Not Exactly the Boy Scout Handbook
Though she had not abandoned her quest to seek out more information concerning Forrest’s affair with Brenda, Regina had given me the afternoon off, and Forrest was off on his bicycle, training for the triathlon. (Legitimately training, I was pretty sure. He was back to being the old Forrest now.)
I was down at the dock again, reading my book. Jilly had been invited to a Bring-Your-American-Girl-Doll party. Over by the badminton court, Hayward and his friend Jasper were having a water pistol war. I was trying to read my book, but—rare for me—I couldn’t concentrate.
I was thinking about the tennis tournament coming up, and what came after that—the end of my time at Wonderland.
Not that I wanted to, but I was also thinking about my parents.
I’d mostly managed to keep them out of my thoughts all summer.
Now the picture was coming to me of our dark little apartment.
My windowless room. Lunches in the school cafeteria with Martha, my only friend, while boys threw spitballs at us and grinned. No more tennis.
I looked out to the water. As much as I could, I wanted to hold on to the picture of this moment. Sky, lake, birds, boat. The smell of freshly cut grass. Up at the house, Prudence would be making fried chicken.
Trying to distract myself—with nothing better to do—I walked over to the boathouse and pushed the door open. At first it stuck.
I’d only been in the boathouse once before, all summer—to look for an inflatable swan Jilly wanted me to blow up for her.
I’d spent half an hour doing that, and by the time it was ready to float she’d lost interest. Now the deflated swan lay on the boathouse floor along with a pile of life jackets, old snorkel masks, and a broken glider Billy hadn’t gotten around to fixing and probably never would.
Along the back wall: a few old canoes, the Sunfish Hayward had taken out only one time all summer, a birchbark canoe Regina’s father had evidently bought on a fishing trip to Quebec long ago that turned out to be too tippy to use, which Forrest was always talking about fixing up.
On the shelf by the door there was a stack of old National Geographics and another stack of Good Housekeeping magazines from the 1960s.
I pulled one down and flipped through the pages.
Diet tips . . . recipes for interesting things to do with Jell-O .
. . advice from Dr. Joyce Brothers—none of which was likely to apply to me.
What to do if you’re almost fifteen years old and you haven’t gotten your period yet.
What to do if your parents are getting a divorce and your father’s moving out and even though he’s a total screwup who gets drunk all the time, still you know you’re going to miss him.
What to do if the woman you work for wants you to prove her husband’s having an affair.
What to do if you wish somebody else was your father, and somebody else’s family was your family, even if—as you know now—that family is pretty screwed up themselves.
What to do is, you try to put it all out of your head. Think of something else. Anything.
This is when I spotted it. Tucked behind The Ultimate Trout Encyclopedia, on a shelf so high I had to step onto a stool to take it down.
The book contained words, but it was the pictures that transfixed me.
They would probably have had a strong effect on anyone, but most particularly a girl who’d spent the last couple of years consumed with thoughts of sex without knowing how it happened or what it looked like—a girl for whom, even after spending a good part of her summer attempting to record evidence of her employer’s husband’s affair, the details of male anatomy remained hazy.
The illustrations featured a man and a woman in bed. No covers concealed their bodies, which were naked and assuming a variety of positions—more of these than I could have imagined.
Part of what transfixed me about the illustrations in this book was how real the people looked. They could be my science teacher, Mr. Mackenzie, or the woman behind the desk at the Lake Catherine Library. They could be anyone.
The woman in the picture had slightly droopy breasts—like real breasts, my mother’s, for instance.
The man featured in the drawings had a beard.
In some of the pictures, he was on top of the woman, but in others she was on top of him, and sometimes they arranged themselves in more complicated and intriguing positions, not so different maybe from the knots I guessed were displayed in the Boy Scout Handbook, located on the same shelf.
I felt shock and fascination, both at once. Did people actually like doing these kinds of things?
I sat on the floor of the boathouse for as long as I dared, leaned up against a bunch of old life jackets, studying the illustrations. I wondered if my parents had ever done one of these things. I didn’t need to wonder if Forrest Emerson had.
The Joy of Sex. I loved the title of the book. Always in the past I’d thought about sex as something dirty. Thrilling, but shameful. The idea of sex being joyful would never have occurred to me.
I flipped through the pages at random at first—naked bodies entangled in a dizzying variety of positions.
Then my eyes landed on a particular page, 157.
Something about the drawing there caught me up short.
I put my hand inside my underpants while I studied the picture.
I found the place deep inside that I could count on to make a warm, good feeling wash over me. I rubbed the spot a little. Then more.
I was breathing harder. Sitting on the old, splintery boathouse floor, I rocked my body back and forth so the feeling grew stronger.
I closed my eyes. I tried to summon the image of a real person—River Phoenix maybe, or the boy at the ice cream counter at the Caboose—with whom I might imagine doing the things I saw in the picture.
Not Forrest. That was over. Maybe I’d think about nobody but my own self for a change.
I was rocking faster now. Rubbing harder. The warm feeling had spread all through my body. I was off in some other place.
I heard another sound then. This one didn’t come from me. There were voices. More laughter, louder this time. Coming from just beyond the door.
I opened my eyes. That’s when I saw it. A single blue eye, pressed up against a knot hole in the boathouse wall. The eye belonged to Hayward Emerson.
I heard his voice now, and that of his friend. They had probably been taking turns looking in at me through the hole.
My hand flew up to cover my mouth, as if I could stop their laughter that way. I shut my legs. No way I could pull up my underpants without standing up, naked from the waist down. Better to sit there with an old piece of tarp thrown over me.
I set the book down. “Go away,” I yelled.
Then something came over me. You could call it courage, or just the refusal to be ashamed of doing something that made me feel happy and didn’t hurt anyone.
“You probably do this too,” I called out to the boys. “If you don’t, you should try it.”
The eye disappeared. Whoever it belonged to—and I knew who that was, of course—must have run away.
I considered the possibility that Hayward would make fun of me afterward. But back up at the house, as I served the children their afternoon snack, he said nothing. I poured the Coke in his glass. He muttered thank you. We went on with our day.