[Artie has managed to "date" the fabulous Penny Miller, and actually screwed up enough courage to kiss her - several times - on the lips - on the bench - a "soul kiss" or "French kiss" as we used to call it. This is where I lose Artie, because I knew a girl at our school who could have been the girl he calls "Penny Miller" and there is no way Artie could have gotten within a mile of her, much less touched her knee. Well, he says he had a "date." Yeah, right. So what. Anyway, Artie's "memoir" is about to get raunchy, so beware ... mpb]
We never formally dated again.
That year, we were both active at school in separate crowds. Penny Miller wrote short stories and poems for the school magazine and I was still involved with sports. My group of friends were mostly jocks and the girls who hung around them. Penny played flute in the orchestra. She worked on the staff of the “Sophomore Sing,” an annual musical show put on by the class. She wrote the “book,” a “Twilight Zone” take-off in which Ulysses finds himself transported to our school and runs into clever parodies of teachers and students there. It was a big success, and she won a prize at the year-end assembly.
Penny found the first excuse for us to get together without actually “dating,” at her house after school, supposedly to do homework and watch Dick Clark.
We opened the books, turned on the T.V., danced a little, and at one point, she looked at me with a peculiarly intense gaze, which I sensed to be a silent question — wanting something from me.
I was a novice in the arcane art of interpreting signals from females. That kind of look from a girl was like the mysterious look a cat gives you that may seem to be inviting a tender touch, but could just as easily be prelude to a nasty scratch.
My previous attempts with other girls had usually been faltering and often misfired. But somehow, despite the fact that Penny’s aura should have made her impossible to approach, I acted with almost complete assurance - as on our one and only “date.”
I pecked her on the cheek and she kissed me on the lips so hard our front teeth tapped painfully. I made a teasing joke about it and we kissed again. We continued to kiss and hug until her mother came home.
That day, while we did some homework and flirted out of the hearing of her mother, Penny began to tell me about what she called her “Life Script.”
I’d never thought farther than the next ballgame or summer job and was shocked at how thoroughly she had planned out the rest of her life.
She would go to an Ivy League college and teach English Lit. while she wrote intense poems and satiric short stories and tried to be published in avant garde journals. She wouldn’t get married until she had established herself as a writer, and that only after she had “really experienced life,” which is what “good writing” required. But once she had lived “fully” and written about it, she would have to marry because she knew it would be difficult to support herself and she wanted not just career, but home and family, too.
She expected to marry a wealthy guy from a good family who would support her dream and allow her to write novels in their home. They would live in the country and he would commute to The City and she would raise their children, educating them herself in art, music, and literature. She would write “realistic” novels and achieve a sort of limited fame in literary circles as an eccentric artist with a mysterious, tragic aura.
I didn’t know how to respond to Penny’s elaborate plan, but from the ardent seriousness of her description of it, I decided not to poke holes in the defects, or to criticize it in any way, but rather to support her ideas, which seemed to be very important to her, and which she seemed to want me to understand.
I viewed this development as an important breakthrough, though I didn’t really appreciate the significance of Penny’s sharing these thoughts with me, which in fact elevated us to another level of intimacy in her mind.
After that day, we began to weave a pattern without planning it. It sort of just happened by itself. We kept our separate group of friends and involvements apart from our friendship with each other, but we found time for what Penny called “a rendezvous” two or three afternoons every week. We made concentrated efforts to be alone, either at her house, or outside on park benches. We both felt the drama of what quickly became an addiction to the risk of our secret “affair.”
The next few times we found excuses to get together, our kisses advanced in intensity, grew longer, deeper, our tongues more adventurous, our hands wandering further each time. Later, when the weather warmed up, we rode our bikes to Prospect Park and made out on a blanket on the grass under a huge maple tree.
Once, we took the Coney Island Avenue bus to Brighton Beach, kissed on a bench on the boardwalk, walked on the beach near the shore. I dared her to follow me out onto the breakers, the huge slimy boulders that separated the beaches. We sat under turbulent clouds, with waves crashing, smelling the oily, fishy ocean, kissing and talking about Greek myths.
Over those months, this adventure evolved into an exciting secret life. None of our friends knew about us, and we didn’t talk to one another about what we did with our friends. We eventually stumbled onto a vaguely defined pact. We would each teach the other what we learned from other partners about “sex stuff.”
Because I had few real opportunities for other partners, I used some of the stuff in books my brother kept under his bed, like “A Stone For Danny Fisher,” which had some well worn dog-eared pages that I could use as a manual for borrowed experience.
Later, when I tried something new, Penny laughed, said, “Wait a minute, I read about that - I think it was in 'The Group.'"
I admitted using vicarious literary sources for inspiration and, to my great surprise and relief, Penny thought it was a terrific idea and admitted doing the same.
We then shared our reading material and openly discussed new discoveries. Penny and I would try these things out with each other. Remarkably, whatever I imagined and tried with her seemed completely natural and inevitable, not to say incredibly arousing.
Invariably, when a certain point was reached, we both sensed it had to stop, either because her mother might come home and find us, thereby ending any future for this pleasure, or because I was going to embarrass myself by spouting all over my pants.
At one point, Penny exuberantly referred to us as “Lovers,” no doubt influenced to hyperbole by her reading. I didn’t correct her, or scold for exaggeration or pretense, but the fact is that we were not lovers, in either the romantic or literal sense.
That is, we neither professed nor pretended love for each other; nor did we complete the circle with an act, whether it be defined in romantic terms as lovemaking, or clinically as intercourse. In the words of our parents, we didn’t go all the way. In the competitive terminology of my crowd, I never scored. Penny was not the kind of girl who put out and, horny as I was, I didn’t want to think of her as one.
I never bragged or even mentioned anything that happened between us to anyone, least of all my friends, who were accustomed to pre- and post-mortem descriptions of all sexual encounters, real or imagined. In fact, after our one and only date, we never appeared together in the company of any of our acquaintances.
Our mutually understood joint status was as trusting close friends, intellectual equals, who happened to be privately and innocently experimenting with each other’s bodies as a sort of a science homework assignment.
Truthfully, it didn’t seem like that much of a big deal at the time, at least in the beginning. I mean, it just seemed natural, not dangerous or anything like that.
Because we liked each other, and not more than like, there was nothing at stake, no chance of rejection or the heartache associated with such activities. It seemed that we had solved the adolescent problem of exploring the mysteries of the opposite sex without being burned severely in the process.
I accepted the arrangement willingly and gratefully because I never really expected more than a stolen temporary and superficial relationship with any girl like Penny Miller. From the moment she’d accepted me as an amusing school friend, I’d achieved more than I had a right to expect. When she then evinced interest in me for sexual purposes — even if it was in order to find a safe object for experimentation, which she would later put to use in the far more serious business of finding a boyfriend, lover, husband, or material for “realistic” novels — I was ecstatic.
Because we were not “in love” with each other, there was an informal comfort level to our involvement that made it delicious fun, in an almost childish, playful way. Because our playing was hidden from our friends and parents, it was almost unbearably exciting.
One warm Spring afternoon while we were cuddling on her bed - avoiding some stuffed rabbits and elephants that viewed the event with silent amusement - my hand on Penny’s breast under her blouse and bra while she rubbed my crotch and kissed my cheek, she croaked two magical words: “Let’s undress.”
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
"CHIMERA" - Chapter 2
[In Part 1 Artie rambled on about his supposed freshman year in a Brooklyn high school in the late 1950's. He claimed that his mind was fixated on girls and he described the smorgasbord of Jewish & Italian girls that he was hungry for - I apologize for his sexist views. Then he claimed to notice a different sort of girl, "Penny Miller," who he seemed to be completely goofy over. All year he watched this goddess'in a poodle skirt from afar - with no guts to do more than smile at her. MPB]
I was well into my sophomore year before I’d mustered the courage to entertain the absurd notion that it might be within the realm of slim possibilities to ask Penny Miller for something like a “date.”
We were in the same English class again. We sat only a row apart this time because Mr. Fohr did not seat alphabetically or by height. For weeks I watched Penelope Miller closely as she bent over her desk, unaware in her deep concentration of my spying, writing in her loose leaf binder in a meticulous hand with all the letters of equal height in a round style that gave me a hard-on every time I looked at her hand wrapped around her pen and her tongue peeking from a corner of her lip.
Penny Miller was even more stunningly beautiful than she had been when I first saw her way back when we were mere freshmen. The summer had reduced the few remaining childish angles in her body, refined the curve of her calves and breasts and rear, but had not affected the arch of her high cheekbones or the slim grace of her arms and hands or the complete picture that was even greater than the perfect parts they were made of.
Over the first few months of the term, we small-talked occasionally in class and I made her laugh a few times, enough so that it gave me a faint hope she might at least tolerate my presence, if not actually go so far as to like me. She had a funny wheezy, barky laugh to go with her voice, which was husky, as if always close to laryngitis, forcing me to suppress the desire to clear my throat. Her voice and laugh were so sexy I could barely sit in my seat in class. I found myself crossing my legs to hide the goings on inside my lap, though it was painful wearing jockey shorts.
I knew little about Penny Miller’s social life outside of that classroom; I was sure she must have a boyfriend, though I’d never seen her with one at school. I imagined that he might attend a different school, be a senior, or maybe even be in college. Although she was only fifteen, that gap seemed in my depressed moments to be infinitesimally smaller than the gulf between us.
Until The Fates appeared and showed a way to bridge the chasm. The Fates were much on my mind that year because we were studying Greek Mythology. Mr. Fohr, our Zeus, pointed his capricious thunderbolt and ordained that groups be formed for a class project. Some time after Thanksgiving but before Christmas vacation, we were grouped in threes to team together to write a report on “The Iliad” and present it in class.
I don’t remember the third person on our team, a sign of my focus on Penny Miller. We talked about the project in class and two times after school in the library. Penny was an enthusiastic savant on the subject, able to expound in dizzyingly alluring detail about Ajax, Achilles, and Agamemnon as if she had met them at summer camp. We each did our research and Penny volunteered to write the final draft for the presentation we were to make the next day.
That morning while my sister and I fought for sink time to prepare for school, our phone rang. It was Penny’ mother. She had gotten our number from the phone book. No one had unlisted numbers in those days.
