Sputterpub's Blog

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.”

Cloud cover thickened and the light turned strange. Greenish. Jen’s pale red hair grayed under it. Kim glanced from that hair to her eyes as they resumed walking. She saw Jen look sideways at her. She watched the freckled face fill and redden as Jen spoke. “Look Kim. You’re going to deny this but I have to say it. I really think you may be gay. You have to consider it.”

“Well of course I’ve considered it!”

Jen goggled.

“I’ve considered it and I’ve concluded that I’m oriented toward men.”

“But you admire women. You find them beautiful. The way you talk…”

“I do find women beautiful. I like looking at women. But I don’t want to have sex with one.”

“Kim. I thought I was straight too. Just unhappy. It wasn’t till I was married and divorced and in my 30s that I found out the truth about myself. Face it: you haven’t exactly been successful with men.”

“That’s not fair! Anyway, sex is one thing and a good relationship seems to be another. For that matter, you don’t seem to be in any kind of relationship; you’re not exactly an argument for the benefits of homosexuality.”

Jen didn’t speak for a moment. Then she said quietly, “That’s why I brought this up. I think you and I could… well, we should… I mean, if… oh, fuckit.”

“Jen…”

“No! Forget I said anything. Please.” Jen picked up her pace and tried to stride ahead, but Kim thoughtlessly matched her steps. “Listen to me, Jen,” she insisted. Her friend breathed harder, almost hyperventilating, but Kim thought that was from exertion more than emotion. “Let’s slow down,” she suggested ambiguously.

They paused, looked briefly at each other, blushed to the extent of their complexions. Kim spoke again.

“I love you. I do. You know that. I’m just not, not… well, attracted isn’t the exact word, because I don’t want to convey that you’re unattractive. Jen, it just doesn’t work for me. No sexiness. Like I don’t find a really small man or a really old man compelling, bed-wise. I’m just not up for it.”

“Say no more.”

Kim started to protest and speak again, but reconsidered. She wanted to talk about the nature of a one-sided attraction. She was wondering how a mature person could be attracted to someone who didn’t return the attraction. It seemed to her that for Jen to be attracted to her, when Jen knew Kim wasn’t attracted to Jen, meant that Jen was turning her into an object. She didn’t get it. She wanted to discuss it. But she hesitated, and in the time the hesitation gave her she realized that Jen probably didn’t have any answers to her questions. Wouldn’t share them even if she had them. Kim said no more.

They turned left and began a gentle climb into the hills. A strong wind kicked up behind them. The light continued strangely greenish. The unusual wind pushed at their backs and parted their hair.

“This weather is kind of eerie,” Jen said, but her last syllable was masked by a sharp peal of thunder. They saw no discharge. The dog acted skittish and Kim observed, “You’d think this was Kansas. I’ve never been in a tornado but it feels like one’s coming.”

That’s when they heard the explosive crack. Followed by a whooshing crash. Then a flash of light to their left and a short thunderclap. They turned around together, faces to the wind, and were awed by the sight of a huge oak fallen across the road. It looked like giant broccoli on the wide thoroughfare. It blocked the two-way traffic like a dam.

Kim stopped to let her dog sniff agapanthus. “The question is,” she intoned downward, “who learns more, the teacher or the taught?”

“That’s one question, anyway.”

“It’s the one that interests me right now.” She could tell Jen wasn’t into it. But that didn’t stop Kim from continuing. They weren’t talking about anything else just then, and their old friendship could bear soliloquy as well as silence. Kim went on. “I guess it depends on whether the learner wants to learn. I mean,” pulling at the dog’s leash to continue the clamber up the pedestrian path, “if I want to learn something, I’ll take it any way I can get it. But if I’m indifferent about the subject? less than keen? Then I think I learn best if I teach it…”

“So where are you going with this?”

Kim smiled fondly. She liked that slight edge in Jen’s tone; it meant she was paying a little attention. Just enough attention that Kim wasn’t talking to herself. She liked Jen, but not sexually. Usually, the fact that Jen was gay and alone and Kim was straight and alone didn’t produce any discomfort between them. But Jen had lately been putting on fat and showing her age and wanting reassurance, which conditions led her to look at Kim with a little longing. Kim in response put up a little guard. Which could also account for the slight edge in Jen’s tone.

Kim spoke. “I guess I’m wondering lately who gets more socialized by nursery games, the kids or the parents…

“Take Musical Chairs, for example. I used to think it was an innocuous little party game. But I wonder: does it have a message about mating? Does it tell us to grab a seat, now matter how it fits, or lose? And if so, does it teach the kids that, or does it really teach the teachers, who in turn convey the desperate mating message to the kids?”

Jen said, “I don’t follow.” She was behind Kim on the trail when she spoke, but Kim was too stuck in her own thoughts to notice, too intent to laugh.

