by Ann Dulaney
(8/15/01)

This is how two people make a baby:

A man puts his penis next to a woman's bottom and pees on her.

On the steps of the south entrance of Watkins Elementary, Marie DeRuiter broke the news to me. She didn't call it sex, didn't call it anything. We were ten.

It would be two years before I believed her, two more before I tried it myself, and ten altogether to sort it all out.

"My mom and dad did it to get me," she said confidently, as if she had witnessed it. "Then they did it again to get my sister."

I pictured Marie's parents. Actually, I pictured Mrs. DeRuiter, in her usual place behind the wheel of their green station wagon, driving us to junior theater. I thought of the little Ziploc baggies of popcorn she always had for us, and I felt sick.

"My mom says I won't like the idea until I'm older. But most grownups say it's quite pleasurable."

That was Marie's attempt at ten-year-old erudition. Such syntax was born of reading books like Misty of Chincoteague and A Little Princess.

Most grownups say it's quite pleasurable.

My friend Sarah Durham was born with weak legs. She couldn't run, she couldn't ride a bike, she could barely walk. Although she was my friend I was embarrassed to be seen with her because she was so slow.

Until we were fourteen we would get together to curl our hair and play Barbies. Once while stroking the copper tresses of Disco Darci, Sarah talked about our friend Jenny Young.

"Jenny spent the night Saturday."

Sarah, in addition to being slow on her feet and prone to stumbling, was equally prone to stumbling over her speech. Sometimes when she fell it took a long time to resurrect her, with her disabled limbs sprawling heavily across the floor, as if she were affected by the denser gravity of some other planet. As if she would be happier in a world in which everyone crawled. I had to goad her to continue.

"Yeah? She spent the night?"

"Oh, want to hear something weird?" It was as if Sarah were changing the subject. But she wasn't. "Well, Jenny took a shower? and when she was done? she didn't put her P.J.s on?" Each pause sounded like a question. I had to keep nodding.

Sarah rolled her eyes back in her head in that weird way she had, like she's getting ready to laugh. Or pass out.

"She walked right down the hall naked. No towel even. And then she sees Sunny? and she goes, 'Here Sunny, here Sunny, come here boy!' And I thought she was just going to pet him or something?"

The hand holding the miniature fuchsia brush never stopped running it through the doll's hair, its rhythm never altered. Sarah's words dropped softly into the room, and I dangled from each syllable.

"Sunny starts licking her coochie. She goes, 'Hey, check this out.' And she just stands there in the hall and lets him do it. She doesn't push him away or anything - just pets his head and laughs. You know?"

Sarah died of multiple sclerosis, long after our friendship died of natural causes. My mother mailed me her obituary. Sarah Durham, 31. I didn't know what to do with the slip of newsprint, and because I had opened the mail while making dinner, I stuck it in my cookbook.

Now, whenever I make Five Alarm Firehouse Chili, Sarah's eyes look out at me. They're kind of rolled back in her head, like she's getting ready to laugh.

I spent a fresh autumn weekend at Marcie Dover's house when I was eleven. We stayed up late both nights, watching Creature Feature, Tales from the Crypt, and even an early morning airing of Hitchcock's The Birds.

We played Ouija and learned that Marcie would soon be asked to go out by Todd Webster, and that she would even lose her virginity to him. The Ouija board told us who among our classmates were still virgins. Shellie Johns was, definitely, and would be for some time. Shelley Orns was definitely not -- hadn't been for some time. Kristi, Amy, Jennifer...and myself, of course: virgins all.

Waiting for my mom's blue Beetle to roll up on Sunday afternoon, we sat on the sofa in Marcie's living room, a room seldom used in a house constructed in the generic trilevel style of so many in my hometown. It was a room that served no purpose whatsoever, except to provide the proverbial stranger with a formal place to sit; meaningless knickknacks rested atop lace doilies to the tune of a grandfather clock that ticked methodically but did not give the correct time. A seascape oil painting hovered above a mammoth stereo console -- a relic of a former decade but not yet an antique. The silence, the geriatric character of that room, and our two nights of giddy sleeplessness made us yawn until we thought our jaws would break.

We watched a girl, perhaps our age, perhaps somewhat older, collect mail from a box across the street. It was cold out, really cold. But the girl wore only a light windbreaker, which she had left unzipped, a halter top, short shorts, and cowboy boots. Marcie and I involuntarily burrowed into our warm sweatshirts, pulling the sleeves over our hands.

"Do you know her?" I asked Marcie.

"S-s-s-slut!" Marcie's reply was merciless in its implication.

"Does she go to Lakeview?"

"Nope, St. Pete's. I know a huge secret about her."

