One
The first day I ever gave a shit about soccer was September 4, 1979—the day that Mr. McMann showed up at Powell Park High. You know those moments when everything changes almost at once, like some kind of wave rolls over a room and whatever you had been doing gets washed away as it dawns on everyone that something way bigger is taking place? It was like that.
It wasn’t even like Bobby McMann turned the tide on a particularly boring day. It had been eventful as hell. There’d been tryouts for The Sound of Music in third period. Every girl I knew was bonkers for the movie—the Rialto had brought it back for a special engagement that summer. I’d gone to see it with my best friends, Tina Warner and Candace (sometimes Candy) Trillo, who’d loved it. I was bored. Everyone in it was too nice (except the Nazis, of course).
I hadn’t tried out for the play, but Tina and I had gone to watch Candace give it a go. Candace wanted a part because she was forever on boyfriend lookout, and school plays always seemed to yield a few new couples. She’d told me I should have auditioned because I was almost seventeen and no one had ever touched my breasts. They were small and unevenly sized, though the slightly bigger right one had a Farrah Fawcett quality to it. I wasn’t opposed to them being touched, but I’d never gone to even one school play starring a guy I’d be eager to have doing the honors. Anyway, despite Candace’s spirited performance, Tina and I had our money on Peggy Darnell getting to be Maria because during the auditions, while she was spinning, Julie Andrews–style, her giant, braless, totally symmetrical boobs had busted out of her top, to the delight of our drama teacher.
“Julie Andrews was totally flat in the movie,” someone at the end of our cafeteria table was saying. I couldn’t see who through the mess of smushed paper bags and trays and girls leaning forward so other girls could help them with their hair. We messed with our hair at lunch a lot, in ways our mothers would say was unsanitary. But our cafeteria was a large gymnasium with long tables rolled out in the center for lunch periods, and the room smelled like sweat and feet, so what was a little hairstyling?
“Doesn’t matter—Mr. Doberton is a total perv,” I said knowingly, and took a sip of my Yoo-hoo. I practiced my knowing looks in the mirror sometimes, because I liked hiding how little I actually knew. “He’s probably writing ‘Peggy’s jiggly tits’ on the cast sheet next to ‘Maria’ right now.”
Our table became a laugh chamber. And it was precisely in the middle of that laughter that Bobby McMann opened the double doors to the cafeteria.
At 12:07 p.m., all concerns about who’d been overshadowed by D-cups became moot.
You know those Coke commercials where you see the bubbles pouring mesmerizingly over ice and the liquid ripples like it’s dancing and your mouth gets dry and all you want is a Coke? Even if you’ve never had a Coke, or you’ve just had one?
In a way, I’d just had one. Sort of.
Before I tell you any more about Bobby McMann, whose name I didn’t even know yet, I should explain. See, sometimes, something will stir me up. On that day, it was the back of Alex Noti’s head in fourth-period physics. His neck looked really nice: strong but not too ropy, with his light hair cut in a clean line just below his earlobes. And since he didn’t turn around (Alex Noti’s face would ruin everything), I imagined his neck was Paul Newman’s. The Long, Hot Summer Paul Newman. My weird urge was to lick that line of hair. Fantasy Paul Newman did not think I was weird. His skin was warm and he shuddered as he turned around to see me. Then Paul Newman’s lips were near mine, not even kissing, just breathing into my mouth like he wanted to kiss me, and wanted to get it exactly right. That idea of Paul Newman created this not-bad . . . stirring at my fulcrum (it’s a physics word for the thing a lever sits on, but I think it sounds like a nice way to say “crotch”). I crossed my legs and had to fight off getting too carried away. I know from past at-school daydreams that taking it too far means walking around all day feeling like I have an itch I can’t scratch.
Boys would call it being horny. Girls would call it the same thing, I think, but not out loud.
It’s not something I’d put on a job application or anything, but I don’t want to lie: I’m good at getting myself off. When I got my first period—this was back when my parents were still together—my mom told my dad we were going out, just us girls, and she took me for pizza. And at the pizza parlor, she didn’t just show me how to use a maxi pad—she also let me have some of her red wine and drew a picture on her napkin of the vagina and told me that I was a woman now and she really wanted me to understand the clitoris, so she circled that part and she even wrote it there in pen. C-L-I-T-O-R-I-S. She told me, “Susan, the men in your life sure aren’t going to care about it, so you’d better,” and I hadn’t realized it but I guess it was an early sign that she and Dad were done. Then she just left it on the table at Vito and Ray’s, a vagina napkin. Which, as first periods go, was slightly less embarrassing than bleeding through my pants.
When we got home, she gave me a book called Our Bodies, Ourselves, and “clitoris” was right there in the index. So was “masturbation.” Not step-by-step instructions, but enough to clarify that those feelings in my fulcrum—feelings I’d felt before, riding a bike or sliding down the banister of my grandma’s house in Wisconsin—could lead to something good. So I read between the lines.
And came up with elaborate footnotes.
It’s not that my thoughts are that dirty. I daydream about being undressed like one of the heroines in a Rosemary Rogers book, or about Han Solo pushing my hair out of my eyes, or Roy Scheider from Jaws squeezing me a fresh lemonade and watching me drink it. The fantasies can be brought on by small aspects of boys I know—like Alex Noti’s neck—but whose other aspects take them out of contention as fantasy material. Candace always tells me I need to give more boys in school a chance, get to know them, but honestly, I feel like I know enough about the boys we know: Most of them stink. And even the okay ones are no Han Solo.
If I wasn’t so proficient at masturbating, maybe behind-the-scenes groping with some bumbling stagehand would sound more appealing to me. And if I were a boy, I probably wouldn’t be so secretive about it. Masturbation and boys went, well, hand in hand. At school, boys had nicknamed stalls in their restrooms the Spankin’ Station (first floor), the Beat-Off Box (second floor), and the Jerkin’ for Jerkins (a stall in the third-floor bathroom next to the teachers’ lounge that got its name because visits there were often inspired by the curvy geometry teacher, Ms. Jerkins). I’d actually tried to masturbate between second and third period once, but I couldn’t do it standing up, and lying on the bathroom tile was out of the question. It seemed unfair, in a way, that guys not only could yank their things in almost any position but also had almost-official places to do it right at school. But I guess it’s not that different from how boys can just pee against a wall in an alley if they have to, while girls are expected to hold it until the proper time and place.
Anyway. That day, I’d come to lunch fresh off my Alex Noti/Paul Newman daydream when—BAM—this guy, this man, this vision in tight nylon shorts appears. I’m not even going to describe him in detail just yet, because I won’t do him justice. If I say he was a white guy who had day-old stubble along a cut jaw and hairy, muscular calves, I could just as easily be talking about our plumber, Mr. Mariano. But there he was, in the cafeteria, collapsing the tower of my disparate thoughts—school play, geometry homework, the weekend’s parties, the zit I felt growing right under my lip—into one compact and focused mass: