Chapter 26: What Laura Read in the Good Book -- 2

You can call me Peggy, also. Actually, in those days, I was Peggy Two, which at the time upset me greatly. It's the difference between being a kid and growing up: when you realize that something you thought was people making fun of you, was really the greatest compliment of your life.

I was ten when my mother sat me down and explained things to me. I was upset because my father was about to leave and I knew he was going off to war and that it was very dangerous. Ten-year-olds don't handle their parents crying very well; I was a good case in point.

She explained to me that my father was responsible for a lot of people and that they needed him to do what had to be done to keep the world safe. It was 1941; unless you lived back then, you have no idea what it was like. The Germans had routed the French and English on the continent, Russia and the Germans had been allies, then enemies. Japan was feared, and then Japan attacked us on Sunday while people were at church. Later I learned it wasn't exactly true, but at the time it was something that upset a lot of people.

After Pearl Harbor, the Philippines were invaded; things were looking very bleak. And my father was going to Europe where it looked very bad as well, with England standing alone against the German war machine.

We would, mother told me, have to help each other during the days ahead. It would be important, she told me, to support each other, so my father would not have to worry on our account.

I waved goodbye to him, then watched his airplane take off, followed by all the others in his squadron. It was noisy, smelly and above all, terrifying.

When we got home, mother sat me down, still in my best dress and explained more. She was going to be lonely, but she had friends who would come over from time to time, and hug her and kiss her, to help make the pain hurt less. She told me that I could come to her at any time and she'd hug and kiss me as well. That we had to be very, very strong.

Then she got down to the birds and the bees. I listened politely, but my mother was making a big mistake. I didn't understand much, and what I did understand, mostly I had wrong anyway. I mean, kiss a boy? Let a boy do things with me? I shuddered in horror. Boys? Not going to happen!

The admonitions not to let a boy touch me in my private places fell on welcoming ears. I had no intention of letting a boy touch me, period. If any boy did, I planned on punching him in the nose, and I told my mother that very thing. She laughed, and pointed to my crotch. "Boys are very sensitive right there. Girls and women aren't so much. Trust me, Peggy, hit a boy there and he's going to stop doing whatever it was that was bugging you and he's going to start hurting."

A few days later my "Aunt" Jane appeared, the day before New Year's Day. There was a lot of hugging and kissing, including some for me. I liked Aunt Jane; she was a lot of fun. One day we were walking in a park and we passed a bunch of boys playing basketball.

She smiled and told me that once upon a time she and my mother had been on the same basketball team in grade school, then in high school. Even after all this time, most of the girls were still in touch with each other and very good friends. That afternoon was the first time I heard I'd been named for their coach.

Time passed. Mother had friends come and visit every month or two. I would see them hugging and kissing; I didn't think anything of them sleeping together. I was, in fact, relieved that I hadn't had to give up my own bed.

Then my father came home, not quite a year after he'd left.

I didn't recognize him. He was gaunt, specter-like, a shadow of himself. Mother cried when she saw him, not just because she was glad to see him, but because of how bad he looked.

For weeks, he would sit on our porch, wintertime or not, and just stare vacantly into the distance. He liked me to sit next to him; he'd put his arm around me; sometimes he'd weep. It was very disconcerting. Obviously something terrible had happened, something he didn't want to talk about.

Right after Christmas a car came for him and he was gone for three days. When he returned there was a resigned air about him that I didn't understand -- until mother told me he was going back to the war in another month. I knew she was trying hard not to cry in front of me, so I tried hard not to cry either.

Long before my father left that second time, I changed. I had a chip on my shoulder; I was bitter and angry. Not only did I feel that towards "them," whoever it was who was sending my father off to that horrible place, but my mother as well. And my father.

My attitude carried over into school and I started getting into trouble. I knew they were debating keeping me in seventh grade for another year; I have no idea why they passed me. I made eighth grade an unmitigated hell for everyone around me. I was twelve, turning to thirteen, bitter and hateful. No one could tell me anything, although God knows, they tried.

