Six months after Dave had started dating Sheryl, he had begun picking Joanne up from band practice so Joanne didn’t have to take the late bus, an ingratiating kindness to get in with the family. Sheryl had endorsed it, promoting Dave’s big brother familiarity, Dave arming himself against Dad and all his resistance.
Joanne was a pawn in the conspiracy of their love.
Dave had always had an over-familiarity about him. She should have seen it. He wasn’t as stupid as he seemed. This is what groomers did. They talked about it on daytime TV, the obvious signs: Dave sitting at the kitchen table with a tall glass of milk and peanut butter sandwiches, talking to ‘Jo’, a name she hated that further made her less a woman and just a kid and incited her in the way someone like Dave better understood; Dave making it his business to be out in the open in his dealings with Jo.
This was again how a groomer groomed. She hardly showed in her chest. She was conscious of a slow change that could not come fast enough. She was her own worst enemy. She stuffed with cotton wool. Sheryl made a point to tell Dave this, because Sheryl was a bitch, and her gain always had to be Joanne’s loss. These were the trenches of family life, of sibling rivalry. Dave, in taking Jo under his wing, was seen to be seeking a mediating peace.
He took Jo out for a sundae at a roadside ice-cream parlor. He was sympathetic and not given to taking sides. They would work it out between them. Jo was a rare beauty and he told her the story of the ugly duckling, which should have raised five alarm bells about his intentions, but he knew what she wanted to hear. There was any number of things a person could say to another person in a shared intimacy that could never, or would never, be repeated in the light of day.
Who didn’t love Dave? Dave, familiar and funny! Dave, all hands, taking the truck the long way home, wresting the last of good fortune from an Indian summer, because he loved drives and aloneness, something he revealed as he stopped smiling, which suggested suddenly a greater depth of understanding and caring. He had the power to see in Joanne’s heart. She understood, in looking back on it, how it happened.
He had money in rolls and paid at a small window at what was ostensibly a summer shack for hot dogs and ice cream — Dave, licking his thumb, peeling off notes, and Jo on a picnic table in the last of what had been a long hot summer of first awakenings. He was a loser if she had looked close enough. She hadn’t. He incited an underlying pathology and fear in younger kids. He was the Fonz in that arrested state of early manhood, come of age early, when there were kids with acne and no facial hair, or no hair where there would be hair eventually, and Dave made it known, pushed his advantage. He was a bully, and maybe understood already, that, in the long run, these lesser kids would eventually run his life and make it a misery.
They were headed back from the ice-cream parlor when Dave reached and wiped whipped cream off her upper lip. He put it to his own lips and tasted it. Did Jo taste that good, or was it the sundae? He had a cassette he had made for Sheryl — all love song tracks — power ballads. He loved Journey and REO. He wanted her opinion. What turned her on?
She liked the drives along roads with harvested corn: the land worked and prepared in the fall; the U-pick apple orchards; the fermented tang of rotting apples along the roadside; Dave getting out and taking an apple and giving it to her, polishing it with the sleeve of his denim jacket, getting in again and simply driving, the cassette playing, and his eyes drifting toward Jo, giving her the once over with an appraising smile. So it was built-up between them. It would define a life she would look back on.
On a third consecutive Friday, he picked her up and smelled a perfume she had on. She had worn it especially for him, and admitted it, so, after ice cream, on a circuitous road home with few cars he unzipped and, taking her wrist, placed her hand there until it grew into her hand. She felt such a racing feeling of sudden panic. He went for her chest. She had not taken the precaution of removing the tissue and was so mortified. Dave, in his way, paved over it, removing the tissue, saying it was like opening a present in the crepe of paper balled and hot against her heart.
It took a matter of weeks until she did it of her own volition, looking straight ahead. Dave shifted to accommodate it. There was the occasional oncoming traffic, the brim of baseball caps and deferential nods. She kept her eyes straight ahead with it in her hand, feeling its pulse. She had experienced nothing like it before, that it went on like this between two people and she had never known it, or never experienced it. It became her life.
When it was not enough, and she felt a sudden wetness below, with the pressure of Dave’s hand at the back of her neck, she disappeared into his lap, and, when it was done, Dave smoothed strands of hair around her ear with a tenderness she had never experienced.
It became something she looked forward to, taking him in her mouth.
It continued, Dave taking ‘Jo’ with him on errands, when Sheryl was already entrenched in a domestic future of what her life would be like with Dave, and it was okay, until there was eventual penetration. Dave wanted to be inside her. He made promises he could not keep and didn’t. For a time, during it, in the midst of his strength, the scent of him, the hotness he emanated, the pulse of it, she wanted to become pregnant, in the way she had heard girls speak of in school.
It was how she would usurp Sheryl and her full rack, aligning her life with a man who came so close to perfection. She had won a great prize. She had it in her head, a man arrived into her home, and, finding her preferable to her sister, chose her, like in bygone days of Little House on the Prairie, where a man might seek a woman early, because it took so much to survive, and where it wasn’t uncommon for a girl of sixteen or seventeen to be God-fearing and simultaneously sexually active in a marriage. She had anticipated the advance, the realignment of Dave’s heart and his appeal, with absolute sincerity, standing alongside her, like some adolescent pairing of American Gothic, this love that would not be denied.
These were the dreams of youth, the reach for the improbable when it wasn’t improbable, and all Dave had to do, really, was to assert his love for her. She would feel the thrill of vindication, big-breasted Sheryl beginning to snort like the pig she was!
What she remembered of that fall, her sophomore year, was the time alone with Dave, the way she learned to straddle him in the pickup, her back against the steering wheel, the slight tear when he entered that she would never really know again. She wore no panties, Dave running his tongue along her clavicle and down under her raised arm, into the cup of armpit, biting her hardening nipples, and, after it, semen running between her legs. She loved it more than anything and understood why the body was made the way it was, when she had known nothing of the experience before.
She remembered Dave staring across the harvested stalks of corn, the great bounty of what had been yielded from the land, lamenting that it was not as it was earlier in the country’s origin, when land was there for the taking. He would have built her a homestead and filled it with children and chickens, and so, in the lurch of want, she felt his seed again, if one could feel a life force finding and attaching itself in a great yearning and reach for life.
In compensation, in the brooding sense that this was not possible and that Dave was, in fact, a factory worker, she reached and touched his face and said she could imagine him before a plow, and, in saying it, touched him, so there was enough in him that he could take her again, but with more effort, his head against her sternum, in the place where there should have been cleavage.
It persisted, the way he took her, the hard grind of his teeth against hers, her head in the growth of hair on his chest afterward. This was a joy and a love that would not persist. All that came after would pale in comparison. She knew it then, the imminent danger of it.