behind. She should’ve been startled but wasn’t. She’d somehow known that touch was coming, but it didn’t dislodge her from her world. It only brought Brooke into it. She turned to face her sister sitting cross-legged on the corner of the blanket. Brooke had the towel folded in her lap and patted it for Leah to lay her head there.
Leah smiled and did as told, lay back on the blanket so her head rested in the perfect cradle of Brooke’s lap cushioned by the towel. Brooke’s back was to the sun so her body shaded Leah’s face. She gazed up at her sister smiling down on her, her face etched against the deep blue sky, all the clearer in every detail for that background and the shadow it projected.
“From a distance they might think we’re boyfriend-girlfriend,” Brooke said from above.
Leah laughed, not so much at the statement as at the fact that Brooke’s face was upside-down, so her lips and words were upside-down. This didn’t hinder her understanding—she could read Brooke’s lips at any angle—but cast those words in a slightly different light, a surreal tone somehow in keeping with this glorious day. It all made Leah very happy to be exactly where she was.
Brooke followed her statement with a sly smile. “But no babies,” she said.
Leah blushed.
Brooke pushed the allusion one step further. “We don’t have the right parts.”
Earlier in the week Leah had burst into Brooke’s room waving a glossy magazine she’d found between the towels in their bath’s linen cupboard. She thrust the magazine in front of Brooke who was reordering her chemistry notebook while sitting against the headboard of her bed. The magazine was open to a full page photograph of a chisel-featured, hunky guy sitting in a chaise by a pool. The man was naked and his legs were spread apart, exposing a thick patch of dark pubic hair and a long but limp penis lying atop twin pillows of testicles in their scrotal sack. Brooke leaned forward and gasped then threw her hand over her mouth to stifle any further shrieks. She grabbed the magazine from Leah and turned to its cover. It was a year-old issue of Playgirl with the corners of the pages rounded over from frequent thumbing.
“Oh my God!” Brooke had said. “Where did you find this?”
Leah told her.
Brooke hooted. “I knew Matt was doing more in there than flossing his teeth! You’d better put it back.” She handed it back to Leah, holding it by the spine between thumb and forefinger as if handling something repugnant.
Leah took the magazine but held up the photo and pointed at the model’s private parts.
Brooke nodded. “So?”
So what’s that? Leah asked with a near desperate look.
Brooke suddenly realized just how naïve her sister was on matters of male sexuality. She’d known Leah was uninformed on the details of human reproduction, but had never stopped to consider just how uninformed. She felt a twinge of guilt at having let matters get to this point. She prided herself on being the bridge between Leah’s world and the real world, and it was time to correct a severe oversight. “That’s a penis,” she said as she pointed to the pale tube of flesh. “And those are testicles.”
Leah seemed perplexed.
Brooke grabbed the magazine back and leafed through its pages. There was a side view of the same model on another page. He had on an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt but was naked from the waist down, and his flaccid penis and sagging scrotum were more clearly defined in profile. “That’s a penis,” Brooke said. “And that’s a scrotum. Inside the scrotum are two testicles.”
Leah nodded slowly, her eyes wide with amazement.
Brooke thought no time like the present and continued. “The testicles produce the sperm. The sperm fertilize the woman’s egg. The fertilized egg grows into a baby inside the woman.”
Leah pointed to Brooke’s stomach. She’d learned about the woman’s side of this equation during her lessons on menstruation.
Brooke nodded. “Yes. Inside there, in the uterus.”
And then Leah pointed first to the man’s testicles then to Brooke’s uterus.
“I figured you’d ask that,” Brooke said with a sigh. Her finger drew a slow line from the model’s scrotum up into the penis then down out its tip. She then made a “V” with her fingers to represent a woman’s vulvae and continued the sperm’s journey out of the man’s penis and into the “V” of the vulvae and on through the air of an imaginary vagina and ended at her bellybutton beneath her pajamas.
Leah’s face was clouded by confusion and misunderstanding. Brooke hated that look on her sister’s face more than she hated anything in the world. It was an affront to her sensibilities and a sign of failure in her main purpose.