Penny was sick and was not going to school but she had finished the report last night. I agreed to pick it up from her house on the way to school. The Millers lived on Ocean Parkway, near Kings Highway; my house was about five long blocks away. I had to run to make it to her house and then race again to catch the school bus.
She lived in one of the upscale apartment houses in the neighborhood. It had a doorman and a desk like a hotel and a marble lobby and two Art Deco wood paneled elevators. By the time I got to her apartment door I was sweating despite the cold December air, my shirt tail was out of my pants and one of my shoe laces was untied.
I cleaned up as well as I could before ringing the bell, hoping to see Penny wearing a baby doll or maybe a robe which would open up revealingly, like one worn by a woman I’d delivered clothes to when I worked for the dry cleaners last summer.
Her mother answered the door, wearing what my mother would have called a “going-to-The-City” dress. She did not invite me inside, but asked me to wait and closed the door. I thought she’d gone to get Penny but she hadn’t. She returned with the report which was in a manila envelope, thanked me and closed the door while I was stammering my concern for Penny’s health.
During English class I decided to stop at Penny’s house after school and talk to her. I rehearsed all day what I would say and imagined many scenarios about how it would go: she would have the sniffles and be looking very pale and she would offer me tea, and she would be feeling miserable and I would make her laugh, and we would share a look, and she would fall in love with me. Or she would not really be sick, but I would catch her making out with a boy, a neighbor, that college student who she had been having a hot affair with, and she would coldly thank me like the women who I delivered clothes to, and maybe tip me a quarter.
Either scenario seemed far-fetched but I’d already developed a penchant for pre-experiencing moments like that. The goal was to prepare me for any eventuality; it would cushion the disappointment when it came; and in the less likely occasion of a positive experience, I would be able, I hoped, to function rather than freezing up completely — like I usually did with men on base and the game on the line.
Penny answered the door, wearing a bathrobe that revealed nothing to me. She looked merely beautiful, with her nose red and her eyes watery and puffy; she held a box of tissues. I managed to relate that the report went very well and that we all probably got A’s. She was pleased about it and apologized for not being able to read her part. I told her that I read it for her and the teacher said it was the best of the three. That was a lie, but not much of one. He had praised our work, most of which she had done.
We stood in her foyer a little awkwardly after that because I’d forgotten to rehearse a transition from this part into the asking her out part, and since she was sick and I didn’t know how long she was going to be sick, it didn’t seem like the timing was right. So I said I hoped she felt better and she thanked me with a weak smile and I left.
All the way home I felt really stupid for not saying more to her, and I thought of lots of things I should have said. “You look very pretty like this, vulnerable and pale, like Camille. It makes me want to take care of you.” Or “I hope I get sick so that we can share our germs and a box of Kleenex.” That might have choked a giggle out of her, if not the admission of love I was hoping for.
When she didn’t show for school the next day, I decided to call her that night and find out how she felt. I would tell her all about class, the work she missed and discuss the reading due the next day. I would offer to come over and read to her if her eyes were too puffy to read. I would say that as soon as she got well, I wanted to take her to see a movie to cheer her up.
I found her number in the phone book and after dinner I waited for a private moment when my parents and sister were watching television and I could use the phone without notice. With my heart pounding, I mis-dialed twice, my fingers slipping from the holes before the disk fully rotated.
I paused, dispatching bad thoughts. “Mis-dialing is an omen; I should forget the whole thing and see her in class.” “No, shmuck, it’s only a phone call.”
The third time I dialed carefully. Her mother answered it on the fourth ring, just before my nerve gave out. I’d forgotten that she would probably answer. I almost hung up, but managed to stutter my name and that I was calling to see how Penny was. Her mother was politely formal, saying that I was “sweet” to call and that Penny was feeling better and would be at school tomorrow.
I thought she would hang up on me so I blurted, “Well, its very urgent that I talk to her, Mrs. Miller, because the teacher gave us some special assignment for tomorrow and she should be prepared for it if she’s coming.”
To my surprise, her mother again said I was “sweet” and that of course Penny needed to know that, and for me to wait a moment. I heard her call to Penny and say, “It’s that boy, the one who picked up the report. He has a message from your teacher.”
Penny came to the phone. Her voice was even huskier than usual, though not as scratchy as it had been the day before. To my surprise I was able to coherently relate the ostensible reason for the call and she was very grateful and said I was “very sweet” to call.
I had such a boner that I kept thinking that I should have whacked off before calling her so that I could be thinking more clearly and not be talking so fast. The next line was going to be my big transition where I said that when she got better, I would take her to the movies to cheer her up, but I hesitated because I hadn’t planned for her to be better already and going to school the next day.
During another sickening silence while my mind raced for a way to say it, she said, “Well, I better get to reading. Enid called earlier with my math homework too and I have a ton of it. So, thanks again, Artie, and I’ll see you tomorrow in class, okay?”
I said, “Sure, bye.”
Well, that was really depressing, I thought, as I jerked off later in the dark and replayed the call in my memory.
The sound of Penny Miller’s voice on the phone was unbearably sexy as it reverberated in the hollows of my mind while I stroked away and recalled every word she spoke. Her voice on the phone was like velvet mixed with sandpaper, thick as hot fudge when it’s not runny and hot but after it comes out of the fridge rich and gritty. It was perfect for her: mysterious and dangerous, but at the same time teasing and girlish. Her phone voice matched my image of Penelope Miller, which I’d etched in my mind with the permanence of a Greek statue, but one with arms.
The next day in English class I was dreamily staring at the board when she came in almost late. I felt a note slip under my left hand. I caught a glimpse of Penny’s hand pulling away before the teacher noticed. Penny’s cheeks were tinged in red. She rubbed her nose with her Kleenex, and a little smile escaped as she blew gently.
The note was in her perfect round letters:
“Artie,
Thanks again for everything. I think you’re very sweet.
Do you want to go after school for a lime rickey?
Pen.”
I didn’t breathe as I read the note over and over, analyzing each word like a World War II cryptographer. "Thanks" was pretty neutral, but "everything" was pregnant with possibilities.
"I think you’re very sweet" was the best of all. I had to suppress my boner, just reading that phrase for the tenth and eleventh time.
The "lime rickey" was a soft drink specialty of the candy store on Kings Highway near her house. It was a place and invitation that encoded a breath of a hint — taken with the "very sweet" part — that she might actually like me, though it was also possible that she simply may have been trying to be polite.
She could have been one of those girls that sent thank you notes to everyone for everything.
"Thank you for the very sweet birthday present.” “Thank you for not spitting on me in the school bus today.”
But I had a soccer game that afternoon, which was a Friday, and it was a dilemma. There was still a slim chance I might get to play for a few minutes — unless it snowed and the game was canceled, I thought hopefully. A quick glance out of the classroom window told me that a blizzard was not going to happen, no matter how much I willed it.
Near the end of the period, I bit my lip and turned her note over to the other side, held my breath, and scrawled:
“PEN,
Can’t do it — big soccer game. But how about a movie tonight?? I think you are sweet too. Art.”
I folded it up and put it on her desk just as the bell rang. Penny Miller looked at the note and frowned, then smiled at me and allowed a few fog-shrouded words to escape. “Okay, sure. Why not.”
I finally breathed. Breathing was wonderful.
The saxophone voice continued. “Pick me up after supper about seven-thirty? Gotta run. See ya.”
That night I picked her up at her house at exactly seven-thirty, figuring that punctuality would count. I had to run most of the way due to delays necessitated by my painstaking preparations: carefully choosing clothes, especially pants that wouldn’t strangle me while I sat in a movie theater with a hard-on; re-combing my hair thirty two times with enough Brylcream to lubricate an engine; covering as many zits as I could without requiring bandages or surgery; and finally, destroying thousands of breath germs with my father’s mouthwash that tasted like battery acid.
Penny’s parents treated me in a way that surprised me at first: that is, with complete indifference. Her father read his newspaper, watched the TV, did not even deign to give me a once over. Her mom stood nervously smoking while listening intently to someone more important on the telephone. After initial relief that I would not be scrutinized and found unacceptable, I began to feel queasiness of another sort. They must be so used to guys coming to date their daughter that it had become routine. They treated me so casually that I felt I should have taken a number.
Worse, I began to think that the comfort level they evinced at my presence was insulting, because it suggested that they saw me as posing very little danger for their daughter. Well, there are advantages to being the non-threatening type. Maybe I would show them, I dared to imagine.
Penny had washed her hair and it was very blond and fluffy, forming a sort of golden halo around her face. She wore a turtle neck ribbed blue sweater, plaid skirt, and black leg tights under her pea coat. I mentioned that it was very cold outside that night. Her mother wanted Penny to wear a hat; Penny refused, insisting that her hair was dry, and that she would not catch a “chill,” but yielded to a muffler and gloves. Her mother wanted her father to drive us to the movie house and luckily he shot that down with a grunt.
While I walked with Penny to the elevator, I kept up a stream of banter that I hoped was clever and funny but sounded to me like inane chatter. Penny giggled in her squeaky laugh in the elevator as I made a face at an elderly couple, and their nasty tiny dog yapped at me.
Outside, the air was biting and our breaths were smoky as we walked on Ocean Parkway toward Kings Highway. The street lights cast black shadows and the tree branches were bare and stark. The sky was black and thick smoke came from the exhausts of cars waiting for the light as we trotted across the long intersection toward the lights of the theater district.
We saw “The Left-handed Gun” with Paul Newman, a western about Billy The Kid. I remember that I held her hand during the show, paid for Jujubes and Bon Bons and a Mary Jane bar, teased her about her voice, and made whispered jokes about the people in the theater.
After the movie, we took a booth in the candy store and Penny had tea with a cinnamon stick and honey and I had a hot fudge sundae. I gave her the cherry and I dared a teasing sex innuendo about that and luckily she laughed a sincere laugh.
There were other school kids there and I was very proud to be seen with Penny because by then everyone knew she was one of the Beauties at the school, and that us being together on a date was a shock. We talked to a few people; one guy who had flirted with her now tried to horn into our table, but it was late and Penny accepted my urging to leave with no sign of coquetry.