It was my Aunt Jane who first told me how much I was hurting my mother. She was angry, too. Really angry. She told me off like no one had ever done before. For a few days I was better, then I started sliding downhill again.

She started telling me stories about their coach. Things she's done to help her girls both in school and in life, taught them about basketball and just about everything else. I couldn't believe anyone could be that perfect.

Then came a day I'll never forget. Instead of going to school like I was supposed to, I hid in some bushes. Mother had said she and Aunt Jane were going to run some errands in the morning, and might be back late. It was my thought to sneak home and spend the day doing whatever it was I wanted, instead of what someone else wanted.

I came from the alley, and didn't think to check the house to find out if my mother was gone. It turned out she and Aunt Jane were getting a late start. My mother was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, her robe apart and Aunt Jane was between her legs, kissing there, between my mother's legs.

My jaw dropped in surprise. It was something I'd heard once, but had laughed at. Women making love to each other. That was stupid!

Except there it was, right in front of my eyes. I exploded into tears and ran out the door I'd just come in. Somehow, Aunt Jane caught me before I'd gotten more than a few steps away from the house and hauled me back.

This time I learned a lot more, with Aunt Jane doing most of the talking. Mother and her friends were a lot more than friends. Lovers. I didn't want to believe it, but how could I not? Aunt Jane sat two feet away from me, explaining it.

Over the next few days there were a lot of long talks. Another of my mother's friends, Aunt Jill came to visit. More long talks as it was explained to me once again.

I'm not very bright, sometimes. It was Aunt Jill who finally got through to me. People get lonely, lonely people want to have sex. If my mother had sex with a man, it might get out or she might get pregnant. That would be, she explained, a catastrophe that would make life very hard for my mother and father. It would probably mean they would get divorced. Divorce in those days was extremely rare, and divorced women weren't well thought of. Women who messed around when their husbands were overseas were despised. But, Aunt Jill told me, it didn't mean that they wanted to stay lonely.

It was Aunt Jill who first asked me if I masturbated. That was a joke! Until then, I'd never heard the word. Yes, I'd discovered there were a few places between my legs that caused interesting sensations when rubbed. My breasts were starting to grow, and when my nipples would get hard, they too felt nice when rubbed.

I remember Aunt Jill looking at me. I wasn't sure what she was looking at, I was feeling nervous and excited, not sure why. Then Aunt Jill hugged me, and I hugged her back. Then she kissed me. It wasn't like a regular kiss; her lips on mine left me gasping, unwilling to have her stop. Later I learned that asking her not to stop was exactly what she wanted me to say. And, she didn't.

Her tongue came into my mouth; her fingers went to my breasts, stroking them beneath my blouse. The next thing I knew her hands were under my dress, inside my underwear, then inside me. My first orgasm was relatively mild, but Aunt Jill didn't stop at one. Or two or three. And when she kissed me like Aunt Jane had kissed my mother, I understood why mother had let her do it.

It was a stunning revelation. Not only could I feel so good, or how it came to be that I felt like that, but that I wanted more. Before the sun came up the next morning, Aunt Jill had very thoroughly brought me out; I was an eager, willing and, above all, a full participant.

Over the next few days it happened a few more times. Not as intense, but satisfying. And with those times, came more and more lessons. Warnings and admonitions; I understood the need for those. I understood that if I wanted to find a girl my own age to "play" with I would have to move carefully and most circumspectly.

Lynn, Aunt Jill's twin sister was next in our house. She liked my mother a lot, but she spent a few times in bed with me as well.

Then came the telegram. A terse statement from the War Department, telling mother that my father had been wounded in action, and that he was expected to fully recover at a hospital in England.

There was just me that night. She cried and cried, and I held her and rocked her like she was the baby and I was the grown up. Sometime in the evening she got horny and we made love. It wasn't like it was with the others; my mother wanted to get off and wasn't concerned much about how. I was there, available, and after a fashion, willing.

