Mama is cooking spaghetti for dinner tonight; I love my Mama’s spaghetti. I can smell the hamburger and onions cooking in the skillet, hear it sizzling all the way in the living room, while I watch The Three Stooges on the TV, Curly wearing a skunk hat and Moe after him with a tomahawk. Karen is upstairs, playing with tinker toys in her bedroom. Suddenly, there comes a sharp, loud knocking at our front door, and there is something almost urgent about it. I am a big boy now: I call into the kitchen, “I’ll get it!” and when I open the door, our neighbor Pat, who lives at the other end of the building, is standing on our small concrete porch, puffing hard on a cigarette and pacing back and forth.
“Hi, Billy,” she says to me, though she is looking over me into the apartment, her eyes darting around nervously. “Your mama at home?”
“Yeah,” I say, opening the door wider. “She’s cooking dinner.”
Pat breezes past me with a trail of cigarette smoke following her like the wake of a passing boat. “Thanks,” she says.
Mama has stepped out of the kitchen. “Who is it?” she says.
“It’s me, Barbara,” says Pat. She walks to where Mama is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, then starts pacing again, in front of Mama, back and forth, back and forth, all the while puffing away madly on her cigarette. She looks for a moment like she’s going to speak, then shakes her head and doesn’t say anything.
“What’s wrong?” says Mama. “Are you alright?”
“No,” says Pat, who has paused to spit out a bit of tobacco onto our floor. “No, I am not alright, Barbara.”
Mama’s apparently not sure what to make of this, and stays quiet. Pat begins pacing again, but holds her cigarette between her fingers and points through our living room wall in the direction of her own apartment. “I’m livid!” she says. “Livid!” The she stops. “I just got home, and guess what I found? Guess!”
Mama shrugs. “What did you find?” she says.
“I found my Billy and that little shit babysitter Kathy, upstairs, on his bed, and he was on top of her, fucking her!” Pat bobs her head sideways when she says fucking, and rolls her eyes as if her brains are somehow being scrambled behind them.
Pat is Mama’s best friend. She moved into the end apartment just a few months ago. She has three kids, same as Mama, and her middle kid, Billy, who is seven years old (same as me), is my new best friend, too. I can’t help looking toward our wall myself, as if I can see through it and into their apartment, where my mind’s eye floats up their stairs and into Billy’s room, looking now at Billy’s little body lying on top of Kathy, the tall, skinny blonde girl who lives in the middle apartment in the next building down from ours, and whom everyone on this end of the projects seems to know, thirteen years old, and who actually has titties. “Wow!” I say, awestruck.
Both Pat and Mama shoot me a look. “You watch your mouth, young man!” Mama says to me.
“Yeah!” says Pat, pointing her cigarette at me. “You kids are entirely too young to be pulling this kind of crap!” She pokes her cigarette at me in time with the words en-tire-ly too young, as if she’s chiseling them into rock.
Mama glares at me for a moment longer, then turns and walks back into the kitchen to stir the hamburger meat. “What did you do? Did you pay her?”
“Pay her!” explodes Pat, bugging her eyes out, following Mama into the kitchen, with me close behind, and Pat looking at Mama like she’s crazy. “Hell, no! I told her to get her clothes on and get the hell out of my house, and she should consider herself goddamn lucky I don’t call the cops on her!” Pat’s face is red. She coughs, then, holding her cigarette away from her so she doesn’t knock off the ash.
“And what about Billy?” says Mama.
Pat closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I don’t know what to do with that kid,” she says. “I swear to god there are times when I want to strangle him!”
Mama looks at me sidelong. “I know exactly what you mean,” she says, scrunching up her mouth in disgust.
Pat shrugs helplessly. “I’d beat him if I thought it would do any good.” She took a deep drag from her cigarette. “Which it doesn’t. So, the best I could think of was to take away his new scooter for a month, but I’m having a hard time with that. I mean, it’s not like she wasn’t the one in charge, even if Billy was on top. He’s seven years old, for crissake!”
Mama just shakes her head. “These kids,” she says. “This world! What is this world coming to?”
“Seven years old,” says Pat to the wall. “And fucking a thirteen year old! Jeezuz Christ!”
Mama’s blood is starting to rise to her face; it’s almost as red as Pat’s. She stirs the meat some more, then drops her spoon abruptly into the skillet and turns to face me. “I hope you’re learning something here, young man,” she says, pointing. “and I hope it’s this: if I ever, ever catch you fucking anybody while you’re living under this roof, I will personally beat you to within an inch of your life. Do I make myself clear?” She says this slowly, as if each word has special meaning that has to sink in before the next one can be uttered. “Well, do I?”
“Yes,” I say, backing away from her.
