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Subject: {ASS} RP Part 06-07 of "The Adventures of Me and Martha Jane" by S.J.R.
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Date: 24 Mar 1997 13:15:47 GMT
--------
**** WARNING **** WARNING **** WARNING ****
THIS DOCUMENT IS A SEXUALLY GRAPHIC STORY ABOUT AN INTENSE SEXUAL,
EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A TEENAGE GIRL AND
A YOUNG BOY AND THE COURSE OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP OVER A PERIOD OF
10 YEARS. IT IS A DRAMATIZATION ABOUT REAL PEOPLE AND THEIR CON-
FLICT WITH SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS. IF THIS SUBJECTS OFFENDS YOU OR IF
SEXUAL LANGUAGE UPSETS YOU, OR IF YOU DON'T WANT THIS MATERIAL SEEN
BY UNDER-18 OR OTHERWISE UNQUALIFIED PERSONS, DELETE THIS DOCUMENT.
THIS DOCUMENT IS COPYRIGHTED 1994, 1996 BY SJR. SO--HEY, YOU CAN
COPY IT BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE IT OR SELL IT UNLESS I SAY SO.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE
by S.J.R.
PART 6A:
Neither my parents nor Martha Jane's mother were home that
week. She slept with me for the first time. When I woke, earlier
than usual, the morning sun was just above the rooftops of the
buildings beyond mine. Dazzling shafts of sunlight rushed into the
room. Water was running in the bathroom.
I knocked on the bathroom door and Martha Jane invited me in to
take a bath with her.
I told her I'd love to. I walked into the bathroom and stood in
front of the sink, looking at myself in the mirror.
She noticed me and said, "Do you spend every morning looking at
yourself in the bathroom mirror?"
"I don't look any different," I said, observing the same old me
in the mirror.
"Oh," she smirked, soaping her legs. "But how do you FEEL?"
I took in a deep breath, my shoulders back and my chest out,
extended my arms far out at each side, and intoned as loudly as I
could in my best, loudest, deepest, Texaco Opera Theater baritone,
"Steeee-vennnnnn!". I beat my chest several times and grunted like
a gorilla. Then going back to my operatic bellow, I sang from the
famous aria from Barber of Seville: "Lala Lalala Lalala Lalala
Lala...Figaro! Figaro! FigaroFigaro Feeee-gaa-ro!"
She said, "My, my! Were you, uh, referring to last night?"
I grinned.
"Veerry flattering." She stood and moved to one end of the
tub to make room. "C'mon, let's wash the sleep off you."
I climbed in and she handed me the soap, but before I got
started she held me close to her bubbly-slick nakedness and
hugged me.
"You were asleep when I woke up," she said. "You're a wonder-
ful lover." She kissed my forehead. After I soaped down she
took the bar of soap from me and lathered her hands, then reached
down to wash my cock.
She winked. "Remember this?"
"Mm-hm."
"I never thought of using soap on you when we started all this.
Of course, you're a lot bigger now."
She rinsed me and stepped out of the tub to dry off. She had
chores to do that day, she said, but we had time for breakfast
and a little talk. I saw a small blue bag in the corner of the
room and asked, "That's all you bought over here with you?" She
told me the blue bag was filled with enough spermacide and powders
to lower the Indian birth rate. She blushed and said, "You put an
awful lot of cum in me." After I fell asleep the night before,
she had douched twice, and twice again before I came into the
bath.
"Douched?" I asked.
"It's a long story, hon. Later." She blushed again.
Then I remembered reading about it. "Oh. You mean, 'cause
we didn't use a rubber?"
She sighed impatiently. "Yes."
"I don't mind using one."
"No!" she said firmly, spreading jars of makeup on the edge of
the sink. "And you just forget that those ugly things exist."
I asked, "Doesn't all that stuff make you sore or dry inside?"
"We can always apply some...lotion," she said, blushing again.
I was amused at her modesty. After a night of raw passion, she
blushed and avoided my eyes continually. She got into her bra,
panties, and slip right away--a far cry from the way we started
out a few years before. As I dried off I watched, fascinated and
charmed at the sight of her putting on makeup.
"What are you staring at?"
I answered, "Watching you doing woman things."
She laughed mildly, dabbing at her face with powder. "I'm
glad you find it so enjoyable. We women think it's just a pain
in the neck."
"I like watching."
"How can you get such a thrill out of watching a female cover
up what she really looks like so she can throw the wool over
everyone's eyes?"
"I like watching women do woman things."
"I see."
I paused. "I like watching you do woman things. It's not
just watching. It's watching you."
"Speedy. You're a dear. Really."
"I'll fix breakfast," I said, hanging up my towel.
"You've added cooking to your many talents?"
"Sure," I said. "I've been hanging out in a restaurant for
years."
"Well...I'll try anything once. Hope we live."
I was pretty noisy about it, but I managed to get the eggs
sunny-side up and the toast looking just right in two plates on the
small kitchen table. Out in the back yard I found a wild daisy and
placed it in a small glass of water on the table. She entered the
kitchen in her slip. "Wow," she said, "Look at this, picture
perfect! You're being so nice to me. It looks beautiful. Is it
edible?"
We ate and talked.
She told me about her schedule for the week. Just listening to
what she had planned was exhausting. "I'm a work fiend," she
confessed. "I feel guilty if I don't work myself to death every
day." She told me about her classes, the kinds of projects she was
doing, the problems she encountered with teaching in special
education. I told her, "But you like it," and she nodded. "Yes,"
she said, chewing off a corner from a piece of toast, "not because
I'm so dedicated, but because I'm so neurotic. I'm terrified of
ever being poor like this again." I asked her more about what she
did, about the people she met at school, about what college was like.
"The first thing you should know," she warned with a strong edge
of sarcasm, "is that every professor at Memphis State is a Commu-
nist. And anyone who shows up expecting to actually learn anything
is a pathetic egghead. All the girls are virgins, regardless of how
many football players they've slept with." She went on with this
litany of definitions, exaggerating each item and apparently having
a good time doing so; but after a while I realized that she was
actually defining herself as a hardworking, dedicated outsider.
She stopped at one point and looked at me hesitantly. "Speedy,
would you...would you like to spend an afternoon with me and go to
Memphis State? It's the holidays, but they're open--at least the
library is. That probably doesn't sound very exciting, but--"
I breathed in amazement. "Really?"
"Do you want to?"
"That would be the best adventure I've had since Uncle Johnny
let me spend two hours in the Bump 'em Cars at the fairgrounds."
"Yes, well, it does get a little like the Bump 'Em at exam
time, but...don't get all worked up, now, it's not the biggest
thrill I could think of for somebody as adventurous as you are."
"But," I said earnestly, "it's what you do."
She stared at me, taken aback.
I went on enthusiastically, "It's your...it's your world, like
mine is in the movies and the plays. And yours is college and
learning to be a teacher. Of course I want to see it."
She blinked and cleared her throat, propping her elbows on the
table and folding her hands. "Speedy, do you know how many boys
your age and older--much older--just want to spend an afternoon
with me so they can get inside my pants?"
"Get inside your pants? Hm, that's a funny expression, I
never heard that one before. You mean...to fuck?"
"I mean that's all they want to do."
"Don't they ever do anything else?"
"A lot of them, Speedy, no. Do you know what a tragedy it is
in my life just to have an argument with some boy because I have
work to do and I don't have time, just no time right away, right
then, right now, to go out with them? They think I'll hop into bed
with them to express my undying my gratitude for their taking me to
a football game and watching them scream and guzzle beer and make
fools of themselves."
"So," I said, tenuously, "...so do you do it?"
"Of course not. And then I don't hear from them for two weeks,
or a month. Until they get horny again, and all of a sudden they
develop this deep interest in what I'm doing with my life and my
time."
I grimaced. "What shitheads."
"That's a very...apt description, hon."
"Apt?" I echoed.
"Yes, it means--"
"Don't tell me. I wanna look it up."
"I'll tell you what," she said, reaching across the table and
taking my hand, "You go with me, say, Thursday afternoon, and I'll
show you lots of things you can look up. Would you like that?"
"Sure."
We cleaned up a little, as I had left some record albums lying
about, and Martha Jane made phone calls while she polished her
shoes. Still in her slip, she went into the bedroom and started
making the bed. When I went in there to help her we were almost
finished when she asked me to sit on the bed and started undoing my
jeans. I told her I thought she had to get dressed for her inter-
views, but she said we still had a little time and she could stay in
her slip for now. "I've always been curious about something," she
said, taking out my cock. "We still have some time before I go. I
want to show you something about your body." Of course, I didn't
object. With my legs hanging over the bed and Martha Jane kneeling
before me, she licked and sucked me until I was hard and then she
started fisting me quickly, her hands gliding smoothly up and down
my shaft. Again I was startled to feel all the things that happened
in my groin as I approached orgasm. She could tell I was close
when I began throbbing erratically. As I neared cumming she took
one of my hands and put it into my crotch under my balls. "Feel
here, underneath," she said. "Keep your hand there. In a minute
you'll feel your muscles jump." Sure enough, I could feel swelling
and movement down there. Then she pulled down the straps of her
slip and shoved the front of her bra below her breasts, and brought
her bosom closer to my cock. As she fisted me she whispered, "I've
always wondered what this feels like...c'mon, hon...c'mon..."
Soon I felt those secret muscles moving under my fingers, and I
gasped frantically, "I'll get it on you!" but she grinned and said
"It's okay, I can change...c'mon..."
As my eyelids drooped I lost focus, and though my resources were
limited because of the night before, I started cumming. Encouraging
me, she whispered, "C'mon...c'mon," and then "Oh!" as I gave her a
tight little squirt on her left breast. She slowed and tightened
her pumping and I squirted again in the same place and she was
delighted. The rest streamed out thinly over her hand and made
squishing noises while she finished me off.
I lay back on the bed, breathless. She stood and leaned over
me, giggling. A drop of me ran down the swell of her breast and
sneaked under the nipple. "Was that good?" she asked. "You getting
used to cumming now?". I told her it was good, but it was still a
little scary. She said, "Speedy, I can't imagine you being afraid
of anything like that."
"No," I said, "not that kind of scary. It's just...it's
different. It takes over, and it all happens at once."
"That's the way it's supposed to feel, hon." She walked to the
bedside table, got a kleenex, and wiped off her breast. "But don't
worry. You'll get accustomed to letting yourself go. I love
watching you cum. I never thought I'd enjoy it so much, but you get
so hard and it's so intense for you. I like that about you." She
wadded up the kleenex and bent down to kiss me on the nose. "That's
one of a lot of things I like about you."
She did not see me again until Thursday, three days later. Where
she was for three days I didn't know. She called at least once a
day, and on Wednesday morning she came clomping with her high heels
and purse and Sunday best to see that I had not transformed the
apartment into a Frankensteinean horror. Each night just as I
climbed into bed she would phone from next door and ask how I was.
The phone rang Tuesday night around 9:30. I picked up.
"Hello," I began. "This is the Louvre. Wanna buy some French
post cards?"
"Speedy, what if this had been someone else on the line?"
"I would say 'wrong number' and hang up."
"Did your mom and dad call today?"
"Yes."
"So how are they doing?"
"Sounded like she was having a good time."
"Just 'she'? What about your new daddy, didn't he have any-
thing to say for himself?"
"He never talks to me."
"Now, that's mean. Maybe you just never talk to him."
"I don't think he knows how to use a telephone yet."
"Speedy, you must learn to like him. He's your daddy now."
"It feels funny talking to you on the phone and you're right
next door. Are you gonna sleep over here?"
"...I can't, hon."
"Why, what's wrong?"
"I just...can't. I know it's silly, but I can't. I'll have to
tell you all about it."
"Okay."
"You all tucked in bed?"
"Yep."
"Well, you go to sleep. And don't be afraid to call me if
anything goes wrong, okay?"
"All right."
"G'night, cowboy."
"G'night, Miss Scarlett."
In later years, spending most of a vacation alone would not have
been my first choice. But that week my mind seemed particularly alive
and sensitive. Waking, walking about town, entering a movie and
walking back out, and then strolling home, I followed the path of the
rising, passing, and setting sun as I had never done before. In the
late afternoon I made a sandwich, packing it and a wedge of cheese
into my G.I. Joe mess kit, and defied the world by hiking all the way
to the edge of Exchange Street, at the very zenith of the hill at the
avenue's end, and sat on a bluff overlooking the river. Battle-
hardened youth that I was after this gruelling six-block walk uphill,
I ate from the kit and swigged heartily from my canteen filled with
Nehi Grape Soda, and watched the sun go down on the flat, distant
shore of Arkansas. The sky changed colors minute by minute, so
gradually that it was always a surprise when I surveyed the horizon
again to see how the silent panorama had repainted itself. Before
dark it turned magenta, then intense purple, and finally black. As
the sky dimmed, distant lights not seen in the sunlight became visible
one by one. I wondered what might be out there. I wondered what it
might be like not having to return home but to keep on going,
straight, past those lights and onto new lights, new rivers, new
bridges and towns.
What got me back home was not a strong desire to be there but to
be in bed when Martha Jane called. The phone rang at exactly 9:30
and I picked up.
"Why, Martha Jane, you sound so clear on this wonderful invention,
Mr. Bell's telephone, just as if you were right next door!"
"Silly. Were you a good boy today?"
"No."
"That's the spirit. Did your mother call?"
"Yes, they're fine. She called around supper time."
"They'll be back Friday, then. And next week you'll move out
of the Lauderdale Courts forever. Won't that be great?"
"I guess."
"You don't sound so happy about it."
"Well..."
"Oh, you will be when you get there. And you'll have that
wonderful room all to yourself instead of keeping your things in
cardboard boxes in that closet."
"Well...maybe."
"Oh, c'mon, you'll love it."
"I'll have different neighbors, though."
"...I'll have to talk to you about that...We'll have a nice talk
all about that tomorrow. You still want to go with me to Memphis
State?"
"I'm ready now."
"I'm over here with textbooks up to my nose, so I'll be up a
while. But I'll still be up bright and early, so you better get
your beauty sleep. You all tucked in bed?"
"I sure am, Miss Scarlett."
"You didn't leave a stinky sink full of dirty dishes, did
you?"
"No'm, Miss Scarlett."
"...Are you mad at me for not being over there?"
"No'm, Miss Scarlett."
"Well...Okay. I'll be there at ten in the morning."
"Yes'm, Miss Scarlett."
"You be all ready to go."
"Yes,'m, Miss Scarlett."
"Stop it. G'night."
