Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [52]
Nellie Goodloe, dressed in her red velvet Christmas suit studded with a jeweled Christmas-tree brooch and glittering smaller trees on her ears, gets up and calls the gathering to order.
“I want to tell you something, Jim Roy. I want you to know that I had my first kiss in the Trail Theatre in 1942.” Wolf whistles fill the soda fountain. “Yes sir, I did. Robert Taylor leaned over and kissed Vivien Leigh on the silver screen, and up in the balcony, Spec Broadwater leaned over and kissed me. I never forgot it.”
The crowd cheers, and Spec turns so red, he matches his flannel shirt. Spec’s wife, Leola, in a running suit with snowmen painted on it, shoots Spec a dirty look. Then she thinks better of her petty jealousy and chuckles. Fleeta stands up on a step stool behind the counter. “Nellie, I want to know one thang. Did old Spec know what he was doin’?”
The crowd turns to Nellie. “Honey, I hope to tell ye, he surely did.”
Fleeta spins her dishrag in the air like a truce flag. Etta is laughing along with the crowd, and she looks so grown-up to me all of a sudden.
“I think Etta just got her first sex-ed lesson,” I whisper to Jack.
“Could be worse,” he whispers back.
Fire or no fire, once I’m home, I have to clean up the dishes. I’m one of those people who must have every dish washed and put away before they can sleep. Luckily, Theodore is one of those people too. My husband, however, is not. He went to bed after putting Etta down.
“How about I take Etta to Cudjo’s Caverns tomorrow,” Theodore says, stuffing the refrigerator with more leftovers.
“She’d love it.”
“What are you going to do on your day off with your husband?”
“I don’t know.” And I really don’t. I never have a day off with Jack.
“Maybe you can think of something fun to do together. And I don’t mean clean the oven. I’ll keep Etta away until suppertime. You can have a lot of wild sex while we’re gone.”
“Thanks.”
“You don’t even blush. What has happened to you?”
I look at him, and he laughs. He goes into the dining room to collect the last of the dessert plates while I scrub the sink and think about wild sex. I don’t think of actual wild sex, I’m wondering where mine went. Ours. I expected, before I got married, that I would be the last person to trade passion for comfort and then for routine and now for, I don’t know, privacy. I thought the need to communicate, to physically communicate, in marriage would grow. No one told me, and perhaps no one can, what the truth of it all is. Sex becomes another way of speaking to each other, and when you stop touching, it’s just as bad as if you’re not speaking. When you stop everything except those perfunctory hello and good-bye pecks on the cheek and the hugs, more a way to brace yourself than to express feelings, you’re in Big Trouble. But there is no one day or one thing that sets the Big Trouble alarms off. At first you stop kissing because you’re annoyed at him, and it’s a way to communicate that. And when the message gets through that you’re not kissing for a reason, his behavior seems to adjust to the new rule: you upset me, you hurt me, you disappointed me, no kissing. And when those tender kisses become further and further apart, so goes the sex. It’s impossible to make love when you can’t kiss your lover. Someone once said that sex is the thermometer in a marriage; only when something is wrong is sex an issue. And that is true. But what no one tells you is that once you stop connecting, it is very hard to bring it back. There are times when I see my husband doing mundane things like unloading the truck or stacking the firewood, or today, when he was carving the turkey, and my instinct is to run to him and tell him how much he means to me and how I want to make love to him, and let’s drop everything. But I don’t. Maybe I’m afraid he’ll reject me or maybe it’s just life—there is always something in the way. Time. Work. Etta. Company. Or something else that has to be done. And then you forget. And sex is always the first thing to go, because it’s the one thing that can wait. Who knew the most natural