rarity of this solitude makes him giddy—when is he ever completely alone? And then, before even comprehending the action, he is back on shore, impulsively tugging off his clothes. He wades into the water, naked, mud squishing up through his toes. He holds his balance and keeps walking, pausing, with a gasp, when his balls hit the water’s surface. He doesn’t want to get his hair wet—doesn’t think he could explain it to his mother later—but he lowers himself down to his shoulders.
He touches his dick under the water, grabs it between his fingers, wiggles until it stiffens. He hops up and down, careful at first not to slip, and feels his hardness cutting through the water. A quick fear of a fish biting him there makes him stop, and then he laughs at the thought—Yeah, right, like Jaws lives in the Ice Pond. He laughs out loud, his laughter surrounding him, free and unleashed. The sound fills the air for a few moments—all he can allow himself before fear of discovery closes in again.
He makes his way back to the shore, hiding himself behind the boulders, and shakes himself off like a dog. His dick is still hard—with his hand he presses it against his belly, then looks around again, expecting someone to be nearby. He is still alone; he rubs himself some more, letting the warmth build underneath his palm until it travels through his body. He keeps at it until the friction is too much and just as he thinks he should stop—What am I doing? Someone might drive up—he finds he is so weak against his own will that he can’t not continue. He looks at the mud streaking down his legs and the beer cans around his feet, he thinks of the pissing contest, Donny and Seth and Long Dong Danniman—longer than himself, longer than this thing in his hand—their pissing contest happened right here, at the Ice Pond. They stood side by side, as he’s seen them in the locker room, pissing next to each other the way he and Jackson have done at home, crossing streams into the toilet. He sees himself doing that with Todd Spicer—standing right here, feet planted in the garbage and the Trojans, their streams crossing, the two of them with their things in their hands, Todd without underwear, just his skin and his bushy hair under his open fly and his hand shaking out the piss, his strong hands, his arms with their definite muscles, shaking the piss out of his thing right next to Robin, making him shiver and gasp—Robin is gasping, he is standing but it feels like falling, falling through thick humid air. He braces his back against the rocks behind him and watches the pink tip of his dick open up and shoot out something that is not piss. It lands on the garbage at his feet—a wet, white shower on the char-black ashes.
He has a moment of stunned disbelief that he let this happen, out here where anyone could see. Sweat trickles down his ribs. He breathes deep, he feels as if he hasn’t breathed for hours, that time has bent around him. Disbelief gives way to shame: he hurries back into his clothes and onto his bike, his untucked shirt flapping as he pedals away.
On the dirt road a car is approaching, a guy at the wheel, a girl snuggling up next to him. Robin panics—just a few minutes earlier and they would have seen him!—and loses his grip on the handlebars, skidding to the side, his wheel grinding into a spindly bush. The driver stares at him quizzically as he passes. Robin snaps a branch from his spokes and continues his escape, all the way home imagining that guy and girl discovering his white goop on the ground amid the garbage. He imagines that they could read the splatter like tea leaves and discern what he was thinking while it happened. They could chase him down and have him arrested for being a pervert in public.
All that is left is the embarrassment of returning with a secret. The leaves above him are shiny with diamonds of light breaking through, the sun falling lower in the sky, stretching across the front yard as he turns into the driveway. He’s rehearsing a quick speech for his mother, something designed to spare him too much explanation—I rode into town to play Asteroids—when he recognizes Uncle Stan’s car in the driveway.
As he swings open the screen door, his mother stands at the counter, an oven mitt on one hand and a glass of wine in the other.
Stan’s voice carries above the clamor of the nightly news from the living room TV set. “Come on, Dottie. If it’s ready, let me have a piece now.”
Dorothy faces Robin, but raises her voice loud enough to carry to the living room. “I thought your uncle came over to apologize for his boorish behavior last night, but he seems to be doing nothing but barking orders.”
“I’m hungry,” Stan says.
“Well, if your son wasn’t keeping my son out playing through dinnertime, maybe we’d be able to sit down and eat.” She turns off the oven and leaves a tray of lasagna on the stove. “And where have you been?”
“Nowhere. Just riding my bike.” A chill moves along his skin, and he wonders if he’ll catch a cold from having been naked in the water. Or if maybe he did something bad to himself by touching his thing like that.
Dorothy flicks her head to the side in exasperation and throws up her hands, sloshing liquid over the lip of her glass. “Fine, everyone just run around and play while I try to get dinner ready. Don’t offer any help. Fine. ”
“Where’s Ruby?” he asks.
“I sent her out to fetch Larry and Jackson. I think they’re at the playground.” She glances at the clock on the stove. “She should have been back already.”
Smelling the lasagna, Robin realizes how hungry he is. “Well, if it’s done, maybe we should just start.”
Dorothy sighs at last and gulps down a mouthful of wine. Robin watches her throat move above the soft depression between her collarbones. Her chest is flush. He has a flash from the night before—her skin was ghostly white then, her face a morbid contortion as the vomit dripped from her lips. “Do you still feel sick?”
“Just fed up,” she says. “I’m trying to make dinner and no one’s around. Your father’s coming home late. Here, bring your uncle some dinner and let him eat in there by himself. What do I care anyway?” She takes off her apron and picks up her purse. “I’m going to have a cigarette.”
“Really?” He’s stunned—smoking at home! He’s only ever seen her smoke in the city.
She pulls her Pall Malls from her purse and walks to the screen door. “Everyone else is doing what they want.”
Robin follows her with his eyes; through the screen door, she looks grainy, like a newspaper photo. Taking a drag of her cigarette, she raises her nearly empty wineglass and calls out, “Clark MacKenzie, you poor excuse for a family man, where the hell are you?”
Robin carries the lasagna and a fork to his uncle. “I’m so hungry I could eat a pigeon at a Chinese restaurant,” Stan says, spearing the fork into the pasta before Robin’s fully let go of the plate.
Robin’s own appetite seems to have instantly disappeared. “Where’s Aunt Corinne tonight?”
“She’s at one-a those meetings again, getting brainwashed into selling vitamins,” his uncle blurts out angrily. “There’s a load of quackery if I ever heard of it. Not to mention a conspiracy to undermine the American family farmer.”
Robin scowls. Uncle Stan is always putting Aunt Corinne down. For years, she was sort of quiet, almost mopey at times. If you asked her for anything she complained that everyone took from her and no one gave back—the way his mother sounded a minute ago. But lately she’s been in a better mood. She’s started selling vitamins, and it seemed to make her happy to have something to do besides wait on Stan and Larry. She’d even begun wearing streaks of pink and purple blush on her cheeks. “For contour,” she told Robin, “to thin out the face.”
Robin has come to like his aunt; he feels the need to come to her defense. “I read in Time magazine that researchers are discovering vitamins and other nutrients are more important than anyone ever knew.” It was actually his mother who read the article and told him about it, and as he parrots back her words he worries about Jackson’s accusation that he talks too much like her.
“Well, if you look at who’s selling vitamins, it’s all Jews. Like that guy Goldberg who got my wife hooked. You get all the nutrients you need if you eat three square meals a day. My mother never took vitamins and she’s