Chapter 4

Nobody said a word about my project for the rest of the next week, until Friday morning, when Mom sat down across the breakfast table from me.

“You can take the rest of your pictures tonight. They’ll all be here.” She took a sip of coffee and looked at me.

“Okay,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“You should wear some shorts or something,” she said.

I felt my face get hot. “Okay,” I said again.

“Do you have a jock strap?” she asked.

“Somewhere,” I said. It had been required for gym class, but you only had to take Gym in your Freshman and Sophomore years, so I hadn’t seen it for a couple of years.

“I don’t want you to feel bad about what happened,” said my mother.

Great. She wanted to have a mother-son discussion about my erections.

“Okay,” I tried.

That wasn’t enough, for her.

“I know you’re embarrassed about it,” she said. “I just want you to know that it happens to all boys.”

“I know that, Mom,” I said. There was an edge to my voice that I hadn’t intended to put there. “I just hope Grandma sees it that way.”

“You hope your grandmother sees your erection?” My mom looked shocked.

“No!” I yelped. “I mean I hope she understands ... that’s all.”

“You think you’ll get ... hard ... when you take my mother’s pictures?” suggested my mother.

“I don’t know!” I gasped. “Do we have to talk about this?”

“I think we should, dear,” said my very pragmatic mother. “I’m just worried that you’ll start acting like a man.”

“What else am I supposed to act like?” I was getting really frustrated by now. “You want me to start wearing a dress?”

“Of course not, darling,” she said, reaching out to touch my hand. I jerked mine away.

“You don’t have to worry about me jumping Grandma’s bones!” I said, my voice sulky.

She laughed, and then saw the look on my face. Her face got serious.

“Don’t be mad at me, Pat,” she said, somewhat stiffly. “I’m not used to having a man around the house.”

I rolled my eyes. “Danny’s over here every other day,” I reminded her.

“Danny’s different,” she said, immediately. “Danny wouldn’t do anything with any of us even if we asked him to.”

I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I just wanted to needle her, like I thought she was needling me. She wasn’t needling me, but I felt like she was. Anyway, I said it.

“Don’t be too sure about that,” I said. “He thinks you’re all hotties. He even said so, the other night.”

The shock on her face made me wish I hadn’t said it, but, like most things you say in the heat of passion, it couldn’t be taken back. I was about to try, though, when Randi came into the kitchen.

“Morning, Mom,” she said. “Hi, Sport.” She stopped, looking at the expression on our mother’s face. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

My mother looked nervous and sat back. “Nothing,” she said.

Randi looked at me and I shrugged. My mom got up and started fiddling around, cleaning up the kitchen, doing busy work.

I wasn’t about to get into the same discussion with Randi, so I gulped down the rest of my cereal and got up and left. I looked around, in my room, for my jock strap, but never found it. I did find a pair of last year’s jeans shorts, which I knew were really tight on me, and laid them aside, for later that night.

My plan to wear tight shorts didn’t quite work out. That’s because habit kicked in, and I didn’t think about it. I thought about the pictures and all that, but not specifically how to plan for them.

What happened was that, after supper, I took my shower, like usual, and put on jockey’s, like usual. I wasn’t aware that Grandma had arrived early, while I was in the shower. She was waiting for me, like Randi had been, in my room, when I got back there.

“You ready?” she asked, her voice perky. She didn’t have to tell me what she was talking about. She had put on makeup and everything.

Grandma Mona was fifty-four. She was seventeen when she had my mother. She married the man, and had Aunt Vanessa three years later. Then, when her marriage started falling apart, her husband, who was technically my grandfather, but whom I had never met, apparently started spending a lot of time away from home. I got the impression all that time away from home was in the same town they lived in, but I never got any details. Anyway, that led to her divorce.

Aunt Christy was mixed up in that story somewhere. She was six years younger than Aunt Vanessa, and nine years younger than my mother, and the divorce from my grandfather happened about the same time she was born. Nobody really talked about it much, but a curious genius finds ways to get threads of information, that can be woven into a tapestry, that will eventually give at least a partial picture of things.

My grandmother didn’t look fifty-four. I remembered her arriving at the house, when I was little, in sweat-stained running clothes, wearing a sweat band around her head and stuff like that. She didn’t run any more, but she walked a lot, and attended exercise classes at the gym, along with a bunch of her friends. She was in pretty good shape. She was also the most masculine of all of the man-haters. She was the one who tossed a baseball with me, and threw footballs more or less at me, when I was ten or eleven, like she was trying to make up for the father I didn’t have. She knew her way around a tool box too, having been independent for twenty some odd years without a man around the house. Danny still went over to her house when something needed fixing, but they usually worked on whatever it was together. Of them all, my grandmother was the closest to being my buddy. She never yelled at me. She always supported me, and reminded the others how smart I was. My sisters were ... well ... my sisters. I loved my mother, but it was possible that I loved my grandmother even more. That’s not fair to Mom. Maybe I loved her in a different way. I love Mom more than anyone else on the planet.

I’d never seen my grandmother in anything other than street clothes, for the most part, and most boys don’t think of their grandmother as a “woman” in the first place, so I had no idea what to expect. She was wearing jeans, and a flowered silk blouse. She looked like those women in the Oil of Olay commercials, who are supposed to be in their forties and fifties, but look more like they’re in their thirties. To say I was surprised, is like saying eating raw Jalapeno peppers will make your mouth warm.

