Odyssey In A Teacup (3 page)

‘Can you lend me twenty cents?’

‘Sure. But they’re called a
pair
of underpants. Why don’t you just start off with one pair till you have more money?’

‘They’re called a pair because they were originally made in two parts, and I don’t care that they’re still called that; we’re talking
one
piece of clothing.’

It can be hellish hard work trying to argue with a smart-mouthed obsessive-compulsive. The only time I had the edge on Ralph was when I called him odd. Mostly, though, I indulged his neuroses, and he indulged mine (by calling me Ruth-ie, which worked in both our interests). God knows I developed plenty, not least cacomorphobia, a dread of morbidly obese people. This was spawned by the spawn of Satan herself, cousin Zelda.

Our parents felt sorry for Zelda, so we kids were conditioned to tiptoe around her (it’s not hard to give a wide berth to someone with a titanic stern).
I
didn’t feel sorry for her at all. Buffered by the adults’ pity, Zelda regularly played the boohoo-I’m-fat card, and succeeded in making me her villain. Her pathological lying got me into trouble on family Sundays at our place.

‘Go to your room!’ Sylvia would yell, her tone brooking no argument.

She didn’t even give me the benefit of the doubt. I never, ever made fun of Zelda’s size—well ... not to her face. Ralph and I secretly nicknamed her Little Lotta, after the comic book character whose full name was Lotta Plump. And honestly, we were being kind
.
Zelda was shitloada plump! Anyway, she mouthed ‘Ha, ha’ every time I got banished. Then she would chant through my open window, ‘Sooky, sooky’ as I sat on the floor of my bedroom weeping over the injustice.

Where Zelda was my provocateur, Louwhiney was Ralph’s. She wasn’t as spectacularly porcine as Zelda, but still, she was a squealer just like her. And Ralph did a lot of time in his room because of his sister’s furphies.

Being scapegoated too often was wearing thin for Ralph and me. I’d had enough of hanging out with the rellos every weekend, and Ralph didn’t want to hang out in front of them ever again. This time when I stated my case, I had more ammunition. Drawing on what I was learning about the various forms of government at school, I stood my ground with Sylvia.

‘This
is
a democracy, by the way, not an autocracy. I’m not going to these family things anymore. You cannot make me! I have democratic rights!’

‘
Oeuf!
I should have home-schooled you,
pest
!’

Would that have included sex education?
Of course not! But Ralph’s expo had been an interesting introduction to it.

CHAPTER TWO:
FOURPLAY

Maxi, Vette and I have been friends since kindergarten. There’s not much we don’t know about each other. And glimpsing Ralph’s dingle-dangle that afternoon launched a whole new level of, er, intercourse. Sure, we’d seen boys’ bits when we were little—we shared baths with our big brothers. Ronnie is two years older than Maxi (they also have a younger brother, River. Maxi was thirteen when he was born). And Alex is three years older than Vette. This was the first time, though, that we’d seen the whole enchilada ... straight
up. Ralph, on the other hand, had yet to see a fully ripened female ‘noonie’ (as Vette’s mother called it), but he got a preview of coming attractions when he was nine and played peekaboo with Gwen.

A year younger than Ralph, Gwen was a skinny, fair-haired girl who lived two doors down from him. They were lying in the clearing of the little nearby park, which was overgrown with weeds. Gwen was a bit shy, so Ralph took the initiative. He stood up, pulled down his pants and flashed.

‘Ta-da!’

Gwen recoiled. ‘Oh,
iiick
!’

Having grown up with two sisters, no father present and only female cousins, she had never seen a boy naked. She assumed male gonads looked like her Ken doll’s. Gwen thought Ralph was badly deformed, and told him as much. He set her straight.

‘
All
boys’ privates look like this. They’re not useless, seamless bulges like Ken’s!’

Never mind that Ralph actually spoke like this as a child; I suspect that six years on when his moving parts fell out of his shorts, he probably thought Ken was lucky.

Gwen looked again through narrowed eyes, and just shrugged. It was her turn. She lay back and pulled down her pants. Ralph scrutinised her exposed noonie, examining it from all angles. He then casually picked up a caterpillar that was marching across the clearing, and perched it on her pubic mound.

‘Why d’ya do that?’ I asked him when he relayed the story.

‘I just wanted to see what it would look like.’

