Brain Child Page 4

  Barbara’s parents, owners of a fuel-oil distribution company, knew only that Barbara was friendly with one of the smartest students in the school. They were happy with such a friend and they didn’t give the relationship much thought. The few times that they had met Lois Wilson they thought she was plain, innocuous, unassuming. She was certainly unlike any of those other teenagers who seemed wild and wasteful. Whenever Barbara made reference to Lois, it was always with adulation and admiration, bragging about Lois’s academic achievements or verbal wit. Her parents certainly saw no danger in the relationship.

  “I’m collecting night crawlers and other fat worms,” Billy said. Barbara turned her attention from the cookies. Billy Wilson’s cherub face with its rosy cheeks reminded her of the plate of cherry vanilla ice cream she had had for dessert last night.

  “Huh?”

  “I get these worms and I bring ‘em down to the hardware store and I get money for them.”

  “How gross!”

  “I got more’n five dollars already. You know any places where there’s a lot of worms?”

  “Hardly. I don’t keep track of worms,” she said, running her tongue over her lips.

  “You eat worms often,” Lois said as she entered with the tea.

  “She does?” Billy said. He looked more directly at Barbara, his eyes widening.

  “I do not. Don’t listen to her. I don’t even like touching them. I hated dissecting them in biology class, and I had that class right before lunch.”

  “Did you eat them for lunch?” Billy asked. Whatever his sister said was gospel, as far as he was concerned.

  “Aaa-ooh,” Barbara said, grimacing to show her revulsion.

  “You eat worms,” Lois insisted calmly. “We all eat worms.” She put the tray down gracefully. “We eat fish. Fish eat worms. Thus, we eat worms by eating the fish whose flesh is made from the flesh of worms.”

  “That’s gross.”

  “Why do you use that stupid word so much?” Lois asked quickly. She sat back and crossed her legs, her eyes small, inquisitive, and intimidating. Barbara looked away.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do. You use it because all the other girls use it and you’re trying to be like them. You’re hoping they’ll accept you because you talk like them. Fundamentally, you want to be like them and you’re trying to get other people to think you are like them. You can’t stand being an outsider. You’re a victim of subversive peer pressure. I’ve seen it a thousand times,” she added, a note of boredom in her voice.

  “I’m not trying to be like anybody.” Barbara looked at Billy to see if her denial held up, but he was building a community of toy cars, plastic soldiers, and houses constructed from cigar boxes he had taken from the drugstore.

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. It’s not a judgment; it’s a simple diagnosis. Teenagers behave like primitive tribes. They have their mores, their codes, their unwritten rules.”

  “You’re a teenager,” Barbara muttered. She could never contradict Lois directly.

  “Only in chronological age. Fortunately, I can step aside and analyze. That’s all I’m trying to get you to do when I ask you why you use gross so much.” She leaned forward and took a cookie. Barbara quickly followed suit.

  “It’s just a habit.”

  “Habit,” Lois said disdainfully. “People use that word as if it will excuse behavior. Don’t you know that things which become habits were once conscious acts? By doing them over and over, you allow your brain, nerves, and muscles to work automatically. There was a point when you had control.”

  “All I meant was—”

  “I suppose you would call your overeating a habit too.”

  “I won’t say gross anymore, OK?”

  “I couldn’t care any less about it, believe me. It’s just that you should understand why you do these things, that’s all. It’s the mark of an intelligent person.”

  Barbara looked away again. Her eyes watered, but she didn’t want to show any pain. She knew Lois was critical of people who revealed their emotions. She was certainly not the kind of friend to go to for sympathy. But what Barbara did enjoy about Lois was the way she attacked the others. She was tough, cutting, cruelly sarcastic. The others avoided her and rarely took up the verbal gauntlet if Lois threw it down. When Barbara was with Lois, she felt protected. She would never tell Lois that, though, because Lois would ridicule it.

  “Cindy Weiss is having her Sweet Sixteen tonight.”