Brooke tossed the magazine on the mattress and jumped off the bed. She went over to her dresser and slid it off the wall and reached underneath its base at the back. She returned with a small white envelope. Standing on the far side of the bed, she raised her finger to her lips and looked intently at Leah in her standard expression of utmost confidence and secrecy.
Leah, though baffled, had managed her automatic response to Brooke’s assertion—a simple “X” over her heart in silent vow of silence.
Brooke nodded solemnly then opened the envelope. She slid a thin stack of cards out of the envelope and fanned them before Leah above the bed. There were four cards and from the back they looked like normal playing cards with a red diamond pattern and a white border. Then she turned the cards over and laid them in a neat row in the middle of the bed. The symbols in the corners of the cards marked them all as jacks, in the four suits. But it wasn’t the playing card symbols in the corners that riveted the gaze of both girls; it was the pictures in the middle of the symbols. Instead of the standard jack design of normal playing cards, these four cards had photographs of couples in sexual congress, a different couple and a different sexual act displayed on each card. Brooke pointed at the card showing a dark-haired man engaged in vaginal intercourse with a blond-haired and panting woman.
Leah looked from the card to her sister. And instead of showing shock or revulsion, she simply nodded. She pointed with her fingernail to the man’s testicles, drew a slow line along his erect penis and on to where it disappeared inside the woman’s vagina and onward to the woman’s belly, flat now where she was lying on her back on the bed, and drew in an imaginary hump there—the baby that would result.
Brooke was the one baffled now. How could Leah grasp all that so quickly, and stoically? She asked Leah that, with her eyes rather than her mouth.
Leah could smile now. She made two four-legged dogs with her hands and brought them together in rapid humping. She laughed. She’d seen dogs doing it many times, she just couldn’t translate it to humans—until now.
Brooke nodded—her sister, always and still the avid watcher and quick learner.
Leah now leaned over to study the other three cards, portraying fellatio, cunnilingus, and sodomy.
But before she could even fix the images in her mind, Brooke swept all the cards up and back into the envelope.
Leah frowned.
Brooke said, “One sex lesson at a time. You can figure the others out if or when you need to.” She picked up the magazine. “Now put this back, exactly how you found it; while I hide these raunchy cards.”
Leah looked at her. And Matt?
“Don’t let him know you found it.” She didn’t add what she thought—unless one day we have reason to let him know.
Leah had raised her finger to her lips, slid the magazine under her T-shirt, and headed out the door for the bathroom down the hall, walking as naturally as she could manage with a magazine plastered to her stomach.
Leah looked up now at her sister’s upside-down face against the blue sky and asked with her eyes and her hands—Where did you get those cards?
Brooke laughed. “I’ll never tell!”
Leah gave a fake pout that looked especially phony in her serene and innocent face pillowed on the towel in Brooke’s lap.
“O.K. I’ll tell you—Joey gave them to me.”
Joey Hans
on was a short and studious kid from two streets over. All the girls had loved him in grade school for his mischievous smile and cute dimples. But then he’d stopped growing and donned thick glasses and the girls stopped fawning over him. But he still had a way of gaining their confidence, as a friend and spy from the other side, meaning the other gender—guys and guy thinking and needs. And Joey, no fool outside the books either, used this connection to his advantage. Leah was shocked—partly that Joey had such contraband, more so that he’d share it, but mostly that Brooke would even bother to talk to such a nerd, let alone make a secret and risky exchange with him. Why did he give them to you?
Now Brooke blushed, which was a rare occurrence. “We worked a trade.”
Leah was uncertain what she meant but knew not to push. And the other cards?
“I think Joey made lots of trades.” She laughed and shook her head. “That bookworm knows how to work the angles. He’ll be a millionaire by the time he’s thirty!”
Leah laughed.
Brooke said, “I wonder who got the aces?” She stared off in deep thought. “I bet it was Liz Carver!” she hooted. The other girls called Liz Milkmaid for her adult-sized mammaries and her willingness to share those assets. The guys called her lots of other names, but mainly called her a lot—in the halls and on the phone—and she never lacked for male attention. Joey might well have parted with his aces in return for a chance at Liz’s favors.
