“Are you nervous?” Abby asked, hands folded over her bag.
I turned away from the window and settled back in my seat. “Nervous?”
“You haven’t stayed in the same position for more than five seconds. Wouldn’t have something to do with Dave, would it?”
Was she kidding? It had everything to do with Dave. And yes, I was nervous. And excited. And a little bit scared.
“Just excited to be home,” I said.
“Me too.” Valerie was picking her up, and they were going out to a new club that had opened in College Park over the summer. “Hope you and Dave have a good time.” She looked at me knowingly. “A really good time.”
“We’ll try,” I said, and that sounded so naive and pathetic, it made us both laugh.
* * *
He met me at the baggage counter and pulled me into a hug, followed by a kiss about as long.
I backed away finally and smiled up at him. “Hi,” I said, and he grinned some more.
“Sure glad you’re back,” he told me. He looked a little heavier than he’d been when I’d left, a little fuller around the jaw, but mostly his shoulders seemed broader. Whatever; it looked good on him. Especially in his bright red Terrapins T-shirt. Wanted to make sure I knew I was back in U of M territory, I guess.
He picked up my luggage, a bag in each hand, as though they were mere five-pounders, and we made our way out the double doors.
“Hope you’re hungry tonight, because I’m cooking,” he said. “How does grilled steak, garlic mashed potatoes, and asparagus sound?”
“Garlic?” I said in dismay, then felt my face flush.
He smiled without looking at me. “Or not,” he said, and we headed over to the parking lot.
We were strangely quiet as we drove. Dave looked over at me occasionally and asked general questions about Oregon. We were like high school freshmen on our first date, I thought. So weird to go from good friends to . . . something more. Maybe we should wait. . . .
I began to feel slightly panicky, and Dave must have sensed it because he reached over and caressed my arm, and his smile reassured me.
The traffic began to thin out at last after we exited the beltway, and the farther we went, the more rolling the land became until we could see the misty rims of the Blue Ridge Mountains far off. I was looking at the mountains and thinking about the matching blue bra and bikini bottoms I’d bought in Eugene.
Sex must be so simple for guys. I’d been to Planned Parenthood, got the pill, bought the K-Y lubricant, the panties . . . Dave had probably just walked in a drugstore and bought a package of Trojans off the shelf. Done.
At his house Dave carried the cooler he had brought into the house, and we put all the food in the fridge.
“It’s beautiful here,” I said, looking out the sliding doors beyond the kitchen. “Not a house in sight from back here.”
“There are some great trails, but we’d need to go while it’s still light enough to see,” Dave said. “Are you up for a short hike before dinner?”
“Love to!” I said. “I’m wild to stretch my legs.”
Dave had put my bags in the guest bedroom, so I traded my sandals for sneakers and we set off, following one of the trails up into the foothills for a couple of miles, enjoying the rich earthy scent of the woods.
Looking at Dave’s broad back as he went ahead over the rough places, stopping to hold back branches to let me pass, part of me wanted to grab his arm and say Now!, and part of me wanted to go until we were both too tired to even try. I could say I got blisters. Splinters. Blisters and splinters. An allergy to pine trees. A plain old panic attack . . .
At the top of a bluff, however, we stood looking out over the valley, the dusk outlining everything in sharp detail—the trees, the shrubs, the stretch of meadow in white and yellow and lavender—and this time when we kissed, our bodies pressed together, I felt I was ready and followed him back to the house.
* * *
There was a wait, however.
I was in his arms again, my lips pressed against his chest. He smiled down at me and cocked his head toward the kitchen. “This?” he said, then nodded toward the bedroom. “Or that?”
“Dave . . . it’s . . . my first time,” I said.
He stood absolutely still for a moment, then gently pushed my hair from my cheek. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Well then . . . I suggest we eat dinner first.”
That made me laugh, and I leaned back away from him. “What? We need extra carbs or something?”
