Blue Rebound: Marsha (KOI 23)
August, 1969
It was Gallagher on the phone. It was early August before the first year of college.
" ' you want to double?" said Gallagher. "It's a friend of Sandra's. She's a looker and she
puts out
."
Gallagher paused, significantly.
"Get this: she knows you and
she just broke up with her boyfriend!
"
To be upfront about it: I didn't think very much of Gallagher's character. I'd told him as much. I thought Gallagher was a sleazebag. Is that clear?
"Wow! Who is she?" I asked.
"Marsha Holtgraf."
"Light of my eighthgrade homeroom! She sat right behind me! She could play one hot round of 'Twister' at Earl's parties in junior high!"
"I remember them parties..."
Not yet nineteen and we were talking like beery grandpops. Gallagher did that to you.
"I thought she was tight with that Marine," I said. Actually, I knew little to nothing of Marsha Holtgraf's life since junior high. She took the General Track. I knew her to be a nicely conventional kid, obviously destined for a pleasant and unexceptionable life of wife-and-motherhood. About a year earlier, as Kathy and I were breaking up, Marsha had made a joke in the school corridor which had led me to spontaneously ask her out -- symptom of my desperation. She'd declined, alluding to her Marine as an easy, consoling excuse.
"Jeez, she ran past that fucker a year ago," wheezed Gallagher. "Then there was a night with Brad Huxton, and some other guy asked her out, and then she got hooked on this guy from Normandy High. He's dumped her now and she's ohsoblue.
"You should really try and pick up a piece of this," urged Gallagher.
"I hate you, Gallagher," I said. "You are a real sleazebag."
Gallagher's Sandra was apparently a very good friend of Marsha's. To pick up Marsha's spirits, she'd suggested a double date. Sandra and Gallagher had recited the pig list and Marsha had recognized my name. Come Friday night, we were cruising down Watson Road in Gallagher's '59 Chevy, after the Rush Hour Double Feature.
The beer cooler took up most of the room on Marsha's side of the backseat floorboard, so she'd arranged her bare brown legs akimbo on the seat. Like the rest of the brunette, the legs were almost skinny, in a really sexy way. (In puberty, I'd developed a sexual type-fixation from the original Barbara Feldon AquaVelva commercials.) We sat apart on the wide backseat as, upfront, Gallagher and Sandra argued the merits of the various burger drive-ins on Watson. My arm covered Marsha's bare arm as it stretched across the top of the seat; my hand gripped her thin but tuff shoulder. Marsha was looking good with her sneakers kicked off, in white bib overall shorts and yellow teeshirt. The white denim bib and straps were loose, cool. Marsha's breasts were firm against the cotton tee, their full youth emphasized by the leanness of her body. (And bralessness was a relatively new phenomenon in 1969.) Marsha was quiet, trying to seem interested in the front seat conversation, as the wind blew through her Sassoon knock-off by Ginny of Hairstyles A GoGo. Her fingers tapped beneath my bicep. "I'm not really hungry," she called to the front seat.
"How about you?" she asked me.
"Not at all." Our exchange of glances confirmed for me the nasty half-promises of the unpleasant Mr Gallagher. Strangely enough, I wasn't sure I wanted to go through with the evening. But it had been four weeks since Suzanne had left town for good.
Marsha pulled her arm away and twisted around on the seat to watch the twilight fall on the Watson strip. Resting her chin on her folded forearms, Marsha studied with sad interest the lights as they blinked on in the dusk. I easily resisted the urge to touch her, and turned around on the seat, to face the twilight myself.
"I'm going to college this fall," Marsha announced. And she mentioned a cousin's town well away from the City and anyone else's plans.
The wind through the car blew away Gallagher and Sandra's talk. Gallagher tooled on down Watson, toward the Interstate.
"I thought you were staying here. Getting a job."
"No."
And she smiled. She had a well-formed mouth of no special sensuality. Sharp, even teeth -- nice, if you're into teeth. Marsha's head was maybe too apple-like to be called beautiful. That's to say, her good, pretty features were a little too polished at the brown cheekbones, small hard nose, dimpled chin. She might have been Huck Finn's sister, or something. But the slightly winging eyebrows added a strange exoticism to Marsha's eyes, which otherwise shown with unassuming, hillbilly brightness.
Marsha's "no" really conveyed all the justification she needed for leaving the City. I considered the seductive usefulness of asking about her reasons for going away to school, and then felt a little ashamed. Marsha could tell me more, but only if she wanted to.
We talked about our respective colleges-to-be, and a little about our feelings about leaving home, as Gallagher drove the Chevy down the Interstate toward the State Park. After a while, Marsha did tell me more.
*****
We walked some easy bright moonlit trail in the big state park, the same park where I'd first had Thomasina Wicker. By the time Marsha and I returned to the car from our walk, Gallagher and Sandra had disappeared. The bowered parking space Gallagher had found, off a back road, seemed as if it should have been a haven for mosquitoes. But it wasn't.
We'd wandered slowly back to the car, arms tight around one another, hands tucked inside each other's clothes, palming smooth waists and hips, and above and below.
My erection had fallen a little, but was still hugged by my briefs. A little earlier, I'd pressed its shape through our clothing into Marsha's midriff, as the two of us kissed against a tree. I'd rocked, so she'd know it was there.
Marsha knew it was there.
