Magic Time, page 6
“Sugar,” I’d say.
And he’d reply, “Sherrylynne Espinoza, your first girlfriend.”
And we’d go on like that, playing This Is Your Life, Mike Houle, until I found something that he didn’t know about me.
I thought of a girl I was seriously involved with while I was at LSU. Her name was Francie Deveau, she was Cajun, slim, and dark-skinned with black eyes that seemed to be all pupil.
“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else, something no one else in the world knows about you,” Francie said to me one evening in my tiny room in what had once been a mansion, was now student housing, not far from the LSU campus. We were cuddled up in my single bed, having dragged the covers up off the floor after making love.
“Hurricane Francie,” I said. “I think of you as Hurricane Francie, because you’re such an uninhibited lover. But I’ve never had the nerve to say the words out loud.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Francie said, running the tip of her tongue along my upper lip like she was applying lipstick to it. “But I want something really secret, something dark and revealing. You must have a skeleton in your closet. Everyone does.”
“Okay,” I said. “Something I know about myself that I’ve never spoken aloud, tried never to think about. Something that no one else seems able to recognize. During a game, when I get into a tight situation, a crucial situation, I choke.”
“That’s not much of a skeleton,” Francie said.
“For a baseball player it is.”
In high school, the first girl who actually liked me back was Sugar Espinoza, one of a dozen or so students bussed to our mainly white, middle-class high school from a Puerto Rican neighborhood close to downtown Chicago.
She had beautiful long black hair and chocolate eyes. Her teeth were a sparkling white, and she wore a different lipstick every day, each brilliant as a tropical flower. Sugar wore tight sweaters and tighter jeans, and talked a mile a minute in a charming accent. She taught me about serious french kissing, and before long, about most other aspects of sex.
When I asked her for a date, Sugar said I couldn’t come to her house to pick her up. Pick her up was a euphemism anyway, because I traveled by bus. After Mom was killed, Dad sold the car. We were within walking distance of work, school, and the downtown shops, what did we need a car for? It is only since both Byron and I have left home that Dad has started to drive again.
I’d take the bus into Chicago, meet Sugar on a street corner, and we’d take in a movie, usually a double feature at a second-run movie house, where we’d sit in the back row and kiss and put our hands down each other’s jeans. And where, during a break, Sugar would light up a cigarette, and stare around the mostly empty theater as if daring anyone to complain.
After the movie we’d go for coffee or ice cream, then Sugar would head off on her own.
“I don’ ever wan’ to be seen in my neighborhood wit’ joo. My old man, he’d have a monkey he ever seen me wit’ an Anglo. He don’ think I should go out wit’ boys ‘til I’m eighteen, then only wit’ ones he pick out for me.”
“He doesn’t know you date?”
“He thinks I still play wit’ dolls.”
“Anatomically correct ones?”
“One of these nights, soon as my girlfriend’s parents go out of town, we’ll see how good joo play.”
The next Friday night Sugar took my hand and said, “Come on! Violet’s folks have gone to Detroit for the long weekend.”
She led me about ten blocks in a direction we’d never gone, the neighborhood getting seedier each block.
“We’ll cut down the alley,” she said, pulling me along. “I know too many people might be out on the street.”
We came in through a back yard crammed with junk, up a rickety iron fire escape at the back of a very old brick building. We entered by a fire door and walked down a long, dark hallway that creaked ominously at every step. The interior was like an old hotel, and it smelled like a basement with underlying odors of cabbage, urine, and perfume.
Sugar knocked on a black door and after she identified herself, the opener released about six chains and locks.
Violet was a lumpy-looking girl with frizzy hair and very thick glasses. The apartment was cozy, filled with furniture covered in colorful knitted shawls, and dime-store religious pictures, on the walls.
“Violet, this is Mike. We’ll talk later.”
I managed a quick wave at Violet before Sugar pulled me past the small television that Violet and two young children were watching, and straight into a bedroom.
