Chapter 4: Home Again

Marilyn Grant felt better riding up from Champaign in May of ‘77 than she’d felt at the end of a school year since her freshman year in high school. And this was looking ahead while that had been relief at the year’s ending. The drive up from Champaign was delightful. She and Andy talked of their immediate future and their past two years. When they were silent, it was a comfortable silence.

Different as they were, the two of them had both been successes in their sophomore years. Andy, while he wouldn’t say it before he got the grades in black and white, was likely to be on the dean’s list for his third straight semester. Her grades, if not likely to be as good, would probably keep Dad satisfied and make her transcript acceptable to any school board thinking of hiring her. If she hadn’t quite been a leader of her sorority, she was accepted as a leader of her year in the sorority.

And, together, they were a little more than that. At First Urbana, they were “that nice young college couple.” From the dismay her dating of Andy had caused some seniors her first semester, the consensus of the sorority had moved to approval and -- in some cases -- admiration. She’d been the shoulder to cry on for enough girls dumped, wronged, suspicious, or needing a ride because their date was too drunk to drive, that the very stability of her relationship had become a cause for comfort. And the girls Andy had tutored were his fan club.

Andy, as usual, backed into the driveway of her house. When she got out, he got out, too, and opened the trunk. He carried her luggage up to the porch. When she got the door open, he carried it inside and put it down at the foot of the stairs.

She was up two stairs and deep into a kiss when she heard Mom’s voice.

“Marilyn!” Andy immediately dropped the hands that had been cupping her ass.

“Yeah. Later,” she called back. “I’m busy now.” She went back to the kiss. Andy shared his tongue if his hands weren’t anywhere near her.

“Is that Andy?” Whom did Mom think it would be?

“Yes, Mrs. Grant. Hello. I brought Marilyn home.” Andy would answer politely, even when Mom was being terribly rude, like now.

“Come upstairs now.” Well, she was home, now.

“Love you,” Andy whispered as he turned towards the open door.

“I love you, too,” she said loud enough for Mom to hear. When Andy closed the door behind him, though, she went up.

“Really, dear, I’d have been glad to pick you up at the train station.”

“Didn’t go anywhere near it. Andy drove me up from campus.”

“Really! I don’t want you acting like a married couple.” Mom especially didn’t want her acting like a married couple in bed, she’d bet. Too bad, Mom, that bridge had already been crossed -- not that Andy and she had ever been in an actual bed together.

“Well, Mom, we aren’t married. Honestly, we’d have sent you an invitation.”

“Well, I meant...”

“We are, however, a couple,” she pointed out. “You don’t like that. Fine! I don’t remember asking your opinion. But your not liking it doesn’t make it any less so.”

“I only meant...”

“So, we are a couple, and we are going to behave like a couple. You might disapprove, but I approve, and that’s how I’m going to behave.”

“You say you aren’t married,” Mom said.” Are you planning on it?”

“He hasn’t asked me yet.” She’d not even told her friends about Andy’s blurting out that he wanted to marry her. She sure wasn’t going to tell this enemy. “If he does, I’ll have to figure out my response.” She sure wasn’t ready to be a married woman, tempting as a shared bedroom might look.

“I just don’t want you locking yourself down.”

“I’m not. I’m dating the man I want to date. What bothers you is that I’m not locking myself to your opinions.”

“And what does your chapter think of Andy?”

“It depends,” she said. “The only member who matters in my choice of date is in love with him. Most of the rest think he’s a great guy; some think that more than others. Isn’t that always the case?”

“I can’t believe that your friends like him that much. I don’t know, he’s...”

“They’re younger than you are. They see a man. You see that he’s not an old man like Dad. Well, I don’t want to marry an old man ... And, no, that doesn’t mean that I’ve decided to marry Andy. That means that I don’t want to date an old man, either.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes he looks like an old man to me -- acts like an old man, at least.”

“That’s just because he’s always polite to you. You think, although you aren’t ever polite to him, that politeness is a sign of old age.”

“Well ... Are you going to leave your bags down there?” Mom changed the subject abruptly.

“I came up because you told me to. I’ll take care of the bags now. ‘Welcome home, Marilyn.’”

“Well, you are welcome.” Mostly, though, she was home -- home where she was expected to tote her own bags, which was fair. What wasn’t fair was tearing into the guy who was willing to tote them for her.

