Chapter 9: Moving Forward

1979 to 1981

Mary told her husband that night about their son’s change in his personal status. He took that in stride, realizing his older brother Joey had done the same at about the same age the previous year. Then she told him about how he had done it three times and he smacked her on the ass when she asked if he could still do that.

Judy came over the following weekend, driving in her ‘new’ car. Her birthday was May 30, and after passing her written and driving tests, the State of New York, in its infinite wisdom, had granted her the privilege of driving on the public thoroughfares. At least that was what her father had said, even as he shivered in fear. She also got her birthday present, a bright yellow two-year-old Ford Maverick. She loved it. She didn’t know that the reason she got it was that the price was right; the Maverick was discontinued in 1977 after a less than stellar lifespan and Bob and Brenda were able to get it for a steal. Judy just didn’t care. She had wheels!

Mary Caparelli congratulated the girl both on turning sixteen and on her car. Then she pigeonholed her in the pantry. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Uh, fine, why?”

“I know you and Hersch weren’t just on a regular picnic last weekend.”

Judy turned beet red. “How ... I mean ... Hersch...”

Mary said, “I knew as soon as he came in the door. This might be indelicate, but he smelled like he’d spent the day screwing his brains out.” Judy’s blushing approached terminal levels. “Are you on any kind of birth control?”

“I take the pill, every morning, no exceptions.”

“Good. Now, I need to know. Was he a gentleman? Did he force you, at all? Even in the slightest bit?”

That stopped Judy for a second. “Oh my God! No! It was wonderful! He was wonderful!” Mary raised an eyebrow, and Judy continued, “I wanted to as much as he did. I had put him off ever since his birthday, but not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t want to do it in the station wagon! I guess I wanted something more romantic. Does that make sense?”

Mary smiled. “More than you can imagine. A little romance is a good thing. So, you’re alright with what happened? If there was a problem, we’d be happy to take him out back and bury him with the backhoe.”

Judy giggled. “Don’t do that. I need some more ... romance.”

Mary snorted at that. “What about your parents? What did they say?”

Judy gave the older woman a confused look. “They didn’t say anything. I never told them. Do you think they could tell?”

Mary shrugged. “Not if you cleaned up. I mean, Hersch told you about my situation, right?” Judy nodded. “My mother never knew until I’d missed two periods, and I had to ask her to take me to the doctor.”

“Oh.”

“Just be careful, and if he ever acts up, hit him where it hurts.”

Judy giggled and nodded. “Okay.”

They stepped out of the pantry to find Hersch and his father looking at them curiously. “What do you two want? Go away! Girl talk! We’re having a union meeting,” said Mary.

Tommy looked at his son and said, “Our mistake wasn’t giving them the vote. It was teaching them to talk.” That earned him a wet dish cloth to the face, and the two men retreated to the living room.

Mary told Judy to get her boyfriend to set the table and they went about making hamburgers for dinner.

In any case, Judy’s new old car proved a Godsend to the young couple. They no longer had to worry about who had Mary’s station wagon. That privilege was given to Joey, and Judy happily drove Hersch around in the Maverick. Even more interesting, now that she had experienced the pleasure to be had in sex, she no longer worried as much about romance. If they could be horizontal and comfortable, great, but if their only choice was to climb into the back of the Maverick, then that was what they needed to do. If nothing else, that was the real proof of their love for each other, since the only car more cramped was a VW Beetle stuffed with a dozen college kids on a bet.

School started again in the fall and both Hersch and Judy were juniors; Joey was now a senior. Hersch and Judy remained an item. Joey continued changing girlfriends every few months.

High school education wasn’t the only thing they studied that fall. Judy was snooping around in her parents’ bedroom one afternoon when they hadn’t come home from work yet. In her mother’s night stand she found a book called The Joy of Sex. She opened it and was utterly amazed. It was all about sex and had drawings and all sorts of descriptions of sex, and not just what she and Hersch had done. Several pages were dog-eared, and the spine was broken; it was obvious her mother, and probably her father, had read it frequently. She read it until she heard her brother moving around downstairs, so she quickly put it back and ran to her bedroom.

