THE WEAKER SEX

THE WEAKER SEX

“I'm telling you for the hundredth time, Mom, ‘No way!’ I ain’t gonna go over to some strange kid’s home and play with him just ‘cuz you say so.” It was 1972, I was eleven, and Zeppelin’s Four Sticks pursued me from my older sister’s room.

“If your mother tells you to do something, Toby, then, by gawd, you will obey her or I will grip the big paddle with two hands.” My father, Leon Forrester, was not someone to cross, especially a pygmy. Being 4’7 and 82 pounds, I qualified.

“But I don’t wanna. The guys got a football game up at Armstrong Field in thirty minutes. I told ‘em I was in.”

My dad’s eyes became dead end alleys.

I gulped.

“You can miss one game. Now go with your mother. Be the good son.”

Unless I fancied a whipping I was doomed to get into our station wagon, drive across the city, and visit this new family my mom had decided to adopt off some stupid church bulletin board.

***

We were halfway there. I had successfully frozen out my mom, punishing her for erasing my precious Saturday afternoon.

“I know you are mad at me, but this is really a sweet thing you are doing. This family just arrived here from India.”

My hackles soared. “‘India?!’”

“Bombay, to be precise. And like I said, they have a child your age. Besides, it’s about time you open up to meeting people from different cultures.”

I hated it when my mom tried to make me sound stubborn. “What’s his name?” I muttered, a flash of sissy cricket knickers baiting my angry mind.

“Oh, my gosh. Sashi told me this too. It’s umm... D-uh, Damini! That’s it! Damini.” My mother turned to me and grinned like some rubbery lipped chimp that just typed a complete sentence on a Smith Corona. “Isn’t that a splendid name?!”

I folded my arms and then released a huff that Smokey the Bear could have used. “Rhymes with weenie.” I flicked my eyes stage right, and glared out the window. Pouting 101. “This’ll teach her for ruining my favorite day of the week,” I silently hissed.

***

We rolled into a strange part of town, where people used clotheslines, and cars were jacked up on dirt clod and crabgrass yards.

“Bath,” cried the vowel challenged woman I assumed was Sashi. “My dear friend, Bath!” Sashi charged us with a delighted grin, her bulky frame identified amidst a warehouse of sashaying, rainbow-colored linens.

My mom killed the engine and, in one impressive burst, swung open her door to hug this toothy, dark-skinned lady who had a mesmerizing black smudge between her eyes. “Sashi! I love what you are wearing! So lively!”

Sashi python hugged my mom. If she had squeezed any harder, a solid would’ve passed through a solid.

It was officially ridiculous. And I slumped beneath the dashboard to utilize the dangling rearview mirror Christmas tree freshener as a crude cloaking device.

“And this must be Toby!” shrieked Sashi, her pie face flaring wild mustang nostrils through the concave windshield. It was a house-of-mirrors effect. I was arrested by sudden willies.

“Climb out, Toby,” said my mom. “Introduce yourself.”

“Geezus S. Christ,” I mumbled, making sure this grinning goblin didn’t hear. Then I swung my puny frame from the station wagon and straightened up. As I did I saw a beige curtain flip open-and-shut so swiftly it could’ve been a mirage. “Hello. I am Toby.” I offered my hand, which she hijacked inside her two calloused mitts and then pressed the back of my wrist to her cheek, which was strangely chiffon in contrast to her sandpaper palms.

“Sooo bery nice to meet you, Toebeee.” She had a twinkle in her eye but, nonetheless, her entire presentation was off setting. I wanted to be back home, breaking tackles with the guys up at the field, pretending I was Gale Sayers.

“You’re welcome,” flew from my lips. I knew it sounded foolish, but before I could recover, my mom and Sashi were howling.

“Forgive him. He’s all boy,” chirped my mom, attempting a bail out.

The curtains moved again. This time I was positive. I made out a body’s silhouette, perhaps my size. The gumshoe was: it must be Damini.

“So, is your son around?” asked my mom.

Sashi’s face crimsoned and then she bent over like a mechanical clown toy, her shawls kaleidoscopic windmills. “Nooo, Damini is—”

Abruptly, pure luster stood at the front door. It was like an Ali uppercut with fairy dust and distant trumpets.

“... a girl,” finished Sashi, recoiling from her private merriment.

I didn’t need to be told twice. I was staring at some exotic creature, a bewitching recipe of tomboy and woman yearning to escape her cutoffs and canary yellow tanktop. She was barefoot, smiling a library of sonnets, and biting on her scarlet lower lip.

My Levis shifted. I glanced down to make sure things weren’t obvious. Fortune had slid my apparatus so that it was flush to my inner thigh, and thus, not identifiable.

“Damini, this is Toby,” began Sashi. “Toby, this is my darling, Damini. Her name means Lightning in Hindu.”

