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Two days later, Rick and Sandy spent a rare hour in post-coital conversation. Usually they had no time; at fifty-nine Rick was finally uxorious, home by seven most nights.

Usually they had no place; Rick wasn’t rich and Sandy still had her daughters. But a rare window of opportunity had opened that afternoon, when the twins left town for a junior statesman conference and Rick and Sandy could both get away from work. They met and chatted over a couple of cocktails, grew warm toward each other, drove to her place. He kissed her hand, they worked elaborately on each other’s mouth, and then he ran his hands and mouth well but too quickly down her body, penetrated her well (at his age!) but too quickly (better than the reverse problem!), and gasped moaning into her ear.

Sandy was disappointed; it was better than nothing. Except for her first time, when it was worse than nothing, that’s how sex usually seemed to her. Actually, better than nothing was how it seemed to usually be for most folks, according to Sandy’s informal, unscientific, but consistent survey.

They relaxed under her down comforter, she in his boxers and he in his T-shirt. Rick kissed her shoulder and asked, “Do you know how much I like you?” He took Sandy’s hand in his before she phrased any answer. “I really really like you, and I always have.” Sandy considered how youthful he sounded – “like” – and how in his case “like” was probably a cleaner more descriptive word than “love.”

“You know, we’re soul mates.”

“What?!” That phrase was completely untypical of Rick. “Soul mates?”

“Well… yeah.” He grinned. “I don’t mean it in any sappy way. It’s just that you always said the things that made me feel best about myself. Still do. You make me happy. I think you understand me.” He bent his face to hers and nibbled her lower lip. “You may not agree, but I know I understand you.”

His ardor alarmed her. “Yeah?” she blurted. “If you’re so wise then explain to me why Jill is still so hostile about us?” She spat a little with her emphatic “still;” quickly she wiped his cheek with her forefinger.

“I’m not even sure about what set her off in the first place. I never understood her initial anger unless she still thought she and I had something, which is kind of flattering to me and all, but hardly based on reality if I remember correctly. I mean she was someone I fucked, but I was real restless then and did every woman I could. And I hate to tell you this, but your friend Jill was doing the same thing from a female perspective. Of my whole crowd only Bentley got turned down…and shit: I remember we all admired him for being honest about that, instead of admiring her for her chastity.”

“Hey! Talk about your double stand…” Rick interrupted her with a wrestle. “Shut up, woman,” he murmured when he had her confined against him. “I don’t often talk like this. Let me.”

“But I was sleeping around then too.”

He paused at that and thought. “Maybe. But you weren’t doing it all in the same group of guys. She asked for the reputation she got among us. Which wasn’t disrespectful, not really. But it was kind of humorous…”

Rick shifted and propped himself up on an elbow. “Anyway, what I do remember happened about five years ago. I ran into Jill and of course I asked about you. She told me you were still happily married to Keith.”

“Five years ago? I’ve been single for ten…”

“Yeah. Let me put it this way. I’m not sure what exactly I asked and she answered, but I’m pretty good at getting information, and I came away from that conversation with the distinct impression – no: knowledge – that you were still married to your second husband and very happily so.

“I remember saying to Jill: ‘Well, shit. Great. Now I know we could have been happy if I’d left Peggy then…’ and she got a funny look on her face but didn’t respond.

“So I don’t get her hostility, no. But that facial expression confirmed it. Whatever problem Jill has with us is more enduring than most relationships.” Sardonic grin.

Sandy flashed with anger at her friend, and immediately warmed as she realized how dreadful it would be to have married Rick. Inadvertently spared by her best friend’s calumny? Her emotions were powerful and confused. She tenderly squeezed Rick’s rubbery-cool penis while she stretched to fit her lips into his. Their goodnight hug was sincere.

There’s an elephant in the living room. Invisible to all except Sandy and Jill, a big old pachyderm is standing on the golden oak floor.

It’s a lonely cow elephant. She’s been awaiting acknowledgment for twenty slow years. She made a hairline crack in the foundation when she first stepped into the room, and though she hasn’t moved since then the crack slowly (undramatically) grew.

Lately Sandy has begun to talk to Chris about it. She did so partly in an attempt to defuse the weird sexual tension in their ambiguous friendship; she figured talking about her sex life could demystify the energy between them. But mostly she talked to Chris because the elephant began to shift her weight from leg to ponderous leg, enlarging the crack and demanding attention. Some sort of collapse seemed imminent, and Jill wasn’t talking.

“The story goes back twenty years,” Sandy explained in the lab one afternoon. Their work at UC is in vibration engineering, and they were reviewing the results of safety helmet tests. Reading strain gauges that were affixed to tiny human skulls that came from India, from small doomed adults.

