Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [38]
It was a freshly painted clapboard two-story with a small green lawn in front on a street with other houses just like it. Inside, the rooms were as clean as Cleary’s, no dust or clutter anywhere, pillows set on the sofa, a bowl of apples on the small kitchen table, the hardwood floors gleaming under the lamplight.
Laila and Rosie were being raised alone by their mother who was working two jobs, one in an office, the other in a restaurant. In the six months I was with her daughter, I never met her mother or even saw her.
I don’t know whose idea it was for the five of us to go up to the girls’ bedroom, or if it was Rosie or Laila who lit the candles, or where we got the bottle of wine we began to pass around, Jeb and Laila sitting at the foot of the bed, Cleary leaning against the bureau, Rosie and me sitting side by side up near the pillows. The record player was on, Bill Withers singing “Lean On Me,” and Rosie’s tongue was in my mouth and we kissed a long time. Once I looked up and Laila was standing between Jeb and Cleary, kissing one, then the other, her hand rubbing Cleary’s crotch.
After a while the three of them were gone, and Rosie and I stretched out on the bed on top of her covers. I was thirteen and had touched breasts before, a girl when I was eleven and she was twelve, and it was like holding a soft-boiled egg gently so it wouldn’t break. Rosie let me touch hers that way under her shirt and we never stopped kissing and soon her jeans were unsnapped and unzipped and I was rubbing her pubic hair, so much more than I had, and I kept expecting there to be some kind of hole there, that if I kept rubbing, it would be like finding a button that would open her secret compartment. She seemed to like what I was doing, but I began to wonder if something was wrong with her, if some girls just didn’t have holes and couldn’t have babies. Or maybe I couldn’t find it because she was a virgin, and it wasn’t there yet.
This went on for a long time, maybe half an hour, my wrist burning so I had to switch hands. Then Rosie arched her back slightly and my fingers slid lower and into the warm, slippery answer to all I’d been asking myself, my lips never leaving hers, this girl I’d just met.
A WEEK later we did it on the floor of her bedroom while up on the bed Laila made out with Jeb or Cleary or Sal M., a handsome slow Italian kid who lived close by. The room was dark, but I remember a nightlight plugged in near the bureau. It was shaped like a seashell and it gave off a dim white light over Rosie’s pretty face, her eyes closed, then mine too as something happened to me that had never happened to me, this gathering and gathering in the very center of my body that seemed to pause, then pulse and pulse though it was like I was falling and I knew something was leaving me and going into her.
A few days later, on a bright afternoon lying clothed on her mother’s made bed, she told me that had been her first time.
“Me too.”
“You know what my sister says?”
“What?”
“No protection, no affection.”
She straightened her legs and reached into her front jeans pocket and pulled out a small plastic package. She handed it to me. On the front was the silhouette of a man and woman facing each other, sunset colors behind them. Rosie and I looked at each other, then started kissing, and I learned how to put that thing on and we did it on her mother’s bed.
This is all we ever did. We never ate a meal together or got dropped off at a movie, or even went walking. And she only came over to my house a few times. Mom would be asleep on the wicker couch or the floor or maybe in her room reading a book, and Rosie and I would go to mine.
Laila had done it with Jeb and Cleary, and probably Sal M., but she was older than we were, almost seventeen, and soon enough she had a boyfriend, a white basketball player who’d pick her up in his black Mustang and they’d roar down the street and away. By now Jeb and Cleary