I held her gloved hand all the way back. I kept talking, thinking about whether and how to try to kiss her. Ocean Parkway was a very wide avenue with four lanes of traffic in each direction. On one side, there was a bridal path lined with trees that paralleled the traffic lanes and separated it from another street with parked cars and another wide sidewalk. The paved walkway on the other side had benches under the trees and then another two driving lanes and parking near the curb.
I steered toward a bench on the walkway near the front of her apartment building and we sat down on it. She did not, as I dreaded, say “It’s late,” or “It’s too cold, we better go in.” Either would have been understandable and true.
I looked at Penny Miller, my mind a blank. She looked ahead to the cars going by and sniffled. Her hands were stuffed into her coat pocket. Her breath was smoky.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her with real concern.
“Okay,” she said, glancing at me a bit furtively I thought.
She was fingering the Kleenex she had drawn from her coat pocket. I kept looking at her with what must have been a dumb smile on my face.
“What?” she asked.
“Huh?”
She barked a giggle and made a more serious, though not a severe, face. “You’re kind of staring at me.”
I heard my voice, as if coming from somewhere far from my mouth, say something truthful and unrehearsed to a girl for the first time in my adolescence. “I like to look at you. I do it a lot when you don’t know it in school.”
Penny Miller squirmed in her seat. “I’ve felt you looking at me.”
I was thinking, "lots of guys like to look at you. You better get used to it if you’re going to be as beautiful as you are at this moment." But I didn’t say that. I said, “I hope it doesn’t annoy you, Pen.” That was true, too.
She looked as if she was thinking about how to answer. Maybe she wanted to say, "all the guys look at me; I like it." But she didn’t. Finally, she said, “No, it doesn’t annoy me, not really,” and she shook her hair. “It makes me a little self-conscious but.”
I heard my voice say, “I’m sorry, its just that — I like you a lot.”
Penny Miller then said, “I like you, too, Artie. Just as much, I think.”
That should have stopped me cold, but it didn’t. For some reason which I’ve analyzed in odd moments for the rest of my life, at a crucial turning point in history, chutzpah emerged at just the perfect moment. I felt relaxed and in control of myself, with a calm self-assurance that I’d never felt this far from second base, and certainly not with any girl, and Penny was not just any girl to me.
My voice was strong and clear, saying, “I’m dying to kiss you.”
Penny Miller looked at me. She didn’t smile exactly; it was more of a puzzled look, indecisive maybe, a look which I interpreted as seeking a polite way to let me down.
So I turned to wisecrack humor. “Hey, I don’t care if I get sick. At least then we’ll have something else to share, like germs?” I was proud that I finally fit in a version of that joke I’d rehearsed.
She did laugh a little. “I don’t think I’m contagious anymore.”
“So its okay then?”
“Yeah, its okay.”
I leaned closer and she quickly wiped her nose with the Kleenex, sniffled and turned her face up to me. Her eyes sparkled watery blue in the light of the street lamp.
I kissed her gently, barely brushing her lips, stole a look as she closed her eyes, and I pressed my lips to hers. I held her shoulder with my hand on the back of the bench and held her gloved hand with my other hand. Her cheeks were pink and her nose was chafed. I took the Kleenex from her hand and daubed her eyes and her nose.
She chuckled again, a foghorn of a laugh. I leaned over and kissed her again, felt her tongue touch mine and could barely stand it.
She whispered in a croaking voice, “That was nice, Artie.”
I told her I hated my name, Artie, because it was so dorky and I always got my cheeks pinched when one of my relatives called me Artie.
She said she would call me Arthur from then on because it was “more elegant, like King Arthur.”
I reminded her that the most famous Arthur was Arthur Godfrey, the corny TV host. “Besides,” I said, “King Arthur in the story kind of loses Guenevere to Lancelot, doesn’t he?”
She laughed about it and from then on called me Arthur or Arturo when she wanted to tease me, and Artie when she wanted to retaliate for my teasing.
We kissed again, and it is that kiss that I still can taste. It was a kiss that was subtly different from the experiments I had been used to. I felt something I could not then define, but later knew was some sort of feeling that had moved beyond titillation or curiosity. I didn’t know whether it was because of something I was feeling or something she had done.
It didn’t occur to me that it could be because of something that she was feeling. I had no way of comprehending how that could be possible. Yet today, almost a half century later, the sensation and the meaning of that kiss still lingers with me, as a shadow of a dream.
Somewhere deep within, I must have dimly sensed what Penny Miller was trying to convey by that kiss: that it was a message — an offer, a plea; but the substance was something I could not decipher.
It was clear that after each kiss, we each became more comfortable, more trusting, permitted more entry to levels of — and I never would have then used or thought of the word — intimacy.
She told me that she was tired of being called Penny and Pen. I asked her if she minded that people made fun of her when we read “The Odyssey” in class and the teacher mentioned Odysseus’ wife, Penelope.
She was very serious when she said she liked Penelope as a name because in the story, Penelope had turned away all other men, steadfastly believing Odysseus would return to her.
“But of course, my mom screams my name, ‘Penelope!’ when she gets really mad at me.”
I laughed because Penny had said it in a funny way, with a squeaky mock scream, something like Imogene Coca on Sid Ceasar’s show. I said something like, “I swear I’ll never call you ‘Penelope’ in anger, but only when I want to remind you to wait for me.”
She seemed to like that a lot, and asked me to kiss her again, which I did, thinking that it was even more exciting having her ask me to kiss her, resulting in my boner almost causing me to double up.
When I could breathe, I told her I wanted to give her another name, one that only I would call her. After some unacceptable tries I no longer recall, I settled on “Kid,” telling her that it was because our first movie was about Billy The Kid.
I was really thinking about a movie I’d seen on television with Humphrey Bogart called “Casablanca,” where he called the younger Ingrid Bergman, “Kid.” It didn’t exactly fit us because Penny and I were the same age, but it made me feel more “mature.” I really felt the way toward Penny that Bogie felt about Ingrid, somehow protective and responsible, though I couldn’t have explained it at the time.
Penny seemed to understand the idea, as she was to “get” most of my screwy notions, and she seemed to like it. At least, she didn’t stop me from calling her “Kid.” Or from putting my hand on her leg when we kissed again.
She told me that “Miller” had been changed by her grandfather from “Millstein” and I told her that “Brewster” had been “Brownstein,” so that was another thing we had in common.
I kissed her again in the elevator and once more, secretly, at her door, daringly, excitedly, knowing her parents were just on the other side, smugly sure that I was a safe one.
When I went to bed alone that night to review every detail in the dark, I realized that there were few moments I would have changed. It had been perfect. It was the best sex I’d ever had up to that point.
[Part 3 will come soon. I will give you a teaser, the first line -MPB]:
We never formally dated again.
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
I was well into my sophomore year before I’d mustered the courage to entertain the absurd notion that it might be within the realm of slim possibilities to ask Penny Miller for something like a “date.”
We were in the same English class again. We sat only a row apart this time because Mr. Fohr did not seat alphabetically or by height. For weeks I watched Penelope Miller closely as she bent over her desk, unaware in her deep concentration of my spying, writing in her loose leaf binder in a meticulous hand with all the letters of equal height in a round style that gave me a hard-on every time I looked at her hand wrapped around her pen and her tongue peeking from a corner of her lip.
Penny Miller was even more stunningly beautiful than she had been when I first saw her way back when we were mere freshmen. The summer had reduced the few remaining childish angles in her body, refined the curve of her calves and breasts and rear, but had not affected the arch of her high cheekbones or the slim grace of her arms and hands or the complete picture that was even greater than the perfect parts they were made of.
Over the first few months of the term, we small-talked occasionally in class and I made her laugh a few times, enough so that it gave me a faint hope she might at least tolerate my presence, if not actually go so far as to like me. She had a funny wheezy, barky laugh to go with her voice, which was husky, as if always close to laryngitis, forcing me to suppress the desire to clear my throat. Her voice and laugh were so sexy I could barely sit in my seat in class. I found myself crossing my legs to hide the goings on inside my lap, though it was painful wearing jockey shorts.
I knew little about Penny Miller’s social life outside of that classroom; I was sure she must have a boyfriend, though I’d never seen her with one at school. I imagined that he might attend a different school, be a senior, or maybe even be in college. Although she was only fifteen, that gap seemed in my depressed moments to be infinitesimally smaller than the gulf between us.
Until The Fates appeared and showed a way to bridge the chasm. The Fates were much on my mind that year because we were studying Greek Mythology. Mr. Fohr, our Zeus, pointed his capricious thunderbolt and ordained that groups be formed for a class project. Some time after Thanksgiving but before Christmas vacation, we were grouped in threes to team together to write a report on “The Iliad” and present it in class.
I don’t remember the third person on our team, a sign of my focus on Penny Miller. We talked about the project in class and two times after school in the library. Penny was an enthusiastic savant on the subject, able to expound in dizzyingly alluring detail about Ajax, Achilles, and Agamemnon as if she had met them at summer camp. We each did our research and Penny volunteered to write the final draft for the presentation we were to make the next day.
That morning while my sister and I fought for sink time to prepare for school, our phone rang. It was Penny’ mother. She had gotten our number from the phone book. No one had unlisted numbers in those days.
Penny was sick and was not going to school but she had finished the report last night. I agreed to pick it up from her house on the way to school. The Millers lived on Ocean Parkway, near Kings Highway; my house was about five long blocks away. I had to run to make it to her house and then race again to catch the school bus.
She lived in one of the upscale apartment houses in the neighborhood. It had a doorman and a desk like a hotel and a marble lobby and two Art Deco wood paneled elevators. By the time I got to her apartment door I was sweating despite the cold December air, my shirt tail was out of my pants and one of my shoe laces was untied.
I cleaned up as well as I could before ringing the bell, hoping to see Penny wearing a baby doll or maybe a robe which would open up revealingly, like one worn by a woman I’d delivered clothes to when I worked for the dry cleaners last summer.
Her mother answered the door, wearing what my mother would have called a “going-to-The-City” dress. She did not invite me inside, but asked me to wait and closed the door. I thought she’d gone to get Penny but she hadn’t. She returned with the report which was in a manila envelope, thanked me and closed the door while I was stammering my concern for Penny’s health.
