A Long Time Ago

My father was a good man, but a poor husband to my mother. Still, the year after he passed on was hard on her, and she took to drinking more and more. I didn't like seeing her drink, and would probably have turned out some kind of delinquent out of doors, but she seemed to want me with her all the time. I guess this was a pretty hard time for both of us. Anyway, she grew very possessive. She didn't have any sense for my privacy, and I was thirteen and had grown old enough to want it. We had no locks on any of the doors in our house; for some reason we never knew, the people who had moved out before us had taken all the keys with them. Pretty often, Mama would walk in on me as I changed or as I used the bathroom. And she wouldn't excuse herself and leave. It was like there was nothing strange in it. I didn't like it. It embarrassed me, and I was self-conscious. I must have said something sometimes. I remember she'd say, "What? You're ashamed before your mother?" like it was no big deal. She also became pretty negligent of her own modesty, especially when she was drinking. She would walk between her room and the bath in various states of undress; she would change in front of me; she took to going about the house in nothing more than a thin nightie with no robe or housecoat on over it. Very often, as I bathed or brushed my teeth or combed my hair, she would come into the bathroom and sit down and take a pee as I stood there.

One afternoon, I was in the bathtub and she did this and then just stood there talking to me like she would sometimes. She said she wanted to bathe when I was done. She stared at me with her smart black eyes and her strong-beaked aquiline face and made me feel pretty funny. I tried to cover myself with my hands. "Baby," she sighed, "you're almost grown." She leaned against the sink and sipped her drink. "If your daddy was still here, he'd tell you about things, things a boy as grown as you should know."

I was very embarrassed. "I know all about that, Mama," I said. I wanted to drop the subject. Her eyes narrowed, and she laughed. "What do you know?" Fact of the matter, I was about as ignorant as a boy can be. All I had was the vaguest of vague ideas picked up in smutty schoolyard talk. "Have you ever seen a girl," she pressed, "what a girl looks like?" She was the only woman I'd ever seen naked (and only in peeps and flashes), but I couldn't tell her that. I had to say that I had not. "Do you know where babies come from?" I was too embarrassed to hazard a guess. She just stood and stared at me and didn't seem much inclined to let it go, like I was praying she would.

She knocked back her highball and set the glass on the counter. There was a potted rubber-tree in the corner on a four-legged stool. She set the pot on the floor and moved the stool to the side of the tub. Then she sat facing me. Mama did that, and she didn't seem much different than she might at any time; only, rather than tuck her robe up between her knees as a woman will when she sits on a low stool, she just let it part at her waist and fall free of her legs, and she was naked underneath. Mama's legs were parted, and I could see the dark patch between them. She untied her belt and let the robe fall open, and I could see her belly and breasts. I was ashamed, and I wanted and I tried to look away, but my eyes would only dart between her suckling-thickened paps and the dark hair below.

"You should know about things, Harry. You should know what a woman looks like -- the facts of life, you know." My eyes were still all over her, and I had to drag them up to her face. "Its all right," she smiled, "I want you to look so you can see how a woman is made." She scooted toward me on the stool and drew her knees back so that I could see her better. Her skin was very white. We never went to the beach, you see, and she always went well covered in sweaters and long skirts, hats and scarves. The hair that clustered on her *mot* was very black and dense but not so thick where it spread down over her ruddy-showing sex. My mother had a rather large quim -- I know that now, anyway, because I've been with other women, and, of course, there are all the girls in the magazines -- but she must have been a little vain of it to have done what she did. I joke, though she did have a pretty quim -- I've always thought so, though maybe pretty isn't quite right -- it was well-formed, long and broad and thick in its outer parts and surpassingly delicate within the hairy rind. Mama had a fat and opulent quim, a great, pulpy half-fruit and she proceeded, in her strange and kindly way, to give me an unselfconscious demonstration of its design.

