The beautiful confusion
It wasn’t that Cheryl’s kiss was completely unexpected. She had been pretty darn friendly up to that point, and the whole “you’ve got something on your lip” line was also heinously transparent. The question was why she had bothered at all.
But the answer to this question lay years before, in high school, while I was out on the football field cleaning up this storage shed the janitor had there. It was one of my afterschool odd jobs for condom-and-beer money. I was about sixteen, and thought I was pretty smart. While I was tossing things around in the shed, excited rhythmic yelps from the field suggested that the cheerleading squad was in practice. I took a not-very-well-deserved break to lean on the doorway and check out the action. They were high school cheerleaders, and therefore of my highest recommendation, at least at the time.
Some of these girls I recognized, as our local paperless pinup equivalents, and some of them were more anonymous. They were all bouncing around out there wearing their colorful banners of stretchy fabric, which stretched more on some than on others. At the time it struck me as rather salacious to put school sports team names over the busts of young girls and pretend it was all innocent. But then I met girls in college with t-shirts that read “Fuck Me” and forgot about it.
I watched the cheerful leaders for a while in their garden-variety acrobatics, knowing neither their position nor momentum most of the time, but extrapolating their performance into daydreams that were also crudely indecorous and better chronicled elsewhere. But besides the Heisenberg variety, I had plenty of uncertainty, and turned back to the shed and the tasks at hand. Ogling cheerleaders was not original, and it wasn’t going to get me into heaven, not even cheerleader heaven.
So I stacked boxes and boxed rags and tried not to touch the really dirty stuff. I heard only the last three steps of someone on the grass outside the door, and then, “Hi Jack.”
In the half-open door was a member of the cheerleader tribe, a doe-eyed, pony-tailed youth that the guys at the local ag college, or Jim Thompson, would call “poor for beef, fine for milk”. “Hi, Amanda,” I said back to her.
She smiled and stepped inside the shed. “Whatcha doing?”
“I’m just cleaning up a little for Mr. Dirksen.” The janitor.
“I saw you watching us,” Amanda dropped, and I felt chilly. Then she laughed. “I don’t mind. It’s no fun cheering when no one’s watching.”
I smiled back at her, or smirked, which was my version. It must have been a smirk, because her smile became a smirk, too. Our faces were already a few minutes into the future, but the conversation was lagging. “I wanted to tell you,” she said, “I’m moving this summer. My folks sold the house. I won’t be coming back to school in September. We’re going to Michigan.”
I said, “Really? I’m sorry to know that, Amanda.” She took half a step forward, then bounced back. “I’ll be sorry when you’re gone,” I said.
“I know we don’t really know each other,” she said. “I guess it’s too late now.” She laughed. “I thought you were cute.”
I looked at her deep saucer eyes, scrawny body, and burdened-down sweater. “You’re cute,” I told her monumentally.
She took a half-step forward again. She renewed her smirk. “Stop staring at my boobs,” she deadpanned. I drew in breath. Then she reached up and pushed on her breasts. I held my breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mind,” she whispered. I smiled at her. She let go of her breasts, which snapped back into shape.
We stood there, not very near each other. Amanda smirked at me across space, then smiled. “I know I can trust you,” she said. “You’re not like a lot of boys. I know I can trust you, can’t I?”
“Of course,” I said, which was true.
“You don’t think I’m funny-looking?” she asked me.
“No way,” I said poetically.
She smirked. “You’re cute,” she reprised. It was about this time I began to realize she had an agenda. She wanted to be admired. We looked into each other’s eyes across the crowded, empty shed. Her hands crossed to her elastic waist and she tugged her lettered sweater over her head. Her mousebrown pony-tail swished against her naked shoulder, sweeping where her bra strap dug deeply down. I think my mouth hung open a little as I stared at her flushed face. I know hers did. I took a step toward her, then stopped. She took one step toward me. Then I closed the distance.
I wrapped my arms around that little girl, and her back was hot against my frozen fingers. I buried my head in her neck and kissed her there. She seemed to let out steam from her mouth. I pulled around and kissed her on it, the thin, pliant mouth that was cured of smirking.
I leaned her back and tried to understand her with just my eyes. Her trembling face, her breathing chest. I just stared at her and stared at her, and she just stared and stared at me. Until she said with a quaver, “Do whatever you want.”
Now, I don’t know what she meant. I don’t know what she expected me to do. Most definitely not whatever the same line might mean from some hardboiled dame I meet down by the Hudson waterfront, or the Plaza Hotel. We were just kids. Even then, I wasn’t sure what she meant.
I supported her against my chest and with fingers that were unschooled in the domestic art of brassiere-unhooking, I undid her clasp in one motion. I pulled the bra off her as she gasped, and I kissed that gasp. I held her up with one arm around her shoulders, and I gazed down to see what I had brought forth. Let’s face it, we can make this romantic, but I was a kid, and this was the ripest pair of giant textbook tits I had ever had the opportunity to investigate. My palm pressed into one, the fingers tried to get around it; the fingers, the palm, and the breast moved aimlessly, but together. The owner of the breast breathed raggedly; the owner of the hand did not breathe at all. The fingers scouted new territory as the palm canvassed the heartland. Then I took them away and bent down to kiss that one-eyed face as warmly as I would a lover’s. (I never touched the other one.) Amanda, swear to god, she moaned.
Then her arms seemed to gain strength and purpose, and she put them around me and she kissed me hard. Then she pushed herself away from me, jiggling, and with whooshes, clicks, snaps, and rustles, got into her clothes quicker than she had gotten out of them. “I’ve got to go,” she said with wide eyes. She squashed herself flat against me and held me desperately. Then she ran across the field.
I didn’t know what had happened. I had had so little time to form an opinion on it that I hadn’t even gotten a hardon, although as I stood there reflecting, that changed. It made me feel pretty important, though, even though nobody had to know about it. It made me feel like I could expect more excitement in the future. Not necessarily from Amanda, who was going away anyhow. But maybe I had some kind of luck with women. In a way, I preferred that she was going away. It made me seem more like a love ‘em and leave ‘em hero, that we might never meet again, even though she was the one going away. I knew there would be others for me. In other words, I was a big jerk about it.
Of course, I only understood a small part of it. But what Amanda, and now Cheryl, and many in between have shown me is that it’s all a gift. You can’t go through life expecting anything from women, or trying to get something out of them, or manipulating them in tried-and-true ways. Weird things just happen as you float through intersections. And most importantly, don’t take it personally when they do. Everything is a gift. A big, hazy, not-about-you gift.
It isn’t much of a philosophy maybe, but it seems to describe the world I live in. And I wouldn’t normally be so full of myself as to title something after Fellini, but in this case I figured with both childhood and tits being involved, it was forgivable.
by Jack, February 25, 2004 1:49 PM | More from Amanda | More from Jack History Month | More from Women
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Fucking excellent!
Fucking lame!