Chapter 4: The Accidental Dominant, Part One

"All right, you bitches, let's get to work."

I received no answer from the girls. That was as it should be. The less trouble they gave me, the less abuse they'd get. Because right now, as I pulled my gloves tightly onto my hands, I was ready to take the misery of the last week out on every single one of them in turn.

I honestly don't remember when I'd decided to name all of the gas-powered machines in Laura Stone's garage. I'd obviously been angry at something, and found that it was more fun to imagine Diane mowing the grass, and more fun to have Liza rototilling the soil. They all had names, oddly enough the same names as my mother and my aunts. Those would be my mother's older sisters. The rototiller was my favorite, because as far as I knew, my Aunt Liza hadn't come within twenty feet of any actual soil for her entire life. I had never been allowed to set foot in her house, because teenage boys were the living embodiment of dirt.

The others? Aunt Diane, Aunt Caroline? I hated them, too. I might have mentioned earlier that the one thing my mother liked about going to her family reunions was a chance to boast about her unchanging figure. What she didn't like was the chance it gave all of her sisters to boast about their children. Compared to the ones in Harvard, and Yale, and M.I.T., the ones who were already doctors, the ones who were concert pianists, the ones who just missed last year's Nobel Prize in chemistry — compared to all of them, my cousin Martha and I were the family failures. And since Martha was deaf, my aunts stored up all of their taunts — "oh, is Terry still in high school? Isn't he eighteen? By eighteen, my son Conrad was already..." — for those occasions when my mom and I visited my grandmother. And my mom — "poor Deirdre" — would be forced to shake her head and hold up her hands and sigh, "I know, I know."

My completely impotent response was to name Mrs. Stone's garden machinery after them. Hell, I even named the chain saw after her mother — Bitch Barbara. In person, I call her "Grandma." She calls me "poor Terry." Bitch.

Not that I was allowed to use the chain saw, of course. Mrs. Stone had assured me that the fire I'd ignited with the leaf blower hadn't done any permanent harm to the lawn, and that the grass would grow back next year, but my mother had declared the chain saw off limits. I don't care; I abuse it anyway. As for the other machines, I like to think that they work better after being kicked around a little.

You'd think that after I'd had my knockout French teacher Pam Lee writhing beneath me on my bed last Sunday, it would pretty much take a dead relative or a natural disaster to put me in any kind of a bad mood on the following Saturday. And not just any dead relative, either. My Aunt Caroline, for example, after whom I'd named the leaf blower on the theory that both were full of hot air — she could have died on Friday afternoon without having any serious effect on my weekend.

So I was pretty stoked early in the week, when I was still looking forward to Friday night. That was when Ms. Lee was planning on asking me to come over to pick up the legal papers that I'd left there the previous weekend. And to Saturday, when Ms. Lee would no doubt find some way to express her gratitude for the computer program that I'd written to hack into the website containing her youthful indiscretions, a series of pictures in the aptly titled "College Spread." If I was right, my program would turn "Pam Lee" into "Pat Lee." Yes, I expected that Pam Lee would be very grateful that her pictures would no longer turn up on a Google search. Pat Lee, on the other hand, I hoped never to run into.

I didn't need a natural disaster or a dead relative, as it turned out. My mother was good enough. On Wednesday, when I'd proudly displayed the results of my latest trig test — an A-minus, coupled with a "good job" scrawled across the top of the paper — she'd sniffed that of all the skills I could possibly acquire in high school, I had unfailingly managed to pick the least useful. When I showed my folks the B I'd gotten on an English essay the next day, she looked at my father and sighed, saying that it just proved her point. Apparently she'd never gotten anything less than an A in English, which to her was the very epitome of useful subjects.

A little later on Thursday evening, she had reminded me that my Saturday was booked. Mrs. Stone's lawn was overdue for its fall clean-up, and Mom had already committed me to spending as long as it took to get everything ready for winter. Pam was disappointed when I instant-messaged her the bad news later that night, but reminded me that she still had the "papiers legaux" that I'd left at her house the weekend before. She told me she was still planning on calling on Friday evening to ask that I come over to pick them up.

Yeah, that was another great plan. My mom always answered the phone when it rang because she assumed, usually correctly, that it was always for her. So when the phone rang on Friday as I prepared dinner, it was my mother who strode into the kitchen to take the call before I could even get within spitting distance of the phone.