Late in the night I was standing in the middle of the universe
and I had the sensation of getting larger and smaller at the same
time, while the universe shrank and expanded at the same time, and
the part of me that shrank was not getting small fast enough for the
universe that was shrinking, and the part of me that was expanding
was not expanding fast enough, and the part of the universe that was
shrinking kept pulling my expanding self back into the part that was
shrinking, and yet nothing was changing at all in any direction. As
I tried to comprehend this a low-pitched hum grew louder, louder,
and soon it was a deafening buzz that threatened to crush even my
thought.
I woke up, literally poised to jump through the ceiling. I was
gasping and sweating. I was not in bed, but standing in the pitch
black hallway between the bedroom and living room. Apparently I had
leapt from the bed in a single broad jump, as I vaguely remember
being in the air just before I jerked to a halt.
In the kitchen I made a glass of ice water and brought it to the
living room, where I sat in front of the Philco and turned it on.
The pearlescent eye of the green tuning tube glowed and stared at
me. I picked up static. Trying to relax, I listened. After a
minute I heard a voice in there. I could not hear the words.
Concentrating on it took my mind off the nightmare and the eerie
panic that crept into me when I remembered it.
This was a dream I'd had before, perhaps a year earlier. I
never told anyone about it; I didn't know how to describe it. Back
in bed, I removed my underwear and moved to the bed to be naked
under the moonlight. Lying on by back, I spread my legs and looked
at my growing, lean, surprisingly strong-looking young body. I
tried to remember what cumming felt like. It was unimaginable
while it was happening, and so it was when I tried to recall it. A
small machine whirred inside my chest, urging me to do something;
like the voice in the static, my brain could not understand what the
machine was saying. I gazed past the moonlight and out into the
city. Out there, awake, all the things I wanted to do were waiting.
A cricket chirped. I heard the sugary spring Southern night
air glide past the window and felt me and the yard and the tree and
Martha Jane next door and our little patch of earth turning slowly
together in the universe. As fell asleep again I imagined I could
feel the morning approaching us.
PART 6B:
Thursday was overcast and chilly. Martha Jane and I made a long
trip over two local bus lines to the campus of Memphis State, which
was farther out than I had ever gone in my explorations. When we
arrived I was both excited and apprehensive. There was so much to
it! Surrounded by a well-to-do suburb and even a few estates, the
campus of several Georgian buildings and dormitories spread over a
rustic landscape that alternated between broad green pasture and
heavily forested alcoves of pine, maple, oak and magnolia.
I'm certain I must have seemed like a spellbound infant.
Tongue-tied, I stayed at her side like a puppy as Martha Jane, one
arm carrying a shopping bag loaded with books and notebooks, led me
down the long rambling drive toward the main library. I spent so
much time looking up and stretching my neck to take in everything
that I tripped over every curb and twig along the way. Martha Jane
finally had to lead me by the hand. At the library's columned
entrance I ran to the door and tried to yank it open for her. Sur-
prised by its weight, I was jerked back against the door and had
to lean far backward to open it again.
She laughed, "Don't be in such a hurry."
Inside, I was overcome by the solemnity and silence in the large
and spacious building, which was far more imposing than the small
branch library I knew in my neighborhood. Martha Jane walked ahead
of me to the front reception desk. I followed, my neck craning and
my eyes agape at the high walls solid with shelves and books. My
tennis shoes squeaked softly on the tile floor and echoed into the
ceiling. I was so flabbergasted that I walked right into her as she
stopped to have the receptionist check her bag. I shifted to avoid
standing on her feet, apologizing so loudly that my voice shot back
at me several times over, startling me, and I had to lower my
volume. Turning around and trying to take it all in, I took a step
or two in each direction to try to see down the paths of shelves and
oak tables to my left and right, only to stumble backward with a
loud clunk into the face of the reception desk.
Martha Jane said quickly to the receptionist, "He's going to be
with me. He's not a student or anything, he doesn't have an i.d.--"
The bespeckled, matronly woman smiled at Martha Jane and handed
her back the shopping bag of notebooks. The lady looked exactly the
way I had always imagined librarians would look.
"That's perfectly all right," the woman said warmly, and she
peered down at me cheerfully through her bifocals. "Well, young
man, this must be your first visit."
Martha Jane laughed and blushed. "Yes, it is. I'm afraid he
doesn't have his bearings yet. Bumping into everything..."
"Oh, don't you worry, he'll find his way around. You enjoy
yourself, young man. If you're interested, there is a child's
section right over there in that far corner just past the card
catalog cabinet."
I asked, "Where do you have the newspaper stacks? I guess I'll
start with The New York Times Index? Do you have it back to the
1920's?"
She looked at me and then at Martha Jane, a little surprised.
Martha Jane grinned at her. "He likes newspapers."
"Oh, how interesting. He's your son, is he? Oh, I'm sorry, you
certainly don't look that old. Your brother?"
"No, he's my..."
"Student," I interjected, somewhat formally. Behind me, out of
the lady's sight, I felt Martha Jane poke a finger in my back.
"Oh, I see. How nice, bringing your students to the library in
person, that's a wonderful idea. Well, now, you get settled and
then come back here and I'll show you to the periodical stacks."
"Thank you," I said, and Martha Jane also whispered a thank you
and led me by the hand into a small alcove with a large writing desk
upon which she parked her shopping bag. She smiled wryly at me as
she removed her sweater. "You're my what? My student?"
"It had a certain status."
She blushed. "I'm glad you spoke up. I had to stop myself
because I almost said you were my boyfriend. I'm certain she would
have got a rise out of that."
I smiled broadly.
"Now, you've been in libraries before, so you know what the
general setup is. I'll be working right here if you need anything,
or anybody at the big front desk can help you."
She left me on my own. A young woman at the front desk gave me
a brochure with a map of the building and directed me to the card
catalog filing cabinet. On first seeing it I was taken aback. So
many drawers! And in each drawer were hundreds of index cards, some
packed so tightly they had to be shoved back firmly to be read. I
didn't know where to begin. There were so many choices. The
problem was, I wanted to see everything at once. Going through them
became stultifying after a while; I wanted something more substan-
tial, something I could hold in my hands.
Leaving the card catalog as a hopeless case of too much to absorb
at once, I moved to the stacks themselves. Looking over the titles,
I couldn't imagine how any book or index or subject might be missing
from this building. Following the map, I took the elevator to the
next floor and found myself confronted with hundreds of shelves,
thousands of books. The musk of paper filled the room. And on the
next floor I encountered the same odor, and the same endless maze of
stacks and shelves and labels and volumes. On the elevator again,
to yet another floor of the same thing. And from there, a curled
iron stairway leading to still more, and then to another wing of
more floors, more tiers of books. I grappled with one thick book
that almost pulled me to the floor as it slid from its shelf. It
was a weighty volume of nineteenth century photographs. Opening its
large pages separated by translucent tissues which themselves had
chipped and yellowed, I found myself in the grip of an eerie
fascination with the faces of the people in the pictures. Starkly
and stiffly posed, their eyes seemed alive and knowing--a strange
and hair-raising sensation, because these people had posed for the
photographs in the 1870's. There were long shots of tailcoated,
booted men in front of banks and post offices and on street corners.
And there were pictures of the streets. New York City in 1876. An
interior of a fancy restaurant, the shot taken so that the tall
windows lined up along the right and rays of sunlight drenched the
floor and the tables, leaving the corners of the room deep in
shadow. I could smell the wood frames of the windows, hear the
photographer prompting carefully as he held the shutter open for the
long exposures required in those days. The streets and the build-
ings and the rooms struck me as being oddly familiar; I was not
surprised at seeing them, and felt that I was seeing nothing new.
Everything seemed to be exactly in its proper place. The surprise
was my knowing that it was so, that I had seen these buildings and
their arched windows and tall shadowed doorways before.
A rustle of clothing startled me. I looked up. Martha Jane was
strolling toward me. I had been studying the book so closely that
my eyes watered and the back of my neck was cramped.
"You've been gone for hours," she said. "I looked everywhere
for you. Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"I'm sorry," I stuttered, finding my mouth dry.
"Find anything interesting?"
"This," I said, holding the book open with both hands. I
touched my fingers to a full-page photograph of 4th Avenue, in
downtown Manhattan, taken in 1881.
She looked at it. "What about it?"
"I've..." I was startled as the words came out of my mouth,
almost on their own accord. "I've been here."
"Here? You've been on this street before?"
I nodded.
"Speedy, this is...Hon, this street is in New York City. The
picture was made sixty or seventy years ago. Maybe it reminds you
of Adams Street in Memphis. It looks a lot like it."
I shook my head slowly, not believing it myself. "No," I
muttered. "I mean it feels like...I was here, on this street.
This street."
"You mean, like deja vu. You know about deja vu?"
"Yes. I remember looking it up. This is what deja vu is?"
Standing beside me, she gazed into the picture. I saw her
eyelashes flutter as she scanned the page from corner to corner.
I felt embarrassed. It was true: the photograph was from another
century, from a place I'd never seen.
She looked into my eyes with her piercing blue-green orbs
floating in white. "You feel you were there? Really?"
I nodded.
"I've had feelings like that too, hon."
Her words both astounded and intrigued me. For a moment both of
us stared at the photograph.
Then she said, "Come with me. I want to show you something."
She led me down the iron staircase and then down another, to a
floor of magazine stacks and dozens of metal shelves piled with
loose papers and brochures. She took me to a corner where her hand
went straight to an enamel-backed issue of a National Geographic.
"Look at this," she said mysteriously, and flipping the pages
along her thumb she seemed to know exactly the page she wanted and
found it right away. She held the magazine open and motioned for me
to take it. "Look," she said quietly.
It was a grayed, gold-bordered monochrome photograph. The woman
was in a shawl and held a child wrapped so heavily that only part of
its forehead could be seen. In the background was what appeared to
be a desert. The picture was taken from the knees up. The woman
wore what looked like a light gray (pale blue? pale yellow?) heavy
shift tightly girdled at the waist with a white cord. The folds and
shadows of the loose garment revealed that she was slim and deli-
cate. Looking suspiciously toward the camera, her bright eyes
projected a strange mixture of fear and concern. Her left arm
cradled the child closely; but her right was extended across the front
of the child's wrapped body, facing the camera, and the sleeve of
her garment fell back to reveal her long, slender white arm with her
fingers spread around the child's covered head.
She breathed, "It's me."
And as I continued studying the woman, who did not look like
Martha Jane except for her remarkable eyes, Martha Jane stretched
her right hand across the page and spread her fingers in the same
pose that was in the picture. I was silent, numbed. Their arms
and hands looked alike.
She mused aloud, "There's probably nothing to any of it. It's
just a feeling I have when I see this picture. I've looked at it
hundreds of times. But always, I get the same feeling. I've seen
that desert. And those mountains back there on the landscape." She
sighed, taking the magazine from me. "Or maybe I'm just going crazy
or..." She jammed the magazine back in its place and added soberly,
"...maybe I just take myself too seriously."
I felt giddy at the prospect that I wasn't the only creature in
the world who had otherworldly sensations. Martha Jane reinforced
that when she said, "Speedy, I hope you don't think I'm just weird,
but I feel those things all the time."
I said earnestly. "I feel the same way sometimes."
As she led me out of the room she confided, "Speedy, you're the
only person in the world I could have shared that with."
"What do you think it means that we both feel those strange
things?"
She put a finger to her lips and whispered mischievously, "Shh.
It means we're both crazy."
I whispered back, "I won't let the lady at the front desk know."
"Come on, let's go to the cafeteria before they close and get
a late lunch. I'll introduce you to the wonderful world of institu-
tional food."
The cafeteria was closing when we arrived, so we picked out
cold sandwiches and cokes in plastic cups and went outside to sit
on the massive steps of the administration building. From there
most of the campus spread before us, as far as we could see, into a
dense wood beyond a grove of magnolias. A chill, early spring wind
picked up and rustled the stiff leaves of the magnolias. Some
sparrows and mockingbirds hopped around us and we pitched them the
crumbs that were left from our lunch. Martha Jane was finishing the
last of her coffee, which she referred to as "college soup."
"Horrible stuff," she said, sipping. "It's addictive. Ruins
your tummy. Gives you insomnia."
"Why do you drink it?" I asked.
"Because it's oh so necessary, hon. When you get into college
you'll find out how very very needed it is. I was falling asleep
taking those notes in the library. Sometimes you think you'll go
into a coma, but you just keep on working."
She finished the coffee and sat one step lower than me, her
knees raised and her head propped on them. She looked up at me
sideways.
"You're finally leaving the project. I'd give anything to be
leaving, though I know I will someday, not long from now. My
mother's dating now. She met a very nice man in the office supply
business. He has a beautiful home right out there, near where you'll
be living with your mom and your dad. He's in a richer neighborhood,
so I know it's not quite the same, but...it'll be yours, and you'll
have your own place. You're way too old to be living in a closet,
you have too many interests. I should think you'd be very happy
about all that. But you're not."
I shook my head. I pinched a small piece off the remains of my
sandwich and pitched it to a lone mockingbird a few steps below.
"Why not?" she asked gently.
I didn't respond, holding back the real answer. Finally I just
shrugged.
"Is it because I won't be your neighbor anymore?"
I nodded.
"Speedy, that's very nice. But you can't give up everything
just to live next door to me. I'm hardly there anymore, anyway.
And when I can, I'll be moving away again. Then what would you do?"
"Well...I'll stay in the project until you move again."
"And then what?"
I shrugged.
"And then what?" she repeated.
"I don't know."
"Speedy, listen to me--"
I tried to remain casual. Stubbornly I said, "You're my friend."
"I know, hon, but both of us have to get out of that place sooner
or later. Both of us need homes, not just a hole in a wall."
"You're my friend," I said again, offering another crumb to the
white-trimmed mockingbird, who chased greedily after it.
"I know, but you'll have other friends. A whole neighborhood
full of them, not like those rough kids downtown."
"You're my friend," I said again, stubbornly, and pitched another
crumb.
"And you'll be in high school before long, at Christian Brothers,
and there's so many smart kids there just like you--"
"Don't make me cry!" I demanded, crying and then choking it back
in the same instant--but not soon enough to stifle the single tear
that dripped down my face. My nose ran and I sniffed loudly.
"Honey!" she whispered in amazement. "Here..." She produced a
kleenex from her sweater pocket and reached up toward my face.
But I took it from her. "No!" I said stubbornly, and wiped my
nose. "No, I won't cry. I will...not...cry. I'm too old to cry.