Over the next few days, she read the entire book, and it transformed her life. Sex wasn’t something bad. In fact, the book said it was good! Sex wasn’t just about making babies; whole sections of the book were about things that could never make babies! Sex was fun, which she and Hersch had already discovered, and the book told how they could have even more fun. After she finished it, she knew she needed to get a copy of her own. She drove to the Pyramid Mall and went into the bookstore and started looking. They didn’t have a section on ‘Sex’, but they did have a section on ‘Self Help’, and she found it there. She was very nervous when she took it up to the desk, worried the Sex Police would come and arrest her and report her to her parents. Instead, the bored clerk never batted an eye and rang up the purchase, putting it in a plastic bag for easy carrying.

She stored it in the bottom of her dresser, all the way in the back, and read it at night under the covers. That was where she learned that what Hersch did their first time, when he licked her pussy, was called cunnilingus, and that she could do it to him as well. Blowjobs, which she had heard of, were called fellatio, and there were descriptions and drawings of a woman giving a blowjob to a guy. Some of the drawings were in color! The next time Judy and Hersch went parking, they didn’t make love in the cramped back seat. Instead, she pulled his pants down and did what was in the book. She bent down and gave him a blowjob! Hersch was ecstatic. Then she did it a second time, and he was even happier.

“Oh my God! How ... Who ... Where did you learn that? That was amazing! Wow!”

Judy grinned at him and licked her lips. It didn’t taste as bad as some of her friends at school said it would, though she decided to bring a bottle of water with her the next time. “I guess you liked that.”

“No, I loved it! Tell me what I need to do for you! Jump in front of a train?” said Hersch.

Judy laughed. “No. Just promise not to tell anybody about what I am going to tell you.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die!”

With that, Judy admitted to what she had done, about finding the book and reading it, and then going out to buy a copy for herself. “You’re kidding me!” Hersch said a couple of times. “Wow!”

“I know. I couldn’t believe some of the things in there either,” she said.

“Is there anything in it that I can do for you? I mean, it’s the least I can do,” he said, “Especially after, you know.”

Judy quickly pulled her jeans down and pulled her t-shirt and bra up. “Fingerfuck me and suck my tits hard and get me off. We can call that even.” Hersch smiled and bent to his task with a will. The Maverick was rocking with Judy’s movements, and any animal in fifty yards was running far, far away, alarmed by her cries.

Hersch took her through three big orgasms and then relented. Judy sagged into the back seat and said, “That was amazing. Want another blowjob?”

“Give me a moment. Can you let me read this book?”

“Oh, yeah. Just don’t let anybody know about it. It was weird enough talking to your mom about us. No way am I going to talk about a sex book!”

“Yeah.” With that, Hersch smiled and leaned back, to let Judy put her face in his lap. Whatever else this book was, it was wonderful!

Hersch kept his word and didn’t say anything to anybody. Still, the word got out and when he learned about it, Hersch knew that Judy must have been the source. Within a week’s time, half the girls in school were comparing notes, and the bookstore in the Pyramid Mall had sold out every copy of The Joy of Sex. They even started stocking copies of similar books, including some very explicit versions of the Kama Sutra. Meanwhile, Hersch diligently studied the book and asked Judy what he could do specifically that she would enjoy. She even bought a second copy, so that they both had a copy, and either one could ask the other for something, such as ‘What they were doing on page 123.’

Picnics ended by the end of September because fall was approaching. It was hard for Judy to believe, even though she had seen it sophomore year, that it could snow as early as late October. When she mentioned it to the Caparellis, she was greeted with laughter. Mary told her that they had normally taken the boys into Ballston Spa for Halloween and on more than one occasion had gone trick-or-treating in slush and snow.

That put a real crimp in their romantic endeavors. Mary was emphatic that Hersch and Judy were not to fool around at the house. While she believed her son when he told her that nothing had happened the night she found Judy in his arms on the living room floor, she also believed that something had happened. Likewise, Bob and Brenda Roswell weren’t all that sure their daughter was as pure as the driven snow despite her protests.

The solution occurred to Judy as she and Hersch were driving home from school one afternoon. Their next big date was the Homecoming Dance, and they both wanted to spend some time someplace warm and horizontal. As they traveled, they passed several small motels, and it got Judy to thinking. “Hersch, what if we got a motel room?”

“A motel room?”

“Think about it. Saratoga County is full of little motels. It’s all seasonal to them. They get a huge amount of traffic during the racing season, and then it slows down until hunting season. After hunting season, it slows down all over again. I bet we could get a room for after the dance. If we paid in cash, nobody would know.”

