John Donato got out of the cab and looked at the simple house that he had called home for all of his 18 years until going off to college last fall. The house looked smaller, in fact the whole neighborhood looked smaller than it had a few months ago.
That was a product of spending time in Denver and then coming home to little old Troy, New York, a old industrial town no match for a major city in any way except in his heart. John had gone to school out there, because of a scholarship he won, but he was home here.
In the house was Mom, the love of John's life. Her husband, John's father, had died too young, leaving Mary Donato all alone. John didn't want to go to school so far away from his mother, but as she told him, the opportunity was too good to pass up.
So he left Mom behind, all alone in the house built for 3. Mary Donato worked at a dry cleaners nearby and then went home, ate, slept and went back to work. That's the way working class people did things. She would be home now though, John knew, but she would be surprised to see him because he wasn't expected until next week.
When he slipped in the house, Mom was at the stove making soup and humming some tune that John didn't know, probably one by Jerry Vale or Mario Lanza or some other guy John wasn't familiar with, and his heart skipped a beat when she saw her wearing one of her old house-dresses, one of the sleeveless ones that showcased her beautifully shaped arms, which were slightly plump but still nicely toned with the bronze tone of her skin reflecting her Italian heritage.
John coughed, making his mother jump, but when she saw him she screamed out and ran to him, crying and carrying on like she always did when she got excited. After about 5 minutes she finally calmed down enough to sit at the table a talk to her son, grilling him about school and college, and even though the talked every week on the phone, she needed to hear it all again.
As John looked as his mother carrying on, all he could think was how much he loved her. Loved her like a son loves his mother and also in another way. A way that, if she knew, would probably make her faint or worse.
What would she think if he knew that if her son had a choice to go to bed with any woman in the world, he would choose her? He had gone to bed with 3 girls in his life so far, and they were nice enough in their own ways but they all had the same flaw. They weren't Mom.
***
"So Johnny," my Mom said after giving me the third degree about school and making sure that I was indeed hitting the books as hard as I had promised. "You still have that girlfriend out there? The one you told me about?"
"Uh - no," I said. "Didn't work out."
"You know that Teresa Benvenuti - she's still around," Mom said.
"Over and done," I said about a past flame who had been my second lover. "Her father is still alive, isn't he? He's a widower. Why don't you get together with him?"
"Ah, my time has come and gone," Mom said. "I'm happy as I am."
I doubted that, I thought as I looked over the table at my mother, who was pushing 50 but still looked nice to me. A little bit chubby, I supposed, but not certainly not fat, and a hell of a figure.
"I remember that dress," I said, referring to the green and red striped house dress that I recalled her wearing several years ago but had disappeared. "I thought you must have thrown it out."
"Probably should, but I didn't think anybody would be seeing me here today," Mom said. "Little snug. Maybe I'll dump it after today."
"No, don't," I said. "I love it. You look sexy in it."
"Oh, you kidder," Mom scoffed.
"I'm serious," I said. "I always told you that you look nice in dresses without sleeves. You've got sexy arms and you used to wear things like that all the time, but then you stopped."
"That's when your father was still around," Mom said. "I wore them for him. After he passed - eh - between that and your friends..."
"My friends? What about my friends?"
"Let's not get into that," Mom said. "When does soccer start?"
"Forget soccer. What were you talking about?"
"I know how they used to tease you about me," Mom said, and when I started to protest she cut me off. "The names they used to call me, and then the one time I heard you got in a fight over it."
"What - you mean?" I said, finally realizing what Mom was talking about. "Oh, that asshole?"
"Johnny! The mouth."
"Sorry but he was," I responded. "Gene Savoca was an idiot. Why would you care what somebody like that thought?"
"Him? No, I didn't care about what some snot-nosed kid thought, but I didn't want you to get harassed over it," Mom said. "Besides, I did it for your father because he liked me that way."
What Mom was talking about was was the fact that unlike most of the women in the neighborhood, my mother didn't shave her armpits. Even though this was an Italian part of the city, most of the women had adopted the ways of this country by 1966, and one of the rituals involved women removing the hair from their legs and under their arms.
