Watch Your Mouth (7 page)

“You’re talking like some male fantasy character in a dirty book,” I said. I felt like I’d been caught reading it.

She shrugged and her whole body twisted in such a way that crossed the inevitable line. We both quickened with military

precision and ferocity, like a field drum roll. Our faces grew furious and fell closer and closer to one another—we didn’t want to fire until we saw the whites of our eyes. It occurred to me that all she’d said had maybe been nothing but talking dirty. Not a plan of action but some new toy to try, some way of taking the family stress after an invigorating year in the dorms and turning it into further fuel for our exploits. The idea of her telling me secrets to egg me on aroused me even as the secrets repelled me, and the
accelerando
of our our bodies drowned out

T.U.D. and the unblinking mirror saw another splashdown. Cyn’s exhausted flesh collapsed on top of me and I placed my hands behind her, pressing myself further in even as I retracted. I imagined the view from above, fluttered as the fan still spun, of my damp hands upon her like those of an exhausted cast- away. The image of her body stirred me even more than the body itself, the idea of her being viewed, like this was all in front of an audience. She must have felt my resparking, because she raised up on one arm and one eyebrow, and shook her head. “I
must
get to bed,” she said, and hopped off me and the bed like her examination was over. She crossed the room and bent down to grab the robe she’d snuck up in. She picked it up by the scruff of its neck and regarded it for a moment before fig- uring out how to turn it right-side out—a perky oboe solo should do the trick. I myself felt wet, shaky, squinty. Fetal. In the usual bout of post-coital gloom I wondered bleakly how Cyn could be so casual. All our wailing and gnashing of teeth were measures and measures behind us, right now only the polite pastorals of the scene’s opening accompany what we did. I stared at the room, gawky as a marionette; Cyn looked for her other sock with yawning patience. She was a loose woman. I

had slipped in and out of her almost unnoticed, so clogged was her brain with the memories of listening to her parents and from the educational prospects of sleeping with her father. I remem- bered suddenly how her expert unbuckling when we finally succumbed in my dorm room, peeling away her own pants like the greedy unwrapping of birthday presents, had distressed me as well as hardened me, her refusal to even pretend that we were exploring new territory. How loosely had I slipped inside her, and now how loosely did I find myself in her family attic, embarking on a summer on the basis of so much fucking. She was a loose woman, and as she tied the cloth belt with a brisk strangling gesture I thought of what she’d told me about her father, what her father had told me about her, all the things I didn’t know and wouldn’t notice until I stepped on them like shards of glass on the beach. She was a loose woman, and as I considered all that lay untold between now and the last few gasps of August she felt like a loose cannon as well.

I could have spent the summer anywhere, called her on the phone in the evenings after grumpy days at some job. Thought of her discarded jeans before I slept at night, led myself to sweaty explosions in a sagging bed in some room creaking with unfamiliar noises. Then I wouldn’t have heard the ones below me after Cyn had left the room and I was alone between the fan and her downstairs bed. The paternal knock on her door could have been the house settling, but all the muted gasps after that, whispered cadences creaking up from the house, had to be more than my dirty mind. My brain soiled as I strained to hear more, and obligingly the sound of the ceiling fan faded and I could hear low moans, familiar to my attic bed as the wind through the window. I pictured Cyn from above, fluttered as the ceiling

fan I’d noticed when she showed me her room spun above them. My dirty mind could picture the doctor with his surgeon hands upon her like those of an exhausted castaway. I closed my eyes to hear better and the room turned to steam around me. I pic- tured myself floating through the vapory floor, down to her bedroom with the consummated carpeting and entering her body from behind. Would I be joining anyone there, like a guest? I couldn’t trust the sounds of a house I’d never lived in, couldn’t trust my body for an appropriate response as I shifted on the wet sheets and felt my own hands fumble down my hips. But the offstage aria, if indeed it’s being sung, is lost to the audience’s ear as the orchestra closes the act and leaves the dirty minds of the audience sputtering in the sudden surge of the house lights, on for intermission.

A
B R I E F
I N T E R M I S S I O N

[The audience strolls out of the auditorium and chats about subjects tangentially related to the action.]

