William Van Wert

The Porch

I'm in the eighth grade with Betty Jo. We're standing on her porch, the brown wooden porch, the size of a broom closet, with the uncovered yellow light overhead that makes us look like giant bees. There's barely enough room to stand. No room for a swing, a sofa. We can sit on the steps if we want, but if we're on the porch, we have to stand, and, if I shift my balance from one foot to the other, sometimes I touch Betty Jo. Just a brief touch, by accident, and I am totally aroused. Betty Jo is wearing the first perfume of her life, some sort of flowered scent, roses or lilacs, I don't know. But it's summertime, a hot June night, and she's also sweating. I can smell just the faintest whiff of body odor from her underarms, and that's what arouses me, not the flowered scent.

     She is Polish, dark and Polish, and her stern Polish father insists that the door be left open, at least ajar, so he can hear us if we make a sound, and so we can hear him when he tells her to come in or me to go home, which he does in a monotone, neither seductive to her nor admonishing to me. Just a drone. "Come in" or "Go home," the same flatness in his voice, as though life held no more surprises for him, the television on, illuminating thedarkness, where he sits in his undershirt with his warm can of beer.

      I've always loved Polish women. I'm Dutch, myself, but I've spent a lifetime loving Polish women, most of them dark-skinned American women of Polish descent, but some of them in Europe, in France and Prague and Warsaw to be exact. Betty Jo was the first. Maybe that's why I'm on the porch with her in the eighth grade.

     I'm forty-two years old, so I can't be on the porch in the eighth grade, but I am. It's a memory, then, a flashback. But it's so vivid that I don't care to call it a memory or a flashback or middle-age crisis or anything else. I'm just there, the being-there both powerful, as it was then, and pivotal, I know it now, to my sexuality. Something happens or doesn't happen on this porch, which affects me for the rest of my life, and that's why I'm here again, again and again, no matter how many times her father tells me to go home.

     We stand very close to each other, not kissing. I say it this way, because kisses weren't so automatic then. Today's eighth graders might be around the side of the house or in the dark backyard, half-way jimmied up a tree or on a blanket among the fallen apples, touching, poking, fondling, I don't know, all those things that came later for me and Betty Jo, and with other people.

     I have been in love with her since the second grade. We went to the same Catholic school, and we had this conversation then, where I told her I liked her second-best of all the girls, when really she was third, and she told me she liked me third-best of all the boys, and because I only came in third on her list, I put her instantly at the top of my list and just loved her forever after that.

     But now we're in the eighth grade and we have the changed bodies to prove it, she more than me. She's got breasts and hips now, no tomboy left. I'm taller than I know what to do with, more tall than I am graceful, my voice has dropped and I have this big Adam's apple I sometimes self-consciously hide with my hand. I don't know what there is to see in boys for girls, except the changes, any changes, change for change sake, and maybe we're all they've got to be attracted to. I can't believe it, I don't know why it's true, but I know it's true: Betty Jo is attracted to me. I think it's not my body at all, but the way I've grown surly at school, the way I slouch in my chair with my long legs and sass the nuns. She likes my rebellion. I'm the closest thing she's got to a James Dean, even though I look more like Ichabod Crane.

     I like Betty Jo and basketball, in that order. She doesn't have to be a certain way. In fact, she doesn't have to have a personality at all. She just has to look like she does and stand outside on the porch with me, sweating under the yellow light, staying close enough that we can smell each other's breath, not kissing

     It's not all innocent. There are things you can do when you're not kissing. Her father has just called her in for the umpteenth time, and each time he does this, she moves closer tome.

     "I think I'm fat," she says.

     "Oh no, you're not," I promise.

     She smiles. She knows she can count on me to say the right thing.

     "Like my boobs?"

     We called them boobs then, both boys and girls. She hadn't had them long enough to own them or be private about them or use them to drive boys crazy, so we could still talk about them as though they were something in a store she might or might not buy, depending on what I thought.

     Like them fine. Like to faint. Like to die when she asks me, because then we both get to look at them, and I don't know what she's doing with her looking, but with my looking I'm touching and tasting and nudging my nose in between and hibernating for many winters.

     "God, yes," I say, because we're just old enough to stop using God's name in prayer, using it now for emphasis, and this is emphasis. I can't say yes any stronger than to say, "God, yes."