During English class I decided to stop at Penny’s house after school and talk to her. I rehearsed all day what I would say and imagined many scenarios about how it would go: she would have the sniffles and be looking very pale and she would offer me tea, and she would be feeling miserable and I would make her laugh, and we would share a look, and she would fall in love with me. Or she would not really be sick, but I would catch her making out with a boy, a neighbor, that college student who she had been having a hot affair with, and she would coldly thank me like the women who I delivered clothes to, and maybe tip me a quarter.
Either scenario seemed far-fetched but I’d already developed a penchant for pre-experiencing moments like that. The goal was to prepare me for any eventuality; it would cushion the disappointment when it came; and in the less likely occasion of a positive experience, I would be able, I hoped, to function rather than freezing up completely — like I usually did with men on base and the game on the line.
Penny answered the door, wearing a bathrobe that revealed nothing to me. She looked merely beautiful, with her nose red and her eyes watery and puffy; she held a box of tissues. I managed to relate that the report went very well and that we all probably got A’s. She was pleased about it and apologized for not being able to read her part. I told her that I read it for her and the teacher said it was the best of the three. That was a lie, but not much of one. He had praised our work, most of which she had done.
We stood in her foyer a little awkwardly after that because I’d forgotten to rehearse a transition from this part into the asking her out part, and since she was sick and I didn’t know how long she was going to be sick, it didn’t seem like the timing was right. So I said I hoped she felt better and she thanked me with a weak smile and I left.
All the way home I felt really stupid for not saying more to her, and I thought of lots of things I should have said. “You look very pretty like this, vulnerable and pale, like Camille. It makes me want to take care of you.” Or “I hope I get sick so that we can share our germs and a box of Kleenex.” That might have choked a giggle out of her, if not the admission of love I was hoping for.
When she didn’t show for school the next day, I decided to call her that night and find out how she felt. I would tell her all about class, the work she missed and discuss the reading due the next day. I would offer to come over and read to her if her eyes were too puffy to read. I would say that as soon as she got well, I wanted to take her to see a movie to cheer her up.
I found her number in the phone book and after dinner I waited for a private moment when my parents and sister were watching television and I could use the phone without notice. With my heart pounding, I mis-dialed twice, my fingers slipping from the holes before the disk fully rotated.
I paused, dispatching bad thoughts. “Mis-dialing is an omen; I should forget the whole thing and see her in class.” “No, shmuck, it’s only a phone call.”
The third time I dialed carefully. Her mother answered it on the fourth ring, just before my nerve gave out. I’d forgotten that she would probably answer. I almost hung up, but managed to stutter my name and that I was calling to see how Penny was. Her mother was politely formal, saying that I was “sweet” to call and that Penny was feeling better and would be at school tomorrow.
I thought she would hang up on me so I blurted, “Well, its very urgent that I talk to her, Mrs. Miller, because the teacher gave us some special assignment for tomorrow and she should be prepared for it if she’s coming.”
To my surprise, her mother again said I was “sweet” and that of course Penny needed to know that, and for me to wait a moment. I heard her call to Penny and say, “It’s that boy, the one who picked up the report. He has a message from your teacher.”
Penny came to the phone. Her voice was even huskier than usual, though not as scratchy as it had been the day before. To my surprise I was able to coherently relate the ostensible reason for the call and she was very grateful and said I was “very sweet” to call.
I had such a boner that I kept thinking that I should have whacked off before calling her so that I could be thinking more clearly and not be talking so fast. The next line was going to be my big transition where I said that when she got better, I would take her to the movies to cheer her up, but I hesitated because I hadn’t planned for her to be better already and going to school the next day.
During another sickening silence while my mind raced for a way to say it, she said, “Well, I better get to reading. Enid called earlier with my math homework too and I have a ton of it. So, thanks again, Artie, and I’ll see you tomorrow in class, okay?”
I said, “Sure, bye.”
Well, that was really depressing, I thought, as I jerked off later in the dark and replayed the call in my memory.
The sound of Penny Miller’s voice on the phone was unbearably sexy as it reverberated in the hollows of my mind while I stroked away and recalled every word she spoke. Her voice on the phone was like velvet mixed with sandpaper, thick as hot fudge when it’s not runny and hot but after it comes out of the fridge rich and gritty. It was perfect for her: mysterious and dangerous, but at the same time teasing and girlish. Her phone voice matched my image of Penelope Miller, which I’d etched in my mind with the permanence of a Greek statue, but one with arms.
The next day in English class I was dreamily staring at the board when she came in almost late. I felt a note slip under my left hand. I caught a glimpse of Penny’s hand pulling away before the teacher noticed. Penny’s cheeks were tinged in red. She rubbed her nose with her Kleenex, and a little smile escaped as she blew gently.
The note was in her perfect round letters:
“Artie,
Thanks again for everything. I think you’re very sweet.
Do you want to go after school for a lime rickey?
Pen.”
I didn’t breathe as I read the note over and over, analyzing each word like a World War II cryptographer. "Thanks" was pretty neutral, but "everything" was pregnant with possibilities.
"I think you’re very sweet" was the best of all. I had to suppress my boner, just reading that phrase for the tenth and eleventh time.
The "lime rickey" was a soft drink specialty of the candy store on Kings Highway near her house. It was a place and invitation that encoded a breath of a hint — taken with the "very sweet" part — that she might actually like me, though it was also possible that she simply may have been trying to be polite.
She could have been one of those girls that sent thank you notes to everyone for everything.
"Thank you for the very sweet birthday present.” “Thank you for not spitting on me in the school bus today.”
But I had a soccer game that afternoon, which was a Friday, and it was a dilemma. There was still a slim chance I might get to play for a few minutes — unless it snowed and the game was canceled, I thought hopefully. A quick glance out of the classroom window told me that a blizzard was not going to happen, no matter how much I willed it.
Near the end of the period, I bit my lip and turned her note over to the other side, held my breath, and scrawled:
“PEN,
Can’t do it — big soccer game. But how about a movie tonight?? I think you are sweet too. Art.”
I folded it up and put it on her desk just as the bell rang. Penny Miller looked at the note and frowned, then smiled at me and allowed a few fog-shrouded words to escape. “Okay, sure. Why not.”
I finally breathed. Breathing was wonderful.
The saxophone voice continued. “Pick me up after supper about seven-thirty? Gotta run. See ya.”
That night I picked her up at her house at exactly seven-thirty, figuring that punctuality would count. I had to run most of the way due to delays necessitated by my painstaking preparations: carefully choosing clothes, especially pants that wouldn’t strangle me while I sat in a movie theater with a hard-on; re-combing my hair thirty two times with enough Brylcream to lubricate an engine; covering as many zits as I could without requiring bandages or surgery; and finally, destroying thousands of breath germs with my father’s mouthwash that tasted like battery acid.
Penny’s parents treated me in a way that surprised me at first: that is, with complete indifference. Her father read his newspaper, watched the TV, did not even deign to give me a once over. Her mom stood nervously smoking while listening intently to someone more important on the telephone. After initial relief that I would not be scrutinized and found unacceptable, I began to feel queasiness of another sort. They must be so used to guys coming to date their daughter that it had become routine. They treated me so casually that I felt I should have taken a number.
Worse, I began to think that the comfort level they evinced at my presence was insulting, because it suggested that they saw me as posing very little danger for their daughter. Well, there are advantages to being the non-threatening type. Maybe I would show them, I dared to imagine.
Penny had washed her hair and it was very blond and fluffy, forming a sort of golden halo around her face. She wore a turtle neck ribbed blue sweater, plaid skirt, and black leg tights under her pea coat. I mentioned that it was very cold outside that night. Her mother wanted Penny to wear a hat; Penny refused, insisting that her hair was dry, and that she would not catch a “chill,” but yielded to a muffler and gloves. Her mother wanted her father to drive us to the movie house and luckily he shot that down with a grunt.
While I walked with Penny to the elevator, I kept up a stream of banter that I hoped was clever and funny but sounded to me like inane chatter. Penny giggled in her squeaky laugh in the elevator as I made a face at an elderly couple, and their nasty tiny dog yapped at me.
Outside, the air was biting and our breaths were smoky as we walked on Ocean Parkway toward Kings Highway. The street lights cast black shadows and the tree branches were bare and stark. The sky was black and thick smoke came from the exhausts of cars waiting for the light as we trotted across the long intersection toward the lights of the theater district.
We saw “The Left-handed Gun” with Paul Newman, a western about Billy The Kid. I remember that I held her hand during the show, paid for Jujubes and Bon Bons and a Mary Jane bar, teased her about her voice, and made whispered jokes about the people in the theater.
After the movie, we took a booth in the candy store and Penny had tea with a cinnamon stick and honey and I had a hot fudge sundae. I gave her the cherry and I dared a teasing sex innuendo about that and luckily she laughed a sincere laugh.
There were other school kids there and I was very proud to be seen with Penny because by then everyone knew she was one of the Beauties at the school, and that us being together on a date was a shock. We talked to a few people; one guy who had flirted with her now tried to horn into our table, but it was late and Penny accepted my urging to leave with no sign of coquetry.
I held her gloved hand all the way back. I kept talking, thinking about whether and how to try to kiss her. Ocean Parkway was a very wide avenue with four lanes of traffic in each direction. On one side, there was a bridal path lined with trees that paralleled the traffic lanes and separated it from another street with parked cars and another wide sidewalk. The paved walkway on the other side had benches under the trees and then another two driving lanes and parking near the curb.
I steered toward a bench on the walkway near the front of her apartment building and we sat down on it. She did not, as I dreaded, say “It’s late,” or “It’s too cold, we better go in.” Either would have been understandable and true.
I looked at Penny Miller, my mind a blank. She looked ahead to the cars going by and sniffled. Her hands were stuffed into her coat pocket. Her breath was smoky.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her with real concern.
“Okay,” she said, glancing at me a bit furtively I thought.
She was fingering the Kleenex she had drawn from her coat pocket. I kept looking at her with what must have been a dumb smile on my face.
“What?” she asked.
“Huh?”
She barked a giggle and made a more serious, though not a severe, face. “You’re kind of staring at me.”
I heard my voice, as if coming from somewhere far from my mouth, say something truthful and unrehearsed to a girl for the first time in my adolescence. “I like to look at you. I do it a lot when you don’t know it in school.”
