Fucking Cousin Charlie by Editor Skirt #003 (aka Casey Kait)

     b/w pinhole photographs from the "desert as metaphor" series by Editor Skirt #002 (aka Donna Wingate)
 

    a poem "Drive, They Said" by Editor Skirt #001 (aka Sandra Zane)
 
 
 

"Some things shouldn't be said." My mother was talking to my aunt.

"I mean, we don't talk like that, why should she?"

We were at my Aunt Kay's house and I was sitting in the livingroom playing Atari. We didn't have Atari, and that's one of the reasons I agreed to come. The other reasons were soda, which we also didn't have, and HIM. Him was Charlie. Charlie of five years older than me, Charlie of playing baseball and riding dirt bikes. Charlie, my first cousin.

"Well at least she didn't have to say it like that," my aunt chimed in.

"At least?! If she didn't like the damn sweater she shouldn't have said anything at all."

She was probably right. My grandma was always saying things she shouldn't, and my mother was always going off on it. Grandma was irreverent towards standard notions of propriety. I learned by example, so I picked up her irreverence for convention but also I learned to keep my mouth shut. My mother could be brutal.

I was playing Q*bert and I wasn't very good, didn't have a chance to play much. I sensed a presence behind me. I heard the floorboards creak under the wall to wall carpeting. His weight shifted slightly from foot to foot as he watched Q*bert jump from cube to cube, avoiding brightly creatures and objects.

"Hey kid. Wanna play two player?"

"Uh..."

Time stopped. The china crashed. My mother's sour tongue turned into a melifluous stream of peace and wholeness. These were the moments I lived for, pined for, ached. I sat through innumerous cups of coffee and family gossip for these simple acts.

"Crap. I'm dead. I don't feel like playing anymore."

He tossed the controls back into my lap and got up. I watched him rise, like the smooth muscle that he was, go into the kitchen and get a Dr. Pepper. I watched him leap up the stairs to his bedroom in threes. I could hear the door shut. He was gone.

I was nine.

At fourteen, I was a mess. All the girls were developing, and I hadn't even gotten my period yet. My bangs were too short to be pulled back, too long to not get in my eyes. I had a nose that would take another decade to grow into and at school I was called "Chicken Legs." The taunting got so bad that I eventually went against my proletarian instincts and went to Das Principal. She was an apologetic ball of a woman, with a head that bobbed to her own inner tidal pull. She was not small, and here I was, little paperclip of a teen next to her, an ever-rocking buoy. Her office was all soft colors. Pinks and greys. This was a progressive school with comfortable chairs arranged in a circle for discussion, not confrontation.

I told her what was going on, the verbal assaults, the locker-room jibes, and she assessed my special case as she assessed all cases. All cases were special cases, to be dealt with delicately, tactfully. Confidentially.

She assured me it was all on the up and up, that something would be done. Like I said, confidentially. But I should have known. High school principals have a way of making you feel like selling out your fellow student is your civic duty with their manipulative little promises of redemption. Later in high school she said she'd overlook the fact that I got caught smoking behind the gym, but only if I gave her a lead on the anti-jock propaganda strewn like confetti during pep-rally. Even before that incident I should have known that nothing said in that office was sacred, but I had needs too, and I thought Buoy and I might be able to work out some sort of deal. As I walked out of her office I could tell by the hum of fluorescence in the hallway that I had made a mistake. That the repercussions would be dramatic. For the next few weeks the jibers were quiet. Too quiet.

Later that semester I was in a play. It was a student production of Clytemnestra, and I played pleb woman number two. Though the part was small, I did have a brief monologue with some crucial foreshadowing. It was a scene alright. Mom and Aunt Kay were there, and Charlie too. Aunt Kay said that since I had gone to every one of Charlie's baseball games, the least he could do was come to my school play. Little did she know…

Act Two: Scene Three. From the dark, the glow of a single candle warms downstage left. It is pleb woman number two. She rises, slowly. She has had a vision, a dream, a premonition. Her weary legs shake in her loose-fitting toga. She stands and...

"Perdue done chicken right!"

It was like a stab in the heart. Or was it a stab in the back? The unmistakable voice of Peter, the originator of Chicken Legs. The humiliation was devastating. Buoy had sold me out, and as if this weren't bad enough, Charlie was out there. My image as the mature, ripe and righteous plebian woman—destroyed. Somehow I managed to make it through the monologue, but I dreaded having to go out and greet them. The false praise, the patronizing bravas. Ugh.

"Hey," I said as I slinked out of the clanging auditorium doors.

"Ooh, shma shma shma, shmee shmee shmee," the women said.