I don't have any business crying."
She started to rise but I put my hand on her shoulder, so she
moved up only one step and was sitting next to me.
"Baby," she crooned, "you've been holding this back from me for
a long time, haven't you?"
"There's nothing to hold back. You're my friend. That's all.
I've lost friends before. And I've liked people who didn't like me.
And you told me things you didn't like about people and how much
work you're doing and how you can't spend all your time with them.
I know you have to leave the place. I know you want a home. This
week I went down to the river front and watched the sun, and I saw
the whole world in front of me and I wondered how big it was, how
much of it is out there and how much I had to do. How much I had to
learn. It's your world, too. I know you'll leave, or I'll leave.
And I'd never try to stop you. I'd never try to take that away from
you and I'd never blame you, like I did last time. 'Cause I know
it's not because of me, it's because of what you have to do, it's
what you want. And because--"
I blew my nose hard, once and for all. "Because I know you
don't like schmucks, and I don't wanna be a schmuck!"
"Speedy..."
I would not look at her. I could feel her looking across at me,
leaning toward me. "I don't have to actually *like* leaving my
friend on the other side of town, do I?" I complained. "I don't
have to be a schmuck, but I don't have to like it either."
For a long minute she didn't say anything, and I refused to let
her see my face until I felt I was totally in control again.
I felt her arm go around my shoulder. She put her cheek to mine
for a second then pulled away from me. "Look at me," she said.
When I hesitated she said, "Look at me, hon."
I turned to her and she had her teeth and jaw set in a playful,
mock-tough, happy little smile. She said, "C'mere" and put both
arms loosely around my neck and pulled me to her slightly so that
our foreheads were touched.
"Hey, bud, answer one question."
"Yeah?"
"Did you mean everything you just said?"
"Yes."
"You didn't just get it from some movie somewhere?"
"Hey, lady...This ain't Hollywood."
"Speedy...Steven...don't ever let me call you a little boy
again. Don't even let me think it. If you catch me doing it,
remind me of today. Promise?"
"Promise."
"I've got a proposition for you, Mister Ricci."
"Proposition?"
"Yeeeahh...We still going to the movies tonight?"
"If you want."
"Yeah, I want, but after that...I want you to spend the night
with me."
She stuck her tongue out, far out, and licked my nose.
I wiped it off with the kleenex. "What if my folks come home
early or something? Tomorrow's Friday."
"Then we'll stay up and keep watch."
"You don't have to. Stay with me, I mean."
"Yes I do, hon. Yes I do."
PART 6C:
That night we walked through light drizzle all the way to the
Warner's on Main Street and saw "The High and the Mighty." The
minute the film was over, I knew I'd go back to see it again and
again.
"Oh, my," Martha Jane said as we rose from our seats to leave.
"That was pretty schmaltzy, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, it was. Schmaltzy. That's what makes a great movie."
"You just say that because John Wayne was in it and he saved the
airplane."
"But that's what schmaltz is," I insisted.
We had been sitting near the screen. As we turned to go out,
we were confronted with a thick crowd moving at a snail's pace.
"It'll take forever to get out of here, Speedy."
"Don't worry. Follow me." I led her on a detour down one of
the side aisles where I pushed down the handle on a black-painted
door that was difficult to see. It opened into an empty alley that
led to the main street.
She said, "Hey, I'm glad I decided to bring you with me."
Outside, the drizzle had grown into light rain. I walked
out into it. "It's like Gene Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain", I
said, holding out my arms.
"You won't start tap dancing, will you? Speedy, get under
the umbrella with me. You'll get soaked."
I walked ahead of her. "But I want to. It's drama, it's
Hollywood. It's schmaltz."
"It's insanity."
I stayed ahead of her, getting wetter by the minute. Now and
then I'd look back at her, a few yards behind me under her um-
brella. "Come on, Scarlett! Where's your sense of adventure?"
"It's right here under my umbrella."
A man in a rain coat and rainhat passed me on the sidewalk going
the other way. He looked at me, and I gave him a silly smile. Then
he looked at Martha Jane behind me, who strained to give him a
perfectly normal smile.
She called out to me, "People are staring at youuuu."
"Martha Jane, honey," I said cockily. "This is my night. I just
got that feelin', baby. It's like...like money from home. Like,
nothin' can stop me now."
"Pneumonia will stop you. Hon, you've seen too many movies."
"Look!" I exclaimed, and stopped short. I pointed across the
street at the Memphis Light, Gas and Water office building. Built
in the 1920's, it was famous for its thousands of 60-watt electric
bulbs that lined the frontage and the entrance marquis. Onto the
sidewalk they cast a strong yellow light that shimmered in the rain
and glowed as brightly as the bulbs themselves. "Look at that! It
looks just like the ending of the movie tonight. Remember John
Wayne whistling at the end, and walking down the sidewalk with all
the yellow lights?"
She looked at me sternly and said, "No."
"C'mon, let's walk in the yellow light."
"Get under the umbrella," she said, harder now.
"But what's wrong with me doin' it myself?"
"Because," she said, louder and upset now, "I'm wearing a wool
sweater and it'll get wet and ruined and I can't afford another one!
Now get under here with me and stop making me so angry with you!"
Surprised, I walked to her. She scowled angrily and started
walking toward home. For a tense moment we didn't say anything. I
took the umbrella, offering to hold it for her, and she smiled
tightly and said, "Thank you, you're a gentleman," and we walked
under the umbrella together. I looked at her. She looked straight
ahead and wouldn't look at me. After a minute she took my arm and
put hers through it.
"It wasn't you," she said. "It was me. Some things just remind
me that I'm poor. I've worked so hard. And I wear the same sweater
for six years, and the same shoes, and borrow clothes from more
fortunate girls with more money so I can look for work. And all I
do is work and I'm still not out of it. And I don't have a job and
I looked for one all week. But I won't quit school to take a
full-time job. I applied for a job yesterday and the guy, the boss,
he had me in his office talking to me and he started telling me
about how demanding the job was, how there was all this clerical
work and he said I could have it but I'd probably have to cut some
of my classes if I wanted the work because it took so-and-so many
hours a week. Well...I told him there was no chance I'd quit any
of my classes, and he said, well, he could make a little deal. A
little deal, he said. There would be a little something extra,
after hours, and he could pay me for it. He could pay me a lot for
it, he said. And the way he was looking at me...He knew I was
desperate. He could tell I needed the job. So he was going to
make me a little deal. A little after hours deal. Oh, Speedy,
sometimes I hate being pretty. I hate being trapped. Evelyn's
getting successful now, people are finding out how good she is at
her job, and when a man looks at her like that and wants to make a
little deal she can just tell him to shove it. I can't do that
yet. I can't say that without losing out. So I passed it up.
I told him thanks but no thanks. And I walked out. But I didn't
want to say thanks -- I wanted to say 'shove it, mister'. I
didn't even get that much satisfaction out of it. All I could do
was walk away from it and just forget about it."
I didn't know what to say, so I walked with her silently and
put my hand on the arm she had locked in mine.
"I'm getting too desperate. I want it too much. I have to stop
wanting it so much. You were having such a good time and I don't
often see you feeling that good. I didn't mean to stop you. I
might have even been...a little jealous, seeing you let go and
watching you say 'screw you' to the world."
She simmered down and walked silently for a moment.
"Hey," I said. "I've got a Hank Williams album at home my Aunt
Frances bought me."
She smirked at me. "Well, you certainly know how to change the
subject, don't you? You don't fool around."
I shrugged. "I guess you said what you wanted to say."
She hugged me. "You know something? You're a pretty cool guy.
I kinda like you."
I winked at her.
She winked back. "So, you want to play Hank Williams and turn
out the lights and watch the rain?"
"Sounds nice."
"You, uh, wanna do it nekkid?"
I looked at her, then cleared my throat. I blushed.
"What's wrong?" she asked. "Oh, don't tell me I embarrassed
you! Oh my lord, you have to be kidding! "
"I kinda thought, after the story you just told me..."
"I was talking about a greaser who was taking advantage of me
and girls like me. He had an office full of them, all practically
the same age. I wasn't talking about you. You're different.
We're different. You know that."
I shook my head. "Maybe I'm too young. Sometimes girls are,
uh, verrry mysterious."
"You don't seem to have a problem understanding me...most of
the time."
"Most of the time," I said.
"Okay. We'll go home. Turn out the lights. Play Hank
Williams. Get nekkid. And I'll tell you all you want to know
about 'us girls'."
"Deal," I said.
Sometime later, Martha Jane and I lay nude together in her
apartment, listening to the rain patter against her bedroom window.
The Hank Williams album had long since been played and replayed, and
she had explained to me a great deal about women, and different
kinds of women, and girls, and the way she thought about sex and
boys when she was my own age. Then she wanted to know about boys;
specifically, she wanted to know about me; and more specifically she
wanted to know exactly what it was I liked best when she sucked me,
and after I told her she did it exactly that way. She did it so well
that I began feeling the now-familiar tightening and the pleasure
pangs and the lusty itch and told her I was starting to cum and that
she had to be careful because I was going to cum in her mouth if she
didn't stop. Rather than stop, she kept sucking with a sweet
vengeance until she felt the first spurt. Then she slowed, tanta-
lizing me, and in my dim state of consciousness as I emptied my bag
of cum into her mouth I heard her gulp and swallow until I fell back
and lay still. With her hands and lips she drained all of me into
her and then lay beside me while I recovered.
"So," she said, "now you know another way to cum."
"I didn't think you wanted to swallow it."
"Some girls don't. I never sucked that boyfriend I told
you about. But I wanted to now because it was you. Your cum."
"Oh, yeah," I murmured, "your boyfriend."
"Don't be jealous, hon, I don't see him anymore."
"Did you and him...?"
"Yes. Not very often. And I made him use a rubber, and I
hated it." She laid a gentle hand on my arm. "Don't worry about
him. It wasn't at all the way it is with you and me. And I love
your dick without a rubber, it feels good inside me and it tastes
good sucking you."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, dummy."
"I thought I was finished cummin', but when I heard you swallow
I sort of starting all over again."
"Is that what it was? I thought it ended, too, and then you
squirted more."
Not to be outdone, I told her there was still more I wanted to
know about women. Specifically, about her. Specifically, about her
most pleasurable spots and how she liked being licked. Another half
hour went by as she spread her legs and educated me in the details
of her nipples and tummy and thighs and cunt. She was much better
at explaining the technical details than I was at explaining my own,
though at one point she had to make me stop. I asked her why and
she said, "It's so intense, I thought I was going crazy. Hon, you're
getting so terribly good at this!" After she rested she asked me to
keep going and explained more to me, although at times she was so
breathless I had trouble understanding her. Eventually her sentences
made very little sense and she stiffened and quivered with a long cum.
She explained the differences between how it felt when I made
her cum manually or orally, and how her outer lips were especially
sensitive right after she came, so since I was hard I entered her
and we started fucking slowly and she told me how wonderful it felt
to fuck after she had just cum. She asked if it felt different for
me, now that I'd already cum once, and I said it felt more sensitive
but that I also felt more in control. So we practiced learning how
we could tell when either of us would start cumming and how to stop
it but keep the pleasure going until we were ready to start again.
Both of us started a long climb that took us to an edge where we
didn't want to stop and couldn't, and I started squirting in her
when she was in the middle of her cum and her contractions milked me
so thoroughly that I didn't want to move when it was over. For a
long time we held each other until she said she had to get her
little blue bag and go in the bathroom. This time I didn't mention
rubbers, knowing how much she disliked them.
When she came out she said she was okay and asked if I wanted to
fuck again. It took a while to harden me, which she did with her
mouth and then by putting me half-hard inside her and moving under
me. Less urgent and hysterical now, we were both almost clinical as
we talked and excited each other. When I was hard enough I screwed
her the way she told me she liked, bringing her to an edge and then
changing my movements to slow her down, until finally she said she
wanted to cum, so I moved in her the way she wanted and didn't stop
until she came. I let her rest a minute and started again, keeping
her on the edge, and finally she came again and almost fainted. I
was thoroughly drained by then and didn't cum, though I was close a
few times and highly sensitized. At that point I needed rest more
than I needed another orgasm.
For a while we talked sleepily, listening to the rain that still
slopped outside the window. She put her head on my chest and I
found out how to massage her temples with my thumbs. I caressed her
that way until I knew she was asleep. Watching her doze on me was a
marvel. Filled with tenderness, I continued stroking and touching
her, finding the exact shape of her gentle shoulders and her back,
playing in her hair, learning the wonder of the hollows and curves
of her trim waist and flared hips. Her deep and steady breathing
became my music for the night, along with the waning rain. I didn't
want to fall asleep right away. I wanted to keep holding her and
listening. I wanted the night to go on. I considered staying awake
all night and would not allow myself to fall asleep; this would make
the night last longer, I reasoned, and by morning it wouldn't matter.
But I was asleep before I knew it. I found myself in the middle
of the universe again. I was floating. Somewhere in the distance I
heard the hum, almost imperceptibly, and I thought this time I would
wake up and pay attention and I would know what it was. But then
the dark that had no shape began changing and not changing shape and
I thought: no no here it comes again --
I was standing in her kitchen. Panting. I gulped, trying to
figure out how I got there. Behind me I heard her bare feet running
toward the room. She whispered frantically, "Where are you?
Speedy, where did you go?"
Turning, I saw her arrive in the doorway, and then she came
toward me quickly. I stumbled to her and as soon as I felt her
nakedness against me I clasped her tightly and wanted to disappear
into her breasts.
"Sweetheart, what's wrong? You almost knocked me off the bed,
you jumped out and ran so fast! I never saw anyone run so fast!"
"I dreamed this before," I gasped.
"Of course you were dreaming, hon, of course. Are you okay now?"
"I dreamed this before," I repeated, I held more tightly. One
hand at her back, my other held her by her smoothly globed buttocks
and pressed her into me voraciously. She reciprocated and writhed
into me. Her pliant body fit into me as if her flesh and bones were
part of mine. My cock was incredibly hard against her pubic hair.
"Hon, your heart's beating so fast! What's wrong?"
"I had this dream before," was all I could say. I let go of her
and pulled her by the hand and led her back into the bedroom. "I'm
okay, I'm...waking up. I'm okay." Still holding her hand I gest-
ured for her to climb in, and when she was in the bed on her back I
pulled her knees wide and opened her legs and fell on her, clasping
her as tightly as before, my face in her neck, mashing her tight
breasts against me. Frantically, realizing I had little control
over what I was doing and that it may have been part of the dream, I
searched for her with my cock, which was painfully erect.