My Mom didn't, even though she was born in this country, arriving when she was 3, but I didn't know that my father was the reason. That might account for the fact that it turned me on as well. Used to, and still did. I wasn't the only one because my friend Tony Lanni admitted to me once that he thought Gene Savoca was an idiot and besides, he used to masturbate thinking about my Mom and her armpits. Join the club, I could have told him.
Anyway, this moron Gene Savoca, who didn't like me any more than I liked him, used to bug me about Mom's armpit hair. A couple other guys made cracks once or twice but then let it go. Not Gene. He kept going, calling her Hairy Mary and telling me that my mother looked like she had Cassius Clay in a headlock, so one day I popped him one in the mouth even though he was bigger than me.
I didn't know Mom had heard about that, but at least after that he shut up about my mother. That was one thing we all usually kept away from was mother bashing, and besides even though she was my Mom she was the best looking mother in the neighborhood.
"Now that your friends don't come around I suppose I don't have to hide myself any more," she said with a laugh, and that pissed me off to think that Mom stopped wearing those dresses because of that.
"You never had to hide," I said. "You're gorgeous just as you are."
That wasn't what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that I had a raging hard-on ever since I got home, and I admit that a good part of that came from me truly loving her, in addition to the fact that she had a beautiful complexion with full red lips, and that she had an incredible pair of breasts that seemed as large and full as Sophia Loren's.
Much of my arousal came from seeing that she hadn't followed the herd though, and the few glimpses I got when she raised her arms revealed that those round hollows were still untouched by a razor and were every bit as hairy as I remembered them being.
As I was thinking those thoughts, as if on cue Mom chose that moment to scratch the back of her head, affording me a couple seconds of heaven as I got to stare at the wild jet black jungle of hair under her arm.
Mom caught me staring at her armpit, but unlike times in the past when she would lower her arm right away if she caught be leering, this time she didn't, and if I didn't know better I would have sworn she did that to tease me.
Mom went back to her soup when she realized the had forgotten about it, and as the scent of Minestrone filled my nostrils I looked at my Mom from the rear. What a body she had, and while she would never wear a bikini even if she could swim, she could probably get away with it.
As I stared at her legs, which were very curvy and only a little plump, I wished she wasn't wearing those little white socks like she always did. I remembered that the times I had seen her legs bare I recalled that she had a little hair growing on the insides of her calves. Not very much, certainly nothing like her underarms, which were profusely hairy by any standard, so that made me wonder whether she had a lot of hair between her legs.
In my mind I pictured her with a really large and thick bush, which was alright by me because although none of the three girls I had seen in person turned out to be as furry as I had hoped, the really hairy ones that I had seen pictures off turned me on, and that reminded me that I still had a magazine in my dresser that had inspired me many times, and I suspected I would be using it later tonight, if I lasted that long that is.
44-28-46. That was my mental appraisal of my Mom as I undressed her while she stirred soup. The hips and waist were only guesses, but I knew the top measurement was accurate from many years of looking at her bras, and the cup size was D, which gave you an idea of what a sick pup I was to know this stuff.
"Gonna put my stuff away," I announced while Mom still had her back to me, and that made it easier to slither out of the room without her seeing the bulge in my pants.
***
After dinner I helped Mom clean up the kitchen before announcing I was tired and retreating to my bedroom. After locking the door behind me I dug out my old favorite magazine and climbed onto my bed to acquaint myself with some of my old fantasy girlfriends.
As I looked through the dog eared magazine it struck me about what Mom had said about my late father. This was his magazine that I had grabbed when we went through the attic after he passed away, keeping it for my own enjoyment.
It was titled European Delights, and while it might have been considered pornographic by the standards of 1966, it was relatively tame. All of the women were fully naked, but there was no sex of any kind. No men at all, just women. Naked women and most posing very innocently.
Most of them hand their arms raised, either straight up or with their hands behind the neck, and the majority of the women were unshaven. No wonder Dad had this magazine, and to think that he wanted Mom to look natural like these women was erotic to me.