They reached a patch on the path with no trees arching over them, and their eyes were so dazzled that they paused. The sun lit the red and gold streaks in their colored hair. It made the fallen oak leaves look like coins on the ground.

“Or what about scavenger hunts?” Kim asked as she continued walking. “Are they in imitation of the quest for the Grail? No… better yet:” she paused and turned and then climbed some more, “do they teach us to seek our goals by amassing random objects?”

“Good grief, woman. Compose yourself.”

Kim laughed with delight. She emerged from the path onto a sidewalk, and Jen followed her. They walked in silence and full sun for half a block. Then clouds blocked the rays and stole the shadows. Kim flipped her sunglasses to the top of her head. Jen stopped squinting as the light gentled.

The dog made them pause by squatting to urinate. Jen broke a small sprig of lavender off an adjacent bush. Kim tried to recollect her nursery game theory but her recent revelations unraveled like smoke in the afternoon air.

Funny how some customs start. Octrave began with a rant Olivia delivered to her friend Kris, who laughed so sincerely that Olivia wrote it up for her blog. It tumbled then into local popularity, was test-driven in Berkeley, and soon spread up and down the west coast. From those points, Internet and geographical, it ballooned into a tradition.

But it started on an evening walk. Olivia had had a trying day, and she ventilated about it to her best friend. Kris and Olivia had been walking and talking for decades and the best reason their friendship thrived was their mutual respect.

They are dissimilar women. Kris is short, blonde, buxom, and into people. She majored in Sociology. She is not an intellectual or an athlete. She is one of the nicest people Olivia ever met, but it’s a sincere niceness, so it doesn’t repel Olivia the way smarminess does. Kris hasn’t married or had kids. She’s always employed but she doesn’t describe any job as her career.

Olivia is tall, dark, slim, introverted. She took a degree in English because she could never stop reading and writing. She’s been married three times, has two children, works at least full time, and is critical about everything.

The two women talk on the phone every day (even now, when telephoning is almost as dead as videotapes). They try to take a walk together at least once a week. They have agreed to allow any sort of talk on those walks.

The walk environment means Kris can be judgmental. She has strict ideas about manners and the importance of education and sports, but she’s usually too polite to voice them the way she feels them. With Olivia she can be draconian, at least for her.

Olivia has always excelled at indignation. She has a quick mind, a powerful vocabulary, and a very expressive mien; she often scares or intimidates her interlocutors without meaning to. But when she walks with her BFF she can say it all. She can let it rip and not be held accountable for it. She can obtain relief.

So on that fateful walk, after releasing into the evening air her disdain for her work colleagues and her contempt for her fellow commuters, Olivia had a brainstorm.

“I have a proposal,” she announced. “You know the seventh inning stretch in baseball? I always liked that idea. Well, I think we need a verbal stretch. All of us. Every day.”

“When’s the seventh inning?” Kris asked. She was half a step behind Olivia and took her right arm as they walked.

“Oh mid-afternoon.” Olivia pondered for a few paces. “How’s this? From 3:07 to 3:15 p.m., every work day, everyone can say whatever they want, and not be held accountable for their words …”

She stopped walking and faced Kris as she spoke. “Really. Anything. You can be politically incorrect, make racist statements, engage in unfair verbal attacks. Anything goes. For eight minutes in the middle of the afternoon. Then it’s over. You reassume the mantle of civilization. And feel so much better.”

“Kind of like temporary Tourettes?”

Olivia laughed harder at that. “Exactly. I mean, we’re of course not supposed to make jokes about Tourette Syndrome, right? That would be senseless and inconsiderate and rude. But it will be allowed, from 3:07 to 3:15.”

“So what are we going to call it: Temp-Tourette?”

“That’s pretty good,” Olivia responded. “Maybe.” She paced forward for a few seconds. “Wait a minute. I don’t know why I specified 3:07 to 3:15. I mean, I wanted mid-afternoon because that feels like the seventh inning in a normal work day, but I don’t know how I came up with eight minutes. Maybe that’s too long. No … I like 8. It gives everyone time to stand up and shout. And it’s a lucky number; it’s the only one that ends in an upstroke. It’s factorable. It’s an octave. Oh! Oct-rave. Octrave.”

And so it went. Within six weeks, small businesses were adopting the Octrave break. It started like a guerilla action in bigger companies, where HR departments were so universally unsuccessful at shutting it down that they recognized inevitability and went with “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Even sole proprietors, working out of home offices, engaged in Octrave or said they did.

Octrave parties were thrown on weekends and holidays. Octrave-included tours were organized for travel. Octraves joined humor as the only practical response to worsening world, national, state, and local conditions.

It’s entirely possible that Olivia is correct in her assessment that the human species is headed for extinction, that we’ve passed the tipping point as irreversibly as polar ice melt. But philosophers and psychologists are starting to agree that, if there’s any hope for the survival of human personality, it may be owing to the initiation of the Octrave.