The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (222 page)

It’s early still, so we go to Kelly’s Drive-Thru and get Cokes and clam fritters, and while we’re eating our food, the rain stops. Albie throws out our trash, and then he starts his car and drives us out to Oak Swamp Reservoir, which is a make-out spot for kids our age. Well,
my
age. It’s easy to forget that Albie’s six years older than me. He parks and turns off his engine but keeps the radio on. They’re playing that song “Baker Street,” which I like, but when I say I do, Albie says it sucks and that he wants to listen to some
real
music. He reaches under his seat and pulls out a Judas Priest cassette and puts it into his player. “Yuck,” I say. “Where’s my earplugs?” and Albie says I obviously don’t know good music and turns up the volume. We start making out a little, and he guides my hand down there again to that same area as last time, big surprise, and he’s got his lump again. “Please, sweetie. Please,” he says. It makes me think of that thing my father said to me that time when he caught me feeding veal loaf to our cat, Fluffy, under the table. “You start that, Anna Banana, and he’ll pester you nonstop.” One thing about my father: whenever he got finished working on our car, he always came in and washed his hands with that scratchy soap powder, Boraxo, to get the grease off. But Albie always has greasy hands, and, when he gets close to you, he smells like . . . mufflers.

Five minutes later, Albie still hasn’t finished and my hand’s starting to go numb. Then something unexpected happens. He puts his hand between
my
legs and starts tongue-kissing my mouth at the same time. I let him because it feels kind of strange but also a little bit good, and the more he does it, the less I want him to stop. “Mmm, you’re wet,” he whispers.

“No, I’m not,” I say. Am I?

“Yeah, you are,” Albie says. “You’re so wet, I almost need a mop. You’re good and ready for it, aren’t you?”

I know what “it” is, and I don’t want it in me, but I don’t
not
want it, either. I’m confused. So when he pulls me into the backseat and gets on top of me, I let him. He pokes his thing all around down there but his aim is bad. Then he finally figures it out. He starts whispering stuff like “Oh, Jesus” and “Oh, baby” and he’s pumping his hips faster and faster, and that’s when, all of a sudden, I think about birth control. “Hey!” I say. “Stop. I don’t want to get pregnant.” He says it’s no problem, that he’ll pull out before he “nuts,” which, I think, must mean when his wet stuff comes. There’s a lot about sex that I still don’t get, but I know it’s their wet stuff that gets the girl pregnant. And Albie does pull out, too, 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, I tell myself that as soon as I finish my second stuffed clam, that’s when I’ll tell him I’m pregnant. By now I’m only half-listening to his complaints about his mother, but he gets my full attention when he says that sometimes he daydreams about her getting killed in a car accident or getting struck by lightning and dying. “Winona Wignall, R.I.P.,” he says. “I should be so lucky.”

It’s ignorance, that’s what it is. He has no idea how awful it is to have your mother die. “Don’t even
say
stuff like that,” I tell him.

“Why not?” he says. “It’s a free country.” He takes a huge bite out of his grinder. There’s a strand of shredded lettuce sticking out of the corner of his mouth and he’s so stupid, he doesn’t even realize it. “Maybe someday I’ll take out my hunting rifle and put me and my dad out of our misery.”

I get so mad when he says it that I kick him under the table. Not that it must hurt very much. All I’m wearing is sandals.

“What the
fuck
?” he says. “What’d you do that for?” And when I don’t answer him, he lifts up his leg and stomps down hard on the top of my foot with his big clodhopper work boot. The pain shoots all the way up my leg and puts tears in my eyes. For several seconds I can’t even catch my breath. I wait until the nausea passes.

Here’s how I tell him. I say, “That’s a nice way to treat the mother of your child, you asshole!” I didn’t want it to come out that way, but I have to admit that the look of fear on his big fat face is satisfying.

“What did you just say?” he asks. I put my arms tight across my chest and don’t answer him. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

I nod without looking at him.

“By me?”

“Oh,
no
, Big Boy,” I say, real sarcastic. “It couldn’t be yours because you take that pill that doesn’t really exist. Remember?”

He tells me to stop fucking with him, and I tell him to pull that strand of lettuce out of his mouth because it looks disgusting.

“Are you having a kid or not?” he says, in this voice that’s loud enough that a customer who’s sitting at the counter swivels his stool around and looks at us. I’ve only eaten one of my stuffed clams, but I’ve lost my appetite and my foot’s throbbing, goddamn him. He better not have broken it if he knows what’s good for him. I get up from the booth and limp toward the door. I have first shift the next day, and it ought to be a whole lot of fun wearing my waitressing wedgies for five hours if my foot’s all black and blue and swollen. Albie follows me out of the restaurant and I scream it over my shoulder, “I’m not having
a
kid, you jerk! I’m having
your
kid! Deal with it!”

Albie’s scared to tell his parents, mostly his mother, so it’s me who finally has to call the meeting. “It’s urgent,” I tell Winona. The four of us are seated at the Wignalls’ kitchen table: Albie, his father, Winona, and me. There’s coffee mugs in front of each of us, and Winona’s put out a plate of Oreos that nobody’s touching. Winona doesn’t say much when she hears what we have to tell her, but her nostrils keep flaring and she’s teary-eyed. Then finally she says, “Big Boy, how could this have happened?”