A few days later she slipped into my room late at night and made love to me. It was, she told me, something we shouldn't do often. But, she told me that she loved me and hoped that I loved her and that I would understand.

The truth was I was getting so I liked sex a lot, and wasn't upset at all.

Then, abruptly, my father was home again. He seemed okay, better, even, than after he'd come back the first time. Then we moved to San Antonio, where my father was put in charge of getting an entirely new squadron ready to go to Europe.

I'd finally gotten my head on straight enough to not be in danger of flunking eighth grade, and after school was out, mother and I moved to catch up with Dad in Texas. It was a long, boring, hot, frustrating summer for me. With my father home, relief sessions with my mother or one of her friends were impossible. I was a new girl in a new town, and knew almost no one, except a few girls near my age, whose fathers were in my father's squadron.

Then came school in the fall and mother met her old basketball coach. I'd long since figured out that Coach had slept with her team. None of my mother's friends seemed in the least bit concerned about how old they were or how old I was. It was the first time I'd been treated like an adult and I adapted to it like a duck to water.

Just before my father was to leave again, mother and I had a fight. I asked her if she thought it was cheating him when she was with her friends. "No," she told me, "cheating is doing it with another guy. He knows I have girlfriends, he knows we are lovers. As long as I'm careful and discreet, it's okay with him.

"One day, Peggy, you will be older. You'll meet a nice man and get married. You'll have babies. Some of our friends from high school didn't want to be lovers any more; but it will be up to you."

"Aunt Jane doesn't have a husband, Coach doesn't have a husband." I told her.

"And all the others do, Peggy. Jane is safe because she is who she is: one of the best women's basketball coaches in the country. There are colleges who would hire her in a second, even if she had tentacles and two heads. Coach doesn't count; for one thing, she did have a husband, and she's stopped being with women." Mother smiled benignly. "Until now, of course."

"Not me. Not ever me," I told her emphatically. "I've met boys. I've met men. Stupid, stupid, stupid!"

She laughed. "Yeah, I said something like that when I was your age. I outgrew it. It will happen to you, too. Don't try to fight it, if it does."

That gave me the last push I needed. I'd become friends with one of the girls on the team, Libby Dalglish. We were just friends, but I realized I was horny a lot when I was with her. For two weeks I conducted a full-scale assault on her virginity, moving slowly even so. Touches and hugs.

Then my father left again and I was depressed and unhappy; Libby told me she'd do anything to help me feel better, so I told her what I wanted her to do. She was enthusiastic, if inexperienced. For a week, every day after practice we would go to my room and I'd teach her something new.

One day we were lying together in bed, having just mastered sixty-nine, relaxing and talking. It was Libby who commented on how wickedly sexy Sheila Vickers was. I told her that Penny was quite fetching. We had, you see, seen both nude.

It was Libby's idea to have a contest to see which of us could seduce someone else first; I told her a few things about what I'd heard from my Aunts, in regards to being careful. Libby smiled at that, and told me she was sure it could be done.

She was right. She was even willing to pay up when I won: she went down on me for a solid hour. A few days later the four of us were sitting around, with Libby and me explaining that we'd been lovers first, and that if we worked together, we would have a much easier time of it. Before the afternoon was over, Penny was sitting on Libby's lap, kissing and fondling her, and I had my hand in Sheila's panties.

One of senior girls, Kay Reinhardt, stopped me one day after a practice, before we went into the showers; everyone else was ahead of us. "You and your friends are playing much better."

"Practice, practice."

"Motivation, too," Kay said, her eye on me.

"Well, I guess." I was sure we'd been found out and I was going to hear a lecture on how "good" girls didn't do that sort of thing.

Kay laughed. "You're a freshman, Peggy. Where you are today, we seniors were years ago. We too found out it was nice to be motivated, and worked together to get us all properly in the same... mood."

I looked at her, a little surprised.

"Yeah, if you like sucking pussy, you have a lot of company on the team. So far as I know, only Lindsay Gallagher doesn't fool around. Some of us fool around a lot, some a little."

