Mother must decide what’s best for her son, incest, family taboo, Snowy days dot my memory. Seminal events in my life seemed to play out with a white background. I looked out at the rounded mounds in the back yard while thinking about my mother. Even her name sounded round to me; Robin…Robin Owen. Everything about her form spoke of roundness… places for the eye to rest… places for the hand to glide over and caress. I wasn’t supposed to notice of course because she was my mother. No… not much.
I laughed to myself as my mind flew into a poetic flight of fanciful amusement. I imagined that her breasts were moons of snow, capped by strawberries and that anyplace my mouth touched would taste like vanilla ice cream. Most of the time my thoughts about her couldn’t be deemed poetry.
That she looked good was pointed out to me many times when I attended the middle school where she taught. The kids knew her as Miss Owen, and most didn’t think we were related because my name’s Tom Owen Blanco. She had gone back to her maiden name when she started teaching. More than once I had to say, “Shut up that’s my mother” to guys who wanted to rhapsodize about her looks with me.
It never seemed to bother my brother Paul who was a year older than I was. We had different friends and we probably fought less than most brothers but we really weren’t close. I guess I was jealous of him and he was indifferent to me. I loved it when he wasn’t home and it was just mom and me because then I would be the one who took care of her after school.
By that time she seemed always tired and down. I remember that she was a good cook, but for five years we hadn’t had a meal that didn’t come from a can, a box, or the microwave. She took some kind of pill or other all the time and her answer to almost everything was,”Okay… take a jacket.” If I said I wasn’t coming home at night because I was staying at a friend’s or I said I was going to drown myself in the river, I could expect, “Okay… take a jacket.”
She came home physically and emotionally exhausted and what she wanted most was a massage on her legs or her arms or her back. Many times she fell asleep while she was being rubbed. I became intimately familiar with her skin… the creamy smoothness… the supple curves of her calves and thighs… the smell of… her. Sometimes I would bring my face close to inhale her; it was a musky lemony fragrance I’d never encountered.
She was then only thirty-one, and thirty-five when I graduated high school. She had a young face and could have passed for a woman in her twenties. When we all went out together, to the casual observer, she could have been our sister.
Her young marriage had lasted three years. Early on she dated occasionally but she never had a boyfriend that I knew of for more than a few months. As we got older, she was open and honest with us and never minced words. When I asked her how come she didn’t date more she said, “I don’t seem to find the kind of men I want spend time with… it’s all small talk and games… there aren’t any white-knights out there… forget it, I’d rather stay home… and sex isn’t that big a deal for me.”
That’s a sentence that doesn’t compute for an adolescent male. Sex isn’t a big deal? At that time, in my testosterony fog, it was the only deal. Women’s bodies… faces… legs… they crowded out just about every thought. My mother’s was no exception. Especially when I found out.
The snow was coming down in chunks the day I saw her naked breasts. They weren’t where I wanted them to be. I had come home early when band practice was cancelled and went behind the house to see what I thought of as the ‘Winter Wonderland.’ That’s when each branch has a thick coat of white on it and everything is still. I passed by a window and Paul and my mother were kissing. They weren’t only kissing… mom’s dress was down to her waist and her tit was in Paul’s hand.
I watched in frozen fascination as he felt the tits I had fantasized over. The nipples looked big from where I stood and the youthful form of her breasts awed me. My brother brought my mother’s nipple to his lips and started sucking on it. She just sat there almost immobile, staring off as he fondled her. He took her hand and tried to put it on his crotch but she took it off obviously saying “No.” I was frozen and if they weren’t so occupied I’m sure they would have seen me.
I walked for an hour in the cold, shaking. I was upset and by the time I got home, I knew why. It wasn’t complicated; I wanted it to be me… kissing her… touching her.
That evening was surreal… because everything was so normal. They were both exactly the way they always were. So how long had that stuff been going on between them… how far had they gone… how could I have not known? Those were three of a thousand questions. It seemed like I came all night thinking about what I saw.
When I got up the nerve to tell Paul what I saw he sort of smiled and said, “Old Robin has a great rack doesn’t she?” She did, but I didn’t like the way he said it. I also didn’t like that he always called her Robin.
I pressed him to tell me how it started and he said, “I don’t know… one day I was rubbing her legs while she was laying on the couch you know… and I just kept going over her ass you know? And she said, ‘why did you do that?’ and I said, ‘I wanted to’… and she didn’t say anything else so I kept doing it…you know?” Paul didn’t think any sentence was complete without saying two or three times, ‘you know?’
He told me that he started kissing her and touching her whenever he felt like it and she let him. I couldn’t understand the ‘why’ of any of it and was almost afraid to ask what was really on my mind… but I did. “Did you…?” I almost said ‘you know’.
He knew, and he said before I finished the sentence, “Naw… she won’t let me screw her… but I’m working on it… you know?” I could have smacked him for that last one but that wasn’t our way.
It took me days to digest it all and the best I could come up with was, maybe the pills… maybe she was lonely… maybe he was just taking advantage of my mother. That’s how I started thinking about her; mine not his… I decided that Paul didn’t really care about her.
My dreams or fantasies or nightmares, I wasn’t sure which, had the three of us in combinations that woke me up red faced… and sometimes sticky. My complicity in using her was disturbing to me even in a dream. Her mouth on him… on me… her legs spread… cocks finding their way into all her holes… pearly white by the corners of her lips… white on her breasts… white inside her.
When Christmas vacation rolled around, Paul stayed at college and for the first two days I debated calling him… or a doctor. My mother slept most of time in her clothes. She hardly ate or talked. I wondered how she had been functioning at school. I tried to get her to go to a movie or take a walk but she just wanted to stay in. Finally I told her that I was worried about her and I begged her to cut back on the pills. Finally she agreed, “Okay baby… for you… ” It took a couple of days but she did come back to some semblance of alertness.
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