospital, and then Ida. Then he went to the bathroom to wipe up. Marilyn was crying weakly in the bedroom. Cedric came in with water and a sponge and a towel and began pulling the nightgown from her. He could not afford to think right now.
“Shush,” he told his wife gently. “Don’t wake Maddy. We don’t have time for it.”
The naked husband wiped down his bloody wife. The whole bed was bloody, but her stomach was still firm with the child. Cedric slipped on a new nightgown and then brought her down stairs. Somewhere in this he had changed into clothes. He slipped his trench coat over Marilyn and then set out into the autumn night. They drove to the hospital.
Somewhere in the early stages of labor, Ralph came. He looked disheveled. His reddish brown hair was uncombed and nappy. There were bags under his hazel eyes.
“Ida is with Madeleine. She came to the house right away,” Ralph said. “Maddy’s in bed, asleep. Gladys is on her way here.”
“Oh, no,” Cedric shook his head. “I don’t think I can handle Mama right now.”
But Cedric does not remember having to handle Mama or anyone at all. He remembers that not long after sunrise two things happened. They were so connected that Cedric always thought of one person as a transition into the other. The idea of the two of them together in the same time and space has always seemed untenable. The doctors came out and told Cedric that he had a wonderful, small son. A real fighter. And they told him that though his wife had also been a fighter, he could not have her.
Cedric remembers Ralph being beside him, and he remembers seeing Marilyn looking tired and a little, yes, proud. She had wanted to bring the second child into the world. He remembers her hair not limp at all, but very alive, a little a mess, and her breasts, under the hospital gurney, full of milk that would not be used. He remembers asking himself what would be done with it? What happened to a woman’s body when she died?
And then there was the child, little and scowling and grey who would outlive him.
It is not Cedric who tells Madeleine that her mother is dead. She cries and cries and cries. The house is not empty for a long time. It seems as if the house will never be empty again and it never is. The night before the funeral, he realizes that he will sleep alone for the rest of his life. It’s poetic to say that, maybe melodramatic. But it’s true. He is past thirty-five now. Many men, he reasons, have lost their sex lives by this age. He will be alone. He will never make love again. The thought sends him into such a tizzy, his body into such a need that he begins to take his clothes off and run his hands over his whole flesh. He makes love to himself, gently and then violently until he comes wet in his hands, a second wetness in his bed with the hastily turned mattress that still smells of blood. He cleans up and then weeps for a long time. The spell is broken. He is awake now. To the terror of living alone, sleeping alone, a dead wife, two children he does not know how to care for, these people he does not know how to throw out of his home or even if he wants to. He is awake to the knowledge that he will be raising these children alone. He cries and cries and cries until the only comfort is to masturbate again. It isn’t shameful. He doesn’t know why people act as if it is. Teenagers always did. When he was a teenager he thought it was. It’s better than a whore. There’s love here. He loves himself, knows himself, comes sweetly to himself, sleeps and sleeps.
At the funeral they sing “Amazing Grace”. It is the first time the baby comes home. His name: Vaughan William Alexander; such a large name for such a small child. But he will have to have large names and a large will if he is going to thrive. Cedric wonders if the boy will make it as he brings the little bundle into the house.
“He looks so serious,” Madeleine says.
Cedric agrees.
That night they all sleep in the same bed. Madeleine clinging to Cedric, Cedric’s arm a cradle for the serious new arrival on Michael Street.
None of them weeps.
IAN DOES CALL the Fosters, as Vaughan has advised. It is Tina who picks up the phone. They chat for a second. “Yeah. Sure. You’re welcome. Alright, here he is.” She hands her brother the phone.
“We’re doing something on Saturday?” Mackenzie says. “Sure,” he says. “Alright. Vaughan’s deciding? Well, I don’t know if it’ll be wild, but it might be weird.”
“You all don’t look like you’d be friends,” Ian tells Mackenzie baldly. “You all don’t seem anything alike.”
Mackenzie shrugs at the foot of his sister’s bed. “We grew up together. Like, literally. One big happy family.”
When Ian thinks of growing up together he thinks of kids he went to school with, or played on the same soccer team with.
“No,” Mackenzie says. “Vaughan’s mother died giving birth to him. Vaughan’s parents helped my mom and dad out when no one else would. So when we were babies my mom used to care for him too. We even slept in the same cradle and stuff. We’ve grown up in the same house.”
“Like brothers?”
“He’s more my brother than my brothers,” Mackenzie tells Ian.
When Mackenzie gets off the phone, Tina takes the receiver and hangs it up.
“He doesn’t know about the whole gay thing, does he?”
For some reason Mackenzie is suddenly a little resentful.
“God, I just met him, Tina. One thing at a time.”
He stretches and yawns. “I need to go to bed.”
“Are you upset with me?”
Mackenzie turns his unintentionally dazzling smile on his sister, and she knows he’ll break someone’s heart.
“No, I really am tired. We can’t all be night owls.”
“Oh, well,” Martina shrugs.
Mackenzie rises, kicks out his legs, and gets ready for bed.
Downstairs, in his own bed, under the window that looks over the side yard, Mackenzie tries to convince himself that he feels the same way about Ian he feels about Vaughan. But this is ridiculous. He can’t tell Ian because Ian would be the victim of his... gayness. He hates to admit it. It makes him feel a little dirty and a little triumphant every time he’s with Ian.
Mackenzie steadfastly refuses to masturbate to the fantasy of losing his virginity to Ian.
Would I still be a virgin if I had sex with a guy? Or does it have to be a girl?
Though it seems Vaughan has recently determined to never have sex with anyone, Mackenzie thinks that only his best friend would be able to handle a question like that.
A STRANGE ARRANGEMENT follows in those days. 1959 Michael Street is never empty. Meghan is in the process of divorcing Harv, and she and her son are over frequently. Kevin and Aileen and the kids end up there all the time. Louise, and her little girl, and the cousins from Crawford Street are constantly bringing food over. Cedric is teaching himself to cook, and as for teaching, he has told Ralph and Ida that he will never do it again.
“That part of my life is over.”
Cedric helps Kevin and Aileen find a place to live that’s not a closet sized apartment over the mechanic’s gas station. There is a little house down the corner. Cedric helps a couple of his cousins get into college and doesn’t mind watching after Meghan’s boy. The secret is that it’s just easier to care for others than it is to wrap yourself up in pain. Ralph comes, or Father Brumbaugh—who isn’t senile yet-and they give him daily Communion. In the cracks of free time, Cedric finds himself writing a new play. He has no idea this is the one that will bring him to the attention of New York, and make the way for his eventual role as playwright laureate of the state.
Margaret Stearne will be in this play. The Stearne children are in and out of the house, though Cedric cannot tell Margaret’s brothers apart. The ever changing scene on 1959 Michael is a comfort.
But patterns do emerge. The Foster children are there frequently, practically live in the house. Tina and Madeleine are obsessed with their little brothers and each other. Ashley is obsessed with flirting with boys and men. Cedric does not like her, even when she is a toddler, and he tells Ida that she’d better “watch out for that one”. Lindsay is a colicky baby. There is something mean about her even then. Suddenly she will not take to Aileen’s breast, and Aileen has become used to nursing two babies at once. So, one day, Aileen lifts Vaughan to her chest, and beside Mackenzie he takes the place of the twin. They milk together, are weaned together, sleep together, go from house to house together, are watched by their sisters together, and grow up to share secrets together. Even when Mackenzie gets real brothers, this doesn’t change anything. He scarcely notices the last two children. There is no closeness with Lindsay, but only a vague annoyance Mackenzie feels for his actual twin. He is always Vaughan’s shadow, or either Vaughan is his. Even when Mackenzie makes his transformation into a beautiful young man and Vaughan remains himself—or waits on the sidelines to wonder who his Self is—their relationship only deepens.
i v.
Mackenzie Foster is in the library of Jamnia High School during lunch hour. He remembers Vaughan spending the majority of his free time here the year before. Mackenzie has found the most secret table he can. The library is clean smelling, and fluorescent beams give a merciless light to tables populated by one or two loners avoiding lunch who also avoid smokers on the stoop. These kids are hunched together here, not so much learning or studying, as huddling against the miseries of high school life. There are new computers the school board just bought last year and then there are rows of shelves.
Beyond these rows are small study corrals, set each between the long windows that look out over the little untended courtyard at the center of the school. Across that courtyard Mackenzie sees the windows of the hall that leads to the cafeteria where he should be right now. For the first time in his life he really hates high school. He hunches down at one of these corrals to read the book he just brought home yesterday, and has spent the whole morning hiding in his locker face down, under all of his other books. Sitting through morning classes, his heart has thumped and his skin tingled to imagine this book burning a hole through the fragile metal of his locker.
MACKENZIE FOSTER HAS BEEN LOOKING for books. He has always read. Not like Vaughan who was ridiculously ambitious, who taught himself Latin in the sixth grade and spent one summer learning Old English so that he could read Beowulf. But up until now Mackenzie has randomly grabbed books from shelves and most of these have been fiction. For the first time he finds himself gravitating toward long books with names that promise solutions to questions.
At school the subjects are limited. He ends up searching through the church library and then going downtown to the large pink bricked, white pillared library across the street from Windmill Foods, the depressed brick building where his mother works.
He admits to himself what he is really looking for. He checks these books out, wondering if the computer will go off, start beeping and telling him he’s not old enough or the subject matter is too racy. Jamnia is not a small town. It is a town. It’s a city, but certainly no Chicago. Not even a Fort Wayne. People know people. Maybe the librarian will know his mother and father, but it’s just as likely he or she will not. There’s really no reason his mother or father would come into a library anyway. But as the librarian, a man in silver bangles with an elf like face and curly greyish brown locks, scans his card, Mackenzie expects him to ask, “Are you a faggot?”
Mackenzie makes it home, stuffing the books in his backpack, peddling on his bike quickly. Not riding anywhere near Vaughan’s house. The house on 1151 South Logan is the color of raspberry yogurt after the cup’s been opened and eaten and the remains darkened by the day. It sits under elms, with a little enclosed porch and a line of seven windows, on the floor above the two large windows on either side of the raspberry colored square, one Ashley’s room, one Lindsay’s. Once upon a time he wanted one of these rooms and not his that looks over the side yard into the McAlistairs’. Above that is the mansard roof, its sides coming together at one point, a slim brick chimney popping up to the left of the little dormer with its wide window from which Tina does her spying on the world.
Mackenzie rolls his bike along the side of the house, sticks it in the two story garage, and then goes through the back door up to his room. He’s tried to stuff his book bag under his bed. When this does not work he stuffs it under a pile of clothing- ironically enough- in the closet.
Today he has taken a chance and is sneaking one of these books to school.
“HEY, KENZIE!”
Mackenzie almost shouts, and shuts the book close.
Ian peruses the cover.
“The Silence of Sodom?” It’s a plain white book with a little rosary on the cover.
Mackenzie grins.
“Can I see?” Ian asks, putting his hand out.
Mackenzie debates saying, “No”. The best tactic is to be nonchalant. He hands the book over.
“I missed you at lunch,” Ian is saying.
At the same time Mackenzie is touched by this. His heart is actually palpitating for the nearness of the older boy. Mackenzie is also terrified what Ian will make of him if he realizes this, or deduces too much from the title of the book.
“The Silence of Sodom,” Ian reads, “Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism.”
Ian tilts his head, and his dark eyes give Mackenzie a look the other boy cannot decipher.
