THE PASSING OF THE PAST

She thought. As usual, she had to work hard at it. Today, though, she applied additional diligence. It was important. She stared, but saw little, just jerky thought-images rolling by like frames in an ancient film strip. She listened, but heard only long-dead voices. It was beginning to prepare to start.

Her mind settled on a time during her childhood when her daddy’s brother and his family would visit on Saturday nights. Every week they came. It never failed, for life followed a more predictable path in those days. The car would stop. The horn would honk. Then the whole bunch of relatives would pile into the house. On those evenings, the women talked, the kids played, and the men drank beer in the basement. Meanwhile, Time, that stealer of dreams, notched another week onto the tally-pole of life.

Around ten, the women began to listen. If she tried, she could remember why they listened. The men would begin to sing a parody of the song Sweet Adeline. When they reached, “your feet stink just like mine,” the women would nod to one another and move to the door leading to the basement. The kids would pick up any scattered toys and store them away like memories that were no longer useful. All was predictable.

While the women retrieved their men, the kids would bound up the stairs and take turns sliding down the banister. Down they would come, and then race back to the top for another turn, over and over until the order came to stop.

She hated to hear the stop for she had always supposed the other kids did it because they enjoyed the experience of speed. She enjoyed it for a different reason, having found at an early age that it felt good in a way she didn’t quite understand, that is, if she wore a loose-fitting skirt that allowed more-or-less direct contact. She sometimes played banister riding when she was alone in the house, using a personal technique that was much slower than the Saturday night rides. It made for an even nicer experience.

One day, the ride took her somewhere she had never been, took her someplace special that was hers and hers alone. She loved going there and never came all the way back. Not long after that, a shower nozzle performed the same task. The opportunities multiplied, and she soon found other ways. Was she afflicted or something? She didn’t understand, but thought it best not to tell anyone, especially the priest. That much was for sure.

Well, she had told Jeremy much later, but he was special—young, married, noncommittal Jeremy was just what a lively woman hoped for in life. He posed no threat to her and called what they did “sport-fucking.” That sounded jolly to her, and she didn’t mind teaching him a thing or two, hence the confession about the banister rides. She smiled. Jeremy was sweet and belonged with her in that special place.

She had even taught him the importance of foreplay, though that sharing of expertise had unintended consequences when he got too good at it, and things would start moving far faster than she preferred. Things were doing that now as well. Back then, she would whisper in his ear, “Slow down. Be still for a minute,” although it never worked. He would try his best to be motionless, but the slightest twitch kicked her into action. She would arch her back and scream while her legs locked around him and held him in place. He had better, by God, hold on for dear life at that moment … stay in the saddle, so to speak. Good times, overall. She smiled again from simply thinking about it. Jeremy was special and life offers too few special things. But she had helped Jeremy get a promotion and that took him away. Plus, she hadn’t told him everything.

She hadn’t told him, for example, about what she thought of as her “near-black” experience. He was a man who came on to her in a bar where she sat on a stool wearing one of what she and Emma called their “easy-access skirts,” in this case access for roving hands and not bannisters. She was younger then and looking for new things, not things to write home about, mind you, just things to file away and recall later, at times like this. Special things.

Back then, a tumble in the parking lot with a handsome man seemed promising. “Sexperience-gathering,” she called it. He seemed nice, he smelled good, and he had a big car and money, far more good points than the typical man could claim. There was room in the car to accomplish any number of new ideas, and she had always been goal-oriented. The size of the car meant she could move around a bit if the mood struck her. But after a long period of tasting tongue, lips, and ebony skin, accompanied by some skillful rubbing, she found size could be a deterrent as well.

She had, years later, told someone about this: her friend Emma, who shared her taste in skirts as well has her taste in men. Emma knew how to keep secrets, and besides, they both knew enough about one another to ensure silence. Emma’s eyes had grown wide when she heard, “it was as long as a sausage and as big around as a tomato juice can. I had to run, leaving him there holding it while I hopped, skipped, and jumped away, pulling my drawers up as I went. I’m going to call it my ‘easy-escape skirt’ from now on.” But even now on lonely nights, she wishes she had stayed on track and rode it through.

She and Emma both laughed about it. That, of course, was the last time she had seen Emma laugh.

