Odyssey In A Teacup (5 page)

What ... so she can’t possibly put out? Well, guess what; she already has. Ha!

Sylvia’s low opinion of Maxi took a further dive when my intrepid friend posed topless for a football magazine. The picture appeared in its centre-page spread. In the early seventies, that was very daring, and the sort of thing a Jewish girl just didn’t do. No way. What would the neighbours think? Still, Vette and I envied Maxi, but Sylvia was incensed. When Maxi dropped round just after the footy magazine was published and in circulation, Sylvia wouldn’t even acknowledge her. After Maxi left, Sylvia barged into my room and let loose with a verbal onslaught.

‘That floozy! That strumpet! That
putana
is not welcome in this house!’

Hell, I’m not even welcome in this house, and I live here!

‘Pth-Pth-Pth.’
Sylvia made a spitting sound, the kind you make when you’re trying to spit out hairs. She looked over her left shoulder as she did this. It was some superstitious crap about spitting on the devil (and it was
always
over the left; Lucifer must be a southpaw). She then stormed out. But a couple of minutes later I heard her fumbling around in the lounge room and striking a match. Ah yes, she was burning incense to ward off the evil spirit. Still not enough for her. She flew back into my room. This time, she brought in a turquoise blue glass ‘evil eye’ bead—
—suspended on a thin chain, which she hung on the door of my wardrobe. It was added insurance for Greeks. But wait ... we weren’t Greek, although, because of my sense of this ancient lineage, it made me feel like Cyclops was stalking me. Still, Sylvia was covering all the bases. I now heard her banging pots and pans in the kitchen.

Shit!
I’d studied Macbeth in my last year of high school. Smatterings of the incantation of the three witches came back to me:
newt’s eye, frog’s toe, dog’s tongue, leg of a lizard, and wing of an owlet, all boiling and bubbling in a hell-broth.
I expected Sylvia to zip back in on her invisible broomstick and force me to drink a vile potion with eyeball ice cubes. Quadruple indemnity? I’d plead with her; tell her there was no need. Any desire I might have had to bare my breasts in a football magazine evaporated, just like that.
Pfft.
Amazing stuff! Her pagan rituals were working.

Maxi’s exploit made her the topic of juicy gossip in the Jewish community, but even though this audacious act would keep coming back to haunt her, she mostly kept running her own race. And despite her wild ways, she remained a ‘good’ girl. Until she started dating Ralph.

Ralph had harboured a crush on Maxi for a while, and not long after he saw the centrefold spread, he felt it was time to bite the bullet. The short, skinny, borderline-ugly boy suddenly shot up at sixteen and started filling out. Now seventeen, and unlike his short and stocky family, he stood at just over six feet. Ralph had developed broad shoulders, a nice pair of biceps and a washboard stomach. The coke-bottle glasses were gone, replaced by contact lenses so you could see his brown, puppy-dog eyes without the distortion. His pearly-whites framed by Cupid’s bow lips were now in proportion to his roundish face with its strong jaw. His hair had thickened and he wore it just above his shoulders. In short, Ralph had become very good-looking. Tweety Bird had transmogrified into a knockout (those of us in the know were careful not to liken his development to the ugly duckling story).

Looks aside, Maxi agreed to go out with Ralph based on the eyeful she copped
that
day in his backyard. Maxi called me early one Sunday morning three weeks into their relationship.

‘We screwed.’

‘Ooh, ooh! How was it?’ I asked eagerly.

She sighed. ‘He must have been speed-reading Masters and Johnson that day in your bedroom. He couldn’t master his johnson ... so no time even to
look
for
my
on-switch! And it hurt.’

