Luke and John came in and I asked them where they kept the beer, which got a nice discussion going, and then Marilyn and I left. She shook her finger at me. “Don’t go giving them any ideas about beer and women!”
“Honey, they’re teenaged guys. All they think about is beer and women!”
“No they don’t! They’re good boys!”
“Then they must belong to a different species of humans than the one I know about!” I grabbed her from behind and wrapped my arms around her. “I think about beer and women, or at least just one woman!”
“They’re better behaved than you are!”
“Most humans are!” I decided to punish her for arguing with me, so I started tickling her.
Marilyn is extremely ticklish, and within seconds she was shrieking and trying to escape. She managed to squirm out of my reach and ran off towards one of the warehouses. I ran after her, which made her bolt in a different direction. I caught up to her and tickled her some more, and she kept running away. Eventually I managed to trap her in one of the corners of the warehouse. “Stay away from me!” she said with a warning tone.
“Oh, I can’t do that. All I can think about is beer and women, remember, and there’s no beer out here.” I moved closer, and she tried to squeeze to my left, but I blocked that and moved in.
She was smiling, and said, “I’m not that kind of girl!”
“But I’m that kind of boy!” She moved the opposite direction and I blocked that path as well. By now I had her completely in the corner, with my arms planted on the walls, trapping her.
“Your father would have never done this with your mother!” she argued.
I laughed loudly at that. “Where do you think us three kids came from? The stork!” I moved even closer, so that I was pushing up against her. “I think we should go find an empty trailer.”
Suddenly she got a very scared look to her eye, and tried to push me back. “That would be crazy! We’ll get caught for sure!”
Yeah, we probably would be. You’d think that my experience when Jeana’s parents caught us would have taught me a thing or two, but hormones are powerful things! “We can be quick!”
“My parents will kill us!”
“What a way to go!” I started kissing her.
Marilyn eagerly responded, but then she pushed me back. “No way are we doing anything in the homes or out here in the warehouse. You are going to just have to wait until tonight!”
“Okay, but tonight you’d better have taken your vitamins! It’s going to be a long night!”
“I hope so!” We settled back down to making out. “I missed you so much!”
“Me too, and not just because of that. I like being around you. I love you,” I told her. I never told Marilyn that enough the first time.
“I love you, too.”
“It’s just too bad we can’t be back at the Hilton for a few hours.”
She giggled at that. “I can’t believe we did that.”
“It’d be even better now, without the, well, you know.”
She just rolled her eyes. “Those things are so gross!”
“But necessary.”
She nodded, but said, “Yuck!”
“Come to Kegs in a week or two and spend the weekend with me. We’ll kick Bradley out and get crazy.” I pushed my body against hers. “I really liked sleeping with you, even when we were just sleeping.”
“Okay. Maybe every other weekend we can see each other?”
It was my turn to nod in agreement. “You know how we spent our vacation? How would you like to do that over winter break?”
Marilyn eyed me curiously. There was some sound from the other end of the warehouse, so we pulled apart and slipped out a side door, and walked hand in hand slowly around the lot. “What did you have in mind?” she asked.
“Well, I was thinking, I have off most of January. I don’t know what your schedule is going to be, but you’ll probably have at least a few weeks off. You could come and visit me, and we could go away for a week.”
She had an eager look to her face. “Where?”
I shrugged. “Who cares? Anyplace would have to be warmer and sunnier than New York in the winter!”
She gave me a disdainful look. “New York is a great place in the winter!”
“Not if you’re wearing a bikini it isn’t!” That got a giggle from her. “Do you know how to find a tanning booth or salon?” I asked.
She looked very confused at that. “A tanning salon? Why do I need a tanning salon?”
I wrapped her back in my arms and whispered in her ear, “Because I am going to find you the world’s smallest bikini, and you’re going to need an all over tan before you can ever wear it.”
She blushed fiercely. “Oh my God!”
“It will be so small I will need to shave you, everywhere, before you can wear it!”
“You are evil!” She tugged my hand and we went back to the farmhouse. It was time for lunch.
We goofed off after lunch, and I took a quick nap around two. At three I woke up and Marilyn asked me if I was going to church with her. I shrugged. “Sure, but don’t sit next to me. When the lightning comes down through the roof, you don’t want to be caught by friendly fire.”
“Very funny!”
At three-thirty the entire family showed up. I changed shirts and put on a dress shirt I had brought for the occasion, along with a tie I had tossed into my bag. Back home, when I was growing up, ‘Sunday go to meeting clothes’ consisted of suits and ties for the guys and dresses for the women. I was very surprised to find that to the average Catholic, simple clean clothes were considered sufficient. In the rural area we ended up living in, that could mean fresh overalls and clean barn boots. My mother would have been scandalized! As it was, simply wearing a tie meant I was fancier than any of the boys.
They went to St. Peter’s in two cars, and Marilyn and I drove separately in my car. She simply had on clean jeans and a decent shirt. We sat together in two pews, with Harriet and Big Bob in the back pew, the better to swat unruly heads. I had been to countless masses before, and skipped countless more. It took all my willpower not to whisper to Marilyn my thoughts on the priest’s sermon. Over the years it got to the point where Marilyn stopped asking me to attend, because I wouldn’t behave. I think that was after one of the priests at her church compared the Holy Week to a baseball game. Of course it could have been after the sermon where an older priest repudiated the Second Vatican Council and called Jews the Christ killers. My mother was a quarter Jewish (maiden name Rosenkrantz — long story, but she was still hard core Lutheran), enough to have gotten her into trouble with the Nazis, and it was all I could do not to stand up in the middle of church and denounce the priest and leave. Marilyn was very worried about me that day.
And don’t even get me started on the priestly sex scandals that ultimately broke the church. By the time I stopped going to church with her, I had taken to calling the collection plate the Altar Boy Defense Fund. Marilyn lived long enough to see how all that ended, and it just about killed her.
Marilyn had steadfastly refused to believe there was a problem in the Catholic church. Whenever there was a sex scandal in a Protestant church, maybe once a year at most, she would trot that out to ‘prove’ we had problems like they did. Never mind that for the better part of two decades the Catholic church had a problem every week! That was just anti-religious people like me publicizing things unfairly.