"This is my pubic hair," she said, starting with the obvious and combing it with her fingers. "Yours is called the same. And this is my vulva." She cupped it a moment proprietarily. Mama liked the naming of parts: "These, here and here," she traced the fleshy pads with her fingers, "these are the *labia majora*. Most just call them the outer lips, you see, the parts with the hair on them." She spread her thighs as wide as she could and pulled one side of her sex open with her hand. "And you see this bit, here and here? Those are the *nymphae*. Most people just say 'inner lips.' They're called *labia minora* in the doctors' books." (Her father had been a physician; that's how she knew.) "They can be much larger in some women; sometimes they stick way out."

I was very curious to look at her, but I had an irrational compulsion to glance toward the door, too, as if "they" would crash in and catch us doing what we were, at any moment. Frankly, I was at least as scared as I was excited. I could smell a smell coming from her, not a strong or a bad smell, but distinct like mushrooms. She showed me her clitoris, "There, beneath the little hood there, I don't know if you can see it," but I don't think she told me its pride of place in the female genitalia. Otherwise, I probably would have paid it better attention later. "... And you see the man puts his penis in here. This is my vagina. He puts his penis in here, and he spends his seed, and, if his seed fertilizes the tiny egg and a baby is made, it comes out of here when it comes to term." I laughed that a baby might come out of such a little hole, but she assured me that it was true, that I'd come out from there. "Let me have your finger," she said, and she put it into her vagina so that I could feel that it was soft and moist. I can't describe how incredibly strange it felt to be sitting there in the bathtub, in water growing tepid, with my finger in my mother's vagina. After that, she let me touch her all over between her legs. I was curious where she made water, and she showed me. "And look, this little fold of skin, its called the *fourchette*. Some women don't have it. Some women have it, and some women don't; isn't that funny?" The hairs grew sparse around her bum hole. It's odd to remember that I thought was it so strange that her anus was so near her vagina. I was curious to look at *it*, too, but that was incidental to Mama's show-and-tell.

My penis was up for all that it was worth by this time, and though I was so young, and it wasn't very big yet, it was sticking out of the water. Mama saw it lift its little head and enclosed it in her hand. She stroked it kind of soft and played with my scrotum. "Do you understand why it gets hard like this? It is very natural; when the man becomes aroused, his penis stiffens like this so that it will go into the vagina... It feels good, doesn't it?" It did feel good. I flinched from her hand when she first touched me, but after a moment I felt all hollow inside with that feeling deep in my stomach. "Do you ever do this to yourself when it gets like this?" she asked. I admitted that I had, and that concerned her. "You mustn't do that, its very bad for you." I'm sure that she believed that; many people did. She made me promise that I wouldn't masturbate.

"Come," she said at last, "you've been in there too long. Your hands and feet are wrinkled like a prune." I thought that she was going to get into the tub, but she pulled the plug from the drain. We both stood, and she helped me to dry. She wouldn't let me dress but led me into her room. "I'll teach you how to have intercourse," she said.

"Teach me?" My chest was frozen with a longing I'd never known and little understood, and all the fear just washed over me. I'd heard low-class Colored men say "motherfucker," and I had some idea that it was supposed to be a really bad thing -- like the worst thing that a guy could do. But I was excited, and I pretty much gave myself over to her. She seemed so poised and certain of what she was doing; I was used to trusting her.

I didn't know what she wanted from me. She let her robe fall off of her shoulders, and she took my hand. "It will be okay," she soothed. "You'll like it. The man always likes it. It feels very nice." Mama wasn't short or tall, fat or thin, young or old; she wasn't beautiful, though no one would have thought her very plain; but the sight of her loving form, stripped for my learning and my lust, and of her kind pale brow and her sharp jet eyes, set such a longing behind my lungs as I've never slaked. I lay down beside her on the bed. "Are we going to make a baby?" I asked. "No," she said, "but when we are through, you will know how it is done." She asked me to kiss her, and I did. "No, like this," and she gave me her tongue. I pulled back, a little startled and, for a moment, a little repulsed. I'd never seen nor heard of people kissing that way. She laughed and asked me to do it again. I tried it. Her mouth and breath tasted a little of gin and lime, but I was surprised to find it so pleasant to kiss like that, our tongues slicking together.