She walked to the stainless steel counter and poured mugs of coffee. “Jill and I were in our late 20s and we failed at sharing a lover. Well, not quite,” she smiled the words, “but that was a grabber topic sentence, wasn’t it?”

Chris looked sideways at her and then back at the lab bench. They were trying to duplicate the results of one experiment, and attaching the tiny oblong gauges to the skulls was a delicate procedure. “I’m listening.”

Sandy continued. “Remember: it was that brief period of time between the advent of the pill and the outbreak of AIDS; at least on this coast, free sex wasn’t just a motto.

“Jill was married and divorced already, but I was still with my first husband. She had a lot of lovers, mostly married men, and I was stuck with boring old Jeff. Adam was eighteen months old and I felt trapped and bleak. I stepped out.” She delivered the coffee and spoke while Chris sipped. “Trouble was: I picked an ex of Jill’s to step out with.

“I thought I cleared it with both of them before I started.” She watched Chris attach the last strain gauge, strap the helmet onto the skull, and move to the gun that would send the shock at that puny cranium. “I remember she told me Rick and she were done before I met him. And I asked her that night, and she reassured me they were over.

“It was all confusing and kind of silly. There could be nothing significant about a relationship with Rick; he was married and insincere and lots of fun. I guess I justified my own involvement with him by saying that I really needed it right then, and that it leveled the playing field with both of us being married and parents and all. Seems a little facile, now.” Sandy smiled, slightly but sheepishly, into her coffee.

Chris checked the aim on the long shock gun.

“So anyway, Rick and I had an affair. It lasted almost two years. Jill acted pissed about it in the beginning, and disinterested in it as it continued, but I didn’t stop. I guess I was too needy, too enamored, too selfish throughout. I guess.” Sandy turned to the counter behind her and edged her hip up on a stool while setting her coffee mug aside. Chris pulled the gun lever, there was a percussive pop, and the helmet moved. Sandy got off the stool and both walked toward the skull.

“He lost interest after a couple of years. I was devastated. Bereft and lonely. I couldn’t talk about my loss with Jill, and my husband certainly didn’t want to hear about it. I normally ventilate all over the place and there was nowhere to go with this. It hurt a lot.

“And now,” Sandy concluded, as they reached the skull and Chris began to remove the helmet, “now twenty years later Rick has come back into my life, on a much less passionate basis, and the trouble with Jill is happening again. She doesn’t want to see us together. She doesn’t want to hear about him from me. After all this time. I don’t get it.”

“And no one should get this helmet either,” Chris said. “Look at that,” pointing to a visible crack in the skull. “This is a lousy helmet.”

Sandy had to agree.

Laura found Bonita exotic but Nancy kind of liked Chula Vista. Laura’s house was close to the school and felt almost metropolitan with traffic. Her brothers were younger and didn’t bait them like David did. Her parents rarely fought. But the girls agreed in preferring to have their overnights at Nancy’s.

There were several advantages. Her bedroom was isolated so they were unlikely to be disturbed by any brother or parent. Among other things they practiced kissing in there, pressing their mouths together like it looked in the movies, pushing their bodies against one another, eventually daring to touch tongues. (It wasn’t that they were homosexual, they understood; it was just that they wanted to be good at making out when the time came, and they could only go so far with their own pillows and forearms (in fact, wet kissing was icky-weird, like that trick when they put their index fingers together and then stroked the resulting double digit: they each perceived the other’s flesh but it felt dead.))

Then too, overnights always meant sneaking out, and the sneakout environment was vastly superior in Nancy’s territory. No traffic. Little light. Better cigarettes to swipe. Vodka less measured than the liquor in Laura’s parents’ cabinet.

They could venture into the cemetery at night, full or new moon, egged on by the vodka and also by taunts from bullying David and his friends, shrieking when discovered by the older boys, haunted and then tackled and finally wrestling for fun. They were nasty girls, and they never noticed that the boys were angling for them even more than they for the boys. Nancy was bothered by her own smell after a long tussle with David’s friend Gary. Laura first knew ambivalence when she started to carry erotic mental images of David along with clear recollections of his obnoxiousness as Nancy’s brother.

They could even edge out to the golf course and sometimes encounter boys from their own school, Ron and Doug who were almost popular and took golf seriously but also liked mischief, who would chase them and flirt a little. Once they found a herd of unharnessed horses there, nocturnal escapees from the adjacent livery stables.

