Grace Eddy
Her little crew
Chapter 1
It was a quiet life but she liked it. At thirty-nine Theodora often laughed at what she had thought being a dancer was like. What it was really like was hard work. Since she had been eight Ted's life had been a daily round of practice, exercises to twist her body into shapes nature had never intended a little girl's bones to go.
It was, she reflected, very like a nun's life except that it required more rigid vows and a greater dedication. A nun had to give up screwing. A dancer… Ted had been a virgin till she was nearly twenty-eight, thanks to the still uninvented pill. Pregnancy for d dancer was not just a social embarrassment. It was The End. Nobody.in the world of ballet cared who fucked whom but if a dancer wanted to Make It she had to devote her whole body, every erg of energy to just one thing. There was no room for fucking. There was even less room for overeating.
Thinking back about it all, Ted knew it had been a waste. All those wonderful years… When she had been fifteen and all her friends had been out in parked cars getting their stockings pulled down their thin legs she, Ted, had been bellying up to the practice bar, exercising, practicing, turning herself into some kind of machine that made old men in the twenty-five-dollar seats sigh. But in street clothes she had been unable to turn the head of any man of any age. They were interested in a girl with some meat on her bones-an ass to grab, some tits to nuzzle. She had often thought of what she could have done for a man if she had been willing to give up her career-all the interesting positions she could twist her slight body into. And she had always felt safe walking down dark streets at night, knowing her thin, almost nonexistent body was as muscular as a rattlesnake's and just about as deadly should any male try something she didn't want tried.
But it was all over now. She had been one of the lucky ones, able to see herself objectively and know that she was a good dancer. She had also known she would not be a great one. When, after wasting all the wonderful years from fifteen to twenty-five pursuing a career that never quite materialized, she had finally found The Man, she had known better than to hesitate.
Twenty-eight-year-old virgins with a body of a fifteen-year-old and the mind of a middle-aged adult are not easy to come by. She had, thinking back on it, sold herself. But it had not been all that much of a sacrifice. Virgil had possessed a hard-muscled body, still interesting at fifty. And he had known what he was doing too. She remembered the day he had proposed.
"Look," he said, "a man my age and with my money has had all the clean young cunt he needs. What I need is a woman who can run my house, wear clothes, entertain my friends, and who knows the difference between 'these' and 'them.' Also, I'd like her to like me enough not to make me go to sleep on the couch half the time. You willing?"
Looking toward dwindling talents, an aging body and fifty more years of virginity, Ted had been willing. And Virgil had kept his bargain, too. Most of his money was tied up in trusts, doled out to wives, sons and daughters from previous entanglements. But he had left her with ten thousand a year tax free. He had also left her the yacht.
At thirty-nine, Ted didn't know which she was most grateful for, the money or the yacht. Until she met Virgil she had never been on a boat in her life. Now she was firmly addicted to sailing. No matter what Nixon might do about selling the country to the oil companies, as long as she could keep the sails of her thirty-foot sloop in repair, Ted knew she would never be bored. It was small enough for her to sail single handed, large enough to go around the world if she felt like it.
She finished bagging the Dacron sails, thanking Neptune for the thousandth time that cotton was obsolete and that nobody had to worry about mildew from stowing damp sails any more: After a day's sailing all she had to do now was tie a couple of things down before she went up to the club house at the head of the dock and had a long, soul-satisfying shower.
She had just finished tying the boom in its crutch when the PA speaker blatted, "Telephone for Ted Stickles."
Now who, she wondered, could that be? Still clad in faded sailing denims, she jumped from the raised-deck sloop to the dock and walked toward the telephone.
"Mr. Stickles?"
Since Mr. Stickles had been dead for almost five years Ted knew immediately it was either somebody selling something she didn't need or begging something she couldn't really afford to give. "Not exactly," she said.
"Oh, you must be Mrs. Stickles." It was a woman's voice. "I'm calling for the Souterrain Hilltop Receiving Home."
Ted was tired. She wanted a shower and then a drink before she went back to watch TV in the small but extremely comfortable cabin of her sloop. "How much?" she asked.
"Oh dear, no," the voice protested. "We're not asking for money."
Ted sighed and wondered how much of this face-saving crap she would have to listen to before the woman got down to how much.
"Most of our children come from underprivileged homes," the woman continued. "Many of them have never seen the ocean, much less a boat."
"A boat," Ted said, "is something you use to get from the dock out to where a ship is anchored. On a sloop as small as mine you make do with an inflatable raft."
The woman's canned spiel continued right over Ted's acid commentary. "We're trying to see that each youngster gets an afternoon sailing. It may not sound like much but have you ever considered that a boy who's busy building a boat is too busy to be out stealing hub caps or robbing stores?"
Ted really hadn't considered it. Her own hub-cap-stealing years had been spent bending her ass out of shape at a ballet practice bar. But suddenly she knew she might as well give in. If she didn't this woman would never stop pestering her. And besides, she had never had a child. Maybe it was time she started paying her dues to the human race. "All right," she said. "I've only got room for maybe two. When?"
"Would tomorrow morning at nine be all right?"
"It would except the wind never comes up before noon. Try to have them here at eleven."
The woman's voice was hesitant. "I'm afraid we're a little crowded for transportation," she began.
"I have a ten-speed bicycle to get to the grocery." Ted said with a tone of finality. "Have them out here at eleven."
And that was how it had happened. The next morning a woman gone to fat had pulled up with a station wagon full of grubby children. While they did their best to destroy the car she had gotten out and looked around uncertainly. Ted appeared and the woman gone to fat had laid two boys on her. Leading them down the float of the marina Ted had not been impressed. "First," she began, "you take those shoes off before you mark up my deck."
"Why?" It was the larger boy. He seemed to be about fourteen, tall for his age and rather thin. Though white, he seemed more loaded with hostility than a carload of newly emancipated blacks.
"Three reasons," Ted explained. "First, those soles are slippery on a wet deck. You wear them and you'll be overboard before I'm past the first buoy. Second, you're not on land now, no nails or dirt to step on and plenty of clean white decks that have to be scrubbed dean every time somebody puts a scuff mark on them. And third, I'm the captain of this ship so you'll do what I say without argument. Is that understood?"
"Yes, ma'am." It was the smaller boy. He was maybe thirteen, with a mop of curly red hair that would look like an Afro if the boy had not been so thoroughly Irish in appearance.
Ted glanced at the older boy. He glared back, then realized this trim muscular woman was not going to be bullied. "Yeah," he said. They arrived at her berth and began taking off their shoes.
"Why don't you take yours off?" the older boy asked.
"Because they're boat shoes." She unbent a moment. "If you buy them in the expensive part of town they're boat shoes. In other parts of town they're sneakers or 'tennis shoes' and cost half as much."