[17]
Kiss me, Kiss me, Kiss me, 1981
On her way home from Carrie’s, Becca spots Kevin Richfield, fourteen now, standing in Bart Carlson’s yard. Bart too is fourteen, but he’s not good-looking like Kevin. He’s a fat bully.
Kevin calls, “Hey! What are you doing?” It’s mid-October, but eighty-plus degrees. Shielding her eyes, Becca approaches Kevin. The sun is going down.
“What are you doing?” he asks again.
“Going home.”
Kevin’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt that brings out the blue in his eyes. When Becca is nineteen, she’ll see Kevin’s eyes again in the eyes of her art professor, Christopher Lord, a.k.a. Apple Pie.
“We’re playing hide-and-seek.”
“You and Bart?” Becca looks at the two-man tent Bart keeps set up in his backyard for hide-and-seek, which isn’t really hide-and-seek anymore, now that Bart and Kevin are freshmen in high school; rather, it’s some deranged kissing version of the children’s game—or so she’s heard.
“You and me could play?”
Bart, holding the water hose, approaches and points the nozzle at Becca.
“Grow up,” Kevin says, shielding Becca, and Bart shoots the water spray beside them instead of at them.
“I’m just fooling, man.”
“I’m going home,” Becca interrupts.
“Have you seen the inside of Bart’s tent?”
“It’s a tent. I’ve seen a tent.”
“Not with me.” Kevin smiles. His eyes are so bright. His arms, strong and tan.
“I’m going to get something to eat,” Bart says.
Kevin unzips the green tent door and pulls the two nylon flaps back. Becca ducks to avoid the top zipper. Inside the tent, Kevin crouches over her because it’s a low dome tent. Becca sits Indian-style on the slick nylon bottom, feeling the pointy twigs and rocks of Bart’s yard under her thighs. She has always wanted to talk, really talk, to Kevin Richfield, the boy who rode his bike past her house for three years, the boy she thought was her destiny.
While she thinks dreamily, Kevin Richfield thrusts his tongue into her mouth. He slobbers on her face, and she feels the metal of his braces on her lips. He moves his tongue around hers. She tries to keep up with him. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Then he stops. Unzips the tent door. He’s leaving.
She says, “Do you want to kiss again?”
“Not really.”
“That was a good kiss.” What is she supposed to say?
He says, “Thanks.” The tent flaps blow in the evening breeze.
Kevin Richfield has crawled out of Bart Carlson’s tent, and Bart Carlson tries to crawl inside. Becca pushes her way past him. She’s twelve years old, being passed off to fat Bart Carlson. This is her first kiss.
She runs home to nothing. Her mother is in bed—maybe sleeping, maybe passed out. Becca and Whiskers watch The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. Barbi Benton is guest-starring on The Love Boat. Becca wants to be Barbi Benton. Not for the big hair, the big teeth, or the big boobs, but for the earnest smile. No one, Becca thinks, is that great an actress. Barbi Benton must be the happiest girl in the world.
Six months later, shortly after her thirteenth birthday, Becca meets Irvin, Carrie’s bad-boy cousin from California. He’s staying with the Drinkwaters for a few months while his own parents try to figure out what to do with him, where to put him permanently. He’s trouble.
Everything at Carrie’s house is different from Becca’s own home, which is now half empty. The Drinkwaters throw nothing away. Like Becca’s dad, they’re collectors, but rather than collecting coins and vintage sports cars, they collect dust, spilled salt, sponges soaked in bleach, dryer sheets, coffee cups, National Geographics, yarn, and bobby pins. There is never a clean surface.
Laundry sits folded and piled on the kitchen chairs for weeks because the dressers and closets are full, and the furniture throughout their home is torn and scratched from the once stray cats Belinda has lured into the house with tuna fish and milk.
Belinda says she can’t help loving the animals, and Carrie’s dad, Pete, shouts, “Goddamn it!” and says she’d better help it. The heavy shag carpets are flat and browned and smell sickly sweet like cat piss. The cats stretch and purr, drinking their milk on the kitchen counter as Belinda strokes their backs.
Becca spends as much time as possible at the Drinkwaters’, and Pete says she’s his second daughter.
