a fifteen-year-old than I look like Muhammad Ali I had seen her pictures, of course; Teddy was big
on family pictures. But she didn?t look like that in pictures. No way. All I clearly remember was that
she had an absolutely sensational rear end. I couldn?t take my eyes off it. I was embarrassed, but my
eyes kept straying. It was like a magnet, I tried, I tried really hard, but it didn?t d any good. I kept
sneaking peeks. Then Teddy suddenly buried an elbow in my side.
She?s fifteen,” he hissed under his breath.
“What?s the matter with you?” I whispered back.
“Clicking eyeballs, Junior,” he said. “Lay a finger on that behind before she?s eighteen and I?ll
disengage your fucking clutch.” Then he broke down and started laughing.
That was the fall of 1960, a couple of weeks after Teddy Findley and I met, became roommates, and
began a friendship that would last far beyond college. He started calling me Junior the day we met. I
don?t know why, and he never explained it. I finally figured it was because he was taller than me.
Two, three inches. Nobody else, not even Doe, shared that privilege.
Anyway, I waited until she was eighteen. Two and a half years; that?s a lot of waiting. And during
those two and a half years she kept getting better and better, blossoming from little sister to big sister
to woman, while I watched it happen. Teddy didn?t help. He became a verbal calendar, taunting uric
every week of the way.
„How about it, Junior,” he?d say, “only four months to go.” It never occurred to me until later that I
was being sized up all that time: that waiting until she was eighteen had as much to do with me as it
did with her.
“Jake! Jake Kilmer. Is that really you?”
She was standing a foot away. I could feel the fire starting in the small of my back arid coursing up to
my neck, like the fuse on a stick of dynamite.
Time seemed to have evaded her. No lines, no wrinkles. Just pale gray eyes staring straight at me and
the warmth of her hand as she squeezed mine.
I stood up and said something totally inadequate like “Hi, Doe.”
Then she put her arms around me arid I was smothered by the warmth of her body pressing against
mine, by the hard muscles in her back and the softness of the rest of her. I was consumed with
wanting her.
Then she stepped back and looked up at my face, cocking her head to one side.
“Hardly a gray hair,” she said. “And every line in the right place.”
“Is that your way of saying I?m growing old gracefully?” I tried to joke.
“Oh, no,” she said softly, “not that. „You look beautiful.” She stared hard at me for another second or
