You might say Annette was my first girlfriend, since we went to a prom together, sealing the deal. We were both seniors nearing graduation, and it must have been her high school prom. I hadn’t paid much attention to girls until then, except in slick magazines, since I attended an all-boys Catholic school in San Francisco, operated by Irish Jesuit priests. Besides, my mother was already letting me know that she was the one I was to marry and provide with generous retirement benefits.
Where was I supposed to find them? Girls, I mean. Among the Jesuit vipers and the red-faced boys at my high school? Annette attended an all-girls Catholic school run by some order of nuns descended from Saint Maria Goretti (that poor tortured body and soul). The girls didn’t circulate the same kind of magazines, just holy cards with fully clothed virgins on them. We had been introduced at a religious retreat in the Napa wine country where you weren’t allowed to talk. Well, we didn’t need to talk. There was only one thing we wanted between us; talk was not it. I would look into her slightly crossed eyes, and imagine the fire burning down below. This was before either of us had to start shaving, up here for me, down there for her.
The great Annette had a tiny bullet head relative to her substantial body, with closely cropped tight curly black hair on it, making the head seem even smaller. Actually, the head was commensurate with the smallish breasts and slim upper torso. Her thighs, however, were humongous, if not homeric, like columns holding up a medium-sized Greek temple. It was a strange combination. When we kissed, I could feel her carapace underneath, a hard, tight girdle that she wore to contain her lower amplitudes, an exoskeleton designed to keep everything in and everything else out at the same time. Like a drum that would resonate when struck. Boing. When I would throw myself at her in the darkness of her father’s garage after an evening out at the Trident in Sausalito, I would bounce (boing) off the girdle and land (boing) on the shiny trunk of her father’s enormous Cadillac. It’s not that she minded the heat; she just wasn’t going to give it all up on the Caddy in the back of the garage. Smart girl. She knew she had only one shot, in spite of her father’s ownership of a very lucrative liquor store in downtown San Francisco’s financial district. Her dowry. She was set on keeping her powder dry.
But in our senior year of high school, everything I wanted in my entire miserable life was to be found inside those thighs. I wanted to crawl into those thunderous trunks most desperately, right to where the cuneate bundle of frisky wet curls lay waiting, and wafting the scent of tuna fish with anchovy sauce. But she wasn’t having any of it. I wish she had, because our horny teenage pressure was unbearable, and I was tired of coming into my pants all the time; but she didn’t budge. We could have gotten the whole matter out of the way with one stroke, and been done with it. It would have been nifty if she had come into her own pants, but I had no way of knowing. Clearly, she was a saint; she should create her own line of holy cards.
But she could cook, having learned from her Italian mom, a genius in the kitchen. Boy, did they know how to cook. When Annette realized that something would have to give in that garage, she invited me to stay for breakfast instead, trading one form of hunger for another, just as the light of a rosy-fingered dawn crept up to the garage door. Clever girl.
Sated with breakfast food of every kind, I made the jizzy trip back to San Francisco. While crossing over the Golden Gate bridge, I decided, no more. After we graduated, I fled, running all the way to New Haven, as far away from the iron maiden and my mother’s incestuous cupidity as I could get. There I was promptly deflowered by a woman twice my age in my single room overlooking the Cross Campus. Boing, that’s cooking.
I miss Annette and her mom, a lot. Just not enough. I do know what I left in San Francisco and it wasn’t my heart.
Decades later, on some kind of impulse, I looked for Annette on the internet. What I found wasn’t as bad as, say, Kelly LeBrock, the woman in red of the 1984 film The Woman in Red. Ms. LeBrock changed significantly; even co-star Gene Wilder would not have recognized her.
I did not recognize Annette. Yet, there she was, and I became giddy with excitement, just like before. Well, not quite like before. She posted a video of her getting a makeover in a beauty salon. It was painful to watch. Age catches up to all of us. Aside from having broadened her physique, she was also missing a leg, sporting instead a complex mechanical prosthetic device. She did have a thing for wearing armor, and such. I promptly shut down my computer, thinking how lucky I was that I had dodged that bullet.
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