Farm Girl Soulful

I was with my girlfriend when the fuse between Janey and me got lit. We were at a party in some kid's brownstone, back when having a whole brownstone on the upper west side wasn't that big a deal. I don't remember how it happened, but Janey and I started kissing with Anna (my girlfriend) right there. Not making out, but single kisses. Me getting up off the couch every few minutes, walking over to Janey and kissing her, then coming back and sitting next to Anna, who was Janey’s close friend. It wasn't a game exactly, more like a testing of boundaries. Anna saying (without saying), let’s see what I feel if Tom kisses you in front of me? Maybe she was experimenting with jealousy. Maybe it was an offer of intimacy to Janey, maybe even a proxy for her own desire to kiss her. I’m not sure. I just know I was really into it-- Having one girl who I knew wanted me, allowing/encouraging me to kiss another girl who seemed to want me as well. It didn’t go any further that night, but those kisses planted a seed.

Anna isn’t really part of this story. She had moved to Colorado by then. I broke it off with her before she left, leaving her for a girl two years younger than me whose dark eyed, Jewish gypsy face led me somewhere I had to go. She was fourteen at the time, and that summer (on my sixteenth birthday) she gave me her first kiss and all the rest. A few months later I was living with her in her parents’ Central Park West apartment. That is not a typo or a teenage boy's fantasy. Her parents, in a state of 1979 progressive delirium (or total abdication of parental duty) let me move in.

As for me and Corina (her name), there were no problems between us, except that we were children. In fact, she was a godsend to me, getting me away from my emotionally violent mother and loving me as much as a fourteen-year-old girl can love a sixteen-year-old boy, which is a lot. But the seed that was planted between Janey and I had grown into a sapling. I would see her every day at school and she would look at me with that “I’m still thinking about it” look, and I, curious boy that I was, needed to find out what she was thinking.

My interest in Janey wasn’t just her interest in me. I really liked her. She was cool in a very uncool way. A mid-west gentile in a school full of fancy Jews, she was from a working-class, single parent home and took the E train into Manhattan each day from her apartment in Queens. She was smart and real and farm girl soulful in her overalls. I dug her pug nose, and slightly squished-up face, her witchy eyebrows that always told more than her words. She had long dirty-blond hair that fell soft on the bib of her Osh-Kosh, that bib always pushed out by her large but not too large breasts. Only fifteen, she was wise, deep, and thoughtful. There was a whole world going on behind her eyes, and every time she looked at me, I knew I was part of it.

How did we decide? I don't remember any big build up or “How do we make this happen” conversation. It was more teenage mysterious than that. More female and telepathic. She was patient, sending out the homing signal, until one afternoon we found ourselves on the “double A,” headed toward Times Square to catch the E train going the other way. I have no idea what I told Corina, but it didn’t matter, she already knew. Janey was part of the group that came up to our place between classes (we lived a block from school) to smoke weed and Lark cigarettes and raid the fridge. Our school was tiny and incestuous. There was no hiding anything.

I’ll never forget that trip out to Queens. The longer we rode the more we felt like strangers. It had been almost a year since those kisses and I don’t think we had had one conversation longer than five minutes. There had been no courtship, just glances exchanged and almost always with others around. Yet here we were, headed to the outer-boroughs to have sex. She was going to lose her virginity to a boy she rarely talked to. A boy cheating on his girlfriend; the girlfriend, a friend of hers.

Everything about that afternoon was strange. I never went to Queens, so just walking the wide two-way boulevards with the elevated train above was otherworldly. Her building was a 1950s five-story number made of soot-stained brick, and a whole lot different than Corina’s opulent Central Park West digs, the doorman taking you up in the hand-lever elevator.

Janey took out her keys, opening two separate doors, then into a tight elevator and up to her place. We sat in the scrunched kitchen of her small two-bedroom apartment, and she offered me some apple juice. “If you want to smoke pot we have to go to the roof.” “I’m good. Do you want to?” “No, I’m okay.” I leaned over and kissed her. The first kiss since that one way back when. Her mouth was tense and dry. She laughed shyly, took a sip of apple juice, then tried again, her mouth now cool and sweet. She had a look in her eyes like she was way into it. A look that said, “I’m glad you’re here. I want to give myself to you.” We kissed some more, and she took my hand and led me to her room. It was tiny. A bed and a dresser. She stood in front of me, unhooked the straps of her overalls, then undid her ponytail and literally let her hair down. She took the overalls off, unhooked her bra, pulled off her underwear and stood there naked in front of me like it was olden times and this was our wedding night.

I looked at her, this sweet, lovely, naked girl, and was stunned. I was used to Corina’s small, lean, light brown body, and Janey was pale and fleshy. Her nipples had tiny bumps all around them, her hips were wider, her pubic hair a light brown tangle, and it all took me by surprise. I feel awful writing that and want so much more from sixteen-year-old me. I want him to make her safe and do exactly what she needs him to do, but he can’t, because he shouldn’t be there, and when he looks at Janey’s body, so different than Corina’s, he realizes that he’s not running to love, he’s running from it. He doesn’t know it in that kind of language, but he knows that something is wrong and wants to get out of there as fast as he can.

But course, I’m a still sixteen-year-old boy with pride. I may have only had sex with two girls, but I’ve had a lot of it with them and I’m not going to let my conscience or some nipple bumps keep me from doing what I need to do. So, I get in there, and kiss and rub and put my mouth where I think my mouth should go. But it doesn’t matter. My inner life is against me and even my natural, sex-crazed sixteen-year-old get hard at the drop of a hat horniness won’t do me any good.  It’s hopeless. My body is in revolt, and with my hands still on her, I tell her “I can’t do this…I have to go.”

Janey just lays there, fifteen-years old and naked, wondering what she did wrong and how this important thing we had imagined into being could end like this. Her squished-up face is even more squished-up, and I’m too young and freaked out to tell her, “I’m sorry. It’s not you, it’s me. I know you think I know what I’m doing but I don’t know what I’m doing at all.” She starts putting her clothes back on, and with great care and sweetness tells me, “It’s okay,” but I barely hear her, flying out the door, lost in my own guilt and embarrassment.

It’s a long subway ride back to the city. I’m not even thinking about what just happened. I just want see Corina and make sure she still loves me. My head is louder than the Times Square station. I’m back on the eighth avenue local, headed for Central Park West. We live on the corner of 87^th. I get off at 86^th. It’s a dark, winter, taxi whizzing night, and as I walk up Central Park West I see Oliver Lewen, a good-looking kid in Corina’s class, running in the street, pushing his bicycle. I call out to him, but he doesn’t answer, flying right by me, a wild, scene of the crime look in his eyes. A few minutes later, I find out that while I was with Janey he was with Corina. She couldn’t go through with it either and “please, don’t beat him up.” But I don’t feel anger, just relief, and we cry and huddle on the low platform bed we sleep in every night, the sounds of New York out the window.