The girl returned with the mail to the house next door. I would no longer be able to cross-reference what I was about to hear with the real person. Marcie shook a bottle of carnation-pink sparkle polish and began dabbing her fingernails.

"This summer, while you were at camp, she and I did stuff together. She has an older brother. I used to think he was kind of cute, like in a Leif Garrett/Tommy Shaw kind of way? But now I can't stand him."

Marcie pretended to gag on something.

"One day, we're over at her house watching TV in her room. Her brother knocks on the door. She goes, 'I'm busy,' but he keeps knocking. She goes, 'go away!' But he doesn't.

"So then she says to me, 'Wanna see something?' I go, 'Sure.' She tells me to hide in the closet, and props it open just a crack -- like this -- so I can see out. Then her brother comes in and they start taking off all their clothes."

I began to feel that strange tingle. The first time I felt it, I was three years old. It was when I saw something strange on television: a man dressed as a snake charmer, naked to the waist, sitting cross-legged on a carpet, playing a long horn. The longer he played, the more the picture evolved and psychedelic patterns emerged, until there was no longer a man sitting on a carpet but a bizarre wilderness of trees and vines and flowers, curling and twisting as the tune played out. One of my favorite games after that was to sit on the floor, in the exact geographic center of a carpet, with my shirt off, and pretend to charm a snake with an imaginary horn.

I remember how it felt: sitting on a carpet with my shirt off, charming a snake.

"And then he just started doing it to her."

"What do you mean?"

"You know...doing it. They were humping each other."

One of the reasons I didn't believe Marcie's tale was that the girl I had seen was very obviously not pregnant.

"And then, when he was done, he got up, put his clothes back on, and left. She goes, 'Marse, can you get me a bunch of toilet paper?' And I saw her wipe herself off down there, and it was like a huge slimy sticky wad of snot or something, all white and totally gross."

"And that's what you want to do with Todd Webster?"

"Are you kidding? Ohmigod, gross me out the door. No way! I just want to lose my virginity with him, that's all."

We are thirteen, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and I am the Dungeon Master. I have spent weeks putting together the module, crafting the scenario of each room, planting treasure and monsters. And now my four players are no longer paying attention. Kurt, Pat, James, and my brother have lost interest and are putting the dice in their mouths and crunching them in their teeth. My brother, at age nine by far the junior player, wants to play Atari instead. I'm the only girl, and Pat and James are trying to make me laugh.

Kurt is telling us about a new girlfriend. A girl we wouldn't know, he says, because she goes to another school. Kurt only knows her from church. No one is listening to him. James has puffed out his face and is making frog eyes.

Kurt jumps up and stands against the wall, holding his legs wide apart, narrating his anecdote-in-progress. "So she's standing there like this, right? And she's says to me she wants me to eat her pussy out."

Hearing the word "pussy" makes me freak.

"Shut up, dork. Could we get back to playing?" I am incensed that my game has been disrupted. We have only been playing a half hour. All that effort, all that time -- up in smoke.

And now Pat and James are riveted. The frog faces vanish, and mottled patches of red appear on their cheeks. My brother squats silently on one knee and pokes at his toes.

"And I go, I'll only eat your pussy out if you suck my dick."

I am covering my ears, but I still hear.

"So I start licking her pussy out. I'm licking and licking. She tells me to put my tongue inside her pussy. And I go, 'I'm not doing that.' So then she has me put one finger in her pussy, and one finger in her ass. And while I'm doing that, she grabs her tits and starts shaking them really hard."

Kurt demonstrates. He is cupping engorged imaginary breasts and is shaking them maniacally up and down. Meanwhile, his hips gyrate. It looks like a comedic dance. Or a coordination exercise, like trying to simultaneously pat one's head and rub one's tummy.

In my memory of this event, I don't see Kurt acting this out for us. I see a real girl, a faceless, tall, naked girl with large premature breasts -- a girl who goes to church. And I can see Kurt, fully clothed in his striped rugby shirt, his Levi's and basketball socks, his comb peeking from his hip pocket, as he kneels under her, fingers inside her, mouth on her. I can see them both clearly, as if I had been there when it happened. I would recognize this girl if I saw her today.

I feel sorry for her. I want to be her. Sometimes, I am her.

"...And she starts jizzing all over my face! I mean, it was all over me, all over my shirt, my hair; it was like she was pissing on me. She just kept jizzing out her pussy. And I kept eating it, and she kept shaking her tits and going like this, and..."

Kurt is a frenzy of pantomime, lost now in his own story. He is laughing. "God! Don't you fucking...don't you fucking hate when that happens?"

All four of us -- my brother, Pat, James, and I -- we have been quiet, the dice have been quiet, our eyes have dilated to silent black disks. We all nod, as if we share a common thread, as if the same thing has happened to each one of us.

Yeah, we hate when that happens.

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