What Trouble Meant
“A boy is in trouble” was the explanation my mother offered between customers. My older sister and I were waiting, after Vacation Bible School, for a ride home when our father, she’d told us, “was finished with his business in the city.” That morning, our father had showered and changed after his night shift at our parents’ bakery, looking strange as he walked to our car wearing a coat and tie and one of his two white shirts on a weekday.
Another hour, it took, for our father to return, the coat and tie left behind in the car, his shirt, as it often was in church, sweat-stuck to his chest and back. I was eleven, anxious to be playing baseball with my friends, but he stood in the bakery like a customer. He waited in front of the display cases, speaking to our mother as if he was there to order a birthday cake for his daughter, maybe a girl about to turn fourteen like my sister. “The boy was a Scout once. I did what I could,” he murmured, then added that he’d never speak of it again, as if life-sentencing himself to silence.
When I heard Scout, I listened closely. I was a Tenderfoot, but I began to understand that our father, the Scoutmaster, had been called to testify as a character witness for a young man on trial. Because the defendant, nineteen now, had been a Boy Scout in our father’s troop, I recognized his name. And because our father had loved, when I was five or six, to take me along when the troop camped, I remembered that young man as a twelve-year-old struggling to make a fire without matches and trying to follow a path marked by broken branches and a scattering of prearranged stones.
That night, the city newspaper’s front page displayed a picture of the man on trial. There seemed to be no question that the former Boy Scout had raped several teenaged girls at gunpoint in the county park closest to where we lived. I opened the dictionary my sister, now that she was about to enter high school, had been given for her birthday. I looked up rape and learned that trouble could mean something I’d never imagined, a secret I carried carefully toward my room.
That night, instead of falling asleep a few minutes after my ten-p.m. bed time, I lay awake for nearly an hour. I was so restless that I needed to use the bathroom again. When I passed my parents’ bedroom door, I could hear our mother still talking to our father as he readied himself for work. “It could have been worse,” she was saying. “At least those girls were left able to tell.”
My sister walked home alone from her 4-H meeting seven Fridays that summer, always on a busy front street. On the eighth Friday, the meetings ended for another year, she carefully carried two dresses she’d sewn, eager, in mid-August, to enter them in the county fair, girls’ intermediate class, hundreds of handmade teen outfits competing for three shades of ribbons.
Those clothes became so clumsy in her arms, she said later, that she took a short cut along a narrow, diagonal street between two rows of the tiny, flood plain houses at the base of the hill behind our house. The street was deserted, but a small pack of snarling dogs began to follow her. Even though she didn’t make any sudden movements or start to run, one, at last, bit her leg.
She came home crying. Our mother cleaned the wound and called the police. She told me to sit in the back seat and be quiet while she drove my sister to that neighborhood of unleashed dogs. The police rounded up owners and arranged their dogs in a growling lineup, but my sister was so hesitant when the choice was narrowed to two, that both dogs were loaded into a van while their owners cursed. “For rabies testing,” I heard a policeman say, and even though I was safe in the car, the windows wound down on both sides for ventilation, I shuddered and cried while the rest of that pack of dogs barked as if they were marking my sister. As if, next time, they would show her what trouble meant and make sure she would never tell.
Foreplay
After ninth grade, your mandatory week at church camp includes girls. There are very few chances to spend time together, but if you walk to the outdoor vesper service with a girl, you have status with your cabin mates, and the service doesn’t seem nearly as tedious as you stand beside her mouthing, but not singing aloud, the hymns. By Monday, you are thrilled to walk to and from vespers with a girl named RaeAnne as you clumsily hold her hand but can think of nothing at all to say but “See you tomorrow,” a phrase she answers, “Maybe.” You are so lost when you have a few minutes alone that she and her friend mock you to another boy in your cabin, most of their ridicule referencing the word “baby” in any number of humiliating ways.