Penny Miller squirmed in her seat. “I’ve felt you looking at me.”
I was thinking, "lots of guys like to look at you. You better get used to it if you’re going to be as beautiful as you are at this moment." But I didn’t say that. I said, “I hope it doesn’t annoy you, Pen.” That was true, too.
She looked as if she was thinking about how to answer. Maybe she wanted to say, "all the guys look at me; I like it." But she didn’t. Finally, she said, “No, it doesn’t annoy me, not really,” and she shook her hair. “It makes me a little self-conscious but.”
I heard my voice say, “I’m sorry, its just that — I like you a lot.”
Penny Miller then said, “I like you, too, Artie. Just as much, I think.”
That should have stopped me cold, but it didn’t. For some reason which I’ve analyzed in odd moments for the rest of my life, at a crucial turning point in history, chutzpah emerged at just the perfect moment. I felt relaxed and in control of myself, with a calm self-assurance that I’d never felt this far from second base, and certainly not with any girl, and Penny was not just any girl to me.
My voice was strong and clear, saying, “I’m dying to kiss you.”
Penny Miller looked at me. She didn’t smile exactly; it was more of a puzzled look, indecisive maybe, a look which I interpreted as seeking a polite way to let me down.
So I turned to wisecrack humor. “Hey, I don’t care if I get sick. At least then we’ll have something else to share, like germs?” I was proud that I finally fit in a version of that joke I’d rehearsed.
She did laugh a little. “I don’t think I’m contagious anymore.”
“So its okay then?”
“Yeah, its okay.”
I leaned closer and she quickly wiped her nose with the Kleenex, sniffled and turned her face up to me. Her eyes sparkled watery blue in the light of the street lamp.
I kissed her gently, barely brushing her lips, stole a look as she closed her eyes, and I pressed my lips to hers. I held her shoulder with my hand on the back of the bench and held her gloved hand with my other hand. Her cheeks were pink and her nose was chafed. I took the Kleenex from her hand and daubed her eyes and her nose.
She chuckled again, a foghorn of a laugh. I leaned over and kissed her again, felt her tongue touch mine and could barely stand it.
She whispered in a croaking voice, “That was nice, Artie.”
I told her I hated my name, Artie, because it was so dorky and I always got my cheeks pinched when one of my relatives called me Artie.
She said she would call me Arthur from then on because it was “more elegant, like King Arthur.”
I reminded her that the most famous Arthur was Arthur Godfrey, the corny TV host. “Besides,” I said, “King Arthur in the story kind of loses Guenevere to Lancelot, doesn’t he?”
She laughed about it and from then on called me Arthur or Arturo when she wanted to tease me, and Artie when she wanted to retaliate for my teasing.
We kissed again, and it is that kiss that I still can taste. It was a kiss that was subtly different from the experiments I had been used to. I felt something I could not then define, but later knew was some sort of feeling that had moved beyond titillation or curiosity. I didn’t know whether it was because of something I was feeling or something she had done.
It didn’t occur to me that it could be because of something that she was feeling. I had no way of comprehending how that could be possible. Yet today, almost a half century later, the sensation and the meaning of that kiss still lingers with me, as a shadow of a dream.
Somewhere deep within, I must have dimly sensed what Penny Miller was trying to convey by that kiss: that it was a message — an offer, a plea; but the substance was something I could not decipher.
It was clear that after each kiss, we each became more comfortable, more trusting, permitted more entry to levels of — and I never would have then used or thought of the word — intimacy.
She told me that she was tired of being called Penny and Pen. I asked her if she minded that people made fun of her when we read “The Odyssey” in class and the teacher mentioned Odysseus’ wife, Penelope.
She was very serious when she said she liked Penelope as a name because in the story, Penelope had turned away all other men, steadfastly believing Odysseus would return to her.
“But of course, my mom screams my name, ‘Penelope!’ when she gets really mad at me.”
I laughed because Penny had said it in a funny way, with a squeaky mock scream, something like Imogene Coca on Sid Ceasar’s show. I said something like, “I swear I’ll never call you ‘Penelope’ in anger, but only when I want to remind you to wait for me.”
She seemed to like that a lot, and asked me to kiss her again, which I did, thinking that it was even more exciting having her ask me to kiss her, resulting in my boner almost causing me to double up.
When I could breathe, I told her I wanted to give her another name, one that only I would call her. After some unacceptable tries I no longer recall, I settled on “Kid,” telling her that it was because our first movie was about Billy The Kid.
I was really thinking about a movie I’d seen on television with Humphrey Bogart called “Casablanca,” where he called the younger Ingrid Bergman, “Kid.” It didn’t exactly fit us because Penny and I were the same age, but it made me feel more “mature.” I really felt the way toward Penny that Bogie felt about Ingrid, somehow protective and responsible, though I couldn’t have explained it at the time.
Penny seemed to understand the idea, as she was to “get” most of my screwy notions, and she seemed to like it. At least, she didn’t stop me from calling her “Kid.” Or from putting my hand on her leg when we kissed again.
She told me that “Miller” had been changed by her grandfather from “Millstein” and I told her that “Brewster” had been “Brownstein,” so that was another thing we had in common.
I kissed her again in the elevator and once more, secretly, at her door, daringly, excitedly, knowing her parents were just on the other side, smugly sure that I was a safe one.
When I went to bed alone that night to review every detail in the dark, I realized that there were few moments I would have changed. It had been perfect. It was the best sex I’d ever had up to that point.
[Part 3 will come soon. I will give you a teaser, the first line -MPB]:
We never formally dated again.
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
"CHIMERA" - Artie Brewster's 'Memoir' - Chapter 1
Artie is an old high school friend of mine from Brooklyn. I haven’t spoken to him for 40 years. Somehow, he tracked me, and sent me the following in the form of an e-mail. He called it “Chimera,” which I had to look up.
Chimera N. Gr: chimaira Gr.Myth: 1. a fabulous monster; 2. An impossible or foolish fancy... Chimerical adj. 1. Imaginary; fantastic; unreal. 2. Absurd; impossible. 3. Indulging in unrealistic fancies; visionary.
I am guessing that means this “memoir” is mostly bullshit. But I’m going to publish it in my blog anyway, because bullshit memoirs seem to be acceptable -- these days. Here it is, only slightly abridged to clean up the dirty parts.
My Hebrew School rabbi insisted that the Genesis story about Creation was the emmis, The Truth. The way he told it, God, the Omnipotent King Of The Universe, created the world in six days. On the first day, He worked on the heavens, the earth, and the oceans. But The Know-It-All Genius was working in the dark, which apparently accounted for some of His screw-ups, like hurricanes, floods, and that slimy tarry stuff I always got on my feet at Coney Island. It wasn’t until the second day that He got the idea to flip the light switch.
I received this version of history with some skepticism, especially after catching the rabbi in the act of parking his car a few blocks away from the temple on Shabbas before he began to sneak up to the temple on foot. I had been ordered to walk the twenty blocks from my house after being caught by my grandmother pedaling my bike to Schul. I rode my bike every Saturday after that, hid it in an alley — until one Saturday, it was stolen.
The moral lesson revealed by that episode was not matched until my first day at Lafayette High School, which was spent on the basketball courts waiting for the teachers to end their strike. Was my duty to support the teachers’ struggle or to pursue my education?
Conflicted though I was between my father’s ardent unionism and my “socialization” as a dutiful Jewish boy, I’d tried to enter the imposing grey stone building on Benson Avenue in Bensonhurst. But some Bath Beach Italian guys, who wore leather jackets and carried argumentative switchblades, had taken a scrupled stance in support of the picketing teachers and, incidentally, extended summer vacation one extra day by blocking the entrances. That served as a practical solution to my own qualms — and taught me an important lesson. Moral choices should be delayed until events ripen.
And so it was that I had to wait until the second day for my first view of someone who almost restored my faith in some Greater Power. Penelope Miller, by the Grace of some unseen hand, was in my freshman English class.
In those days, Freshman classes were seated either alphabetically or by height; either way I was in the front and Penny Miller was near the rear. But I soon found myself twisting in my seat, and trying to steal looks at her, then quickly snapping my head away before she caught me staring. If our eyes met, I knew for sure that I would be struck dumb or turned into a pillar of salt or a slab of marble. The gulf between us was far greater than the five rows of chairs that separated us in Freshman English. There were volcanic peaks, shark infested oceans, and rivers of molten lava to cross.
It was immediately evident to me that there was something terribly amiss with this female type Thing. She was out of place in my world; she seemed to have descended from some etherial region of my imagination: a creature from mystic legend, science fiction, or a Hollywood inspired wet dream. Even at fourteen years old, I could tell at a glance that — if Penny Miller was human — all of my previous hormonal fantasies about girls had been childishly understated.
I couldn’t have described her then in words, and probably can’t now, so many years later. Using my slim fund of metaphoric knowledge as it existed the first high school year, I can say that the difference between Penelope Miller and all of the other females I had previously encountered was algabraic: If other females = X, then Penny Miller = X∞.
I should here explain that, sociologically, our school’s population in that era was roughly half American Secular Jewish, half Brooklyn Second Generation Italian. This produced an oddly compatible association of similar, yet unique sub-cultures co-existing in a bubbling stew of adolescent curiosity and fear.
I must admit that my instinctive preference was for the Italian, rather than the Jewish, girls. I believe now that this bias was due to my mother, who was Romanian, often mistaken by strangers for Italian. I shared her Olive complexion and jet black hair. My mother loved to flirt and tell naughty jokes. She danced and bounced her bosoms with frisky delight at family affairs. She loved to eat spicy food, and fancied herself a Gypsy. In the words of some forgotten comic, “Oedipus, Schmedipus, I loved my mommy.”
The more attractive of the Jewish girls I had seen tended to be on the standoffish side. They practiced a form of seduction which was so heavily encoded with barely audible innuendo that I was at a loss to figure them out. The Italian girls were less mysterious; they tended to be more blatantly erotic, at least in my fantasies, because they were more exotic, tantalizingly accessible, sneering with implied lust, and daring you to cop a feel.