She stares at me for several seconds before her face softens. She picks up the spoon and stirs the meat, then turns off the burner on the stove. “Go outside for a while,” she says. “Dinner will be ready in about half an hour. Stay out back here so you can hear me when I call. Don’t make me come looking for you.”
“But I was watching Three Stooges,” I say.
“You watch Three Stooges every day. I want to talk to Pat alone, and I don’t want little ears picking up everything we say. Now, move it, or else.”
I can hear the theme song for the next film short. Wah-wah-wah, wah-wha-wah, like an orchestra of ducks. Mama looks at me, and I hang my head and start for the door. “Yes, Mama,” I say.
A week later, when I get home from school, I see Billy’s little sister, Sissy, playing something like hopscotch outside her back door, throwing a safety pin onto the concrete and hopping back and forth over it. But she’s only in kindergarten, and I figure she doesn’t know the rules yet. She’s holding a small dark brown bag in one hand, M&Ms, it looks like. Every once in awhile she stops and takes a green or a red or yellow candy from the bag and pops it into her mouth, then starts hopping again.
I watch her for awhile from my back porch, not necessarily wanting to go inside yet. In a while, she notices me and comes scurrying over to my walkway. “Hi, Billy!” she says, brightly. Her hair is almost white, it’s so blonde, and cut straight across her forehead. “Do you want to play hopper-scotch with me?” She holds her M&Ms out: “Want some candy?”
“Sure,” I say. I hold my hand out and she pours almost all the candy into my hand, but she doesn’t seem to notice, she smiles and starts hopping around the walkway. Once, she trips on the tall grass edging, and falls, but gets right up again, giggling. I wonder to myself how anyone can be so happy.
We play hopscotch on the walkway there, or something like it, so Sissy won’t feel bad, and after a while, when we get bored with that, she says, “Do you know any games we can play?”
I try to think of something I can play with a kindergarten-aged girl. Checkers? Candy Land? Nothing comes to mind. Then Sissy bends over to pick up one of the candies she’s dropped, and an idea pops suddenly into my head.
“I know something,” I say.
Sissy is all ears. “What?” she says.
“Have you ever heard of fucking?”
“Fucking?” says Sissy, frowning. “What’s that?”
I stand up from the porch where I’m sitting and take her hand. “I’ll show you,” I say. Then I take her to the other side of the building, the front, where the tall bushes are, against the wall, where someone can sit behind them and not be seen by anyone who didn’t know they were there. I tell Sissy that fucking is lots of fun, but that our parents might not like it if they knew we were playing it. And we shouldn’t tell anybody what we’ve done.
“Why not?” she asks.
“Well,” I say, grabbing at the first straw that enters my brain, “it’s—it’s like eating a candy bar just before dinner. You know how they don’t like that.”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s why,” I say.
Sissy thinks about this for a moment, my stupid explanation obviously not registering with her. But she finally shrugs, and says “Okay.”
She goes with me behind a particularly thick patch of bushes, and I order her to lay down, which she does, though the ground is moist, and full of dead leaves and who-knows-what underneath them. Then I get down next to her and immediately reach under her dress with pink elephants on it and take hold of her panties. A few seconds later and I have them down to her ankles, far enough that I can spread her knees apart. So far she has said nothing, though I can see the question on her face: exactly how is this game played?
Then I unzip my own pants and pull them and my underwear down past my knees, and, lifting up Sissy’s thin dress, lie down on top of her.
“What are you doing?” she says, grunting under my weight, though I can tell she’s asking more out of curiosity than anything else.
“We’re supposed to kind of move around like this, and uh—“ I’m fumbling for something to say. I can’t tell her that I don’t have a clue what I’m doing, how this is supposed to work. The image in my head, taken from a crumpled photo one of the sixth-grade boys was showing around the schoolyard, is growing faded in my head, unclear.
I know at least this: it has to do with the man’s thing. He puts his thing between the girl’s legs, and moves around, until something happens. I situate my own thing somewhere at the juncture of Sissy’s legs, and move around, grinding her buttocks into the earth underneath us. Nothing is happening. Nothing. What is supposed to happen? The only idea that comes to me, is—to pee. I relax my grinding, and in a moment, I let loose with a small trickle of piss, barely enough to say I’ve gone pee. But it’s the best I can do.
Sissy is still grunting under my weight, and beginning to fuss. “I don’t think I like this game,” she says, frowning.
“I guess I don’t remember how to play,” I say, suddenly embarrassed. I get up off Sissy and pull my pants up and zip them. Then I help her with her panties, and when we come out from behind the bushes, she’s got leaves and loose dirt all over her back, so we spend the next minute with me whacking her backside with my hand. Then we stand there just looking at each other for a minute or two.
“I know,” I say. “Let’s go down to the park! I’ll swing you!”
Her smile is instantaneous. “Can we hold hands?” she asks.
“Sure,” I say. And we skip down the drainage ditch all the way to the park.