Lydia

A work of Fiction

***

There is no intergenerational sexual activity in this story. There is a lot of frank, honest, intergenerational discussion about sexual activity between people who love and care about each other. The sexual activity described in the story, and the sexual activity in the stories told within this story are between like aged adults each of which is at least eighteen years of age.

***

Lubbock Texas - October 2002

I have done a few things right in this life. I have been a good friend, and a good lover, and a good empathetic practitioner of nursing, my vocation. Best of all I have been, with Mave my partner, a good parent to our children. This morning my heart melted when our daughter Valerie asked me an important question. That a college freshman would come to her mother for advice, or just to talk, well it just makes me feel that together we did something right.

Biologically Eddie and Val are double first cousins, which is really special. My big brother Geoffrey, after a simple request from me, provided Mave with what I could not. Nine months later my lover gave birth to Edward, our eldest. Geoffrey was fine, perhaps even eager, to provide the necessary service. His wife was alright with the arrangement, which was "a few times on the right days, that's it." Our parents didn't love the concept, but they have lived with it.

But Duane, Mave's brother and Val's biological father. Duane was a real pain in the ass. Emotional balladeer farmer that he is, he wasn't interested in "fire and forget" as he put it. We had to talk EVERYTHING over before we did it. He was worse than another girl. Although truth be told it was pretty nice actually. Mave's brother was always willing to do any "guy" thing the children needed growing up.

Duane was already heavily invested in Eddie and Val when he met the girl that he married. The four of us are very, very close. I know I shouldn't be, but sometimes I am just a little jealous. Geoffrey and Carline live in a big house facing the Terrace just south of campus.

It's a long walk or an easy bike ride from our home in the more modest 'Tech Ghetto,' what the realtors call North Overton. But it's Mave's family that is always inviting us to drive that hour or so to Philadelphia and see them. We see my parents and my brother a couple, four times a year.

I don't think that I'm selfish. Sometimes I wish Eddie and Val had gone away to college rather than choose to live at home and ride their bikes a few minutes west to Texas Tech. Just so that they could see more of the world. But in reality I am pretty happy they stayed.

Lubbock isn't small or limiting, at least to me. It's sixty times the size of Philadelphia where Mave and I grew up. Texas Tech is one of the biggest Universities in Texas, in addition to being one of the best. Thirty-five thousand students go to school there. It has a top tier engineering and law school and nationally recognised University Hospital, that's where Mave and I work.

***

Mave was working and would be off at noon. Eddie was in a morning engineering class, and I had just finished making a fresh pot of coffee when Val came into the kitchen in her pajamas.

"It's fresh," I said, "want some?"

"Yes, please," she said, "where's Mave?"

"Pulling a double," I said, as I poured her a cup and sat down at the breakfast table.

"That sucks," she said, as she sat down across from me.

"Yup, Post-Op is still short," I said.

"Got a few minutes," she asked.

"Sure."

We, Mave and I, have always been very open about things with the kids. We try always to actively listen to what they are saying and figure out what information or what response they are looking for. It isn't always easy. When you don't know a thing it isn't always clear how to ask the right question.

Sometimes questions are really requests for actions rather than talk. It's also important to give out information in digestible chunks at the appropriate level of understanding, that's a whole lot easier now. Now that they are inexperienced adults and no longer children. We try not to lead the conversation, but to follow.

"I wasn't snooping," she said, "I want you to know that."

"OK."

"I remembered we had a box of fancy tissue paper and crepe paper under the stairs."

"For Will and Soapsuds?" I asked.

"Yes."

"One point... In overtime..." I said.

"Yeah..." she said, "Wild one... Anyway... I opened the wrong box. I taped it back up, but I can't stop thinking about what I saw inside."

"Yes."

"You can just tell me that it's none of my business," she said, "that's OK."

"Would I really," I said, "tell you that."

"No mom," she said, "never. It's weird but that actually made it harder to ask. Knowing that if I asked you would tell me. Really, really wanting to know, but not being sure I wanted to hear it from you. Is that weird."

"Yeah," I said, "but two 'wierdos' raised you, so of course you are weird. You didn't really have much of a chance at normalcy."

"I love you mom."

"I love you too, Val."

"The box was full of S and M stuff, sex toys," she said, "I'm not sure exactly what to call it."

"Our old 'Toy Chest,'" I said, "I don't love the term S and M, but it probably fits better than most."

"You and Momma Mave?"

"Yes," I said.

"Still?"

"Oh dear God, yes,' I said, "still."

"And enemas..."

"Yes," I said.

"You and Momma Mave... You guys?"

"Yeah," I said, "Mave has been a big part of just about every wonderful thing in my life, you, Eddie, other stuff."