The Jewish girls wore sweater sets and pleated skirts, white socks and “tennies.” They wore their hair in pony tails or bouncy natural curls. They were mostly named “Sharon” or “Eunice” or “Bernice.” The Italian girls wore sheer stockings and black pumps with straps that showed their heels, and tight skirts that showcased their asses, tight sweater sets that previewed their breasts — or at least their bras — in excruciating detail. Their hair was sprayed to a concrete immovable set, smelled strongly of alcohol and floral perfume. They were named “Maria,” “Gina” or “Marianne.”
In the first few months of high school, my hormones made few cultural distinctions. Stalking the halls, I might have been swimming in the warm Coney Island waters crowded with assorted females in bathing suits and hiding my boner.
Maria Mangeone’s stockinged heel as it lifted free of her shoe while sitting at her desk caused me strangling pain. A bra strap showing from Eunice Kagan’s sleeveless blouse was enough to give me cramps. The pink pilling that identified the forward curve of palm sized breasts hiding inside Bernice Moskowitz’ mohair sweater set me off. Gina Cappazola, sitting in the cafeteria across from Marianne D’Amato, freshened her lipstick while peering at her compact and my concentration was gone for the afternoon.
They were all attractive, at least in some particular. Certainly, it didn’t take much to attract me at that age. Some girls had one alluring feature or combination of features that I surveyed like a shopper while walking the halls or sitting in class: thrusting breasts, round firm tush, flowing hair, inviting full lips, teasing eyes.
But in my memory’s admittedly hyperbolic eye, Penelope Miller’s looks were of another species, a miraculous mutation, a monumental leap in evolution, a composite of all the best features I could have imagined in a girl — a superwoman. Her appearance was something I had never seen in real life and was totally unprepared for; I was unnerved by her flawlessness.
For one thing, she was neither definably Jewish nor Italian in appearance; I couldn’t fit her in with any of the other girls in the class. The phrase: “She looks like ____” (fill in the blank with any pitifully inadequate superlative, beginning with “a goddess”) could not be spoken without conscious understatement.
It wasn’t just that she had no particular “ethnic” features I associated with the other girls, some of which, in and of themselves were appealing. Neither was she my vision of some non-ethnic white bread paragon of the kind I had little contact with at that age, but had seen in movies and in magazines. She was neither comparable to Marilyn Monroe nor Audrey Hepburn, or any fantasy object in between. She was neither “Annette,” nor “Darlene” of the sexiest show on television, “The Mickey Mouse Club.” She was far above those shadows.
Penny Miller’s facial features were subtle and delicate, a perfect balance of sensuality, intelligence, and elegance. She was breathtakingly stunning, the kind you watch from a distance and avert your eyes as she nears, like oncoming high headlight beams. In repose, she exuded a sort of eerie calm, an unguarded innocent sense of assurance.
I have since seen many and known some of Penelope Miller’s genera of beautiful woman: who stand in elevators, ignoring awestruck stares with distant, icy mien; who with fresh wholesome American airs exercise in mylar, oblivious to the gasps they evoke; who enter rooms amidst stunned murmurs and whimpers. Penny Miller, as I remember her at fourteen, was something apart from even these exceptional beings I have seen during my long life of awareness of such creatures.
Beneath the dazzling symmetry of Penny Miller’s face, there was something even more unfathomable than mere striking beauty, a shell of mystery that separated her from others, even those girls I had written off as beyond my scope.
I had long realized that, to girls, I was destined to be categorized as “nonthreatening,” a boy who girls trusted, because I was clearly without any dangerous or sexy aura. Even in the unforgiving Darwinian blackboard jungle, this was considered a pitiable label.
Because I could be trusted not to overstep prescribed boundaries, there was a small sub-class of sympathetic girls (the sort who would later become social workers with the disabled) who ventured to invite me to their finished basements after school to dance, and then to make out on narrow sticky naughahyde benches beneath wood paneled walls. But humping was as far as I’d ever gotten in eighth grade; now I was a high schooler and expected to graduate to more complex and challenging activities. I had resolved to change the way girls thought of me, take more risks, no matter the likelihood of rejection. This was my primary goal in freshman year, that and making the baseball team.
Unfortunately, I’d discovered early that I was the kind of kid whose reach exceeded his grasp in both endeavors. My desires outdistanced my abilities by planetary measures. I knew this was a curse which had to be accepted as much as the bump on my nose, being left handed, and all the other immutable infirmities of my looks and abilities. In school, I was learning to adapt to my intellectual limitations, to promote strengths and manage weaknesses. Any subject that required comfort with numbers would always be a boring puzzle; if words were allowed, I could manage to get along. Accepting these realities would narrow choices for me, eliminating entire careers but opening others that might provide some “succor” (I used to like that word - it sounded dirty but isn’t), even while dashing childish dreams of becoming the next Oppenheimer or Chuck Yeager.
In the same way, I was learning that I would always struggle to be satisfied with the type of girls who went for me; to resist the trap of yearning for the girls whose pursuit offered only inevitable misery. I was beginning to suspect that this necessity to compromise, to settle, to accept mediocrity, was a constant that would trickle into all facets of my life; in fact, it would become the theme of my life. With a heavy heart, I gathered the sense to narrow my range, to accept the challenge of wanting those who wanted me.
Considering these truths, it was immediately evident that Penny Miller was so far beyond my grasp that it was nonsensical to even dream that she might have anything to do with me, in a sexual way that is, which was the only way that counted to me at that age. It took me until December 1st to build the courage to even speak directly to her.
By that time, she knew my name because I was a talker in English class, my arm always upraised to answer a question about the subject matter. In those days, I knew how to write a sentence within the rules, and could even spell, before spell checkers when spelling counted. I was such a nerd that I didn’t know yet that it was uncool to participate in class discussions much less to volunteer an insight, showing that I was bright and that I’d actually read and understood the material.
I was slow to realize that there was extreme social risk in seeming to curry favor with the teacher, who was required by the prevailing social code to sweat through his curriculum without student assistance. Luckily, I was also a smart ass, and occasionally made clever funny asides that made the class laugh and the teacher scold me. As far back as fifth grade, I’d stumbled upon the discovery that class clowning could be a route to a certain limited popularity for me.
A few of my wise cracks evoked tepid smiles from Penny Miller, as revealed by my frequent stolen looks for her reaction. But these blips were not enough to encourage me to take the plunge into the bottomless chasm that separated us.
Penny’s general indifference to my charm was a minor setback, completely lacking in surprise, even somewhat comforting. Once you know you can never have the most expensive toy, settling for second best becomes acceptable, necessary for mental health. I was used to hand-me-downs from my brother. My closet was full of damaged model airplanes, one-legged tin soldiers, flashlights with chipped lenses. Even my Schwinn had lost a fender. I could make do.
There were a few girls who showed interest in me in that first year. In my Algebra class, plump Gina Maione giggled at my jokes and allowed me — over a painfully long period of time — to persuade her to permit me to put my hand on her breast and then, after the glacial passage of eons, to move my fingers under her sweater and, eventually — with the coming of a new Ice Age — to slip a tip of a finger under her bra while we humped. All the while, I listened intently for the arrival of her parents, who would surely discover us, kill me and toss my hacked up body into the swamp near the school — or worse, would force me to marry Gina and to spend the rest of my life hauling garbage for La Famiglia.
For the most part, I smothered my hormones in sports. At the time, I didn’t make the connection between sports and sexual urges, but it was clearly more than a coincidence that freshman sports was very big for almost all the boys. To a kid in Brooklyn in the 50's, baseball was like the military to a Prussian lad, the first love and the dream for a life’s work.
Artie sent me a lot more of this garbage, which I'll post later, if anybody cares.
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
Chimera N. Gr: chimaira Gr.Myth: 1. a fabulous monster; 2. An impossible or foolish fancy... Chimerical adj. 1. Imaginary; fantastic; unreal. 2. Absurd; impossible. 3. Indulging in unrealistic fancies; visionary.
I am guessing that means this “memoir” is mostly bullshit. But I’m going to publish it in my blog anyway, because bullshit memoirs seem to be acceptable -- these days. Here it is, only slightly abridged to clean up the dirty parts.
My Hebrew School rabbi insisted that the Genesis story about Creation was the emmis, The Truth. The way he told it, God, the Omnipotent King Of The Universe, created the world in six days. On the first day, He worked on the heavens, the earth, and the oceans. But The Know-It-All Genius was working in the dark, which apparently accounted for some of His screw-ups, like hurricanes, floods, and that slimy tarry stuff I always got on my feet at Coney Island. It wasn’t until the second day that He got the idea to flip the light switch.
I received this version of history with some skepticism, especially after catching the rabbi in the act of parking his car a few blocks away from the temple on Shabbas before he began to sneak up to the temple on foot. I had been ordered to walk the twenty blocks from my house after being caught by my grandmother pedaling my bike to Schul. I rode my bike every Saturday after that, hid it in an alley — until one Saturday, it was stolen.
The moral lesson revealed by that episode was not matched until my first day at Lafayette High School, which was spent on the basketball courts waiting for the teachers to end their strike. Was my duty to support the teachers’ struggle or to pursue my education?
Conflicted though I was between my father’s ardent unionism and my “socialization” as a dutiful Jewish boy, I’d tried to enter the imposing grey stone building on Benson Avenue in Bensonhurst. But some Bath Beach Italian guys, who wore leather jackets and carried argumentative switchblades, had taken a scrupled stance in support of the picketing teachers and, incidentally, extended summer vacation one extra day by blocking the entrances. That served as a practical solution to my own qualms — and taught me an important lesson. Moral choices should be delayed until events ripen.
And so it was that I had to wait until the second day for my first view of someone who almost restored my faith in some Greater Power. Penelope Miller, by the Grace of some unseen hand, was in my freshman English class.
In those days, Freshman classes were seated either alphabetically or by height; either way I was in the front and Penny Miller was near the rear. But I soon found myself twisting in my seat, and trying to steal looks at her, then quickly snapping my head away before she caught me staring. If our eyes met, I knew for sure that I would be struck dumb or turned into a pillar of salt or a slab of marble. The gulf between us was far greater than the five rows of chairs that separated us in Freshman English. There were volcanic peaks, shark infested oceans, and rivers of molten lava to cross.