To this day I’m not sure, but I’m guessing my jaw plummeted like a safe off the Empire State Building because it took a moment to realign speech.

Sashi spent a wink at my mother. They were grinning, amateur matchmakers. I knew they smelled my goat-heel musk. I just prayed that Damini hadn’t figured it out.

“I think he likes me, Momma!” Then she vanished inside.

I was frozen, yet an El Nino dampened the back of my shirt.

My mother giggled, and if I could’ve thought to glare I would’ve but my mind had chased Damini inside. Her haunting features already crippled me. I was metal shavings to her magnetic catnip.

“Go. Go inside and play,” said Sashi, shooing me from my moorings. “Damini has been preparing events.”

“‘Events?’” I echoed, a puppet with frayed strings.

“Toby, get along and join Damini. Sashi and I are going for a walk.”

The mothers stood vigil until slowly, my heart a timpani of bedlam, I scaled the porch and disappeared inside.

“You like checkers?” Her voice was pure nightingale, yet I still jumped.

She was setting up the board, two glasses of lemonade nearby, fogged by yacht-sized ice cubes, rested on the coffee table.

“Kid’s stuff,” I growled, puffing my chest. “Only simpletons and hicks slumped over pickle barrels play it.”

Damini looked up, her svelte fingertips poised to line up the final row of red checkers. “I couldn’t agree more.”

“Chess is all I play.” Although I’d only just learned the game a month ago--and clobbered my gullible, buck-toothed pal, Ned Stern, in five-straight matches--my bravado burst forth, a gauntlet I was sure would shrink her.

“Oh, that’s a coincidence. I hate checkers too. Just thought you might wanna do it.” She smiled a bouquet of wild flowers, her clear brown eyes a ray-gun that turned my support columns into mud, and gathered the checkers with assembly-line dexterity. It was something subtle, but it stuck in my head she had some quicks. “We got a chessboard right there on the dining room table.” She nodded at an adjoining room. “Father and I play every night.”

I hadn’t noticed anything other than her and the lemonade. I guess that pegged me her servant. But an elaborate chessboard with expensive pieces glistened in the sun that lanced through their backyard window.

“If you want, we could play that instead?” She was cheerful, innocent.

I wanted to back out with dignity, but every drop of gravity in that room conspired to drag me closer to her dazzling face and wispy cadence.

“Umm, sure. I guess we have time for a game. They can take a century yanno?” I waited until she started toward the chessboard, praying she would say no.

“Oh, yes, just this summer it took Bobby Fischer twenty-one games to beat Boris Spassky and wrestle away the World Championship from Russia for the first time in twenty-four years. They started on July 11th and Boris resigned by phone on September 1st. “

Damini was already seated by the time she put a dot on her sentence. I was left grasping phantoms and trying to remain nonchalant about her Univac info.

“Yeah, think I heard about that,” I said, approaching their dining room table. Then I tripped on my Keds’ shoelace and bashed headfirst into a thick, triangular table leg. Cuckoo birds circled.

“Oh, my gosh!” cried Damini, “are you okay?!”

She knelt beside me, her vanilla scent lifting me off the ground.

“Umm-hmm,” I said, gutting it out better than I ever had, the knot on my hairline volcanic. “I’ll be fine. Let’s play.”

“Are you sure?” she said sweetly.

“What, ya scared?!” I snapped.

She stared at me like I was a psycho, which I had just exhibited I was, and said, “No. That’s fine.” Then she nestled back into her seat, an angel facing a skunk.

I felt like a schmuck. My head throbbed, but dwarfing that was the high-voltage buzz in my loins. Damn, was she beautiful, unlike any girl I had ever seen. I wondered if a boy could fall in love in two minutes, because if it was possible it had stung me hard.

“So, who usually wins when you play your dad?” I rallied for my ill-mannered comment.

Damini brightened. All was forgiven. Her smile crept coast-to-coast, a beacon of Sylvania’s brightest. “He does. But I’ve beaten him once now by employing the Sicilian Najdorf. It got me off to a flying start and he couldn’t recover!” She said this so humbly that I couldn’t help but admire her enthusiasm.

“Dorf what?”

“It’s an opening defense invented by the Polish-Argentinean, Grandmaster Miguel Najdorf. It begins thusly: One, e4 c5. Two, Nf3 d6. Three, d4 cxd4. Four, Nxd4 Nf6. Five, Nc3 a6.”

She moved the pieces as if they were her co-joined digits, placing them down in an impressive sequence while explaining more disorienting minutiae. All I could do was watch her perfect lips move, the data lost in the walls and ceiling. I nodded, a stooge.

A couple minutes later, she said, “Checkmate.”

To this day I don’t recall making a single move.

“Hold on. Gimme a minute,” I said, studying her gambit that had me trapped like a bee in a jar. Suddenly, I realized she beat me without my guys crossing midfield. So, I pretended to sneeze and wiped all the pieces off the board. “Oops! Oh well, let’s go climb a tree!”