One of her breasts was pressed to my own, and she placed my hand on the other. I'd, of course, never felt a woman's naked breasts before now, and I thought them pretty remarkable. Mama was about thirty-five, and I suppose she looked her years -- not that that is very old, but, as is natural, her body was slowly settling toward middle age. Her nipples hung dark and a little heavy on her breasts. Her hips and bottom flared, her belly rolled out, and her limbs were soft and substantial. But she *was* shapely, her wrists and ankles finely turned, and her waist still narrow.

"Get on top of me," she said. She spread her legs wide on each side of me, and I lay with my penis pressed to her stomach. She had me raise myself, and she took my member in her fingers. I could feel it dragged down though the crisp hairs. She drew her legs back and back 'til her knees brushed the sides of her breasts and she touched my back with her feet. Her feet were soft. She went barefoot sometimes, but she kept them rubbed with a pumice and used baby oil on them. As her legs came back, her bottom rolled up, and I was inside her. We'd left the door open, and I could hear the water draining loud in the bathroom. I relaxed myself and felt her hairs crush to my belly and my pubic bone press into the rubbery pad of her sex. "Move it in and out," she said, and I did.

There's no need to tell you how wonderful it felt. We fucked a couple dozen strokes, then she had me roll back and crouch on my shanks without pulling free of her. She wanted me to see what it looked like going in and out. I spread her quim open with my fingers and gazed into the pinky groove as my penis slipped in and out of her vagina. Her belly shimmied with the jostling. As I started to spend, I laid myself back on her. Mama didn't say much when I was done. She didn't seem at all sorry. She just said that I'd done fine, she kissed me and said she loved me and went and took her bath.

A couple of days later, she asked me if I would like to have intercourse with her again. I told her yes, that I would, and we did it on her bed. This happened a few times over the next week or more. Early one evening, *I* asked *her* if we might have sex. It was about all I thought about, and I had begun to itch for it just about all of the time. I thought that I loved her different than I ever had before. I told her that, and she seemed very gratified. She hugged me, but, as she did, she told me that I mustn't stop loving her as my mother, that if I did, she would grow very sorry that she had taught me what she had. Mama stopped drinking just after that. Neither of us ever said anything about it, but it must have been pretty hard for her, without any help -- I think she was an alcoholic.

We began to lie together every day. One time -- this may have been two weeks or more after the first -- she spent. I knew something had happened to her, but I was still very ignorant. She cried out and got very tense and grasping. You all know how that is, but I didn't until then. I guess I'd thought of sex as nothing more than a gentle kindness on her part and a fantastic pleasure on mine. That is how she had treated it, though I'm certain it was pleasant for her -- I remember those first times so well, you know. But that was changed now. "You gave me an orgasm," she said. When I was made to understand what that meant, I was very pleased with what I had done. I was more inquisitive after that, and I worked toward her pleasure as much as my own when we did it. I soon found there was nothing hard in it. She was as passionately inclined as any woman in good health can be.

As we grew more assured, she began to teach me things, and we sometimes experimented so that we eventually became rather accomplished lovers. We played at all of the positions we could think of. She serviced me with her mouth, and I learned to do the same for her. We became quite attuned to one another's pleasures. This was easily the most intensely erotic relationship of my life. She never let me sleep in her bed, though, not until many years had passed and I was married. She said that I would never grow to be a proper man if I were to wed myself to my mother. She held to this even when, after about a year, she discovered that we had made a baby despite her precautions.

Mama's pregnancy really scared her. If abortion had been more easily available in those days, she would have done that. She thought that the baby might be born deformed. We also had to move. It had been almost two years since my father had died, and people would have looked down on her pretty bad if it had gotten out that she was pregnant. My sister, Jess, was born in California, three thousand miles from anyone we knew. It was all okay in the end; Jess turned out fine. She teaches grammar school now and is a very bright woman and very handsome. She is married and has teenage children of her own. I raised her from when she was ten, but she doesn't know that I am her father.

