Parental Guidance
Donna Cameron
Word Count 936
I always did my homework after dinner at our kitchen table. Many of those nights, I couldn’t help but overhear Mom and her friend Pam discussing Pam’s husband, her lover, and the challenge of managing both. It all sounded very complex. While I had read books and seen movies where couples engaged in adulterous affairs, they rarely addressed the more practical considerations. I found these almost as interesting as the actual sex.
Up to that point, most of my understanding of sex was acquired through books. On our shelves, I had discovered the hard-boiled detective stories of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, and the noir fiction of James M. Cain. Men were remote and hard-drinking, while women were sultry objects of desire or “dames” to be rescued. I was drawn to the cynical heroes and pleasantly titillated by the implied—but generally not too explicit—sex.
These tales were supplemented by volumes passed to me by my mother. From the time I was about ten, Mom gave me her books after she read them—books like Forever Amber, Valley of the Dolls, Harold Robbins, Henry Miller, and their ilk. They tended to be a bit more explicit, introducing me to the notion that sex might come in many flavors. My transition from The Happy Hollisters to The Happy Hooker was jarring, but not—I can now say with assurance—fundamentally warping.
Pam and her lover had a weekly tryst—not in some out-of-the way motel, but in Pam’s own bedroom. With her husband at work, her son in school, the morning was theirs. Pam said her mother would sometimes call and they’d chat while Pam was in bed otherwise occupied.
How, I wondered, did that work? In the books I’d read, participants seemed to be fully absorbed in the task at hand. Wouldn’t a phone call from mom be distracting?
My mother’s comments tended to display a similar practicality.
“I hope you at least change the sheets after he leaves.”
“Of course,” Pam replied, “Wednesday is laundry day. That’s why I’m always so tired.”
Pam was a sharp contrast to my mother—outgoing, flashy, maybe even a bit vulgar—but she’d been there for Mom when my dad died years earlier, and she had remained supportive throughout Mom’s messy grief. Unlike some friends, who distanced themselves, as if widowhood were contagious, Pam stayed.
Infidelity would have been unthinkable in my parents’ marriage, yet Mom seemed to withhold judgment and clearly derived considerable enjoyment from hearing about Pam’s love-life. I found it riveting, too—and, in its own way, far more educational than seventh-grade science or world history.
While the conversation between my mother and Pam was often eye-opening, it was also pragmatic, showing me that after the ecstasy comes lunch and laundry. Books rarely bothered with those topics, so I suppose it also made me a better storyteller, more cognizant of the fact that not everything needs to be told. Trusting your reader, you leave some of the mundane—and some of the erotic—to their imagination.
Did I recognize the inappropriateness of my mother encouraging her pre-teen to read licentious, and sometimes fairly graphic, books? Of course I did. That made them all the more enticing, and gave me a tiny thrill of naughtiness. I can still recall the look of alarm on my sixth-grade teacher’s face when he asked me what I had chosen to write my spring book report about. I told him I wasn’t sure, but I had just finished Peyton Place, so perhaps that? His frozen visage conveyed both concern and confusion. I think he gave me an A on my paper out of sheer relief when I turned in a rather dry composition on Jane Eyre.
While I appreciated—and even savored—my mother’s hand-me-downs, the books I selected for myself tended to be more age-appropriate. Thus, I also grew up with Pippi Longstocking, Nancy Drew, and Cherry Ames—books where sexual activity was essentially absent.
One night, I almost missed their after-dinner chat in favor of my English composition assignment. Pam was describing how she regularly got pedicures and always made sure her toenails were perfectly polished. It seemed that Frank (husband, not lover) had something of a foot fetish and she never knew when he would want to suck on her toes.
Okay, this beats The Grapes of Wrath, I thought to myself, resting my pencil on the kitchen table.
“Honestly, Connie,” she said, “it can get a little boring, lying there as he slurps on my feet, but it’s worth it for the sex afterward. He becomes a wild man!”
I couldn’t make out my mother’s reply, but I heard her laugh and the clatter of the ice in their glasses. I looked down at my bare feet, size 9-wide, scuffed and sunburned, with raggedy toenails. The second toe on my right foot was bent unnaturally toward the first, having never been set when I broke it years earlier in a collision with an unyielding concrete step.
I found nothing attractive about my feet, nor anyone else’s for that matter. This particular inclination was something I had never encountered in Harold Robbins. I paused to consider whether there was anything to Pam’s narrative I might file away for use when I was older, but I felt no desire to footnote this for future. I comforted myself with the knowledge, that when the time was right, some other—more agreeable—appetites would surely arouse a quiver or two. There was time. Until then, there were always books.
I picked up my pencil and turned back to Steinbeck.
*
Donna is the author of the 2018 book, A Year of Living Kindly. She considers herself an activist for kindness, though admits to occasional lapses into bitchiness. Her articles and essays have been featured in The Washington Post, Seattle Times, and numerous other publications. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she loves outdoor activities that require little or no coordination. Visit her website: https://ayearoflivingkindly.com.