Bonus Story from Lore: Membrane by David Tippetts

Membrane

by David Tippetts

I was the babysitter. Dennis Olson and his wife had three kids, a boy and two girls. A college freshman, I just started taking classes a few weeks before. I was blonde and maybe attractive. I didn’t know. Boys didn’t exactly flock to me in high school, but I went to dances and made out once or twice with Melvin Hartwig after. He fondled my breasts once, a little roughly as I remember, maybe it was just inexperience. I wanted him to do it again, couldn’t wait, but we never went out after that. I lived my senior year with the anxiety of not knowing why. I didn’t know how to flirt, how to talk to boys, play the game. I just didn’t have the gene.

My family name is Erickson, but I don’t have that Viking queen look, shorter and more compact, maybe chunky, wider hips and shoulders than you might be picturing. No ice-blonde hair, a little darker, ash-blonde. Blue eyes though, good fair skin, good teeth. I was the oldest of four kids, a farm family from Choteau. My dad wanted boys, but he only had girls, so he treated us like boys. I learned to drive a hay truck at 10, drove a tractor cutting alfalfa at 13.

I babysat a lot during high school. I thought it was a good way to earn some spending money after I arrived at Montana State in Bozeman. There must have been a list at the college placement office and I put my name on it.

He picked me up in front of the dorms. That’s where I was living with Peggy Archambeau from Havre as an assigned roommate. Peggy was beautiful and small, dark hair. Her acne scars only accentuated her other assets, made her human instead of perfect. She went out every weekend and got loads of calls to the phone in the hall. I don’t know how she managed her sex life, but she was one of the girls making out in front of the building and scooting in ten seconds before the key turned in the lock. She whooshed into the room at 12:03, her lips swollen, her face flushed, her eyes brilliant with too-quickly-terminated arousal. We didn’t talk about it. In fact we didn’t talk much at all. Later we became friends, but that first semester we slept in the same room, kept our belongings there. She flitted out with Havre friends and boyfriends while I sat at my desk with my nose in a book.

I wasn’t uninformed. I found a book my parents hid in their bedroom under the Farm Journals and Reader’s Digests on my father’s side. It was called The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sex. It looked well worn, maybe second-hand. Blue boards, gold-leaf print on the cover. I consulted it whenever I thought I could get away with it, when my parents were gone and the other kids occupied. I pondered, a little confused but intrigued about anal penetration and erotic spanking. All the parts were labeled. That plum-shaped tip fascinated me and I stared at it so often the book started to fall open to the page, cooperating with my secrecy.

After I found the book, at about age twelve, I looked at the boys at school differently.  It was heady knowledge and I had to live with the ache it caused me…and I had to keep it to myself. Good girls weren’t supposed to know about that stuff, at least not where we lived, not in those years. I felt like a secret agent from another world, one where it was all illustrated and indexed instead of being held secret by a conspiracy of adults and institutions.

My parents were religious, Lutheran, and the book seemed a contradiction to their otherwise stuffy behavior. I never wanted to imagine them doing anything shown in it. When an assistant pastor tried to feel me up when I was fourteen that was the end of God and Lutheranism for me. Afterward I only went to church under duress and quit as soon as my mother couldn’t make me go anymore.

By the time Dennis Olson picked me up that evening I was eighteen, and had discovered my clitoris on my own and knew how it worked. I liked boys and I liked men better. I had the illusion I was more adult than the noisy, boozing college boys my age. I had a crush on one of my professors, an algebra teacher in his late twenties. I sat in class and watched him walk back and forth, loved it when he turned his back and wrote on the blackboard. Jeans were just becoming acceptable wear for teachers and I treasured how he filled them out. I yearned to get my hands on those buttocks. I came back to the dorms from algebra aroused.

The guy, Dennis, drove a new car, a big one, dark green under, ivory on top. He double-parked on the shady street in front of the dorms. I stepped into the car, sank into the bucket seat, so modern and new. He was late thirties but holding up well. He had a dark short-trimmed beard and mustache, but light full hair, fine and soft-looking. It made my hands tingle. Attractive face, rounded but with a masculine nose and forehead. He wasn’t tall, but neither was I, so that was okay. He wore jeans and a western shirt, pearl snaps, short-sleeved, that showed off his browned arms. I pictured him wearing a Stetson, riding a horse.