Leah giggled to match Brooke’s mirth, but truth was Brooke’s cryptic allusions had moved beyond the scope of her imagination. There was no precedent for such teenage intrigue in her Victorian novels or at her special school, where everything was closely ordered and carefully watched. She’d wandered beyond her depth and had the good instinct to stop. She closed her eyes and let her mind drift.
Brooke stared down on her sister’s face, suddenly glad for Leah’s unspoiled innocence and passionate to preserve it. She lightly brushed her hair and the side of her face.
Leah’s eyes flashed open. What’s it like to be with a boy? she signed
“Whoa, Leah, I’m not that kind of a girl! You’ll have to ask someone else.”
At first Leah was confused then in an instant realized what Brooke had thought she meant. The image on that playing card, the Jack of Hearts, flashed through her mind but in no way attached itself to Brooke. She laughed, shook her head, then offered a clarification—hugging and snuggling and kissing an imaginary boy, right there in Brooke’s lap.
“Oh, that,” Brooke said, followed by a sigh that maybe she wasn’t aware of. She took a deep breath and thought for a moment, staring off at the lake. When she looked back to Leah, her gaze was simultaneously penetrating and distant. “Most times it’s incredibly awkward and clumsy, and you wish you had a manual you could give him to go home and study and try again later. But every once in a while, it’s perfect, Heaven.”
Leah stared up at her sister.
Brooke’s gaze suddenly came back to earth, back to Leah’s face in her lap. She sighed again. “There’s no way I can describe that, Leah. You’ll have to see for yourself.” She grinned. “But wait a little while, please.”
I’ll check with you first.
Brooke laughed. “To get Momma Brooke’s approval? I don’t think so. You’ll be on your own.”
A moment’s anxiety clouded Leah’s stare.
Brooke lifted Leah into a seated position then jumped up. “I’m going to rent a paddleboat.” She ran off to the ranger station, leaving Leah on the blanket.
Two minutes later she waved from the dock for Leah to join her, holding the key to a paddleboat’s chain lock in her hand.
The water was cold and their clothes quickly soaked, but their laughter merged with the spray kicked up by the furiously churning paddles in this their newest shared experience, out there in the middle of an empty lake under spring sun.
Matt headed off to college in the late summer, where freshman were not allowed to have cars. This gave the girls greater flexibility with usage of the station wagon, especially on weekend evenings when Momma and Father were using the Buick if they were using any car at all. They often attended dinner parties with some of Father’s business associates, or sometimes went out to dinner and a movie in what Brooke called an old-timers’ date though Leah thought it was sweet and hoped if she ever married she and her husband would still want to go out when they were old (Momma and Father were in their late thirties at this time).
Early in the fall Brooke reserved the station wagon weeks in advance for them to go to the State Fair on the Friday night of its opening. At her request, made in an off-hand way at dinner one evening, Momma had looked to Father who had stared back for a few seconds of pregnant silence before nodding once. And Momma said, “O.K. But back by eleven and no other kids in the car.” Brooke said, “Of course” in a way that suggested she was mildly offended they felt the need to verbalize such limits. Then she reached across and squeezed Leah’s knee under the table.
The sisters had gone to the State Fair, the fairgrounds only a few miles away, at least once every year far back as they could remember. At first it was always with their parents and usually on the Sunday afternoon of the fair’s closing. Then starting about five years ago, they were allowed to go alone together, but only on a weekend afternoon. Momma would drop them off at the pedestrian gate with instructions for them to be waiting at exactly that spot promptly at seven to be picked up. And Brooke and Leah said “Yes, ma’am” (each in her own way) and ran off to pay their youth fares (a dollar in those days) and immerse themselves in all the fun and excitement of that sprawling event. Brooke was partial to the rides and the games. Leah loved the exhibits and the farm animals. The two found common interest in the food (funnel cakes!), the more sedate rides (Leah wouldn’t get on the wild rides, watched Brooke waving and mouthing screams from the safety of the ground), and the livestock competitions (Leah watching the animals, Brooke their handlers, who were usually teen-aged boys in tight jeans, rodeo shirts, and cowboy boots). They loved the fair for the same reasons all youth love the fair—so much to do, so much energy—but also because they were complementary equals there. Brooke of course heard sounds Leah couldn’t (and did her best to mime them for Leah’s pleasure and laughter—especially the voices of the carny hawkers) but Leah saw many things Brooke missed, pointing out everything from a weeping toddler with an ice-cream cone upside-down at his feet to a fat woman with one too many beers squatting to pee behind the Octoberfest tent. The State Fair had become for them a kind of private playground within the public realm. They had other such playgrounds but none as varied and unpredictable as the fair.
