Sputterpub's Blog

Her friends skipped off. Melanie picked up her hoop and started for the open garage.

“Mom says it’s time to set the table,” her brother announced. He was feeding his pet hamster, who didn’t have a great life. Their mother wouldn’t allow a rodent in the house, so Skippy (named for his food dish, which was the overturned lid of a large peanut butter jar) seldom interacted with any mammals and tended to languish in his cage above the bike gear. In fact, Skippy would die of the ambient heat in another month, when Brad and everyone else in the family forgot about him in the hot garage.

“Okay. But guess what?” Brad looked up at her question and cocked his face to one side. “What?”

“I did the Hula Hoop a million times.”

“Liar.”

“No really. Didn’t you see me out there? I’ve been hooping all afternoon.”

“Not a million times!”

“Uh huh. What do you know? You can hardly even count.” Brad looked a little defeated. Melanie proceeded inside. She set the flatware down for each family member. She knew the knife and spoon went on the right side, and the right side was the hand she used for the Pledge at school. She would have put the big plates on the table too, but her mother was following her father’s advice and heating them in the oven. Melanie set small salad plates down on each foam-backed placemat.

A few minutes later the family took their seats. Her mom dished out the salad and her dad ground pepper onto his. Melanie picked out the cucumbers first because they were her favorites. Brad loved cukes too, but he saved his for last.

“How was your day?” Her dad always asked that, and he always asked Melanie first, because she was the oldest.

“Okay,” she said around cucumber. Then she remembered and swallowed her food before continuing. “Guess what? Today I did the Hula Hoop a million times.”

“Melanie…”

“No really, Dad! I did it!”

“Sweetheart. We need to talk.” Her father set his fork down so the tines were on the edge of his plate, aimed at peppered lettuce. “How long does it take you to count to one hundred?”

“Um… about a minute?”

“I doubt that. But let’s say you can. And let’s even say you can spin the Hula Hoop as fast as you can count. So one hundred spins a minute, huh?”

“Yeah…”

“Well there are ten thousand hundreds in a million.” He paused to scoop the rest of his salad into his mouth. “So at that super fast spinning speed it would take you ten thousand minutes to count to a million.”

Melanie’s mother got up to serve the main course. Melanie stacked the salad plates and brought them to the sink.

Her father continued. “Sixty times twenty-four,” he said half to himself. “Honey, there are less than fifteen hundred minutes in a whole day. It would take you about a week to count to a million.”

Melanie was good with arithmetic. They were doing the multiplication tables at school and they were then up to nines. She couldn’t run the calculation in her head but she comprehended what her father was telling her. She could grasp impossibility. She pondered.

That’s when her mom brought the heated plates to the table. She was wearing two oven mitts and she set one dish on the middle of each mat. In the quiet they all heard the slight sizzle.

“Ye gods,” exclaimed her father. “Do you realize what you did?” He started to lift his plate, reconsidered, pulled his napkin out of his lap to act as insolation, and raised the porcelain disk. It had burned a perfect circle into the coral colored plastic surface of the placemat.

Then her dad and Brad and even Melanie laughed. Her mom looked annoyed. Kitchen accidents were common in their household, and always caused by her mom’s impulsive energy.

The placemat incident put an end to the Hula Hoop conversation. Melanie alone kept considering the subject. She went to bed that night boggled that her friends and brother had stopped arguing with her, had acted like they gave up and made her think she’d gotten them to believe her, when that obviously was not the truth.

There are some activities that are just easier for kids. Like getting up from the ground. Or rolling down a hill and liking it. Kids hate to get drunk but love to get dizzy. Adults tend to have opposite tastes about those.

Most kids have no trouble keeping a Hula Hoop up. Adults have to struggle for the skill, even those with solid memories of excelling at the activity when young.

Melanie was a natural at the balancing act. She turned nine years old the year after Wham-O started marketing the device, and her body was at prime development for spinning a plastic ring around it. Her first hoop was blue.

