Dan Wakefield - Under the Apple Tree - A Novel

Suddenly Fishy wrapped his arms around Caroline, mashing his mouth against hers at the same time, and instead of jumping away or screaming, Caroline mashed back, wrapping her arms around the padded shoulders, pressing herself against the zoot-clad body, as Fishy bent her back at the waist like he was doing a dip at a dance, but he didn’t bob back, he just kept dipping and holding the kiss, like he thought he was Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind or something, and the other kids were gasping and whistling through their teeth and Artie felt his stomach moving wildly and was scared he was going to heave his pretzels. He suddenly yelled out “Puget Sound!” and Tutlow called out the basketball hex words “Oogum Sloogum!” but Fishy and Caroline kept on kissing, till finally, out of breath and red in the face, Fishy pulled away, stood straight up again, blinking and swaying like he might fall over, and then he said “Fo-dee-do” in a hoarse whisper, and turned and walked wobbling up the basement stairs and out.

Everyone was talking all at once and Caroline went to the bathroom to fix her lipstick and Ben Vickman put “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” on the record player. Artie couldn’t tell if the game was over now, after the bombshell kiss of Fishy and Caroline, and he wasn’t even sure if he wanted it to start again. He didn’t like the idea of kissing Caroline right after Fishy had had his mouth all over hers and maybe had passed on some awful communicable sex disease he had picked up in the hotel bathrooms of Chicago; on the other hand, he wanted to kiss Caroline to show he could do it even better than Fishy, wanted to kiss her so great and so long and hard that even the memory of Fishy’s kiss Would be wiped out of her mind for the rest of Eternity.

Before he could even figure out how he had felt about it all, Caroline had ambled back from the bathroom, looking as cool and collected as if nothing at all had happened and the girls were back in the circle on the floor and it was Artie’s turn to spin. He clutched the middle of the bottle and aimed the mouth toward Caroline, thinking maybe if he pointed it there first it would know it was supposed to end up there, and then he gave it all he had with his wrist. The bottle spun sluggishly, making only a couple of circles before it stopped dead in a perfect point toward Marilyn Pettigrew.

“Crum!” called Ben Vickman, who creamed for Marilyn Pettigrew, and must have thought Artie had spun for her on purpose. Fat chance. Marilyn was stuck on herself because she was a Science whiz and her Dad had a “C” card for gas rationing on account of being a Veterinarian and supposedly having to do “essential” driving to deliver calves and rescue stray pigs and stuff. Marilyn had a little pug nose and everything about her was pert and prissy, like the outfit she had on tonight, a plaid skirt and a white blouse with a matching plaid sash draped over the shoulder like she was ready to blow on a bagpipe.

Marilyn stood up with a coy smile, twined her fingers behind her back, and minced to the center of the circle. Artie stepped out in front of her, feeling as much like stomping on her patent leather foot as kissing her, but he tried to pretend she was really Maria Montez, a beautiful princess disguised as a bagpipe player.

Artie took a deep breath, grabbed her, and pressed his mouth on her prissy thin lips before she could even scream. Her arms flew out from behind her back and waved at her sides, like she was trying to fly, and Artie dipped her backward, just like Fishy had done with Caroline, but he went so far they both toppled over and fell to the floor and Artie was shook loose from her mouth and she yelled “Heeeelp!” and Ben Vickman rushed over and yanked Artie up by the arm, saying at the same time “You win the Purple Heart, Garber!” and squeezing his hand on Artie’s left tit in a terrible, painful hickey that would quickly turn black and blue. Artie yelled.

Mrs. Spingarn came’ storming down from the kitchen, turning on the ceiling light that flooded the basement with a harsh glare, and shouting, “I am very disappointed in all of you!”

Artie grabbed his coat and quickly went up to Caroline to apologize.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I got carried away.”

Caroline shrugged, like he didn’t even count.

“You’ll learn,” she said.

Then she made the little brush of her hair back with her hand, and turned away. Now she reminded Artie of Lauren Bacall.

He bent forward, crouching, as he passed Mrs. Spingarn, hoping she didn’t notice his hard-on.

At home in bed after Caroline’s party, Artie did something he had never done before, something which probably ranked as a new kind of sin, no doubt a worse one, than those he had committed in the past.

He beat off thinking about a girl his own age, in his own class at school: the sleek new ambling Caroline Spingarn.

The sin itself was bad enough, but even worse was the realization that from now on he couldn’t guard against lustful thoughts and deeds by avoiding sexy movies and magazines. Now that looking at Caroline Spingarn could get him just as hot as watching Princess Tahia or a Lana Turner pinup picture, it meant that if Artie was to keep himself pure in body and mind, he would not even be able to go to school ! He would just have to sit around the house all day taking hip baths, and reading the Scout Manual and the Bible.

That was impossible, and Artie resigned himself to waging a lifelong battle with sin, which he was no doubt doomed to lose, along with his mind, his hair, and his child-bearing seed, while acquiring in the process pimples, bad breath, and assorted forms of ravaging disease.

Artie really got down in the dumps. He caught two bad colds in a row, and had to stay home from school. It seemed like winter would never end. Like the War, it just kept dragging on. There weren’t even any good snows to get your spirits up, just a few little flurries that quickly turned to slush, and then there was sleet, and long, cold rains that chilled you to the bone. For supper, they started having Spam a lot, which was some kind of Wartime imitation of meat that came in a can, and something called “Spanish rice,” which Artie figured was invented to feed the growing numbers of refugees in the world. When he moaned about it, Dad got real hot under the collar and said how Roy was probably having nothing but C rations, and then Mom got sad about Roy still being halfway around the world and in danger every minute of the day. Artie felt awful, knowing he’d turned into a full-time slacker. He even let his homework slide, and started getting complaints from customers on his paper route, saying he’d missed the porch altogether and the paper had got all soggy from the rain.

He started staying home from school when he wasn’t even sick. One morning he woke up full of remorse after jacking off the night before imagining him and Caroline Spingarn being trapped alone on a desert island.

He told Mom he had a terrible earache. At least that was something original.

As usual, he turned on the radio and listened to soap operas to keep his mind off sex. He listened to “Our Gal Sunday,” “Young Widder Brown,” “Ma Perkins,” “The Romance of Helen Trent,” “Stella Dallas,” “Vic and Sade,” “Lorenzo Jones,” and “Just Plain Bill, Barber of Hartville.” That got him safely through the day, but the sadness of the stories and the organ music that went along with them left him feeling even groggier than when he woke up in the morning. In the afternoon the sun had come out, and that made him feel even worse, being inside under the covers. He wondered if he’d ever feel like getting up and facing the world again, or whether he might spend the rest of his life in bed, becoming like one of those old cranks who sit in their house for years letting old newspapers pile up until they can’t even get out the door and just die.