      "They're not too big?"

     "They're just right," I say, careful not to show my tongue or lick my lips or appear too much like a hungry puppy.

     "Just right now, maybe, but I'm not done growing."

     "Neither are my hands," I say.

     Maybe I'm not quick enough to say this the first time I'm on the porch, and maybe this is just about enough for one evening's worth of summer and smoke, but I certainly have thought it and have said it on some subsequent return to the porch. It's important that I somehow answer and not just swallow sexual longing like so much unchewed food.

     My hands, my Dutch hands, have grown up to the exact sizeand contour of her breasts. Why can't she see this, now or at any other time?

     It occurs to me, from the vantage point of an eighth grader's body on Betty Jo's porch that three years ago, even two, we could have played a game of I'll show you mine if you show me yours. She could have bent over with her unbuttoned blouse and let me look down her chest. I could have moved my shorts over half an inch. That's all it would have taken. She might have slapped my hand, saying "Looksies, I said, but no feelsies."

     She is ahead of me in so many ways. Not that she is smarter than I am. She says, in fact, that I am so much smarter than she is. Even in the way I sass the Sisters at school, she says she can tell I know the right answers, and she respects me for not "scoring points" as a "brain." We didn't have the words like "nerd" or "dork" then. We just had "brain" and "book." I was neither, but Icould have been, according to Betty Jo, who often didn't know the answers, but never got called on, because the Sisters had a habitof picking on the boys. Why they picked on the boys was anybody's guess, but a right guess might range anywhere from "they were hung up sexually" to "they were recruiting for the priesthood, and, if the boys cooperated and gave the right answers faithfully, meekly and mildly, they made good candidates for the brainwash that sent them off to seminary."

     Betty Jo didn't want to keep me for herself, although she felt good knowing she had more power over me than the nuns had. She was already way ahead of me, thinking about all the boys she would date in high school. This standing on the porch with me was hot for now, good practice for now. I was part of her rehearsal.

     "God," she said, emphasizing what she was about to say, "I don't even know how to kiss, let alone French."

     "Me neither," I say, perhaps too quickly, because I already know from somewhere that girls want to think their boys are more experienced than they are and have something to teach.

     So, one night on the porch we touch tongues. We both lean forward, she puts her tongue out, I put mine out and we touch tongues. I can tell she's been chewing mints or something, because her tongue is sticky with the taste of it.

     "Have you been smoking?" she asks me.

     I'm two years away from trying my first cigarette, so conscious am I to keep my body growing for basketball, so sure am I that I can get to six-five or so if I don't smoke.

     "No. Why?"

     "You smell like my father."

     Her father smokes a pipe. Cheap tobacco, aromatic, CherryBlend or something. I realize there's only me and her father she has kissed, as far as men go. I feel a little cheated, though, because we have bypassed the lips-to-lips stage to get to this French thing, and I would gladly backtrack, I would crush her mouth with my mouth. The word "crush" comes to mind. I'm so wobble-kneed I couldn't crush a mosquito, let alone her lips. Maybe the word "crush" comes to mind, because it's what I'm feeling instead of what I'm doing.

     "Do you think sex is overrated?" Betty Jo asks me, and I know by the way she asks me that she thinks it is. It's amazing how freely we ask each other such things, questions we will never again feel so free to ask once we've actually started having sex.

     "Oh, I don't know," I say, like I was puzzling a math equation or something that needed logic.

     At this age we never admit to ignorance. We claim to know, we claim to have expertise, because we have to be cool. We make it up as we go along and hope to God we're never caught, found out, confronted.

     "I'm afraid it's going to hurt," she says with sudden candor, "and then I'll be stuck, having to do it for years and years, just to have kids and keep a marriage going."

      She's way ahead of me, but I can't bear to think of her in pain.

      "Not if it's done right," I say, as though I know anything about it.

      "What's right?"

      "I don't know. Slowly, tenderly. Maybe with lots of jellies or salves."

     "Sounds like a drugstore prescription. Where'd you get that stuff?"

     "I read it in a book."

     "A dirty book."

     "I don't remember."

     "Well, I just wish we could go back to being kids again."