She’d take the toy out onto the curved driveway to practice. Standing with her feet planted a shoulder-span apart, Melanie would start the hoop spinning clockwise about her waist. She rocked her hips around and the blue hoop flew, steadily maintaining its parallel position above the concrete-covered earth. Melanie felt like she could continue the motion endlessly.

Her parents noted her skill. Her brother tried to outlast her at it but failed. Her father praised her coordination. Melanie’s father was an affectionate man who appreciated his first-born’s intelligence but he hadn’t had many occasions then to compliment her about physical feats, so she treasured his approval. At first it made her try to be better at hooping. She soon realized that trying to be better at it actually slowed her down; she could spin longer if she let her body run the show instead of her head.

Her across-the-street neighbor wasn’t as good at hooping as Melanie was. Linda looked prettier at the activity, but Linda always looked prettier. Linda was two years older than Melanie and an archetype of cute girlness. She even managed to look good as the hoop circled toward her knees and her face reflected cute dismay. Everyone told Linda it didn’t matter when her red hoop clattered around her feet.

Shelly and Alice were pretty good at the game. They had yellow hoops and a way of spinning in sync with one another. But they couldn’t go as long as Melanie could.

It was a Thursday in late May when Melanie impressed even herself. She started hooping soon after she got home from school, and she kept that plastic ring rotating around her waist almost all afternoon. It was nearly dinner time when Shelly and Alice came by on their way home from the playground; they whooped at Melanie, startled her a bit, and that’s when the hoop hit her hip wrong and she didn’t correct for it, and the toy wobbled to the ground.

“Wow,” she said then. “If you guys hadn’t wrecked that I could have gone on forever. I just did the Hula Hoop a million times.”

“You did not,” Alice replied.

“Did too.”

“Not,” barked Shelly.

“Yes I did. You’re just jealous.”

Shelly and Alice looked at each other, turned eyes toward Melanie again, shot glances at the blue hoop and back to Melanie’s face, and shrugged.

“Wanna come with us to my place?”

“Nah. It’s almost dinner time. I have to stay here.”

That evening Mellie had dinner at Candace’s house. She liked dining there, even though she thought the tacos smelled funny. At Candace’s house the girls could eat without having a parent around. And they were allowed to watch “The Twilight Zone.”

Carmella was out but she returned to the house after dinner. Bob was with her and they seemed to have gotten over their argument. They headed to the back yard while the girls watched TV.

“What do you think they’re doing?” Candace asked during an ad break.

“We already know ‘who’ and ‘where’ and ‘when’ and even ‘why,’ but the article won’t be complete without a ‘what’.”

“This show is a rerun; let’s check them out.” Candace rose from the old hide-a-bed sofa first. Mellie followed her stealthy progress to the sliding glass patio door.

They could see two figures on the bench near the pool. Carmella and Bob were sitting close together and facing away from the house. The girls edged the glass door open just enough for them to shimmy through to the outside. As they snuck forward their eyes adjusted to the murk and they both recognized the telltale head movements of deep kissing. Bob groaned words that sounded like “Baby, baby.” His hand went to the nape of Carmella’s neck and then her head sank below the benchback. The bench remained motionless. The silhouette of Bob’s head and shoulders didn’t move.

Candace and Mellie looked at one another and shrugged. Together they tiptoed a few steps closer, and Mellie stumbled on the edge of a poolside planter. Carmella’s head bobbed up immediately.

“What the …?” she barked. “You whores! Get the hell out of here!”

Mellie and Candace ran back, indoors and through the house. They might not have thought further about what they’d seen if Bob had stayed still. But each carried the impression of a man adjusting himself, dealing with his fly. Neither girl had heard of oral sex – the idea of it skimmed the edges of their minds, like a fourth dimensional object just out of the reach of comprehension. They each had a dim, grossed-out impression about what the older kids were doing.

As for what they heard, neither knew what “whore” meant. As soon as they felt safe going back in the house, the pulled the dictionary onto the table.

