Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

I heard voices in the kitchen. My son Andrew was exuberantly relating to Rebecca all the details of the fishing expedition with Papa Abe. They had caught a small sand shark, which was now proudly displayed on the kitchen table. Abe told his daughter he had never eaten shark meat in his life, and he wanted to try it now; he was willing to bet it was a rare delicacy. Rebecca sounded unconvinced, but we had a housekeeper with us that summer, and I guess she figured if Abe made a mess of the kitchen, the housekeeper would clean up after him. Besides, eight-year-old Andrew was begging her to please let them cook the shark (his whine was almost identical to Sett’s except that he produced it in a high, piping voice, and usually accompanied it with a little nervous tap dance), and it would have taken someone stronger than Rebecca to have resisted both Abe and Andrew in the same kitchen on the same hot August afternoon.

They must have cut the shark open, preparatory to broiling it or frying it or whatever Abe had in mind for it, because the next sounds I heard were compounded of surprise, awe, and (from Andrew) delight. Apparently, there were three perfectly formed tiny sharks inside the one they had just cut open. Honest Abe ventured the opinion that the eviscerated shark had been feeding on smaller sharks just before they hooked it. But Rebecca, whose knowledge was encyclopedic, told her father flatly and authoritatively that some species of sharks were viviparous, and that what they’d caught and sliced open on her kitchen table was nothing more nor less than a pregnant shark. Her father wanted to know what viviparous meant (I was glad he’d asked the question because I was dying to know myself), and Rebecca told him viviparous meant bearing live young, and repeated that what he’d cut open on her kitchen table was a pregnant shark. Andrew asked what pregnant meant, and Abe said What the hell, it’s only a fish, and they went about preparing to cook and eat the shark, as had already been planned, though I think Rebecca vetoed the idea of cooking the pups. The house rapidly filled with the stench of frying shark meat. Abe took one taste (he had style, the prick), told Rebecca it was the vilest thing he’d ever eaten in his life, promptly threw the whole stinking mess into the garbage can, and then went out onto the back porch, leaving Rebecca in a kitchen reeking of fried shark meat, and filled to bursting with a tap-dancing eight-year-old boy who wanted to know all about how the shark had got those babies in her belly. Quite calmly, Rebecca told him — even though I’m sure she hadn’t the faintest idea of how sharks mated — that the mama shark and the papa shark had got together because they loved each other very much, and the papa shark had put his sperm into the mama shark, and the sperm had got together with the mama shark’s eggs, and the baby sharks had been formed inside the mama shark’s belly. She made the mistake of adding, “Sharks make babies the same way people do.”

“What do you mean?” Andrew asked immediately.

“People,” she said.

“Is that how I got made?” Andrew asked.

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Why don’t you go out on the porch with your grandfather?”

“You mean a sperm got inside your belly?”

“Yes.”

“And got together with an egg?”

“Yes.”

“An egg like in the refrigerator?”

“No,” Rebecca said. “Well, yes. But not a chicken egg,” she said. “A human egg.”

“Yeah?” Andrew said.

“Mm,” Rebecca said. “Now go outside and play.”

“How did the sperm get inside your belly?” Andrew asked.

There was silence in the kitchen. It lasted at least a minute.

“The same way it got in the shark’s belly,” Rebecca said at last.

“What do you mean?”

“The papa shark puts the sperm inside the mama shark.”

“Did Daddy put the sperm inside you?”

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Andrew, why don’t you go outside and find your brothers? I think they’re...”

“How did Daddy get it inside you?” Andrew asked.

When I heard this, I almost burst out laughing. I was delighted by my son’s persistent questioning (so like his dear grandmother Stella’s), and I was also tickled to death by Rebecca’s discomfort. Good, I thought. See what happens when you falsely accuse Dwight Jamison of having responded to some dumb cooze from Bedford Village? Go ahead, smart-ass. Explain the mysteries of life to your eight-year-old son. You’ve probably memorized a lecture from some goddamn textbook, anyway. Answer the kid!

“Well,” Rebecca said, and then took a deep breath, and apparently decided to go whole hog. “The daddy,” she said, impersonalizing it so that it referred to daddies in general and not to Andrew’s daddy in particular, “puts his penis into the mommy’s vagina.” She took another breath, and in a rush said, “And the sperm comes out, and that’s how it gets in there.”

“Yeah?” Andrew said.

“Mm,” Rebecca said.

Andrew was thoughtfully silent for quite a few moments. I held my breath.

“That’s how people do it, huh?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rebecca said, and the confident tone in her voice indicated she thought the conversation had ended.

“Let’s do it!” Andrew said.

His offer was so unexpected, his tone so exuberantly innocent, that I almost choked to death. I quickly covered my mouth with my hand. If Rebecca heard a sound from the bedroom, I knew she’d come in there with a meat cleaver. It was one thing to play “The Man I Love” for a dizzy blonde from Bedford Village; it was quite another to allow your own wife to flounder helplessly before the sexual inquisition of a bright eight-year-old.

“We... uh... can’t,” she said.

“Why not?” Andrew said. He sounded extremely puzzled.

“Well... uh... the mommy can only do it with the daddy,” she said.

“Oh,” Andrew said, and again fell silent. And then, with the spontaneous brilliance of pure inspiration, he piped excitedly, “Let’s get Daddy!” and was running toward the bedroom when Rebecca’s voice stopped him.

“Daddy’s sleeping!” she shouted in panic.

“Let’s wake him up,” Andrew said.

“No,” Rebecca said. “ No! Now that’s it, Andrew, I want you to go outside this minute.”

I heard the screen door opening. But Andrew must have hesitated on his way to the back porch, because I heard him ask, somewhat suspiciously, “Is it really true?”

“Is what really true?”

“All that stuff you told me.”

“Yes, it’s true,” Rebecca said.

“That’s the way sharks make babies, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“And people, too, huh?”

“Yes.”

“You mean everybody? Or just you and Daddy?”

“Everybody,” Rebecca said.

“Then how come I never saw it on television?” he snapped, and I swear to God his voice had all the triumphant timbre of someone shouting, “Ah-ha, got you, didn’t I?” I burst out laughing. Rebecca came rushing into the bedroom, and I covered my face defensively, expecting that single cleaver stroke that would smite my skull in two. But instead, she threw herself on top of me, and began kissing my closed eyes, and my nose, and my mouth, and my cheeks, laughing between kisses, and saying again and again, “Oh, you son of a bitch, you no-good son of a bitch.”

Standing in the doorway, Andrew logically asked, “Are you doing it now?”

I took Rebecca to dinner alone that night. Davina and Seth had been invited to the home of a couple they’d met at one of the cocktail parties. (“Who, me? I’m nobody but Dwight Jamison’s sister-in-law”), and I prevailed upon Honest Abe and Sophie to sit with the kids. Abe protested at first. “We should all get out of here,” he said. “The place stinks to high heaven.” But he and Sophie stayed, and Rebecca and I enjoyed a quiet, candlelit shore dinner together. I apologized to her for the way I’d foolishly allowed myself to be flattered by the blonde (“It’s beneath you, Ike, really,” she said), and I promised it would never happen again, and we drank muscadet with our lobsters, and laughed over what had happened with Andrew in the kitchen, each of us telling the story from our separate viewpoints, Rebecca in the kitchen in a head-on confrontation, I in the bedroom as an eavesdropper. We laughed a lot that night, we reaffirmed our vows.