When the time came for me to go to college, I was fortunate enough to get into one of the best universities on the West Coast. Mama bought a house nearby. But, though we remained very passionate, she kind of pushed me out of the nest, and I lived on campus. It was difficult at first, but she really knew what was best. I met my wife, Clara, at school, a girl of whom my mother grew very fond, even to genuinely love, especially after the grandchildren came.

Well, Mama was killed in an automobile accident almost thirty years ago. We had last made love just two days before she died. She was good and loving and, to me, a very desirable woman -- I loved her very much. Sometimes, I get to missing her so bad, and it makes me so blue, that I settle into a funk that hangs about me for days. I had always found my best antidote for this in Jess. She looks very much like my mother did, and, as each year passes, I see more and more of my mother's ways in her daughter. I took after Mama myself, so I suppose it should be no wonder that the resemblance has grown so strong in Jess. Just being with her, watching her and hearing her voice, always had a way of dispelling these moods of mine and giving me some comfort.

But it's come to me, of late (something that has never before occurred to me), that there is, in what I feel for her, a strong tie of incestuous desire. The shock of this recognition stayed with me for many days when it first came upon me, and, like a fool, I let myself dwell upon it. So now, her every display of affection stirs my longing, then begs my shame. My experiences being what they are, I could never feel anything inherently loathsome if some closer connection were to occur between us -- indeed, there's nothing I would want better in the whole world -- but I can only imagine how she might react if she were to know how I want her. She has always been a rather modest woman, you see, so far as I know, perfectly conventional, perhaps even a little reserved, in all matters of sex. She would have to think this a horrible perversion, even believing me no more than her brother.

But I think of her in this light all of the time now. I am very much afraid that I shall do something stupid and irrevocable. I fear to lose her regard, but, as my mind sits, I can hardly bear to spend a day out of her company. I've become obsessed with my want for her, and I think of little else. I cannot say what will come, but I've no cause for hope. If I had any sense, I'd move a thousand miles away, but that won't happen. My ties to this place run too deep -- almost forty years -- my life has been here. I can't just up and run... And what could I say? to my Clara? to Jess? I don't know what will happen... No, nothing will happen. I can't let it... And yet... ?

Oh God... How I miss my mother.

An Addendum

Several months ago, I posted an account, that I called "A Long Time Ago," of my sexual initiation with my mother, of our long-standing love, and of my current torn and guilty feelings toward my "sister" Jess. As you may recall, Jess was the fruit of our intimacy. My mother had been dead for thirty years, and Jess, who had now reached her own middle years, reminded me of her in every way. Jess was forty years old, a grammar school teacher, active in service to our community, and a happily married woman with two children, a son and a daughter, nearly grown. Her mother, and then I, had raised her as "regular people;" she had no idea that I was her father. We were very close, but I had no reason to believe that she would have been anything but horrified to have known who I really was to her and how I now desired her. I was half mad with despair, very much afraid that I might do something that would cause me to loose her love. Much has changed in the intervening months.

School let out last June like it does every year, and, as happens every year of late, Jess and I began spending our days together. My business has grown more or less self-sufficient. Most of my time is relatively free, and I've gone into a semi-retirement mode. My wife is an attorney -- she loves her work, but it keeps her pretty occupied -- so I have my days to myself. Jess' husband, Frank, is a district sales rep for a major electronics manufacturer, and his job keeps him living out of hotel rooms for much of the year. Because of this, it's natural that my sister and I should keep a lot of company, especially in the summer months when she isn't working.

I got up early one morning -- I'd promised it as a favor to Jess -- and drove over and took her kids to the train station. Their grandparents owned a share in a houseboat on Lake Shasta, and the children went up every year for two weeks. Bridgette and Jeffrey groused a little in the car that they were too old for these trips, but I think that they looked forward to their houseboat vacation as much as they ever did. Frank's folks are a good natured and active couple, and I know they show the kids a good time.