They knew the animals. Although Nancy always rode Polopony, Laura took lessons at the stables, backbending in the saddle, posting to the trot, rocking to the canter. She got to know the horses by name and temperament and she had introduced them to Nancy when they hung out there. Boys learned how to ride but liked guns more than horses, and they never knew the animals as pets. Boys weren’t found much at the stables, but the love of horses brought Nancy and Laura there anyway.

Before the loose horses drew other adventurers, Nancy and Laura had sized up the herd. Deliberately then, each took the base of a coarse mane in her left hand, each swung her body, right leg leading, onto a broad back. Dingo was a sweet red quarterhorse, soft-mouthed and docile under Nancy. Bella was a beautiful bay mare, a little more spirited but a particular friend of Laura’s.

That’s when David and Gary arrived. They saw the girls mount the bare horses: momentary nymphs in the moonlight. Snorting they ran to ride as well, and Laura couldn’t resist. She didn’t have to work very hard to direct them toward dappled gray Casper and palomino Wasp. Ron and Doug got there in time to compound the humiliation, as Casper bucked off Gary’s mounting attempts. Wasp stood at first and then darted into a run and sudden halt, which threw David into the sand. Gary sprained an ankle. David broke his arm.

When the kids grew near driving age, or tall enough to see enough through the windshield, they hijacked the vehicles their parents didn’t care much about, and their playgrounds expanded to the fields and the unenforced roadways. Gary’s father owned a surplus Army weapons carrier, with a dozen forward gears and as many for reverse, and sometimes they mucked about in the fallow alfalfa fields, on that. Or they unilaterally borrowed Doug’s father’s Impala or Nancy’s and David’s dad’s old Caddy, and they took it up the straightaway beyond the country club to see what the car could do. The Impala shuddered at 105 but the Cadillac was good all the way up its speedometer.

They nearly crashed that car. They had it out trying for 120 when a small group of horses appeared on the verge of the dark county road. David twisted the steering wheel and put the car into a 720 degree skid. He held onto the wheel like it was the helm of a sloop at storm; the passengers were pressed against the starboard side of the car. The Caddie didn’t roll, but it stopped spinning six inches away from a big tree.

That evening, awash in goofball emotional storms of adrenaline high and sobering fear, was the last time they were nasty. They split up soon after – Laura to the university and David to the college, Gary to the 2-year community school and Nancy into a dull marriage – and learned to describe themselves with other adjectives. Each agreed it was a miracle most teenagers survive to adulthood.

Nancy and Laura were nasty little girls, and they developed into nasty teens.

Laura figured out how to masturbate when she was four. That’s when her hand explored her groin deliberately, that’s when she recalled the sight in the pediatrician’s waiting room of a large woman changing a squirmy girl baby and fantasized about being that baby. (It wasn’t that she was gay, she contended when she revisited those first fantasies from the vantage point of much later; it was that she wanted someone powerful and confident, like her rookie mother wasn’t.)

Laura taught Nancy at one of their play dates soon after, solemn for fifteen minutes while their mothers drank coffee and evened up the edge of the sour cream coffee cake in the kitchen. “It’s entirely too quiet down there,” Laura heard her mother’s voice as the sound of a dinette chair scraped the floor overhead. She and Nancy pulled their pants up before parental eyes could scan the built-out basement room. (Decades later Laura watched her own baby girl lay stomach-down on a fat stuffed sheep, pressing her little crotch against the toy’s plush, and smiled with recollective understanding. She just tried to get Cassie to take the activity to her room.)

No mammal would forget those clitoral lessons. Mostly alone but sometimes together, Laura and Nancy continued to self-stimulate. After her mother caught her behind the living room couch Laura narrowed the scope of her grope to her own room, own bed, after hours. (Her mother told her “not to do that” and within two days put the incident out of her mind, but of course Laura never forgot being found and forbidden.) Nancy was allowed to lock the bathroom door and was not discovered.

They were almost twelve when they added reading material. By then Nancy’s brother David was living in the basement room, filling it with boy noise and boy smell, and that’s where the girls found the paperbacks. Cheap ink and thin margins on yellowing paper. Busty girls in short skirts who managed one way or another to lose their underwear. The books opened easily to sections about hard penises thrust into odd places. The language was corny but the images were fresh.

Not that all the girls’ time was spent on sex. School took a bit of attention, objective in class or subjective on the playground, and family time could be fun or infuriating but mostly, from age four to fourteen, what gave Nancy and Laura pleasure was candy and sex, and riding horses while talking about snacks and sex, and walking while joking around about food and sex.