"So you mean he just left the papers there?" she asked, looking at me in disgust.

"Pam, don't make excuses for him. No, I'm not going to have him come over. John's just going to have to learn not to send a boy to do a man's job. I'll have John stop by on his way home from work."

She pressed a few buttons on the phone and asked — told — Dad to pick up the papers. Then she turned to me with a sneer.

"Honestly," she said sarcastically, "you'd think that you could show just a little more courtesy toward my friends."

As I was leaving to bike over to Mrs. Stone's the next morning, she reminded me not to set anything else on fire. So by the time I got there, I was in a pretty foul mood. I managed to smile at Mrs. Stone, and she smiled back at me, but when I got out to the garage, somebody was going to pay. I decided to start with Dierdre. My mother, the weed whacker. I topped off the gas, checked the string, and Dierdre spent the morning doing what her namesake did, cutting down anything that got in her way.

That took until about noon. Deirdre and I had had our fun, but now it was Diane's turn. Diane was a temperamental push mower whose blades I kept almost as sharp as my Aunt Diane's tongue. I had a particularly hard time getting Diane going that day, the complete opposite of my Aunt Diane, who was able to start abusing me almost the second I showed up. It was always hard to get Diane the mower started for the first time. For one thing, you had to yank the starter cord with one hand while the other held down the deadman lever, the switch that killed the engine of you let go of it. And Diane needed to have her starter cord pulled in just the right way before her engine caught. Her only saving grace was that once you got her started the first time, she would roar right back to life without any effort at all.

Part of my problem today was that we simply hadn't had much rain recently. So it had been about three weeks since I had needed to start Diane to mow Mrs. Stone's lawn. Another part of it, though, was my attitude. As much fun as Deirdre-ing the weeds had been, it still wasn't the same as spending your morning in a computer lab at a high school that would have been deserted except for two people, one of them an amateur computer hacker and the other an appreciative French teacher and former magazine centerfold. So I probably wasn't giving Diane my full attention. And the little bitch's willful failure to do her job was pissing me off.

"Fucking bitch!" I screamed on the fourteenth pull as the engine finally roared to life.

I released the deadman lever, and put my hands on my hips as the engine sputtered to a stop.

"That's right, bitch!" I exulted in smug triumph. "On your fucking knees! It's time you did some fucking work around here for me."

The tinkle of breaking glass was not normally a sound I associated with lawn care. I turned around very slowly, mortified that somebody might have heard me heaping transferred abuse onto a defenseless set of lawn machinery. Laura Stone was ten feet away, amid the small puddles of lemonade and shards of drinking glass that now littered the concrete floor. She was staring back at me, her face a montage of fear and apprehension and panic and something else that I couldn't recognize. Or to be more accurate, she was staring up at me from underneath the brim of a white baseball cap, staring up at me from the spot where she'd dropped to her knees.

"Mrs. Stone?" I asked tentatively, as if there was some chance that she might deny it at this point.

"Laura," she said quietly. She stared at me for another second or two and then bowed her head.

I stood there, frozen in place, looking down at Laura Stone. She was dressed in a faded button-down men's shirt whose ends she'd knotted underneath her chest. The top two buttons were undone as a concession to the unusually warm weather, and they afforded me a splendid vista of the top of her ample chest. Her shorts were surprisingly short, not the knee-length variety I would have expected from a 39-year-old mother of an 18-year-old kid who was just starting his first semester of college. But then, there was very little about Laura Stone that reminded me of a 39-year-old mother of an 18-year-old kid. In particular, today I really liked the way that her shoulder-length blonde hair was pulled into a short ponytail that stuck out the back of her cap. And I really liked the way that brought her hair off of the elegant curve of her neck as she studied the garage floor in front of her.

Even as recently as two weeks ago, I would have responded to this scene in one of two ways. I would have run down the street, terrified that Mrs. Stone would tell my mother. Or I would have dropped over in a dead faint.

Two things had happened since then, of course. One, I'd bedded Pam Lee. That took care of the fainting. Second, I'd seen the videotape my mother had made of her three unwitting friends. Suddenly, all the teasing that Laura Stone had endured from Pam that day became clear: the reference to keeping her ass in line, the snide little comment about liking to be whipped.