Wow ... so young and already contemplating the aesthetics of pubic topiary for a woman. Clearly, Ralph was a mini man of vision. That he displayed a lack of it while he was straddling the mini bike was his hard luck.

A few months after his unfortunate display, Maxi, Vette and I attended a youth camp (Ralph’s family couldn’t afford to send him). It was here that I experienced my first lip kiss. A group of seventeen of us—eight boys, nine girls—were playing spin the bottle. I had a thing for Aaron Eisen, who was sitting directly opposite me in the circle. He spun the bottle but it didn’t land on me. Cassandra was the lucky girl who got to kiss him. Then with her spin, the bottle pointed at Eugene, but Cassandra refused to kiss him because he was beastly looking. He still got to spin the bottle, though, and it stopped at me. I didn’t want to kiss Eugene either, but ...

I had been paying close attention to kissing scenes in movies and frankly, I was sick of practising on my hand or the doorjamb. Even though the seventeen-to-one odds of my upcoming spin landing on Aaron were not great, if I did get lucky, I didn’t want him to think I was inexperienced. So I let Eugene kiss me.

Eugene looked like a blobfish. He had fat, squishy, wet lips, and he opened his mouth really wide as he zoomed in. I had to match him or my whole head would have disappeared down his yawning gob. But when his tongue darted in and out of my mouth like a gecko, I retched. Eugene appeared wounded.

Maxi, who was sitting next to me, leaned over and whispered,
‘Way to go, kemosabe!’

This made me feel worse than I already did. Callous as it sounds, it wasn’t that I felt guilty about almost yacking in Eugene’s mouth and upsetting him, I was only concerned about Aaron’s reaction. Would he ever want to kiss me with that special image imprinted on his psyche? I looked at Maxi sheepishly; she tried to make me feel better.

‘Hey, don’t look so worried. Check it out. You gave him a stiff.’

Ecch.
If only she’d been talking about Aaron ...

The others then urged me to have my spin. The bottleneck pointed at Jonah. Jonah wasn’t as ugly. His head was shaped like a turnip and he had a small mouth, which made his lips look frozen in a permanent pucker. He closed in on me and made sucking and nibbling movements, like a goldfish eating a long worm. There was no danger of being vacuumed into his blowhole or even his tongue shooting out, because the aperture width was too narrow.

The kiss wasn’t great, but it wasn’t revolting. Jonah’s face was flushed when he was done. With that, and with his strawberry-red hair, compact yap and a sudden, er, swelling, Jonah reminded me of the Dr Seuss character, Gustav the Goldfish. Little dude eats fish food and realises he’s made a boo-boo. He grows twice as long, thick and wide; exceeding his fishbowl, his tail hangs outside. My thoughts got all lyrical:

I regretted the deed, ‘cause just like Eugene,

My kiss set in action a small part unseen.

Quite clear to all present, he wasn’t a queen!

A formal salute in the pants of young Jonah!

The upshot of snogging; the boy gotta boner!

Maybe I wasn’t up there with the likes of Theodor Seuss Geisel just yet, but clearly, I had talent (even if it was as a prick teaser). And I was determined to exercise it.

Kissing became the sport du jour at that camp, and we three girls participated fully. It was also a first for Vette but for Maxi, it was just a refresher course. We kept up our kissing binge post-camp, working at bettering our personal bests.

Ralph wanted in. Not your average bloke, Ralph averaged himself by turning it into a pissing contest. He made a tally board at school during one of his woodwork classes.

‘Why do we need this?’ asked Maxi.

‘So we can see who gets the longest list.’

‘We already know you’ve got a long one that lists.’

He smiled at this. Yep, average bloke.

By comparing notes (not lists), we four learned a lot about the opposite sex. From Sylvia, I learned a lot about the opposite
of
sex.

One Saturday afternoon when Ralph, Maxi and Vette were over at my place, we sat in my bedroom pooling our experiences and gossiping. We talked about a girl in my class who did more than just kiss. Bridget was an attractive blonde. The girls at school nicknamed her Gidget (after the movie character), the petite and cutesy heroine of many teenage girls. Well, Bridget was the petite and cutesy heroine of many teenage boys. She earned pocket money after school hours from her job in a deli, and she earned a reputation at school from her hand jobs behind the lunch shed. The boys nicknamed her Digit.

After my friends left, Sylvia, who was a walking cliché and often spouted them, called me into her bedroom. Her lips were tightly pursed in disapproval.