"You want me hon?" she asked. "Want me? Wait...let me get
wet." She licked her palm and I felt her rub herself with it but
I knew that wouldn't make her wet enough so I scooted down and
licked her--slowly, thinking that she'd get naturally wetter if I
did it the way she liked, and after only a few seconds she said,
"Good, hon. Hurry inside me."
I moved up again, quickly, lunging with my cock and missing.
Her hand helped, and I went straight in. Doing something I had
never done before and had never thought of doing, I put my hands
under her butt and hid my face in her neck and fucked her
rapidly, deeply, hungrily. She said "Yes, hon, it's good, it's
good," and right away I came. It was not a long or a very wet cum,
but it was blindingly intense and as always she milked me with her
cunt when she felt me throb in her.
Then I simply lay gasping on her, afraid to let go, amazed at
how I had just fucked her so thoroughly and completely and quickly.
She caressed my neck and back.
"What was wrong?" she whispered.
"I don't know what it is," I moaned into her neck.
"But what did you dream, hon?"
"I don't know what it is," I said again.
"Are you okay now?"
"Yes. I came in you. You'd better go in the bathroom." I
started to move for her, but she stopped me.
"No. Not until you're asleep again."
"I'm okay, go ahead."
"Shhh. I won't leave you in here alone." She put a hand on
my back and one on my rear and pressed me into the pliant, warm,
clinging length of her and squeezed her cunt on me. Then she
rested and held me.
I more than slept: I fell unconscious. I woke much later as
the birds were just beginning to sing in the dark. Their song
meant the sun would rise soon. The rain had stopped. Martha Jane
lay next to me on her side, one arm around my waist. Her face was
toward mine, eyes closed, lips softly parted, hair splayed on the
pillow. I kissed her cheek very lightly, not wanting to disturb her.
Faintly I could smell her body on me and felt her dried moisture
between my legs. I put my hand on her waist and slept again.
In the morning we woke and bathed together and I made breakfast
again. As we ate I was unable to explain my dream to her, though I
tried. She got dressed and went to the supermarket and I went to my
apartment and got my bed ready for her. Late in the morning she
returned and we got back into bed, this time at my place. She
grinned as we embraced and said, "We owe the old place one more try
before you're gone." I was still a little tired and she wanted to
talk about my dream, but I stopped her by fingerfucking her until
she had a prolonged orgasm during which her hot and frantic whispers
never stopped. Then she was very tired, and we rested and made
lunch, then got back into bed and napped for half an hour. We got
up and bathed again. Though still tired, I asked if we could fuck
again and she smiled and led me back to bed. Languidly she lay back
with her thighs spread flat and watched me as I steadily fucked her.
I wanted to learn more about how I could tell I'd be cumming. I
stroked lazily in her until I tired again, but I still didn't cum.
She moved me to the edge of the bed and lay on top of me, moving
gently on me, first in circles for a while and then up and down until
she was tired as well. Having her on top left me more rested and
very erect and horny, so I moved her to her back on the edge of the
bed and with her legs dangling to the floor I stood between her
thighs and found the bed just high enough to let me stand and enter
her deeply.
She lay restfully and looked down to watch, one hand behind her
head and the other stroking the exposed part of my shaft. I stood
between her outstretched legs, marveling at how the skin of her inner
thighs now had a tight, athletic tone and flesh that whispered faintly
as I stood and pistoned gently in her snug wetness and watched her
subtly arch her mound up and down. Finally, almost out of breath, I
could feel my shaft start twitching.
She asked, "Are you close?"
"...Yes..."
"Wait," she said, smiling devilishly. She held my hips to make
me stop thrusting and then she sat up a little, saying "I've always
wanted to do this." Biting her lip girlishly, she looked into my
eyes and held my half-immersed shaft with one hand and with her
other fingers she pressed the muscles under my balls.
"Cum in me this way, hon," she said. "Let me jack you off
into me." With that, she began gently but quickly masturbating
me with half my cock in her.
All I could do was throw my head back and moan.
Her breasts jiggled as she swiftly but neatly jacked me off
with three slender fingers while rapturously studying my face.
"Oh, I"m...Oh, it's so close!"
"hon...I can't believe how wonderfully wicked this feels."
She jacked me some more, not strongly, just enough to carry me
along an almost painfully slow, irresistible glide into a long and
libidinous cum, which finally arrived with a smashing wave of sensa-
tion at the tip of my cock where the wet ring of her outer lips held
me and warmly, subtly clung; my knees weakened and bent, and uncon-
trollably I leaned back with my cock and hips extended toward her,
my tummy tightening. I watched helplessly as my knees moved out and
spread my thighs lewdly; and with a jerk of my hips a blob of cum
shot out of me like a bullet.
She felt it pulse along my shaft.
"There, baby, theeerrrr...mmm, you're cummin' so good...MMM!"
She beamed up at me, surprise and lust flooding her face. She
gently squeezed my balls. "I feel it," she murmured glutton-
ously, highly satisfied with herself. She watched my cock and
continued draining me. "This is so good."
Soon she could tell from my glazed eyes and the weakening of my
throbs that I had peaked, so she slowed her smooth squeezing and
stroked my chest as I finished.
Then I collapsed on her. I was emptied, and completely out of
breath.
She gave a low chuckle as I rested, still standing but bent over
her with my face in her neck as she lay on the bed with her legs
hanging over the side.
She said, "Hey, you animal, you really liked that, didn't you?"
I nodded, struggling to get my breath.
She chuckled again, contentedly. "Oh my, so did I. I was so
surprised at myself!"
I panted into her neck, "You always...make it feel so good."
She whispered, "Yes, and I want to, because you make it good for
me. You always do--it's like a fuck fantasy come true. It's very
special, the way we please each other, the way you always seem to
just...know."
I craned my neck and gave her a long kiss on the cheek.
By that afternoon, when we started straightening up for the
return of our relatives, both of us were saying we probably wouldn't
want to have another orgasm for months.
Of course, we were both wrong about that.
Continued...
From: sjr <73233.1411@CompuServe.COM>
--------
**** WARNING **** WARNING **** WARNING ****
THIS DOCUMENT IS A SEXUALLY GRAPHIC STORY ABOUT AN INTENSE SEXUAL,
EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A TEENAGE GIRL AND
A YOUNG BOY AND THE COURSE OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP OVER A PERIOD OF
10 YEARS. IT IS A DRAMATIZATION ABOUT REAL PEOPLE AND THEIR CON-
FLICT WITH SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS. IF THIS SUBJECTS OFFENDS YOU OR IF
SEXUAL LANGUAGE UPSETS YOU, OR IF YOU DON'T WANT THIS MATERIAL SEEN
BY UNDER-18 OR OTHERWISE UNQUALIFIED PERSONS, DELETE THIS DOCUMENT.
THIS DOCUMENT IS COPYRIGHTED 1994, 1996 BY SJR. SO--HEY, YOU CAN
COPY IT BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE IT OR SELL IT UNLESS I SAY SO.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE
by S.J.R.
PART 7A:
My mother scowled as she stood in the doorway of my new bedroom in
our new house in the new suburb on Macon Road. She warned me, "This room
better be straightened up before your daddy gets home."
As she turned to leave I said, "Can you close the door, please?"
Her frown deepened. "Why do you always stay in here with the door
closed?"
"I just do," I replied, sitting on the floor and pouting, surrounded
by the artifacts and tools that I had collected during the past few
months in my large room.
She closed the door, sighing impatiently. I remained on the floor
and pondered how I might organize the mess around me. I had books,
comics, magazines, drawing supplies, record albums, newspapers, theater
magazines, brochures, copies of theatrical scripts, research papers and
mementos of plays and movies. Now and then I bought a copy of the New
York Sunday Times at the Union Station newsstand when I visited my
godparents, as I still did almost every weekend. Several issues of the
Times, with all sections intact, stood piled in one corner of the room.
And there were reams of lined looseleaf paper filled with schoolwork and
drama club notes and the thousands of words of novels and stories that I
had begun writing since the move to the new house. Unfortunately I had
only a single chest of drawers and one small two-shelf bookcase, my bed,
a small table with a record player, a desk large enough only for a book
and small pad, and an eight-inch knickknack shelf screwed into the wall
near one of the two windows.
Knowing my stepdad would be home within the hour, I began stuffing
the loose papers into a couple of cardboard boxes. I found room for the
boxes in my closet, along with many other things. Even more of my keep-
sakes and projects were slid under the single bed, and several books were
lined up along the floorboards on either side of my small desk. Just as I
was looking for a place to stow the Black Lady -- my prized Underwood
typewriter, with which I had typed my make-believe newspapers and my new
crop of stories and novels -- I heard the kitchen door squeak and slam
shut. My stepdad Tony had arrived with the familiar heavy stride that
rattled the prefab windows in my room as he approached.
"You finish cleanin' this up yet?" he asked, his voice as always
noisily and deeply resonant. He looked tired, overworked and impatient,
his strong and darkly-haired arms bulging from the white shortsleeved
shirt, his large hands parked on his hips.
Sweaty from working quickly, I was kneeling on the floor, pushing
the old typewriter along the floor. I stopped and looked up at him.
"Almost," I said.
"Still looks like a lot of junk left in here." He strode heavily
into the room and went directly to the closet. Pulling the door open
with a quick swish of air, he grunted unpleasantly at what he saw. "In
the Navy they would have kicked you overboard for a mess like this. And
in the Navy, we don't stuff goods under the bunks..." Stooping, he saw
what I had placed under my bed.
Without pause, he glowered at me and pointed a finger at each thing
he named as he spoke. "Okay, mister...all of this goes. This goes out in
the trash...and this..this...and all that crap piled on the floor in that
closet."
Amazed and shocked, I gulped hard. "Throw it away?"
"This ain't the Lauderdale Courts housing project," he bellowed, "and
it ain't gonna look like it, either. Throw those boxes away, throw those
newspapers away, and get this place straightened up. *Before* you eat!"
Without another word, he stomped out of the room.
Having lived with this intractable man for half a year, I knew
resistance was futile. He had mentioned earlier that my projects were
junk and that sooner or later they'd have to go.
I sat on the floor for five minutes or so, looking at each article
that would soon be gone. I knew I had no choice. While I was thinking
about it, spending a last few minutes with my belongings, Tony growled
from the doorway, "Let's MOVE it, mister! Get rid of that crap or you
don't eat."
An armful at a time, I carried one load of newspapers out of my room,
through the living room where my stepdad sat watching Bishop Fulton J.
Sheen talk about Communists on tv, past the dining room table, through
the kitchen, out the squeaking aluminum back door, down the steps and
across the narrow driveway, where I dumped the load into the dark green
fifty-gallon garbage drum by the carport. Then back into the house, past
my stepdad who sat engrossed in Bishop Sheen's warnings about the threat
of godless enemies, and into my room. Then another armload, back through
the house and out the back door, without a word between the two of us,
until I had emptied four armloads of my belongings into the big green can.
He stepped into the doorway to check on me as I gathered another
load. Behind him, my mother peered past his broad shoulder. "All those
damn record albums, too," he said. "They must be twenty years old and the
seams are falling apart."
"Better keep those, Tony," my mother reminded him. "Most of them
belong to his Aunt Frances."
"Then next time you go to see your Aunt Frances, take them outta
here and give 'em back to her."
"Yessir," I said tonelessly, loading up an armful of brochures and
magazines.
"And all that paper you got in that box over there, if ain't
schoolwork, throw it away!"
I looked up at him. "That's stuff that I drew myself."
"That 'stuff' is foolishness nobody needs, and we don't have room for
it."
The raw sternness of his voice and face told me there would be no
compromises in my bedroom that night.
"Yessir," I said quietly.
"I don't see why you cain't be like any other boy and play ball with
the rest of 'em. It ain't no good for somebody your age to just come
home after school and close yourself up in this room every day. Put away
that art crap away and grow up like everybody else."
"Yessir."
"You have schoolwork to do, and that's what you're supposed to do.
Not all this art crap and newspapers from I-don't-know-where."
I mumbled, "I already have an A average."
"What?"
"...nothin'...sir."
"You don't have no time for backtalk, buster. Just get rid of this
mess and clean this place up."
"Yessir."
They both left for the living room. I passed them with several more
armloads, wordlessly, as they both watched Bishop Sheen and exchanged
concerned whispers to each other about the Communist threat. More
armsful of my history and my time and my effort tumbled into the dark
green can, which began to look like a great black hole as the sun fell
and the evening turned to night.
Soon I passed them with what I thought was the last armful, which I
soon dumped into the top of the growing heap in the can. I stood there
sweating, looking at the pile, and took a long breath. Well. I had
lived through that, anyway. Perhaps they were right: there was not much
future in the way I'd spent my time. I passed them once more as I went
back to my room and closed my door.
After a moment my stepdad opened the door again and looked around.
He pointed directly at the Black Beauty. "And get rid of that."
"That's my typewriter," I argued feebly.
"It's junk. Get rid of it!"
I said nothing. I looked directly at him, aware that I was ready to
jump at him and rip his throat open. But I stubbornly concealed every-
thing I thought and felt.
"You heard me," he said threateningly.
"Yessir," I said. I rose to my feet, pretending that I was tired
rather than reveal that even my own body resisted me. I stooped down.
The Black Beauty came into my arms heavily, reluctantly, and I lifted it
like an overweight child to my chest, and cradled it. I walked past them
into the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, silently telling
myself that I had to be prepared soon for the instant when its weight and
its keys and its words and memories and its secrets that I had typed out
on paper would soon disappear into a barrel of trash. I banged open the
kitchen door with one foot, stumbling and scuffling under the Black
Beauty's heft, and moved into the cool night under the power of the
obedient little boy whom I knew was not really me at all. And the real
Me watched and the sadly drifting lightning bugs watched and the angrily
flittering moth at the back porch light watched as another Me let the
Black Beauty slip out of my arms and settle with a dull crunch, half-
hidden in the paper and drawings and books and pieces of crayon. Instead
of going inside to dinner I walked to our front yard and leaned on the
head-high cyclone wire fence that girded our front and side yards. I
listened to the sound of cars swishing past in the street and watched the
automobiles full of people who did not know what had just happened and
who couldn't have done anything anyway. After a moment I could not see
the cars very well through the liquid gathering in my eyes.
As soon as I felt one eye overflow I brushed the wet from my cheek
and whispered aloud to myself, "You have to be tougher than this."