A typical day at Camp Shalom that summer went as follows: Cyn and I would leave the Glass home with the sticky stagger of people who are hot, tired and late. We’d be clutching identical plastic mugs emblazoned with Mather College’s crest, Cyn’s marked with a little red ribbon so we could tell them apart.

She drove us to Shalom in the same automobile that had bumped and ground our way to Pittsburgh, the same automo- bile in which Cyn had fondled our pimply employer, the engine rumbling beneath my denim shorts. We usually both wore denim shorts—the weather too hot for long pants and the camp-

ers too messy for sensitive cloth—and, at least at first, one of the two official Camp Shalom Counselor T-shirts we’d been is- sued. As the summer dragged on we grew lazier and lazier about rinsing the T-shirts every night and despite the occasional grip- ing of the pimply actor the shirts appeared with less and less frequency, like the electronically rendered heartbeat of some- body dying in the hospital.

We never spoke, the whole way there, the whole summer long. We didn’t need to. We never needed to. It was a mutual, unspoken agreement, like some family tradition that later re- quires extensive therapy. We didn’t need to, but it meant that between Camp Shalom and the Glass dinner table the only pri- vate conversations that Cyn and I had were during or imme- diately following sex. The ride to camp would have been an ideal time for conversation, but never, the whole way there, the whole summer long. It was usually a twenty-two-minute drive, meaning that we could leave Byron Circle at a quarter to eight and only be seven minutes late. We’d slink into the Mandatory Staff Meeting and the pimply actor would glare at us, less for tardiness than the way we’d come in. In a mutual, unspoken agreement we’d always enter the meeting smiling or even laugh- ing at one another as if we’d been chatting blissfully the whole commute instead of waiting for our coffee to cool and listening to the grating radio announcer update us on our tardiness. The hit song that summer was “Bing Bing Bing,” which acccording to the chorus, is the sound my heart makes when I see you babe.

It was also the sound of the gong which divided up the Camp Shalom Day into Hello, Peace and Goodbye. The gong wasn’t a

gong proper but three empty cans of government surplus peanut butter glued together to make a large hollow column and sus- pended from the Mitzvah Tree. Each summer the Arts & Crafts students repainted it. Mitzvah means “blessing” in Hebrew and even the campers with no religious education at all knew that “Shalom” could mean hello, goodbye and peace, depending on when you said it. “Like if you said it when someone was leav- ing,” the Camp Director said in her pert little voice, “it would mean ‘goodbye.’ ” And if you stood around the flagpoles in the morning and sang the national anthems of America and then Israel, it would mean Hello, the first third of Camp Shalom’s day. The Camp Director would make some announcements. Then there would be an All-Camp Activity which I remember only from the brief blurry snapshots of All-Camp Activities in the Camp Shalom brochure: A water-balloon fight, leaving everyone’s bodies soaked and the grounds littered with small rubber fragments of blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag. Capture-the-flag, using one ragged blue panel and one ragged white panel that I had cut at the Arts & Crafts Shack. Cyn and I breathlessly pressed together during All-Camp Hide and Seek, my orgasm rivering into her cupped hand as one of the Rosen twins checked the nurse’s office, but not, thank God, its closet. A tinny hora from portable speakers, with us romping around the flagpole. Something in the pool.

The Camp Director would declare winners and losers and the kids would all scamper to the Morning Activity, the second scene in the Hello Act. Based on some checked-off preferences mailed in by Mom, the kids could learn new Hebrew songs from Cyn, rehearse vaguely Jewish skits under the direction of the pimply boy, glue things in the shack I managed, play a variety

of sports rechristened with Hebrew names, get wet under the sunglassed silence of the lifeguard, or, until it was discovered that what they were doing was pairing off to tongue each other in the semi-seclusion of the Theodore Herzl Grove, go on Na- ture Walks. Bing bing bing and it was time for Peace: a kosher lunch.

The Goodbye gong marked the afternoon activities, and by the end of Goodbye everybody was cranky, so the two-thirty closing ritual at the flagpole never had the soft-focus magic of the brochure. The cranky audience had to listen to a brief pre- sentation from one cranky group of activiteers. Cyn’s kids would sing. While the pimply director stood in front and mouthed the script, we’d see a vaguely Jewish skit. The lifeguard would break his silence and present the day’s Most-Improved Swimming Medal to some blue-lipped boy who would take the certificate in his proud little puckered hands. And, before Na- ture was shut down until further notice, a blushing couple would hold out a leaf they’d probably pressed between their heaving Camp Shalom T-shirts.