     I agree, but it's a lie. Now that she is a woman, or at least has all the womanly things, I can't imagine her as a tomboy again, can't imagine her breasts deflating to nothing. She is absolute sexual perfection to me, already the model against whom all other girls pale, the one who lifts a room up by the floor whenshe walks in, and I wouldn't give that up for anything in the world.

     It gets out of hand. I don't know when exactly the porch visits stop, but it's during the summer after eighth grade, after we've graduated from Catholic school and before we enter public junior high. I don't know how they find her, but she is discovered by all the Protestant boys. She is the rage. There is always someone standing on the porch with her, another waiting at the corner, still others talking about her at the tennis courts two blocks away. I can't keep her my private secret long enough. She begins to wear lipstick and eye shadow, red tank tops and pink shorts, loud colors that stay loud against her tanned body. She begins to look, I don't know, whorish.  Slutty. Rings around her eyes, raccoon rings, like she isn't sleeping enough, and nervous too, nervous-irritable, like she's not eating at all, starving herself to stay thin and not bulge like her Polish mother.

     Her parents greet me at the door. She's not home. Of course, they will tell her I stopped by. I should stop by again, but maybe I should call first. She doesn't return my calls. She's evasive when I get her on the phone, late for doing something, in a hurry, has a headache, but yes, we'll talk soon.

     I become a frantic voyeur, spying on her and her house, especially the porch at night. One boy seems to have gained an advantage over the others. His name is Mike Driver. A name like that, I think he must be a golf club. He's taller than I am, good-looking, a fancy dresser. He's a rich kid. His family belongs to the country club. They ski in Aspen. He is what we now would call a yuppie. Ahead of his time, a pre-Sixties yuppie boy. He makes her laugh. He doesn't shift his weight from one foot to the other, like I did. He stands straight and doesn't seem to sweat at all under the hot yellow light bulb. Betty Jo is the one who looks awkward now. She brings brownies out to the porch and feeds him hand-to-mouth, her hand, his mouth. She never brought me food like that.

     She is allowed to date a full year-and-a-half before my parents let me go out. I can't compete. Even if I could, I couldn't. Rebellious is out, rich is in.

     But rich is out before I know it. Just as I am settling into a good lifelong hatred of this boy, he's out, broken, disconsolate, sitting at the tennis courts, with other boys asking him in rushed, quick queries like hungry dogs, what happened? I recognize this brokenness and stay away. I do not sympathize with him.

     She fed you brownies, hand-to-mouth, I think. What more do you want?

     Before I have ever had a date, been allowed to have a date, had the courage to ask for a date and the ego to survive someone saying no to a date, Betty Jo has already dated and now, yes, exercised her new power, the power to break up with someone.

     Ned is the new boy on the porch. I know this boy, because he lives in my neighborhood. He has become a fixture on her porch, attached himself to her like glue. He is aggressive, obnoxiously aggressive. He knows what he wants, and what he wants is Betty Jo. Her parents are rude to him. They say: Go home, don't call, don't come back. He ignores them. He comes back. Again and again. Nothing will keep him away. Not warnings or curfews or threats.

     Betty Jo calls me. At first, I think this is good. We are in touch again. The estrangement created by her first betrayals is suddenly gone. She calls. But I find out she wants advice, not befriending, not boyfriending. She doesn't even stop to think I might still have feelings for her. She trusts my opinion. This is what she says. How can I resist such a statement? And yet I am hurt.

     "He's worn me down," she says.

     "What does that mean?" I ask, and I can hear an edge to my voice, even if she can't.

     "I hated him at first. Such a cocky person. He took me golfing. He puts his arms around me to show me how to hold the club. He says to hold it loosely, very loosely, like a wounded sparrow. Can you beat that? He says that about the club, but his arms around me, he's not holding me like any wounded sparrow. And now I like him. Every day I like him more, and I'm mad at myself for it, because I think my first reaction was correct, but what can I do? He's worn me down."

     I didn't know you could whittle a woman.

     I never would have thought to insinuate myself where I wasn't wanted.

     I am the loser for it.

     Betty Jo is a month away from entering the ninth grade, and she goes steady for the first time. She stops calling. Ned, who once played ball with me and was my friend and who used to talk tome about Betty Jo, as though I had no feelings in the matter, stops calling too. I have lost two people in one fell swoop.