"....Speedy, every time I call, you aren't home," Martha Jane said
over the phone. "What have you been doing all this time?"
"I called a few times myself," I answered, checking in all directions
to make sure no one was listening -- not because I expected an embarras-
singly intimate conversation with Martha Jane, but because I had been
increasing my isolation from everyone I lived with. "Your mother keeps
giving me different telephone numbers."
"I know," said Martha Jane, and her breathing and sounds of movement
on her side of the line told me she was talking and doing other things at
once. "I am so, sooo damn busy, it's pathetic. Moving around like a
chicken with my head cut off. I moved twice in one month, I had a room-
mate that I didn't know hadn't paid the rent for months and we got kicked
out before I was finished moving in, and now...now I'm moving AGAIN!. I
don't believe it. I'm packing books in a box right now, but... Anyway,
how *are* you?"
"I'm...okay," I lied. "When can I see you?"
"Oh my, I don't know, the next couple of weeks are--Oh god I wish I
could just get a day off or something, I -- "
"Need some help moving? I'd be glad to help."
"Oh, Speedy, these books are so heavy, you'd break your back."
"I want to help you."
"If you'd like to spend a day together or something, that would be
fine later on, but -- how are you gonna get all the way into this part of
town from way out there on Macon Road?"
"I'll get there."
"How?"
"Bus," I insisted.
She laughed. "*BUS*? Speedy, that'll take hours. And I can't come
get you, I'm borrowing princess Evelyn's car for just a few hours."
I repeated, my voice audibly shaky with a need I couldn't subdue, "I
wanna come see you and help."
She paused on the other end, then her voice sweetened with concern.
"What's wrong, hon?"
"I just...I just wanna help you, you never let me help you."
"No, something's wrong."
"You're just so...far away, and I want to know I'm helping you."
"Well...I've been so busy for so long, and I really don't have anyone
to help. I can't ask the guys I know, they think if they help me move I
oughtta let them into my pants."
"Well," I said, making up something quickly, "I'm bored! It's so
boring out here in this neighborhood. I want to do something. And you
shouldn't have to move by yourself."
"Oh, you're sweet...well...you're sure this bus ride won't wear you
out?"
"I can handle it."
She gave me directions. I would have to transfer to two other city
buses. I would meet her after my own classes, on a Friday afternoon in
the student center at the college.
"Are you sure you're all right?" she asked.
"Yes," I lied. "I'm fine."
"OK. Next Friday, then. You know where to meet me."
That Friday seemed a month away and in no great hurry to arrive on
time. Days in our new prefab home started as they always did. Mom in
her bathrobe and slippers would make hotcakes in the kitchen, then serve
them dripping with Aunt Jemima syrup. I once remarked that such a
breakfast was all empty starch and sugar, at which Mom irritably shot
back, "What do you want? Steak? We have to eat what we can afford." I
didn't mention my misgivings again, realizing that for some reason she
seemed to be growing more irritable by the day with some sort of ail-
ment. I would spoon away the syrup and eat what remained, watching my
stepdad sit silently across from me and hurriedly sip his coffee while
he tied his shoes and got ready for work. On one morning Mom had to
leave the table, and soon I heard her retching in the bathroom.
"Is Mama sick?" I asked my stepdad.
He dismissed my question testily. "Aw, that female problem stuff is
all in her head." He got up without another word and left for work. Mom
returned shortly after he left, sitting with her coffee and staring
tiredly out the window. No words passed between us until I said goodbye
as I left for school.
One night during that week I awoke from my shrinking universe night-
mare and found myself panting in the dark, standing confused and shaky in
the middle of my room near the bed. The pillow had just slipped from the
bed to the floor, telling me that I must have just then bolted from bed;
my body was poised for a dash into nowhere, but I had waked almost immedi-
ately. I stood deathly still, listening for signs of anyone else who
might be up. Nothing and no one moved. I crept into the living room and
stood near the front window, looking out at the still and empty street
while I settled down. I did not understand my recurring dream of a
crushing, wildly buzzing universe.
We had kept the old Philco radio, which sat on a small table near
the tv. I turned it on, keeping the volume all the way off, and stared
into the bright green tuning eye. What voices might that green eye be
hearing now? What was life like out there, how far away was the source
of the voice? What were the colors and the thoughts and the lives out
there? After a while sleep overtook me again, and I went back to bed.
On Friday at precisely 2:30 PM I left my last grammar school class
and broke into a full run. With my school bag flung around my shoulder
and slapping against my side, I barely made it to a bus three blocks away
that waited for me to dash across the main thoroughfare,
The suburbs to which my family moved lay fourteen miles directly east
of the old housing project. Fourteen miles of long, straight, unbending,
undifferentiated city boulevards. The trip began with four miles of gas
stations, soft-serve ice cream drive-ins, barbecue restaurants, and auto
dealerships. Then four miles of look-alike firebrick school complexes,
look-alike shopping centers, look-alike office towers. And then five
miles of look-alike, quickly built, instantly GI-mortgaged homes. I
remember thinking of it as monotony raised to the level of science, made
all the more bland and pointless by the terrain of this part of Tennes-
see, which was almost ruler-flat. Even my own neighborhood, broken at
least partly by the vast open but treeless fields of an unadorned recrea-
tion area called Geisman Park, seemed a universe of its own with long
curveless streets, no visible beginnings, no visible ends. Across from
my new home the supermarket and the drug store, both of which were con-
tained within a single, one-story, squared-off, plate-glassed building
made from the same brick of the same colors as all the bricks in all the
look-alike houses around it, looked like the same supermarket and the
same drug store and the same building on mile after mile of other look-
alike streets.
But as I boarded the third and last bus in the long trip, and as the
gasoline engine roared under the load of passengers, a different city
entered my view. It was the older Memphis, the Memphis of its heyday in
the 1920's, the streets lined with elegant estates and thick, dark green
trees. The Memphis in which my dead father had grown up, with old
bungalows and quaint corner shops and undulating roadways. The edges of
the college campus soon appeared, its magnolia trees, open pastures and
Georgian buildings filling my eyes and crowding out the memory of the
numbing suburbs. I knew Martha Jane lived somewhere within a block or
two of the campus. As the bus rattled past the streets I wondered how
she looked while strolling down the sidewalk past the cherry trees and
the neat old homes on her way to class. I wondered what it might be like
to be surrounded by ideas, by art, by talkers and teachers and learners.
It seemed as exotic as a vision of a perfect Pacific isle.
The bus squealed to a halt at Patterson Avenue. I jumped out and
walked in long stretching steps down the three blocks toward the campus
center. The walkway soon became crowded with students going in all
directions: yelling, chatting, or alone in a hurry with an armload of
books. Again, I began to feel very, very young and childlike among these
people. I caught myself staring in wonder at a man who crossed my path a
few yards ahead of me, a man with a pipe and two books under one arm, a
man wearing a tweed sport jacket with leathered elbows, a man frowning in
thought. Why his image remained permanently in my mind, I don't know;
but within a few years from that day it would come to pass that I would
be in that very college and I would have several classes taught by the
man that I saw that day. Perhaps, I think now, I had known that he would
be one of my principal teachers in later years. Perhaps, I think now, he
would have been someone whom I wanted as the father I didn't have instead
of the unyielding and exacting replacement with whom I was confronted.
Or perhaps he embodied an image of the person I might one day like to be.
Even though I knew my way, I felt lost. I was besieged by sights and
sounds from a world that was, on that day, completely unlike anything in
my daily life. The odor of pine and magnolia in the breeze almost made
me feel drugged. Being surrounded by so many people was disorienting,
and all of them were completely foreign to my experience of others.
These were adults who could read and converse about concepts and events I
knew nothing about and couldn't possibly imagine. I felt completely out
of my element, and yet I felt I was in a world that I was compelled to
enter and explore. I slowed my pace to a normal walk, feeling I would be
less conspicuous if I adopted the ways of those who inhabited this
strange new planet. But I averted my eyes from theirs, looking down at
the sidewalk as I moved along.
Then I heard her voice, calling to me from the massive steps of the
Administration Building. I looked up and saw Martha Jane, in a plain
gray ankle-length overcoat with her pert face smiling broadly and one arm
waving at me. I waved back. I smiled. I attempted to seem undaunted
and casual. It struck me at that moment, as I observed my own behavior,
how I was beginning to simulate a kind of calm and unaffected front--
when, in fact, I almost jumped out of my shoes at the sight of her.
She met me halfway across the driveway to the building and gave me a
hug and a kiss.
"So there you are!" she said. "Right on time, too, I was afraid
you might have trouble on the bus. Come on with me to the student
center, we'll get coffee or something before we start."
I agreed and stayed closely at her side as we walked to the center.
She noticed me staring at the many students passing everywhere.
She laughed. "You look like a tourist."
I blushed. "Martha Jane...I shouldn't be here. I mean--"
"I know what you mean, Speedy, but don't let them intimidate you --
one day you'll be here for classes every day yourself and you'll find out
how dumb most of them really are."
It was late in the afternoon and the crowd in the student center was
a thin one. Martha Jane led me to a long table near the middle of the
vast, resonant room and sat across from me and opened her overcoat.
"What do you want, Speedy? Coffee? A coke? I don't know what you
like anymore."
I deepened my voice into a macho growl. "Coffee!"
"You sure? The coffee here is more like dark brown kerosene. Has
quite a kick. I *need* that kick, but you might not be used to it."
"Coffee," I repeated, and she went into the serving line to bring
back two steaming cups of very dark stuff that didn't look like any
coffee I had ever seen before.
She caught me looking into the cup before I took a drink.
She smirked. "Just take a deep breath, and swallow." She took a
little gulp of it, sighed wearily, and settled back into her chair.
"Speedy, I hope you hurry and grow up faster so you can get into school
here. You'd certainly add a lot of class to the male population. Don't
look now, but there's a guy behind you, walking toward us, and he's going
to come over here and try to put the make on me. Watch closely, and
learn how the lower classes do it."
PART 7B:
The guy she was talking about soon appeared to my left. He was tall
and brawny, well over six feet, with shoulders to match. He had a
bellowing, gruffy voice and wore a blue and white wool athletic jacket
whose padded shoulders made him look gigantic. He approached our table
and called out heftily, "Hi, Janie, you gorgeous heifer, you!" He lifted
one large thigh and planted a foot on the opposite side of the table,
then lifted the other big leg to stand beside Martha Jane.
"Hello, Frank," Martha Jane said politely.
With sweeping, commanding, swaggering movements, Frank grabbed a
chair and sat backwards on it, huge legs spread and massive arms draped
across the chair's metal backplate.
"Hiya doin, cutie?" he bantered. He nodded toward me. "Hey, Janie,
who's yer friend?"
"That's Steven," Martha Jane said. I immediately realized that she
had not introduced me as "Speedy." and I gave her a half-hidden Groucho
Marx raised eyebrow in return. She winked.
"Steven, huh? Hiya, big guy. You look like you're new here this
year."
Before I could answer, Martha Jane told him that I was her "prize
student"who was checking out the campus. Frank continued to make small
talk with her, his speech as swaggering and masculine as the rest of
him. Finally he asked her, "So, you goin' to the big Homecomin'? Ain't
goin' by yourself are ya?"
Martha Jane told him she was swamped with work.
Frank shook his head. "Damn, Janie, you are the workin'-est heifer I
ever saw. C'mon, now, you ain't accepted my invitation for three
months." He looked directly at me and winked, "Is she always this hard
to get, fella?"
"She's a busy girl," I answered, trying to deepen my young voice as
best I could.
He made another attempt or two at getting a date with Martha Jane,
persisting in calling her Janie, and Martha Jane remained politely
adamant and told him that her Homecoming weekend would be spent trying to
finish her final papers before the semester piled up on her. Eventually
he stood up to leave.
He joked, "You sure you wanna pass up a big Homecomin' date?"
"It's tempting, Frank," she flirted, "and I'm sure I'll regret it for
the rest of my days. But, really, I have a lot of work to do."
"Still doin' that student teaching, huh?"
"Yes, it's a back-breaker."
"Well, that's OK, it'll get you a nice job after graduation. But a
gal like you, you won't have to put up with that teachin' racket for
long, some guy'll snatch you right up before you know what happened."
"Yeah right, Frank, happens every day."
"Well, see ya, then. You, too, fella."
After he was out of hearing range Martha Jane heaved a long, relieved
sigh. "See what I mean? Pride of the campus, that big ox. We could sure
use all that muscle to help us move...but it's not worth it."
"He seemed nice enough," I remarked.
"Speedy, he's not nice. He tried to fuck me on the first date,
strictly on the dubious merit of his membership on the football team,
without so much as a word about how I might feel about it. He was so
surprised when I said no! As if it's the first time in his life a girl
didn't undress the minute he walked in!" She shook her head. "I hate
the name Janie. And I don't like being called a 'cutie' or a 'heifer' as
a sign of affection, by some good ol' boy from Arkansas who can't talk
about anything but beer, football, and his daddy's money. I should have
known better than to go out with him in the first place, but somebody
fixed me up and I was in desperate need of a night out." Again, she
winked at me. "So don't think you're going to be some kind of dummy the
first day you start taking classes here, because most of your mental
competition is in the form of that big palooka."
We finished our coffee and headed across the campus toward Martha
Jane's apartment a few blocks away. Martha Jane said there was no big
hurry; she'd spent two weeks packing and she didn't have that much gear
to move. The sun was sinking near the rooftops by then, the late after-
noon sky beginning to deepen in color. We strolled, and she lit a ciga-
rette and talked. She was in her last undergraduate year now, and had
spent most of it struggling to make it through in three years and quali-
fying for an award that might get her a Master's, and the rest of the
time warding off the good ol' boys whom she described as "so eager to get
me in bed you can smell the lust a mile off."
I told her, "It's because you really are very pretty, Martha Jane."
She flicked her cigarette and sent a smooth stream of smoke into the
chilly air. "You have a nice way of saying that, but...in Memphis, being
pretty just means you're like prey, you're some kind of prize that guys
just want to show off and get their cookies with. Have their babies and
cook. I don't like being so pretty sometimes. I wish I were more
average...or more cosmopolitan, you know--chic, I guess, like my sister
Evelyn. She looks so sophisticated, a guy looks at her and knows he has
to take his time. But for some reason they see me as a sex kitten who's
just waiting to get pounced upon, and I'm supposed to show my thanks by
giving up everything I've worked for and sit at home continually getting
pregnant out of love for their 'Prince Charming' complex...No. No, I
sometimes wish I were not as pretty as they think. I'm being interviewed
for teaching jobs, and the men who interview me--well, what they're
thinking is written all over their faces, they're so patronizing. They
see how I look, that's all. Other than that, I'm just another new
special education major, nothing special, nothing unique. And not a word
about the work I've done and the research I did, not a minute spent
talking about new methods or the problems with abused or precocious kids
or any of that. It's just 'Hi, what a pretty girl.' And it never goes
beyond that."
