We Are Water. Wally Lamb
going, “Oh, fuck! Oh, Jesus!” I don’t appreciate the fact that he’s gotten his stuff all over my stomach, and even a little of it on my new pocketbook, which I only bought the day before yesterday at Two Guys because Althea was out sick and I got assigned her section and one of those lawyers gave me a twenty for a bill that was only four dollars and seventeen cents and said to keep the change.
The next Monday in English, Mrs. Sonstroem has us read aloud from the book we’re reading, A Tale of Two Cities. I’m trying to concentrate, but a part of me is back at the Oak Swamp Reservoir with Albie, and him making me feel that tingly way. “Miss O’Day,” she says. “You’re next.” I hate reading out loud and have been hoping the bell would ring without me getting picked. No such luck. Plus, I’m not sure where the last person left off and Jeannie Baker has to lean over and point to where. Before I start, I see Kenny Lalla and John Marchese smirk at each other and I hear Stanley whisper under his breath, “Get ready.” Get ready for what? I wonder, but I start reading. And when I get to the sentence “My father has been freed!” Lucie ejaculated, the boys—first just Kenny and Stanley, and then a bunch of the others, all start laughing. None of the girls are laughing out loud or anything, but some of them are smiling at each other, and Betsy Yeznach’s hand is covering her mouth. I don’t get what’s so funny.
“All right, that’s enough!” Mrs. Sonstroem, who almost never yells, starts yelling. “Maybe if you’re all this immature, we shouldn’t even read Charles Dickens, who happens to be one of the very best writers of all time.” Then she says something about pearls and swine that I don’t get. One of the boys starts making pig snorts and she gives him a detention. Then the bell rings.
After school, and after I’ve changed into my Friendly’s uniform and still have a few minutes before I have to leave for work, I look up ejaculate in my foster family’s dictionary. 1. To utter suddenly and passionately; to exclaim, it says. Then, 2. To discharge abruptly, especially to discharge semen during orgasm. I look up semen. Then I look up orgasm. Okay, now I get it, I think. “Semen” is the guy’s milky discharge and “orgasm” is the highest point of sexual pleasure, marked in males by the ejaculation of semen and in females by vaginal contractions.
The next time Albie takes me out, we skip the drive-in and go right to the reservoir. I’ve put my pocketbook out of range this time. He pulls out in time again, and I think to myself: he just had an orgasm and ejaculated his semen. Unlike the last time, I’m not feeling much of anything myself, but at least I know the names of things now.
For our next date, I have to go over to the Wignalls’ house for dinner. I get embarrassed because once the food’s on the table, I start eating, but Albie and his parents are just looking at me. Then Mr. Wignall says they like to say grace first. “Oh,” I say. “Sorry.” He and Winona hold out their hands and I take them and Mr. Wignall thanks God for the bounty that’s in front of us. He and Winona have their eyes closed, but Albie and I don’t and Albie’s looking at me with this goofy grin on his face and making cross-eyes to be funny. When Mr. Wignall’s done, he opens his eyes again and says, “Let’s eat.” Winona’s done the cooking and it’s creamed dried beef on “toast points” (which is really just regular old toast, as far as I can see) plus beets (which I hate). The Wignalls pour vinegar on their beets, so I do, too, and the vinegar soaks all into my toast so that I have to eat this mushy pink vinegar bread to be polite. Mr. Wignall has seconds and Albie has thirds. For dessert we have green Jell-O with canned fruit in it, which is something Mama used to make, too. Except at our house, everyone got their own separate dish of Jell-O, but at the Wignalls’ it’s in a big bowl and you pass it around and then squirt Reddi-wip on top. And in the middle of dessert, Mr. Wignall says to Winona, “Sweetness, would you pass me some more Jell-O?” I almost start laughing, thinking about how, the next day at work, I’ll tell Priscilla about Winona’s husband calling her Sweetness and how it’ll crack her up. It’s like I’m a spy or something. Then Winona says, “Would you like more cream, too, Sweetness?” and Albie says there is no more, that he ran the can dry, which is no surprise because he squirted so much cream on his Jell-O that, if he was my kid, I would have yelled at him for being a pig and not thinking about anyone but himself.