     What does that mean? Fell swoop?

     By the time school starts Betty Jo and I are strangers. We nod formally when we pass each other in the hall. We never sit together in the cafeteria. We act as though there is a hurt there between us, but I know I am the only one with the hurt. She is just chilly.

     We go through high school this way. I find girlfriends, play sports, attach myself to a crowd. Ned's family moves away to California and he goes with them, but with promises that he'll be back at graduation after twelfth grade to marry her. But she begins to go steady with Randy. She goes steady with him all through high school and marries him instead.

     I go to the church, even though I am not invited. I want to see it done. This is what I tell myself. I will see it done and then I will get on with my life. She doesn't look very happy at her wedding. She looks taken.

     I go off to college. I forget her some more. The Sixties, trips to Europe, exciting new people from other states and other countries, the Vietnam War, long hair and protests, my own marriage, I forget her some more. I want to say completely. But who can say such a thing?

     At our ten year high school reunion, we sit together near the punch bowl. There is loud music and dancing, but we don't dance, even though she loves to dance. I am divorced, the father of three children. She too is divorced, the mother of five children. My divorce was gut-wrenching but complete, no aftershocks. She and Randy still fight bitterly over the custody of each child, one by one, all five of them. I don't know who has had it worse.

     I think to myself, I would console you if you would let me. She doesn't seem to hear me. She doesn't want to let me. There are all kinds of men in her life, all bastards. I listen to every single horror story and wonder how the high school Homecoming Queen could have gotten so abused.

     I have had enough experiences with women by now to know that women choose you, not the other way around. Maybe if by temperament you're like Ned and won't take no for an answer, maybe then you can wear a woman down, but I've never had the patience for that kind of pressuring. I still think it works the other way around. If the woman chooses you in her heart or head, then she can make you think you're choosing her and things will happen between you. If not, nothing happens. Nothing happens between Betty Jo and me. She's so happy to see me again, tell me her stories, have me "in her life" again. None of these things speaks to the body.

     "I've grown old and fat," she says, posing and pouting.

     "Rubbish," I say.

     "My boobs are sagging."

     "You've had five kids. Besides, they look fine to me."

     "And you don't think my ass is too fat?"

     Like to faint again. Let me count the ways.

     "God, no."

     She smiles. "You still talk like we did in school."

     This is a shock. I've gone on for my Masters and a doctorate. She got married instead and worked to put her ex-husband through school. But yes, here with her in her living room, I still talk like that, God for emphasis.

     "So many men want to screw me," she says.

     Yes? Of course. And me too?

     "I feel like a damn light bulb sometimes. Screw, screw."

     She's telling me this, because she thinks I am the exception. I have not laid hands on her. She's looking for what? A man who doesn't want to screw? It breaks my heart. I realize she wouldn't be asking me about her boobs and ass if she thought I was "screwable material." She wants her ego stroked, the whole widefield of her body scanned, her narcissism still intact to the point of being rampant, and she knows I am good for it. I can be counted on. I will give her compliments, without hitting on her. What she doesn't need from me is her body penetrated, another talkless penetration of her body.

     Part of me goes cold inside. I have been to Vietnam. I have this fantasy. I go to have a whore. I pay for the evening. But the woman who comes is not Vietnamese at all. It's Betty Jo, and she does everything and anything, all positions, all holes, no questions asked. The first time I have this fantasy, it comes to me as a shock. I like it enough to save it and go back to it from time to time.

     We agree to keep in touch. I call her on her birthday and Mother's Day. She calls me on my birthday and Father's Day. And every five years we see each other at the high school reunions, but we see each other every summer too when I take my sons to Michigan.

     I think of us suddenly as Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn. We're in that movie. Same Time Next Year. Just like them, we see each other once a year, but with a small difference. We don'tscrew.

     Is this because we've known each other since first grade? Because we're still too Catholic in our heart of hearts to do otherwise? Because we know each other too well to muster up the requisite passion? Because we're old enough now to realize that friends are harder to come by than lovers, and so we don't mess up a good friendship with risky chancey lovering? Who knows? I still feel incomplete and full of longing, longing that's way too old to be alive, crusted over with regrets and wisdom, lack of innuendo, lack of threat. She has "succumbed" to so many men, lesser men than I, I think self-righteously. Why not me? Why not us, even if just once, before we die?

