Irene entered the living room. Elaine, watching her from behind, stayed in the kitchen.
"What...?" There was a hollow ring to the question; before the single word was completed, Irene had her answer. All at once her eyes picked up details -- the stains on Claude's clothing. Tony's unzippered trousers.
Tony turned to Elaine, and when Irene saw his eyes focus behind her, she turned to face her lover.
"I told him," the lesbian said calmly.
"You told him what?" There was more impatience than anger in the response; though she knew she would hate the answer, Irene was compelled to ask it.
"I told him that you wanted Claude to be one of us."
Irene's mind contracted like a single aching muscle, so tight that thought was impossible for a moment. For a moment, she thought she must address her reply not to Elaine but to Terry. Then she realized that Terry had gone. Terry had almost always been gone. She could hardly remember when Terry had been with her...
She knew instantly that there was no reply she could give that would make sense. Her impulse to object was emotional; not logical. And the weakness she felt when confronting Elaine -- the same weakness she had offered up to previous lovers, none of whom had wanted unconditional surrender as badly as Elaine -- drowned the emotion before it could find words...
"It's all right, Mom," Claude said softly. "It was fun." She had been forgiven before her mind could comprehend the sin.
Chapter Eight
Ella Randall had not slept with a man in the eight months since she had filed for divorce from her husband. Perhaps that was why she was so alert to Claude's sexuality. For, indeed, she could not explain what the boy's gestures indicated to her -- they were, after all, merely gestures. His voice was not effeminate, but at times he seemed to affect the part of a "queer". The other boys would make occasional fun of him, but -- this was the only time she had ever seen anything quite like this -- he could stop them dead with a single, quite masculine, quite virile stare. Uncomfortable, as if someone had spied them with their flies undone, they shifted and squirmed into some other conversation where, silent, standing his ground, Claude waited to make sure they were absolutely through with him.
It was not just the erratic intimations of homosexuality that disturbed Mrs. Randall, who had taught the sixth grade now for three years. She was impressed by the way Claude related to the girls in the class. He did not evoke pity, the way some odd and quiet boys do the kind of pity that is an early sign of the maternal instinct. It was real affection; they sensed, these little girls did, the boy's -- Ella searched her mind for the word. The term that arose seemed absurd when applied to a boy two months away from his thirteenth birthday. Yet it kept coming back when the others would not do. Authority. That was it. A sense of command. He was not afraid of them, not particularly shy with them. He did not giggle around the girls; their presence did not embarrass him, as it did the other children of his sex. It was as though he were "on to" some basic secret of the sex. Ella had known men like that; women always knew -- instantly when a man had spied some feminine mystery that defied articulation. But the idea that a child had that power, almost certainly a power that he could not understand completely -- the idea alone excited her, even titillated her.
Just as the little girls at twelve and thirteen, full of the nymphlike promise of womanhood, did not frighten him, she was surprised to find out that she could not either. Other women -- other teachers -- would have spent their fascination in the process of taming. Ella Randall's natural stance, however, was detachment; her instinct was to stand back and watch the phenomenon, even enjoy it. She had been a teacher only six years, since her graduation from the state teachers' college. Her ego had not been so completely subsumed in her work that she was threatened by her inability to frighten a small child.
She had cleaned the slate-boards and was nervously tapping the erasers to the wooden ledge below. She stepped over to catch the sunlight that poured into the classroom in the late afternoon. Her eyes went almost at once to the small equipment building where the supplies for physical education classes were kept, at a corner of the field.
It was a week -- only a week, she reminded herself since she had walked across the playing field toward the parking lot. She liked walking on the grass, even if it had been watered an hour before and she would have to clean the mud from her heels. And the time she saved by cutting across the field was lost because it was quicker to walk on pavement. But she liked grass better than cement.
She had spent two hours after school correcting papers, and she was tired. But she did not hurry. There was a time at the end of the day when she would rush home. If the time went by, it was no longer important to meet the self-imposed deadline. Besides, there was no one at home but herself.
Her feet scraped at the uneven cement when she stepped off the field at the rectangle's north border. The sky was threatening twilight, but it was not particularly cool. She stood for a moment, surveying the empty schoolyard, and she inhaled deeply. She realized only when she exhaled that she had breathed a full-blown sigh.
The sound of the sigh seemed to have an echo. She looked at the shack without expecting to find anything there, though that was the direction from which the sound had come. She walked closer. She listened a moment and heard nothing. She was walking back, toward the parking lot, when she looked casually through the window. Her eyes jumped to the door of the makeshift building; it was unlocked. Standing still, somehow excited, she looked inside the window -- she had to stare hard to penetrate the reflection of her own face -- to make sure of what she'd seen.
Claude was naked, his back on the wooden floor. Above him, laughing -- the shriek of a laugh had been the noise that had alerted her, she realized -- was Laura Marshall.
Laura Marshall was two months past thirteen. It would have been incorrect to say she had a woman's body. Certainly Laura did not have the body she would have when she became a woman. But her breasts had begun to develop, and they were plump and round; an adult woman of Laura's size would have been satisfied with those breasts. Laura was a big girl, taller by inches than Claude, and taller than any boy in the class but Eddy, whose size doctors explained as a thyroid symptom. She seemed a tangle of limbs; arms that dangled awkwardly at her sides, as if she wanted to hide them but couldn't, and long, thin but sturdy legs -- attractive, even though constantly scraped from exertions in volleyball and other school sports.
Ella's face burned, but she would have been at a loss to explain the blush. It was not unpleasant. Was she aware that she might be embarrassed by watching two youngsters have sex? Was she excited? She was honest enough to have considered either possibility, had they been raised, but she had no chance. She was absorbed in the adolescent lovemaking.
The two were playful. Ella Randall realized she was seeing Claude smile more heartily than ever before. They seemed delighted with their bodies, Ella thought with a pang, wondering why she had avoided sex so conscientiously since the divorce.
Laura was on her knees, astride Claude, whose penis was lost in the maze of her already thick pubic hair. Ella guessed they had already made it, and that they were working up to an encore. Laura's hips moved tauntingly. She seemed to rotate her pelvis as he pushed up inside of her. Her breasts heaved as he filled her with his forward motion. He reached up and his fingers tightened around the tip of one breast, while the other wobbled against her chest. She ran down the prick and stayed still for a moment as he rubbed the inside of his folded hand against her aureole. His hips pushed him up against her, and her body obediently followed.