"For fun? I mean enemas for fun."

"Oh yeah," I said, "what do you want to know?"

"Why? What's the attraction, pain?"

"It's more complicated than that," I said. "Remember when you ran Cross Country. I never told you to. I just told you that Mave and I did and that... My God I did tell you to, didn't I, or at least I strongly suggested it."

"But mom," she said, "you were right. Endorphins, are great a natural, healthy high."

"You and Eddie," I said, "you were blessed by genetics. Geoffrey and I, Mave and Duane, we have runners bodies. So you two do as well."

"God made us to run," she said, "not to get fat sitting in an air-conditioned cubicle all day."

"You know," I said, "that sounds somewhat familiar."

"It should," she said.

"If you own a fine instrument..." I said.

"You keep it in tune," she said. "All things in moderation."

"Even excess," I said, "is usually safe in moderation."

"Mom," she said, "you took me to get nipple rings."

"And I served you your first beer," I said, "and for the same reason. It's part of growing up.I didn't tell you to get nipple piercings"...

"You told me that you and Momma Mave did," she said, "when you were eighteen."

She had obviously seen them many times before, but that wasn't her point.

"That's true," I said, "we came here to Texas Tech from that little town both of your grandparents live in. We came to run in a big invitational meet, 'The Bangin' Bertha.' We didn't have anyone to make sure that those who pierced us were sanitary or ethical. That they wouldn't take advantage of the situation. We chose a place at random, and were lucky.

"It would have been rather hypocritical of us to say you couldn't do what we did. But we made sure you were safe. To me, to us... It's like the first time that you got drunk. Getting drunk here, in your own house was safe. You weren't going to get maimed or killed out there in a traffic accident, or raped by some lowlife predator.

Or when we talked about sex, and how to not give me grandbabies till you are ready for them. We trted, we made sure you knew the risks and responsibilities. We eliminated the 'forbidden fruit' appeal of alcohol, and of body art. Do you drink? Do you like your nip rings?"

"No," she said, "dorphs are so much better, and yes my rings I just love them, I... They... I can..."

"Yeah," I said, "I do too."

"Didn't you ever have talks like this with grandma?" She said getting up and pouring us each another cup of coffee. "About sex, not getting pregnant..."

"Things were different thirty years ago," I said. "Your grandmother, she wasn't unreceptive. But I never talked to my mom like this. Like I can talk to you and Eddie. Well at least not until recently, she is getting better at it, we are both still learning."

"You really trust me don't you," she said.

"I do," I said, "and not just trust you. I respect the decisions you make. Like not wanting to dose yourself with hormones."

"Mom," she said, "you never ever told me to do anything specifically. You just told me what you and Mamma Mave did and if it turned out good or bad. Will you do that for me now?"

"Of course Val," I said, "but you know, I feel pretty good about most of what we did. I'm not so all that impartial."

"I don't want impartial," she said, "the impartial wildlife photographer doesn't care if the Gazelle runs away of if the Gazelle is a lion's dinner tonite. I want the Gazelle's mamma."

"OK," I said, "I see your point."

"S and M," she said, "what is the appeal to you."

"We, Mave and I," I said, "don't like labels. We play very intensely but always carefully. Do you know who the Marquise de Sade was."

"Yes."

"In his writings," I said, "his protagonists had a nasty habit of murdering their playmates."

"Yes," she said, "I picked that up."

"Sacher-Masoch was a champion of diversity and women's rights," I said, "but he really liked humiliation and denigration. I don't like either of those. I just adore the intensity of unfettered play. The pure reptilian brain's physical passion."

"Honesty is everything," I said, "it is the foundation of truth and the foundation of trust. Truth is absolutely required. It can be it God's universal truth or a private mutually agreed upon truth between lovers or friends. But truth is needed, without it standards and expectations change with the seasons.

"And as wonderful as sex is," I said, "you shouldn't be getting naked and making yourself physically and emotionally vulnerable with somebody who is not a well trusted friend."

"You don't have to worry about that," she said, "I can trust my lover with my life."

"He is someone you can predict with certainty? I said.

"Oh, yes, totally."

She didn't modify my pronoun. I wasn't really worried, as in upset or even conflicted, about where the conversation was going. Perhaps because I was thinking that I already knew. I would let Val lay it all out and tell me in her own time.

"Trust," I said, "It's the gold standard. You can't have it without honesty and an unchanging truth. Knowing how that person you are loving is going to react. Giving absolutely everything up in total surrender. Surrender traded for total bliss. Letting your lover take you to the moon and then back safely to earth. So you can take them there tomorrow, and then you get to go again on Friday."

"The cuffs," she said, "the blindfolds, and the gags in the box?'