I loved the way his mouth sort of dipped at the corners when he smiled at me. “We need extra time, that’s all. And we’ve got all night.”
I don’t remember a whole lot about dinner. I remember peeling the potatoes and cutting them up to boil while Dave grilled the steaks. I remember Dave lighting two candles in the dining room and feeding him a stalk of asparagus, which we had undercooked.
Mostly, I remember trying to get myself ready in the guest bathroom while he cleaned up the kitchen. I’d been good about taking my birth control pills, so didn’t have to worry about that. I showered from the hike and checked myself over in front of the mirror. My teeth! I had to brush my teeth. What about my navel? Any lint in there? And, horror of horrors, my pee smelled of asparagus!
I cut the price tag off the blue bra and put it on, but before I put on the bikini, I took out the tube of K-Y jelly and read the directions on the box: Squeeze tube to obtain desired amount of lubricant. May be applied directly onto condoms. Reapply as needed.
What was the desired amount? When did I apply it to condoms? How did I know when to reapply? Who wrote this stuff?
There was a light tap on the door. “Need anything?” Dave asked.
“Do we have condoms?” I answered, a little embarrassed to admit I had some.
“Yeah . . . I’m okay with that.”
“I’ll be out in a minute,” I said.
I took the tube out of the box, flipped open the snap cap, and squeezed. A large squirt of clear jelly shot across the bathroom and hit the wall.
Look how much I wasted! I thought, and wondered if I should try to use part of the glob sliding down toward the baseboard. No, that would be gross. So I cleaned it up and tried again. This time I got a tablespoon or so and applied it the best I could. Then I pulled on my underwear, checked my teeth once more, and went into the bedroom, feeling strangely wet and gooey between my legs.
Dave was sitting up on one arm, the sheet pulled up to his waist. He smiled at me and held the sheet open for me to slide under. “Wow!” he said. “I always liked you in blue.”
I quickly got in beside him without looking under the sheet. What is the girl supposed to say to the guy when she sees him naked for the first time? Is “wow” appropriate? If she doesn’t say anything, is it an insult?
The air-conditioning was on and the room was cool, making it natural that I snuggled up against him. And somehow, reverting to good-friend status, I heard myself saying, “This is all sort of awkward for me.”
But Dave didn’t seem to mind. He kissed my forehead and said, “You’ll get used to it.” And then he kissed me for real, and I felt myself getting excited. I touched him and felt the condom. Dave caressed my breasts and let his fingers explore me, and after a while I heard him breathing more quickly and he edged up over me. “I’ll be gentle,” he whispered.
“That’s what the doctor said,” I told him, and then hated myself. Why couldn’t I think of sexy things to say?
Dave chuckled. “Oh, I love the way you said that,” he teased.
What? We were joking around? My first time having sexual intercourse and I’d made the guy laugh?
“Oh, Dave,” I said. “I’m really so awful at this.”
“We haven’t even started yet,” he said. And then he lay back on his side and smiled at me. “I can wait,” he said. “I think.”
I didn’t say anything the next time we tried, and neither did Dave. We were
too intent on making it happen, but it hurt!
Somehow I thought in the back of my mind that pain was mostly an old wives’ tale. Maybe a little pain. But I found myself pushing him back a little. He eased up some.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but he pushed again.
Maybe we had the wrong angle, I thought. Maybe the position wasn’t right. How did movie stars get by with just a tiny wince, followed by mind-numbing ecstasy?
And then, suddenly, he was in. I felt myself give down there and could feel him inside of me. The strain on his face and the way his head tipped back told me that he was coming. And then he collapsed on his elbows, his head tucked down by my shoulder against the pillow, and I nuzzled his cheek.
* * *
I think we both slept for a while, though at some point I went in the bathroom and cleaned myself up. I’d bled some, so I worried about the guest sheets, which we’d launder before we left. We should have put a towel beneath us.
Then I stopped and looked at my face in the mirror.
“Well,” I said to my reflection, “you don’t look a bit different.”