We took a road south, the car purring, powerful. He drove out of town several miles, then around a curve. On the way he made small talk; my classes, where I came from, and I was pleased I had worn a peasant blouse, white as I remember, with a floral design across the top where my breasts pushed up. I stared out the passenger window and let him take a look, then another a little later. The sexual frizz bubbled in the car. I smiled. So did he, glancing my way. He pulled down on his jeans at one point, squirmed in the seat. I watched his hands on the wheel skimming tenderly into the turns. We arrived at a large house on a corner lot, a barn and corral out back.

His wife was beautiful, her white skin, jet-black hair set off by a scarlet dress. She was doll-like and slender. But the place was an absolute mess, the works–dirty dishes piled, counters grimy, sticky floors, clothes strewn all over the place. The oldest girl was about ten, the second eight and the boy was five or six. Cute kids, but they needed bathing.

The folks left and I set to work. I was good with kids and had loads of experience. I drafted them as labor and within a couple of hours I had things ship-shape, the kids bathed, in jammies and a half-hour warning of bedtime. We watched Happy Days and I put them to bed, no nonsense. I left the light on in the hallway for them. The house was a big bi-level with flocked wallpaper in what I imagined to be a brothel pattern and color, bright red.

I sat down to watch TV, but couldn’t find the TV Guide. I searched around a little, then thought they must have a television in their bedroom. I walked down the hall and hesitated, then opened the closed door. It was a nice room, queen-size bed, but in disarray. I resisted the notion to make the bed and saw the TV Guide lying on the near side. When I lifted it, underneath was a book, ivory color, deep red writing. The Joy of Sex. I held my breath and stared at it.

I’d heard about it, who hadn’t? But I’d never seen it. I forgot all about the TV Guide, slid the sex book silently off the nightstand and walked into the hall. I held it down by my side, hiding it from whomever, God I guess, maybe from my own shame. I checked the kids but they were all asleep.

I took the book into the living room. A bank of tall windows on the north side showed Bozeman in the distance below as a strip of light like a galaxy framed by the Bridger Mountains. The windows were open and the night breeze felt deliciously liquid, mid-September, still warm. I took off my sneakers, turned on a blue-glass lamp on one end of the couch and lay down. 

The drawings delighted me, the hippie-looking man with his beard, the sloe-eyed woman smiling broadly while he nestled into her crotch. I was mesmerized and began stroking a nipple with one hand, squeezing my thighs together rhythmically, legs crossed at the ankles while I turned pages. I was in a state and almost ignored the gravel-popping in the driveway that signaled the end of job. I flitted into the bedroom and had the book in its place, TV Guide back on top just so. I stood at the top of the stairs waiting when they came in. I smiled, innocent as a child.

He was pleased about the cleanup; she was not. He praised me, wondering. He laughed delightedly. She scowled, stiff-faced at his admiration and headed for the bedroom as if she couldn’t stand the sight of either of us another damned moment and slammed the door. Maybe it had nothing to do with me, maybe they’d had a fight in the car, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like I had insulted her, shown her up with her husband. Maybe housework was an issue between them. I touched a nerve and she couldn’t stand it. I felt like she’d slapped me.

Taking me back to the dorms he apologized for her behavior. She wasn’t feeling well. It seemed to make us two against one, a little conspiracy just between us good guys.

It was late, fully dark; the two-lane glowed in the headlights. I was still buzzed from the book and its promised joy. Our arms were only inches apart in the seats facing the windshield, me with my good-girl’s knees locked together, my purse shielding my lap. Lights of Bozeman, nearby subdivisions, the moon and stars glowed and rocked across the windshield. Horse and leather, soap, something else indefinably and uniquely masculine drifted over to me. My peripheral vision caught the motion of his hands driving, his face when he glanced at me. A tingle started deep in my belly and I leaned his way a little, as if pulled by a gravitational field. His voice purred out of the darkness, a smooth baritone, with only a hitch of hesitation. “I hope you don’t mind. I need to stop and check on a house for a minute or two.”

No, I didn’t mind.

“Won’t take but a minute.”

Sure. It wasn’t a problem. Won’t take a minute. Something in his voice, a thickening, as if erectile tissue narrowed his larynx, made me turn away and stare at the dash-light’s reflection.