“You into this stuff?” Ian says, and Mackenzie cannot tell if this is approval, disgust or what. He goes on, his index finger stroking the little bit of black beard under his lower lip. “I’d expect that from Vaughan. Or Tina. I guess you’re a radical too?” he grins approvingly, “That’s cool.”
Mackenzie is instantly relieved. He wants to breathe, to take a series of deep breaths. He wants to collapse onto the floor. Instead he says, “Don’t you all have radical Episcopalians?”
“We don’t need ‘em,” Ian says. “My Dad’s Catholic. I kinda wish I was too. You guys... With that tired old Vatican and shit. You got stuff to fight for. We don’t. It’s just like anything goes. You want a woman priest? Here you go. You want some gay guys getting married? Sure. It’s different with you all. You’ve got an establishment and all, and you’ve got to fight for rights. Do you go to rallies and stuff?”
“No!” Mackenzie wants to laugh hard. He has no idea why. He is enjoying that Ian is so cool, and he’s feeling guilty for watching the other boy stroke the little bit of black beard under his chin over and over again, watching him lick his red lips, smile and cock his head like a model.
“What?” Ian stops talking, Mackenzie has lost the thread of the other boy’s conversation.
You’re cute that way. All confused and everything.
“Nothing,” Mackenzie says grinning, and makes himself stop thinking of Ian Cane this way. God, this has always been the problem and now that they’re becoming friends the problem is up in his face. No one has really asked him what made him gay. How he knew. He’s not sure he does know except that girls don’t turn him on and thinking about Stearne does. Wondering what Rodder looks like naked makes him hard. He wonders if all boys go through this. He thinks they probably do. He and Vaughan never did a “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” but he’s heard of “Elephant Dance” and “Wiener in the Bun”. “Bread and Butter,” and all the sex games straight guys play with each other. So all boys must go through this. Somehow. Some way. And maybe what he feels for Ian isn’t exactly gay. Or not exclusively?
Mackenzie realizes that Ian is watching him, waiting to speak.
“Hum?” Mackenzie looks up, and brings himself back to the present.
“I had come to say Vaughan’s with Maddy and Tina out on the porch,” Ian told him. “I wanted to know if it’s alright for me to sit here with you for a while?”
But it was Ian all along. Watching him in band, thinking about what he might be doing when he wasn’t around. It was actually the unwillingness to picture Ian naked or violate his privacy that made Mackenzie know.
But Ian is still waiting for an answer. It feels like Ian’s been standing over him for an hour, but he just got here about twenty seconds ago.
I wanted to know if it’s alright for me to sit here with you for a while?
Mackenzie nods, trying to nod slowly and seem as if it’s all the same to him. As Ian sits beside him, Mackenzie reminds himself not to seem too cold in his desire to be cool.
THIS WEEK WE'RE DOING SOMETHING DIFFERENT. INSTEAD OF A LARGE WEEKEND PORTION, I WILL BE POSTING A FRIDAY SECTION TOMORROW AFTERNOON. HAVE A GREAT NIGHT.
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great end to the chapter. I feel so sorry for what happened to Marilyn. I know at this point it is far in the past but hearing about it is still sad. I wonder if Mackenzie and Ian will ever become more then friends? It will be interesting to read what happens. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow! I hope you are having a excellent night too!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I know, even though we knew what would happen, it is so very sad to read about it and to be right there. I think the only way I could ever let a character died is if I'm looking at it from the past as a done event, and in away, part of what this story is about is how time isn't really linear and everything's sort of in the present. I feel like that's all I want to say right now without giving anything away. I've had a great night and can't wait till tomorrow to post some more. Have you been well?
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Yeah I have been good. I went to the movies today and saw The King Of Staten Island (A pretty good movie), which after not being able to do for months is a pleasure I will never take for granted again!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I'm glad you had a great time at the movies, and here is a new section....
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
C H A P T E R
F O U R
v.
WHEN SHE SAID, “OH, I think Ian should ask,” even though Ian was taken aback, he waited for the rationale behind Tina’s suggestion to show itself.
“Well,” Tina explained, wiping her hands off and balling up the napkin she tossed back onto her tray, “You’re Lebanese. Stearne is Lebanese. It could be like... You know,” Tina looked from Madeleine to Vaughan. “A brotha helping another brotha out.”
“Oh, my God,” Madeleine murmured.
Ian cocked his head.
“He’s white, and I’m white,” Ian said. “I don’t think white people believe in helping brothas out.”
“Well they should,” said Tina. “We should. Besides, you’re not exactly white, you know. Lebanese people are... Arabs.”
“Lebanese people are Lebanese,” Ian said, breaking off a piece of a cookie. Roy took the rest. “And only my dad is Lebanese. And I think he’s only half Lebanese which is why if you ever showed up at our house and said we weren’t white, I think he’d flip.”
“We’re not white either,” Mackenzie announced.
“Oh, God, here we go again,” Vaughan shook his head.
“Don’t ‘Oh, God’’ me.”
“Mackenzie Allyn Foster, there is no one whiter than you.”
“I’m an Indian. We’re Indians. And proud.”
Ian stared blankly at the blond haired, blue eyed boy. He looked back to Vaughan who said, “I don’t want to touch it.”
“Check the registry at the Tsalagi,” Mackenzie said.
“The who?” said Roy.
“The Tsalagi- ” Tina filled him in. “The bar, you know. It’s supposed to be like a club for all the Cherokee families in town.”
“That’s right,” Mackenzie went on, “And all the Indian families in the area are on the registry- including the Fosters. Technically we’re Cherokee Indians.”
“But what are you all really?” Ian said.
He was shocked to suddenly see the fiercest look in Mackenzie’s eyes.
“We’re really Cherokee.”
WHITE PEOPLE ARE FUCKED UP.
That’s all I can say. The first thing that fucks them up is this whole business of being white in the first place. I don’t think I even know what it is anymore. Like take Rodder for instance. The day he came to the door of our house, Madeleine spent a lot of time trying to tell Dad “He’s Mexican. Not white!” Dad didn’t believe her. It took a long time for me to realize that they have white Mexicans. And hell they have Black Hispanics. So really, it’s not white people I guess. It’s color in general that’s fucked up. Everybody’s sitting next to a color, claiming this, claiming that.
Take this town for instance. It’s a bunch of people in this town but first we’ve got a lot of Levantines- some are Arabs, but most are Lebanese. The Lebanese get upset when you call them Arabs, and I think part of this is just that old hatred of looking white but not BEING white. But then the other part is that they are SYRIANS and will tell you loudly that a SYRIAN is not an ARAB. I’ve heard Egyptians say the same thing about themselves. So you’ve got people like the Stearnes and the Canes and they look pretty white. You might think they’re Italians or something, and then you realize: no, they’re Lebanese. They don’t even have those Lebanese names anymore.
Now the second big group of white people in town are the Indians. Or the Cherokee. All my life, growing up with Mackenzie I’ve known how they had their own country and their own capital city and language. They came from Georgia. We’re connected to them because they also had slaves. I didn’t know they had mixed blood so much that many of them were already white, but they still counted themselves as Indians. The long and short of it with our Indians is that when they got sent away to Oklahoma, one brief stop on the Trail of Tears was in Chattanooga. It was here that a few souls realized that they didn’t want to travel on to Oklahoma, one: because it was too far, and two: just out of spite. I think they had an idea that they could pass for white and make a happy compromise out of being Indian and being white people. It wasn’t such a bad idea Tina told me. She said that once upon a time Irish people and Polish people and Italians weren’t counted as white people. The Cherokee families that broke off and headed north were more white than them. If white meant Anglo-Saxon. And it did. For that matter the slaves were more white.
The slaves.
That’s where we come in.
It was pretty much the idea of a slave to head north. Here the Cherokee would lose their slaves. It wasn’t legal. But here they could start over again with people who—for the most part—were related to them. And like many a down and out person, the Cherokee weren’t adverse to getting as much help as possible. It’s easier to get help from free people than servants. And when they had reached Ohio—this is where we come in—Louis Foster, who was a brother to one of Colonel Foster’s great-grand-somethings, wrote down to New Orleans and New York and Pennsylvania for some free Black people to join in the effort. The other Fosters and McKennas also wrote to Indians who had whitened up a little. All in all the town was going to be quite an experiment.
The Lebanese wouldn’t come for a while. They’d come after the Scots-Irish and before the Poles. But at this time Black people and kinda-sorta Indians were flocking in. And then up from New Orleans came the first Catholics, all Black, all burning fingernails and casting spells. Later on the first white Catholics- priests and nuns- came. They all settled across the river in Canaan, and here in Jamnia they settled on Le Rue de Croix Fraus. But no one but them could pronounce it, so in the end they just called it Crawford Street. Any other place except New Orleans these niggahs would have been considered much too strange to talk to, but in this town everyone was coming up strange and so they seemed to blend in.
Somewhere out of all that blending came the Fitzgeralds.
“MS. FOSTER,” Stearne pronounced in his usual sharp voice accompanied by the mocking eyebrow.
Tina had been walking toward the glass doors of the smoking porch.
“I hate to interrupt you in the midst of skipping- ”
“I wasn’t skipping, Stearne.”
“Well, I guess it is sort of early in the year to run out of absences.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“I thought you’d just like to know that I’ll be putting up the cast list at the end of sixth period.”
“Oh,” Tina tried to manufacture nonchalance.
Stearne went on. “You seem awfully casual. I mean for someone so interested in finding out who got what part that she wanted to make a Lebanese connection—”
“How did you- ?”
Stearne put a finger to his lips.
“I have my ways, Ms. Foster.”
“I’m gonna kill Cane.”
“If you think you’re able.” When Tina looked at him, the little man explained.
“That was a joke, Ms. Foster. You know... Cain and Abel.”
` “I get it… Now,” Tina said, instantly upset that for the second time in a short conversation she’d been brought up... short.
“By the way,” Stearne said as Tina was turning around to leave, “I’m actually only a quarter Lebanese.”
Out on the porch, Luke handed her a Lucky Strike without even looking at her.
“Unfiltered.”
“I figured you’d need it,” Luke said, grinning up at her from where he sat on the stoop. “Stearne and all.”
“He’s something else,” Tina agreed, taking out her own lighter. “Goddamn, what’s in this?” she demanded, almost coughing.
“It’s what’s not in it- ” Luke said. “The filter.”
They sat smoking for a while, waiting for the fifth period bell to ring. Derrick Todd drove back into the parking lot in his mother’s Lexus. He swung out with Lindsay on his shoulder. They attempted to come up the steps without speaking.
“Hello to you, too,” Tina said to her sister.
“Oh,” Lindsay looked surprised. She was a purer, slightly thinner version of Ashley. In her jeans and white blouse, with her blue-jeaned and blond football playing boyfriend, she looked nothing like Tina. “I didn’t notice you.”
“I guess,” Tina said, taking a drag from her cigarette. “Hey, Derrick,” she said.
“Hey,” he was a junior. His hands were jammed in his pockets as he smiled nervously, curly hair combed back and gelled on both sides.
Tina smiled back slowly. “I guess Lindsay’s what the good guys on the team end up with. Right, Sis?”
Lindsay looked irritated.
“Right, Martina.” She hoisted her school bag over her shoulder, “Tina, the bells about to ring, I’ve got class—”
“I know you think you do,” Tina commented. Luke barked out a laugh. Derrick just gave a more desperate grin. Lindsay did not understand the insult.
“I’ll see you at home,” Lindsay was gone.