And I also remembered another clip from that show, too, one I'd replayed countless times on my computer: Laura laughing as she answered Pam's question about her love life: "Yeah, right. Who'd wanna screw a 39-year-old divorcee with a college age kid and a size 12 ass?"

Natalie Winston, our next-door neighbor, had suggested that Laura could easily find "someone who likes that double-D rack." In my view, that would more accurately be anyone who likes that double-D rack. Or still more accurately, anyone. I had studied those stupid Venn diagrams all my life in various math classes, the little circles that overlap to show the joint membership of certain individuals in two sets, like tennis players and people who own Fords. And as far as I was concerned, the little circle that contained the universe of people who would appreciate Laura Stone's rack was precisely identical to the little circle that contained the universe of people known as "males." Count me in.

I realized that Mrs. Stone was looking up at me now, and I sensed that she was just seconds away from getting up in tears and running into the house at the way she had embarrassed herself in front of her college roommate's teenage son. In another minute, the front door of the Stone house would be locked and no amount of pounding or yelling would get it open again any time soon.

"Laura," I accepted the responsibility of her first name.

"Terry?" she asked hesitantly.

I gave her just the tiniest hint of a scowl.

"Sir?" she tried again.

"Go wait inside."

"Yes, sir," she said, the ghost of a smile playing across her face.

"And leave the hat on," I said as she got up and began running across her lawn. I watched her until she reached the house, the twin spheres of her ass bouncing up and down inside her tight khaki shorts as she ran.

Fuck, I thought to myself, running my hand through my hair. What the fuck do I do now?

Oh, I'd surfed the Net. Why, yes, I am 18, my birthday is January 1, 19-whatever year comes up first; thank you for letting me into your well-guarded, age-appropriate website. I knew the divorcee and the garden boy routine. The young guy comes to work on the lawn, the older lady offers him some lemonade, they start fucking like rabbits. Hell, I could do that. I liked lemonade. And I'd demonstrated just the past weekend that I liked fucking like a rabbit, too. I was even pretty darn good at it, if Pam Lee had said so herself. Although what she'd actually said was "Il était magnifique, monsieur," but we had understood each other. Mostly. It was magnificent, sir. I'd originally thought that the "it" referred to the sex. Looking back on it the next day, though, I recalled that she had been staring at my crotch when she'd said it, right before she had reluctantly kissed me goodbye. So maybe "it" referred to something else, something more specific. Whatever. I was fine with that, too.

But the websites that I had visited hadn't covered the submissive divorcee. It was always the divorcee who was in control. It was always the divorcee who led the poor, unsuspecting garden boy down the path that led toward sin and temptation. That was not the scenario we had here. No, if we went down that path this afternoon, I was either going to have be pushing Laura Stone in front of me or, more likely, dragging her behind me. And she apparently was going to be loving every minute of it.

Unless, God forbid, the real Terry Martin made an appearance. That was the Terry Martin who would be inclined to ask the submissive if she'd liked to be disciplined now, or maybe she'd prefer to wait. I'm going to tie you up now, bitch, or would you really rather I not? After a few of these pathetic attempts at dominance, she'd probably just start laughing at me. Then we'd be back to my first two choices, running down the street or fainting. Oh, God, I was in trouble.

I probably spent ten minutes dithering over the issue of whether I was really capable of pulling this off. I finally decided that the overriding question was did I want to fuck Laura Stone? After that, to which the answer was an obvious yes, everything else was just a detail. The first detail, after I'd settled the basic metaphysics, was that I was covered in tiny clippings of grass, as I always was after an hour or two of whacking weeds. I ineffectually brushed at my jeans and my T-shirt, and then took a look in the side mirror of Laura's car. My face was even worse. I grabbed a rag from a box in the garage and succeeded only in adding a greasy shine to the grass. Didn't this woman know not to keep oily rags around her garage?

I finally said the hell with that, too. I'd just ask her if I could take a — no, wait, I'd tell her I was going to take a shower. God, I was never going to get this right. I nervously approached the house, convinced that this afternoon was another disaster in the making. I stopped my fist inches away from knocking on the door, and simply pushed it open. I walked through the elegantly furnished living room, the seldom used dining room, the neat, tidy kitchen, and the aptly named mudroom that led from the kitchen to the backyard. I found no sign of Laura, and walked to the foot of the stairs.