After I saw the train off, I saw some nice crimson peonies in a florist's window, and I took a lavish bouquet back to Jess. She'd promised me breakfast in exchange for taking the kids. The flowers earned me a loving kiss. I sat in her kitchen and drank her coffee as I watched her pattering around in her bathrobe. Her face was a little puffy with sleep, her hair was disheveled, she didn't have any make-up on. God, I thought she was beautiful. So much like Mama, with her large, black eyes and her pale, pale complexion, her long, thin nose and her lovely, narrow mouth. I studied the flare of her hips, the turn of her ankles, her pretty feet and the swell of her calves at the hem of her robe whenever she turned away from me. We ate, and I pretended to read the newspaper as she did the dishes.

Jess took the peonies off the table, cut the string that bound the butcher paper around their stems, and laid them on the counter; then she climbed up onto the step-ladder to fetch a vase out of a top cabinet. But, as she stretched toward the top shelf, she cringed suddenly and drew a breath through her teeth with a grimace.

"What's the matter?" I asked, standing up behind her.

"Oh," she said, "I've got this twinge in my back -- had it a couple weeks and it won't go away. I'm getting to be an old lady."

"Well, let me get that," I said, a little concerned, and helped her down off the ladder.

She put water in the vase and cut the stems and arranged the flowers carefully into it. Then she lifted the bouquet and placed it in the center of the table.

"Careful of your back," I said. "Where does it hurt?"

"Oh, it's not so bad. It's right here," and she reached behind her to touch a place beneath one of her shoulder blades.

I rubbed the spot sympathetically.

"See, there's a little knot there," she complained.

"Yeah, you've got a little muscle spasm. Let me rub it out for you."

"That'd be nice," she said. "I've been meaning to go to the club. I'm due for a massage."

"You're in for a treat," I smiled. "I give a famous rub-down."

"Been moonlighting?"

"Well, Clara likes them."

She laughed.

We went into her bedroom, and she sat on the edge of her bed as I went into the bathroom. I got a towel from the rack and a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a bottle of baby oil from the medicine chest and went back in to her. She wasn't wearing a bra under her robe, and she asked me to turn my head for a moment. When I looked back, she lay on her stomach, her breasts pressed into the counterpane so that I couldn't see them. Her robe was open and peeled down to the line of her panties.

Jess has a lovely back with clear, unblemished flesh, and my hands shook a little as I touched her. She gasped as I splashed some alcohol on her skin.

"Oh! That's cold!," she said.

I went at the knotted muscle in earnest, digging at it with my thumbs.

"Oh Harry! That hurts!," she protested.

I commiserated but dug all the harder with my thumbs until I felt the flesh beneath my fingers soften and watched her body relax as the discomfort passed off.

"There now," I said, "don't I know what's best for you?"

"Ummm," she sighed.

I poured some oil into the palm of my hand to warm it and smoothed it over her back. She brushed her dark hair out of the way, and I rubbed the nape of her neck, her shoulders and arms. I plied her vertebrae like a blind boy caressing the keys of a piano. I traced the line of every rib and ligament.

I was filled with an incredible tenderness for her, and I was extremely aroused. At the same time, there was a certain element of terror in what I was doing. I tried to keep my hands brisk and professional, but I caressed her all the same. She didn't seem to dislike my touch, though. She was very relaxed, her eyes were closed, and I slowly grew more self-assured. I applied more oil and worked the joints of her shoulders, and her arms, and down to her wrists and hands.

"Feel nice?" I asked.

"Mmmm yes," she sleepily murmured.

I kneaded my fingers into the hollows beneath her arms, and sweeping my hands again and again across her sides and under her shoulder blades, I touched the out-pressed swells of the sides of her breasts. Still she did not tense or complain or put an end to it.

"Would you like me to do your legs?" I asked, very much afraid that she wouldn't.

"Mmhmm."

I lifted the robe off of her and tossed it to the side. She tensed at that, and raised her head to glance back at me. What was that look on her face? A little startled? Uncertain? Bemused? Yielding? Each in turn seemed to flit across her face, then she nestled her head back into her arms with a self-conscious giggle.