Tuesday, you walk with two boys from your cabin to vespers. Wednesday, you walk with Joyce, and Thursday you and she are a couple. There is a dance Thursday night, and the agony of having to approach girls you don’t know disappears. Church camp, in fact, is the place where you first kiss any girl. Joyce lives in Derry, PA, a town forty miles from where you live, and so unfamiliar that she might as well have been from a foreign country. She seems as naïve as you are at fourteen, which gives you confidence. When you sit beside her at the last-night bonfire, you put your arm around her shoulders and imagine she will think of you forever. Afterward, you kiss her once.
After tenth grade, “Cathi with an i” is the way a girl introduces herself at church camp. From the moment you first walk together to the Tuesday night vespers until Saturday morning, it is the most fun you’ve ever had at Lutherlyn, the only week you want to continue past the moment when you wrap your arms around her in front of her mother on Saturday morning, kissing her once in the light of day before promising to write and come see her again once you manage to get a driver’s license in the fall.
You write letters to each other all summer and into September. She dots the i at the end of her name with a heart, sprays perfume on the stationery, and seals the envelope with pink wax. When school begins, you are still two months from having a license, which you earn same week you ask the girl who sits across from you in American history to the upcoming junior prom.
By then, you understand that Cathi with an i is part of a routine summer romance story. Nothing about it is exceptional until, one afternoon after your freshman year in college, finished with mowing lawns for spend money, you find Cathi’s old letters in a box of vacation souvenirs. With no current girl-friend prospects, you copy her address on an envelope and write her a brief letter to ask if she is interested in you finally driving to where she lives on the other side of Pittsburgh. If she’s not seriously dating someone, you include. If she’s not engaged or maybe even married.
Incredibly, as if neither of you live in a house with a phone in 1964, she answers with a letter, no heart over the i this time, saying “sure” with a phone number. On a Saturday night, a few days later, you are at her front door at last. Three years after your last week at church camp, Cathi is a beautiful young woman who is in residency at a nursing school in a section of Pittsburgh closer to where you live. You go to a drive-in theater and drink the bottle of wine you’ve brought along. You make out in the car, fondling her breasts through her blouse before you take her home and make a date for the following Wednesday night when you can drive to where she lives in a dormitory near a hospital. “If I change my mind,” she says, “I’ll be washing my hair.” She laughs, and you do, too.
You go out together twice more, and the second time, when you manage, in the car, to unbutton her blouse, unhook her bra, and kiss her bared breasts, you run your hand up high on her thighs and come inside your pants as you rub against her, believing, at that moment, she will soon be the first girl you have sex with.
The next time you drive to the dorm, you have a condom secured in your pocket. When the receptionist calls up to Cathi’s room, another girl walks downstairs to tell you that Cathi can’t come down because she’s washing her hair. “Really?” you say, and the girl smiles in a way that makes you understand she’s walked down the stairs to see for herself who this fool is that Cathi has told her about. You leave and hope you aren’t parked where that girl and Cathi can watch you cross the lot from an upstairs window. “Washing her hair” isn’t a simple “no”; it’s an emphatic “get lost” accompanied, you imagine, by laughter. It makes you a character in a story Cathi with an i will tell more than a few other about-to-be-nurses as well as the guy who will finish inside her on their second date.
By the time you reach home, you realize that at nineteen you are as naïve to Cathi as you’d seemed to RaeAnne at fourteen. Foreplay isn’t an adventure to the Cathi she’s become in the three intervening years. You are excited about the possibility of having sex; she expects to have it in cars or wherever else is available. Admitting you want to “sleep with her someplace nice” after you lost control of yourself from a few minutes of touching her must have sounded like something no boy has said to her since she graduated from high school. Or, you finally decide, before then.
Gary Fincke’s essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays 2020 and The Pushcart Prize XXV. His collection The Darkness Call won the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose (Pleaides Press 2018). After Arson: New and Selected Essays will be published by Madville Press in October.