Mrs. Martin - Part II

The art of the dare is lost on most adults. Childhood is concerned with a different sort of wage. Money is less important than avoiding shame, being seen as brave or at least not a cry-baby momma’s boy who pees his pants. Respect is sovereign. It’s all I dreamed of. Me, riding down Della Street and parents pointing me out to their children, “Look, there’s the boy who went into Bear Cave without a flashlight!” or “Golly, Susie, there’s Shamus Best, the boy quickly becoming man who rode his bike off his own garage roof!” or “Wow, there he is! The boy who fake tripped into Mrs. Laramie’s boobs for an Ewok Tree Base! What a brave lad!” A dare is how I ended up face to face with Mrs. Martin.

It happened the day Em and I were mixing a hex for Melissa. We were up way high in the fort she and her Dad built in the crisscross limbs of her “sugar sap” tree. It was a huge maple that oozed sap from the nail holes gouged into the trunk. Em would just run her finger through the cola colored beads and suck at the sugar sap. I’ve never known anyone as moon-wild since. My favorite memory of her is the night we set out to catch a hundred lightning bugs, us leaping and sprinting, snatching stars right from the firmament. When we’d collected about seventy in our mayo jars she told me to pour them all into her hair. I think if I hadn’t been so in thrall with Melissa’s arriving womanhood, Emily would have been my first love. Her standing in the witch glow of dusk, her cattail colored hair lit up like a faerie Christmas.

So Em and I were stirring up a wicked voodoo brew in a Tupperware bowl we’d spray painted black. It was for Melissa who’d broken my heart by kissing another boy. Not just tongues I knew, but a full kiss. With want and surely, love. Our interpretation of it. And so Em had devised a hex that would make their lips glue together for two days. They would have to breathe the same old stink breath until they were unstuck and then they would never want to kiss again after that. After we’d mixed the mashed snails, the onion grass, the raspberry jelly, gum from the road, a hair from Melissa and a piece of paper with my drawing of the boy’s face in our plastic cauldron with some rootbeer to make it all fizz, we said the two lovers names backwards seven times and both spit into the mix.

Just as were talking about how to apply it to Melissa’s stupid old buttface lips, Em paused and said we forgot the last part. She had this odd look on her face, the one she’d get when Melissa would declare we were playing House and she and I were married and Em was our daughter. Em paused again and said we had to seal the mixture with a righteous kiss. I didn’t find out until later that Emily’s Mom, a professor of classics at Western Michigan University, had been reading her some Arthurian legends as her bedtime stories. She’d been trying to reclaim her daughter back from the sway of her rough-housing, man’s man, carpenter husband. These things I knew later from my Mom who talked frequently with her Mom at the mailboxes. I can only imagine this prompted the righteous kiss idea.

I’m not going to try to recapture any dialogue here because of course, it would be a complete falsehood as opposed to my little ones so far . I argue I’m at least still in the spirit of truth whether or not this all happened in one day or even was an episode of Punky Brewster or Facts of Life that I’ve co-opted for myself. I refused to kiss Emily because I told her I was saving myself for Melissa (a funny phrase I’d learned from an abstinence video my Mom showed me) so she upended the brew into my face and slid down the get-away rope. After I cleaned the gunk off and put most of it back in the bowl just in case we could still use it, I went and found Melissa sitting on the woodpile next to her garage. There were highways for tears carved out in her dust caked face. Before I could say anything, she snapped that I could look into the face of the thing I feared most as an alternative. And she knew that was Mrs. Martin, so she’d dared me to do it. And I never turn down a dare.