At dinner, she laid down the law to Dad: “I’m still dating Andy. You don’t have to like it. I’m setting my own hours. As long as I get in for breakfast, you have no grounds for complaints.”

“And if you’re not down for breakfast?” Summer times, she often wasn’t. She wouldn’t go out that late with Andy, though. The poor guy still had a job to go to.

“Mom can look in.”

“Can I look in?” asked Pete the pervert.

“You put a hand on the door to my room and I’ll chop it off.”

“Really, you two.” Mom didn’t like the hostility to be expressed. “First of all, Pete, no you can’t look in. It’s Marilyn’s room, and she doesn’t want you in it.” Of course, it was her room when Mom wanted to come in, too. But her desires didn’t count, then. “That doesn’t mean that breakfast time is a reasonable curfew.”

“Didn’t claim that it was. A curfew at my age is ridiculous. It’s just the time by which I’m voluntarily offering to come back.”

“Now, Marilyn...” Dad trailed off, probably because there was no reasonable answer to her statement.

“Really, Rick,” Mom said to Dad, “she said the same last year, and she never came back later than she did after Prom -- not as late. Don’t lay down the law, or the little fool will stay out all night -- probably in the garage while Andy goes home for a good night’s sleep.”

“Right. Breakfast isn’t when I expect to come home. Breakfast is the time I expect to be home before without any challenges.” Her English teachers would circle that sentence in red. Tough! She got into the field because she loved Lit, not because she liked grammar.

“Dear,” Mom said. “You do make it sound as though you were sleeping with this boy, and you deliberately make it sound like that.”

“Well, not deliberately, and it only sounds like that to prurient ears. I’d never imply anything like that while this pervert was listening.” She gestured toward Pete.

“But you’re not saying that you aren’t,” said Pete.

“I’m never going to say whether I have sex with anybody when you’re around, not even after I’m married. If I say that I’m not, then that implies that you have the right to know whether I am. And you definitely don’t. I won’t even tell you whether I’m having sex this very minute.” Pete ostentatiously looked under the tablecloth.

“Can we change the subject?” Dad asked.

“Choose another.”

“How do you think your grades went?”

“Well, we’ll learn soon enough. I’m hopeful, and I feel that I actually learned something in each of my courses. The real Ed courses actually begin next year. This year was mostly preparatory knowledge.”

“And Zeta?” Mom asked.

“Fine. I wrote you that we got 16 pledges. Well, half the bids that went to girls I talked to were accepted; only a third of the ones that went to girls I didn’t talk to were. Nobody quit on us, and the next year, as far as anyone can tell, looks good. I still love my little sister.” As opposed to her little brother, whom she hated.

Sunday, when she and her family got to church, Andy was half-way down the stairs with a toddler in each hand.

“The Pierce twins,” he explained. She would have guessed that from their likeness in size. She’d last seen them at Christmas time, but they’d grown so much that memory wasn’t much help. “Wait for me in our pew, will you?”

“Of course.” When he came in, they sat with their hips touching, as usual. After church was coffee hour. The kids back from college gathered at two tables and exchanged news. They all treated Andy and her as a couple.

“Think you can make it in at 8:45 tomorrow, Andy?” Mr. Schmidt asked Andy as he went out.

“Of course.”

“And here, my dear, is a worse sucker than I am,” Mr. Pierce said from behind her.

“Not by one percent,” Andy replied. “I walked the twins up and down twice. How many trips have you made with kids who wanted to climb stairs?”

“You have to understand, Andy,” said Mrs. Pierce, “that being one percent as much of a sucker as Bill still makes you a huge sucker.”

Mr. Pierce left for their car while the girls in the crowd exclaimed on how cute the twins were. The group dwindled as individuals left.

“Are you riding with us, Miss Grant? Are you ready to go?” Andy’s dad asked.

“Certainly.”

“Do you think you’d like to repeat the seating arrangement with my daughters when they are here later this summer?” She looked at Andy, who nodded.

“Sure,” she said. His dad handed Andy the car keys. While he was getting the car, they went out.

“And how did your last year go?” Mr. Trainor asked her.

“Well, fall semester, I got two As and three Bs, including Phys Ed. This semester, I don’t know yet, of course, but I learned something in all the classes.”

“And, while both of you will need good transcripts two years from now -- maybe for some years thereafter -- that’s the question which will matter for your life after that. Not how high were your grades, but how much do you know?”

“Y’know, it’s more than the height. I mean...”