“My sister,” Tina shook her head and laughed. “What a bitch.”
“You must be such an embarrassment to your family.” Luke inhaled the last of his cigarette, crushed the stub out under his work boot, and placed a callused hand in his brown hair. “What does your Dad do when he sees you out here smoking?”
“What most Fosters at Jamnia High School do,” Tina said. “Pretend we’re not related.”
Ian, Vaughan, and Mackenzie stopped talking when Lindsay arrived at Mackenzie’s locker. Vaughan did not want to stop talking, but had no choice. The last time he had acknowledged Lindsay was in that fatal sixth grade year when he was not in homeroom with Mackenzie (twins were never put in the same homeroom at Our Lady of Jamnia). He’d stood up to make a speech during English in which he had announced that Lindsay was a stuck up bitch. He’d paid for this in many demerits, but it had been worth it.
“I just wanted to say that you’d better start thinking about where we’re going on our band trip.”
Mackenzie nodded, but Vaughan said, “You came for this?”
Lindsay debated pretending to be surprised at seeing Vaughan, but explained, “Mr. Stearne told me that Mackenzie and a few others hadn’t given any input about the hotel we’re supposed to stay at, and he asked me to tell him.” She seemed relieved when she could take her eyes off of Vaughan, and looked back at her twin. “So I’ve told you. Can I tell you something else?” she said.
“Yeah,” Mackenzie shut his locker and bent down rolling the combination home. Ian watched the fair hair fall into Mackenzie’s eyes.
“In private.”
Mackenzie looked from one friend to the other. Vaughan shrugged. Ian nodded.
“They’re talking about me,” Lindsay said as she drew her brother away.
“And maybe they should,” Mackenzie ventured. “If you’re gonna be that way. Now what is it, Lind?’
“I was just going to say that that’s Ian Cane.”
“I know who that is.”
“And he’s a loser. He does drugs and all that stuff.”
“Look, Lindsay—”
“Wait. Just let me finish. I’m trying to say don’t end up hanging around him, being like him. Like his type.”
“His type?”
Lindsay ignored her brother’s tone. “You’ll end up like Tina, hanging out with Luke Madeary and smoking on the porch, and being... an outcast.”
“Goodbye, Lindsay,” he said, feeling suddenly very upset with his sister.
“I’m serious, Mackenzie.”
“I know.” Mackenzie shook his head to clear it. He wasn’t like Tina or Vaughan. He wished he was. He felt bad for not liking people. He couldn’t be cool about not liking his twin.
“I gotta go,” he said.
“What did she say?” Vaughan didn’t even wait until Lindsay was out of earshot.
“Something stupid,” Mackenzie said.
Vaughan murmured, “Well, why break tradition?”
“I wish you wouldn’t, Vaughan,” Mackenzie said.
“It’s not like you like her,” Vaughan went on. “And I wish you wouldn’t feel bad for not liking someone who’s.... unlikeable.”
Ian looked between the two old friends, his two new friends.
“Is she really that bad?” he demanded.
Mackenzie didn’t answer. Vaughan nodded solemnly.
“We still on for this weekend?” Ian said.
Mackenzie’s mood brightened considerably, and he said, “Yeah!”
“Great.”
“Roy can come along too,” Mackenzie added.
“I think he’d like that,” Ian told them. “He hasn’t made any real friends yet. We’ll take my car.”
“Well, you won’t take ours,” Vaughan said, making a stomping motion and turning an invisible wheel.
“Ashley, could I talk to you for a moment?”
Ashley Foster took a deep breath, and looked up at Mr. Rafferty. The way this semester was going, she’d felt that there would have to be a “Can I talk to you?” moment any day now.
“It’s about my grades, I know,” she said, slinging her bag from over her shoulder, and walking toward Mr. Rafferty’s desk. “Sir, I promise things will improve... When’s the next test?”
“Next Wednesday,” Mick said sadly. Ashley felt a little guilty for the sadness in his voice.
“Sir, that is just when things will improve. I promise.”
“Why is that, Ashley?”
She could tell by his tone he didn’t believe her. In that second she felt lost. It was a feeling that only lasted a second, though, and a voice in her head told her that Tina would never feel intimidated by Mr. Rafferty’s unbelief.
“Because,” she said, “tomorrow is the last game of the season. I’ll be through with cheerleading, and there’s no dance team until January. Basketball season... They don’t really need us. I will have all my time to study.”
Mick cocked his head, and looked like he was studying her. This upset Ashley, and she thought how he wasn’t the first teacher, the first grown man who had looked at her that way and whom she had brought to his knees.
“Well, I’ll be glad to help you anyway I can, Ashley,” Mick told her. “Don’t hesitate to come by.”
“AND NOW THE MOMENT OF truth where we see if I’m the lead or not!” Tina announced, hooking one arm through Rodder’s, and another through Madeleine’s.
“How do you know Madeleine didn’t get it?” Rodder leaned over and asked her.
“Rod, Rod,” Tina shook her head. “You don’t understand your lady as much as you should. This isn’t a musical. And if it’s not a musical—”
“I don’t try out.”
“You do have a beautiful voice, Maddy.”
“I know,” she told him.
As they approached the wall where the cast list was, they waited for a throng of the excited and disappointed to move away, and then Tina stepped forward. Her finger hit the bottom of the list and she moved right up it until she saw her name.
“You’re not even gonna hoot or holler,” Madeleine said.
Tina smiled in satisfaction.
“Not yet, maybe after I listen to Mom and Dad lay into me for violating my restriction. When I’m in my room. Alone, and punished. Then I’ll hoot and howl.”
“Or when you tell your boyfriend?” Rod suggested.
Tina smiled at the tall young man.
“Rod, Rod,” she said for the second time, “You’re in the dark about everything.”
“Well, then what is Luke?”
“Luke is my friend,” Tina said.
“Who you like to make out with on occasion?” Madeleine raised an eyebrow.
“It’s an evolving relationship,” Tina declared loftily.
MORE TOMORROW NIGHT
F O U R
v.
WHEN SHE SAID, “OH, I think Ian should ask,” even though Ian was taken aback, he waited for the rationale behind Tina’s suggestion to show itself.
“Well,” Tina explained, wiping her hands off and balling up the napkin she tossed back onto her tray, “You’re Lebanese. Stearne is Lebanese. It could be like... You know,” Tina looked from Madeleine to Vaughan. “A brotha helping another brotha out.”
“Oh, my God,” Madeleine murmured.
Ian cocked his head.
“He’s white, and I’m white,” Ian said. “I don’t think white people believe in helping brothas out.”
“Well they should,” said Tina. “We should. Besides, you’re not exactly white, you know. Lebanese people are... Arabs.”
“Lebanese people are Lebanese,” Ian said, breaking off a piece of a cookie. Roy took the rest. “And only my dad is Lebanese. And I think he’s only half Lebanese which is why if you ever showed up at our house and said we weren’t white, I think he’d flip.”
“We’re not white either,” Mackenzie announced.
“Oh, God, here we go again,” Vaughan shook his head.
“Don’t ‘Oh, God’’ me.”
“Mackenzie Allyn Foster, there is no one whiter than you.”
“I’m an Indian. We’re Indians. And proud.”
Ian stared blankly at the blond haired, blue eyed boy. He looked back to Vaughan who said, “I don’t want to touch it.”
“Check the registry at the Tsalagi,” Mackenzie said.
“The who?” said Roy.
“The Tsalagi- ” Tina filled him in. “The bar, you know. It’s supposed to be like a club for all the Cherokee families in town.”
“That’s right,” Mackenzie went on, “And all the Indian families in the area are on the registry- including the Fosters. Technically we’re Cherokee Indians.”
“But what are you all really?” Ian said.
He was shocked to suddenly see the fiercest look in Mackenzie’s eyes.
“We’re really Cherokee.”
WHITE PEOPLE ARE FUCKED UP.
That’s all I can say. The first thing that fucks them up is this whole business of being white in the first place. I don’t think I even know what it is anymore. Like take Rodder for instance. The day he came to the door of our house, Madeleine spent a lot of time trying to tell Dad “He’s Mexican. Not white!” Dad didn’t believe her. It took a long time for me to realize that they have white Mexicans. And hell they have Black Hispanics. So really, it’s not white people I guess. It’s color in general that’s fucked up. Everybody’s sitting next to a color, claiming this, claiming that.
Take this town for instance. It’s a bunch of people in this town but first we’ve got a lot of Levantines- some are Arabs, but most are Lebanese. The Lebanese get upset when you call them Arabs, and I think part of this is just that old hatred of looking white but not BEING white. But then the other part is that they are SYRIANS and will tell you loudly that a SYRIAN is not an ARAB. I’ve heard Egyptians say the same thing about themselves. So you’ve got people like the Stearnes and the Canes and they look pretty white. You might think they’re Italians or something, and then you realize: no, they’re Lebanese. They don’t even have those Lebanese names anymore.
Now the second big group of white people in town are the Indians. Or the Cherokee. All my life, growing up with Mackenzie I’ve known how they had their own country and their own capital city and language. They came from Georgia. We’re connected to them because they also had slaves. I didn’t know they had mixed blood so much that many of them were already white, but they still counted themselves as Indians. The long and short of it with our Indians is that when they got sent away to Oklahoma, one brief stop on the Trail of Tears was in Chattanooga. It was here that a few souls realized that they didn’t want to travel on to Oklahoma, one: because it was too far, and two: just out of spite. I think they had an idea that they could pass for white and make a happy compromise out of being Indian and being white people. It wasn’t such a bad idea Tina told me. She said that once upon a time Irish people and Polish people and Italians weren’t counted as white people. The Cherokee families that broke off and headed north were more white than them. If white meant Anglo-Saxon. And it did. For that matter the slaves were more white.
The slaves.
That’s where we come in.
It was pretty much the idea of a slave to head north. Here the Cherokee would lose their slaves. It wasn’t legal. But here they could start over again with people who—for the most part—were related to them. And like many a down and out person, the Cherokee weren’t adverse to getting as much help as possible. It’s easier to get help from free people than servants. And when they had reached Ohio—this is where we come in—Louis Foster, who was a brother to one of Colonel Foster’s great-grand-somethings, wrote down to New Orleans and New York and Pennsylvania for some free Black people to join in the effort. The other Fosters and McKennas also wrote to Indians who had whitened up a little. All in all the town was going to be quite an experiment.
The Lebanese wouldn’t come for a while. They’d come after the Scots-Irish and before the Poles. But at this time Black people and kinda-sorta Indians were flocking in. And then up from New Orleans came the first Catholics, all Black, all burning fingernails and casting spells. Later on the first white Catholics- priests and nuns- came. They all settled across the river in Canaan, and here in Jamnia they settled on Le Rue de Croix Fraus. But no one but them could pronounce it, so in the end they just called it Crawford Street. Any other place except New Orleans these niggahs would have been considered much too strange to talk to, but in this town everyone was coming up strange and so they seemed to blend in.
Somewhere out of all that blending came the Fitzgeralds.
“MS. FOSTER,” Stearne pronounced in his usual sharp voice accompanied by the mocking eyebrow.
Tina had been walking toward the glass doors of the smoking porch.
“I hate to interrupt you in the midst of skipping- ”
“I wasn’t skipping, Stearne.”
“Well, I guess it is sort of early in the year to run out of absences.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“I thought you’d just like to know that I’ll be putting up the cast list at the end of sixth period.”
“Oh,” Tina tried to manufacture nonchalance.