Hersch considered it but only briefly. The summer rush and the racing season ended at the beginning of September. Homecoming was the first weekend of October. Deer season started three weeks later. There was a period of about six weeks when the motels would have plenty of vacancies. “You think we could do it?”

“Absolutely. If we split the cost, we could spend some nice quality time together,” she said.

Hersch smiled. “Yeah.”

“Think of it, Hersch. You, me, a nice big warm bed. Doesn’t that sound good?” Judy smiled as she said it.

He grinned. “Start writing down the pages you want to practice that night. We can dance for an hour, tell our folks we’re going to an after party and will be home late, and in the middle, we can work on the pages in the book.”

Judy grinned and said, “I like it! I want to try that sixty-nine thing. No way are we doing that in the back seat of the Maverick.”

Throughout their junior and senior years, Hersch and Judy used this technique to evade parental supervision on special dates. The summer between their junior and senior years they enjoyed picnics on the land beyond the fence, though they had to postpone their picnic one weekend when they showed up only to find Tommy and Mary enjoying a serious session of sixty-nine. They backed away and drove to the house giggling.

Early that fall, Joey asked his father about going to college. He had taken the SATs the spring of his junior year, but what happened next? The guidance counselor at school was out on maternity leave and the temporary replacement was about a billion years old. Which colleges should he apply to? Tommy and Mary both gave their eldest a blank look. It wasn’t something they had ever done.

“Why don’t you ask my parents?” said Judy. She had been visiting for dinner. Both her parents had gone to college. Maybe they knew what would be involved. Tommy and Mary had shrugged and agreed they didn’t have any better ideas.

The following weekend, Judy brought her family over. Danny and Sammy were assigned the job of keeping Caleb busy, and the adults, the juniors, and the senior sat down around the kitchen table. “So, you want to know about college?” asked Bob.

“What’s involved?” asked Tommy. “We never went. Joey took his SATs last year and they seemed pretty good. What’s next?”

Bob shrugged at Brenda. They had both gone to school out in Buffalo, which was where they met. Then he turned back to the Caparellis. “Okay, first things first. Joey, what do you want to study?”

“Engineering, either civil or mechanical.”

“Okay. And where do you want to go? Do you want to stay near here, or does it matter? I mean, do you need to go to school somewhere near Saratoga, or would anywhere in the country be good?”

Joey looked at his parents in confusion. It had never come up before. “Probably local would be best. I know there’s a lot of colleges near Albany. Joey might be able to live at home and save money that way,” said Mary.

“How’d you do on your SATs?” asked Brenda.

“1300. I was told that was pretty good,” Joey answered.

“And your grades in school?” she asked.

“As and Bs.”

Bob nodded at his wife. “You’re right. That’s pretty good. So, the next question is where around here you can get a degree in engineering. Not all colleges offer degrees in everything. Some only teach one thing. For instance, there’s a nursing school in Troy, but they only teach nursing. Some colleges don’t teach engineering at all, like Skidmore, which is just up the road in Saratoga.” He smiled and said, “Pity the poor guy in Montana who lives five hours from the nearest college, and they only give degrees in herding cattle.”

“What about Rensselaer?” asked Joey.

Bob nodded again. “Excellent school. It’s probably one of the top ten or twenty in engineering in the country. It’s also very expensive. That’s where it gets tricky. Your grades and SAT scores might get you into Rensselaer but might not be good enough to get you any scholarships or loans.”

Mary asked, “How expensive is it?”

“I’m not sure. You’d have to call and ask. Still, if somebody told me it was five or six thousand a year, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

That elicited a loud ‘Ooof!’ from the Caparellis. No way did they have that kind of money!

“Yeah, I know. We’ve been trying to figure out where Judy is going next year. Some of the colleges around Albany are very small and very expensive, and I am not at all sure whether some of them are worth what they charge,” said Bob.

“What about Albany State?” said Brenda. “That is a very big school, very big, and they probably teach everything there, and they’re probably half the price of the private schools, or less.”

Mary nodded at her son. “That we could afford.”

“Yeah, that we could pay for,” agreed Tommy.

“Here’s another idea,” said Bob. “It’s one of those weird things about colleges, but they really only count the last two years when you say where you went to college. Some kids will do two years at a community college or state school, save a lot of money, and then transfer to a fancier school with a big name and reputation. Maybe you can go to Albany State for a year or two and then switch to Rensselaer. That would save you thousands of dollars. If you can live at home and commute, that saves even more money.”