“You think I’ve had a little influence on my son?”

“A lot of influence.”

“Well, don’t tell him that. He’s establishing his own identity. The first stage of that is that he’s not Jim Trainor. And, of course, he isn’t. Someday, he’ll have the judgment to avoid my mistakes without avoiding everything I am. This ain’t the day, or -- even -- the year. I’m a moderately successful banker. He’ll never be that, nor -- thankfully -- an unsuccessful one. He’ll be an engineer, probably a competent one. You can’t tell this early, of course, but he’s competent on all that sort of stuff. The only question in my head is whether he’ll be happy being one.” At this point, Andy drove up. He got out of the car, but his dad opened the front passenger-side door for her. Then he got in the back.

“Take Miss Grant home first. We’re going to a restaurant. I’m sorry, my dear. You’d be welcome to accompany us, but your parents would have objections -- deservedly so -- on your first Sunday back from school.”

Well, she could hardly invite herself along. Andy drove to her house and backed into her driveway as usual.

“Backing in?” his dad asked.

“Gets Marilyn closer to the door.” So that’s why Andy did that. He was so considerate.

“Really, dear,” Mom said at dinner, “must you two sit so close together in church?”

“You know, Andy’s dad wanted him to go to church. When he learned that he was going to sit with me in church, he thanked me for his being in church.” And she reminded herself to tell Mr. Trainor that they went to church in Urbana when they were in school. He’d be pleased. “When we sat together in church, you complained. Now you complain of the way that we sit together in church. I haven’t heard one word about being the only one of your children that does go to church.”

“We’ve hashed that out earlier.”

“I believe it. But notice. There might have been a ton of ‘Bad Pete; you don’t go to church the way we raised you.’ There hasn’t been one word of ‘Good Marilyn; you go to church nearly every Sunday.’”

“Do you go on campus?” Pete asked.

“Depends on what you mean by ‘on campus.’ We go from campus nearly every week when we’re down there. We’ve been attending First Urbana, which is a fair drive from the campus.”

“Honestly! I thought you’d grown up.”

“You thought both of us had grown up. You were right about me. Sure, ‘you can’t make me go to church’ is a stage towards independence, but look at that congregation some time. Most of the people in the sanctuary are adults.”

“Old and stodgy -- sexless.”

“Well, you want to be grown up. The next stage is getting old. And, while I hate to tell you this, those kids running around after church don’t all come from virgin births. I think some of those couples are plainly having sex.”

“Now, Marilyn,” Dad said. He might be worried that she would point out that he and Mom had had sex at least twice. He needn’t worry. They were old and stodgy, but she didn’t believe that they’d stopped. Mom was still on the Pill.

Mom put her and Pete to clearing the table and running the dishwasher.

“You and this Andy guy look like this.” Pete crossed his fingers. “Mom doesn’t seem happy.”

“Neither of them is happy. I really don’t think Dad has anything against Andy except that he’s dating me. Does Mom ever go off on your girlfriends?”

“Once. She thought Linda was cheap.”

“Haven’t heard about her.”

“Last year. Maybe October and November.”

“And was she?”

“She dressed like she was open to anything, sexiest dresser in the class. She wouldn’t let me below the waist, though, let alone in her. Reason we broke up.”

“Y’know, Pete. Girls, women, are people with vaginas. Boys who think of them as vaginas with people attached show it. That tends to turn the people off.”

“And Andy never tried to get in you?”

“How far I’ve gone with Andy I’m not going to tell you. I will tell you, though, that he never said, ‘give me this or I’m going after another girl.’ Andy always treated me as a person.” She remembered that, after he’d got in her vagina, reached Pete’s final goal, he kept kissing more of her. Maybe she didn’t want him kissing her dirty feet, but she sure appreciated him wanting to kiss them.

“And he never got any from you. You don’t push, you don’t get.”

“Maybe so.” Pete looked surprised at her agreement. “If the girl doesn’t want you, if you haven’t anything desirable, then grabbing is the best chance -- because it’s the only chance -- you have. If the man is desirable, then he has the woman’s desires working for him.”

“You’re saying that this Andy character is more desirable than I am? To you, maybe.”

“To me, certainly.” The washer was loaded, but she wanted to make this point. This was the most serious conversation she’d had with Pete in years. “As for other girls, I’m not saying that; you are.”

“I’m not! He’s a nerd.”