He took a right turn into a subdivision about halfway to town. The street was laid out straight across a recent cow pasture. Three-bedroom bi-levels and ranchers dotted each side in earth tones, some completed, others in varying stages of construction. Vacant lots between houses sported for-sale signs. Pasture mix in the lots still waved in the headlights, so recently was it grazed. The brome-grass was autumn brown now, but the alfalfa flashed green in the flicker of light. I knew these things. I was a farmer’s daughter, as secretly sly as in the old jokes.

He slowed the car and turned into a driveway about a half-mile from the main road. The house, a medium two-story loomed dark in front of the car, not a light. Uncleared boards, a cement-mixer, a few paint buckets lay on the bare construction-scree by the front step. He shut off the engine and the lights. “You can come in if you want.” His voice trembled. “I just need to check the heat is working. The weather might turn.”

All of my nice-girl training told me I should not get out of the car. I should not enter that house with this man. I only knew his name, Dennis Olson, for a few hours. But remember, this was a less sexualized time, less risk avoidant. We weren’t taught like kids thirty years later that all men were potential predators. Bad things happened to girls and there was less justice for those they happened to, but this was before milk cartons and newscasts threw panic far and wide. No one knew where I was. Anything could happen, which was precisely why I opened the passenger door and got out.

He seemed more frightened than I was. He waited for me to come around the car, shoulders stiff, almost at attention. He fumbled the key and dropped it on the barely-cured concrete, laughed and apologized, then took several tries to get the key in the lock. He should have been scared. He had an angry wife to face later. I had only Peggy Archambeau.

 He reached in the door and turned the light on and we entered. The house was finished inside, finished to sell, off-white walls still smelling of new paint, carpets in every neutral shade; the kitchen was cabineted in cherry and countered in light brown Formica. It was empty of furniture, clean and echoing. And it was nice, nice, as in exactly what an upwardly striving family dreamed of.

He gave me a tour. I followed him from room to room only glancing at the space, but gazing long at the nape of his neck, the way his hair brushed his collar, his busy, beautiful hands, the latent power in his arms and shoulders, his competent natural gestures.

 “This place will last 75 years.” He took pride in his proficiency as a builder. He said it in the master bedroom upstairs, the last room, a note of emotion, nodding out the window. I thought, my father would like this man; they could talk about horses. My mother would like him too. You could trust a man like him. Nothing was just money; it was something else. I was going to turn nineteen in a few weeks, but even I could see that. We turned to leave the bedroom. I followed him to the doorway. He shut off the light and was silhouetted for a second or two against the brightness in the hallway. He was perfect. Heat glowed through my body, a throb of yearning so intense I had to stifle a noise. I was surprised he didn’t feel it burn his shoulders and turn to me.

There was nothing else to do. We had seen it all and I followed him down the stairs to the foyer. I couldn’t just walk out the door and go home, back to my books, my fantasies. That wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Somebody had to do something. His reserve and decency, maybe his timidity, or his fear were about to ruin everything.

Under any other circumstance I would never have done it. I wouldn’t dare. Maybe it was unintentional or maybe I wanted to touch him and I let the opportunity occur not quite by accident, just let it occur as if some part of me looked the other way, as if my hand carried out its own semi-blind intention. Maybe we were out of stride going down the stairs, his hand on the banister held that split-second too long, his arm and my hand—just accidentally—occupied the same space at the same time. I brushed his arm just above the wrist, my right hand on his right arm. It was one of those “oh, sorry” moments, but I wasn’t sorry, I was thrilled and I didn’t say anything. My fingers tingled as if from cold, or heat. I felt like I had stolen something priceless.

There is a membrane between people. It’s constructed out of normalcy, politeness, personal space, the expected way of behaving, the ordinary way of conversation, also out of unknowns. Does he…? Does she…? Will I offend? Will I risk humiliation if…? It can be pierced easily under some circumstances, under others it’s an iron curtain. A man and a woman are alone. They’re attracted to each other. The membrane thins and stretches. It becomes fragile. All it takes is a direct look, the pronouncement of a name, a hesitation, the brush of a hand and it will shatter. But somebody has to take the risk, make that gesture. Someone has to go first. Or it won’t happen.

