OK here we go. My name is Thad Wanamaker. I wanted to get that last name out of the way at the beginning, I took enough kidding about it when I was young, and I knew that considering the subject matter of this story (sex, obviously) there would be an immediate double entendre, or maybe single entendre, I'm not even sure what an entendre is to tell you the truth, but obviously there's a hidden meaning in my name and people love pointing it out.
Or they used to. I'm 62 years old now, so it just flies over the heads of most people, because who thinks an old guy wants to "make" anybody anymore? Well, this old guy does, but that's not what this story is about, so never mind.
So. Last name Wanamaker. Yes. And when I'd go on a date my college friends would all say the next morning, "Hey Wanamaker, didyamaker?" Hilarious. Never got tired of it.
And the answer was usually "Yes I did," by the way, and there was a reason for that, and it wasn't my movie-star good looks (only fair, not Quasimodo but not Burt Reynolds, either) and it wasn't my musclebound physique (not too shabby, actually, I played a lot of baseball), and it wasn't my class-clown laugh-a-minute personality (I was incredibly shy most of my youth).
Girls liked me because there was a rumor going around campus that I had a larger-than-average size... well, dick. I've never liked that word too much, but "penis" is too clinical and "cock" is too... too porno, I guess, too dirty, and "member" sounds like your dick belongs to a club, and "schlong" is funny but I can't use it with a straight face, and then there's "johnson" and "pecker" and "putz" and "tool" and on and on and on, if the male species put as much work into science as they do for finding different words for "dick" we'd have a cure for cancer by now.
Anyway, so I had a big dick. (I still do, it just doesn't work as well as it used to. Nothing does.)
As I've said I was extremely shy, so even though I had this obvious reason to have confidence in myself, at least that part of myself, I never did, not until I turned 18. That's when I lost my virginity and, as my mother later put it, "started to come out of my shell."
I don't mean my mother knew about me losing my virginity, don't get me wrong. As far as I know she STILL thinks I'm a virgin, even though I have four kids, because we don't ever talk about sexual matters. No, I just mean she could see there was a difference in me. She attributed it to my turning 18 and graduating high school and going off to college. That probably had something to do with it, but mostly it was Mrs. Naylor. That's what this little story is about.
When I was a kid my best friend was Evan Naylor. Great guy. I haven't talked to him in decades but I'm sure he's still a great guy. And he was popular, so being around him made me at least a little more social than I normally was. We became friends playing little league, we were the two best players on the team and most of the games we won were because of us. It stayed that way all through high school.
Evan's mother's name was Judith, or Judy, but of course I called her Mrs. Naylor, because that's what you called your friends' moms, Mrs. this or Mrs. that, but never by their first name, even if they wanted you to. And Mrs. Naylor really wasn't the "just call me Judy" type anyway, she was pretty prim and proper. I don't mean Victorian, don't get me wrong, but she wasn't, you know, very hip. I didn't think she was, anyway.
At the time of this story Mrs. Naylor was 41 years old, born right before the War so she was just a little too old to have been a hippie, and she wouldn't have been one anyway. Evan's father was killed in Vietnam and she remarried and had two kids with Mr. Naylor and lived happily ever after. The End.
Except not quite The End. I guess I'm sort of what you might call her Epilogue.
Mrs. Naylor and I just happened to share the same birthday, June 19, so more than once growing up his family would invite me over for her birthday and throw in a little birthday party for me, too, since my family wasn't much for that sort of thing. The summer I turned 18, the Naylors had just bought a new house, and it had a big backyard pool, so it was decided that there would be a big pool party for Mrs. Naylor's birthday, and mine too.
Evan was the only one of my friends to have a pool, and I was way, way too shy to use the pool at the YMCA, so swimming wasn't my thing. In fact, I really couldn't even swim at all, if you want to know the truth. When they said they were going to have a pool party it scared the hell out of me. I didn't even have any swim trunks.
Evan said he'd loan me his. So I decided OK, I'll just hang out in the shallow end and nobody will know.
Happy birthday, the day of the party came, and my mother drove me to the Naylor's house. She came in to say hello and drop off my birthday present, but she had to get to work so she was quickly gone. This was good, the Naylors were sort of my second family so I didn't like my first family to be involved; I'd once called Mrs. Naylor "my Mom-away-from-Mom." Ironic.