"Accoutrements," I said, "nice but not required. Cuffs say to your lover I willingly give you all control. Blindfolds take away our primary sense, intensifying those that remain. Gags force us to give up the control of effective verbal communication. I can't tell Mave what to do with words anymore, it puts a scene completely into her capable hands.

"Someone who truly loves you will pay attention to how you react to the scene. He will not do something you would truly object to. He will stop at a lower threshold level than you would be likely to object to." I don't know what caused more light bulbs to come on within my brain, the fact that I had now dropped three unchallenged male pronouns, or her response.

"He does, he stops before I ask him to," she said. "He checks to make sure, not with words, but with his eyes."

"That's... Very good," I said, "so you've."

"A little bit."

"Oh..."

"You don't use them, the toys, anymore?" She said.

"The stuff in the 'Toy Box' is particular to a time in our past. The black wigs, the feathered masks, the leather paddles and cuffs are artifacts of those wonderful days gone by. Those tapes are tapes of us, me and Mave together, when we were barely older than you are right now," I said. "Today is a different day, we have other different toys."

"So you like, tie each other up," she said, "and paddle each other and then have sex, and it's like better because you are swimming in dorphs?"

"It's far more complicated than that," I said, "but yes."

"It's never degrading?" She said. "To have to do what she wants you to do."

"Not the way we play," I said, "but it is intense."

"But that's not the way everyone does it," she said.

"I'm not saying anyone else is wrong," I said. "I'm not judging or criticising, just observing."

"So you value each other," she said, "and don't use each other. You are the ends, not means to the ends."

"We are the ends yes. Not merely the means. But we can be the conduit, that's OK," I said. "I guess that is OK... I guess so, as long as it's not demeaning or devaluing to the person you are loving."

"Objects," she said, "intrinsically hold less value than people."

"Yes, to you Valerie, " I said." But to some people they have more."

"He would never treat me like an object," she said.

"Oh..."

"He values me," she said, "for me,"

"Many people," I said, "value a new Mercedes that is theirs more than a human being's life that is unknown to them."

"Those people," she said, "have pretty fucked up values. I wouldn't associate with anyone like that."

"You know Val," I said, "I guess what I am trying to say is that I am totally OK if Mave or"... Wow, I almost slipped up. "If my lover considers me to be an object, a means to an end. A means to my lover's pleasure. Well, as long as he..." damn... "As long as she considers me to be a most rare and valuable object. An irreplaceable object..."

"I mean you wouldn't drive a Maserati off a cliff or into a tree. If I am the most valuable object in the universe then being an object doesn't bother me. There are so very few people who will willingly choose to surrender their very earthly being to their lover without condition or limit.

"I am a special kind of property, owned by the love of my lover. A lifetime tenancy where the term is the lifetime of the love we share. Anyone fortunate enough to have such a lover, and to be worthy of having such a lover, would logically treasure and wish to preserve that lover. If for no other reason than for the pleasure that such a lover will bestow upon their owner."

"Owner," she said, "does Momma Mave own you?"

"In a very real way we own each other," I said, "body and soul. The benefits to each of us are immeasurable."

"You said he... He..." She asked, "is 'he' Duane?"

"Yes, I mean he is your biological father."

That was a fact we never concealed. Eddie knew that my brother was his biological father as well. I wonder from time to time if the difference in Geoffrey and Duane's decisions regarding that fact hurts Eddie. I can't really complain. Geoffrey, or more likely Carline, could easily have just said "no." As it was, it was really, really special. Duane, the boy who impregnated me, was as close as humanly possible to my lover. And Geoffrey is nearly my biological doppelganger.

"And," she asked, "Momma Mave?"

That was a hard one to answer; I have never ever lied to either of my kids. It made them very unpopular Kindergarteners; telling their classmates and teachers that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were not real. But as I told their Principal Mrs. Johnson so very many years ago; when faced with a direct question, if I answer I tell the truth. What else would she have me do.

"How did you know?" I asked.

"It wasn't Duane it was Millicent," she said. "I saw you and her kissing. The way she touched you. I knew you would never do that behind Momma Mave's back. So I knew she knew. It was a pretty easy step from she knows to she knows because..."

"Momma Mave and you play..." she said. "You play... Have sex with... Duane... And Millicent? All four of you together?"

"Yes dear," I said,"Duane is a really great guy, and Millie is so sweet."

"I know,' she said, "they have always been there for us."

"Are you OK," I said, "It's a lot to digest at one sitting."

"Yeah," she said, "my moms always told me not to judge."

"You know," I said, "they did didn't they."

"They were right," she said.

"Val, you are pretty smart."

***

Lisa Ann