I didn't hear a word of it. I was too busy staring at the ground, then his Asics wrestling shoes, then at the golden hair of his soccer-tanned legs. A warm flat hand was on my shoulder and my skin burned with every cell of raging pubescence. The glow spread to my mid-back and then to my waist as his hand traversed my spiky vertabrae and ribcage.

"Let's go get some food," he said.

Of course. How perfect. His needs were so—primal. This was what was important. The drives, the life force. There was strength in sameness, likeness. What was familiar was good and pure, all else was the cacophony of popularity, the drone of mass media. We were familiar by context, but I often wondered if he felt the same as me. Literally, I wondered if our tendons pulled in the same elastic yet fiberous way. If his shoulderblades jutted dramatically from his back when he bent his arms backwards. The specifics that are explored in the most intimate of moments. We shared the same eyes, lips that spread to show large round teeth. A freckle, a dimple. But what about the rest of us?

On this night there was a buzz, something almost telekinetic when we were together. I know he knew it was there, and I wondered if our mothers felt it too. It was something I knew belonged only to us.

Aunt Kay said she was tired and didn't want to go out. My mother too, so she handed me a twenty and told me to treat Charlie to a burger-delux. They got in my mother's car and were off. I couldn't believe it. We were alone. Thank god. And I could finally raise my head. When we were alone I was not afraid to look at him. Not ashamed either. He smiled at me and there was an exchange, an energy that passed between us stronger than I had ever felt before. I knew this was the beginning.

"You wanna go to Royal Cliffs?" he said. "That's just up the street, right?"

Shit, I thought. There would probably be a lot of kids from school there celebrating.

"Um, could we go to the Red Oak in Fort Lee? They have better mozzerella sticks than Royal Cliffs." Please please please please please.

"Sure, yeah, whatever you want."

It was magic. As we sped from our claustrophobic town into the annonymity of another, I felt the weight of every reproachful gaze lifted from my tiny body. It
was tremendous. My back straightened, my legs crossed, and I was free. Charlie reached over and squeezed my thigh. His hand sat there for a hot minute.

"You were good tonight, you know?"

"Yeah?" I said.

"Yeah."

He was so cool for not mentioning the incident. For not teasing, like he sometimes did. He couldn't have missed it. It was too clear. "Perdue done chicken right!" At first the  words rang in my head, but they eventually faded and I beamed at the Jersey streets that welcomed us. I beamed at Charlie, and he back at me. I felt like our understanding was made real. I wasn't just yet sure what that understanding was, but I felt a safety and comfort that was new.
 

Charlie and I had been doing it since February, right after I turned seventeen. My aunt and I share the same birthday and our family had scheduled a joint birthday party on a Sunday. We had the weird midday meal that you have on holidays. Eating somewhere between three and four in the afternoon. There were fat cats around, tchotchkis of all sorts, some kind of sports on the TV. We gave my aunt bathsoaps, I got girly stationary. You know the drill. While our folks downed cup after cup of coffee, Charlie took me to the den in the basement to hear some songs his band had laid down on a four-track. They were good, solid Jersey garage-band songs. Four good-looking boys from Bergen County, how could you go wrong?

It was dark down there. Maybe not dark, but dim. The wood panelling on the walls and the brown industrial carpeting on the floor and the smell of partially-open paint cans. There was no overhead light, only a reading lamp by the couch. It was the TV room. We both sat on the floor with our backs against the couch.

"What'd you think?"

"It's good." I said. "I like the chorus, especially."
 
"Yeah?"

"Yeah, it's real…uh…religious."

"You think?"

"Yeah."

Charlie was raised Catholic, and though he never seemed too into it himself, he was infused with the imagery. Stained glass and saints, the wafer and the wine. The acoutremont seemed to wiggle its way into his creative process.

Where do the saints go? Where do the saints go? He was humming along. Mouthing the words. I caught him and we both laughed. I don't remember going in for the kiss. I don't remember much of it at all. Were we naked? Partially clothed? It was unimportant. I do remember that it was easy. Smooth and regular and comfortable. It was as though we had known each others' bodies in this way all along. As though it wasn't desire for the unknown, but for the craving of familiarity and wholeness. A completion of sorts. What's that sign that's the twins? Gemini? It was like that. Like the pit and flesh of a fruit. Peach, avocado, nectarine. Parts of a whole that invert, revert. A perfect incarnation, two bodies sucking at the negative spaces the other now filled. Arms curled in the crook of a neck. The pelvis locked in a semi-open/semi-closed position. The way muscles lay on the beach, connected by an invisible spine. We fell over each other like the strings of a cat's cradle. Constantly shaping and reshaping the structure of us. We fucked on the ground, my memory of it now a blur of tight brown carpet loops and styrofoam ceiling panels.