It was immediately evident to me that there was something terribly amiss with this female type Thing. She was out of place in my world; she seemed to have descended from some etherial region of my imagination: a creature from mystic legend, science fiction, or a Hollywood inspired wet dream. Even at fourteen years old, I could tell at a glance that — if Penny Miller was human — all of my previous hormonal fantasies about girls had been childishly understated.
I couldn’t have described her then in words, and probably can’t now, so many years later. Using my slim fund of metaphoric knowledge as it existed the first high school year, I can say that the difference between Penelope Miller and all of the other females I had previously encountered was algabraic: If other females = X, then Penny Miller = X∞.
I should here explain that, sociologically, our school’s population in that era was roughly half American Secular Jewish, half Brooklyn Second Generation Italian. This produced an oddly compatible association of similar, yet unique sub-cultures co-existing in a bubbling stew of adolescent curiosity and fear.
I must admit that my instinctive preference was for the Italian, rather than the Jewish, girls. I believe now that this bias was due to my mother, who was Romanian, often mistaken by strangers for Italian. I shared her Olive complexion and jet black hair. My mother loved to flirt and tell naughty jokes. She danced and bounced her bosoms with frisky delight at family affairs. She loved to eat spicy food, and fancied herself a Gypsy. In the words of some forgotten comic, “Oedipus, Schmedipus, I loved my mommy.”
The more attractive of the Jewish girls I had seen tended to be on the standoffish side. They practiced a form of seduction which was so heavily encoded with barely audible innuendo that I was at a loss to figure them out. The Italian girls were less mysterious; they tended to be more blatantly erotic, at least in my fantasies, because they were more exotic, tantalizingly accessible, sneering with implied lust, and daring you to cop a feel.
The Jewish girls wore sweater sets and pleated skirts, white socks and “tennies.” They wore their hair in pony tails or bouncy natural curls. They were mostly named “Sharon” or “Eunice” or “Bernice.” The Italian girls wore sheer stockings and black pumps with straps that showed their heels, and tight skirts that showcased their asses, tight sweater sets that previewed their breasts — or at least their bras — in excruciating detail. Their hair was sprayed to a concrete immovable set, smelled strongly of alcohol and floral perfume. They were named “Maria,” “Gina” or “Marianne.”
In the first few months of high school, my hormones made few cultural distinctions. Stalking the halls, I might have been swimming in the warm Coney Island waters crowded with assorted females in bathing suits and hiding my boner.
Maria Mangeone’s stockinged heel as it lifted free of her shoe while sitting at her desk caused me strangling pain. A bra strap showing from Eunice Kagan’s sleeveless blouse was enough to give me cramps. The pink pilling that identified the forward curve of palm sized breasts hiding inside Bernice Moskowitz’ mohair sweater set me off. Gina Cappazola, sitting in the cafeteria across from Marianne D’Amato, freshened her lipstick while peering at her compact and my concentration was gone for the afternoon.
They were all attractive, at least in some particular. Certainly, it didn’t take much to attract me at that age. Some girls had one alluring feature or combination of features that I surveyed like a shopper while walking the halls or sitting in class: thrusting breasts, round firm tush, flowing hair, inviting full lips, teasing eyes.
But in my memory’s admittedly hyperbolic eye, Penelope Miller’s looks were of another species, a miraculous mutation, a monumental leap in evolution, a composite of all the best features I could have imagined in a girl — a superwoman. Her appearance was something I had never seen in real life and was totally unprepared for; I was unnerved by her flawlessness.
For one thing, she was neither definably Jewish nor Italian in appearance; I couldn’t fit her in with any of the other girls in the class. The phrase: “She looks like ____” (fill in the blank with any pitifully inadequate superlative, beginning with “a goddess”) could not be spoken without conscious understatement.
It wasn’t just that she had no particular “ethnic” features I associated with the other girls, some of which, in and of themselves were appealing. Neither was she my vision of some non-ethnic white bread paragon of the kind I had little contact with at that age, but had seen in movies and in magazines. She was neither comparable to Marilyn Monroe nor Audrey Hepburn, or any fantasy object in between. She was neither “Annette,” nor “Darlene” of the sexiest show on television, “The Mickey Mouse Club.” She was far above those shadows.
Penny Miller’s facial features were subtle and delicate, a perfect balance of sensuality, intelligence, and elegance. She was breathtakingly stunning, the kind you watch from a distance and avert your eyes as she nears, like oncoming high headlight beams. In repose, she exuded a sort of eerie calm, an unguarded innocent sense of assurance.
I have since seen many and known some of Penelope Miller’s genera of beautiful woman: who stand in elevators, ignoring awestruck stares with distant, icy mien; who with fresh wholesome American airs exercise in mylar, oblivious to the gasps they evoke; who enter rooms amidst stunned murmurs and whimpers. Penny Miller, as I remember her at fourteen, was something apart from even these exceptional beings I have seen during my long life of awareness of such creatures.
Beneath the dazzling symmetry of Penny Miller’s face, there was something even more unfathomable than mere striking beauty, a shell of mystery that separated her from others, even those girls I had written off as beyond my scope.
I had long realized that, to girls, I was destined to be categorized as “nonthreatening,” a boy who girls trusted, because I was clearly without any dangerous or sexy aura. Even in the unforgiving Darwinian blackboard jungle, this was considered a pitiable label.
Because I could be trusted not to overstep prescribed boundaries, there was a small sub-class of sympathetic girls (the sort who would later become social workers with the disabled) who ventured to invite me to their finished basements after school to dance, and then to make out on narrow sticky naughahyde benches beneath wood paneled walls. But humping was as far as I’d ever gotten in eighth grade; now I was a high schooler and expected to graduate to more complex and challenging activities. I had resolved to change the way girls thought of me, take more risks, no matter the likelihood of rejection. This was my primary goal in freshman year, that and making the baseball team.
Unfortunately, I’d discovered early that I was the kind of kid whose reach exceeded his grasp in both endeavors. My desires outdistanced my abilities by planetary measures. I knew this was a curse which had to be accepted as much as the bump on my nose, being left handed, and all the other immutable infirmities of my looks and abilities. In school, I was learning to adapt to my intellectual limitations, to promote strengths and manage weaknesses. Any subject that required comfort with numbers would always be a boring puzzle; if words were allowed, I could manage to get along. Accepting these realities would narrow choices for me, eliminating entire careers but opening others that might provide some “succor” (I used to like that word - it sounded dirty but isn’t), even while dashing childish dreams of becoming the next Oppenheimer or Chuck Yeager.
In the same way, I was learning that I would always struggle to be satisfied with the type of girls who went for me; to resist the trap of yearning for the girls whose pursuit offered only inevitable misery. I was beginning to suspect that this necessity to compromise, to settle, to accept mediocrity, was a constant that would trickle into all facets of my life; in fact, it would become the theme of my life. With a heavy heart, I gathered the sense to narrow my range, to accept the challenge of wanting those who wanted me.
Considering these truths, it was immediately evident that Penny Miller was so far beyond my grasp that it was nonsensical to even dream that she might have anything to do with me, in a sexual way that is, which was the only way that counted to me at that age. It took me until December 1st to build the courage to even speak directly to her.
By that time, she knew my name because I was a talker in English class, my arm always upraised to answer a question about the subject matter. In those days, I knew how to write a sentence within the rules, and could even spell, before spell checkers when spelling counted. I was such a nerd that I didn’t know yet that it was uncool to participate in class discussions much less to volunteer an insight, showing that I was bright and that I’d actually read and understood the material.
I was slow to realize that there was extreme social risk in seeming to curry favor with the teacher, who was required by the prevailing social code to sweat through his curriculum without student assistance. Luckily, I was also a smart ass, and occasionally made clever funny asides that made the class laugh and the teacher scold me. As far back as fifth grade, I’d stumbled upon the discovery that class clowning could be a route to a certain limited popularity for me.
A few of my wise cracks evoked tepid smiles from Penny Miller, as revealed by my frequent stolen looks for her reaction. But these blips were not enough to encourage me to take the plunge into the bottomless chasm that separated us.
Penny’s general indifference to my charm was a minor setback, completely lacking in surprise, even somewhat comforting. Once you know you can never have the most expensive toy, settling for second best becomes acceptable, necessary for mental health. I was used to hand-me-downs from my brother. My closet was full of damaged model airplanes, one-legged tin soldiers, flashlights with chipped lenses. Even my Schwinn had lost a fender. I could make do.
There were a few girls who showed interest in me in that first year. In my Algebra class, plump Gina Maione giggled at my jokes and allowed me — over a painfully long period of time — to persuade her to permit me to put my hand on her breast and then, after the glacial passage of eons, to move my fingers under her sweater and, eventually — with the coming of a new Ice Age — to slip a tip of a finger under her bra while we humped. All the while, I listened intently for the arrival of her parents, who would surely discover us, kill me and toss my hacked up body into the swamp near the school — or worse, would force me to marry Gina and to spend the rest of my life hauling garbage for La Famiglia.
For the most part, I smothered my hormones in sports. At the time, I didn’t make the connection between sports and sexual urges, but it was clearly more than a coincidence that freshman sports was very big for almost all the boys. To a kid in Brooklyn in the 50's, baseball was like the military to a Prussian lad, the first love and the dream for a life’s work.
Artie sent me a lot more of this garbage, which I'll post later, if anybody cares.
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
"After Words" - Act 1, Scene 1
The crying is what always gets to Ben. Acid that etches into his ... No, don’t say “heart.” Ben wouldn’t get caught in that trap again.
Okay, but Tracey sure knows the break-up drill. First and last: make it hurt; it’s her specialty. Red raw cheeks, stringy after-sex hair, “I-thought-we-had-something-going” patter.
From the bathroom, Ben hears bottles dropping into a plastic shopping bag. Inching toward the front door, he whines, “Tracey, you don’t have to do that.”
Hears, “No(sniffle, sniffle),” breath catching. “I do have to do this. It’s called (sniffle, cough) closure.”
“Oh yeah.” Ben lips the word, ‘closure.’ Mumbles, “I remember that one.” It’s an icy wind from his past: “closure,” what therapists prescribe to kill all the memories — the good, the bad, and the silly — like an indiscriminate anti-biotic. A laxative that empties your soul.