Stearne went on. “You seem awfully casual. I mean for someone so interested in finding out who got what part that she wanted to make a Lebanese connection—”
“How did you- ?”
Stearne put a finger to his lips.
“I have my ways, Ms. Foster.”
“I’m gonna kill Cane.”
“If you think you’re able.” When Tina looked at him, the little man explained.
“That was a joke, Ms. Foster. You know... Cain and Abel.”
` “I get it… Now,” Tina said, instantly upset that for the second time in a short conversation she’d been brought up... short.
“By the way,” Stearne said as Tina was turning around to leave, “I’m actually only a quarter Lebanese.”
Out on the porch, Luke handed her a Lucky Strike without even looking at her.
“Unfiltered.”
“I figured you’d need it,” Luke said, grinning up at her from where he sat on the stoop. “Stearne and all.”
“He’s something else,” Tina agreed, taking out her own lighter. “Goddamn, what’s in this?” she demanded, almost coughing.
“It’s what’s not in it- ” Luke said. “The filter.”
They sat smoking for a while, waiting for the fifth period bell to ring. Derrick Todd drove back into the parking lot in his mother’s Lexus. He swung out with Lindsay on his shoulder. They attempted to come up the steps without speaking.
“Hello to you, too,” Tina said to her sister.
“Oh,” Lindsay looked surprised. She was a purer, slightly thinner version of Ashley. In her jeans and white blouse, with her blue-jeaned and blond football playing boyfriend, she looked nothing like Tina. “I didn’t notice you.”
“I guess,” Tina said, taking a drag from her cigarette. “Hey, Derrick,” she said.
“Hey,” he was a junior. His hands were jammed in his pockets as he smiled nervously, curly hair combed back and gelled on both sides.
Tina smiled back slowly. “I guess Lindsay’s what the good guys on the team end up with. Right, Sis?”
Lindsay looked irritated.
“Right, Martina.” She hoisted her school bag over her shoulder, “Tina, the bells about to ring, I’ve got class—”
“I know you think you do,” Tina commented. Luke barked out a laugh. Derrick just gave a more desperate grin. Lindsay did not understand the insult.
“I’ll see you at home,” Lindsay was gone.
“My sister,” Tina shook her head and laughed. “What a bitch.”
“You must be such an embarrassment to your family.” Luke inhaled the last of his cigarette, crushed the stub out under his work boot, and placed a callused hand in his brown hair. “What does your Dad do when he sees you out here smoking?”
“What most Fosters at Jamnia High School do,” Tina said. “Pretend we’re not related.”
Ian, Vaughan, and Mackenzie stopped talking when Lindsay arrived at Mackenzie’s locker. Vaughan did not want to stop talking, but had no choice. The last time he had acknowledged Lindsay was in that fatal sixth grade year when he was not in homeroom with Mackenzie (twins were never put in the same homeroom at Our Lady of Jamnia). He’d stood up to make a speech during English in which he had announced that Lindsay was a stuck up bitch. He’d paid for this in many demerits, but it had been worth it.
“I just wanted to say that you’d better start thinking about where we’re going on our band trip.”
Mackenzie nodded, but Vaughan said, “You came for this?”
Lindsay debated pretending to be surprised at seeing Vaughan, but explained, “Mr. Stearne told me that Mackenzie and a few others hadn’t given any input about the hotel we’re supposed to stay at, and he asked me to tell him.” She seemed relieved when she could take her eyes off of Vaughan, and looked back at her twin. “So I’ve told you. Can I tell you something else?” she said.
“Yeah,” Mackenzie shut his locker and bent down rolling the combination home. Ian watched the fair hair fall into Mackenzie’s eyes.
“In private.”
Mackenzie looked from one friend to the other. Vaughan shrugged. Ian nodded.
“They’re talking about me,” Lindsay said as she drew her brother away.
“And maybe they should,” Mackenzie ventured. “If you’re gonna be that way. Now what is it, Lind?’
“I was just going to say that that’s Ian Cane.”
“I know who that is.”
“And he’s a loser. He does drugs and all that stuff.”
“Look, Lindsay—”
“Wait. Just let me finish. I’m trying to say don’t end up hanging around him, being like him. Like his type.”
“His type?”
Lindsay ignored her brother’s tone. “You’ll end up like Tina, hanging out with Luke Madeary and smoking on the porch, and being... an outcast.”
“Goodbye, Lindsay,” he said, feeling suddenly very upset with his sister.
“I’m serious, Mackenzie.”
“I know.” Mackenzie shook his head to clear it. He wasn’t like Tina or Vaughan. He wished he was. He felt bad for not liking people. He couldn’t be cool about not liking his twin.
“I gotta go,” he said.
“What did she say?” Vaughan didn’t even wait until Lindsay was out of earshot.
“Something stupid,” Mackenzie said.
Vaughan murmured, “Well, why break tradition?”
“I wish you wouldn’t, Vaughan,” Mackenzie said.
“It’s not like you like her,” Vaughan went on. “And I wish you wouldn’t feel bad for not liking someone who’s.... unlikeable.”
Ian looked between the two old friends, his two new friends.
“Is she really that bad?” he demanded.
Mackenzie didn’t answer. Vaughan nodded solemnly.
“We still on for this weekend?” Ian said.
Mackenzie’s mood brightened considerably, and he said, “Yeah!”
“Great.”
“Roy can come along too,” Mackenzie added.
“I think he’d like that,” Ian told them. “He hasn’t made any real friends yet. We’ll take my car.”
“Well, you won’t take ours,” Vaughan said, making a stomping motion and turning an invisible wheel.
“Ashley, could I talk to you for a moment?”
Ashley Foster took a deep breath, and looked up at Mr. Rafferty. The way this semester was going, she’d felt that there would have to be a “Can I talk to you?” moment any day now.
“It’s about my grades, I know,” she said, slinging her bag from over her shoulder, and walking toward Mr. Rafferty’s desk. “Sir, I promise things will improve... When’s the next test?”
“Next Wednesday,” Mick said sadly. Ashley felt a little guilty for the sadness in his voice.
“Sir, that is just when things will improve. I promise.”
“Why is that, Ashley?”
She could tell by his tone he didn’t believe her. In that second she felt lost. It was a feeling that only lasted a second, though, and a voice in her head told her that Tina would never feel intimidated by Mr. Rafferty’s unbelief.
“Because,” she said, “tomorrow is the last game of the season. I’ll be through with cheerleading, and there’s no dance team until January. Basketball season... They don’t really need us. I will have all my time to study.”
Mick cocked his head, and looked like he was studying her. This upset Ashley, and she thought how he wasn’t the first teacher, the first grown man who had looked at her that way and whom she had brought to his knees.
“Well, I’ll be glad to help you anyway I can, Ashley,” Mick told her. “Don’t hesitate to come by.”
“AND NOW THE MOMENT OF truth where we see if I’m the lead or not!” Tina announced, hooking one arm through Rodder’s, and another through Madeleine’s.
“How do you know Madeleine didn’t get it?” Rodder leaned over and asked her.
“Rod, Rod,” Tina shook her head. “You don’t understand your lady as much as you should. This isn’t a musical. And if it’s not a musical—”
“I don’t try out.”
“You do have a beautiful voice, Maddy.”
“I know,” she told him.
As they approached the wall where the cast list was, they waited for a throng of the excited and disappointed to move away, and then Tina stepped forward. Her finger hit the bottom of the list and she moved right up it until she saw her name.
“You’re not even gonna hoot or holler,” Madeleine said.
Tina smiled in satisfaction.
“Not yet, maybe after I listen to Mom and Dad lay into me for violating my restriction. When I’m in my room. Alone, and punished. Then I’ll hoot and howl.”
“Or when you tell your boyfriend?” Rod suggested.
Tina smiled at the tall young man.
“Rod, Rod,” she said for the second time, “You’re in the dark about everything.”
“Well, then what is Luke?”
“Luke is my friend,” Tina said.
“Who you like to make out with on occasion?” Madeleine raised an eyebrow.
“It’s an evolving relationship,” Tina declared loftily.
MORE TOMORROW NIGHT
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
A great portion and thanks for posting a new one today! All this talk about race was very interesting. I don't think Ian and Luke are bad people despite what Lindsay said. I look forward to the next part to see more of the reactions to the casting list for the play. This is a great world to explore in this story and I am glad you are posting it! Have a wonderful weekend!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Oh, you're welcome. I think for the time being I will be posting on Fridays. Race is always interesting.... and extremely subjective. Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay.... we should probably never listen to her. Tina's summation was right, if unkind. We'll see more of everyone on the other side of.... oh, wait, that's right. I'm posting tomorrow. Have a good Saturday.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
CHAPTER FOUR CONTINUED[/B
Mackenzie, reclined on Vaughan’s bed, put down the book and said, “I wish I was normal.”
Vaughan, sitting in his window seat, sketching the mustard yellow leaves of the tree limb blowing in the breeze said, “I wish I could help you.”
“I mean: then I’d be outside playing football or something.”
“With your normal friends?” Vaughan gave Mackenzie a slightly amused look.
Mackenzie sat up.
“Alright, then. I take back what I said. It’s an honor to be abnormal with you. I just...” he handed over the book.
Vaughan opened it and squinted at the print. He began reading where Mackenzie had bookmarked a page.
“For a subject like gays in the church you’d think it’d read a little racier. What’s he talking about?”
Mackenzie snatched the book back.
“I don’t know. All he seems to be saying is that everything in Church Law about how evil being gay is doesn’t really come from the Bible. It comes from gay bashing bishops and cardinals picking out what they like from the Bible, and then telling you what they believe.”
“It figures,” Vaughan shrugged and went back to sketching.
“Whaddo you mean it figures?” Mackenzie mimicked his friend’s carelessness. “And he also implies that the Church is homosexual anyway.”
Vaughan stopped sketching.
“Where?”
Mackenzie climbed back onto the bed and began flipping back and forth through the book.
“I can’t wait till you learn to underline,” Vaughan commented.
“I think it makes books look ugly.”
Vaughan only shrugged, and waited for his friend to find the spot.
“Here,” Mackenzie pushed the book toward Vaughan. “Read this.”
Vaughan read, murmuring. He handed it back.
“ ‘An all male priesthood,’ in dresses—I added that part— ‘sacrificing male flesh to a naked man on a cross,’,” Vaughan nodded. “He’s got a point.”
“Vaughan!”
“I don’t get you,” Vaughan said. “You’re the one who’s gay. You should be delighted that someone’s telling it like it is. Like you haven’t always suspected....” Then to clarify, Vaughan added, “that the Church isn’t always on the up and up.”
Mackenzie was curious and said, “Well, whaddo you think?”
“About?”
Mackenzie ducked his head, put the book down, and said, “We’re Catholic.”
“This is true.”
“I mean. You believe in God. And Jesus and all, right?”
“It depends on the all I suppose,” Vaughan said.
“Well you were the one that was always talking about the Bible in religion class.”
“But you were the altar boy.”
“That’s because I love the Church. I... I like being Catholic. I’d get upset when the other guys at school wouldn’t take it seriously. And then when I knew that I was different... That I was looking at guys, I wouldn’t tell anyone- not even you- because I’d been told it was wrong. It was against God.”
“Like jacking off?”
Mackenzie looked at Vaughan, but in the end ignored this and went on.
“But, regardless if it was against God or not... There it was. And I told you, and now I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.”
Now Vaughan looked confused.
“What?” said Mackenzie.
Vaughan pushed himself off of the window seat, put away his notepad, and sat beside his friend.