  “Christ, what a pagan ritual.”

  “Pagan?”

  “Worshiping an age, acting as though there’s something special about reaching sixteen. If girls want to make big deals about a landmark in their lives, they should do it when they get their periods. That would make more sense, because they’ve reached an important stage in maturity: they can ovulate, conceive.”

  “What would they call it, Period Parties?” Barbara laughed at her own joke and looked to Billy, but he showed no interest in their conversation. Lois didn’t laugh, but she came her closest to it—she smirked and sipped her tea. “So what are you planning to do today?”

  “I’m working on a new experiment.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Not yet.”

  Barbara was disappointed, but instead of showing it, she reached for another cookie.

  “Actually,” Lois said, “it has to do with eating.”

  “Oh?” Barbara held her cookie to her lips, but she didn’t open her mouth.

  “Yes. Did you know that a starving animal will eat almost anything, even itself?”

  “No,” Barbara said, her eyes getting as big as they could. “How gro … terrible.”

  “‘Terrible’ is a judgmental term, having little or nothing to do with scientific notation. Right and wrong vary from environment to environment. For certain tribes in Africa, cannibalism is both right and proper. I can’t see Burger King or McDonald’s ever selling People Burgers, can you?”

  “Oh, Lois! People Burgers.” Barbara looked at the cookie and then put it back on the plate.

  “Don’t tell me I’ve spoiled your appetite. Listen,” she added, leaning back and taking on an arrogant demeanor, “starving people have been known to eat bark off trees. You know that book Laura Kaplow had, Alive?”

  “I know, I know. Can’t we talk about something else?”

  “Of course we can. Shall it be something of great importance, like the latest rock album you bought?”

  “I haven’t bought a rock album in weeks.”

  “Amazing.” Lois leaned forward and put her cup on the tray. “Have you decided what you’re going to do this summer?”

  “I’ll probably work at Rosenfield’s Tourist House again, baby-sitting at night, helping in the kitchen during the day.”

  “I know you like working in that kitchen. But God, where’s the intellectual stimulation, the challenge?”

  “Well, it’s something to do, and my mother says I can’t sit around all summer. I don’t want to work with her in the office, that’s for sure.”

  Billy suddenly stood up and kicked his toy soldiers away. One bounced off Barbara’s thick ankle.

  “Anybody wanna go worm huntin’?”

  “Of course not,” Barbara said.

  “Go yourself. Just don’t go away from the yard.”

  Billy bit down on the inside of his right cheek for a moment and stared at his sister. Then he looked suspiciously at Barbara Gilbert. They both looked eager for him to leave. He remembered a time once when they hadn’t thought he was in the house. He had entered the house quietly and heard them talking softly in Lois’s bedroom. When he went to the door, he found it locked.

  “Go away,” Lois had said.

  “But I wanna come in.”

  “I said go away.”

  He had left, but his curiosity had been aroused by the fact that they were in a locked room and they wouldn’t let him enter. He went outside and crawled up by Lois’s bedroom window.


  When he peeked in, he saw Barbara Gilbert lying on her side on the bed. Lois was at her desk writing something. The scene was extremely disappointing, and he was about to leave to go play in the woods when he noticed that Barbara was looking down at one of the big books Lois had on the top shelf of her room. It was one of the books she would never let him touch.

  He angled himself a little better and got some more height by digging his right foot harder against the siding of the house. From that perspective he was able to look over Barbara’s big shoulder. What he saw puzzled him.

  Barbara was studying two big pictures, each of which showed a naked man and a naked woman twisted and entangled around each other’s bodies in what he thought were weird ways. Was it some kind of wrestling match?

  Inadvertently he tapped the window with his forehead, and Lois turned around quickly enough to catch sight of him. He ran around to the back of the house, but she was out the back entrance, anticipating his direction. She caught up with him before he got to the woods and dug her fingernails into his shoulder until he fell to his knees.

  “What were you doing? What were you doing, Billy?”