They must have looked at every “ho” word in the book. They spent several minutes on “hore,” “hored,” “hoar,” “hoared,” and “horde,” but just couldn’t make sense of those as an insult.

“Well this is weird,” Candace commented and started chewing her hair. “We know she’s really angry; what did she mean?”

“Who, what, why …?” Mellie smirked and then she stopped. “Wait a minute… maybe we’re looking at the wrong pages.”

Mellie shifted in her chair, a little excited. “Think about ‘who, what, where.’ The words all start with ‘w,’ but ‘who’ sounds different than the others.”

“Silent ‘w’?” The question no sooner exited Candace’s mouth than her hands began tearing forward in the book. And found the word they sought.

Then the girls were satisfied. They were mystified by the nature of ‘w,’ with its three syllable name and its short and variable sound. They were perplexed about Carmella choosing a slur for them that was maybe appropriate to herself. But mostly they were gratified to discover and correctly spell a power word they knew they’d use.

Carmella didn’t finish high school. She turned up pregnant the next school term and her parents sent her to her aunt’s place, out of state, until the baby was born and adopted.

Candace and Mellie grew older, and in time they grew apart. Their names changed to Candy and Mel and their paths, while continuing sexually interested, diverged. Before their friendship eroded, before the first of them (Candy) took the big step, they came up with a list of qualities they agreed any good lover should acquire. They discussed the subject at length and in depth, and they concluded that they needed to excel at imagination, coordination, consideration, and practice.

Candy dispensed with her virginity in 10th grade but was no longer close enough to Mel to tell her about it. Mel became sexually active two days after she started college. Like most humans, after awhile at it, each of them got good enough.

It was hard for the young spies to operate near the handball courts. There was no shelter except the concrete structure itself, and the ground was clear in all directions around it. Candace and Mellie watched Carmella enter the area, heard laughter and other nonverbal sounds, and witnessed some suggestive exits, like when Carmella headed with three boys for the hills behind the school or the time she emerged, hair mussed, with her sometime boyfriend Bob’s arm so wrapped around her that his hand was almost touching her right breast. But for real action they had to stalk the older teens in the wild or catch Carmella with a date at Candace’s house.

The arid hills behind the high school were undeveloped. The campus had been built a few years ago, on property hacked out of clay-filled dirt and a landscape of manzanita and scrub. There were birds and rodents and rattlesnakes out there, and there were no parents. Kids climbed the walls of small canyons and dared one another to jump off the tops onto the piles of eroded sand below. They discovered small semi-caves, holes worn in the adobe clifflets, and they used the pockets as secret meeting places. Boys brought their 22s out there, and took shots at small animals. Girls like Mellie wrote protest poetry about those hunting forays. Mellie’s father had given her a copy of The Sea Around Us for her birthday, and Rachel Carson had made her a budding conservationist.

Sometimes Candace and Mellie headed into the scrub on their own, walking and talking or even visiting one of the small caves themselves. There was a medium-sized hole-in-a-dirt-wall they thought of as theirs, until the afternoon they visited it and found the cigarette butts and condoms. They didn’t know what the balloon-like litter was then; they were a year or so away from the season when the local boys would start proudly showing off Trojan packets and ring-impressions in their worn wallets. But they knew the cavelet was being used by others, and they stopped entering it. They observed it from a distance whenever they walked by it. They played investigative reporters and tried answering the five “W” questions. They’d heard about yellow journalism and wanted to write some.

One afternoon they almost ran into Bob’s friend Tony there. They were nearly in plain view of the cavelet’s entrance when they heard human noise and ducked behind a thick clump of manzanita. Tony walked toward the school, passing within about ten feet of them, luckily oblivious. Additional noise made the girls hunker lower. At which point Bob exited the cave. Right behind him was Carmella, obviously distraught. Her hair was mussed and she acted angrier than Candace had ever seen her. “Hey it was no big…” Bob said back to her, but Carmella yelled, “I hate you! I can’t believe this!” and then stumbled on a rock. She almost fell to the ground. Bob went back to her and after a short tussle took her arm. He was murmuring something as they half-walked, half-staggered past the foliage that concealed Candace and Mellie.

