I guess it may have been because of my mother—and of the strange beliefs my grandmother formed around her. Up until the time my grandmother's ill health coincided with me being old enough to go to college, I'd been kept in the dark about so many things. I knew that my mother must have done some really, really bad things from the way that my grandmother just tightened up, crossing her arms under her bust and screwing up her face and pursing her lips like she did any time that I asked about my mother. And let's not even talk about asking about my father. I learned early on that it wasn't a topic to bring up.
"Just go down the street and point out any man you see," Grandma would say in that tight voice of hers. And she'd be looking hard at Grandpa like he was just one more man on the street. He'd look away then, rustling that newspaper he was always reading, and mutter, "Let's just not go there, Marie. Remember your heart."
But my mother. I knew that they knew who my mother was, because she was their daughter. That was how I was their grandson. But they treated us like we were total opposites. And it was only recently that I realized that this was the goal: to make us total opposites. Any mention of my mother at all instantly brought tension into the room. She seemed always to be there, lurking somewhere, even though I didn't even know what she looked like. There was nothing in the house that physically could be associated with her. And the only time I asked Grandpa about her, he turned a stony face to me, peering from around the side of a newspaper page, and said, "Your mother is dead to us, son. We will not speak of that again."
Grandma, though, cleared that up. My mother wasn't really dead dead. She just was somewhere doing something that Grandma didn't want to talk about. And it was quite obvious that it was something I didn't need to know about—and certainly wouldn't be doing as long as I was in
her
house and with my feet under
her
table.
Other than that sore topic, though, my grandparents—well, mostly my grandmother—doted on me. Whereas nothing in the house spoke of my mother, at every turn there was a photograph of me: me seeing the Christmas tree for the first time; me on my first bicycle, with grandpa standing there, holding me upright and making me think I was doing that all by myself; Grandma putting a birthday cake in front of me. The weird thing about those photographs, though—and I only recently noticed that—was that the photographs were always just me—or me with either Grandma or Grandpa. There were no other people in my life. Not even any friends my own age. Maybe that's why later I gravitated to older men. I'd grown up with only old people around me.
That had been the way it was until I was ready to go off to college—which was only something that came to pass after a knock-down, drag-out fight between my grandparents, where Grandpa was saying that I couldn't be kept close all of my life and Grandma only seeing his point when she collapsed and Grandpa had to call in paramedics. When she was strong enough for them to talk again, Grandpa used her ailment to drive home his point, and Grandma just turned her face to the wall and didn't say another word.
Even then, though, I only went to the nearby junior college this past year. Up until then I'd been homeschooled.
I wasn't totally dumb about what my mother was doing that Grandma didn't like—or what growing up was all about. I'd done some experimenting, finding out all by myself what my body was about and how to gain pleasure from it. Of course I knew it was a forbidden pleasure—at least where my grandparents were concerned—and that it had something to do with my mother being a bad person. But it was only late in the summer that I realized that it wasn't just something I had invented—for myself—and then only because it gave me relief from some pent-up feelings.
This came about because of the slow awakening to the world that my grandfather was initiating. After getting Grandma to agree to letting me go on to college—and it wasn't because she wasn't doing a good job of schooling me, because I passed the entrance exams with flying colors even if it only was a community junior college—Grandpa also declared that I would have to help pay for the education, so I'd have to get a summer job. Where Grandma had been good about the textbook part of the schooling, Grandpa had been equally good at making sure that I grew up strong and trim. We had a basement gym room and he insisted that I follow an exercise and strength-training routine almost from the time I could walk. It was natural, then, that he set me up in a job where I would get good exercise.
He bought me two professional-level mowing machines—a big one for open stretches and a narrow one for trimming areas—and other equipment I would need to set up a lawn-mowing business. I started by offering to do work in the neighborhood and then branched out farther when I found that people were happy to pay someone else to mow their lawns while they went off to the gym.
What this is all leading up to, though, is Mr. Crabtree down the block—the football coach at the local high school I didn't get to go to. Now, he was certainly someone who could do his own lawn. He was always exercising and keeping his body toned and fit, and he was outside and on the field all summer getting guys ready to play football in the fall. So, mowing his own lawn would have been a lot cheaper than paying to go to a gym. But I guess he didn't see it that way.
I almost just bypassed his house when I was drumming up business, figuring he did his own lawn or, more likely, he got his football players to do it. But he jumped at my offer to do it. I mean really jumped at the idea. He was all smiles and glad handing and gushing about what a great idea it was and how in shape I looked and how he wondered how we could have been living in the same neighborhood all these years and never have come into contact.