  “I just wanted to see,” he pleaded. “What did you see?”

  “You’re hurting me, Lois. I’m gonna tell Mommy.”

  She released him but knelt down so she could look him right in the face.

  “Don’t you ever tell anything about me and what I do,” she said slowly, pronouncing each word with a cold, knifelike emphasis, “or I’ll do to you what I did to the garter snake last year.”

  He was so frightened he couldn’t speak. All he did was shake his head and run off. He wouldn’t tell, not ever. Later, Lois was very nice to him and gave him one of the garter-snake skins she had in her glass case under her bed. He put it on his wall with a tack, but whenever he looked at it, he could only think of Lois’s fiery eyes. So he took it down and put it in a drawer.

  Remembering that incident now, he decided he was better off letting them alone and leaving the house. Anything they would do would be boring to him anyway.

  “I’m gonna dig in the backyard,” he said. Lois just nodded.

  “So tell me,” she said after she was sure Billy had moved out of earshot, “are you still having frequent wet dreams?”

  “Lois! I’m sorry I ever told you about that.”

  “Oh, come on, Barbara. By now I’d expect you’d be mature enough to discuss these things without behaving like a junior-high student.”

  Her fat friend straightened up and took a deep breath.

  “I wasn’t going to tell you, but I … I had an experience.”

  “Experience?” Lois read Barbara’s expression. “You had sexual intercourse?”

  “No, I don’t mean that.”

  “Well, what’s an experience? A fantasy?”

  “I let Bernie Rosen put his hand under my blouse.”

  “Jesus, Barbara!”

  “It wasn’t there long,” she said quickly.

  “I don’t mean that,” Lois said and shook her head. “I couldn’t care less if he had his hand there for three days and three nights. I don’t call that much of an experience.”

  “It was for me.”

  Lois studied her for a moment. “You had an orgasm?”

  Barbara nodded. A warm, self-satisfied smile formed on her face. Lois sensed an envy growing in her and despised herself for feeling any sort of jealousy, especially of a girl like Barbara.

  “Tell me about his reactions,” she said, the tone of her voice becoming more formal.

  “What d’ya mean? I told you, he put his hand under my blouse.”

  “Did he get under your bra? Did he touch your nipple? Did he have an orgasm as well?”

  “I don’t know. He tried to press his thing against my thigh,” Barbara said, widening her smile and remembering.

  “Penis,’ not ‘thing.’”

  “I’d rather say ‘thing.’”

  “Go on.”

  “I moved away. I could feel it. It was so hard. Like a piece of pipe or something.”

  “Was he breathing fast? Did his face get flushed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know these things?”

  “Well, you didn’t tell me about those things when you told me about that city boy, Teddy Fishman.”

  “For God’s sake, Barbara, I wasn’t more than a day into puberty. The only reason I let him get under my skirt was to see what it would do to my own physiological reactions. You misinterpreted everything I told you about that incident.”

  “Well, I didn’t take Bernie’s pulse, and when he tried to get under my bra, I pulled away.”

  “And that was your whole experience? There are girls in the eighth grade who’ve been pregnant twice, and that was your experience?”

  “Well, I’m not looking to get pregnant. You think I want to be like Shirley Numar just to learn something new about life?” Lois simply stared at her. “Now what are you thinking about? Honestly, Lois, you could scare someone to death looking at them like that.”

  “I’ve been thinking about a project involving sex.”

  “Really? What sort of project?”

  “Why, are you interested?”

  “I don’t know.” Barbara was silent a moment. She reached for another cookie instinctively, just to feel something in her mouth. “What do you have in mind?”

  “We’re not going to play doctor. I can assure you of that. I have something a great deal more sophisticated in mind. Do you think you could get Bernie over here tomorrow afternoon? My parents are taking Billy to the circus in Middletown. I have the house to myself.”

  “I suppose so. But you’ve got to tell me more about it,” Barbara said, folding her arms under her breasts and sitting back.