Sometime in the night Dave would have made love again if I’d wanted, but I was too sore. He offered to put his hand on me as Patrick had done, but I didn’t want any touching for a while.
“Just hold me,” I whispered, kissing him, so he did.
We mostly lazed around the next day. We danced and kissed and walked down to a stream and back. Dave drove to town later and brought back some gyro sandwiches and a Greek salad for our dinner.
The evening had cooled down enough that we could have a fire in the fireplace, and I helped Dave bring in wood and arrange it on the grate. Then we sat on the couch together, each with our separate laptops.
At one point Dave nudged me to look at his screen, and I leaned over. He had accessed his Facebook page and changed his status from “Single” to “In a relationship.” He was looking at me intently. “Okay?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said, and changed mine.
* * *
Gwen and Pamela and Liz and I got together one last time before we went back to school. Liz had been dating a number of guys up in Vermont, none of them particularly special, she said, so she focused more on the fun stuff to do there and told us how—after the first big snow last year—she and some of her friends had borrowed trays from the dining hall and gone sledding on a nearby hill.
Pamela had taken a course in modeling and another in advertising. Her big project last semester had been to film three short commercials, featuring herself in each one.
We gathered around the computer screen in my bedroom and played her DVD.
In the first sketch she was dressed in a leopard-skin bodysuit and was draped seductively, catlike, over the hood of a car. We laughed and cheered. It was so obviously sexist, so obviously Pamela, but she was good at it, I’ll admit. The next, surprisingly, was a commercial showing Pamela as a young mother with a five-year-old daughter, dressed in matching jogging suits and running along a neighborhood street together, their blond hair backlit by the sun, both of them the picture of health. This was supposedly an ad for a new protein breakfast bar, and Pamela looked just as natural in that as she had in the first one.
The third commercial showed Pamela in a black formfitting dress, standing in an elevator, looking gorgeous. A business executive gets on, gives her the eye, and makes a comment, which she ignores. He follows it up with a suggestive remark, which she also ignores. Then her cell phone rings, and when she answers, it’s clear that she’s an executive in the same company he is, even higher up the corporate ladder, and you can see him electronically dwindling down to the size of a mouse in one corner.
“Pamela, those are good!” Liz said, speaking for all of us.
“So . . . so . . . Pamela!” Gwen said. “What’s your field now? Are you still in theater?”
“Oh . . . I don’t know,” Pamela said. “I’m going out with a guy in advertising, and he’s opening some doors for me, so I’m sort of leaning in that direction. It would certainly pay better than theater. But, work aside, how are things going with you guys?”
“Alice has been going out with a guy named Dave,” said Gwen. “In fact, she spent last weekend at his place.”
“His parents’ place,” I corrected as everyone focused on me. “But no, they weren’t there.”
“Aha!” Pamela said.
“He’s nice,” I told them, turning my chair away from the computer and meeting the gaze of all three friends sitting expectantly on the edge of my bed. “And yes,” I added, “We. Were. Intimate.”
“Well, well,” said Pamela. “You have been busy this summer.”
I couldn’t read Elizabeth’s face. Surprise, I guess. “Wow! So I’m the last one,” she said finally.
“Don’t do anything rash,” Gwen said dryly. “It’s not a contest.”
But Liz was still staring at me. “Do you hear from Patrick at all?” she asked. “I mean, are you going to tell him about Dave?”
“What do you suggest? A telegram?” said Pamela, and Elizabeth’s face flushed.
I was glad we weren’t back in ninth grade, because I would have been expected to give out details. But I knew how it felt to be considered the naive one, so I added, “We haven’t been in contact for months, Liz. All I know is what I read on his Peace Corps blog.” I turned back to the computer and typed in Patrick’s blog address.
