61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
1. My mother was dead, my father worked in New York, and the house was often empty when I was eighteen. That year, hostas plants threw white beads up into the shade on a New Jersey summer. I slept on the screened porch most nights and read. I smoked, too, something my dad didn't know about. I slept on the porch cushions, in boxers, the plastic cushion covers sticking to my legs.
2. I had a Kharmen Ghia, a brown egg of a Volkswagen. It had a stick. The seat covers stuck to my legs when I drove. The pedals played patty cake: short, quick, baby hands slapping against my bare feet. I wore my hair long, a beard, listened to Cat Stevens.
3. I dated Joanie for a while in early summer. On the Point Pleasant Beach we wrapped a sleeping bag around us and felt each other up. Cold and rainy. The tide came in. Seagulls hung like clothes hangers, triangles, paused in air. Joanie wore Love's Baby Soft. She had blonde hair that she shook when we talked. She beat me at bowling one night. Afterward, in the parking lot, she reached inside my overalls and jerked me off. Joanie went away to camp for the summer. She sent me letters written in lilac ink. She colored in the round parts of her script.
4. At night, from the screened porch, I watched fireflies dangle over the grass. At dawn I believed the fireflies died. They could not tolerate the sun's strength. But the last light of the day struck birch bark and produced more fireflies. Fireflies were sparks, blind tinder. They would have set the earth on fire except for the dew that quenched them.
5. Mrs. Goos hired me to work at the Tomaques playground. She was the director of Parks and Rec. She paid me air. I got a T-shirt and a whistle and a clipboard. Mrs. Goos worked in the town office surrounded by gray concrete floors. Two fans sprayed wind at us. They lifted papers on her desk as if they were curious, as if Mrs. Goos denied them secrets.
6. Rachel had worked three years at the playground. She was a college sophomore at Lehigh. She had black brown hair and dark eyes. She wore blue jean shorts, fraggled at the thighs, and tennis sneakers. Her socks had white pom-poms above the heel. Peds, she called them. Because Rachel was older, and because she had seniority, she was my boss. Rachel had a lanyard that held her whistle. The lanyard dissected her breasts into east and west.
7. Joanie wrote and said she had met someone. Not serious. Just a guy. It wasn't serious. Honest. She said she still thought of me all the time. She couldn't wait to get home. But fair was fair. We said if we met someone, we should tell. That was the deal. Besides, we weren't going steady, if anybody used that absurd word any longer. You know, she said. She did not color in the o's and u's and c's of her letter, and that meant she was being level. She asked me to please write back soon and not to be mad. She wondered if I had met anyone.
8. On a party boat with my father, I watched blue fish shine like fluorescent bars of light under the surface of the waves. The sun pushed us south, toward Cape May, toward the Chesapeake, the Caribbean. Later, on the screened porch, I thought maybe the blues resembled knife blades or swords. Maybe, I thought, the fish were the edge of blades as creatures dueled below us.
9. At eight in the morning mothers dropped off the kids. Cars formed a chain that opened, door by door, into the playground. Rachel and I sat on the picnic tables and watched the kids hurtle toward us. Rachel kept a sign-in list. She made lanyards and potholders and Popsicle calendars with the quiet kids. I took the frog legs around my hips, the kids jumping, attacking, swinging from the monkey bars. In the afternoon we all slept around trees, fairies, head-on-belly-head-on-belly-head-on-belly. At three I coached the softball team. The kids ran bases and churned sweat on their sideburns. Then Cisco arrived with the Mr. Softee truck, the sound of the ice-cream music a carnival. Kids stuck their heads in the coolers. Cisco smoked cigars. He gave Rachel and me free ice cream. He offered to take Rachel away, anywhere, and that became the joke. Ready today, he would ask her. And she said, no, I can't leave my guy. Meaning me. We ate bomb pops and licked and looked until finally we saw each other.
10. She came home with me one day for lunch. We ate peanut butter and jelly. I poured her a glass of milk in a mason jar. We thought about kissing. We both knew it but we couldn't do it.
11. I have a boyfriend named Brad, she said, who was an engineering major. He was working with his father for the summer in Pennsylvania. He was really busy. Brad called sometimes, but not that much. She didn't know how serious it was or wasn't and she was tired of thinking about it. When her friend, Cindy, visited, we all went out together. We went to a movie then ended up in a diner. I sat across the table from them. Cindy and Rachel talked to me but looked at each other sideways. They knew what they knew what they knew. I was being evaluated. Cindy ate French fries from my plate. She dipped the fries in ketchup.
12. Blue jays called from the forsythia bushes that wrapped around the porch. That summer I learned to identify a cardinal's song. It went: Birdie, birdee, birdeeeee. The jays made a metallic sound, something like a bolt coming loose under pressure.
13. We threw a square dance. Mrs. Goos made every playground in town throw a function so the parents could see what their kids had been doing. We put on music and taught the kids the Virginia Reel. We got the custodian, Mr. Gorman, to open the faculty kitchen the afternoon before and we baked cookies and cupcakes. We bought cider and ice. At seven the kids appeared wearing bandanas around their throats, ready to dance. The parents joined in. We played the music and taught the parents the proper steps. They ate cupcakes and hooked their children with their arms and hoisted the kids into the air right on cue. Do-si-do. Swing your partner. Allemande, left. Rachel wore a peasant skirt that swirled up when she spun.
14. You want to climb in back, she asked. We necked in the front seat. The night had been a success. Mrs. Goos had complimented us. The parents applauded when the kids presented us with two cheap straw cowboy hats. Now Rachel pushed away from me and slithered over the seat, into the far-behind, the tail section of her parents' station wagon. I climbed after her. It took a moment to rearrange ourselves, but our mouths stapled us together. We spread out. I lifted my hand under her skirt but she clamped her legs and put my hand on her breasts instead. I touched her breasts, pinched her nipples, then laid still when she climbed on top of me. I pulled her skirt up until her panties rubbed against my cock. She let me put my hands on her ass and she clamped her legs, finally, around mine. Then we pushed our breath into each other and we kissed while she clamped harder and harder on my leg. She angled until she had it right. She put her hand on my cock, flat, like someone shoving a drawer into a chest. Slowly our movements fit together and we kept kissing, thigh, hand, hands on ass, hand, thigh, until I felt her lips go up to my ear and say, I can, can you? So we did. Afterward we drove home together and sat in the car. She told me Brad wasn't a good boyfriend, but I knew, didn't I, that she was a sophomore in college. She said she thought I was terrific. She thought I would make some girl, someday, happy.
n°
Joseph Monninger is the author of nine novels — including the memoirs Home Waters and A Barn in New England — and numerous stories and articles. He lives and teaches in New Hampshire.