The place she was moving from was in a small two-bedroom, typical
modern apartment building with thin carpets and thinner walls. Her
former roommates had been evicted, leaving only a mattress in one of the
bedrooms and a painted wooden chair in the living room. All the rest of
it -- some bundled clothes, an old trunk, and a few dozen boxes of books
-- belonged to Martha Jane.
Puffing and heaving, we began loading Evelyn's borrowed Pontiac.
Martha Jane was right: those boxed books were *really* heavy. But I was
up to the task, exhilarated at finally being able to move and fling some
weight around after so much torpor in the suburbs. It wasn't long before
we had the car filled with a little more than half of the full load and
were on our way in the car to Martha Jane's new place, several blocks
away on the other side of the campus in an older part of the neighborhood.
Martha Jane drove to an old, well-kept dark red two-story house with
white shutters. It stood in the middle of a deep lawn amid many large
oak and birch trees. Her apartment was in back, atop the two-car garage
behind the house. As I carried the first boxes up the creaky wooden
stairway at the side of the garage and entered the front door, I was
immediately struck by the serenity and homeliness of the interior. It had
a tiny kitchen, a small but ample bedroom in the rear, and a spacious
living room. The many curtained windows looked out over the main house,
the trees, and the rest of the neighborhood.
"Beautiful!" I whispered as I set the box on the floor and looked
around. "This is cute!"
It was furnished with keepsakes, most of it simple early-American
gear having a basic, useful look. One wall had a painted wood bookshelf,
another a long ancient sofa with fairly new, flowered upholstery in good
shape, a big fluffy easy chair covered with the same fabric as the sofa,
and an ancient writing desk with a roll-up top. The carpet had seen
better days and was seamed together from several smaller pieces; but it
did have a certain bohemian character that fit the circumstances.
Her brow dotted with sweat even though the air was cold, Martha Jane
followed me inside and dropped the box she carried onto the floor with a
thud, and the weight of it pushed her across the room and into my arms.
I caught her, and she stopped to give me a hug.
"Whew! Damn, where did I get all these BOOKS!?!" She stood still
and relaxed against me, catching her breath. "Speedy, you're hardly out
of breath! How do you do it? Whew!"
I held her lightly, wanting to simply crush her against me. She was
wearing a turtleneck sweater and jeans and loafers. The sweater clung to
her light frame and slim shoulders; outwardly she appeared dainty, but my
hands felt the lithe and solid body under her flesh, and the warmth and
feel of her seemed to seep into every pore of my body. Her sweaty cheek
was against mine, my lips near her long and elegant neck. Embarrassed by
a sudden wave of affection and passion, I pulled back from her and said,
"You rest, I'll go get the other stuff."
"Oh, I will not!" she protested, leaning into me and still looking for
her second wind. "I can carry my own weight in this job, mister. Whew!
As soon as I get my breath!" She kissed my cheek and hugged me. "I'm so
glad you're helping. You've grown an inch taller, haven't you?"
"I have a long way to go before I can compete with guys like that
Frank fella."
"Don't you *dare* become...whew!...another one of those bull-necked,
overgrown jocks." She moved away from me and collapsed onto the sofa.
"Thank goodness *everybody* isn't like him! Whew! How did I get so old
so fast?"
I headed for the front door. "You stay there and I'll bring up some
more stuff."
"Don't you dare, without me," she said weakly, staring at the ceiling.
But I was already on my way out the door and down the stairs, hearing
her yell behind me, "Don't you dare!" Grabbing the wooden bannister, I
dropped down two steps at a time and was soon into the car and grabbing
another box. I was on my way up the stairs with it when Martha Jane met
me on her way down. "Don't you carry this stuff by yourself!"
I insisted, "Listen, you rest a minute. I'm all right."
"Oh, you men, you always think you can do it all."
In no time at all we had emptied the car and then collapsed on the
long sofa side by side, staring at the ceiling, our feet dangling toward
the floor.
"Are we finished?" she asked, winded again.
"Just one more carload oughtta do it."
"Oh, God...whew!...We have to hurry, Evelyn will drop by for her car
soon, and we have to get you home."
"No. Don't wanna go home."
"Don't be silly...whew!...You have to go home, Steven."
I stopped thinking for at least half a minute. She had called me
Steven! She had not called me "Speedy." It was the first time she had
used my proper name, and the first time in my memory that anyone had
called me by Steven. I was so surprised I was speechless.
After a minute she sat up, her arms hanging limply at her sides, and
looked over the half-filled room. "What a mess. Will this endless
moving ever come to an end? I'm so sick of it."
I lay back into the sofa looking at her. I wondered if she realized
she had called me Steven.
She rose to her feet with a groan, stretched her back and raised her
arms toward the ceiling, then moved slowly and grudgingly toward the
door. "Okay, cowboy. Let's get the last of it."
On the drive back to her old place she told me she was concerned
about how I would get home. "Listen, I have some money. I'll get you a
taxi. It shouldn't be more than ten dollars or so from here. I hate to
ask Miss Evelyn to give you a ride, she's such a put-upon princess!"
"I can take the bus," I said, unworried.
"Bus! Your mother will have a fit by the time you get home. Oh,
it's my fault, we shouldn't have stopped for coffee, we should have come
straight here."
"Coffee was only ten minutes, that wouldn't have saved much time."
"But it's already *DARK* now!"
"Hey, take it easy, we'll be finished soon and it'll be all right.
Anyway, I'm having fun."
"Yeah, fun!" she pouted. "This is all my fault, trying to do it in
one quick flash like this. God knows I've done it often enough to know
better by now!"
"Martha Jane, it's okay."
"It's not okay!" she came back angrily, keeping her eyes on the
road. "I'll end up getting you in trouble, and it's my fault!"
I didn't reply, as I could see that continuing the conversation would
only get her more riled. We had arrived at her old place again. She
scurried ahead of me out of the car and into the lobby elevator. As I
joined her she smacked the button for floor #3 and waited impatiently
while the machine lurched upward.
"We have to hurry," she muttered nervously.
"It won't take long," I offered. But she just said again, "We have
to hurry."
We did indeed hurry, even though I assured her that it was only a
little after five and that we would likely be finished in less than half
an hour. I talked her into lifting two boxes into my arms at once,
though she protested frantically until she saw that the boxes I picked
out were lighter than the others. We piled everything into the hallway
near the elevator, then shoved everything into the elevator and then into
the building lobby, and carried it all out to the car.
On the way to the new place for the last time, she lit a cigarette
and puffed on it deeply and ran a stop sign. "Sorry," she muttered as we
careened down the street. Then she let out a nervous laugh and slapped
the steering wheel. "God, hon, I hope I'm not having a nervous break-
down!" She looked at me and at the road and then broke into a giggle.
"Huh? You think I am?"
I muttered, "Wait until we get there, so you can park the car first
and let me out."
"Okay," she laughed. "I'll wait. Then I'll let go." She looked at
me and blushed, and then giggled again. "I've already gone spastic."
It didn't take long to unload the remaining goods. I again managed
to carry two boxes at a time, while she made several trips with her
clothes. We were on our way up the stairs with the next-to-last load
when someone drove up with Martha Jane's sister Evelyn in the car. Evelyn
thanked the driver, a girlfriend of hers who traded quick hello's with
Martha Jane and me and who drove off when she saw that all was under way.
Evelyn followed us up the steps and into the new living room. She
was dressed in a neat and expensive-looking brown business suit that
seemed to somehow avoid getting a single wrinkle after a full day at the
office. Evelyn herself looked perfectly groomed and unaffected by any
aspect of life that I could determine.
"Well," she sniffed, looking around the place. "It's certainly
homely. Where in the world did they get this rug?"
Martha Jane huffed as she dropped some clothes on the big chair.
"Evelyn, the place only runs $45 a month. What's wrong with the carpet,
anyway?"
"It's a little...thin, honey," Evelyn answered absently. She went
into the kitchen to look it over. "I guess it's enough for one person,
but two would be impossible in here."
Martha Jane rolled her eyes at that and waved at me. "C'mon," she
said, "one more armful and it's over."
"Wait," Evelyn said, strolling to the door. "If you have my keys, I
have to meet some important people for dinner and I'll be late if I hang
around here. I see you're just about finished anyway."
"Yes," Martha Jane agreed, her hands on her hips and her temper
flaring a little, "Yes, we are just about finished. I wouldn't want you
to be late. Your keys are in the Pontiac."
Evelyn stopped at the door. "Speedy, is that you? I didn't recog-
nize you, you're getting so grown-up. Have you been helping Jane move?"
I nodded. "Yeah, but she did most of the work."
"I'll bet," Evelyn laughed in her dry, mildly scornful, successful-
lady way. "Jane, I'll come get you Sunday. We're having lunch with our
Mom's boyfriend and future husband."
Martha Jane's mouth fell open. "Husband? Future husband?"
Evelyn smiled broadly. "Yes. It's going to be announced. But don't
say anything yet. All right? Please? He thinks it'll be a surprise--as
if we hadn't already guessed for more than a year."
Martha Jane stared into space, flabbergasted. "So she's going to
marry him. She's...going...to...marry...him."
"Why not?" Evelyn said merrily, tilting her head with her purposely
sexy little smile. "But don't say anything. Till after. Nice meeting
you again, Speedy."
Evelyn walked out the door, careful not to snag her high heels on the
old plank woodwork, and Martha Jane went to the door and yelled out,
"Well, thanks for the car today, sister. I hope we didn't damage any-
thing."
"It's all right, Jane," Evelyn called back, careful not to muss her
immaculate shoes as she walked to her car. She looked inside briefly
and, satisfied that the last of the load had been placed on the ground
outside the car, she smiled and waved before backing up and driving away.
I followed Martha Jane down the steps for the last two boxes and the
last plastic bag of clothing, which sat in a mild cloud of dust left
behind by Evelyn's Pontiac.
"Well!" Martha Jane said. "So mama's gonna marry that guy."
I said, "They've been dating forever, haven't they? Didn't you tell
me about him a long time ago?"
"Well, he's nice, and fairly wealthy, but....Oh, forget it. Let's
get this stuff upstairs. I'm so tired. I'm really just running out of
gas at this point."
I stood and waited while she lifted two boxes into my arms and then I
turned to go up the steps. But then I heard Martha Jane yelp behind me,
followed by a loud thump. She had picked up a heavy bag that pushed her
backward and onto the ground under its weight.
"You all right?" I asked, and she answered with a dull, "Yeah. Sure."
"Don't pick that up, I'll come back and get it."
"No, I'll get it."
"Martha Jane..." I began impatiently. I stooped to lower the boxes
to the ground, then rushed to her and grabbed the plastic-wrapped
clothing. "You're getting tired, now, don't carry this. I can get it."
Her face seemed blank and her eyes glazed, her brow sweaty and
smeared with a lock of auburn hair. I asked, "Did you hurt yourself?"
She mumbled, her voice slurry. "Take me up the stairs."
"What?"
"Walk me up the stairs, please."
I held her by one shoulder and we started toward the stairway. "Are
you all right?"
"Oh, I'm just...tired and feel a little silly after falling down like
that. I should have been more careful." Holding my arm with one hand
and the handrail with the other, she started up the stairs with me.
"Easy, lady."
"I'm all right! Just bumped the hell out of my butt, that's all."
"That's okay."
"It's not okay, I should have taken more time for this...and Evelyn
didn't even offer you a ride."
"She had that important dinner to get to."
"Her and her damn important dinners," Martha Jane muttered.
PART 7C:
We reached the top of the stairs. She stood in the middle of the
living room, looked about, and turned to me. "I'm so tired of this," she
sighed. Suddenly she squinted and then frowned hard; her eyes closed and
squeezed small pearly tears that tumbled quickly down her cheeks. "I'm
so tired of this," she wept, and covered her face quickly with her hands.
I went to her and held her lightly but closely. For a minute she
shook and cried as I silently stroked her hair. Soon she calmed down.
"I'm so silly," she moaned, sniffling loudly.
"You're dead tired," I said. Firmly, I held her away from me and
looked into her reddened, wet, tired, absolutely beautiful face. "You
get right over to that sofa and relax. I'll get the other stuff."
"Oh, independent me, look at how well I'm holding up. I'm sorry, I
guess all this just...hit me all at once."
"Go to that sofa, or I'll carry you over there and nail you to it."
"Oh, all right..." She whimpered like a defeated little girl and
brushed the wet hair from her face and went to the sofa. I moved to the
door, and by the time I turned around to look at her she had fallen onto
her back on the sofa, her head against an armrest and one foot dangling
onto the floor. She sniffled again.
I stood by the door and shook a warning finger at her. "Now, don't
you move until I'm finished."
Three quick trips up and down the stairs, and I finished the job. I
set the last box onto the floor and saw that she seemed asleep with her
head nestled on a cushion against the armrest. Grabbing some paper
towels from one of the boxes, I went to her and knelt on the floor beside
her, and reached up to wipe her forehead.
Her eyes opened and she smiled wearily. "Oh, look at ME! I feel as
if I need a nurse. No, don't--" she took the towel from my hands, folded
it, and gently wiped the sweat from my face. She whispered sweetly,
"Thank you, hon. You've done enough for me already. I'm sorry I
organized this so badly."
"You did fine," I said. "We moved two carloads in a little over an
hour."
"Stop being so nice to me. You've always been too nice to me. I
wonder why you didn't just blow your stack and start yelling when I was
having a stroke in the car coming over here."
"You were tired."
"You're too nice, hon. I wasn't just tired, I was overworked and
disorganized. And just plain mad. This must be the fifth time I've
moved my stuff in a year. I can't depend on anybody, everything I do
goes wrong, I rush into things before I know what I'm doing, I worked
myself to death for god knows what, I took on too many classes this
semester...I'm a mess."
"Just another lady genius working her way through college."
"Stop. Be a Clark Gable and slap me around a little and bring me to
my senses."
"I could never do that."
She blew her nose. "No, I guess you couldn't. I'd probably slap you
back, anyway."
"You probably would. And you're bigger than me."
"Not anymore."
"Well...you're older."
