In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [64]
In the outside world I had a compatriot: my cousin Les, the one who had shared the open sky and dark outhouses of camp life, who fought daily the same battle I did—against a father who seemed bent on breaking her will to his.
Large green eyes, brown hair falling straight and thick past her waist, highlighted with shades of platinum—the color it had been the first time I met her, when we were two and three. Small-boned like her mother, with the same honeyed skin and high cheekbones, she possessed the kind of exotic appearance that made the town girls look bleached and caused the farm boys to imagine spice on their tongues.
I envied the ease with which she applied her makeup, perched on the bathroom sink, coating each of her long lashes with triple layers of Max Factor. I envied her perfect white teeth, her collection of miniskirts that hung to just below where her long hair brushed her bottom. Mostly, I envied her way with boys. The phone rang from the time she got home from school until the suitors either lost their nerve or were forced to give up the receiver. My uncle Barry, now a construction contractor who worked long, out-of-town hours, intercepted what calls he could. The threat in his self-made voice would have deterred most grown men, but that was what was so amazing about Les: boys would risk anything, it seemed, to gain her attention. I realized early on that part of Les’s appeal lay in her careless regard for the boys’ admiration. By shamelessly baiting then discarding her wooers like trash fish, she ensured their undying adulation.
Even the crosstown boys found their way to Les’s basement window. I spent many summer nights with my cousin in her house, surrounded by pasture at the edge of town, and we were often awakened by the scattershot ping of gravel, or, if the window were open, her name hissed out in a loud whisper—“Les, Les!” She’d sometimes grant the boy the favor of her attention, but just as often she told him to get-the-hell-gone. He’d slink off, grumbling and aching but not long discouraged. He’d be back in a week or two, bringing along a friend for me: maybe if he could get the cousin occupied, Les would be more inclined to his affection.
There were times when Les, in a fit of ennui, would call the boy herself. Would he like to stop by her window, oh, say, around midnight? I marveled at the ease and polish of her banter, listening on the sidelines as she worked her thirteen-year-old magic, the crackle and spit of hormones nearly tangible over the telephone wire.
One such night, her chosen beau, Geoff, scratched at our window, shadowed by Mike, a tall, precociously hairy boy meant for me. We smoked in the garish glow of Les’s blue-bulbed lamp, then split into pairs. Geoff pulled Les into the next room by her belt loops and she smiled at him, a smile that held all the promise in the world.
As Mike’s fingers began their forays into the folds and beneath the buttons of my clothes, I listened half-jealously to the moans and pleading coming from the next room. I had witnessed the ritual of Les’s courtship enough to understand its rhythms: stroke him, give him a little, intimate more, then pull away, make him pout, pout yourself, let him woo you back, act petulant, kiss him hard, suck his tongue into your mouth deep enough to empty the marrow from his bones—then stop. Sit up. Light a cigarette. You are, your actions must say, bored beyond belief.
Geoff was frantic, begging so unabashedly that my own face reddened just hearing it. If not for fear that it might wake my aunt, I’d have turned up the stereo, let Black Sabbath drown it all out—the mewling boy, Mike’s raspy breathing, the sense I had of being the ugly sister who could not work this miracle of seduction.
My initial hesitation had goaded Mike into a stronger state of insistence, the intensity of which frightened me. When I pulled away, he was angry, and then my weakness showed through: I could not stand to think he might be mad at me, might be driven by