I sighed. I was just as disappointed as Maxi. In my Kathleen Woodiwiss novels, as the hero plunges his throbbing, turgid shaft into the virginal heroine’s mossy grotto, after her initial cry of surprise and pain, she always writhes and moans in ecstasy as she arches against him.
Always
. Vette and Maxi might have looked like heroines of romance novels, but neither of their first sexual encounters reflected this. My faith in this genre to tell it like it is was badly shaken and it occurred to me that maybe Sylvia was right about sex. She’d told me a woman wasn’t supposed to enjoy it—‘Sex is just for the man’. Ralph kind of confirmed this when he turned up grinning from ear to ear not long after I hung up from Maxi.

‘I despoiled Maxi last night.’

Jesus! Who the hell speaks this way unless you’re Macbeth, Macduff or Hamlet?

We were used to Ralph’s turn of phrase, but Maxi found being in a relationship with him exhausting. ‘He’s weird.’

Really? You’re just noticing this?

‘He always taps things twice or repeats himself. Is there something wrong with him?’

‘Not that I know of.’ I wasn’t about to betray Ralph’s trust. No one else knew about his disorder.

‘Well, I’ve had enough.’

Ralph was desolate when Maxi ended it, but he came to accept that she only wanted friendship, nothing more. He didn’t speak to her for a few weeks, though.

After Ralph, Maxi really did become a ‘nice’ girl. ‘I’ve already got the reputation; may as well live up to it.’

At the time, the sexual revolution was gaining momentum. Maxi took advantage of these socially liberated attitudes, and she was having fun. For about six months, she bonked a different guy every week. Then, she met Marcus, MD.

Marcus was twenty-eight and didn’t seem her type (she usually went for the Cat Stevens kind, or the complete opposite—brawn). A surgical registrar, Marcus was average looking, average height, clean-cut, and clean-shaven. He was also supercilious and had such super small feet, it looked like he’d been a victim of foot binding.

A couple of months after they started dating, Maxi caught up with Vette, Ralph and me one Saturday afternoon at a little café near my place. Marcus didn’t join us. In between his long hours at the hospital and seeing Maxi, he liked to catch up on his sleep. And ‘doing coffee’ wasn’t his cup of tea. More to the point, we weren’t his cup of tea.
Guess what, fancy-pants!

‘Uh, what do you see in him?’ Vette asked, tentatively.

A crooked half-smile played on Maxi’s lips. ‘Well ... when God made Marcus, He gave him a choice: big feet or big dick.’

Vette and I laughed; Ralph didn’t. Seems he still had some lingering resentment towards her for dumping him, and now he really did
not
get why she had.

‘The two aren’t mutually exclusive, you know,’ he said, cockily as he crossed his right leg over his left one in a figure four position, and waggled his size twelve well-shod foot.

Maxi gave him a long, hard look and winked. ‘I know that.’

Didn’t we all? The whole bloody kith and kin knew that!

Listening to these two fence was entertaining. They were alike in so many ways. One oblique, the other brazen, they were both smart arses, which was probably why they couldn’t make it work. But I questioned Maxi’s devotion to Marcus; asked her how she tolerated his snootiness even if his throbbing, turgid shaft was a sizeable one. She just shrugged. A month later, though, she dropped him.

 ‘A big schlong doesn’t compensate for a small mind.’

We stared at her, open-mouthed.

‘What? ... I’m not shallow!’

Ralph gazed at Maxi with a well-I-have-the-best-of-both-worlds look on his face. And maybe it had something to do with his disorder, but he generally inclined towards both worlds. After Maxi, he had yo-yoed between sexual famine and feast. Then he met someone who ritualised feast/famine/feast/famine ...

Monique was bulimic. Ralph spent most of the money he earned from his job in a men’s clothing store on her. He wined and dined her. She snarfed and barfed. Monique was also monochromic: everything was black and white in her world. This would suit someone with OCPD to a T. But Ralph’s tendency to think colourfully was at odds with his disorder. And his tendency to think outside the box was at odds with his relationship with Monique. We could only assume the attraction to her related to his overwhelming desire and tendency to think inside the box. Outside of that, we couldn’t understand the appeal (Monique was a vain, social-climbing, bleached blonde scrag). Nor did we get a chance to.