The party was in full swing by this time, with around twenty or so in attendance, most out back and circulating through the house for more paper plates of hot dogs, potato salad, and watermelon. Not quite half the partygoers were actually wearing swimsuits, and most of those were the younger ones.
When I stepped out onto the back porch I saw Evan instantly, in the pool, flirting with Suzanne Edmonds, a girl he'd had his eye on for a long time. (His HANDS, however, he'd had on lots of other girls) I waved to him but he didn't see me. I started to make my way down the steps to go say hi to him, when I spotted Mrs. Naylor.
She was standing near the diving board but she was unlikely to use it, because she was one of those not dressed in a swimsuit. Instead she was wearing her preferred summertime suit, a pink terrycloth "romper," I believe they called it, strapless outfit with an elastic band around the chest to keep it up and an elastic belt at the waist and rounded shorts, all one piece. I had seen her wearing a green one before, and a yellow one, and a white one, but the pink one was her favorite.
And she looked absolutely stunningly gorgeous in that thing. It hugged every curve, and Mrs. Naylor had a lot of curves to hug. The romper was a popular thing to wear in the early 80s, but to me it looked best on busty women with generous hips and long legs, and that described Mrs. Naylor to a T. I had often fantasized about taking hold of that elastic top and pulling it down over her naked breasts, it would be so easy, one quick yank and Heaven would be exposed to the world.
The truth was, though, Mrs. Naylor was Heaven enough fully clothed. She was a beautiful woman, with shoulder-length light brown hair and limpid -- is that a word? Limpid? -- blue eyes that made you feel good even if she was looking at you with annoyance, with full crimson red ruby rose-tinted lips that, in retrospect, made me think of this line from an old movie: "You should be kissed, and often, by someone who knows how." Of course at the time I didn't really know how, in fact it was Mrs. Naylor who taught me, but that's jumping ahead in my story, and I hate when writers do that.
Anyway, she was very beautiful. She was about average height, and I guess by the standards of the day she might have been slightly overweight, I don't know, I've always believed one person's body type is their own particular body type and you can't judge it against somebody else's... but anyway... her extra-ness came out in gobsmacking curves, not just her breasts and her hips, but even the curve of her shoulders and her elbows and her knees was gorgeous.
All of Evan's friends had crushes on his mother, and of course it bothered him but there was nothing he could really do about it except limit their exposure to her, so he rarely invited anybody over... except me, oddly enough. Maybe it was because I was never blatant in my lust for his mother, I always treated her with great respect and deference, and she always seemed to like me and treated me like part of the family. I never made off-color comments about her, to Evan or anybody. I liked her. I liked being around her.
She even SMELLED beautiful, like a tropical rain forest, or like I imagine a tropical rain forest should smell like. She had every shampoo, moisturizer and conditioner known to modern science, and just following behind her to the dinner table made me high. To me she was, and remains, the ultimate human female body.
So, okay. She was good-looking. We got it.
As I said she was standing by the diving board in her bubblegum-pink romper, holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, wearing these gigantic brown sunglasses that obscured half her face, and talking to several other women similarly dressed, and she spotted me almost the second I spotted her, and she grinned and whipped off her sunglasses.
"Everyone, the birthday boy is here!" she called out, and everybody turned to look at me. "I'm the birthday girl, he's the birthday boy. Let's all sing happy birthday to the birthday boy!"
And so, while I stood there melting in humiliation above the crowd on the porch, the entire party stopped and they sang happy birthday to me. What do you do when you're painfully shy and everybody is looking at you and singing to you? You burn, man, you burn.
At last they finished and clapped and went back to their party, I went down the porch steps into the back yard and was greeted with handshakes and claps on the back and a hug or two, and then Mrs. Naylor was in front of me and giving me a hug and a kiss on the cheek and I actually felt her breasts pressing against me and automatically without thought I looked down into the deep, deep line of cleavage where they were pressed tightly together and thought, Heaven. Heaven.
"This is Thad, my son's best friend," she said to the women around her, holding on to my hand while she held her drink and her cigarette with the other. They all said hello and smiled pretty middleaged smiles at me. "He came into the world eighteen years ago today, just like I came into the world... uh, twenty-nine years ago today." This got a good laugh.