She also knew that the pictures would be taken in my mother’s bedroom. She seemed to be in a hurry, so my jeans shorts were left lying on the dresser, where I’d set them aside, and I followed her to Mom’s room. Without any fanfare at all, she unbuttoned the blouse and shrugged it off, to reveal a white, functional bra, just like my mother’s. She didn’t undo it herself, though.

Instead, she turned her back to me and said, “Unhook me, sweetie?”

Like I knew how to unhook a bra.

I fumbled with it for ten or fifteen seconds.

“You’ve never done this before, have you?” she commented.

“Uh ... no,” I said, using the same voice some people use when they say, “Well Duh!”

“Good,” she said. “You’re too young to be fooling around with bras.”

Then she gave me a primer on how to unhook a bra, telling me it had to be pulled, to loosen the catch, which could then be unhooked. It worked, but as soon as it was undone, the ends snapped out of my fingers and disappeared under her armpits.

“Sorry,” I said.

She turned around, and I just naturally looked at her cleavage. There was a lot of cleavage there, with that bra sagging in the front.

There was a frown on her face, when I made my eyes drift upwards.

“You may not want to include me in your project,” she said. “I’m old and saggy.”

She did the same thing my mother had, giving her shoulders a little shrug, and the bra straps slid off her shoulders. She caught the bra in her hands, and pulled it away from her breasts. My eyes flitted between what she had uncovered, and her face, which was looking nervous.

My grandmother’s breasts didn’t look fifty-four either. Of course I had never seen any fifty-four-year-old breasts before, but they didn’t look like I expected them to, after what she said. I’d expected them to look like the breasts on those women in the old National Geographic magazines, out in the garage ... empty, sagging bags, that lay flat on the chest, drooping down around the belly button area.

They didn’t look like that at all. The first thing I noticed was that she had freckles all over her chest, tons of them. Her breasts did hang down, but I wouldn’t have called it “sagging”. To put it in the same basic description as my mother’s, the fruits that were in the panty hose of her breast skin were more the size of soft balls, but they stretched the skin just as tightly. Her nipples weren’t on the ends, though. It was like the skin under them had been stretched by those soft balls, making the nipples look like they were higher. They sat on top, pointing up, at about a forty-five degree angle. They were pointier too, somehow. The effect was like a miniature ski slope, with a ski jump at the end. Her nipples weren’t brown, either. They were more maroon, except it was a lighter color than that. Other than that, they were carbon copies of my mothers, with thick, long nipples.

My mouth wasn’t dry, this time. There was so much saliva in it that I had to swallow.

“Are they all right?” My grandmother’s voice trembled a little.

“They’re great,” I said, staring at them. “I definitely want them in the project.”

Her whole body sagged, just a little, and she smiled.

“Well aren’t you the charmer,” she said. I swear she stuck her chest out at me ... just a little. Her hands came up and lifted her breasts. The nipples slid down, to the ends, where they “should” have been, and she looked down at them. “They aren’t much, but I’ve had them for a long time. I’ve kind of gotten attached to them.”

I watched, astonished, as she squeezed both of those fat nipples between a thumb and forefinger. She looked up at me, and blushed as she saw my mouth hanging open.

“What in the world am I thinking?” she said, half gasping. She turned around and walked to the drapes. She also knew about them. Then she turned to face me again, and her face was straight. She dropped her arms. “How’s this?”

“Fine,” I gasped.

I took the pictures, forgetting all about the fact I was in jockeys.

My grandmother didn’t. When I had taken the last one, she was staring at the lump being caused by that dowel rod. I announced we were done, blushing furiously.

“Pat?” she said.

“Yes?” I responded.

“Would you be kind enough to pull your underwear down for me?”

“What?” I choked.

“You got to see me,” she said, her voice nervous again. “It’s just been so long since I’ve seen a...” Her eyes came up to my face. “A man, Pat. I’d just like to see what a man looks like again.”

“You want to see my ... my... “ I couldn’t say it. “You want to see it?” I said, instead.

“Yes, please?” she asked, like it was the most normal thing in the world. “I won’t tell anybody you showed me.”

I would hope not!

What would you do? I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t scared or anything ... it was just ... weird, you know?

“Please, Pat?” she said. She sounded even more nervous now. The camera felt like it weighted fifty pounds in my hands, and I looked around for someplace to put it, before I dropped it on the floor.

She moved, and her hands came to cover her breasts.

“I’m sorry, Pat,” she said, her voice sounding like it hurt. “I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t know what came over me. Please forgive me.”

“No!” I almost shouted. Of all the people in the world, the one I wanted to hurt the least was my grandmother. Okay, maybe my mother, but it was close. I loved them both, and I didn’t want either of them unhappy because of me. “It’s okay! Honest!”

She stopped. When she looked at me I could see her eyes were wet.

“Don’t cry, Grandma,” I moaned. “It’s okay, really. I was just surprised ... that’s all.”

“Of course you were.” She smiled, tentatively. “You really don’t mind?”

“Well, it’s weird,” I admitted. “But I don’t mind ... not for you.”

She looked happy again, and I felt great, all of a sudden. I was going to make my grandmother happy, and all I had to do was show her my boner.

See what these women did to me? As I look back on it all, it just blows me away.

I didn’t delay. I pulled my underwear out, and then down, letting the waistband snap against my thighs, just below my balls. I could hear my grandmother’s gasping intake of air, clear across the room.

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