Ralph gushed about his new squeeze in the early days—Mons this and Mons that—but when Maxi asked if her last name was Veneris or Pubis (and Vette and I laughed), Ralph refused to talk to the three of us for a good month. Then he unexpectedly turned up on my doorstep early one Saturday morning.

‘It’s over. I’m done with her ... and I’ve missed you, Ruthie.’

‘I’ve missed you too! What happened?’

Mons was a catalogue model who had her sights set on the catwalk, and although she was the right height, she couldn’t make it because her legs were too short.

‘I told her vomiting would thin out her legs, not elongate them. She got so upset, she pilfered food from
my
plate and then, she threw that up!
My
food!’

Geez. Imagine.

‘Well, we had a big fight. She called me Daffy ... ’ Ralph’s voice broke and he got misty-eyed ‘… and that was it for me!’

Ralph went back to his loose ways for a while, but then he reconnected with Gwen, who found his outré behaviour adorable. A few weeks after they started going out, I asked him if he’d been harvesting caterpillars.

‘Don’t need to. She has her own home-grown army of them.’

While Ralph mounted a coup at every opportunity, I was getting cabin fever. The only viable solution was to sustain a loss: my virginity. Meantime, the beaver might be hiding in the backwoods, but it had been my ‘pet’ since before Sylvia issued her bullshit injunction. She couldn’t stop
me
from playing with it!

CHAPTER THREE:
DATES & LEMONS

Other than myself, there were plenty of takers, but it had to be the right one. A couple of months after the camp, I landed my first boyfriend, Zach Cohen. Before I met him, I’d chalked up a reasonable snog log and was a seasoned kisser, even though I had practised on a lot of frogs. Zach also turned out to be one of them.

At sixteen, he was a year older than me. Ironically, he was someone I did not want to lock lips with. The first time I saw Zach was at a party, where he was wheedling all the girls into pashing him. Zach came across as an overweening weasel and I told him to get out of my face when he tried it on with me. This just piqued his interest. And when he found out I fancied Aaron, who was his cousin, it seemed to make me all the more appealing. So, Zach pursued me relentlessly. And Sylvia relentlessly pestered me to go out with him because he was Jewish. Eventually, I relented. I need to make it perfectly clear it was
not
because I took her advice; it was just that where Zach was addicted to the thrill of the chase, I was addicted to feeling wanted.

Zach wasn’t much to look at, but he had a certain
je ne sais quoi
that charmed the girls. The thing with Zach, though, was that he engaged in serial monogamy ... with a twist. Obviously, being a monogamist, he was not the kind of guy who had two relationships happening at once. Instead, he had one relationship happening twice. Zach was a sequential recycler. The best way to explain this is mathematically because his dating practices followed an algebraic formula.

Zach would date girl A for a couple of months, then he’d move on to girl B (without bothering to inform A that their relationship was kaput). After dating girl B, also for a couple of months, he’d move onto girl C. As in the case with girls A and B, girl C was not notified that her number (or letter) was up. Two months into his relationship with C, Zach moved on to girl D, then E, then F (all in much the same manner). But here is where the equation gets a tad complicated. Rather than advancing from F to G, as one would expect, Zach went back to the beginning and dated A again. He then progressed chronologically (every two months) through B, C, D, and E, stopping at F once more. This is called a repeat pattern in algebra. And because repeat patterns are key in algebraic thinking, seems Zach made sure to pick girls who weren’t too good at maths, me included.

This enterprise of his had a biennial life cycle—Zach changed the pattern every two years. In other words, after completing the second cycle with A, B, C, D, E, and F (six girls x two months per girl = twelve months + the same six girls x another lot of two months per girl = twenty-four months), Zach then started a new cycle with girls G, H, I, J, K, and L times two, and so forth. I may not have been a maths whizz, but as my second go-round with him was nearing the two-month mark, I put two and two together and told him to bugger off. No loss for him (he didn’t like it that my breasts and pawpaw were off limits). The horny toad just leapfrogged onto the next in line.