The young girls looked into the cavelet after that. A few empty beer cans and a lounge chair pad had been added to the litter.

When Candace and Mellie were 13, they were sex fiends. That was their favorite subject, for private musing or confidential conversations. They’d been friends since they were 10, and they still played with their Barbie dolls. But not with the Mattel clothes. They fashioned provocative outfits out of small silk scarves. They made wild women of those manikins.

They also sought pornography in word and picture, but those were difficult to acquire. Neither had an older brother from whose drawers they could filch. Candace’s dad was absent and Mellie’s disdained men’s mags, so there was no Playboy stash to discover. But they were desperate girls with active imaginations; they made do with what they had. Mellie borrowed her father’s copy of Candide (copyright 1930, Hartsdale House, Inc.), illustrated by Mahlon Blaine (and by A. Zaidenberg at the chapter ends). She never found anything sexy in the words of the book, but some of the pictures were much more inflammatory than the National Geographic photos her classmates went for. There was an etching of two naked girls opposite the title page, to Mellie’s initial shock and continuing delight, and just about every following picture was suggestive. On Candace’s part was Another Country, by James Baldwin. Her grandmother had given it to her for her birthday a month before, figuring it would broaden the child’s perspective. When they learned that the opening scene includes balcony sex at a party, the grandmother tried to take back the book and the granddaughter became so interested she proceeded to read the whole novel. Candace was disappointed that the sex didn’t get better, but she liked the book anyway.

The girlfriends were into sex but not yet up for boyfriends. Their classmates were too childish and even the notion of an older male was intimidating. They agreed that their obsession was really a form of preparation. They had an idea about what was ahead of them, and they aimed to be good at it.

They were also into getting away from their parents. That’s the main reason they were trying out new variations on their names. They answered to Candy and Melanie in their homes. But Candace had recently decided her nickname sounded cheap; she was experimenting with her full Christian name. Mellie didn’t have a Christian name, she said, because she was Jewish. But she’d never been crazy about her three syllable appellation and she’d recently met a character named Melly in the longest book she’d ever read, so she was then trying on a short version. The name project was not caused by their sex obsession but the two courses were obviously coincidental, both incidental to adolescence.

As was their shared interest in journalism. They volunteered to work on their junior high newspaper. They covered subjects like the afternoon football games and pencil sales at the little student store on their campus. They had some ideas about becoming glamorous, sexy reporters when they grew up. They perused Brenda Starr in the Sunday comics with stars in their own eyes. They regularly chanted like a catechism: who, what, why, when, where?

So Candace and Mellie read and viewed what they found, took their doll play in directions parents don’t want to imagine, invented the raciest stories they could think of and once even showed one another how they touched themselves. But by far their favorite activity was spying on Candace’s sister.

Carmella was almost four years older than they. At 16½ she had curvy hips and a real bustline. She filled her bra (Candace and Mellie did not need their stretchy training models, and were about two weeks away from experimenting with toilet paper implants). Carmella’s hair was long and straight, peroxide-encouraged to remain blonde: exactly what teen sex wants. And she had boyfriends.

The younger girls had always found Carmella’s activities interesting compared to their own, but this was her first year of high school, and she’d taken a turn into what Candace and Mellie considered a darker side. Carmella had given up trying for the cheerleader positions and girl-cliques of late junior high, in favor of a pouty edgy type of solitude. She dressed in tighter clothes and walked around alone a lot. When they could do it discreetly, Candace and Mellie followed her.

They knew she sometimes met up with a group of boys at the practice tennis/handball courts on the school grounds. The courts were stark white concrete backboards, open at one end and separated by thick walls. They were built for tennis and handball players, but they were used for quick meetings and sketching sessions. A few kids brought paint but most drew with chalk or with the coal-like rocks that littered the ground nearby. Everyone learned how to sketch sex organs on those walls.