The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [46]
As if that weren’t excitement enough, when we reached Grand Avenue my sister took me down a secret path between two apartment buildings and past the back of Bauder’s Drugstore on Ingersoll—it had never occurred to me that Bauder’s Drugstore had a back—from which we emerged almost opposite the theater. This was so impossibly nifty I could hardly stand it. Because Ingersoll was a busy road my sister took my hand and guided us expertly to the other side—another seemingly impossible task. I don’t believe I have ever been so proud to be associated with another human being.
At the box-office window, when the ticket lady hesitated, my sister told her that we had a cousin in California who had a role in the movie and that we had promised our mother, a busy woman of some importance (“She’s a columnist for the Register, you know”), that we would watch the film on her behalf and provide a full report afterward. As stories go, it was not perhaps the most convincing, but my sister had the face of an angel, a keen manner, and that fluffy, innocent hat; it was a combination that was impossible to disbelieve. So the ticket seller, after a moment’s fluttery uncertainty, let us in. I was very proud of my sister for this, too.
After such an adventure, the movie itself was a bit of an anticlimax, especially when my sister told me that we didn’t actually have a cousin in the film, or indeed in California. No one got naked and there were no fingers in ears or toes in hatboxes or anything. It was just lots of unhappy people talking to lampshades and curtains. I went off and locked the stalls in the men’s room, though as there were only two of them at the Ingersoll even that was a bit disappointing.
By chance, soon afterward I had an additional experience that shed a little more light on the matter of sex. Coming in from play one Saturday and finding my mother missing from her usual haunts, I decided impulsively to call on my father. He had just returned that day from a long trip—and so we had a lot of catching up to do. I rushed into his bedroom, expecting to find him unpacking. To my surprise, the shades were drawn and my parents were in bed wrestling under the sheets. More astonishing still, my mother was winning. My father was obviously in some distress. He was making a noise like a small trapped animal.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Ah, Billy, your mother is just checking my teeth,” my father replied quickly if not altogether convincingly.
We were all quiet a moment.
“Are you bare under there?” I asked.
“Why, yes we are.”
“Why?”
“Well,” my father said as if that was a story that would take some telling, “we got a bit warm. It’s warm work, teeth and gums and so on. Look, Billy, we’re nearly finished here. Why don’t you go downstairs and we’ll be down shortly.”
I believe you are supposed to be traumatized by these things. I can’t remember being troubled at all, though it was some years before I let my mother look in my mouth again.
It came as a surprise, when I eventually cottoned on, to realize that my parents had sex—sex between one’s parents always seems slightly unbelievable, of course—but also something of a comfort because having sex wasn’t easy in the 1950s. Within marriage, with the man on top and woman gritting her teeth, it was just about legal, but almost anything else was forbidden in America in those days. Nearly every state had laws prohibiting any form of sex that was deemed