She wiped her nose. "Yeah, but you're catching up." She crumpled
the towel and pitched it on the floor and took the fresh towel that I had
in my hand. "What a big grown-up girl *I* am, right? I can't believe I
broke into tears just because I fell on my rear end."
"Stop apologizing for being worn out."
"Listen...how the heck are we gonna get you home?"
"I don't wanna go home."
"I'll call a cab."
"That costs too much."
"I can afford it. Anyway, I owe you something for all this."
"No! I'll take the bus."
"But you won't get home until after ten."
I shrugged. "I wanna stay here for a while."
"And do what? You've already done enough."
"It's nice here. I like it, it's a great apartment. Right now, I
just want -- " I stopped.
"You want?"
I didn't answer. I suddenly became aware of how, over the past few
months or perhaps over the past few years, I'd become so indirect and
timorous. I was thinking about that and about how to reply to her, when
she laughed bashfully and blew her nose again.
"Hon, we can't...uh...I'm so embarrassed to admit this, I have never
admitted this to you, but...well, we can't."
"Can't what?"
"You know. It's...I'm having my period. It started today." She
suddenly hid her face with the napkin. "Oh, god, after all we've done
together, why am I so embarrassed? Oh, I'm so messed up."
I said to her flatly, "That's not what I was thinking about."
"What? What do you mean, then?"
"I wasn't thinking about that, that's not what I wanted."
"Oh. I'm sorry." She laughed and rolled her eyes. "Oh, WELL! We
know where Martha Jane's mind is, don't we? Oh, brother! I'm sorry,
hon. What did you want, then?"
I hesitated, only briefly, wondering why I waited and why I could
not be direct with this young woman. I started to say, "Well..." and
rose on my knees so that I looked down at her, and stuttered, "Well, I
just wanted--". I stopped, looked deeply into her questioning face,
and then put my arms around her and placed my head on her chest, just
below her breasts, and hugged her.
She asked, surprised, "This is what you wanted?"
I nodded against her.
I felt her fingers at my temple, stroking my hair. "That's all you
wanted?"
I nodded. "Just for a while."
"You sweet." She stroked my hair for another moment and then said,
"Wait a minute, hon, lemme get my shoes off." I lifted and she reached
down to pull off her loafers and said, "You too, hon." I removed my
tennis shoes as she stretched lengthwise on the sofa and reclined along
and against the backrest. She held her arms up to me. "Come here and
let's cuddle," she said.
I lay half on top of her, and she curled up closer to me and held me
with my face in her neck as stroked my back and my hair.
She said after a while, "I think I'll like this place. It's so nice
looking out the windows at the trees. It's the first comfortable dump
I've seen since I started school."
"I like the breeze in the leaves," I said.
"Yes."
We talked, not moving, then rested silent for a while. Then we
talked.
I did not tell her much about myself. I was uncertain about what was
happening to me or who I had become. She talked about her mother and how
her mom's health had gradually improved after being courted and spoiled
for years by her boyfriend, Mr. Buchanan. He owned an office supply
house and did well financially and had a beautiful home in East Memphis.
Martha Jane said she didn't like the man very much. He was nice, very
generous with his time and money and his displays of affection. And
patient; he had now spent some years waiting for Martha Jane's mom to get
over her fears of disappointment and her feelings of inadequacy about her
ill health. But Mr. Buchanan was old-fashioned, very "Memphis" and
close-minded about women. He adored her mom, but the only virtues he
could see in any female were subservience and physical beauty. He gently
but constantly urged her successful sister Evelyn to quit her job and
find a husband. He had respect for, but meager agreement with, Martha
Jane's independence or her liberal politics. He felt that a woman's
place was in the home rearing babies and baking turkeys. He had helped
Martha Jane in small ways financially with her schooling, but he wanted
to marry her mom and he wanted Martha Jane and Evelyn to live in his home
and not in their own apartments; he wanted them to stay in his home until
they were cured of their career ambitions and could get themselves
married and "raise a family in the proper way."
"There is no way for me to talk to him," Martha Jane said, still
stroking my hair. "He agrees in word, and then disagrees in action by
not supporting anything I do or believe. And if he tells me one more
time how pretty I am, I think I might get very angry and do or say some-
thing stupid that I'll regret and that he probably doesn't deserve. He's
been very good to my mother--and my mother, unfortunately, agrees with
him. I wouldn't want to mess it up for her."
We fell silent for several minutes. We listened to the wind filter
listlessly through the trees.
She said, "You haven't talked much."
I shook my head no.
"Is there anything you want to tell me?"
Again, I shook my head no.
"Hon, that light over there on the table is in my eyes. Can you turn
it off?"
I rose and turned off the only lamp in the room. I stood there until
our eyes became accustomed to the dim moonlight and the faint glow from
the light in the kitchen.
From the sofa, she looked up at me with two small points of light in
her dark eyes. "I'm sorry I'm having my period."
I shrugged. "I wasn't even thinking about it. I just wanted to
spend an afternoon doing whatever it is you usually do."
She grinned. "Really?"
"Really."
"Come here and lie down."
I went to the sofa expecting to lay with her as before, but she stood
up and motioned for me to lie where she had been. "Go ahead, hon."
I lay down lengthwise and face up, my head against the end armrest.
She knelt on the floor beside me with her head onto my chest. "It was
getting a little cramped the other way."
"I'm sorry, you should have said something."
"No, no. It was nice." She lifted her head and looked at me. Her
voice took on that strange, mesmerizing, throaty quality that meant she
had something particularly intimate to say. "I never told you when I was
having my period. That's the first time I've admitted that to you. Or
to anyone. I don't know why it's so embarrassing. Every other female I
know just gabs and bitches about it every time it comes around."
"That's okay."
"Are you embarrassed when I mention it?"
"Of course not."
"It's getting late."
"Yeah. Phooey."
She lifted her head off my lap and reached up to gently part the
folds covering the zipper of my jeans. She neatly held the cloth folds
open with one hand, and with two fingers of the other hand she lifted the
zipper latch. "You'll have to be starting for home soon."
"Yeah," I whispered, my voice getting wobbly and thick. I swallowed.
"Yeah, I guess so."
Fiddling with the zipper tag, she continued: "That time a few months
ago, when we had a whole week together and your folks were on their
honeymoon...I had my period for three days. They don't usually last very
long. But that's why I disappeared." She slowly pulled the zipper
down. With two fingers she found and parted the slit in my underwear.
"I was afraid to let you see me in that condition..."
She used the same two fingers to feel the contours of my rapidly
expanding organ and to give it a squeeze. She deftly took hold of my
tip, sending a thought-destroying tickle through my cock and into my
spine, and pulled my flesh free of the clothing. My cock stood straight
up, twitched, and hardened more. I could feel every blood cell in my
body turn on a dime and begin a journey to and through my loins.
"Such a nice shape, " she whispered to herself, and softly curled her
fingers around me. "The skin is so soft, but underneath it's so hard...
so warm in my hand." She tightened her grip at my base slightly and slid
her long fingers slowly up and then enclosed my tip. A bead of pre-cum
greeted her fingers. She smiled and breathed, "Mmm. Yes."
I swallowed again, hearing my loud gulp echo through the room. I
said, "I hadn't expected this."
"That's what makes it so exciting," she said, almost to herself. She
looked at me. "I know you weren't in the mood, but...do you mind?"
I smiled and had to take a deep breath to get enough air into me to
be able to answer her. "You don't expect me to make a big fuss about
protecting my virtue, do you?"
She looked back at my cock and studied it, as if contemplating where
to start and how to go about it. "You have such a nice dick," she said
sweetly, and the next thing I knew she opened her mouth wide and leaned
down to me and, her hand near my root holding me straight up, she lowered
and slowly, wetly, fully took all of me into her mouth, shoved her tongue
against the underside, and lightly sucked me all the way to the tip, back
down, and up again. I think I heard someone gasp and I'm pretty sure it
was me, since Martha Jane's mouth was occupied at the time. My own voice
sounded far away. She lifted her mouth from me and wet her lips and
scrunched down to make herself more comfortable, and repeated the move in
the same way, once, twice, three times, sweetly and softly sucking. By
the fourth suck I knew every ridge and curve and hollow in her tongue. My
eyes closed and I floated somewhere else in the room and her mouth
floated with me; I heard only the soft sound of Martha Jane breathing
through her nose and the sound of my own irregular gasps and sighs and
the wind in the leaves outside. Slowly, she repeated the long lascivious
suck, her lips and mouth and tongue relaxing their grip as she moved
downward, then renewing their molten hug as she sucked upward. And
again. And again. My balls tightened.
I gasped, "I don't...think I'll last very long."
And as soon as I spoke the hot, itchy pleasure of a strong and
remarkably easy cum obliterated all except her mouth; her rough little
tongue began making tortuous circles around my immersed tip as her mouth
pulled a long hot squirt from me. Undaunted, she continued without pause
and another hot eruption bathed her tongue and bounced off it toward her
throat. She swallowed loudly, but she didn't pause or waver. Her
sucking strokes were shallow now, her lips tightening on me and her
tongue circling lazily, and then I felt three warm cumshots leave me in
quick succession and she swallowed them as if they were one. Continuing
to siphon and swallow me, she worked her maddening tongue until my
pleasure-choked body jerked slightly, once, and rose again into her, and
her tongue drew one more wildly eager spurt that bounced against the roof
of her mouth and which she gulped with affectionate greed and a happily
surprised little "Hmmm!". The rest flowed from me in swiftly weakening
trickles until her lips and tongue could find no more. With a final gulp
and a contented sigh she removed her mouth and closed her fist on my
cock, giving it that last long tug that she liked to give when I was fin-
ished, draining the last thick drop of me onto her extended tongue and
drinking it down. Then she gently and briefly fisted me while I shrank.
She grinned and giggled childishly. "I couldn't help myself. Was it
good?"
Still breathless, I told her it was.
She watched my wet cock wither as she calmed it with her strokes.
She licked her lips, blushing and smiling when she saw me watching her.
She chuckled, still stroking. "Look at me, licking my lips like a
German shepherd! You do taste good, y'know, creamy and hot and...just
slightly salty...but the part I like best," she went on, her voice
dropping to a sensuous murmur as she watched her hand stroking me, "is
how wicked I feel when you squirt on my tongue."
It was only then that I realized how iron-rigid my body had been, and
only then that I noticed I had not been breathing during the entire
orgasm. I was still breathless. My body relaxed with a sudden sag. I
took a long deep breath.
Then her incredibly soft, smooth cheek touched mine and she kissed me
on the neck.
She whispered, "I love the way you cum." Uncontrollably I held
her to me as tightly as I could and buried by face in her hair, and she
hugged back with a playful groan.
I wanted to cry: it was not so much the mind-boggling pleasure she
had given me as it was the lovingly erotic nature and ways of her. But I
found I somehow could not tell her so. I didn't know why.
I refused to waste her money on a taxi. I took the bus home, luckily
meeting every transfer just in time. The lack of passengers at stops
along the way speeded the trip. It was still later than usual when I
arrived home a little after nine-thirty, but there was no argument about
the late hour. When I arrived I found the tv was not on, as it usually
was. At first it appeared no one was in the house; I knew that my step-
dad would be working late at the grocery store and that my sister was
staying at her godmother's, but it seemed my mom was gone as well.
It was not until I walked into the hallway leading to the bedrooms
that I found my mother curled up on her bed and vomiting small amounts of
blood ...
PART 7D:
Mom convulsed into a tight ball on her side and retched quietly,
weakly, making a small sticky red stain in the kleenex she held to her
mouth. Then she relaxed with a pitiful moan.
"What's wrong?" I asked, going swiftly to her side of the bed.
She licked her lips clean and tried to catch her breath. Not getting
an answer, I raised my voice fearfully. "What's wrong? What happened?"
"I'm sick, Speedy. It came on...all of a sudden."
"What's wrong? When did it start?"
"Called your daddy...but he said he had to work late."
I was incensed at her words. "Had to work late? Work late? What
does he expect you to do, just stay sick?"
"Well, I don't know...maybe it'll just clear up."
"How long have you been sick?"
She shrugged, taking in a deep breath and wiping her lips again. "A
couple of hours, I guess."
"You've been sick for hours and he just says he has to work late?" I
threw up my hands in anger and walked in a small, confused circle in the
room and looked back down at her with my eyes flaring. "What can I do?"
She shook her head. She hid her face from me and did not seem to
want to tell me what was happening. "I don't know...Call your daddy, and
see what he says."
I went straight to the kitchen wall phone and telephoned the grocery
store. My stepdad answered the phone with a tired, bored voice.
"Mama's real sick," I said. "She's throwing up blood."
"Hell, it's one of those female things, she's been sick to her
stomach and throwing up for weeks."
"But she's throwing up blood!" I insisted. "You don't throw up blood
when you're just sick to your stomach."
"I told you, it's one of those female things. That kind of stuff is
all in their minds, anyway."
"Well...what should I do?"
"Don't do anything," he answered, unconcerned. "I'll be home in about
an hour or two. Tell her to drink some water."
"But...she's acting like it hurts really bad."
"You know how she is, she overdoes everything. Tell her to drink
some water or some soda, and I'll be home later."
His indifference told me I was wasting my time. I said I would look
after Mom, said goodbye and ran back into the bedroom where I stood
beside the bed, helpless and frustrated.
"He said drink some water and he'll be home later."
"I can't drink water," Mom said, her breath short and labored. "I
tried that, it came right up." Then she made a retching sound again,
down deep in her throat, and tried to hold back. But another convulsion
soon overtook her and she coiled up again, her neck stretching in a
fierce heave outward, and more blood spilled onto the tissue and onto the
bedspread. This time she did not simply moan and come out of it, but
bent herself into a small trembling circle and grasped her stomach and
began to cry and cough.
I touched her shoulder, but did not know what to do. She heaved
again, and groaned, and finally relaxed.
"Mom...What can I do?"
She hid her face but reached out with one hand and grabbed my arm
tightly. Her fingers trembled and her entire form shivered. She spoke
with a breathless rasp, "Go down the street...to Aunt Catherine's. I
tried to call her, but her line's busy...bring her here."
My Aunt Catherine was one of my stepdad's sisters. She lived in a
house a few doors down from ours. Quickly, my fear for my Mom's pain
giving me a bloodcurdling case of the shakes, I ran to the front door.
"Put your jacket on!" my mother yelled. "It's cold outside!"