Tracey slinks from the bathroom. Drops the Ralphs bag full of discarded Ben mementos on the coffee table. Sits on her couch. Allows him to see a leg, thighs, a hint of crotch that he is going to miss. Covers with her robe and rests her arms across her stomach, bends forward to underscore the pain he causes her.
Eloquent, that’s what she is.
“You want the Bowl tickets?”
Pleasant surprise escapes. “You got them?”
“Yeah,” with eyes saying, that hurt. “There were plenty left after all.” Takes a cheap shot. “Apparently not much demand for Greek folk music concerts.”
“No kidding?” Ben regrets this, then thinks, fuckit, be tough. “You don’t want them?”
She makes a face that Ben remembers later as the one bright spot of the evening. Dumps the tickets into the bag with Ben’s parting gifts, holds the burden toward him, her eyes squeezed tight. Ben takes the bag without touching her hand.
“I found the (sniffle) blue briefs I bought you. I put them in there.”
“Oh, yeah, thanks,” mumbled aloud. “Wondered where those went to.” Resumes his moon-walk retreat. “Better be going, Trace. Meeting at nine and you, probably, well ...”
Her hands press against her eyes. She runs fingers through her hair. “I’m calling in sick,” seeps through elbows.
“Sure, good idea.” Waits for the next volley, but her timing is perfect. He would have to stay on the hook for another in the string of silences. He owed that much.
Fingers near the doorknob, he risks one more word, just one: “Then ...”
He hasn’t accounted for her talent for ambush. Tracey the Tracer, he once named her.
Sniper bullets zing into Ben’s body without mercy: Thud! “Shaeffer, you’re just like the others, after all. You make a clean getaway, slink into the night.” Thump! “You won’t find anyone better than me, you know. Not in a million years.” Thwak!
Wounded, he still finds the strength to grasp the knob. “I know, Trace, I won’t even try.”
Walking the stone lane to the condo gate, wounds begin to sting. He post-mortems the exchange in his head. When he gets to the curb, he dumps the Ralphs bag into a trash container — after removing the Bowl tickets.
“I know, Trace, I won’t even try.” That was good, he says to himself later. That was at least something he meant at the time.
Under the circumstances, it was almost admirable.
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
Okay, but Tracey sure knows the break-up drill. First and last: make it hurt; it’s her specialty. Red raw cheeks, stringy after-sex hair, “I-thought-we-had-something-going” patter.
From the bathroom, Ben hears bottles dropping into a plastic shopping bag. Inching toward the front door, he whines, “Tracey, you don’t have to do that.”
Hears, “No(sniffle, sniffle),” breath catching. “I do have to do this. It’s called (sniffle, cough) closure.”
“Oh yeah.” Ben lips the word, ‘closure.’ Mumbles, “I remember that one.” It’s an icy wind from his past: “closure,” what therapists prescribe to kill all the memories — the good, the bad, and the silly — like an indiscriminate anti-biotic. A laxative that empties your soul.
Tracey slinks from the bathroom. Drops the Ralphs bag full of discarded Ben mementos on the coffee table. Sits on her couch. Allows him to see a leg, thighs, a hint of crotch that he is going to miss. Covers with her robe and rests her arms across her stomach, bends forward to underscore the pain he causes her.
Eloquent, that’s what she is.
“You want the Bowl tickets?”
Pleasant surprise escapes. “You got them?”
“Yeah,” with eyes saying, that hurt. “There were plenty left after all.” Takes a cheap shot. “Apparently not much demand for Greek folk music concerts.”
“No kidding?” Ben regrets this, then thinks, fuckit, be tough. “You don’t want them?”
She makes a face that Ben remembers later as the one bright spot of the evening. Dumps the tickets into the bag with Ben’s parting gifts, holds the burden toward him, her eyes squeezed tight. Ben takes the bag without touching her hand.
“I found the (sniffle) blue briefs I bought you. I put them in there.”
“Oh, yeah, thanks,” mumbled aloud. “Wondered where those went to.” Resumes his moon-walk retreat. “Better be going, Trace. Meeting at nine and you, probably, well ...”
Her hands press against her eyes. She runs fingers through her hair. “I’m calling in sick,” seeps through elbows.
“Sure, good idea.” Waits for the next volley, but her timing is perfect. He would have to stay on the hook for another in the string of silences. He owed that much.
Fingers near the doorknob, he risks one more word, just one: “Then ...”
He hasn’t accounted for her talent for ambush. Tracey the Tracer, he once named her.
Sniper bullets zing into Ben’s body without mercy: Thud! “Shaeffer, you’re just like the others, after all. You make a clean getaway, slink into the night.” Thump! “You won’t find anyone better than me, you know. Not in a million years.” Thwak!
Wounded, he still finds the strength to grasp the knob. “I know, Trace, I won’t even try.”
Walking the stone lane to the condo gate, wounds begin to sting. He post-mortems the exchange in his head. When he gets to the curb, he dumps the Ralphs bag into a trash container — after removing the Bowl tickets.
“I know, Trace, I won’t even try.” That was good, he says to himself later. That was at least something he meant at the time.
Under the circumstances, it was almost admirable.
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
A Very Short Romantic Comedy
ACT I
“Do I love you?”
His question shocked her. Was he trying to be clever? He sounded confused, helpless, like he had missed something that was really important. He was terrified, as if asking, “Is there a spider on my back?”
She hedged her bet. A gentle tease; a test. “Well, let’s see,” she said through a smile after wetting her lips. She put a finger to his face, actually touched it, traced a line that cut deeply from his brow to the bridge of his nose.
“Your skin is pale, a bit clammy. Your eyes are ...” There she paused, trying to find a word for it, decided on, “trapped.”
“No,” he said quickly. “No, that’s not it. Not at all.”
She put her palm on his cheek to stop his rant. “No fever.”
“You sure? I’m feeling awfully warm.”
“You are? Well, that might be a symptom.” Still smiling, she asked, “Swollen glands?”
He put his own fingers to his throat, where he thought his glands should be, the ones that hurt when he swallowed.
“How ‘bout other glands?” This she said with a laugh in her voice. When he didn’t get it, she lowered her eyes and raised them and lowered them more pointedly until he did.
“Well, yeah, there’s that. But ...” he didn’t finish the “but” and she figured out what he meant by the shrug that followed.
“Still, it is some evidence.”
“C’mon, be serious,” he whined.
It took her a while to say, “I am very serious. You’re asking me if you love me. Not if I love you, right?"
"Uh, that's right."
Well, no one ever asked me that question before.”
“Really?” It hadn’t occurred to him that the question was unusual, although, when he considered it, he didn’t remember ever asking it or even hearing it asked. Another thought led him to say, “I suppose all the guys you know always know that they love you, huh?”
Once she figured out the meaning of that convoluted sentence, she really let go a laugh. “That’s right. Sooner or later, they all know that they do. Or that they don’t.”
That’s when his breathing got away from him.
ACT II
“You’re hyperventilating,” she said, her smile all gone. “Relax.” and when he didn’t, “Do you have a paper bag?”
He gasped. “Am I gonna heave?”
His chest was heaving plenty. She put her palm on his chest, and repeated “relax” a few times, but the words and action had the opposite effect on him. His pallor turned almost gray, but with silly red dots on his cheeks and the tip of his nose, clown make-up.
Finally, she was really alarmed. She took his face quickly with both hands and pressed her lips to his, blew a lungful of air into him. That did the trick, and his shoulders sagged.
ACT III
When she inhaled, his tongue was sucked into her mouth and with it, his question was finally and certainly answered.
By the time her lips unstuck from his, their bodies were lying side by side, tangled in a pile of semi-discarded clothing, bed sheets twisted like sheet metal after a tornado.
Finis
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
“Do I love you?”
His question shocked her. Was he trying to be clever? He sounded confused, helpless, like he had missed something that was really important. He was terrified, as if asking, “Is there a spider on my back?”
She hedged her bet. A gentle tease; a test. “Well, let’s see,” she said through a smile after wetting her lips. She put a finger to his face, actually touched it, traced a line that cut deeply from his brow to the bridge of his nose.
“Your skin is pale, a bit clammy. Your eyes are ...” There she paused, trying to find a word for it, decided on, “trapped.”
“No,” he said quickly. “No, that’s not it. Not at all.”
She put her palm on his cheek to stop his rant. “No fever.”
“You sure? I’m feeling awfully warm.”
“You are? Well, that might be a symptom.” Still smiling, she asked, “Swollen glands?”
He put his own fingers to his throat, where he thought his glands should be, the ones that hurt when he swallowed.
“How ‘bout other glands?” This she said with a laugh in her voice. When he didn’t get it, she lowered her eyes and raised them and lowered them more pointedly until he did.
“Well, yeah, there’s that. But ...” he didn’t finish the “but” and she figured out what he meant by the shrug that followed.
“Still, it is some evidence.”
“C’mon, be serious,” he whined.
It took her a while to say, “I am very serious. You’re asking me if you love me. Not if I love you, right?"
"Uh, that's right."
Well, no one ever asked me that question before.”
“Really?” It hadn’t occurred to him that the question was unusual, although, when he considered it, he didn’t remember ever asking it or even hearing it asked. Another thought led him to say, “I suppose all the guys you know always know that they love you, huh?”
Once she figured out the meaning of that convoluted sentence, she really let go a laugh. “That’s right. Sooner or later, they all know that they do. Or that they don’t.”
That’s when his breathing got away from him.
ACT II
“You’re hyperventilating,” she said, her smile all gone. “Relax.” and when he didn’t, “Do you have a paper bag?”
He gasped. “Am I gonna heave?”
His chest was heaving plenty. She put her palm on his chest, and repeated “relax” a few times, but the words and action had the opposite effect on him. His pallor turned almost gray, but with silly red dots on his cheeks and the tip of his nose, clown make-up.
Finally, she was really alarmed. She took his face quickly with both hands and pressed her lips to his, blew a lungful of air into him. That did the trick, and his shoulders sagged.
ACT III
When she inhaled, his tongue was sucked into her mouth and with it, his question was finally and certainly answered.
By the time her lips unstuck from his, their bodies were lying side by side, tangled in a pile of semi-discarded clothing, bed sheets twisted like sheet metal after a tornado.
Finis
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
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