She moved slightly, so that our breasts were nearly touching, "I'm thinking you are someone who likes to get around."

I met her eyes. "My mother told me it was never smart to contradict someone older than me."

Kay reached out and pulled my jersey over my head, moved closer, her breasts pressing against mine and undid my bra. I lifted her jersey in turn and she shrugged out of her bra. She brought her much larger breasts in contact with mine.

"None of your friends will go ape if they see us, will they?" Kay asked, rubbing her nipples against mine.

"No."

She grinned and pushed down my pants, taking my panties with the outer garment. "Neither will my friends. And Lindsay is nice and shy and tongue-tied. She just gets dressed and leaves."

"And coach?" I asked, warming up to Kay.

"I've seen the way she looks at you, girl. She might be jealous, but she won't say anything."

I smiled at her. "You might be surprised. Did you know she used to coach my mother?"

"I heard that."

"Coach was close to her girls," I explained to Kay. "She would schedule extra practice once a week. She'd lock the doors and not watch who was doing what."

Kay laughed. "Extra practice, eh? Maybe we could use some of that!"

Kay and I traded finger-fucks, were still doing each other when all the others returned. Quite suddenly there was a lot of kissing and hugging going on. It didn't last very long, but long enough. Coach didn't come in, either.

A day or so later, I took Lindsay Gallagher to the side and asked her if we made her uncomfortable.

She met my eyes. "Am I going to tell? No, I'm not going to tell.

"No, are we making you uncomfortable? Would you rather know in advance so you can go some where else?"

She looked me right in the eye. "I have bigots for parents. Narrow-minded bigots. They found my older brother jerking off; they put him in an asylum for the insane. Thanks, but no thanks. Not me. One day, if I behave, I'll leave home. When I do, I'll never go back and I'll never tell them where I went. Never. But in the meantime, a little physical gratification is all I need. I do it where there is no way in hell for my parents to find out."

"Sorry," I told her.

"Your father is off fighting the war; mine sits on his fat ass, bragging at how he uses pull to avoid having to go. I hate the bastard. Hate him!"

I remembered what my father had looked like the first time he'd come back and wasn't sure at all that Lindsay's father wasn't smarter than mine.

Then my mother asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday.

I haven't said much about Coach, and there's a reason for that. She wasn't like anyone else I'd ever met. Fair, that she was. Willing to do anything to help you, no matter what. Patient and understanding. Above all, she taught us. In class, sure, but on the basketball court as well. There, more than the other, at least for me.

She always knew exactly the right thing to say to make you feel wonderful or humble, depending on what you needed just then. She could encourage you to excel, discourage you from doing something stupid, and hardly pause between the two. Sometimes both at the same time.

I'd had a lot of chance to think. I liked sex. I liked sex with my teammates. We knew each other; we had a lot of the same goals and ideas. It didn't take very long before we all knew which buttons to push to make the person we were with sit up and beg for more. But it was sex.

Coach was someone different, someone I might have sex with, but it was going to mean a whole lot more than just a quick suck or fingering. Not that I didn't like those, didn't want those, but there was also something hungry inside me, something that wanted more.

I decided that Coach was very close to what I was hungry for; if we'd have been anything like the same age I'd have been content. But Coach was not only not my age, she was older than my mother. In fact, she was only a little younger than my father's mother. Coach looked a lot better, kept herself up a lot better, but by the time I graduated, Coach was going to be the same age as my grandmother was right now.

I decided I wanted to seduce her anyway. I was pretty sure Coach liked us and would schedule extra practices like I'd told Kay about. But first I wanted to do something for her.

So when my mother asked me what I wanted, I replied with one word. "Coach."

She looked at me, a mixture of amusement and curiosity. "Do you want her gift-wrapped, or as is?"

"I want to make love to her," I told my mother. "I want her to make love to me. You told me that it never affected how she treated any of you."

"No, it never did. Of course, I can't truthfully say we didn't let it affect us. It did. We were happy campers, ready and willing to do anything Miss told us to do. We were little angels from then until now. There is nothing she couldn't ask one of us to do, that we wouldn't."