We kissed wildly, then lay on the bed and undressed each other. There wasn’t a lot to undress. Sugar was wearing a white sweater, jeans, and panties. When the sweater was off she pushed my head down to her breasts. I took each firm, orange-sized breast in my mouth, the nipple becoming rigid at the touch of my tongue. Sugar moaned appreciatively.
She pushed my head down farther. I undid her jeans and she helped me peel them and her panties off. She guided my mouth to the wetness between her legs.
“A little higher,” Sugar moaned. “Oh, yeah,” she said, as my tongue found what was like another tiny nipple. “Oh, yeah. Pretend your tongue’s a butterfly. Let it flutter!”
She convulsed against my mouth, then shuddered wildly, and held my head in place with both hands.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered. “Turn around and I’ll kiss you ‘ ’til you feel good, too.”
And she did.
When she could feel me getting really excited, she pushed me away. “Now, make love wit’ me.”
I pulled myself around until I was above her. Her mouth was already on mine, the sweet tastes intermingling. But instead of entering her, as she was offering, I held back, because an alarm was beeping in my head — my father’s warning about always being responsible … “If you’re not responsible one way you’ll sure as hell be responsible the other.”
There was one family freedom Byron and I enjoyed that most sons didn’t. We were always allowed to bring girlfriends to the house, night or day. Dad seldom had a girlfriend, and I can’t recall one ever staying overnight.
“You’ve got to learn how to relate to women,” Dad would say. Then he’d give us The Speech.
“If a woman thinks enough of you to make love with you, treat her kindly. Don’t ever brag to your friends, no matter how much you want to, and always think good thoughts about her ever after.
“She’s your responsibility.” The Speech would go on. “It’s your responsibility not to get her pregnant. You know how girls get pregnant, I’ve told you often enough. Intelligent girls will know about birth control. But you’ll never go wrong if you assume every girl you’re with knows nothing about birth control. That’s your job, and don’t you ever forget it.”
I first heard The Speech when I was about eleven. Dad banged a box of condoms down on the kitchen table and demonstrated on a banana. If he was embarrassed he didn’t show it, but I was mortified. I barely understood what part of my anatomy I was supposed to cover with the condom, and I certainly hadn’t had any close encounters with girls, unless you could count Sally Pearlman putting her tongue in my mouth during a game of spin-the-bottle at her birthday party.
“Remember what I’ve said,” Dad growled, rolling up the condom and fitting it back into the box. “We’ll have this talk again in six months, just to refresh your memory.”
As the years passed The Speech expanded to contain other information about sex. Because of The Speech, Byron and I became the neighborhood experts on sex. We were able to dispel most of the weird rumors started by boys who knew nothing but what they’d heard second-, third-, and fourth-hand from other boys.
With Sugar pulling me down on top of her, I frantically reached one arm over the side of the bed, searching for my jeans and, the condom carefully concealed in the secret compartment of my wallet.
“What joo doing?”
“We need protection.”
“A safe?”
“Yeah.”
“What joo think, I’m stupid? There’s a free clinic. I been on the pill since I was fourteen.”
Later, after Sugar had guided me out of the neighborhood, while she was waiting with me for my bus, I made the mistake of asking what she had liked best about our evening together.
“The thrill of doing it and not getting caught,” Sugar said. “My brothers’d kill joo if they found out. My old man would probably kill us both, if he thought I was fucking an Anglo.”
Determined to stay alive, I brought Sugar to my home a couple of times after school. But the sex, while good, was never quite so good, perhaps because instead of lying and saying my father would gun us down without mercy if he caught us naked in my room, I told the truth and said that as long as I acted responsibly my father preferred that I brought my girlfriends home.
Sugar didn’t find my bedroom thrilling enough, and I was too chicken to visit her neighborhood again, so we drifted apart. She dropped out our senior year to marry a guy named Kiko, a short, swarthy boy with a drooping mustache and a penchant for purple shirts and pointed black shoes.