“But he can wait until his girl will enjoy something, too. We do, you know. Way back when I was in high school -- when I was years younger than you are now -- we used to talk about boys and what they wanted. There was the boy who wanted to feel your tit because he wanted to feel a tit and he thought yours was available. There was the boy who wanted to feel your tit because then he could tell his friends he had. Well, how do you think that made girls feel? Leaving aside that they were getting talked about all over school.

“Look,” she continued, “sometimes girls who have broken up with their boyfriends desperately want a date to the next dance. Any date will do, but they have to go to the next dance with a date. How does it make you feel if you know a girl will only go with you because she desperately wants some date?”

“You want to know? It makes me feel that I should get something out of it.”

“So, you’re willing to be used if you get to use in return? Well, girls feel used when a boy wants something from them just so he can get that thing. If the boy strokes the girl’s tit because it sends tingles up and down her spine, that’s love, and she loves him. If he strokes her tit because he wants the feel of some woman’s tit, that’s selfishness, and she resents him.”

“You’re dragging emotions into this.”

“No, I’m not dragging them in. Emotions are part of this. Really, this is part of emotions. When you feel more deeply about one person than you’ve ever felt about anybody else and he feels more deeply about you, then it’s natural to express it in a way that you have never expressed it with anybody else. Maybe you don’t, but it’s natural to do so, and you -- at least -- think about it. Maybe you do something you’ve never done before but isn’t sexual at all; maybe you sit in church beside him.”

She poured the detergent powder into the dispenser and closed the machine. She checked the dials and pushed the button. “But, Pete,” she said before the machine got too loud for their conversation to be kept private, “whenever the emotional is there, the physical is something you have to consider. It might not happen, but it’s appropriate.”

They went their separate ways.

Monday, Andy called. His day off this week was Thursday, and they didn’t want to wait that long. They made a date for Tuesday after dinner.

“Want to see the movie?” he asked when they were in the car and rolling.

“Not really.”

“You are the cheapest date.”

“Andy, don’t talk like that.” His expression was shocked. “I know you were joking. You just drove me hundreds of miles and bought me food along the way.”

“Well, I was going anyway.”

“Well, you’ve done loads of things for me. If you’d been asked to put a price on that tutoring, something you didn’t consider doing for the money it would bring, it would have been many dollars an hour. Instead, you did it for me, a favor for a group which hasn’t always been kind to you because that group is important to me.

“It’s just that,” she continued, “I’ve been talking to Pete. He’s all about what he can get from a girl. Apparently, he can get damn little. I explained to him that emotional commitment is important. If he and the girl love one another, then what they do expresses that love. If he is out to exploit the girl, then every step they take makes her feel more exploited.”

“Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you can get anything.” That sounded odd coming from Andy.

“What?”

“Old joke. What your brother wants is sex. You tell him he can get it if he feels love. But he doesn’t feel love; he feels desire. What you feel can’t be controlled. For that matter, I don’t ‘feel love.’ I love Marilyn. If Dad had moved us somewhere else, I wouldn’t be feeling love.” In the middle of this speech, he’d parked, but he didn’t make any motion towards the back seat.

“Andy, I love you.”

“And I love you. The problem is that this is a deeper emotion than I’ve ever before expressed as ‘love.’”

“Yeah.” She got out of the car first. Andy had parked on the wrong side of the road, and she could hear him pushing through the shrubbery to get in back. He was so damn considerate, always thinking of her.

She did love Andy more than she’d ever loved Colin, but she suspected that her difference in intensity was nothing like Andy’s. If they’d never met, she would be involved -- she was all but certain -- in another affair with another boy. Sure, she was glad it was Andy, but she would never have said that she wouldn’t be feeling love if he hadn’t come along.

Well, Andy wanted her. It would be silly to deny him what she would give another simply because her love for him -- while greater than her love for the possible other -- didn’t measure up to his love for her. While she was thinking this, she pulled off her blouse and bra and lowered her jeans to her ankles. She didn’t have any panties to worry about.

He helped her up on his lap sitting sideways. They shared a sweet kiss before he put his hands below her neck. She spread her knees when his hands started stroking her pussy.

He kissed her again, then started a chain of gentle kisses down the front of her neck from the chin to the breastbone. He continued down her right tit quite slowly. When he reached the nipple, he licked and sucked it while her arousal grew. He put one finger, and then two, inside her pussy. She could feel him all the way up.