In One Person

Then Richard and my mom came home, and I asked them about the foreign film. "It was disgusting!" my mother said.

"I didn't know you were such a prude," I said to her.

"Take it easy, Bill," Richard said.

"I'm not a prude!" my mom told me. She seemed unreasonably upset. I had been kidding. It was just something I'd heard Elaine say to Kittredge.

"I didn't know what the movie was about, Jewel," Richard said to her. "I'm sorry."

"Look at you!" my mom said to me. "You look more wrinkled than an unmade bed. I think you should have that conversation with Billy, Richard."

My mom went into their bedroom and closed the door. "What conversation?" I asked Richard.

"It's about being careful with Elaine, Bill," Richard said. "She's younger than you are--it's about being sure you're protecting her," Richard told me.

"Are you talking to me about rubbers?" I asked him. "Because you can only get them in Ezra Falls, and that asshole pharmacist won't give condoms to kids."

"Don't say 'asshole,' Bill," Richard said, "at least not around your mom. You want rubbers? I'll get you rubbers."

"There's no danger with Elaine," I told him.

"Did I see Kittredge leaving Bancroft as we were coming home?" Richard asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Did you?"

"You're at a . . . pivotal age, Bill," Richard told me. "We just want you to be careful with Elaine."

"I am careful with her," I told him.

"You'd better keep Kittredge away from her," Richard said.

"Just how do I do that?" I asked him.

"Well, Bill . . ." Richard had started to say, when my mother came out of their bedroom. I remember thinking that Kittredge would have been disappointed by what she was wearing--flannel pajamas, not at all sexy.

"You're still talking about sex, aren't you?" my mom asked Richard and me. She was angry. "I know that's what you were talking about. Well, it's not funny."

"We weren't laughing, Jewel," Richard tried to tell her, but she wouldn't let him continue.

"You keep your pecker in your pants, Billy!" my mom told me. "You go slowly with Elaine, and you tell her to watch out for Jacques Kittredge--she better watch out for him! That Kittredge is a boy who doesn't just want to seduce women--he wants women to submit to him!" my mother said.

"Jewel, Jewel--let it rest," Richard Abbott was saying.

"You don't know everything, Richard," my mother told him.

"No, I don't," Richard admitted.

"I know boys like Kittredge," my mom said; she said it to me, not to Richard--even so, she blushed.

It occurred to me that, when my mother was angry at me, it was because she saw something of my womanizing father in me--perhaps, increasingly, I looked like him. (As if I could help that!)

I thought of Elaine's bra, which was waiting for me under my pillow--"more a matter of habiliment than anything organic," as Richard had said about Ariel's gender. (If that small padded bra didn't fit the habiliment word, what did?)

"What was the foreign film about?" I asked Richard.

"It's not an appropriate subject for you," my mother told me. "Don't you tell him about it, Richard," my mother said.

"Sorry, Bill," Richard said sheepishly.