So when Brooke parked the station wagon amidst the rows of cars and pickups in the field between the fairgrounds and the football stadium, they both were giddy with excitement. It was a cool clear fall evening and the sun had just set, painting the western sky in pastel shades. To the east, the multi-colored lights of the fair illuminated the flashing and whirling rides, and dust stirred by the crowds mixed with the smoke from the fryers and hung over the scene in a dream-like haze. Brooke could hear the alluring mix of the crowd’s murmur, the popping of .22 rifles and balloons pierced by darts, the shrieks of girls on the spinning rides. But she didn’t have to mime this medley of sounds for her sister. Leah felt the same pull in the lights and motion and blend of smells—nothing smelled like the fair!
Leah locked her door and turned toward the fair entrance.
Brooke caught her by the wrist, looked quickly around them to be sure no one was watching, then showed her the car key before tucking it up under the driver’s side front bumper. She took Leah’s hand and guided it to where the key sat on the lip of chrome-plated steel.
Leah nodded but looked confused.
“In case we get separated,” Brooke said. “Let yourself in, lock the car, and wait for me.”
Leah couldn’t imagine why they’d get separated but nodded to Brooke’s instructions. Who knows what could happen at the fair on
opening night? She marked the car’s location, aligning a light pole with the flagpole on the nearby football stadium’s upper deck.
And that was just the start of Brooke’s peculiar behavior. Her giddiness exceeded that normally reserved for the fair as she skipped between the rows of cars on her way to the entrance, occasionally returning to urge her lagging sister along. Then once inside the gates, she bypassed the Gravitron, always her first stop (“Need to scramble my brains to get in the proper mood!”), as well as the other “vomit ventures” (Brooke’s phrase, well-mimicked by Leah as long as others weren’t watching) along Ride Row on her way to the livestock pavilion. That was Leah’s favorite stop but never first, usually only after a ride for Brooke and a shared funnel cake with chocolate drizzled on Brooke’s half, strawberry and confectioner’s sugar on hers.
But not tonight. Brooke pulled Leah into the sprawling livestock building, one of the year-round buildings on the fairgrounds, used for trade and craft shows in the “off-season.” The sawdust-coated show ring and the bleachers lining one side were empty at this hour. The competitions wouldn’t start until tomorrow morning. Leah picked up a printed flyer listing the times for the first-rounds even though she wouldn’t be here. She felt a twinge of regret at missing those stately displays—the animals so perfectly groomed and dignified, their trainers trying to appear relaxed and composed while watching their charges’ every move, trying to anticipate any unscripted action and head it off before it was too late. To Leah the world inside that ring seemed the closest approach to proper order—humans (her own age, no less) watchful and caring of living creatures lovingly trained to behave in a certain way—even if that order was sometimes broken by a waterfall of yellow pee or outrageous brown plops the scent of which lingered long after the mess had been shoveled into a metal garbage can by the trainer’s attentive father or sibling. That empty ring planted a sense of loss in Leah that she was barely conscious of.
“Come on!” Brooke urged, tugging at Leah’s sweatshirt.
Leah followed to the livestock stalls.
They passed the Jersey and the Guernsey and the Brown Swiss aisles, most of those animals resting alone in the clean straw of their stalls, a few with sleeping or reading attendants beside them. They got to the Holstein section, much the largest; and Brooke slowed and started looking at the nametags taped or stapled at the head of the stalls—Poythress Farms, Meadowbrook Dairy, Robert H. Johnson Holstein. About two-thirds of the way down the long aisle, Brooke stopped at a block of stalls marked with a handsome wood-carved sign above the generic paper one—Ashford Farms. She peeked around the end of the first stall to