The Sidney Ferguson’s mother had told him about was in fact Sydney, a Sydney with the last name of Millbanks, and as the young woman accompanied the weary traveler out of the terminal and led him toward her car in the parking lot, she explained that Mildred was teaching summer classes that quarter and had been held up at a department meeting on campus, but she would be joining them for dinner at the house in a couple of hours.
Ferguson inhaled his first whiff of California air and said: Are you the cook?
Cook, housekeeper, back rubber, and bedmate, Sydney replied. I hope you aren’t shocked.
The truth was that Ferguson did feel a little shocked, or at least surprised, or perhaps confused, since this was the first time he had heard of two people of the same sex living together, and no one had ever told him or dropped the smallest hint that his aunt secretly preferred the bodies of women to the bodies of men. The divorce from Uncle Paul had an explanation now, or seemed to have an explanation, but even more interesting was that Sydney the cowgirl saw no point in hiding the truth from him, and there was something admirable about her candor, he thought, it was good not to feel ashamed of being different, and so rather than admit to being a little shocked or confused by this unexpected revelation, Ferguson smiled and said: No, not at all. I’m just happy that Aunt Mildred isn’t alone anymore.
It took about forty minutes to drive from the San Francisco airport to the house in Palo Alto, and as Sydney tooled down the freeway in her pale green Saab, she told Ferguson about how she had met Mildred some years back when she was looking for a new place to live and had rented the garage apartment attached to her house. In other words, it had been an accidental meeting, something that never would have happened if she hadn’t stumbled across four lines of minuscule type in a newspaper, but not long after she settled in they had become friends, and a couple of months after that they had fallen in love. Neither one of them had been with a woman before, but there they were, Sydney said, a university professor and a third-grade schoolteacher, a woman in her early forties and a woman in her mid-twenties, a Jew from New York and a Methodist from Sandusky, Ohio, swept up in the greatest romance of their lives. The most confounding thing about it, Sydney continued, was that she had never thought about women in the past, she had always been a girl who was crazy for boys, and even now, after being shacked up with a woman for close to three years, she still didn’t think of herself as a lesbian, she was simply a person in love with another person, and because that other person was beautiful and entrancing and unlike anyone else in the world, what difference did it make if she was in love with a man or a woman?
She probably shouldn’t have been talking to him in that way. No doubt there was something inappropriate and perhaps indecent for a grown woman to be sharing such confidences with a fifteen-year-old boy, but the fifteen-year-old Ferguson was thrilled by her openness, at no point in his adolescence had any adult ever been so honest with him about the chaos and ambiguities of erotic life, and even though he had only just met Sydney Millbanks, Ferguson decided that he liked her, that he liked her enormously, and because he himself had been wrestling with these same matters for the past several months, struggling to figure out where he stood on the boy-girl spectrum of desire and whether he belonged in the zone of boys and girls or boys and boys or girls and boys interchangeably, he felt that this California cowgirl, this lover of both men and women, this person who had just entered his life and was taking him to his aunt’s house in Palo Alto, might be someone he could talk to without fear of being laughed at or insulted or misunderstood.
I agree, Ferguson said. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman.
Not many people think that way, Archie. You know that, don’t you?
Yes, I know, but I’m not many people, I’m just me, and the weird thing about me so far is that the only sex I’ve ever had was with another boy.
That’s very common for people your age. So common that you shouldn’t worry about it — just in case you have been worrying. What’s a boy to do, right?
Ferguson laughed.
I hope you enjoyed it, at least, Sydney said.
I enjoyed it, but after a while I didn’t enjoy him, so I put a stop to it.
And now you’re wondering: What’s next?
Until I get a chance to do it with a girl, I won’t really know what’s next.
It’s not much fun being fifteen, is it?
It has its good points, I suppose.
Really? Name one.
Ferguson closed his eyes, paused for a long moment, and then turned to her and said: The best thing about being fifteen is that you don’t have to be fifteen for more than a year.
THERE WERE NO flies or mosquitoes in California, and the Palo Alto air smelled like a box of cough drops, spicy-sweet throat lozenges with a eucalyptus flavor because eucalyptus trees turned out to be everywhere, giving off an all-pervasive scent that seemed to cleanse your nasal passages every time you inhaled. Vicks VapoRub dispensed free of charge into the northern California atmosphere for the health and happiness of the human population!
The town, on the other hand, felt bizarre to Ferguson, less a real place than the idea of a place, a quasi-urban-quasi-suburban outpost designed by a master planner with no tolerance for dirt or imperfection, which made the town seem dull and artificial, a quaint little Spookville inhabited by people with trim haircuts and straight white teeth, all of them dressed in good-looking, up-to-the-minute casual clothes. Luckily, Ferguson didn’t spend much time there, going once to shop for groceries with Sydney in the largest, cleanest, most beautiful supermarket he had ever seen, once to a filling station to put gas in her primitive, lawn-mower-engine Saab (seven parts gasoline to one part oil, both poured directly into the tank), and twice to the local art house theater to watch films in that week’s Carole Lombard Festival (My Man Godfrey, To Be or Not to Be), primarily because Sydney believed Mildred bore a strong resemblance to Carole Lombard, which, upon reflection, Ferguson granted was more or less true, but what splendid comedies those films were, and now that he had seen them, not only did Ferguson have a new actress to admire but a new insight into Aunt Mildred, who had laughed harder at those films than anyone else, and since Ferguson’s mother had often told him how her big sister had mocked her in the old days for liking movies so much, he wondered if love hadn’t softened his aunt’s attitude toward what she had once called trashy, low-life entertainment or if she had always been a hypocrite, lording it over her sister by asserting her superior taste and intelligence in all things while privately reveling in the same trash everyone else did.
Twice, the three of them left Palo Alto and went on all-day excursions in Mildred’s black Peugeot, first to Mount Tamalpais on Wednesday, with a return trip down the coast that included a two-hour pause at Bodega Bay, where they had dinner in a restaurant overlooking the water, and a Saturday outing to San Francisco that triggered dozens of tourist yelps from the startled Ferguson as they drove up and down the steep hills and then stopped for lunch at a Chinese restaurant where he ate dim sum for the first time (food that tasted so good his eyes filled with tears as he gorged himself on three different varieties of dumplings — tears of thanks, tears of joy, tears of hot sauce surging through his nostrils), but for the most part Mildred was busy with her classes and student conferences that week, which meant that until she came home for dinner at six or six-thirty Ferguson was either alone or with Sydney, although far less alone than with Sydney, who was on a ten-week vacation from her school, just as he was from his, and because Sydney professed to being the laziest person in the world, a title Ferguson had always thought belonged exclusively to him, they spent the bulk of their time together sprawled out on blankets in the yard behind the house, which was a one-story stucco cottage with a terra-cotta roof, or inside the house, which was pleasantly cluttered with books and records and was the first house Ferguson had ever set foot in that had no television, and as the days passed and he got to know Sydney better, he was intrigued that the almost pretty cowgirl was turning into the pretty cowgirl, and then the very pretty cowgirl, for the longish nose he had first seen as a defect now struck him as alluring and distinctive, and the blue-gray eyes that had once seemed so ordinary now looked alive and full of feeling. He had known her for just a few days, but he already felt they were friends — in much the same way, he imagined, that he and cousin Francie had once been friends in the long-ago world before the Newark fire.