Nancy owned a horse. A lot of the kids in Bonita kept horses but they were rich; Nancy’s family was there because they’d been in the area forever, and they owned a horse that no one else would. Polopony was his name because he had been one, but the accent was on the second syllable and that threw most ears off. Polopony didn’t throw anyone off though; he was a gentle old gelding who only came to life near the golf course greens, because they must have reminded him of polo grounds. Near the lawns he would perk up into a trot or even a canter, which was kind of painful because Polopony was so thin his neck bone jutted like a rock, and when Nancy and Laura rode him double the one in front could get hurt on that neck, but it was kind of wonderful too, to feel Polopony moving like the horse he’d once been.

He was a skinny aged thing and couldn’t compare to Liz’s five-year old quarterhorse or Pam’s half-Arabian mare but Polopony was still a horse, and that was more than Laura’s suburban household had to offer. Nancy’s family sprawled in the unincorporated area of Bonita while Laura’s inhabited a Cinderella home in the die-cut tract near the newest high school in the adjoining town of Chula Vista. Bonita means lovely and chula means cute, which in Laura’s opinion just about summed up the difference. For not only did Bonitans have horses and golf courses; they had lonely roads where Laura and Nancy could ride or walk and talk about the boys they liked; and they had the cemetery, where the kids could wander at night and thrill themselves in several ways.

Kim and Jen were about a hundred yards up the sloped street from the tree. “Wow,” they understated simultaneously. It was their first agreement of the day. They began walking back to investigate the accident. Their progress was slow for a downslope, into the still-gusting wind. Jen wasn’t in good shape anyway; she never walked fast and she always breathed hard.

“I wish they hadn’t taken FenPhen off the market,” Jen remarked. “It was the only thing that worked for me.”

“Oh, come on. No one needs to risk heart valve damage.”

“Okay. I’m not going to argue with that. Anyway, I heard about a new weight-loss program, at a spa down south. They’re supposed to combine the best of fruit acid therapies, stress management, and individual meds and diet plans.”

“Sounds like a scavenger hunt to me,” Kim said with a grin. The first drops of rain, large and cold, hit their faces and hands.

Jen went silent. She felt a little affronted. Four paces later, when they were in full sight of the fallen tree, she retorted. “And how is it different from that Portals program you got so obsessed with last year? They sent you out to collect people! Recruit those folks and everybody be happy! Sure…”

Kim saw that Jen was smiling, even in the increasing rain, and so she felt embarrassed instead of insulted. “Can’t we put that behind us now?” she mock-pleaded. “I know I got into it. I know I was obnoxious. The first Portals weekend closed so joyfully, I got flash-addicted to that feeling. I was desperate to duplicate it. I had to learn that the experience is like undergraduate studies; you can’t repeat it.

“Anyway,” Kim concluded as they reached the breakpoint, as they passed slowly by the wrenched broken roots of the old oak, “I think it was the Portals experience – how I reacted to it – that helped me first make the scavenger hunt connection.”

“We’d better get some shelter,” Jen said. “This rain isn’t going to let up soon.” She looked at Kim and that’s doubtless why she didn’t see the section of broken root. Quickening her pace to get out of the rain, Jen stepped out with her left foot and came down exactly wrong. She simultaneously stumbled and twisted her ankle, and she fell forward at an angle that made her hit her forehead on the sidewalk. She lost consciousness for a minute and a half.

At first Kim sank to Jen’s side, touching her upper arm as if she intended to raise it, but feeling Jen’s fat loose flesh so toneless and unresisting made her stop. She realized she shouldn’t move Jen. She hated seeing her friend’s sightless open eyes.

Plenty of people were around. Several called 9-1-1, but that wasn’t necessary. All sorts of emergency vehicles were converging on the street already because of the downed tree. Within minutes, shortly after Jen’s eyes filled with sight again, there were two fire engines and an ambulance. There were paramedics bracing Jen’s spine and moving her. There was Kim climbing in with the rolling gurney after its X-legs scissored under her friend.

They raced in the increasing rain to the emergency room, but they needn’t have. It turned out that Jen’s concussion was almost too slight to deserve the word; they put a band-aid on her head and gave her some packets of Tylenol. Her ankle sprain was more significant, especially since she carried so much weight. But Jen was large-boned and a quick healer; with a little rest and a good brace she’d be fine.

She stayed in the hospital long enough to sample some of the food there. She was offered a choice of a fat-free vegetarian snack, cookies and milk, or juice and pudding. Kim went to the bathroom while Jen chose. She headed for the ladies’ room, past the corridor of windows streaked with still-falling rain, till she could barely hear Jen chanting, “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo.”