She stood up and said, “Here’s what the gypsy did to the virgin,” and she pressed herself against me and kissed me on the lips, a real closed-mouth kiss, felt like kissing the seam on a football.
Lydia banged on the door. “Come on, I want to see the waistline.” Then suddenly I was naked from the navel down, except my socks, and something felt really weird and I woke up with this mess on my stomach.
I wiped myself off with a day-old sweat sock and changed pajamas. In the bathroom, I examined my eyes for signs of jaundice. Me Maw died of jaundice caused by cancer and Caspar said it was hereditary. I checked a mole on my right inner thigh, which I’d been told would change color and fall off if I had polio.
No yellow, no rotting moles. I went in, turned off the TV, and woke up Lydia, which I’d never done before.
She still slept on the couch in an askew post-Gilbey’s position, but at least she’d graduated to a white flannel nightgown. No more waking up fully dressed. Out the window, dawn turned the snow from gray to a light pink. That meant she’d had several hours to process the gin and Valium and might be somewhere near coherent.
I stuck the gooey sock up close to her face. “What’s this?”
Lydia blinked twice, stretched her spine, then made a chewing motion. It was my first experience at watching a woman go from asleep to awake.
“Sammy?”
“Lydia, something weird is going on and I demand an explanation.”
Her eyes focused. “You blew your nose on a sock.”
“No way in the world did this stuff blow out my nose.”
Lydia blinked a couple more times. She touched the goo with her index finger and touched the finger to her tongue. Her eyes woke up. “You jerked off. It’s come.”
I’d heard come-brains and come in your pants, and knew it was connected to the penis, but I’d vaguely figured it meant peeing on yourself. Jerk-off was a term used in sports to denote a lazy screwup. “I didn’t jerk off, Mom. I woke up with this stuff all over me.”
Lydia’s eyes left the sock and went to my face. “You had a wet dream, honey bunny. It’s okay. Boys have them all the time.”
“A wet dream?”
“Were you dreaming right before you woke up?”
I nodded.
“Maybe there was a girl in the dream?”
“She was naked.”
Lydia smiled. “Did you recognize her?”
Something told me to skip that one. “She kissed me and I felt funny.”
Lydia sat up and hugged me. I held the sock out away from her back. “Poor Sammy. It’s a natural stage in life. You just moved a step closer to being grown-up.”
I couldn’t see how gushing pus on my belly made me a grown-up. “Will you get me a Dr Pepper,” Lydia asked. “My mouth is all dried out.”
Staring into the refrigerator, I thought about the trauma I’d been through. This was just the kind of information that doesn’t sneak up on boys with fathers. Back in the living room, Lydia was examining her face in the turned-off television screen.
“Mom, a major fluid is leaking from my body and no one ever mentioned it. Why wasn’t I told?”
She drank about half the D.P. in one pull. “Don’t boys talk in locker rooms?”
“Dothan Talbot threw a rubber at Kim Schmidt once. I know how it fits over the end.”
“Well, that stuff is what the rubber catches. It’s not just for show.”
Outside, the pink snow was turning a different tinted gray and I could make out the Tetons off across the valley floor. “What exactly is this stuff?”
“Do something with it. Mothers and sons aren’t supposed to talk about this with a sock full of come between them on the coffee table.”
I carried the gooey sock into my room and set it on the keyboard of my typewriter. Then I went back and re-asked the question. “Talk, Lydia. I bet every kid my age in the world knows about come and they’re laughing at me, saying I’m a squirrel.”
Lydia made some eye contact with Les. Then she sipped on her bottle. “Come is like sperm in a runny mayonnaise base. It’s where babies come from. That’s why they call it come.”
“You give this stuff to a girl and she makes a baby?”
Lydia thought. “I guess that’s one way of putting it.”
“Doesn’t it get the girl all messy? I don’t know of any girl would want runny mayonnaise smeared on her.”
Lydia looked at me sadly. I guess ignorance is always sad when it has to be set straight. “The come goes in the girl, honey bunny. You really don’t know, do you? It doesn’t get on the girl—until she stands up, then it runs down the inside of her legs and feels icky.”
I sat down and tried to picture an anatomy I’d never seen. “You stick your dick up where the girl pees? How can millions of people do something they don’t let kids know about?”
“It doesn’t go up where they pee, there’s another tunnel. And sex is practically all anyone talks about.”
“I never heard anyone talk about sticking their dick up a tunnel.”
Lydia lit her first cigarette of the day and blew smoke at the dawn. “People use vague adult terms the kids can’t follow. Make love. Do it. Fuck.”
This was as major as discovering color or water or something crucial to life that everyone else knows about but I hadn’t dreamed possible. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea. “Lydia, this gooey dick and tunnel and sex stuff sounds kind of grotesque.”
She blew more smoke. “It’s fun once you get the hang of it.”
She was sixteen, a cheerleader at a large Southern high school, with long legs, blonde hair, and real breasts. She came to Sam Callahan in the early evening, as the sun dipped behind the Tetons. “I hear you can teach me something.”
“Who told you that?”
“Ramona. She says you revolutionized her life.”
“Ramona was a quick learner. Are you prepared to trust me?”
“Yes, Sam, teach me the mysteries of adulthood.”
“It’s not all pleasant. Icky stuff might run down your leg.”
“Teach me, Sam Callahan. Teach me everything.”
First thing I wanted to do Monday was tell Maurey what happened during the skipped parts of novels. I made Lydia’s coffee, ate a donut, and carefully wrapped my gooey sock in Saran Wrap just in case Maurey didn’t believe me. I thought about taking it over to the Pierces’ as proof—look, come—but it made a lump in my jeans that made me look squirrelly.
Besides, some things I did know instinctively. How to have sex wasn’t one of them. Knowing enough not to talk dicks and tunnels in front of Annabel was. Not all mothers are equal.
That day, Monday, Annabel finally took an interest in the national tragedy. She sat in the overstuffed recliner, cross-stitching a Christmas scene all morning. “Look at Jackie. I heard she hasn’t cried once all weekend.”
On the television, people filed through the Capitol rotunda on each side of the president’s body, four abreast. They’d been standing in line all night so they could do this, but what surprised me was the ones who didn’t look at the casket. They looked straight ahead or into the network cameras filming them. Why had they waited in line ten hours to do something they weren’t doing?
Maurey noticed it too. “It’s sad,” she whispered. “I don’t see the point.”
To take a shot at honesty here, by then I was somewhat bored with the assassination aftermath. The television had been droning for four days without a single commercial. No matter how much it affected the rest of our lives, Maurey and I were just too young for sustained somberness. I wanted to go outside and build anatomically correct snowboys and girls so we could figure out this sex thing.