"You told me how you and your friend seduced her that first time. Do you think it would work a second time?"

"Like shooting fish in a bucket!"

So, we had the party. And I got to make love to her and she made love to me. I wasn't even upset that Libby somehow managed to slip in ahead of me.

The calendar changed, it was 1945 and the allies had invaded Europe, were smashing the Japanese back, island after island. In May, just weeks before the school year finished, the war in Europe was over. Almost at once we got word that my father was coming back, would stay about a month, then would proceed to the Pacific theater.

He got home in time for the Fourth of July; it was a hell of party that year. The end of the war was clearly in sight. Another year, tops, people thought.

My father was scheduled to leave on the 15th of August; I remember when he came home early and told us that we'd done something awesome and terrible to Japan. A few days later, we knew what, and we knew we'd done it again.

And the war was over, just like that. Not a year or so, right then, three months after Germany had been knocked out.

There were a few kids at school who'd lost their fathers, but most were suddenly looking forward to their return. So when school started we were ecstatically happy. We'd lost three seniors, and gained four freshman girls. We all wanted to continue "extra practice" but we couldn't with four unknown girls in our midst.

Her name was Alabama McKenzie. Light a candle for her, sisters!

I don't know what her parents were like, but Alabama was as bigoted as Lindsay's parents were. Lindsay told coach that if Alabama ever started ragging on her again about how to live her life, Lindsay was going to beat her black and blue.

Alabama played fair basketball, but she didn't fit with the rest of us. Not even a little. Coach called Alabama in and told her gently that while she played well enough, there was more to it than playing. She had to be a part of the team, and she wasn't. Come back, Coach told her, when you learn how to deal with others.

Two days later, Alabama McKenzie, hung herself in her room. That devastated everyone on the team, particularly Coach.

A few days later Coach called us all together and hurt us more. "We're not supposed to tell you about this. Don't talk about it. But when they did the autopsy on Alabama they found out she'd been sexually molested. Repeatedly. They are going to charge her father and an uncle. It'll be hushed up, but those two will go to the penitentiary, where, I'm told, their life-expectancy will be very short."

Coach looked at us, I remember the tears in her eyes. "We failed her, I failed her. We were so busy looking out for ourselves we never stopped to ask ourselves, 'Why?'"

We played some serious basketball that year. We stopped most of our opponents in their tracks and our shooting was simply magnificent; I've never been on a better team. Lindsay took Alabama's death the hardest, understanding, I guess, better than the rest of us. It was Lindsay who, half way through our season, suggested putting her initial on our jerseys.

God, I love Coach! In an instant she healed the worst of the hurt we'd suffered. She reached out and kissed Lindsay on the forehead... and told her that no matter how accurate, it would look bad if we played with a scarlet letter "A" on our jerseys.

A dozen girls started laughing and crying, all at the same time. You had to have been there. So we played with an "A" embroidered on our jerseys, black instead of red, and tiny, lost on the shoulder seam.

There have been a lot of girls I've kicked off my teams since then, but I always stopped and asked myself "Why?" And more than once, I found someone who needed help. Regardless of what it cost, I helped them.

Then one day I walked across a stage, took my high school diploma, flipped my tassel and waved to my parents, then blew a kiss at Coach.

I went to Oklahoma the next year; Aunt Jane had a place for me. I spent most of my four years there rooming with Angie Mann. Angie and I were kindred spirits, and at long last I'd found someone with whom, when I made love, it was a lot more than sex.

And one day we walked across the sere grass of the football stadium, accepted our diplomas and tossed our tassels. It was a more exciting than graduating from high school because it was Oklahoma. The last diplomas were rushed, and then everyone headed underground, as there were tornadoes spotted a few miles away from the stadium.

Angie and I moved to Arizona, Aunt Lynn was now superintendent of a school district in central Phoenix and she got us jobs in two different elementary schools as PE teachers in training.

