Dining out with my friend Ellen and her hubby David always means a night of live entertainment.  On this moonlit evening of glowing candles and flowing wine, David reached into the bag of stories about his Midwestern childhood and pulled out the most vividly memorable of them all:  his first encounter with sexuality.

Since you've never had the pleasure of meeting David, let's start by conjuring an image.  Visualize James Doohan, who played "Scott" on Star Trek, in his later silver-haired years.  Google him if need be.  Add a wry sense of humor, engaging warmth and exceptional artistic talent.  Architect by profession, David is an ingenious cartoonist and humorist.  Children gather to him like the Pied Piper, charmed by the "little boy" in his personality and his drawings of outrageously silly characters.  Here's a snapshot.  My rather shy daughters were only four and six years old when they first met Ellen and David.  Even though he was a relative stranger, they loved the idea of sharing their "way back" seat of the station wagon with him on the long trek to the picnic grounds.  Why did David choose the "turned around" seat?  Because it faced the window and he saw a chance to play the "gesturing game" with the girls.  Of course these were G-rated gestures like the peace symbol or just frenzied waves.  Before long, the car was filled with pealing bells of laughter.  Sometimes reactions from the people in the other cars set off the rounds of giggles, but most often it was David's hysterically funny comments.

In the story that David shared that night in the restaurant, he really was a little boy.  Just six years old.  The older woman in question was 11, known only to him as one of the neighborhood girls.  Nothing seemed off the beam about Jannie Yoder until the day she led him off to a secluded pine stand, dropped her panties, sat down to reveal her hidden jewels and told David to touch them.  Instantly, he knew there was no way he would touch anything that scary-looking.  Instead, he reached for the longest possible twig he could find.  Unfortunate choice for Jannie, considering that pines are notorious for rough bark.  After the briefest moment of twig-to-jewels contact, David's sense of horror far outweighed his innocent curiosity.  He ran home at warp speed, bursting into the living room where his mother was ironing clothes.  The confessional door was open and the penitent was beyond ready to pour out his heart and soul.

"Mamma!  I fucked Jannie Yoder!"  he blurted out in anguish.  Not that he knew what that unspeakable word meant, but surely this had to be it.

Ellen and I were unglued.  We were in danger of becoming a spectacle in an upscale restaurant.  Tears streamed down my face in the struggle to cover my howling mouth, hold my sides, and right myself in the chair all at the same time.  She was in worse shape.  It was obvious that Ellen had never heard the name Jannie Yoder before that night.

Like every great comedian, David understands the element of timing and waits for the gales to subside.  Or at least I thought he was waiting.  Pulling myself back together and wiping away the tears, I croaked out the question that anyone would have asked, "So what did your mother say?"  Most of us would be flashing back to images of bulging blood vessels on the foreheads of our parents the first and only time we dared to utter that darkly powerful but ever-so-confounding F-word.  Just those four little letters are enough to bring down an entire roof on a kid's head.

David's mother looked up, fixed her eyes on her small son, then turned her gaze back to the ironing board.  Not a single word.  Not so much as a wince.  Nothing.  We'll never know what she was thinking.  Maybe denial was preferable to even slightly cracking the lid of what could be Pandora's box.  We can only hope that little David translated that particular moment of silence as one of total absolution.

Copyright © Margaret Michaels 2008 All rights reserved
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