Those of you who have read my
Handyman's Memoir
stories will recognize one of the themes here. I think I'm a better writer now, so I thought I'd take another crack at it from a different angle, using a classic smut trope as its basis: the college boy spending a summer with his lusty aunt. Hope you like it.
β
Auntie and I have a secret. It's a secret shared with eight other women, women who live quiet lives up in Toad Harbor, Maine. It happened the summer of my nineteenth year, but, I should start at the beginning...
My father died before I was born, shipped off to the Gulf War not long after what I can only hope was a beautiful night of loving sex with my mother. I've had inklings over the years that make me think maybe it wasn't such a beautiful night, and wasn't such loving sex, but I still like to think of it that way, my mother the beautiful peasant girl, my father the handsome prince, just like in the movies.
My Aunt Pamela helped raise me. She's my father's little sister, just eighteen at the time of his death. A talented artist with no money to go to college, she stayed home and freelanced for a local advertising company, sold her own paintings at art fairs, and helped my mother with me, the baby. Mom named me Jonathon, the same as my father. Most everybody calls me Jon.
As soon as I learned to talk I started calling Pamela "Auntie". I still like the ring of it, the way it rolls off the tongue. Mom and Auntie, they raised me into a boy, and eventually, a man. From day one there was a strong emphasis on respecting women, treating them the way a man should, with love and reverence for their womanhood. Maybe it wasn't quite that sappy, but you get the idea. I learned over the years that my dad probably never got those lessons when he was growing up. There were quiet whispers of abuse, whispers I tried to close my ears to. It all made sense in a way, clarifying the reasons why I was taught the way I was, the reasons why I think of women as Mother Nature's greatest triumph.
I'm twenty-six now, married, with a boy of my own, living the good life in Southern California. I wouldn't be here without my father and his family. His parents passed away when I was seventeen, one from cancer and the other from a broken heart. The inheritance went to my mother and Auntie, my mother's half financing my college education at a prominent design school. Freshman year I took an automotive design class and that gave me my direction β I minored in drawing and painting, but designing cars became my passion. Now, I happily spend my days working on top secret projects at a Japanese car company's American design studio, and my weekends are full of laughter at the beach with my beautiful wife and child.
But this story isn't about all that. It's about the summer of my nineteenth year, a summer burned into my memory. The smell of spruce, and low tide. The smell of fishing boats, and oil paint on freshly stretched canvas. The sound of charcoal pencils on rough artist's paper. The taste of woman.
You see, Auntie Pamela had taken her inheritance and ran. That's how it seemed at the time, to me. Mom seemed to understand, but she was saddened when her sister-in-law, her best friend, moved away. Auntie had long been in love with the coast of Maine. It seems to be an almost universal affliction among artists, drawn to the haunting light and the rocky, watery scenes like moths to a flame. Auntie used her money to buy a small storefront with an apartment upstairs, in a small coastal fishing community that was starting to developing into a haven for artists. A few art galleries had already opened on Main Street and Auntie sensed a real opportunity, a chance to buy-in before real estate values started going up. Mom and I visited her soon after she moved up there. We stayed for two weeks the summer before I started college. The old store didn't look like much at that point, having been empty for over a decade. We spent part of our vacation helping her rip out horrid looking wall-to-wall carpeting, dirty orange and faded green, probably installed in the sixties, and smelling at
least
that old.
"Oh, I love this concrete!" Auntie said, excited when she saw what lay beneath the old carpet. "I can stain it and make it look like leather."
My mother smiled and said, "You could make mud look pretty if you put your mind to it."
By the end of the day we'd deposited every scrap of the old carpet in a dumpster out behind the marine supply store across the road, thanks to Auntie sweet-talking the owner. Her big breasts might have had something to do with it. Did I mention she has big breasts? They were sweaty and braless under a dirty white t-shirt when she went over to talk to the man. She was smiling when she came back. "We're in," she said. "He said we can use it for some other things, too, as long as I give him all my marine business. He knows I don't have a boat!" she said, smiling.
When I think back on those two weeks I realize that was when I started to get an inkling of the power that women hold over men. Sexual power. I shouldn't say they hold it over us, because they don't for the most part, but it's always there, always playing a roll. Auntie Pamela is a beautiful woman with a million dollar smile. She doesn't look like a model or a magazine girl, more like the girl next door with the big bazoombas and the hourglass hips, full bodied in the voluptuous sense, with soft but not unpleasant bulges where she probably didn't want them. Muffin tops, I've heard them called. To me, looking at her with the hormonal eyes of an adolescent young man, she looked like a wonderful playground. They were emotions I hadn't felt at home before she'd moved away, but not seeing her for a while made her look new. It was all me, I realize now, the adolescent pathways in my brain rearranging, changing females from back-lot-baseball partners to something so much more. Did I mention Auntie has big breasts?
Those two weeks in Maine were a revelation. I'd never seen the ocean before, and what a spectacular place to see it! We spent part of a day on the rocks at Pemaquid, in the shadow of the iconic lighthouse, Auntie and I with our sketch pads, Mom happily reading a book.
One day we drove to Acadia National Park. We walked the carriage roads, hiked some trails, listened to the waves at Thunder Hole. We had lunch at a restaurant in Bar Harbor and I fell in love. A Japanese girl was eating at a nearby table with her parents. They didn't speak much English, but she was fluent. She saw me sketching and came over to look. I blushed, my face bright pink, when she saw the drawing was of her. Some sort of electricity shot through both of us. I could see it in her eyes and hear it in her soft voice. I would have married her on the spot, the way they did in the old days, but, alas, I was seventeen and she was gone from my life as quick as she'd appeared.
By the end of the two weeks, Auntie's gallery was stripped of its former ugliness, the nice man across the road's dumpster was overflowing, and the small upstairs apartment felt like home. The Japanese girl was still on my mind. I was very sad to leave Maine, nearly in tears, deeply unhappy to leave Auntie behind and terrified about my upcoming move to college.
"You're going to
love
it!" she said, hugging me tight against the warmth of her bosom. "I would have given
anything
to be in your shoes.
Love