Kinflicks by Lisa Alther Read Free Book Online Page A

and profferings of breasts. Joe Bob’s movements lagged behind by about half a beat due to the five-pound canvas-covered wrist and ankle weights he was wearing, shackle-like, to build up his arms and legs. As though they needed any more building.
    Occasionally, unable to tolerate the mounting tension, one of us would whirl off and, back to the other, writhe in narcissistic isolation, eventually spinning back around, restored, to face the other and resume our invocation of the muse of adolescent lust.
    And then the reward: a slow song. “Why does my heart go on beating? /Why do these eyes of mine cry? /Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?/It ended when you said good-by.” The heartbreak of the song merely increased Joe Bob’s and my delight at having found each other in a world in which, so Skeeter Davis assured us, the only certainty was loss. Joe Bob wrapped his muscled arms around me as though enfolding a football for a line drive, his wrist weights clanking together behind my back. I shyly put my arms around his waist and first discovered those two delightful ranges of rippling muscle down his back.
    We didn’t really dance. In fact, we scarcely moved, swaying in time to the adenoidal wailings with only enough friction between us to give him an erection, which prodded my lower abdomen. Not knowing then what an erection was, I assumed that this strange protuberance was the result of yet another football injury, a hernia or something. I politely pretended not to notice, as I’d pretended not to notice his moronic smile, though I did wonder at the reason for his chagrined glances down at me.
    I must confess at this point that, in spite of having been flag swinger for Hullsport High and girl friend of Joe Bob Sparks and Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival Queen, I hadn’t always been beautiful and gifted. There was a time, when I was thirteen, when I wanted nothing but to be a defensive left tackle for the Oakland Raiders. That was before I learned the bitter lesson that women led their lives through men. In short, that was before I became a flag swinger on the sidelines of Joe Bob’s triumphs. I must have suspected what was cooking, deep in the test kitchens of my unconscious, because my football playing had the desperation of the doomed to it. My tackles were performed with the fervor of a soldier making love on the eve of a lost battle. My blocks were positioned with the loving precision lavished on daily routines by terminal cancer patients. Something in me knew that I would never be an Oakland Raider, that I would never even be a Hullsport Pirate, that I would have to pull myself up by my training bra straps into some strange new arena of combat at some unspecified point in the near future.
    That point turned out to be the messy morning my first menstrual period began. My family may have been into death in a big way, but they definitely weren’t into sex. So unprepared was I for this deluge that I assumed I had dislodged some vital organ during football practice the previous afternoon and was hemorrhaging to death. Blushing and stammering, averting her eyes to Great-great-aunt Hattie’s epitaph on the wall, Mother assured me that what was happening was indeed horrible — but quite normal. That bleeding like a stuck pig every month was the price exacted for being allowed to scrub some man’s toilet bowl every week.
    â€œThat’s life,” she concluded. She concluded many of her conversations with the phrase, like a fundamentalist preacher’s “Praise the Lord.” When she said it, though, the implication was not that one should accept the various indignities of corporeal existence with grace, but rather that one should shift one’s focus to the dignities of the dead.
    â€œNo more football,” she added offhandedly. “You’re a young woman now.” I knew at that moment what Beethoven must have felt when informed that