The shrink told her she was trying to get approval from everybody, including the jock, and the big sex party was another substitution for the physical affection she’d never had and always needed. She had told the shrink that sex with Mush had been like what happened to her at a playground at a private school when she was five years old. She had been on the teeter-totter with a friend, and a fat older kid got on the other end. Big sport. He’d hitch back and let his end bang down on the concrete, nearly tossing Norrie off her end, and then he’d slide forward so far she would go down and hit bottom. It scared her and it hurt her and it went on and on, and she kept smiling and laughing and chortling right along with the fat kid because she knew that if he knew she was scared, he might hop off entirely when she was way up in the air.
So no pleasure with Mush, and she equated that with no pleasure with anybody anywhere anytime. Just fear, pain, and keep-smiling. The doctor told her it might be that way for her forever. Or it might turn out to be good some day. It was all part of the original hang up. He knew she wanted to be a woman in every way, and he told her not to force it. He told her that if a person has one short leg or a missing hand or bad vision, then they do not try to become an Olympic runner, or a concert pianist, or a trapshooter. He said if she would think of herself as having a permanent disability that didn’t show on the outside, life could be rewarding for her. He told her that her people would never admit that any such disability was permanent, and for her not to let them sell her on the idea that she had just had a little unimportant breakdown.
We had gone back in out of the cold night and we lay there in the dark on our backs on the bunk bed, too far apart to touch, and we talked and talked and talked.
When she got around to confession, she told me that when she had heard the wallowing and sloshing in the pool she had thought an animal was there, and she had sneaked up and seen me, and then she had stayed to look at me naked. She explained that it wasn’t that she was getting any sex turn on out of looking at me. It was because I didn’t look scary to her. She had thought of a penis as being a kind of brutal, cruel, barbaric thing, all mixed up in her mind with the sacking of cities and rape of the Sabine women and blood sacrifices on old stone altars. But I had looked sort of innocent and harmless to her. I’d looked like something she could maybe manage without terror. I’d looked like part of nature. And my being younger made it easier for her too. So instead of sneaking away she’d forced herself to move out into the open and holler to me and offer me a peanut butter sandwich, which is one brand-new way to start a program of seduction, I guess.
But when it got to the moment of truth, she couldn’t cut it. The fright came back. And mixed in with the fright I got the idea that she hated the way she looked, hated her body, hated her build, felt as if she was a scrawny, ugly, sickening mess. She was ashamed of herself in a strange way that was hard for me to understand. I had had all the strokes I needed. A breast-fed kid; both my folks big, loud, warm people who’d grab you and hug you when you walked by. That’s why I felt lost when they got divorced, and reborn when they married each other again. So I’ve always felt at home inside my skin. I don’t think of myself in any kind of critical or insecure way, I guess. I am just here, and every part of me is my own and no different than any other part. I am not enchanted with myself, understand. But I look this way and there is no changing it, so why yearn to be somebody else?
But from such separate places, we were both loners, each in a different way. The one thing I would change — that I would have changed way back then, two years ago, but would just as soon leave alone now, would be to drop that damned genius IQ down twenty or thirty points, because what it did to me was let me see what damned idiots the people around me were. I could read them too easily. And I used to let them know about it, back then. So they hated me. Hate makes hate. That’s why I took off from school that time.
It was confession hour, so I told her how scared I had been and that I finally had to either make that grab at her or run out the door and across the hills and far away. I told her that I was a virgin, and I had certainly made a couple of tries to change that status, but I had been stopped short of scoring. I rambled on and finally asked her a question, and when she didn’t answer I knew she was asleep. I covered her over with a blanket and got another for myself and went to sleep too.
In the cold cruel light of morning, which everyone talks about, she wouldn’t look right at me. She couldn’t. She went skulking around with her head down, and when she talked she didn’t move her lips much. So finally after the eggs, I said we ought to try to settle it one way or another, for both our sakes. She told me that what I should do was take my stuff and go to Ithaca. I told her we were supposed to be bright according to all the measurements, and we should go at it the way you hit a case study assignment in school.
We spent most of the day shouting and snarling at each other. In the late afternoon I talked her into an experiment called body-reading. I stripped and stretched out on the bed. She couldn’t stand the idea of me watching her while she looked at me, so I put the pillow over my face. And she read me inch by inch, front, back and sides, toes to larynx, studying this strange specimen called young male. But it took her until the next day, in the late morning, to take her turn as the book and let me be the reader. It took her a long time to get used to it and to relax. I told her how lovely she was, how sweet and beautiful every part of her was. She kept contradicting me until finally I told her to shut up and enjoy.
Weird kids with weird hang ups in that cabin, full of the* scent of the apple blossoms. You could hear the creek bubbling along, hear the bird songs. Careful progression. Simultaneous reading, and then exploration by touch. Cause and effect. Do this, and watch what happens. Do that and watch what happens. Places to kiss and be kissed. At the end of the fourth day we were ready to try it. But in the dark, under the covers. She was constantly trembling, and she was too dry. I couldn’t get into her. We gave up. At dawn she woke me up and said maybe it would be the right time to try again. It was. I had not known what a fantastic sensation it would be, the first time of pressing and then suddenly busting through and then sliding sliding sliding, all the way to the deepness, looking down into her wide eyes in that early light, seeing tears on her lashes, and seeing a funny little self-satisfied smile. She pumped her hips twice and it finished me right then and there. I was so damned ashamed and annoyed. But then the next time, maybe fifteen minutes later, it went on and on and on, until she suddenly grunted and shuddered and held me very strongly, and then relaxed. She made a purring sound and we both laughed, and it was fine.
From then on it was half serious, half games. It was as if we had broken into the world’s biggest candy store, and nobody was ever going to stop us from gorging ourselves. We fooled around with crazy ways, crazy positions. I know now that she was a good lover. Back when I had no basis of comparison I thought they would all be like Norrie was in that cabin when we lost track of days and nights. But they aren’t like that. Not all of them. Not even a tenth of them, probably. She could make it about once out of every four times we made love, and that was, she said, all she could handle. She said the rest of the time it just felt good and if it left her on any kind of edge, she said, it faded back with no problems.
I suppose that sooner or later that old Turner bag had to catch us at it. Maybe we were lucky it wasn’t sooner. I’ll never forget seeing that face in the window, and I’ll never forget how much cool Norrie had, how we stopped and Norrie turned and stared back over her shoulder at that old woman, and how after that ugly face full of envy and hate was gone Norrie smiled and picked it up right where she left off, and pretty soon we forgot her and finished it. Then we packed and cleaned the place and left together in her car. We were going to stay together forever. That’s what we said. Maybe we should have. That’s another of the things I will never get to know.