As with all lovers, the more we did it, the better we got. There were no whispers in the dark guiding, "a little to the left...softer...softer." We knew what each other wanted, because we wanted it for ourselves. When the bodies met, we experienced ourselves through the other, as the other. Sex was not an illicit event, colored by the adrenaline of getting caught (we hardly ever did it where we could). At picnics, family reunions, christenings, there were no sidelong glances exchanged between the two of us. No hand gripping knee under the Thanksgiving table, no frantic, scrambling-mad energy. There was no need for such things. Not even the need for explanation, introspection. We knew what it was—the union of two slippery halves, grouping and regrouping and ungrouping—and that was enough for us.

Over the years we would bang and mash and hump and shag and fuck and grind and ride and roll and loll and bump and tease and tickle and pinch and snog and bounce and finger. We did it in our own beds when no one was home, in hotels when someone was, in the shower, on our way to Corning, New York, in the Vince Lombardi rest area, the parking lot of the Bergan Mall and the storage closet of the coffee shop I worked in (after closing of course). We did it when we wanted to and when we could. It was easy to do because nobody suspected we would. When would we have the time? Me with my boyfriends and Charlie with his music?

And we were normal young people, dating and falling in love with our peers. What Charlie and I had didn't fall into the complications of these conventional relationships and romance. When I was younger and unable to fully understand and articulate what we had between us, I thought maybe it was a love to be posessed outside of myself. A romance that would eventually come under scrutiny and become a terrible mess. I admit, I sometimes fantasized about that happening and the attention it would bring.  But ultimately I realized that this was not a dramatic affair. I also don't think Charlie was imaginative enough to make it dramatic. I mean, I don't think he was imaginative enough to concoct the elaborate story lines that I sometimes played with in my head. Sometimes I thought it would be fun to check into a motel as husband and wife, or merchant marines, or truckers. But Charlie wasn't so into that stuff. Didn't like to think. Just liked to be. He'd always been very zen, though I don't think he realized it.

Last August Charlie got married. I like his wife, her name is Carrie. Her dad owns a hardware store in Mahwah and that's where she's from. She's blond and has beautiful posture and wears girl-jeans. She's very sweet and I'm glad that Charlie stopped chasing after those East Village goth types and found someone from Jersey. Someone who appreciates New Jersey as she deserves to be appreciated. They're going to have beautiful children, and soon too. Carrie is pregnant with twins and is due in January. Charlie and I still do it, but not as frequently. It's a little more difficult now. Carrie expects him to be around more, so it's harder for us to just go somewhere and disappear. Also, not that he suggested it or anything, but I told him I'm not going to do it with him in their bed. It was one thing in our parents' houses. Those were our houses too. But Charlie and Carrie's home, that's different somehow. Funny for me to be proprietous about this seemingly small detail, but I just can't help it. It's almost like I think that doing it there would invite some sort of catastrophe. I'm not a religious person, but I am somewhat superstitious, so why risk it?

As their wedding approached I thought I might be jealous, but luckily that hasn't turned out to be the case. I realize there's no reason to be jealous because I don't want what they have. They have difference; she is full, bouyant, giddy. He is quiet and sinewy and  brooding. They need each other for balance. Charlie and I don't balance, we are too like for that. Being together is to resonate, two pitches in the same chord implying a third. When we are alone we exist in that vibration and it calms and comforts us. We're happy, without conflict or remorse. As our lives twist with experience, it may become impossible for us to continue this way. I understand this, and I don't fear the loss. What we have together, is what we have apart. The teeth, the tongue, a dip in the neck where the sweat gathers.
 
 

Drive, They Said by sandra zane   We hit the impasse.        feel it in the air, like melon. Roll down   the windows, think twice about the blue.        Remind yourself to   dive in, take out the instant camera,        shoot around you while changing   lanes. asphalt, grey flannel, broken lines, a summer tan        paling on a girl's thighs, military manuevers.   Remember what you first wore, the juncture        of eyes, smile, don't smile.   Another coat of lipstick. place yourself        in this moment. it will bring me there.    motion. Only over public phones. smooth down your hair.        this is my drive. Don't call back,   I'll pretend not to notice. I listened to your names for your grandmother.        I make up names for now. blow this, Napoleon, charette.   A helicopter lifts away from the sand,        dips into the valley of my heart.

 

* Larry would like to acknowledge that the first editor skirt was actually an editor kilt, #000 Kristian Hoffman.
 

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