     It has nothing to do with reality, of course. I'm happy in my life and work, full of my children and friends and work. I have a lover who satisfies me. But I am also obsessed with the past, and the lingering memories of summer nights on the porch still haunt, still pull at me. I've always felt in her company that I could get hard at any minute. One word, a hint, a wink, a certain word, a way of saying that word, a half-bared breast, and I'm hard. But no, I'm restrained, because I have to be. Difficult, I think, to have maintained that in-betweenness for so many years.

     We're in our mid-forties now, both of us. We're beyond the child-bearing years. We're probably beyond remarrying, although she still talks as though she'd like to. We sit old and comfortable, not unlike her parents must have sat indoors, while I was out on the porch with her. We're like an old married couple, all the platonic comforts, but without ever having tasted the fire.

     Her daughters look like her, just like she used to look, and yet her daughters do not tempt me. They seem like cute facsimiles of her, the more unreal for all their resemblance. And Betty Jo still looks the same as she did in high school. How can this be? I have gray hairs, failing eyesight, a paunch, more moles than I can count, wrinkles when I smile. How can she look the same? I know she "colors" her hair to keep out any gray, and she stays meticulously in shape, lifting weights and running. Her hair is shorter, tighter to the sides, and her eyes are somehow harder, as though they had lost some of the soft skin around them. But for all she looks the same. Is this only a way of saying I still see her the same?

     She expects my yearly visits in July. Her kids expect my yearly visits. My sons don't understand what kind of relationship we have, but even they expect the visits, although there's nothing in it for them, except to go downstairs and watch television, waiting for us to have our talk upstairs.

     "I think sex is highly overrated," she says on one of my visits.

     This time, she speaks from experience. It's not my experience. For me, sex is the highest form of humanity, what forestalls death and keeps us from barbarianism and world wars. Suddenly, I think, she's too old to argue with. She deserved better. I have always gotten better. There is a chasm between the two that I can't see ever bridging.

     "I'd just like to find a man and dote on him. Cater to his every need. Cook up a storm. You know what I mean?"

     I don't. It sounds so suffocating. We don't have very much in common, except forty-some years of habit and survival. She respects what I have done with my life. She respects what I am to my children. She gives me every compliment under the sky, which is still a way of keeping me at arm's distance. Or more. I am one of life's heroes to her, a man who is not a bastard. It's not enough.

     One summer I decide not to see her. She knows I am around or thinks it's the time for me to be there or "senses" I am there. Anyway, she calls and comes to visit. She comes to visit me for the first time ever. I cook dinner for her. We take a long walk. She's warm and friendly all over, even giving me hugs from time to time. I am chilly, stiff, unsure of myself, which is to say, unsure of her.

     When it's time to say goodbye, I start to speak for no good reason.

     "You know, on my list of loves, I'd have to say you're third-best."

     She laughs. Memory floods her face.

     "And in my book, you're what? At least, second."

     There doesn't seem to be anything more to say.

     She opens her car door but doesn't get in. She holds the door and looks at me long and hard.

     "I've debated for a long time whether to tell you this or not. It probably won't mean much to you anyway, so I decided to tell you. My daughter asked me the night of her prom who was the first man I ever loved, and I said you. And she asked me how I knew I was in love. And I told her I just knew, because when we used to stand on the porch at my parents' house, I was hot to the point of being crazy inside. Crazy in my blood. And I knew even then, don't laugh, that I wasn't going to feel any hotter later on when I was older and making love. It's funny about the first one you love too. Being first means coming too soon, so it never works out, but, on the other hand, the first one gets, I don't know, a room in your heart that's always his and nobody else ever gets to come in that room. It's locked away forever. Pretty dumb, huh? I thought I'd tell you anyway."

     So, there it was. I'd been waiting forty-some years for my turn to come, and I'd been first all along. That was why it never sparked between us later on. I had that room in her heart and it was locked, even to me now.

     Finally, I could be a friend to her. I said as much. I said, I will be your friend and you can call me whenever.

     So far, she hasn't called. I didn't expect she would.

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