She smiled again. But then she thought of children and stopped smiling. They promised her no joy in life. She found them self-centered and grasping. She read somewhere that the human species had such a long gestation period that the final years of embryonic development had to be accomplished outside the womb. She found it could last much longer than that. It wasn’t unusual, she had observed, for it to last into adulthood for families who could afford it. For those who couldn’t, there was the military or the penal system. Either way liberated the parents, and she was happy for them. Let anyone blame her. Fuck them all.

She forced her thoughts away from children and into the further past and memories of “the big nasty,” as they called it back then. She held out until she was 15, almost, then she had gotten around to it at a secluded lake house after a dance. Afterwards, she wasn’t sure it was worth all the anticipation. The boy had spoiled the moment by promising her they would be married. She would work while he went to college. He would come home, tell her what college was like, and they would marry. Then, he solemnly announced, she would have sex with him, and only him, every night, pretty much forever. Forever?

That had almost clamped her thighs together for good. But, it was difficult at that age to arrange a night free from parental surveillance, so she had gone ahead and tried it. It wasn’t too bad, not as good as a long spell with the banister, but not too bad. Best thing was: it had given her a taste for more. Therein lay the value, she supposed.

They stuck the name “whipper” on her in high school, or, more precisely, “whupper,” as one of her classmates, a boy from the South, phrased it. She shook her head when she thought about this. It wasn’t fair, not a bit. It was the first time, but not the last, in her life that she would face that reality. She hadn’t really done the deed that spawned the name. She had spurned a date’s advances because he smelled bad, and he had started the rumor in retaliation. It stuck, and every boy she went out with afterwards expected the mythical privilege. None were successful but idle talk will suffocate reality any day of the week. She learned later that the lie even stuck to her younger sister like a malignant, life-sucking slime. “Whupper Junior,” they called her. She had taught them, though.

She then realized that men start out stupid and get worse. They could be useful, but that was about it. If reality could provide them a thousandth part of the sexual escapades that locker-room talk did, they might improve, or that’s how she had always felt about it. Meanwhile, they could always be on tap, and sometimes on top if she felt like it. That was it as far as she was concerned. High school days ended in disappointment.

She grew up quick and learned to be picky. In college, a boy who could be patient and take instruction was good for at least five dates. No more. Any more would get them to thinking awful thoughts, sometimes with the word “love” growing from an otherwise pleasant conversation like a weed slithering out of the ground in a garden. That made them forget the things she had taught them, and she didn’t like that. She liked a boy who could learn, utilize what he had learned, and move on to make room for another. They were always free—the boys—to pass along what they had learned to the other girls. She was charitable in that way.

It was a way of repaying life for granting her such special gifts.

Thinking about these things right now, she touched herself, in an “inappropriate manner” as the nuns used to call it, just to calm down a bit. The warm memories of the banister rides had ruined any chances for true peace. Funny how memories worked. That made her think of the day one of her husbands had confessed that the reason he failed, so often, to perform was that he would be haunted by memories of his first wife. That’s when she quit believing in a god that could create, and allow the continuation of, the male of the species for any purpose other than a woman’s casual pleasure. Who could blame her for feeling that way?

“College boys were the worst,” she was thinking now. Had computers been more advanced at the time, they would probably have had a sexual version of “fantasy football.” They could form imaginary harems and vie for digital prominence. “Fantasy Fucking.” Why not?

Most men proved unredeemable. Kurt had been different. Kurt had been nice. He taught her some things involving ice cubes, for example. She had once ensnared a man who had loads of money with the ice cube technique Kurt called “frosty balls.” That particular man was special because he lavished money on her and took a long time to understand what was happening.

Remembering Kurt, though, made her think again about the bannisters. Then she silently hoped that Allah, or whichever god was to blame, withheld the virgins from the son-of-a-bitch who ended Kurt’s further quest for mastery of the sexual act. She allowed her mind to drift back, and when she saw no one was watching, she folded her pillow, crammed it between her legs, and pretended that it was Kurt’s head. She stopped and jerked it away when she recalled that they had never found his head. They never found his head but his family had sent her his dog tags and medals. They didn't want them. She lost them in the most recent fire.

She felt her eyes begin to swell. “Damn it all to hell,” she thought. She moved the pillow back behind her, rested on it, and closed her eyes.

She was dreaming of bannisters when she heard a voice calling to her, “Mrs. Adams, it’s time.”