After dinner, Albie and I go over to my foster family’s house because nobody else is home. We’re watching Dallas, and Albie says he’d bet me any amount of money that Lucy Ewing is a slut in real life, too—that she probably doesn’t even have to act. Then he tells me that, a few weeks back, he had a dream that Lucy Ewing was sucking his dick. I roll my eyes. No class, I think.
“Hey, can I ask you something, Sweetness?” Albie says. It nearly makes me puke, him calling me that. Who does he think we are? His icky parents?
“What?” I say, and Albie says he was just wondering if I would ever want to try something like that.
“Like what?”
“Sucking my dick. I bet it would really turn you on.”
I get up from the couch, turn off the TV, and tell him to go home. “And if you ever say something like that again to me, Albie Wignall, I’m going to tell your mother you said it, and don’t think I wouldn’t because I would.”
He says maybe I should just become a nun, and I say yeah, that’s a good idea, maybe I will, and he says I’m lucky someone like him even gives me a second look, and I say “Ha, that’s a laugh and a half!” and tell him again to go home. He gets up and, on his way out, slams the door so hard that he’s lucky my foster father isn’t home because he gets real mad when anyone slams things and he’d probably chase Albie all the way down the sidewalk.
The next night at Friendly’s, Albie is all apologies, saying how he respects me, he really, really does. “Let’s take a drive and clear the air after you get off work,” he suggests. I tell him no three different times. Then finally I say yes just to shut him up. And when my shift’s almost over, he gets up and says he’ll wait for me out in his car. When I go to wipe off the counter, I see that he’s left me this tip that’s dimes and nickels and quarters shaped like a heart. He probably thinks he’s being romantic, but all’s I think is that it’s pretty corny. Still, when I scoop it up and count it, it comes to two dollars and eighty cents, which is the most he’s ever left me, so I guess he really is sorry.
But guess where we end up. In a way, he can’t help it, I guess. I read in a magazine last week that, on an average, girls think about sex twice in an hour but for guys it’s seventeen times. This time, after he puts his thing inside of me and I can tell he’s getting ready, I tell him, “Pull it out! Pull it out!” and he says he can’t, it feels too good, and anyways, he doesn’t need to because he’s taken a pill that stops the girl from getting pregnant when the guy “nuts” inside of her. A pill that men take? Here’s how stupid I am: I believe him. So I let Albie have his orgasm inside of me—that night and the next two or three times after that. And then one day at work, I go up to two of the older waitresses, Ginny and Mary Beth, who are both in their thirties. Mary Beth is married and it’s common knowledge that Ginny “gets around” down at the Anchor Clanker where all the sailors go to drink and meet girls. I ask them if they’ve ever heard of this pill men take so that the woman doesn’t get pregnant. Instead of answering me, they just look at each other. Then they both start laughing, and I feel like the idiot I am. I’m three weeks late, which is why I asked them, and now I know why I am.
It’s Saturday, my day off—the day I’ve decided I’m going to tell Albie. I just wish he was in a better mood. He and Winona have just had one of their big fights, and in the car on the way over to Olympic Pizza, he’s saying stuff like how Winona’s “the wicked witch of the West” and his father’s “pussy whipped.” In the fifteen minutes since he picked me up, he’s told me three times already how much he hates his mother’s guts. It’s quiet at the pizza place. We take the booth by the window. Albie orders a toasted salami grinder with fried onions and peppers, plus a quart bottle of Dr Pepper. I order a small Sprite and three stuffed clams. I’ve felt sick to my stomach all week, but suddenly I’m hungry, even though I’m nervous. When our food comes,