* * * *
A lot of my customers this summer have been really friendly to me, but none more so than Mr. Crabtree. He always seems to be home when I come to mow, even though I know he is busy at school with summer practices. And he always insists that I come up on his back porch and have a cold drink and cool down after I've done the mowing. It's really been hot this summer, out there mowing. So hot that I was going through a lot of T-shirts, sweating, while I mowed. After the first couple of weeks Grandma complained about all of the extra washing she had to do and how stinky my work clothes were—so I began mowing shirtless. None of my customers complain, so I just keep on doing it.
Mr. Crabtree always has offered me a beer after I've mown, and I've always had to turn him down. I'm really not old enough in our town to be drinking beer and Grandma would have had a cow to hear that I drank anything alcoholic. Mr. Crabtree teases me about it, but he then goes back inside and comes out with a glass of lemonade or iced tea or Coke or something.
He's always done that: offered me the beer and then had to go back inside the house for something else for me to drink. The second time he did it was the first time I noticed that he had magazines sitting on the table next to the chair I sat on on the porch. When I first noticed them, I thought they had something to do with physical education—and thought it was natural that Mr. Crabtree would have magazines like that. But when I looked closer, I saw that they weren't like that at all. They had photographs of guys. And they didn't have a stitch on. Some of the photos were of just one guy, but others were of guys like wrestling with each other or something.
The third time I mowed his lawn, I couldn't help it. I looked closer at those magazines. They weren't just wrestling.
Well, that set my mind going, I'll tell you. And it had an effect on parts of me other than my mind too. I found myself looking around to see if Mr. Crabtree was coming back and listening for signs that he was. He's been taking an ever-longer time getting my drinks, though, so it's giving me a chance to look at those magazines more closely. Last week I thought maybe he'd caught me looking at them. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw some movement in the window, in what I think is his dining room, out onto the porch, but when I turned to look there, I didn't see anything but what looked like the back of a dining room chair—and ruffling curtains.
After cutting his grass since then, though, I've been going home and going straight to the shower. Now while I shower, I think about those photographs I'm seeing in his magazines. And I'm taking care of myself. Since seeing those photographs, I've had more of that tension than ever before, and I look for relief. I wasn't taught shit about sex education, but I've discovered some things myself. And there's the Internet to help. And I've found that those photographs I saw on Mr. Crabtree's porch don't just come in magazines.
I know now what I'm doing, because I've looked it up. I'm masturbating, or, in more crude terms, jacking off. I didn't know anything about that sort of stuff before. It's nothing that my Grandma covered in her homeschooling and nothing that Grandpa has ever mentioned either. I haven't brought it up myself, because it's very clear to me that it's tied up in whatever badness my mother is doing—and any subject bordering on that sets my Grandma right off. I don't think her heart can take that sort of irritation anymore.
* * * *
Miss Rogers, my English teacher, has asked me to come to her office at school after class today. She asked me while I was standing there at the end of class with Tom Strong and Glen Childress. This is the first day anyone has talked to me in class. I've gotten some friendly looks from some of the women, but this is the first time any of the men have said anything to me. The women seem to be older than me, mostly, but the guys are mostly like me—just out of high school and trying to work their way into college. They've been kind of standoffish, though, because I've been able to answer all of the questions that Miss Rogers answered—just like the women do—and I think the guys think I'm a show-off. Most of them didn't get very good grades in high school, I think. And I think that's why they're here instead of a better college. I'd like to work my way out of here and go to a better college.
I have to remember not to raise my hand in class when I know the answer to the question.
"You know what it means for Miss Rogers to ask you to her office after class, don't you?" Tom Strong asks with a smirk on his face.
"Means she's got the hots for you," Glen says. "Tom can tell you exactly what that means, can't you Tom?"
"She's old, but she's got as good a pussy as any of them do," Tom says, wagging his head. "Have fun, chum. Guess it pays off to answer her questions in class."
I'm not really sure what they mean as I go down the hall to Miss Roger's office. It's the last one down the hall of the teacher's rooms. The light is off in the room, and I almost don't go in. I almost just stand there at the end of the hall, waiting for her to show up.
"Is that you, Allen?" I hear her ask from inside her office. Her voice sounds a bit breathy. "Come on in and shut the door behind you."
As I enter her room, which isn't totally dark—she has a window and it's late afternoon—I notice that although her door has a glass window in it as they all do, hers is papered over from the inside.
She's sitting on her desk, one leg dangling in front of her and the other propped up on a chair pulled over to be right in front of the desk. Her skirt is pulled up over her knees, and I can see all the way up her plump thighs to hallelujah. She isn't wearing any panties. There's a V of curly brown hair that I can see up there where her thighs meet.
I'm think that's strange—the color down there—because the hair on her head is blonde.
"It's great having someone in class this year who is ahead of the curve, Allen," she says in a breathy voice that is a lot different from what she has used in class this first week of the course. "You really are a grown man for your age. And I can't keep my eyes off of you. Anyone tell you how good you look? What a handsome young man you are? I'll bet you smell as good as you look. Come here closer."