Looking back, I haven’t been very successful when it comes to flashy women. While I was at LSU I liked Louisiana girls with their mysterious bayou upbringings, their language full of words I found strange to the ear and tongue. For some reason I was attracted to women who enjoyed making love in dangerous situations, but thinking each sexual experience might be my last is not a turn-on for me. Once, about three in the morning, my date and I were walking across the foggy LSU campus when she leaned against a light standard in the shadow of the library, slipped off her shoes, stepped out of her panties and stuffed them in her purse, leaned against the pole, and said, “Make love to me.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked, though I knew she wasn’t.
“It’s more fun when there’s danger involved,” she replied.
“Not for me,” I said, and walked on.
“Chicken,” said the girl, whose name I’ve blocked from my memory, with good reason.
Francie Deveau was my sweetheart for well over a year. We thought we were in love. We met in the library at LSU where she was obviously having a difficult time with elementary statistics. I volunteered my services as tutor.
Francie had blue-black hair to her waist, and a Cajun temper like a rolling thunderstorm. She was the first of her family — there were six brothers and sisters — to finish high school, let alone enter university. They lived in bayou country in a rambling, ramshackle house that would have been a perfect setting for a horror movie. The family didn’t seem to work, or farm, or fish; they just existed on land that may or may not have been theirs. Her family, especially her three brothers, spoke with such heavy accents, I had to continually ask them to repeat themselves.
Her father had only one eye, and seemed to rule as part dictator, part priest, part social worker. Before breakfast my first morning there on a visit, he offered a free-fall prayer that was more of sermon, the kind delivered on television by evangelical zealots. He called on God to smite his enemies and to protect his family from, and I quote, “the terrors of the outside world,” a phrase spoken while looking directly at me with his one red eye. He called down plagues and pestilence on his enemies, of whom it appeared there were many. I was an object of curiosity, like an unexotic animal that had suddenly appeared on their doorstep, led on a string by their daughter.
Francie and I had arrived late the previous night, after a bus ride to the end of the line, where we were met by one of her brothers, then a wild trip in a pickup truck, and finally a motorboat cruise through a midnight-black swamp.
The prayer raged on, one of Francie’s sisters chiming in an “Amen” whenever her father stopped to take a breath. I thought of the previous night. I was put in a bedroom on the second floor, and after I’d been asleep for some time, I was wakened by Francie crawling under the covers with me. As I listened to the prayer I imagined my bound body being pushed over the side of a pirogue into a scummy bayou by Francie’s brothers while her father wildly denounced fornicators to the heavens.
I lived in fear the rest of that eternally long weekend, even after I insisted that Francie stay in her own room the next night.
When we got back to LSU, Francie said she thought we ought to stop seeing each other. She and her family had decided that I just wouldn’t fit in. I was too different.
I hastily agreed before she changed her mind.
EIGHT
The Buick glided over the two-lane, through the rolling Iowa countryside. Emmett had been talking while my mind was wandering. When I tuned him in again he was saying: “There’s a freight stops in Grand Mound about 10:30 at night, farmers think nothing of dropping by the house at 11:30 to insure a tractor or cultivator that arrived on the late freight. Sometimes two or three separate items come in on the train. The street in front of our house looks like a scene from a horror movie where the locals, at night with torches, hunt down the monster.
“Grand Mound certainly isn’t the fast lane, but we live well, Mike. I’m planning to retire at sixty-two, just ten years from now. The agency will be a fine business for a young enterprising …”
“Emmett! The boy hasn’t even seen Grand Mound yet. Don’t be trying to sell him your insurance business,” Marge Powell said from the back seat. When I turned toward her, she said to me, “You’ll have to forgive him, Mike. Emmett and his friends — you’ll hear about the Grand Mound Booster Club soon enough — are so enthusiastic about small-town life that sometimes it’s a little frightening.”