I raced toward their front door hoping this bluff might work. But her expression revealed she was three giant steps ahead of me and thought I was an idiot.

“Okay,” she said, like a Buddha. “There’s a great one in the park across the street.”

I bolted from their home, miles ahead of her as she picked up my mess. “I’ll show this chick,” I coached myself. “She mighta got me in chess but now I’ll show her how boys are stronger and faster.”

There wasn’t much doubt what tree she was talking about. It was an aging spruce that jutted up at least fifty feet with more limbs than an octopus reunion. I sprinted across the paved road that divided their property from the park, neglecting to check for traffic, and realized halfway across I would’ve been a dead man had any vehicle happened by. That cemented how far this boggling creature had mind blistered me.

All I could think of was beating her to the top.

As I reached the base of the tree, I chuckled at the cinch of this feat. I don’t want to sound big headed, but I was quite the climber as a kid. We had an elm in our yard that I owned, taming it like a Jungle Gym by the time I was seven. This spruce was frosted cake. And I gobbled the trunk, hopping up its sturdy, ladder-accommodating branches two at a time. I was halfway up the tree by the time my wind even got tested.

I glanced downward: no sign of Damini. So I took a cocky, vise grip on the next limb, thinking, “A couple more Tarzan leaps and I’ll be laughing at her when I get to the top spying her ant-like presence below.”

I was three-quarters of the way up, the sting of the chess debacle now eased by the balm of this wipeout.

“Hey, what took ya?!”

Startled, I lost my grip and dropped to the next branch, where I had to make an amazing snatch of a limb or it would’ve been sayonara.

“Oh, no!” cried Damini. “Are you okay?!” She scurried down, a squirrel monkey on skates. “Here, take my hand?”

“I can do it myself!” And normally I could’ve, but locking into her infinite brown eyes left me limp, the juice in my usually reliable muscles drained as a Kenyan drinking hole in August.

My fingers started losing starch. I was thirty-feet above the ground, too proud to ask for help, risking to be paralyzed at the least.

“Let go of your superbia,” said Damini. “Now give me your hand!” She reached out, a stern look etched her impossibly cute face.

I stuck out my right hand and, as if she possessed Wonder Woman strength, I was whisked upward.

“Upsy daisy,” she sang, as I completed my butt-first landing so close beside her our forearms touched.

This was the closest we had been, our youthful skin sticky with adolescent vapors, and I was overwhelmed by an unfathomable yearning I knew could not be crowned.

“So what the hell is superbia?”

Damini smiled widely, not the least put off by my boorish tone. “It’s Latin for Pride. One of the Seven Deadly sins, you know?”

I wasn’t sure if it was her beauty or brains that captured me more.

“In Jacob Bidermann's medieval miracle play, Cenodoxus, Pride’s the deadliest of all sins and leads to damnation.” She ticked this off as easily as I read ‘stop’ signs.

“Huh?”

Her dimples revealed a scroll of poems while she held my overmatched eyes, and then like a cunning bandit she smooched me softly on the lips.

“Damini!!” screamed her mother.

I guess my eyes closed due to intoxication, and when I opened them I saw her mom shaking her fist from across the street. My mother stood next to Sashi, humiliated, strapped for speech.

“Get down from that tree, immediately!” shouted Sashi. “You are in trouble of your lifetime! SHAME! GREAT SHAME!!”

Damini gripped my wrist and gave it a fond squeeze, then she scrambled down the tree. “Yes, Momma, I am coming!”

I watched her race across the street into their yard, my heart a silverback beating his chest. I had never been more bewildered, more alive, or more forlorn.

Sashi grabbed Damini by the ear and scolded her in some indecipherable tongue while this breathtaking thing I had known for fifteen minutes was escorted inside.

My mother stood there, unsure of protocol. She didn’t speak to me. She just shifted weight. I couldn’t blame her. It was a tough call. All I wanted was for Damini to show her face, maybe framed in her bedroom window. So my eyes darted, berserk with lust, to-and-fro every windowpane.

Eventually, my mother walked to the car and climbed inside.

We rode home in silence, though my crotch was an air-raid siren.

The incident was never mentioned at our home.

***
My mind erupted with wild visions of Damini all week, and when my mom said she was going to church the next Sunday, I showered, lathered a Prell helmet, Kiwi polished my good shoes, snapped on my fake maroon tie, and joined her in the car. She was no dummy. She knew why I was going for the first time in years.

But Damini and her mom were not at church that Sunday. Nor the Sunday after that. Or the one after that. And I gave up after the third strike, my heart shattered like a ceramic bowling pin.

I dated many girls throughout my life, married twice, divorced both of them: good, generous women.

I dunno, maybe I was always chasing that fifteen minutes. Because after that, nothing was the same anymore.

THE END