Angie might be the love of my life, but there are some things we don't share. She loved working with the younger kids; I was bored out of my mind. In 1954 I swapped to a local high school, the first coat of paint still fresh on it. They already had a basketball coach, so I was just an assistant.

Two years later I looked at the handwriting on the wall. Agnes Lowery was going to stay until she dropped dead. She was tenured, comfortable and a winning coach. If that wasn't bad enough, her opinions about lesbians were scorching. She didn't like me, couldn't stand it when Angie appeared at any function and I realized that I was never going to get tenure if I stayed. I was pretty sure that being denied tenure would not be a good thing either.

I went to the man at the district office who was in charge of PE teachers and gently sounded him out about a transfer.

He looked at me for several seconds, and then laughed. "Sometimes you hear stories. I personally ignore whispered rumors. I figure if someone wants to make a point, they need to stand up and make it. Can't stand back-stabbers at all."

I kept my face expressionless. There were, I thought, other towns than Phoenix, and other states. California was just over the western horizon.

"Care for a challenge?"

"What sort of a challenge."

"You're from Texas."

"The south, anyway."

"How do you feel about niggers?"

"Black people, you mean?"

"Those people. Could you coach them?"

I wanted to cry. What would he say if he found out that my mother's lover in school had been black?

"I can coach any girl who wants to play and do well."

"South Mountain High. We can't keep a coach there. Too many issues. You spend two years there; I'll find something else for you. Something that includes tenure. I promise."

I smiled at the jerk. "Way I look at it, next year will be my third year. Tenure year."

"We usually only give tenure to teachers who spend three years at one school."

My smile grew broader. "Hey, this is my volunteering to help you out of a bind. At the district's request, right? Give me the tenure; I'll give you the second year. I promise."

I'd like to say we shook hands and departed friends for life, but I could see in his eyes when I promised him that his promise had been a lie. No, I got his name on the transfer paper, that it was at the district's request, not affecting my tenure. And he got my signature as well.

Angie was upset; South Mountain High was a notoriously rough school. I simply shrugged. I'd deal with it. If I couldn't, I was in the wrong profession.

The following Friday I received a note to see my principal, and found myself transferred a little in advance of the end of the school year.

So, the next Monday I met with my new principal, an elderly man, balding, with a thin fringe of white hair. He also sat stiffly erect in his chair, his hands folded on an empty blotter in front of him. He reminded me a great deal of my father, if not quite so large. Sober rather than bluff and hearty.

"Miss Brewster, welcome to South Mountain."

"Thank you, sir."

"You ever work with Negroes before?"

"No." My mother might have been on a mixed-race team, but that had been a miracle that hadn't happened often in the South and not lately. Oklahoma had been a lily-white school as well.

"I had the privilege to command a Negro unit in the Second World War," he grimaced. "Truck drivers, a transport company. But then one day in the snow of France, the Germans came. We fought them, Miss Brewster. With our rifles, until we ran out of bullets, then rifle butts and bayonets. When those were gone, entrenching tools and fists. We took two hundred and eleven German prisoners that day. General Patton came to give Silver Stars to every man in the outfit. Until he saw the color of my men. He turned around and drove away."

"I've been a teacher for nearly two years, all of that coaching. I have had some of the best coaches that exist. The best women's basketball coaches that exist. The first team my high school coach led was mixed, black, Mexican and white. Didn't stop her from winning her league. My mother played on that team. I didn't come here to turn around and leave."

"You have no doubt heard about what a tough, dangerous school South Mountain is."

"Yes." Lying didn't seem like a good idea.

"Lies. Simple lies. About a third of the student body is white, half Negro and the rest a mixture of Mexican and Japanese. You will find the average parent in our school district is every bit as interested in the success of their children as they are where you were in west Phoenix. Our football team plays rough, but the young men downtown at Phoenix Union are rougher.

"The district hasn't seen fit to supply me with any decent women for PE or coaching. If you want the latter, you'll have to do the former."

"Not a problem."