  “I will. I will.”

  Lois thought about Bernie Rosen for a moment. He was a light-haired boy with big ears. The other boys in school nicknamed him Alfred E. Neuman after the funny face on Mad comics. There was something stupidly clownish about Bernie’s perpetually idiotic smile. Yet none of that mattered. In fact, his low intelligence might make him a better subject, she thought.

  “I won’t do anything perverted,” Barbara said. Lois’s expression of deep thought frightened her.

  “There are no perversions. That’s a judgmental term. I’ve told you that before.” Lois’s eyes grew smaller. “Tell me,” Lois said, “did it ever occur to you that we are the only animal that wears clothing? We’re the only one with so-called private parts.”

  “No, it never occurred to me.”

  “During man’s early existence he was surely as naked as any other animal. Do you think that meant that there was continual fucking?”

  Barbara winced at Lois’s use of profanity. She so rarely did it. When she referred to the human anatomy, she always used the proper scientific terms. Other girls, especially in the locker room, talked about boys’ cocks. Lois never said anything but penis. Barbara could count on her fingers the times she heard Lois use the words screwed or laid. It was always intercourse and foreplay and coitus, for God’s sake.

  “I don’t know about primitive man’s sexual habits. All I know is I wouldn’t want to be naked all the time.”

  “Why not? Aside from the need to be warm, I mean. How did we develop this need to be covered? Why don’t primitive tribes in Africa or Australia have this need to cover the ‘private parts’? And note the fact that even though they aren’t covered, they still have social mores and ethics. Why, there’s even less sexual violation. Did you ever think about that?”

  “No. What does this stuff have to do with my getting Bernie over here?” Barbara asked, tilting her head slightly.

  “Just do it and you’ll see,” Lois said. There was something in her voice that gave her words erotic overtones. Barbara Gilbert felt her heartbeat grow faster. She was embarrassed by the warmth that traveled up her legs and settled in the moistened pocket of her pelvis, so she crossed her legs and
looked away. Lois didn’t seem to notice anyhow. She was in even deeper thought now, mechanically gathering the cups and the remaining cookies. She already knew what the title of this paper would be. She had written the first paragraph months ago and left it in her desk drawer with the others. If either Dorothy or Gregory Wilson had opened that drawer and read some of their daughter’s theories, they might have saved themselves a lot of grief. But Lois’s things were private. In any case, her papers were far too technical to be of any interest to anyone but her. At least, that’s what Dorothy Wilson thought the one and only time it ever occurred to her to read any of them. So she let them be, she left the words unread, the thoughts ticking away, waiting for their proper time to come to light.

  As Dorothy Wilson sat in the car and waited for Gregory to lock up the drugstore, she switched on the little light by the vanity mirror and patted the sides of her new hairdo gently to get the disobedient strands back into place. It was only then that the irony struck her. Here it was Saturday night; she had gone to the beauty parlor for her weekly appointment; she had taken advantage of the long lull in the store’s business to redo her makeup, putting on some of the new eye shadow the Revlon salesman had brought her. In her closet she had that new pants outfit she’d picked up at Melissa’s Boutique two weeks ago. Yet she was going nowhere. They hadn’t even discussed the possibility of a night out.

  She heard Gregory close the door and watched him fumble for the keys to lock it. When he turned toward the car, he looked tired, older, slumping more than usual. During the last two hours she had heard him fidgeting behind the pharmaceutical counter, tinkering around, organizing. She knew he was doing an inventory and wouldn’t want to be bothered by her small talk. But she was restless now and she felt she had worked hard enough all week to deserve a real night out. They hadn’t gone out on the town for weeks, it seemed to her. But from the looks of him as he walked across the street toward the car, she didn’t expect he’d be all that delighted by the idea.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked him as soon as he slid in behind the wheel.

  “Why?”

  “You’ve got that Monday morning look on Saturday night?”

  “Was a lousy week, with the sewer backing up and that order being misplaced.”