“I just assumed that now that you were out and all, you’d have a nice gay wedding in San Francisco one day and we’d all go to the “Y” or... whatever gay people do.”
Mackenzie looked at him blankly.
“I’ve been trying to decide what this gay person,” he thumped his hand on his chest, “is supposed to do. How I’m supposed to keep my faith and be what I know I am. And I can’t pretend that I don’t know anymore.”
While Vaughan looked at Mackenzie, waiting for an explanation, his friend reached into his book bag and pulled out the huge, ugly beige volume of The Catechism of the Catholic Church and flipped open to read it.
“Listen to this: Homosexuality....” Mackenzie murmured over a few words, his tongue sticking out between his lips until he said, “Here: ‘Homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.... These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition. Homosexual persons are called to chastity.’”
Mackenzie finished reading. Vaughan looked at his friend with a raised eyebrow.
“So what are you supposed to do, be a priest or a monk?” Vaughan said.
“Well, that’s chastity.”
“Or be by yourself for the rest of your life? You can either be lonely, or you can pretend you’re celibate? Those are the options?” Vaughan looked indescribably pissed off, as if he were the gay one. “What about people who really do want to be alone? People who really are celibate? And what’s this whole business about the Lord’s Cross?” Vaughan was getting increasingly agitated, “Who the hell is the Pope or anyone else to tell you what your cross is?”
“Vaughan, you don’t have to get so—”
“Yes I do! This is bullshit!” He stood up. “That’s like the Pope going out and telling my great-great-grandparents slavery is their cross and they shouldn’t be able to read.” His hand made an angry gesture over the beige book, as if sweeping it’s existence away. “This doesn’t even deserve to be looked at seriously.”
There was a knock at the door, and then Cedric peeked his head in.
“I heard yelling. Is there a fight?”
“It’s between Vaughan and the Vatican,” Mackenzie said.
Cedric looked at his son.
“The Vatican is bullshit!” Vaughan said.
“Sooner or later,” Cedric told him, “most good Catholics come to that conclusion.”
“Man, what’s Vaughan bitchin’ about in the background?” Ian demanded. He had called the Fitzgeralds, and already talked to the irate activist who had handed the phone to Mackenzie, now straddling a ladder back chair in the kitchen.
“He’s having an attack of Catholic liberalism, ranting and raving at the Vatican.”
“See what I was talking about?” Ian said. “That’s so cool. You ever hear of the Sandinista Nuns?”
“What?”
“These crazy bitches from Nicaragua. They were with the communists, and they were activists and everything. Got killed, of course. No one here seemed to care. You guys are always up to something under the Pope’s nose.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Mackenzie said, non-commitally.
Ian assumed that for some reason Mackenzie didn’t like being up to things under the Pope’s nose, and switched the subject. “I forgot where the band competition is.”
“I think it’s in Chicago.”
“Isn’t that where it was last year?”
“No,” Mackenzie said. “Last year we were in Detroit.”
“That’s right,” Mackenzie said, “How could I forget? It sucked so bad.”
“What did you do then? I don’t remember you being there.”
“I was off in a corner somewhere getting high, probably,” Ian confessed candidly. “I plan to actually be a little sober this year.”
“You better be,” Mackenzie threatened. “I’ll clobber you if you leave me sober by myself.”
Ian was about to suggest that Mackenzie get fucked up with him, but instantly saw this as a distinct impossibility.
“Who did you room with?” Mackenzie asked him.
“Fat Ass Donovan.”
“Does he have a real name?” Mackenzie wondered.
“I think it might be Franklin,” Ian replied. He said in his usual, raspy, laid back voice, “It’s always been Fat Ass to me, though.”
“Yeah. I was with Phil Dugan and Marty Washburn. My sister was dating one of them last year.”
“I think maybe that’s why I didn’t talk to you last year,” Ian said.
“Huh?”
“I don’t know,” Ian told him. “I just thought you’d be like her... You being Lindsay’s twin and everything.”
“She can be difficult,” Mackenzie allowed.
Ian heard Vaughan on the other end of the phone say, “She can be a Grade A Bitch!”
“Lindsay!” Despite the cold night, Tina made it a point to call out brightly, and roll down the window when their two cars met at the stop light on 36th Street.
Lindsay was in the passenger seat of Derrick’s car, which was thumping out loud Papa Roach, and Tina was driving Luke in her LTD so the sisters were side by side in the night.
“Hi, Tina,” said her sister, drearily.
“Hi, Tina!” Derrick shouted. Then, to be nice, he waved at Luke, who stunned him by waving back. He looked much too cool to wave.
“I hear you got the lead roll,” Derrick shouted over Lindsay. “Congrats!”
“Thanks, Derrick,” Tina tried not to choke with laughter over hearing the phrase ‘Congrats’.
Luke whispered in Tina’s ear and gave her something.
“Derrick, Luke says you’re cool. Have this.”
She reached out of the window. Derrick reached across Lindsay, and took it.
The light changed, and Tina gunned the car, turning up the music, and suddenly turning right onto Market, disappearing into the night while Sheryl Crow lamented.
You don’t know what it’s like
to be the bad man
to be the sad man
behind blue eyes!
Derrick drove straight, grinning at what he was holding.
“Oh, my God!” Lindsay cried. “It’s a joint.”
“Your sister’s sooooo cool!”
“She’s a reprobate,” Lindsay said. “And Luke’s a criminal. I should tell Mom and Dad.”
Derrick ignored Lindsay.
“Wanna smoke it?”
“No!” Lindsay said, thinking that it probably came from her aunt, anyway. She hated her family. So she took it out on Derrick. She smacked him in the back of his head as they came to another stoplight.
“Ow!”
“No,” Lindsay repeated.
Derrick drove on. Willow Parkway was becoming nothing but trees. They wouldn’t hit city again until about Lake Street. About a block before Lake Street he decided to play the guilt cards.
“Lindsay, I know we can’t have sex,” he began.
“That’s out of the question.”
“That’s what I just said.” Derrick was a little frustrated. “But would you go down on me?”
The look on Lindsay’s face said that she would not. Derrick thought that out of all the Foster sisters, this was the one he’d ended up with.
He hadn’t expected it anyway. It was just like bidding too low at an auction to get the price you wanted. He’d settle for fooling around, but he went the next step. He was poker faced when he said, “Can I have a handjob? I won’t tell anyone you did it.”
Because Lindsay didn’t immediately look at him he knew this stood a chance. She was taking out her guilt cards too, and seeing if she owed him this.
“It’s the last game of the season,” he added to shift the balance his way. When he thought of how many people on the team were getting sympathy fucked as he drove his girlfriend around this godforsaken town, it made Derrick a little bitter.
In his last jabs, Bone was deep in her. That was the best, when his large body tensed, when her buttocks were cupped by his paws, when her hands were clutching the spread of his own backside and Bone, in all of his largeness was rendered still, his face set in a rictus by orgasm. It made keeping quiet bearable while the too cold shower water soaked her.
Bone was breathing deep like a furnace; his large hands were giving way. Ashley was sore. Bone moved her under the shower. She understood that she was supposed to wash the semen away. He didn’t say anything. If anyone had seen them in the second story bathroom of the McArthur house it would have looked like he was taking her from behind, but he was too tired for that, his head was on her shoulder.
That annoyed Ashley too. If they were in love that sort of affection would have been bearable. But Bone was just the big bear who fucked her.
“Rafferty says I’m flunking his class,” Ashley said, as the water soaked her, as she reached for the towel hanging over the shower curtain rung, and stepped out. She began drying herself.
“Rafferty’s got a little dick,” Bone said.
“How do you know?” Ashley didn’t even bother to look at Bone. She just kept drying her hair.
“His type do.”
Ashley began drying the rest of her body. She smiled and shook her head.
“Un unh,” she said. “I bet he’s big. I bet he’s hung like a bull.”
“Shut up,” Bone shut off the shower water. His skin was red. He was dripping. He looked like an irritated child.
“I bet it’s big as fuck,” Ashley said. “I bet it’s bigger than yours.”
Bone didn’t say anything. Ashley watched him because she liked watching him. She liked his surliness. She liked watching his big old body plod across the bathroom floor.
“Whaddo you think your sister’s like in bed?” Bone said. As he said it, Ashley just caught a glimpse of his cock before the towel went over it.
“It took you a while to think of that one, didn’t it? It wasn’t even a good one. I’d have to ask you which sister. Then I’d have to tell you it didn’t matter cause neither one of them’s doing anything.”
“Not Lindsay. She’s a prude. But Tina.”
“She’s a bitch. She’ll die a virgin.”
“She’s probably taking it up the ass from Luke Madeary right now.”
“I bet he’ll take it up the ass from her before that happens,” Ashley told him. “And all this talking about taking it up the ass is something you can definitely drop because this shit is an exit only,” she said displaying a behind that was round and porcelain smooth.
“All I said- ”
“I know the things you say, and the things you want, and you can keep on wanting,” she declared. “I gotta go. You’re not the only one who has to be at the game tomorrow.”
“I bet you’d give it up the butt to Rodder.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ashley said, slipping into her panties and then looking for her bra. “Rodder’s not here.”
IAN SLIPPED ON HIS LEATHER JACKET.
“You wanna run over to Kirk Berghen’s with me?” he asked his cousin. “Then I’ll drop you off before I go home.”
“I guess,” Roy said, sliding off the sofa. “Are you gonna to buy more weed?”
“His shit is the cheapest and the best in town. Come on.
“Look at that sky,” Ian pointed up to the black heaven as he opened the door for his cousin and then rounded the car, and slipped inside. “And the weather’s great... For this time of year. It’ll be winter before long.”
Roy was quieter than usual as Ian threaded his way from the northeast to the southwest of Jamnia. He thought that he’d have to talk to Roy a little later. But he didn’t want to push his cousin.
They came through the alley to the two story garage behind the white house on Windham Street. Lights were on and Ian could smell frank and unashamed marijuana. Over the laughter The Grateful Dead were demanding:
Oh, Oh, and I want to know- ow
how does that song go!
When Ian came through the back door, Kirk, hair in his face, and black beard around his jaw, noticed his guests and shook Ian by the shoulders. “Come on in. Who’s this?”
“My cousin.”
“Welcome, Cousin!” Kirk stuck out a hand. He looked fierce and handsome, though a little shaggy. He brought them further into the garage where people in ripped jeans, and corduroys, paisley shirts, white men and women with dreadlocks were sitting on sofas, drinking beer, and passing joints.
“Roy! Ian!” Tina leapt up from a beanbag where she’d been sitting between Luke and her Aunt Ally- a woman who obviously did not mind being in a group of people twenty years younger.
Roy waved nervously. Ian was surprised, then said, “I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised.”
“I’m usually never here,” Tina said. “But I’m with Luke.” She jerked a thumb toward the brown haired boy, talking to Alice now.
Kirk came toward them with a sausage in a bun. He bit into it and kept talking, “Grab yourself some food.” He pointed to the table in the middle of the garage. “But I can’t tell the difference between the spicy sausages and the regular. Cause they’re all burnt,” Kirk smiled cheezily. Then he said, “Oh- ” and Kirk dumped a bag of weed into Ian’s hands.
“How much—?”
“It’s free!” Kirk announced. “Tonight. It’s a party night, and everything, you know. And my cousin’s here,” he wrapped an arm about Tina. She gave him a dubious look. “I’m feelin’ Christian.”