Shit. Here we go ...

‘I overheard your conversation about that girl, Digit, the one with the two jobs.’
Jesus! If I weren’t so pissed off that she had eavesdropped, I would have laughed. It was like a really awesome game of Chinese whispers.
‘This girl is a “nice” girl. Boys sleep with nice girls, but they marry “good” girls. Which do you want to be?’

It was not a question. It was a guilt-inducing statement pitched like a question, just for effect. That way, it looked like I was being given a choice. Sylvia was overprotective, and I’m sure she was concerned about my reputation, but only inasmuch as how my decisions would reflect on her parenting skills. Image was paramount. ‘What will the neighbours think?’ was a common catchcry during my childhood and adolescence, and Sylvia was tethered to it.

‘Well?’ she added when I didn’t respond.

‘Well what?’

‘I’m waiting for your answer.’

‘What’s to answer? It’s a rhetorical question.’ I don’t think she understood what a rhetorical question was because she looked confused. I just stared at her and raised one eyebrow.

‘
Oeuf!
Just keep your pawpaw covered up.
Pest!
’

Noonie was not the only pet name for genitalia that I was exposed to. In my family, a vagina was a pawpaw, and a penis was a fawkey. I didn’t question this. But I questioned Sylvia when one of her friends got pregnant. I was nine at the time.

‘How do you get pregnant?’

Sylvia wasn’t comfortable talking about it but obviously, she knew I’d be asking sooner or later, because she pulled out a sex education book from the bottom drawer of her dresser and gave it to me to read.

The book talked about the way a baby is made from a union of a tiny part of the mother and a tiny part of the father. When I discussed this with Ralph, he reacted pretty strongly.

‘You’re wrong!’ He indignantly pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘The father’s part is
not
a tiny part.’

Geez. Only nine years old and already prickly about the size of his organ. Like I said, Ralph was a visionary. But neither of us knew that this tiny father part referred to sperm (we didn’t even know what sperm was). And although I can’t remember the name of the author, it’s highly unlikely a man wrote that book; otherwise, even the size of a sperm would have been blown out of proportion. Here’s the thing, though. Relative to six feet of height and two hundred pounds of mass, a pecker is a piddling, teensy-weensy part of a man. Miniscule. Lilliputian.

The book also talked about how a baby grows in the uterus, which it likened to a balloon with a little opening at the bottom, and how, when the baby’s fully-grown, it pushes headfirst through the opening to the outside. Vagina didn’t rate a mention.
It
was called the tunnel between the balloon’s opening and the outside. I also don’t recall seeing the words vulva, penis or testicles. But compared to winkie and wee-wee, which is what Maxi heard at home, and Vette’s mum’s diddly-doo and noonie, fawkey and pawpaw sounded authentic to the four of us (and as Ralph and I were kin, Norma referred to them the same way that Sylvia did). I found out the truth a year later from a girl I shared a hospital room with when I had my appendix out. I quizzed Sylvia when she took me home.

‘How did you come up with the names fawkey and pawpaw?’

She bristled uncomfortably. ‘My mother called them that.’

‘Why?’

‘
Oeuf!
Does it matter?
Pest!
Ask her.’ Sound advice if only the woman hadn’t been dead for the last twenty years. And so, I was left to speculate.

It took me a few years of speculation, a lot more information about sex, and much discussion with Ralph, Maxi and Vette about this to come up with a plausible explanation. It may well have been that my grandmother, Ruby went to the local market one day, saw a cross-sectioned pawpaw in amongst the fruit display and thought,
oui, il resemble un peu à la papaye
(yep, it looks a bit like a pawpaw). This presumes that Ruby actually checked out her own pawpaw. She probably then stopped eating the fruit because she suddenly realised it was a wee bit too close to home. And since the apple doesn’t fall far from tree, if Sylvia’s puritanical mindset and her tendency to manipulate are an indication of her upbringing, then it’s a safe bet that Ruby would have knowingly served pawpaw to her own husband (my grandfather, Jacob). Her accompanying thoughts?
Voici le cunnilingus tu continue à vouloir effectuer sur moi, mon chéri
(here's the cunnilingus you keep wanting to perform on me, darling). This might be a bit of a stretch because back then, a bloke would be more predisposed to plunging and thrusting than diving in headfirst. Still, eating pawpaw was probably the closest thing to sex Jacob was going to get.