His sensation of having been deafened by the knock on the head was heightened by something else that was wrong: the music had stopped. In the instant he realized this, still groggy, he saw a pair of sandals approaching. They were trimmed with fake cherries. He struggled to his feet and came face to face with Tom’s mother, who was bent over — she was taller than he was.
“What’s going on here?” she said, and the mother’s demand had an echo of the daughter’s scolding voice.
“Nothing,” Slade said, but he glanced behind him and saw Nita climbing out from under the porch.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at the beach?”
But Tom’s mother was not speaking to him; she was addressing the little girl, who sulked and walked away. When Slade started after her, Tom’s mother said, “Not you. You’re staying right here where I can see you.”
Slade went hot with blame, and looked away from the woman’s face, and dropped his gaze to her shoes, the wedge-heeled sandals. The fake cherries on the straps were chipped, but her toes were lovely with pink polish.
“What would your mother say if she knew you were misbehaving?
“I don’t know,” Slade said miserably. He could not keep the tone of guilty pleading out of his voice. “I wasn’t doing anything.”
“Under the house with Nita,” she said. “I think you were being fresh.”
Slade was terrified. He knew he had no control over what Tom’s mother was saying. He could not contradict her, and he hated the little monkey girl for tempting him.
“Come in here,” Tom’s mother said, and she stood aside. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Mrs. Bronster.”
Only then did Slade notice that Tom’s mother was dressed as she had been the day before, in a white bra and loose shorts, the same blue ribbon on her braid, her winking navel in the sallow skin of her bare midriff. The steel guitar was set up where she had left it, the amplifier like a battered suitcase, the sheet music on a metal stand.
“I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on you,” she said. “I don’t think I can trust you.”
“You can trust me,” he said in his pleading voice. “I didn’t do anything.”
In her thick-heeled sandals she loomed over him, and she turned on him and said sharply, “Your knees are filthy. Look at your hands. You need a good shower. Get over here.”
She beckoned him to the back of the cabin where, on a slatted platform, there was a shower stall — a plastic curtain, an overhead pipe and nozzle. She turned on the shower and the water spattered and splashed on the boards.
“Go ahead.”
Slade wanted to please her yet he hesitated, his hands on his shorts.
“I suppose you think I’ve never seen a naked man.”
When she said “man,” Slade did not think of himself; he thought of Tom’s father, who was never there.
“Now make it snappy.”
He turned away and slipped off his T-shirt and dropped his shorts. He entered the pouring shower, hiding in the torrent, his back to the streaming shower curtain.
But he could tell from the way the water splashed that Tom’s mother was watching, crowding the shower stall entrance. Then she stepped away and the water fell straighten Slade soaped himself, still trying to please her, and after he had rinsed off he saw her at the bathroom door, holding a towel.
“Here,” she said, and dangled it, but when he walked toward her, naked, she held on to the towel, gripping its corner as he dried off.
“You’re certainly not putting those dirty clothes back on,” she said, and kicked his shorts away as he reached for them. She gave him a small limp handful of soft silk.
“Put those on.”
He was uncertain, almost afraid.
“Do as I say.”
He drew them on, black lace panties, consoled that his nakedness was covered yet feeling foolish. But the woman’s seriousness helped him. She was matter-of-fact; she could have teased him but didn’t.
“I want to trust you,” she said.
Slade did not know what to say, but he thought, Test me, try me, I will do anything to earn your trust. The panties he wore were so flimsy he imagined that she could see through them, but when he looked down he saw he was covered.
“They’re mine. They’re silk,” she said. “Sometimes you have to improvise. Make do with what you have.”
He could not tell if she was smiling, but her voice was kinder than before.
“You’ll find that, as you get older,” she said. “What are you looking at?”
She touched her own shorts at a place where the side zipper had worked open, the gaping slot showing a blister of pink panties.
“Want to zip me?”
Eager to please her, he used two hands, one to pinch the zipper together, the other to lift the fastener into place, closing the gap, and as he worked on it, Tom’s mother touched his fingers, patting them, and then smoothed the seam when he finished.
“You’re good at that.”
He said nothing.
“Now unzip me.”
He was aware of being barefoot in damp panties, his head still wet from the shower, this woman in her sandals much taller than he was. But he obeyed, working the zipper open, and when it was down the woman plucked at a button and the shorts opened onto swelling pinkness. She tugged at them a little and they dropped to her ankles and she stepped out of them.
Feeling like a geek, he was looking away from the woman, toward the front door of the cabin, the blinding afternoon sunlight pouring through the squares of glass, when she stepped behind him. From the touch of the fabric on his shoulder it seemed as though she were draping him with a scarf.
“I think you need this.”
She lifted the soft cloth to his head and wrapped it, blindfolding him. And just as she knotted it, he sensed a slight effort of her hands and arms, and got a whiff of her body and with that, contradicting it, the odor of her perfume on the silken softness against his face.
“Can you see anything?”
He shook his head, hardly daring to breathe. Yet as soon as he was blindfolded she was gentler, even submissive.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t be frightened,” she said.
She must have noticed that his voice was thick with fear, because it was then that she touched him, holding him like a baby, and led him slowly across the smooth floorboards of the cabin to her bedroom. His feet shuffled, hardly leaving the floor, as he moved blindly, guided by her. He knew when they entered her bedroom from the sweetness in the air, the softness of the pillows. Then he was fearful, alone on the bed, but she had left him only to shut the door, and a moment later she was holding him again.
“Baby, baby, baby,” she said, her hands on him. “Isn’t that better?”
He lay slightly crouched in apprehension, not knowing what to say.
“I’m so lonely, baby.” She sighed and sounded small.
He had entered the cabin knowing nothing, but he was learning, liking the strangeness of it, and now he knew that “baby” meant something different, someone strong, a man. Her mouth was against his ear, heating it, moistening it with her breath.
“You can be my boyfriend,” she said. “Know what boyfriends do?”
He had no idea. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t speak. He thought, I am blind.
“I’m going to show you,” she said, and when she touched him where he was tender, he drew back. “No, no. Let me, let me, let me.”
Her hand was on him, but the heat that burned him was like a thickness of raw flesh after the skin has been peeled away, the warmth of blood and some throbbing, too. When he reached down to protect himself his hands found her head and became tangled in the hair of her loosened braid as she pushed her hot face against him, her tongue snaking, not devouring, not swallowing, but an audible ecstasy of the most rapturous tasting.