I thought: to hell with the damn jacket! I rushed into the night and
ran up the street as fast as I could. By the time I pounded on Aunt
Catherine's front door I was out of breath. I tried not to panic. I
told Aunt Catherine to get to my house as fast as she could, that my Mom
was deathly sick and it was getting worse.
She stood in the doorway gaping at me. "Why, Speedy, what's wrong?"
"I don't know. She needs somebody. Hurry!"
"But what's the--?"
"Now! She needs somebody now!"
Quickly she grabbed her overcoat and threw it loosely over her
shoulders. "You stay here," she said, trying to calm both herself and
me. "Watch my baby, Speedy, I can't leave her here alone. I'm goin'
down there right now, don't you worry." And she ran down the sidewalk
with her loose coat flapping in the wind.
I watched Aunt Catherine's sleeping infant for over half an hour.
Several times I peeked out the front door to see what might be happening
down the street at my house. Then an ambulance with flashing lights
pulled into our driveway. I longed to get a closer look but was afraid
to leave the baby alone. Going back to check on the child I found her
still sleeping, and by the time I returned to the front door, two white-
uniformed attendants were shoving a loaded stretcher into ambulance. I
could not see much detail. The lights began flashing again and the
ambulance backed out swiftly, then screeched as it turned up the street
and took off with sirens wailing.
My mother had suffered a miscarriage. I was deeply affected and
spent days shuddering at the thought of how emotionally and physically
painful it must have been for her. But at the same time I was angered at
discovering that not one of my puritanical family or relatives would
mention the details or even the word "miscarriage" in my presence -- I
gathered what had happened from bits and pieces of conversation that
leaked out now and then. During the few days my mom spent in the hospit-
al I was shipped off to my maternal grandmother's house a few miles down
the road and endured her endless chatter and bad jokes when she drove me
to school each morning in her creaky 1950 Ford. She evaded my questions
about what had happened to my mother, but I figured it out when I over-
heard her telling a neighbor that "the baby died."
It was with deep concern that I came from school one day and Grandma
told me she was taking me home because my mother would be out of the
hospital that afternoon. As we drove and my grandma lapsed into another
awful and unmemorable country joke, I felt some hope that perhaps the
unfortunate incident would somehow narrow some of the distance between my
family and myself. Waiting for Mom and my stepdad to show up, I paced
the living room floor restlessly until I saw our tan Ford arrive shortly
before sunset. Mom was in a bathrobe and overcoat and my stepdad, now
treating her with more deference and attention than I had seen before,
opened the car and slowly and carefully led her to our door.
Mom entered, looking tired but happy to be home again, and looked
down at me and gave me a weak hug. "Well," she said, "I'm back."
"What was wrong with you?' I asked. "Are you all right now?"
She averted my eyes and turned to go to the bedroom. "Well, I was
just real real...sick, Speedy."
My stepdad held her arm as she slowly and haltingly made her way into
the hallway and the bedroom. He completely ignored me, which was exactly
what I would have expected. I watched my mother struggle into their
bedroom, bracing herself against a door or a wall as Tony guided her past
the framed portraits of the Virgin and the Sacred Heart and Saint Jude in
the hallway. I watched her getting farther and farther away from me.
Farther than ever. I felt her pain. I felt her loss. And I felt a
distance that I had little hope of breaching again.
Later in my room and I heard the two of them talking in hushed
tones. Mom was crying softly.
My stepdad spoke in a consoling manner I'd never heard him use.
"His soul will be protected, I know it will," he said.
"But, Tony, I was unconscious," my mother softly cried. "No one knew
to baptize the child. It'll be in limbo forever."
"There, now," he kept saying.
The incident had changed the way my stepdad generally treated Mom.
But it did nothing to quiet my anger nor smooth the raw feeling I had of
not being part of the household I lived in. I was disgusted with the way
he'd ignored her pain for weeks until the result was disaster and heart-
break. I was glad he'd had a comeuppance and that he'd earned it the
hard way. And I knew that my mother's rigid religious fervor meant that
I would never be able to share with her my blasphemous ideas or my
certainty that answers to the mysteries of the universe did not lie in
fairy tales. I could have said that the hereafter didn't exist anyway. I
could have fudged and said that surely their all-merciful God would not
forever consign an innocent fetus to limbo. But there was no way, in
that house whose furniture and walls were dotted with pictures of saintly
figures and suffering martyrs and plastic figurines of Jesus, that I
could communicate through their wall of myth and superstition.
I understood their pain. But I could not forgive them for leaving me
alone in a world so different and so distant from theirs.
Near my thirteenth birthday, Martha Jane called and said that Mr.
Buchanan's Easter present to her and her sister Evelyn would be to marry
their mom soon after Easter and move all of them into his big East
Memphis home. Martha Jane had mixed feelings about it.
"I'm glad for mother," she told me over the phone. "But I don't know
if I can live in that house. He's nice. But he's still a redneck and I
just can't seem to work past that fact."
"At least you won't have to spend the rest of your college career
moving from place to place."
"True, but...one more move, actually."
"Oh no, not again!"
"Yes, but it's just a move *out* of where I am, and into that big
house. Oh, well, at least this time I'm his future daughter, so he's
hiring some movers."
"Being his daughter does have its advantages," I offered.
"Come over and help me pack."
"When?"
"I have two weekends when I can do it, the first and second Saturdays
in April. Which one would you like?"
"Both," I said.
"Which one?"
"Both," I repeated.
Her voice on the other end of the line almost sounded as if she were
winking at me. "Okay," she said. "This time we'll have longer to play.
I'll have a car to use. Not Evelyn's, this time. My daddy-to-be is
buying me one."
On a Saturday a few weeks later, Martha Jane showed up in a bright
blue Chevrolet. But she didn't look happy behind the wheel.
I said after I got into the seat beside her and we were on our way to
her place, "Wow, what a car!"
"It's not me!" she moaned. "This huge gas-burner is NOT ME! Speedy,
I'm scared. Really. I should love this, but I hate it. I feel as if
I'm selling out. And it takes me an hour to park it."
"Well...you can always give it back."
"But this is terrible! I feel so dishonest. I dread to think of how
I'm going to be punished for this...this terrible sin! I've invested so
much in claiming I was on my own and had my own ideas, and now I'm sell-
ing out."
I spent the afternoon with her and helped her pack books and clothes.
She was cranky the whole time. I tried to joke around and make light of
Mr. Buchanan and to convince her that at least her life would be settled
for a while.
"I don't know what's going to happen to me," she said at one point.
"I had finally got the feeling that I was in control of my life and I
could honestly be myself. Now I have to spend every day in that house
pretending that I agree with everybody, when I really and truly don't."
"I know," I said ruefully. "How well I know."
"Hon, can I say something?" She was sitting on the floor with her
legs under her and a pile of books in her lap.
"You can say anything you want, Miss Scarlett."
"Something's...wrong inside you, isn't it?"
"Wrong? What you mean, Red Ryder?"
"Because you're trying too hard to erase yourself and you never talk
about what you think or feel anymore. You're being nice to me about
anything and everything, to the total exclusion of yourself."
I laughed. "You don't like me paying attention to you? I'm having a
good time, just helping you today. Really. Honest."
"How are things with your mom and your stepdad? You never mention
them. I don't have the slightest idea what's up with you and them."
I didn't know what to say. My own feelings about the way I'd been
living and how powerless I felt were thoroughly confused. And I didn't
want to spoil my time with Martha Jane by getting into it.
I mumbled something, a careless "Nothing much going on about that,"
and she was quiet behind me for a while. For sometime afterwards we
didn't talk much except to say that another box was packed or to ask
which box to pack next. At around six o'clock she decided we should stop
for the day so she could make salads for dinner.
"You sure got quiet," she said after I had been eating wordlessly in
front of her at the table for five minutes.
I shrugged. "Burned out from all this packing, I guess."
"I guess," she said. She sighed. "Me too."
"So...you'll be living the life of a cool little East Memphis
socialite from now on."
"Please. Don't talk about it while I eat."
I sat and chewed and tried to think of something else to say. But
the only thing I could think about was that Martha Jane would not be in
that college forever, that she would be teaching one day, perhaps far
away. I knew better than to bring up that subject. In fact, everything
that I could think of as material for discussion somehow led to the fact
that the one person in whom I could place any trust was surely going to
be out of the picture sooner or later. And on that particular day I
wanted very much to undress her and touch her, but I had grown fearful of
even saying anything or making a move in that direction.
I blinked and looked up. She stared questioningly at me.
"Were you in a trance?" she asked.
"No," I said. She eyed me skeptically. I shrugged and confessed,
"Yes."
"I asked you if you have any girlfriends at school."
The question sent a chill up my spine. "No," I said.
"Someone as active as you, and you don't have some girl after you?"
I shook my head no.
"Why not, hon?"
I shrugged--a big, on-purpose, don't-give-a-damn shrug. "I'm not
interested in anybody."
"I see..." She got up and poured some soda into her half-empty glass.
Wordlessly she returned to the table and sat.
After a moment she looked into her glass and said slowly, "I wonder
..Speedy...oh, never mind."
I did not know what she was hinting at. I looked up to find her
staring at me again. I had just taken a big bite of salad. Desperately
reaching for something to talk about that had nothing to do with my
thoughts or with anything else, I pointed at my face and said with a full
mouth, "Nice salad. Good."
She gave me a sad little smirk. "Speedy, you're not talking to me.
You're just throwing words across the table."
"I'm eating," I said, and tried to grin with lettuce sticking out one
side of my lips.
"You're a miserable failure as a liar, you know that?"
"What am I lying about, Miss District Attorney?"
"The same thing I'm lying about."
"You? What are you lying about?"
She hesitated. She opened her lips to speak, but didn't.
I repeated, "What are you lying about and why?"
She took a deep breath and looked me right in the eye. "I'm not
lying, really. It's just that there's something I'm not talking about."
I joked, "Well, gee, thanks for telling me that there's something
you're not telling me about."
"You're doing it, too. But you won't even tell me that you're not
telling me about it."
I shook my head and moved uneasily in the chair. "Miss Graham, this
sounds so complicated."
"Speedy, what do I have to do to keep you from going inside yourself
like that? You're so clever about it, but you're so distant when you do
that, and it's something you do again and again and --"
"No," I said quickly. I gave her a tired, strained smile. "No,
Martha Jane, it's...things I don't know how to talk about yet."
"Oh, goodie, I think I hit the target! What? What things?"
"No."
"What things?"
"No!" I insisted, verging on defensive anger. I'm sure I turned a
little red, but I let it go no further than that. I was getting better
at holding it all in, because I was sure that a tear would show, or I'd
let slip some desperate motion or remark. But all I let out was a quiet
and definite no.
"Well," she said reluctantly, "all right, then. I won't nag."
"Let's pack some more stuff," I said, brightening up.
"No."
"Martha Jane...I'm -- I guess I'm just bored and tired."
"You sure?"
"Mm-hmm."
The look on her face told me she didn't believe me. But all she said
was, "Will you promise not to run away while I take a shower? I'm all
dusty from this work."
"Can I shower first? You really had me sweating today. What a
slave-driver."
"Okay. You, then me."
I showered first, very quickly--not that I was so grungy, but I
wanted to prepare a surprise for her while she washed. After I dried
off, she followed. While she showered I remained undressed, cleaned up
the kitchen, turned down all the lights, readied the bed, and lay naked
in the bedroom face-up with my hands behind my head and my cock standing
straight up in the air.
She came out of the bath toweling her hair. She stopped short in
the doorway when she saw me. Her eyes widened and she laughed. "Well,
well! Am I to gather from this that you are making the moves this time?"
"Isn't it my turn?"
She smirked. "Let me clean up the kitchen."
"I already did it."
"Oh," she said, impressed. "Really! My--All this, and he does
dishes, too." She threw the towel aside and climbed on the bed and
crawled stealthily toward me. "C'mere, you..."
Almost an hour later she lay naked under me with her knees raised
while I fucked her rapidly in the soft bed in her dark bedroom. She had
cum twice, once under my mouth and once with me inside her.
"Slower," she taunted, her eyes fixed on mine. "Let it build up."
"...it's so good, it's close now..."
"Let it feel good longer, honey. Look at me." She held my face
gently but firmly. "Let me see your eyes."
I trained my eyes on hers.
Her hazel orbs searched mine knowingly. She stroked my face as I
moved in her. I was physically close to climax, but emotionally distant
-- and Martha Jane had uncanny ways of sensing it.
She said, "You've been hiding something from me for a long time."
Trying to evade her, I stared back intently. "No."
"You don't have to tell me what it is. But I don't want it holding
you back from me when we fuck. Let go of it. Let it go so you can
really enjoy fucking me."
Her offer melted my resistance, and I could not prevent my face and
eyes from softening with gratitude -- a reaction she acknowledged with a
little grin of recognition.
I stopped moving. I tried telling her, "I keep thinking...I
don't know how to say it..."
"Shh. No thinking. It's so seldom that we can be together like
this. I'm being very selfish: I want to give you a wonderful cum. I
want you to stop thinking and cum."
I began moving in her again, but she cradled my face once more and
said, "Slow, hon. Make it last until you can stop thinking so much."
I slowed my pace and lengthened my strokes so that I withdrew almost
all the way out before going even deeper in her.
"Good," she said. "Yes. Take your time. Go deep."
I dreaded she would make it so good that I would forget myself com-
pletely, that my fears and anger would have me crying or screaming when I
came. But her eyes and voice enticed me out of myself despite all my
recent conditioning to the contrary. I felt my emotions welling up to
match the intense pleasure I felt inside her.
She urged me on with lusty whispers and an ingenious knack for
holding me on the edge and delaying my release until the defenses that
imprisoned my pleasure behind a wall of rage and isolation had been
obliterated. For a long time she would not let me cum until I was so
overpowered with lust that, with a helpless sob, I relinquished all
control to my back and hips and allowed them to pump my cock into a
mindless state of raw pleasure. Below me, she received my surrender
with a sweet smile.
Everything disappeared. I yelled. I slowed and spurted.
She hissed, "Yessss...yes, hon...MMM! So MUCH!...yes, baby!...oh
yes enjoy it, such a good cum..." When she felt my orgasm waning she
rolled her hips in a slow arc and drew my last remnants into her
clutching warmth.
As usual, she thoroughly destroyed and drained me. I fell asleep in
her arms until she woke me up to drive me home. On the way she asked if
I felt better. I answered, yes, I felt better. But what I did not say
was that nothing had changed.
Continued...
Author: sjr <73233.1411@CompuServe.COM>
-- CJ
I don't write any stories. I'm just a reader, and sometimes a reposter.
--
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