He stopped, turned and looked at me. I don’t know what expression I had on my face. I must have been trembling. I had never done anything that forward, never before touched another human being with desire. I stood quaking with my secret life ripped open to his gaze, the first person to truly see me. All the flesh and bone had moved aside, my protective mask dissolved and my fragile, tender girl-self stood undefended within his reach. I made some small noise in my throat, an involuntary expression of my panic.

Then the membrane shattered and his arms came round me. Panic melted into relief and I nuzzled into his neck. I filled my lungs with his scent. I glued my body to his.

He stiffened and moved back a little, the only time in my life I’ve actually felt a person come to a decision. “I’m sorry, Nora. I can’t do this.” He whispered it into my ear.

 It was the first time he’d used my name. Either I didn’t hear him or I didn’t want to understand. “What?”

He stood away from me with his hands on my shoulders. “I…I can’t do this. I want to.” He emitted a little groan or something. “Oh, how I want to. But I just can’t. I’m so sorry.”

Well, of course.

I was misled by my fantasies. I had been a fool to assume his glances, his body language meant anything. I was just a college girl, the baby-sitter, a not-very-pretty kid right out of high school, a cipher. I didn’t have white skin and jet-black hair. Bathed in humiliation, I burst into real tears, sobs and retching. I turned away and faced the stairs we had just come down. I crouched over in self-protection. I wanted to hide, but it was his house and there was nowhere to go. He blocked the only way out. I hear people say, I wanted to die, when embarrassed. But in that empty house that night, trapped at the bottom of the stairs, I did want some kind of nonexistence. I wanted to pop away into mist, like a character in a fairy tale.

He reached out, turned me and pulled me down on one of the carpeted steps. He sat next to me and put an arm around my shoulders. He talked to me for a long time, telling me all the old gems. I was young, beautiful and desirable. I would have lovers and children. Life was long and I would see more clearly when I got older. It was for the best. He hit all the right notes of regret and concern. He was gentle with me, and patient. Gradually, five minutes, ten, I got control of myself. Maybe he was religious or something. I didn’t know.

In the car we didn’t say much. I didn’t want to look at him. I stared out the window. He drove into town and parked in front of the dorms. “You’ll be alright?”

I nodded and started to open the door. “Oh, I need to pay you.” He fished for his wallet and I jumped out and slammed the door. I ran and didn’t stop until I was safely beyond reach. Three days later I received a letter. Inside was a twenty-dollar bill. No note, no explanation, no return address. I carried it in my purse for several months, then I spent it on Christmas presents for my family.

I did get over it, just like Dennis Olson predicted, and I found a boyfriend the next year who was sweet and loving, an engineer with a slide-rule hanging off the side of his jeans, a nerdy kid from Malta up on the Hi-line. I sent him back to his apartment a couple of times a week dazed in erotic satisfaction.

Dennis Olson never called me again, of course, but I often thought about him. I drove by the house once, just looking. The three kids were in the front yard playing with hula-hoops. Over time I became more and more grateful for the mess he helped me avoid. Where would we have gone to after that night if we’d had sex? Either he would have had second thoughts and dropped me, a deeper degradation, or there would have been a prolonged spiral of guilt, frustration and anger, leading to a more public disgrace. I would have been the other woman at nineteen.

For some women, this incident might be so forget-worthy as to not bother remembering three days later, just another near miss in a long string of such episodes – men making half-passes, women trotting their stuff, display and retreat, the small traumas and trials of human sexuality. For me it was unique, and it was a first. It became an awful, sweet and instructive memory. There’s no single word for it.

I transferred to Missoula for graduate school. My engineer went back east for a doctorate and the relationship faded. I was away from Bozeman for several years, teaching in Spokane. I returned for a wedding. Peggy Archambeau was getting married to a local doctor, her first, his second. After the wedding I went with a couple of friends up to Hyalite Reservoir for a drive. We drove south on 19th and took the turn near the mountains. The lay of the land looked suddenly familiar. “Wait, turn right here. I want to look at something.”

“What is it?”

“Somebody I used to know.”

The car slowed and turned. There was the big house on the corner. Weeds grew in the corral, the barn door hung open and the windows on the house looked coated with weather-scum. A yellow sign stuck up out of the unkept lawn. The house was abandoned and up for sale.

In the ensuing years, I liked to imagine Dennis Olson happy. I like to imagine him divorced and remarried to a good woman who keeps a clean house.