Ian thanked Kirk, and motioned for Roy to follow him toward the table. “What’s wrong, you wanna go home?” Ian asked. “We can’t go right now. I just got a free bag of marijuana. But I promise in a few minutes we can get away from these folks.”
Ian made quick work of the sausage, and split his beer with Tina who said, “It’s almost time for us to turn in too.”
“What?” said Luke.
“Me, at least,” Tina said.
Getting into the car, Ian said, “Now tell me what’s up, Roy. You’re my cousin. You know what that means?”
Roy turned, and gave his older cousin a blank stare.
“It means that up until this time, caring about you has been the thing that’s kept me from being a selfish asshole. Alright? So you have to tell me what’s wrong with you tonight.”
“I...” Roy started. Then he blurted out: “It’s tomorrow and tonight!”
“Whaddo you mean? We’re going out. You’re gonna have fun, not be stuck in the house all day.”
“You’re going out,” Roy said. “And I’m tagging along.”
Ian looked as if he’d been betrayed. Then he felt as if he’d been betraying Roy.
“It’s just that...” Roy was trying to explain this. “I like everyone. I like all of your friends. But I want friends of my own.”
Ian sighed and sat back blowing out his cheeks. He did not speak immediately, because he did not know what to say.
At last he spoke, slowly. “How about if you borrow mine for a while? Could you live with that? I mean, friends have to come from somewhere.”
Too quickly by Ian’s judgment, Roy grinned back and said, “Yeah, I guess. Let’s go home.”
As he turned the key in the ignition, Ian was not sure who was comforting whom.
AILEEN WAS SITTING UP AT her little desk off of the kitchen when she heard the back door jingle open, and Ashley come in.
“Where have you been?” she started, motioning at her daughter with two unpaid bills. Then she sighed, and shook her head so strands of hair escaped the bun she’d tied behind her head. “Nevermind. I don’t even want to know. Have you seen your sister?”
“Tina?”
“Either one of them, actually.”
Ashley took the news that Lindsay was hanging out on the town with a note of surprise.
“No, Mama.”
“Well... Go to bed,” Aileen said at last, at a loss for anything else of import to say. If Lindsay and Ashley, the two daughters who actually did have to be someplace tomorrow could hang out till all hours of the night with their many boyfriends, then why couldn’t Tina, the only one who showed signs of having a brain?
Aileen heard Ashley’s steps stop, and then reverse on the stairwell above her head.
“Mama, I just thought...”
Aileen turned around, pushing the difficult hair out of her face as she pushed the glasses up her nose.
“Um hum?” Aileen waited.
“Tina’s probably with Luke.”
“With who?”
“Her man.”
“Really?” Aileen said. “Thank you, Ashley. Go to bed, Ashley.”
Aileen’s eyes were red with exhaustion. She lit a cigarette, smoked it, and wondered how much of a private life did her oldest daughter have. She was crushing out her cigarette, a little hypnotized by the spirals the smoke made as it crawled up over the lampshade, when she heard the heavy plodding of Kevin’s feet coming down the back stair. When he materialized, his brown hair sticking up, his face looking rumpled, and a little bit like Popeye the Sailor Man’s, this did not entice her to come to bed anytime sooner. He stood, stretching, his fists curled behind his back the way he’d done since they were teenagers, rising on the balls of his spread apart feet.
“You comin’ to bed, Aily?”
“I would have been to bed a long time ago if you bothered to look over some of these bills, first, Kevin,” she told him.
He gave her a sour look, and folded his arms over his chest. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew he was still attractive. His chest was broad, his arms were strong. She knew she was attractive too. Her hair didn’t have to be greasy. She didn’t have to look like a movie librarian with the glasses on chains. Tomorrow, at the game, she wouldn’t.
“Come on upstairs, Aily.” She was even more sure of her beauty now, because when Kevin used that voice it meant that there was only one thing for which he wanted her to come upstairs.
Aileen rose in her old worn out satin nightie. She untied her hair, and Kevin sloppily brushed it down with his hand. She flicked off the light. The little converted pantry room behind the kitchen was swallowed in darkness. They went up the stairs, Kevin’s arm around his wife’s waist. He swatted her on the ass, and she yelped and laughed.
“Kevin! Stop! Stop! I’m serious. I’ll hurt you!”
Walking up the stairs was a slow process. She did it with her arm around a man whose arm was around her waist, her head resting on his chest. Kevin kissed her on the top of her head. They didn’t make love enough. They were both too tired and quite frankly too damned cranky. So when he wanted her, she was determined to want him. Aileen resented Ashley because she was sure this Luke boy had been brought up just so she could bring him up to Kevin right now and sour her husband’s mood. Not only would Tina be in trouble, but intimacy would then be all but completely impossible tonight. So she filed Luke away in her brain for another day, knowing he would be as much of a mood killer as announcing before she went into the bathroom for a brief second to slip into something more comfortable that what she was really doing was taking an emergency piss and popping in her diaphragm.
MADELEINE CLIMBED OUT OF THE window and down the trellis, the only way her father had never been able to catch her escaping, and went through the high over growth of the side yard to the garage, into the musty smelling place which was filled with summer heat in late autumn, and mildew scented cold in summer. She pulled out her bike, which she scarcely used anymore. Before she’d thought about getting a car and started using Tina’s, this bicycle had been the freedom to go wherever she wanted. Now she realized that she had never gone far. Jamnia was the extent of her imagination, and she thought she had a better than average imagination. No wonder no one here ever went anywhere.
Madeleine’s path was not down Michael Street. It described a loose circle around the set back cul de sac areas of split levels behind the school, and close to the Lake. She cut up Fairlane Drive, well out of the range of the high school, or her own house before she was anywhere close to traveling toward her intended destination. Several blocks east of her house, she crossed Michael. It was almost empty at this time of night. She rode through the quiet tree lined streets of Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets. Some houses were bricks and colonials, some long blocks of small shoeboxes with one large picture window. A few boasted two stories, garages, antique antennas.
Main Street was still fairly busy at this time of night. Some bars were still open. The Walgreens was open down the block. Two blocks down to her left, Madeleine could see the shadow of Our Lady of Jamnia. There were some kids out, probably from the college, looking for a good time. She crossed Main and all was quiet again. She made a right turn into small houses set back in trees where she could hear crickets. Over some hill a motorcycle was revving up. A train was sighing as it crossed the trestle a block or so away.
Madeleine parked her bike in the bushes before a little house that was set back at an angle. White, two storied, with a little porch, blue shutters and blue trim. Her heart felt light tonight.
When she passed through the gate and the overhang of tree limbs, Madeleine Fitzgerald saw Rodder Gonzales was sitting on his porch, sipping a beer. He toasted her with it, smiled, and then raised a finger and went inside the darkened house. He came back with one for her.
“I thought you’d never come,” he said.
“I told you I would.”
With the edge of his tee shirt, Rodder unscrewed the cap and handed the beer to Madeleine. It was good and fizzy going down her throat. She decided not to smoke. He had always hated that.
“And the parents away for the weekend of the last game,” Madeleine commented.
“What can I say?” Rodder said. “I’m hurt.”
He didn’t seem terribly hurt.
“Don’t worry. Madeleine’ll make it all better. Just let her know where it hurts.”
“I’m not sure if you’re concerned about my welfare, Maddy,” Rodder said in a hurt voice. “I think you just want to take advantage of me.” He kissed her. “What’s a boy to do? I bet when you heard my parents wouldn’t be home to protect me...”
Since they’d first met, Rodder had always turned her on by feigning innocence in the middle of passion. Over six feet, lean, and very handsome with shocking sky grey eyes and a mind sharp as a whip, Roderigo Gonzales, when they were alone would channel a naive boy, helpless and stupid, wondering what was about to happen to him. When he murmured, “What’s a boy to do?” in that same heated tone, she imagined a serial rapist would use to say, “I’m about to fuck you,” it made her panties flood.
She was on his lap, tied up in his arms. They were making out, really making out, lips on throats, mouth to mouth, kissing eyes and noses, caressing arms, squeezing thighs, tasting flesh. She looked around a second. There had been no traffic or anything.
“You can’t see anything from here,” Madeleine marveled. Undistracted, Rodder kept kissing her.
“I couldn’t see this porch until I’d come past the gate,” she said.
“I know,” Rodder murmured, not caring as he set himself on his back, under the porch swing. Madeleine was on top of him. He guided her hands to the belt of his shorts.
“We can’t- ” she gasped.
He pulled her face down and kissed her. His eyes, black in the night, were full on her.
“Yes we can,” he insisted, and began working with her jeans.
“Oh, my God, Rod,” she murmured. She felt the melting. She was going wet and wide in that secret place. Before Rod there had been no one. After him there had never been this melting, the aching inside her, the feel that his hands on her skin, working off her clothes, were actually melting into her skin. There was that old familiar ache in her.
They undressed each other on the porch. Sex with other people was not sex like this. They didn’t even undress all the way. So much of the lovemaking would occur in the touching and the tasting of the body once this was done.
Madeleine got on her side so they lay facing each other, and then he moved over her panting and eager. She pulled down Rodder’s shorts, and his white briefs. She watched him growing. His cock was a black, thick shadow in the night darkness. She only saw it a little as she guided him in. He gasped a little at making his entry. Rodder took Madeleine’s hands gently, and guided them under his tee shirt. Together they lay like that making no loud sounds, no sudden moves, clinging and rolling in and out, trying to fuse their bodies together until slowly Rodder began to develop a rhythm, and sing a little to his rhythm, and Madeleine began to caress his back, broad and damp with perspiration, wet and narrow at the small. She began to caress his ass, round and covered in smooth hairs, his beautiful thighs, this beautiful body she was opening to, felt like she was giving birth to.
Before Rodder began to speed up and make her cry out, before those last moments when the loving became fucking, before it became coming she wondered what had happened to break this unity?
MORE MONDAY NIGHT!
Mackenzie, reclined on Vaughan’s bed, put down the book and said, “I wish I was normal.”
Vaughan, sitting in his window seat, sketching the mustard yellow leaves of the tree limb blowing in the breeze said, “I wish I could help you.”
“I mean: then I’d be outside playing football or something.”
“With your normal friends?” Vaughan gave Mackenzie a slightly amused look.
Mackenzie sat up.
“Alright, then. I take back what I said. It’s an honor to be abnormal with you. I just...” he handed over the book.
Vaughan opened it and squinted at the print. He began reading where Mackenzie had bookmarked a page.
“For a subject like gays in the church you’d think it’d read a little racier. What’s he talking about?”
Mackenzie snatched the book back.
“I don’t know. All he seems to be saying is that everything in Church Law about how evil being gay is doesn’t really come from the Bible. It comes from gay bashing bishops and cardinals picking out what they like from the Bible, and then telling you what they believe.”
“It figures,” Vaughan shrugged and went back to sketching.
“Whaddo you mean it figures?” Mackenzie mimicked his friend’s carelessness. “And he also implies that the Church is homosexual anyway.”
Vaughan stopped sketching.
“Where?”
Mackenzie climbed back onto the bed and began flipping back and forth through the book.
“I can’t wait till you learn to underline,” Vaughan commented.
“I think it makes books look ugly.”
Vaughan only shrugged, and waited for his friend to find the spot.
“Here,” Mackenzie pushed the book toward Vaughan. “Read this.”
Vaughan read, murmuring. He handed it back.
“ ‘An all male priesthood,’ in dresses—I added that part— ‘sacrificing male flesh to a naked man on a cross,’,” Vaughan nodded. “He’s got a point.”