“Did you know, Mike,” Emmett picked right up, “Iowa has more small towns for its size and population than any other state? Some people claim there was once a town about every mile, on every secondary highway in the state, but now the farms are getting larger and the farmers are getting fewer. When the farmers go, the small towns die. We’re trying, me and my friends, to reverse that trend.
“We don’t have to worry about Grand Mound dying for a few years,” Emmett went on, and the way he smiled I knew that was his way of using understatement.
“Grand Mound is one of the few towns in Iowa to show an increase in population every year for the past five years. Now the increase isn’t all that much, but when you consider Iowa had the largest decline in population of any state during that time, the fact that our population now is about the same as it was fifteen or twenty years ago speaks well for our energy and ingenuity.”
He smiled again, as if he was delivering a lecture to a Chamber of Commerce luncheon. “We’re recovering, while almost every other town I know of is still losing population. And I believe one of the prime reasons we’re prospering is having a team in the Cornbelt League. You’d be surprised at how many of our players decide to become full-time residents in Grand Mound.”
“No, I don’t think I would,” I said.
“What happens in small towns, or at least towns where the elders, as me and my friends like to think of ourselves, look out for the future of the inhabitants, the situation becomes positively tribal …”
“Oh, Emmett, don’t go delivering your lecture. Mike just isn’t ready for that sort of thing,” said Marge.
“Tribal,” Emmett went on. “The people of the town become a loose co-operative, jointly looking after their best interests, just as primitive tribes rallied together to fend off enemies.”
“Daddy, you talk as though we’re being besieged.”
“Only an analogy, my dear. What I mean is that a fine, well-managed small town displays tribal tendencies, not the least of which is the need to bring new blood into the community, which is what we accomplish by having a team in the Cornbelt League and bringing upstanding young men like Mike into our community, a certain percentage of whom will remain in Grand Mound, assimilate into the community, marry …”
“I believe I get the picture,” I said.
“Not the whole picture, Mike. We’ll show you that slowly, a bit at a time.”
“I’m sure you will,” I said.
We stopped for coffee and pie. We’d no sooner sat ourselves in booth when Emmett asked the waitress, “Do you know the perfect name for a waitress?” The girl looked blankly at him. “Phyllis,” he said, and laughed loudly. And, when the girl continued to stare at him like he was an escaped mental patient, “Phyllis. Fill Us!”
The girl made a face. Tracy Ellen and Marge groaned.
“I’ve got a million of ’em,” said Emmett, slapping my shoulder.
“More than that,” said Tracy Ellen, looking for meaning in the ice in her water glass.
The land around Grand Mound is rolling and hilly. I didn’t ask, for fear of getting a two-hour history lecture from Emmett, but I suppose the largest hill, the one where the Powells’ home sits, is the grand mound the town is named for.
The Powells live on a tree-lined street in a two-story, white, frame home with a big front porch, complete with porch swing and white-enameled table and chairs. My room is on the second floor, large and bright with double windows facing east, a walk in closet as big as my room at university, a huge double bed, and polished hardwood floors.
My first evening in Grand Mound.
No sooner had I cleaned up and unpacked my few clothes and possessions than I was called to dinner. I’ve been to restaurant buffets where there was less food on the table. There was roast pork and roasted potatoes, thick, pan-browned gravy, creamed cauliflower, fresh peas the color of outfield grass, and some orange mush that Mrs. Powell said was yams.
I passed on the yams, but I ate a couple of helpings of everything else, which included salad, three kinds of pickles, a relish or two, fresh dinner rolls, and applesauce for the pork. I washed it down with several glasses of iced tea. Then, in spite of my protests, Emmett forced a partial third helping on me. After which there was cherry pie and ice cream, and I was offered a choice of tea, coffee, cocoa, or something else I’d never heard of, called Ovaltine.
“What teams are in the Cornbelt League?” I asked Emmett, while I was accepting a second piece of pie and ice cream from Tracy Ellen. We had adjourned to the living room. “I’m afraid my agent didn’t tell me much.”