It’s Friday night. They all watch TV. Carrie’s parents sit on the bigger, newer sofa in the den, and Irvin sits on the floor with his back against a small brown ottoman. Belinda yawns, her cross-stitch on her lap, glancing at the TV every few minutes. Becca watches her stitch.
Irvin, who’s tall and rail thin, has a shaggy mop of black hair. He glances at Becca. He’s already told her that he thinks she’s mature for her age, that she’s pretty. Already he’s pressed his thigh against hers in the kitchen when no one was looking, and his thigh, that pressing of muscle against flesh, sent shivers through her body.
Belinda says, “Do you want to see the pattern?”
Becca scoots closer.
“This is an easy one. The sill will be …” Belinda looks down at the plastic package in her lap. “Green. This green.” She pulls the color out.
Pete shushes them and says, “Irvin, turn up the TV. I can’t hear shit with all this jabbering.” Pete lights a cigarette and puts his feet on the coffee table. He is a small but gruff man, and Becca is sometimes afraid of him despite his “second daughter” talk. “Now get the hell out of the way,” he says to Irvin. “Move.” Irvin, smiling at Becca, backs up to his place by the ottoman.
At two in the morning, Irvin taps on the doorjamb of Carrie’s room, whispering, “Becca.” In the darkness, he strokes his chest.
Becca recalls what he’s said: She’s pretty, mature for her age. So she is. So she wants to be.
Careful not to wake Carrie, she follows Irvin down the hallway to the den. They sit on the shag together. Irvin picks up a National Geographic from the coffee table and flips through it in the darkness. Very little is said. Becca says, “I’ve never been to California,” and Irvin says, “You told me that already. It sucks anyway.”
Irvin says, “I’m going to start my own band,” and Becca says, “That’s really cool. I like music.”
Irvin says, “I’ll get you backstage passes when we play.” Becca says, “Cool.” How can she match backstage passes? She’s got it: “The same year I met Carrie, I got struck by lightning.”
“Very cool.”
She never thought of it that way. She’s very cool.
Irvin leans in and kisses barely thirteen-year-old Rebecca Burke. He pokes his tongue between her lips. She thinks, I’m pretty good at this kissing thing, and feels Irvin’s fingers at her waist, slipping under the elastic of her pajama pants. She whispers, “What are you doing?” and he kisses her again, pulling at the springy waist of her pants. “No.”
He sits beside her, his fingertips brushing the edge of her underwear below her hip bone. “Come on.” He pulls again at the elastic band.
“You,” she says, sitting up, her forearms folded at her waist. “You first.”
Irvin grins. “I like you.” On his knees, he pushes his sweatpants down.
“You’re not wearing any underwear.”
“Touch it. Do it.”
Becca has never seen a penis standing up before. She saw her dad’s a couple of times by accident when he’d just gotten out of the shower. She’s never seen anything like what is in front of her, attached to Irvin. Like a fat wrinkled finger. A pink snake. A gearshift in her dad’s ’61 Austin Healey. She holds on to it.
Irvin says, “What are you doing? Rub it.”
Then, as she’s rubbing up and down and up and down, he says, “Ouch.” On the carpet now, his pants around his ankles, Irvin lurches off the floor. “Be gentle.” With one hand on his forehead, hiding his eyes, he says, “Take it easy. It’s not a gearshift.” Funny, that’s just what she’d been thinking about. He moans when she gets it right. Becca is on her knees, concentrating. He says, “Ah,” and “ah” again. Then Becca puts her mouth around it. No prompting from Irvin. She’s heard about blow jobs before, and Irvin says, “Oh yes, oh yes,” and then he’s vibrating. His thighs shake.
Wrapping his arms first around her neck, then around her waist, squeezing hard, he says, “I love you.”
Since her dad left, she hasn’t felt anything close to happiness. Until now, that is. Until she made someone happy. Until Irvin said “I love you.” It was so easy to make him love her. This was her second kiss.
If you want to dislike Irvin for taking advantage of Becca, don’t. Irvin Drinkwater genuinely loved Rebecca Burke when she was on her knees with his penis in her mouth. Love is sometimes fleeting.