“Vaughan!”
“I don’t get you,” Vaughan said. “You’re the one who’s gay. You should be delighted that someone’s telling it like it is. Like you haven’t always suspected....” Then to clarify, Vaughan added, “that the Church isn’t always on the up and up.”
Mackenzie was curious and said, “Well, whaddo you think?”
“About?”
Mackenzie ducked his head, put the book down, and said, “We’re Catholic.”
“This is true.”
“I mean. You believe in God. And Jesus and all, right?”
“It depends on the all I suppose,” Vaughan said.
“Well you were the one that was always talking about the Bible in religion class.”
“But you were the altar boy.”
“That’s because I love the Church. I... I like being Catholic. I’d get upset when the other guys at school wouldn’t take it seriously. And then when I knew that I was different... That I was looking at guys, I wouldn’t tell anyone- not even you- because I’d been told it was wrong. It was against God.”
“Like jacking off?”
Mackenzie looked at Vaughan, but in the end ignored this and went on.
“But, regardless if it was against God or not... There it was. And I told you, and now I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.”
Now Vaughan looked confused.
“What?” said Mackenzie.
Vaughan pushed himself off of the window seat, put away his notepad, and sat beside his friend.
“I just assumed that now that you were out and all, you’d have a nice gay wedding in San Francisco one day and we’d all go to the “Y” or... whatever gay people do.”
Mackenzie looked at him blankly.
“I’ve been trying to decide what this gay person,” he thumped his hand on his chest, “is supposed to do. How I’m supposed to keep my faith and be what I know I am. And I can’t pretend that I don’t know anymore.”
While Vaughan looked at Mackenzie, waiting for an explanation, his friend reached into his book bag and pulled out the huge, ugly beige volume of The Catechism of the Catholic Church and flipped open to read it.
“Listen to this: Homosexuality....” Mackenzie murmured over a few words, his tongue sticking out between his lips until he said, “Here: ‘Homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.... These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition. Homosexual persons are called to chastity.’”
Mackenzie finished reading. Vaughan looked at his friend with a raised eyebrow.
“So what are you supposed to do, be a priest or a monk?” Vaughan said.
“Well, that’s chastity.”
“Or be by yourself for the rest of your life? You can either be lonely, or you can pretend you’re celibate? Those are the options?” Vaughan looked indescribably pissed off, as if he were the gay one. “What about people who really do want to be alone? People who really are celibate? And what’s this whole business about the Lord’s Cross?” Vaughan was getting increasingly agitated, “Who the hell is the Pope or anyone else to tell you what your cross is?”
“Vaughan, you don’t have to get so—”
“Yes I do! This is bullshit!” He stood up. “That’s like the Pope going out and telling my great-great-grandparents slavery is their cross and they shouldn’t be able to read.” His hand made an angry gesture over the beige book, as if sweeping it’s existence away. “This doesn’t even deserve to be looked at seriously.”
There was a knock at the door, and then Cedric peeked his head in.
“I heard yelling. Is there a fight?”
“It’s between Vaughan and the Vatican,” Mackenzie said.
Cedric looked at his son.
“The Vatican is bullshit!” Vaughan said.
“Sooner or later,” Cedric told him, “most good Catholics come to that conclusion.”
“Man, what’s Vaughan bitchin’ about in the background?” Ian demanded. He had called the Fitzgeralds, and already talked to the irate activist who had handed the phone to Mackenzie, now straddling a ladder back chair in the kitchen.
“He’s having an attack of Catholic liberalism, ranting and raving at the Vatican.”
“See what I was talking about?” Ian said. “That’s so cool. You ever hear of the Sandinista Nuns?”
“What?”
“These crazy bitches from Nicaragua. They were with the communists, and they were activists and everything. Got killed, of course. No one here seemed to care. You guys are always up to something under the Pope’s nose.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Mackenzie said, non-commitally.
Ian assumed that for some reason Mackenzie didn’t like being up to things under the Pope’s nose, and switched the subject. “I forgot where the band competition is.”
“I think it’s in Chicago.”
“Isn’t that where it was last year?”
“No,” Mackenzie said. “Last year we were in Detroit.”
“That’s right,” Mackenzie said, “How could I forget? It sucked so bad.”
“What did you do then? I don’t remember you being there.”
“I was off in a corner somewhere getting high, probably,” Ian confessed candidly. “I plan to actually be a little sober this year.”
“You better be,” Mackenzie threatened. “I’ll clobber you if you leave me sober by myself.”
Ian was about to suggest that Mackenzie get fucked up with him, but instantly saw this as a distinct impossibility.
“Who did you room with?” Mackenzie asked him.
“Fat Ass Donovan.”
“Does he have a real name?” Mackenzie wondered.
“I think it might be Franklin,” Ian replied. He said in his usual, raspy, laid back voice, “It’s always been Fat Ass to me, though.”
“Yeah. I was with Phil Dugan and Marty Washburn. My sister was dating one of them last year.”
“I think maybe that’s why I didn’t talk to you last year,” Ian said.
“Huh?”
“I don’t know,” Ian told him. “I just thought you’d be like her... You being Lindsay’s twin and everything.”
“She can be difficult,” Mackenzie allowed.
Ian heard Vaughan on the other end of the phone say, “She can be a Grade A Bitch!”
“Lindsay!” Despite the cold night, Tina made it a point to call out brightly, and roll down the window when their two cars met at the stop light on 36th Street.
Lindsay was in the passenger seat of Derrick’s car, which was thumping out loud Papa Roach, and Tina was driving Luke in her LTD so the sisters were side by side in the night.
“Hi, Tina,” said her sister, drearily.
“Hi, Tina!” Derrick shouted. Then, to be nice, he waved at Luke, who stunned him by waving back. He looked much too cool to wave.
“I hear you got the lead roll,” Derrick shouted over Lindsay. “Congrats!”
“Thanks, Derrick,” Tina tried not to choke with laughter over hearing the phrase ‘Congrats’.
Luke whispered in Tina’s ear and gave her something.
“Derrick, Luke says you’re cool. Have this.”
She reached out of the window. Derrick reached across Lindsay, and took it.
The light changed, and Tina gunned the car, turning up the music, and suddenly turning right onto Market, disappearing into the night while Sheryl Crow lamented.
You don’t know what it’s like
to be the bad man
to be the sad man
behind blue eyes!
Derrick drove straight, grinning at what he was holding.
“Oh, my God!” Lindsay cried. “It’s a joint.”
“Your sister’s sooooo cool!”
“She’s a reprobate,” Lindsay said. “And Luke’s a criminal. I should tell Mom and Dad.”
Derrick ignored Lindsay.
“Wanna smoke it?”
“No!” Lindsay said, thinking that it probably came from her aunt, anyway. She hated her family. So she took it out on Derrick. She smacked him in the back of his head as they came to another stoplight.
“Ow!”
“No,” Lindsay repeated.
Derrick drove on. Willow Parkway was becoming nothing but trees. They wouldn’t hit city again until about Lake Street. About a block before Lake Street he decided to play the guilt cards.
“Lindsay, I know we can’t have sex,” he began.
“That’s out of the question.”
“That’s what I just said.” Derrick was a little frustrated. “But would you go down on me?”
The look on Lindsay’s face said that she would not. Derrick thought that out of all the Foster sisters, this was the one he’d ended up with.
He hadn’t expected it anyway. It was just like bidding too low at an auction to get the price you wanted. He’d settle for fooling around, but he went the next step. He was poker faced when he said, “Can I have a handjob? I won’t tell anyone you did it.”
Because Lindsay didn’t immediately look at him he knew this stood a chance. She was taking out her guilt cards too, and seeing if she owed him this.
“It’s the last game of the season,” he added to shift the balance his way. When he thought of how many people on the team were getting sympathy fucked as he drove his girlfriend around this godforsaken town, it made Derrick a little bitter.
In his last jabs, Bone was deep in her. That was the best, when his large body tensed, when her buttocks were cupped by his paws, when her hands were clutching the spread of his own backside and Bone, in all of his largeness was rendered still, his face set in a rictus by orgasm. It made keeping quiet bearable while the too cold shower water soaked her.
Bone was breathing deep like a furnace; his large hands were giving way. Ashley was sore. Bone moved her under the shower. She understood that she was supposed to wash the semen away. He didn’t say anything. If anyone had seen them in the second story bathroom of the McArthur house it would have looked like he was taking her from behind, but he was too tired for that, his head was on her shoulder.
That annoyed Ashley too. If they were in love that sort of affection would have been bearable. But Bone was just the big bear who fucked her.
“Rafferty says I’m flunking his class,” Ashley said, as the water soaked her, as she reached for the towel hanging over the shower curtain rung, and stepped out. She began drying herself.
“Rafferty’s got a little dick,” Bone said.
“How do you know?” Ashley didn’t even bother to look at Bone. She just kept drying her hair.
“His type do.”
Ashley began drying the rest of her body. She smiled and shook her head.
“Un unh,” she said. “I bet he’s big. I bet he’s hung like a bull.”
“Shut up,” Bone shut off the shower water. His skin was red. He was dripping. He looked like an irritated child.
“I bet it’s big as fuck,” Ashley said. “I bet it’s bigger than yours.”
Bone didn’t say anything. Ashley watched him because she liked watching him. She liked his surliness. She liked watching his big old body plod across the bathroom floor.
“Whaddo you think your sister’s like in bed?” Bone said. As he said it, Ashley just caught a glimpse of his cock before the towel went over it.
“It took you a while to think of that one, didn’t it? It wasn’t even a good one. I’d have to ask you which sister. Then I’d have to tell you it didn’t matter cause neither one of them’s doing anything.”
“Not Lindsay. She’s a prude. But Tina.”
“She’s a bitch. She’ll die a virgin.”
“She’s probably taking it up the ass from Luke Madeary right now.”
“I bet he’ll take it up the ass from her before that happens,” Ashley told him. “And all this talking about taking it up the ass is something you can definitely drop because this shit is an exit only,” she said displaying a behind that was round and porcelain smooth.
“All I said- ”
“I know the things you say, and the things you want, and you can keep on wanting,” she declared. “I gotta go. You’re not the only one who has to be at the game tomorrow.”
“I bet you’d give it up the butt to Rodder.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ashley said, slipping into her panties and then looking for her bra. “Rodder’s not here.”
IAN SLIPPED ON HIS LEATHER JACKET.
“You wanna run over to Kirk Berghen’s with me?” he asked his cousin. “Then I’ll drop you off before I go home.”
“I guess,” Roy said, sliding off the sofa. “Are you gonna to buy more weed?”
“His shit is the cheapest and the best in town. Come on.
“Look at that sky,” Ian pointed up to the black heaven as he opened the door for his cousin and then rounded the car, and slipped inside. “And the weather’s great... For this time of year. It’ll be winter before long.”
Roy was quieter than usual as Ian threaded his way from the northeast to the southwest of Jamnia. He thought that he’d have to talk to Roy a little later. But he didn’t want to push his cousin.
They came through the alley to the two story garage behind the white house on Windham Street. Lights were on and Ian could smell frank and unashamed marijuana. Over the laughter The Grateful Dead were demanding:
Oh, Oh, and I want to know- ow
how does that song go!
When Ian came through the back door, Kirk, hair in his face, and black beard around his jaw, noticed his guests and shook Ian by the shoulders. “Come on in. Who’s this?”
“My cousin.”
