After S’mores

by Susan Gilbert Guerrant

My father sweats through his undershirt, perspiration rings blooming around his neck and underarms. He pounds in stakes with a rubber mallet, the final step in erecting a tent under the lone maple tree in our backyard. His efforts serve as a siren call to Linda White who lives in the house behind us, who I saw watching us through her upstairs window, who now beelines over to the fence dividing our yards. Linda believes herself a worldly ten and seldom find eight-year-old me worthy of notice, but on this hot afternoon, she pokes the toe of her dirty Ked though one of the fence links, slings her arms over the top metal rail and motions for me to come talk to her.

I approach her by hopping over on one foot and then another, all the while hoping that her attention is because she’s realized I’m someone who would be fun to play with. But even as I smile up at her, I understand it is probably the tent with its promise of outside sleepovers that accounts for her newly acquired enthusiasm for my company.

It turns out thought that Linda has a desire that goes way beyond wanting a new

friend or even a yen to sleep under the stars.

What Linda needs on this August day is an audience, an appreciative audience, an audience with the capacity to be stunned. She has recently come by some very important information. What’s more, her mother has told her not to talk about this very important information with anyone. So that afternoon while Linda is telling me my tent is “really neat” and asking do I want to come have cookies at her house, she is burning with missionary fire to share all she knows.

      Linda becomes my best friend for the day. She does feed me cookies at her house. And then she comes to my house and plays Monopoly with me. When I show her my bedroom, she is careful to compliment the evening gowns I’ve fashioned out of Kleenex and toilet paper for my collection of small stuffed lizards. Of course, after dinner, I ask if Linda can spend the night with me out in the tent.

      Once we are there, Linda is not given to subtleties. She has waited all day after all. So after we’ve eaten  s’mores, while we are lying on top of our sleeping bags listening to the sawing song of the crickets, Linda readies, aims, fires. “Do you know what men and women do?” 

      Well, I think, I’m no dummy. Dads fiddle around in their workshops, make coffee every morning and yell encouragement at the television whenever Joe Namath plays. Moms rearrange furniture, make cookies and talk to their friends on the phone while they wrap the long, curly cord around one finger and then the other. These scenes flit through my head like a soothing movie montage. But Linda cuts right into my little picture show and says, “The man sticks his wiener into her.” Assuming my stunned silence is interest, she elaborates.

            Like errant bullets, questions ricochet in my mind.  What?  What is she talking about?  Why am I here in this tent with her?  And oh god, what is she going to say next?

Linda has turned on her side, extended her elbow out and propped her head with her hand so she can study my response. I see her triumphant stare, so despite my ping-ponging thoughts, I glare right back at her and say, “You’re gross. And a liar. You’re a gross liar and you’re just making that up.”

      “Oh yeah?”  Linda says and pulls out her trump card. “My mother is the one who told me this.” She utters these words with such authoritative certainty that I know they are true. When I can’t think of anything to say, Linda takes advantage of my silence to reiterate, “His wiener . . . right into her.” 

      Later, we do tell ghost stories, but it’s a lackluster effort. I can’t whip up any real fear. I just can’t be spooked by haunted houses or the hook man, even if he does attack Girl Scouts who camp out. All I can think about is wieners.

      So the stories die out and soon Linda drifts into an easy slumber. The tent fills with the satisfied slow and even breathing of one whose mission has been accomplished while I stare out into the dark, turning Linda’s words over in my mind. Try as I might, I cannot imagine the mechanics of what she has described to me. Even more of a puzzle is why anyone would want to do such a thing. It just doesn’t make sense.

I listen to the tiny muffled thuds of June beetles and moths bouncing off of the tent’s canvas walls and wait for my eyelids to grow heavy. What finally comforts me and brings on the enveloping peace of sleep is the certainty that despite the fact that some people might do what Linda has described, normal people, specifically people like my mom and dad, would never, ever do such a thing. After all, I reason, they are my parents.

Bio:
S. G. Guerrant is a giant book nerd who’ll read anything from Sedaris to Satre. She is a writer and library worker who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her work has appeared in various venues including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Albemarle and Salon.