My own presentations were a mixed success. Pieces of cloth, decorated with dried macaroni, beads and glitter, the better to cover bread for Shabbat, were an ideal project, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that papier-maˆche´ candleholders were a bad idea until every last one of them caught fire and burned down to their wire-hanger frame in the Goodbye presentation. Assigning each Hello child a pair of animals and getting the whole Goodbye group to collaborate on an ark was an inspi- ration, but construction-paper mock Torahs drew angry phone calls from Orthodox parents pointing out that The Word is properly written on lambskin. After finding inspiration in

events best left undescribed until Act III Scene Two, I trooped the shackers down to Red Sea Creek to scoop mud into big plastic vats which originally held ice cream donated from Sco- berg’s Scoops for make-your-own sundaes. They bitched as we lugged them back up the hill, but everybody revelled in the filthy enchantment of dumping the mud onto a big plank and forming it into a giant seated figure. The little Katz kid donated two marbles for his gaping eyes; his leering face was scraped out of the muck with popsicle sticks. We covered our golem with a sheet and the lifeguard helped us slither him over to the flagpole where he dried, a mystery, all day long. For once no- body was cranky for the final ceremony, but in all the excite- ment I forgot a key rule of golem-making: it’s the Word of God, not the clay, that makes a golem a golem. Mud, when it dries in an atheist context, is just dirt. What looked mighty when wet was as flimsy as construction paper. The friction of the unveil- ing broke his left leg. It crashed and dusted on impact. The sheet raked him over; his face fell like a bad cake. In a final insult, his right eye rolled right out, hit a small rock and broke into jagged halves, the Katz kid’s best shooter. By the time his whole body was unsheeted he didn’t look like a golem. He didn’t look like a statue. He looked like a pile of shit. Four of the eight- year-olds cried.

I almost redeemed myself with the God’s Eyes, almost. Put the sticks together to make an
X
(
Not
a cross; this is Camp Shalom). Weave the yarn around them in concentric, sloppy squares. Switch colors. Tie the ends. Around and around and around. The results are somewhere between spiderwebs and quilt squares; when the tidier girls made them in dozens of colors with splindly tassels on the corners they looked like the

confettied photographs in biology textbooks of tiny creatures supposedly found in every pond. As inexplicable as finding one- self in Pittsburgh for the summer, God’s Eyes became a fad. First adorning the roof drains of the Arts & Crafts Shack, then the Camp Director’s Office, then the dining hall, then the other shacks and the infirmary and the changing rooms at the pool and then every available overhanging, with miniature versions appearing on kids’ keychains and belt loops and ears and then given as friendship tokens, romantic tokens and Nature Walk tokens, the God’s Eyes surveyed the whole camp within a few days of their debut. Kids would sneak away from swimming to raid the diminishing yarn reserves of the Shack. Missing kids would return as the gong rang, breathless from their excursions, grass stains on their untucked shirts, clutching exchanged tal- ismans of their lust, damp from their sweaty palms. The very act of unravelling yarn became foreplay for the pre-teens. Cyn gave me one as a joke after she mounted me in the changing room during lunchtime, the damp room swirling around us with the ghosts of who knows how many bashful boys hiding their circumcised erections behind the blue and white Camp Shalom towels, how many chlorinated orgasms achieved in the trembling privacy of the stalls, wiped off hairless chests with toilet paper, rinsed in the pool as soon as the protrusions sub- sided? God knows. They saw everything, things I couldn’t have seen myself, and they told me I must have been wrong. All summer long, blinking in the breezes, we were watched over by the handmade surveillance of God’s Eyes.

ACT II, SCENE ONE

A pre-curtain woodwind interlude establishes the three weeks between the first we know of Dr. Glass fucking his daugh- ter beneath the attic floor of Joseph’s borrowed room and the eye-piercing blaze when the footlights hit the dagger Mrs. Glass is holding. If the director blocks it carefully, the soprano should be able to catch the light at every angle of her arc, sweeping the audience in pure glare like something arriving from another planet.