“Welcome, Cousin!” Kirk stuck out a hand. He looked fierce and handsome, though a little shaggy. He brought them further into the garage where people in ripped jeans, and corduroys, paisley shirts, white men and women with dreadlocks were sitting on sofas, drinking beer, and passing joints.
“Roy! Ian!” Tina leapt up from a beanbag where she’d been sitting between Luke and her Aunt Ally- a woman who obviously did not mind being in a group of people twenty years younger.
Roy waved nervously. Ian was surprised, then said, “I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised.”
“I’m usually never here,” Tina said. “But I’m with Luke.” She jerked a thumb toward the brown haired boy, talking to Alice now.
Kirk came toward them with a sausage in a bun. He bit into it and kept talking, “Grab yourself some food.” He pointed to the table in the middle of the garage. “But I can’t tell the difference between the spicy sausages and the regular. Cause they’re all burnt,” Kirk smiled cheezily. Then he said, “Oh- ” and Kirk dumped a bag of weed into Ian’s hands.
“How much—?”
“It’s free!” Kirk announced. “Tonight. It’s a party night, and everything, you know. And my cousin’s here,” he wrapped an arm about Tina. She gave him a dubious look. “I’m feelin’ Christian.”
Ian thanked Kirk, and motioned for Roy to follow him toward the table. “What’s wrong, you wanna go home?” Ian asked. “We can’t go right now. I just got a free bag of marijuana. But I promise in a few minutes we can get away from these folks.”
Ian made quick work of the sausage, and split his beer with Tina who said, “It’s almost time for us to turn in too.”
“What?” said Luke.
“Me, at least,” Tina said.
Getting into the car, Ian said, “Now tell me what’s up, Roy. You’re my cousin. You know what that means?”
Roy turned, and gave his older cousin a blank stare.
“It means that up until this time, caring about you has been the thing that’s kept me from being a selfish asshole. Alright? So you have to tell me what’s wrong with you tonight.”
“I...” Roy started. Then he blurted out: “It’s tomorrow and tonight!”
“Whaddo you mean? We’re going out. You’re gonna have fun, not be stuck in the house all day.”
“You’re going out,” Roy said. “And I’m tagging along.”
Ian looked as if he’d been betrayed. Then he felt as if he’d been betraying Roy.
“It’s just that...” Roy was trying to explain this. “I like everyone. I like all of your friends. But I want friends of my own.”
Ian sighed and sat back blowing out his cheeks. He did not speak immediately, because he did not know what to say.
At last he spoke, slowly. “How about if you borrow mine for a while? Could you live with that? I mean, friends have to come from somewhere.”
Too quickly by Ian’s judgment, Roy grinned back and said, “Yeah, I guess. Let’s go home.”
As he turned the key in the ignition, Ian was not sure who was comforting whom.
AILEEN WAS SITTING UP AT her little desk off of the kitchen when she heard the back door jingle open, and Ashley come in.
“Where have you been?” she started, motioning at her daughter with two unpaid bills. Then she sighed, and shook her head so strands of hair escaped the bun she’d tied behind her head. “Nevermind. I don’t even want to know. Have you seen your sister?”
“Tina?”
“Either one of them, actually.”
Ashley took the news that Lindsay was hanging out on the town with a note of surprise.
“No, Mama.”
“Well... Go to bed,” Aileen said at last, at a loss for anything else of import to say. If Lindsay and Ashley, the two daughters who actually did have to be someplace tomorrow could hang out till all hours of the night with their many boyfriends, then why couldn’t Tina, the only one who showed signs of having a brain?
Aileen heard Ashley’s steps stop, and then reverse on the stairwell above her head.
“Mama, I just thought...”
Aileen turned around, pushing the difficult hair out of her face as she pushed the glasses up her nose.
“Um hum?” Aileen waited.
“Tina’s probably with Luke.”
“With who?”
“Her man.”
“Really?” Aileen said. “Thank you, Ashley. Go to bed, Ashley.”
Aileen’s eyes were red with exhaustion. She lit a cigarette, smoked it, and wondered how much of a private life did her oldest daughter have. She was crushing out her cigarette, a little hypnotized by the spirals the smoke made as it crawled up over the lampshade, when she heard the heavy plodding of Kevin’s feet coming down the back stair. When he materialized, his brown hair sticking up, his face looking rumpled, and a little bit like Popeye the Sailor Man’s, this did not entice her to come to bed anytime sooner. He stood, stretching, his fists curled behind his back the way he’d done since they were teenagers, rising on the balls of his spread apart feet.
“You comin’ to bed, Aily?”
“I would have been to bed a long time ago if you bothered to look over some of these bills, first, Kevin,” she told him.
He gave her a sour look, and folded his arms over his chest. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew he was still attractive. His chest was broad, his arms were strong. She knew she was attractive too. Her hair didn’t have to be greasy. She didn’t have to look like a movie librarian with the glasses on chains. Tomorrow, at the game, she wouldn’t.
“Come on upstairs, Aily.” She was even more sure of her beauty now, because when Kevin used that voice it meant that there was only one thing for which he wanted her to come upstairs.
Aileen rose in her old worn out satin nightie. She untied her hair, and Kevin sloppily brushed it down with his hand. She flicked off the light. The little converted pantry room behind the kitchen was swallowed in darkness. They went up the stairs, Kevin’s arm around his wife’s waist. He swatted her on the ass, and she yelped and laughed.
“Kevin! Stop! Stop! I’m serious. I’ll hurt you!”
Walking up the stairs was a slow process. She did it with her arm around a man whose arm was around her waist, her head resting on his chest. Kevin kissed her on the top of her head. They didn’t make love enough. They were both too tired and quite frankly too damned cranky. So when he wanted her, she was determined to want him. Aileen resented Ashley because she was sure this Luke boy had been brought up just so she could bring him up to Kevin right now and sour her husband’s mood. Not only would Tina be in trouble, but intimacy would then be all but completely impossible tonight. So she filed Luke away in her brain for another day, knowing he would be as much of a mood killer as announcing before she went into the bathroom for a brief second to slip into something more comfortable that what she was really doing was taking an emergency piss and popping in her diaphragm.
MADELEINE CLIMBED OUT OF THE window and down the trellis, the only way her father had never been able to catch her escaping, and went through the high over growth of the side yard to the garage, into the musty smelling place which was filled with summer heat in late autumn, and mildew scented cold in summer. She pulled out her bike, which she scarcely used anymore. Before she’d thought about getting a car and started using Tina’s, this bicycle had been the freedom to go wherever she wanted. Now she realized that she had never gone far. Jamnia was the extent of her imagination, and she thought she had a better than average imagination. No wonder no one here ever went anywhere.
Madeleine’s path was not down Michael Street. It described a loose circle around the set back cul de sac areas of split levels behind the school, and close to the Lake. She cut up Fairlane Drive, well out of the range of the high school, or her own house before she was anywhere close to traveling toward her intended destination. Several blocks east of her house, she crossed Michael. It was almost empty at this time of night. She rode through the quiet tree lined streets of Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets. Some houses were bricks and colonials, some long blocks of small shoeboxes with one large picture window. A few boasted two stories, garages, antique antennas.
Main Street was still fairly busy at this time of night. Some bars were still open. The Walgreens was open down the block. Two blocks down to her left, Madeleine could see the shadow of Our Lady of Jamnia. There were some kids out, probably from the college, looking for a good time. She crossed Main and all was quiet again. She made a right turn into small houses set back in trees where she could hear crickets. Over some hill a motorcycle was revving up. A train was sighing as it crossed the trestle a block or so away.
Madeleine parked her bike in the bushes before a little house that was set back at an angle. White, two storied, with a little porch, blue shutters and blue trim. Her heart felt light tonight.
When she passed through the gate and the overhang of tree limbs, Madeleine Fitzgerald saw Rodder Gonzales was sitting on his porch, sipping a beer. He toasted her with it, smiled, and then raised a finger and went inside the darkened house. He came back with one for her.
“I thought you’d never come,” he said.
“I told you I would.”
With the edge of his tee shirt, Rodder unscrewed the cap and handed the beer to Madeleine. It was good and fizzy going down her throat. She decided not to smoke. He had always hated that.
“And the parents away for the weekend of the last game,” Madeleine commented.
“What can I say?” Rodder said. “I’m hurt.”
He didn’t seem terribly hurt.
“Don’t worry. Madeleine’ll make it all better. Just let her know where it hurts.”
“I’m not sure if you’re concerned about my welfare, Maddy,” Rodder said in a hurt voice. “I think you just want to take advantage of me.” He kissed her. “What’s a boy to do? I bet when you heard my parents wouldn’t be home to protect me...”
Since they’d first met, Rodder had always turned her on by feigning innocence in the middle of passion. Over six feet, lean, and very handsome with shocking sky grey eyes and a mind sharp as a whip, Roderigo Gonzales, when they were alone would channel a naive boy, helpless and stupid, wondering what was about to happen to him. When he murmured, “What’s a boy to do?” in that same heated tone, she imagined a serial rapist would use to say, “I’m about to fuck you,” it made her panties flood.
She was on his lap, tied up in his arms. They were making out, really making out, lips on throats, mouth to mouth, kissing eyes and noses, caressing arms, squeezing thighs, tasting flesh. She looked around a second. There had been no traffic or anything.
“You can’t see anything from here,” Madeleine marveled. Undistracted, Rodder kept kissing her.
“I couldn’t see this porch until I’d come past the gate,” she said.
“I know,” Rodder murmured, not caring as he set himself on his back, under the porch swing. Madeleine was on top of him. He guided her hands to the belt of his shorts.
“We can’t- ” she gasped.
He pulled her face down and kissed her. His eyes, black in the night, were full on her.
“Yes we can,” he insisted, and began working with her jeans.
“Oh, my God, Rod,” she murmured. She felt the melting. She was going wet and wide in that secret place. Before Rod there had been no one. After him there had never been this melting, the aching inside her, the feel that his hands on her skin, working off her clothes, were actually melting into her skin. There was that old familiar ache in her.
They undressed each other on the porch. Sex with other people was not sex like this. They didn’t even undress all the way. So much of the lovemaking would occur in the touching and the tasting of the body once this was done.
Madeleine got on her side so they lay facing each other, and then he moved over her panting and eager. She pulled down Rodder’s shorts, and his white briefs. She watched him growing. His cock was a black, thick shadow in the night darkness. She only saw it a little as she guided him in. He gasped a little at making his entry. Rodder took Madeleine’s hands gently, and guided them under his tee shirt. Together they lay like that making no loud sounds, no sudden moves, clinging and rolling in and out, trying to fuse their bodies together until slowly Rodder began to develop a rhythm, and sing a little to his rhythm, and Madeleine began to caress his back, broad and damp with perspiration, wet and narrow at the small. She began to caress his ass, round and covered in smooth hairs, his beautiful thighs, this beautiful body she was opening to, felt like she was giving birth to.
Before Rodder began to speed up and make her cry out, before those last moments when the loving became fucking, before it became coming she wondered what had happened to break this unity?
MORE MONDAY NIGHT!
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Seems like some of the virgins are losing that title. Vaughan's talk of religion reminds me of me at a younger age. That was a great portion with some excellent writing and I look forward to more in a few days! I hope you are having a nice weekend!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
You know, that's exactly what someone else said at this same point! But, in all fairness to the virgins, I'll point out that everyone who started out as a virgin in this book still is one even though I love that seen between Rod and Madeleine. Since Vaughan actually reminds me a lot of me, I'm curious about the similarities you see between the way he feels about religion and the way you did?