What I didn’t tell them was that somehow I found it easier to deal with my feelings about Patrick by keeping up with his work in Madagascar, not treating his blog as if it were something dangerous I couldn’t bear to read. This helped me see him as another interesting friend in my life, one of many. When it came on the screen, I read it aloud:
“RICE TRAINING! It went so well. Even though the road is washed out at this point and no vehicles are going in or out, we managed to bring in a Malagasy man from Diego to do the training. I found two men who could read and write and were really interested in learning with me, and Jessica brought two women from her village. It was three days of going into the rice field in the mornings, with lectures at the school in the afternoons. The guy was GOOD, and it was great to see people from my village frantically taking notes and asking questions. Basically, this is just a very regimented way of transplanting rice so that the yields are two times, four times, even up to ten times the amount of rice they would get from traditional methods.
I’m still extremely happy to be here. Jessica feels the same way. Yeah, I have my moments, but this is where I need to be right now.
“It’s so Patrick, isn’t it?” Pamela said. “He can make friends anywhere. I’ll bet you could plunk him down anyplace on earth and he’d pick up the language.”
“I wonder what he’ll do after the Peace Corps,” said Liz.
“He’ll find something,” said Gwen.
No one mentioned Jessica.
* * *
My own interests were closer to home as I started my junior year. I’d managed to snag one of the newer dorms, and this time Abby and Claire were rooming together, and Valerie and I were just across the hall. The four of us were in and out of both rooms so often, it was hard to tell who lived where.
I wanted to spend more time with Dave, but I was particular about where we made love. The only time I was willing to use our dorm rooms was when our roommates were away for the weekend. I’ll admit that planning one of these nights together was pretty exciting, but as far as the library stacks or the dorm lounges, those weren’t for me. Dave claimed he could do it anywhere, and I believed him.
“Just think how exciting it would be to try it in the shower,” he said one night, nuzzling my neck. We were lying on my bed together, fully clothed, because Valerie would be coming in later.
“The one on the bottom would drown,” I said, pulling out one of the eyebrow hairs that grew in a different direction over his eye.
“No, we’d be standing. You against the wall,” he teased.
?
??I’m having a hard time imagining the choreography.”
“We could manage,” he said, and we kissed again.
I was feeling more comfortable with Dave—about my body, about his, about sex in general, even though I was still pretty new at it. I was really careful to take my pill regularly, and Dave never objected to condoms. I wondered what it would be like to be actually married and not have to bother with pills and condoms unless you wanted to. To have a place you could be together every night without worrying about someone walking in.
One of the things I discovered was that the more freedom you have—no curfew about getting in at night, no restrictions on whom you could have in your room—the more decisions you have to make for yourself. Whom you sleep with, where, what kind of birth control to use, how to respect your roommate’s privacy . . . all grown-up stuff, and no parent to make the decision for you.
I was ready.
7
SCOO
The big event on my mind was Les and Stacy’s wedding coming up in November. True to his word, Les allotted four of the invitations to me. I wondered if I was going to be in the wedding party, but I found out there would be only one attendant, the maid of honor—Stacy’s best friend—and a best man, so naturally, I understood. With both Les and Stacy living in West Virginia, we were just happy that the wedding was to be here in Maryland. Even better, Stacy sent me a little note asking if I would be in charge of the guest book. She said that she and Les would like me to buy whatever dress I would like to wear—something I really loved—and to send the bill to them. You’ll be the first beautiful thing people see when they enter the church, she wrote. Wow!
Meanwhile, there was school, and I lucked out on some of the most popular classes, especially Human Sexuality, for which the two hundred seats usually filled up within the first three days of registration. I also loved Fundamentals of Design, one of my electives, and even the classes for my major were becoming more interesting, more specific: the Autistic Adolescent and the Social Basis of Behavior. Now that I’d flirted with the idea of changing fields and turned it down, I felt recharged, more certain I wanted a job working directly with people. Maybe that’s why a note on the bulletin board at the student union interested me. Both Valerie and I stopped to read it: Need to be needed? Your school needs you. Hear us out over pizza and calzones. And it gave a time and place, a conference room in the administration building.