But this happened before rooms were planets. I wet Caspar’s bed and woke up crying. There must have been a dream, I don’t remember. Anyhow, I stripped off the Roy Rogers pajama bottoms and hopped down on the cold floor. With all these beds to choose from, no reason to sleep in a wet one.
But the hallway was really dark, dark as death. Normally Lydia left the bathroom light on and the door cracked so the hallway had a soft glow of security. I wasn’t used to blackness.
I felt the wall, then the wall on the other side. I sat down and yelled “
I hollered “
I crawled down the hall—afraid I’d lose the floor too if I stood—to Lydia’s room but it was a cave. I pulled myself up and stood at the door and cried, trying to will her into place. The steps going downstairs were no better. I had to turn around and slide on my front, one step at a time. I heard a sound and peed again. Somewhere along the way, I took off the Roy Rogers pajama top.
A clock glowed in Caspar’s library, which had been Me Maw’s bedroom the last year when she couldn’t do the stair deal. I pulled some books off the shelves and walked head-on into a globe of the world. In the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator and made light and everything wasn’t so bad anymore. I ate some grapes from the vegetable bin, then rolled into a ball, using my body to block open the refrigerator, and fell asleep.
Lord knows why I remember that.
Maurey’s knock on the door made me jump like I’d been hit by a rock. In three months we’d had four knocks—two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Girl Scout turning cookies, and a guy looking for Soapley. I’d begun thinking the outside world couldn’t touch me while I was at home.
“Let’s try it,” Maurey said when I opened the door. She was real pretty and brunette standing on the snow. Her eyes had blue sparkles, like she was interested in what she was doing.
“My mom’s not home.”
“She and eight other drunks rented a motel room in Dubois when the bars closed last night. They’re having a party.” Maurey let herself in. She had on Levi’s and a red parka. “My second cousin Delores is there. Delores’s husband told her mom in the hope of getting her dragged out, but it didn’t work, and her mom told my mom and I overheard. Delores and Lydia are the only girls at the party.”
“I’m making oatmeal. You want some?”
“Funny how news travels in a small town, isn’t it. Got some coffee? I want to explain the rules before we do this.”
“Do what?”
“Have sex. Why else would I be here?”
I focused on the label on the back of Maurey’s jeans as I followed her into the kitchen. Ever since I was a little boy, I’d wanted to have sex with a girl, even though I didn’t know what that entailed until recently. The main reason I’d wanted sex was because, as I understood it, you got to see her naked. I couldn’t really conceive of a goal loftier than seeing a woman without her clothes. Rubbing myself against one or having one see me naked were somewhat disquieting thoughts that I’d avoided up to that point.
“We’re going to perform sex now?” I asked.
“After coffee.”
Maurey and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table—a giant wood slab thing with area cow brands burned into the top—and dumped spoonfuls of sugar and about a can of milk into two mugs. I still didn’t like coffee that much, only drank it because I felt like I should. All addictive things are distasteful when you first start out. She blew across the steam and sipped. “You already taught me one thing I didn’t know, Sam.”
“What’s that?”
“Coffee. Now we’ll teach each other something.”
“You think Lydia might come home today?”
She wrinkled her nose and looked closely at the cup. “Doubtful. Ray, that’s Delores’s husband, he says they just sent out for Chinese food and two cases of Schlitz.”
“Where can you get Chinese food at eight-thirty in the morning?”
Maurey dumped more sugar in her mug. “Dubois is a weird place. Think you can get a stiffie?”
I glanced at my lap and thought about Brigitte Bardot. “They seem to come and go. I haven’t figured how to control it yet.”
“Maybe it’ll happen naturally.”
“I’ve heard something about putting it in the girl’s mouth.”
“I’m not doing anything that might make me sick.”
We stared into our nearly white coffee for a while. I was hungry, but I’d turned off the oatmeal and it seemed sacrilegious to turn it back on when I was on the edge of the Great Chasm. This was more important than food. This was what Lydia said grown-ups lived for.
“We’re both virgins,” Maurey began.
“I never said I was a virgin.”
She gave me the evil eye. I bit my thumbnail. “We’re both virgins,” she began again, “but someday we’re going to find ourselves doing it.”
That someday confused me. I thought we were going to do it after coffee.
Maurey continued. “When my time happens, I don’t want to come off like a squirrel, I want to know what’s going on at all times.”
“That makes sense.” I stared at her fingers on the mug. The mug said Fort Sumter and had a picture of an army base on the side. Maurey had the smallest hands in the world.
“So you and I are going to learn about this thing now while it doesn’t matter, so we won’t be fools later when it does.”
“Today’s sex doesn’t matter.”
She stared me right in the eye. “We’re just friends helping each other learn a new skill. Just friends can’t really do it. This is practice.”
“Will we still be virgins afterwards?”
“I don’t know. That’s part of what we’re going to learn, where the line between virginity and nonvirginity really is.”
I’d always understood it as a clearly marked frontier. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s either when you stick it all the way in or when the boy squirts. You better not squirt.” She looked at me suspiciously, as if I was secretly planning to play a trick and squirt in her.
“I won’t squirt. Promise.”
“And no kissing. Kissing is mushy, emotional stuff, and we can’t do it if you’re going to get mushy.”
“No mush.”
We were silent awhile. The refrigerator kicked on. I could hear the toilet running in the bathroom. Downtown, the volunteer fire siren howled. It would continue for a minute while the firemen rushed to the station, then there’d be ten minutes of truck sirens. It happened once a week or so, whenever creosote built up in somebody’s stovepipe and the chimney caught fire.
“I’m not sure you can do it without mush,” I said.
“We can do it.”
“Dot and Lydia both say it takes emotionalism.”
I know Maurey thought I was just trying to trick a kiss out of her, and maybe I was. Unless you count a cheek peck on Janey Silverman in the fourth grade, I’d never kissed a girl. Like seeing one naked, kissing was another goal. It was hard to believe I was going to skip right over all the intermediate thrills and go straight to intercourse.
“You told me your mom had done it with lots of people. It couldn’t have been emotional every time.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know how often and with how many people it was possible to be emotional. “We could try it first without kissing and if it doesn’t work we could kiss without meaning it.”