Her plain, white cotton panties were rid high and stretched tight over her wide woman's bottom, and the creases where her thighs met her buttocks showed naked where the elastic of the leg bands had pulled up.

I began massaging her feet.

"Mama bought this brand of oil," I said, smelling my fingers. "She always smelled like this."

Jess didn't answer.

I rolled her ankle in my hands and worked the arch and center of her foot and gently popped each of the joints and rubbed the oil between her toes until they no longer glistened. I turned up her legs a little, each and each at the knee, placing her foot on my thigh, and kneaded her large, round calves. Her thighs were no longer so smooth and toned as a girl's, but for me there is another, maybe better, pleasure in the more supple flesh of a well formed and mature woman. She was very lovely.

As I finished with her calves, I parted her legs as I laid her foot off of my lap. I could see where her white-clad sex protruded from the crux. She lay still with her eyes closed, but something had now subtly changed. She was no longer relaxed, and I realized, from the gentle tension that had come over her, that she had grown sexually excited, that she held herself in abeyance, not wanting me to see it. I felt myself now in a kind of fog that numbed my senses so that I was able to act with a certain assurance. But it was more than a numbing of my senses, for I felt a certain affinity for my sister like I was certain of all she thought and felt to an extent that I grew certain of all I should do and at what pace I should do it. Where ten minutes before it would have seemed an impossibility that she would ever lie here aroused and allow me to continue touching her in the ways that had caused the arousal, now it seemed the most natural thing. I knew that if she would let me I would consummate my desire upon her.

I let drip a drop of oil on the back of each of her thighs and began to caress and massage her soft flesh. I took each of her legs in the clasp of my two joined hands, and, as I rubbed them, I spread them further apart. I made as though I took no notice of her panties or the proximity of her sex, and I touched her freely and with an expert hand.

There was a willfulness now that kept her head cradled in her arms and kept her eyes closed. She was quiet, but her breathing was up and I could feel that her heart raced as mine.

I reached down and touched the very inmost part of her thighs and cupped her sex through the thin cotton material. She lay strained and unprotesting -- it had come.

I opened my pants and freed my member. I took her by the shoulder and hip and gently rolled her upon her back. Her eyes flew open, and she gazed, frightened, into mine.

"No, Harry! Don't. Stop... We can't," she whispered.

I lay myself on top of her and between her legs. I slipped my fingers into the leg of her panties and pulled the crotch to the side, careful not to pull or tear her hair in the elastic.

"No, don't. Don't," she said, and tried to push me away, her hands on my shoulders.

I guided myself down. She squirmed beneath me and I had a little trouble finding her opening, but at last I slid inside her. She was very moist.

"Oh stop, Harry. Stop. We mustn't."

Jess remonstrated, and she tried to avoid me -- and I ignored her remonstrations and overcame her slight resistance -- but it was not a rape. It was like something understood but not spoken between us that this was a thing that she could not consent to. So I had to consent for the both of us.

After a moment, she stopped her complaints having done what she needed to protect her superego. After a minute she joined me in my movements, and we made love upon her bed. We kissed tenderly and spent together. When we had finished, she began to cry.

"Shhh, shhh, shhh," I tried to console her. I felt bad that she seemed to feel bad. I was a little frightened that she might decide that she was angry at me, but she wasn't.

"I can't believe that we did that," she said.

"Don't be sorry," I said. "You're beautiful and I love you."

She didn't say anything.

"You know that? that I love you very much?"

She gave me an ironic, almost peevish look. "You're very gallant, but I would have stopped us if you'd let me."

She lay there, still part under me, and she made no effort to cover her nakedness. What had happened between us seemed now a fact, just a fact. And if she had not quite reconciled herself to the fact, at least she didn't act as if it were the horror that I had feared that she might.

I looked on her, nearly naked as she was. I hadn't seen her unclothed since she was a young girl. She looked very much like Mama had. Her breasts were smaller, but had held their shape a little better for that. I was quickly hard again.

"Let's do it again," I pled.

Jess just looked at me for a few moments, and then she laughed through her tears.