The Missus

I was in second grade when Lester and his parents moved into the mobile home behind our house. We played together nearly every day for about three years. On weekends and during the summer, we were practically inseparable during daylight hours. I usually went to his house because his mother didn’t like him to be out of her sight. She and her husband were quite old to have such a young boy. At some point, Mrs. Beechum admitted to my parents that she and her husband were Lester’s grandparents, not his parents. Oddly enough, my parents passed on this information to me but forbade me from telling Lester. I never did let it slip, even when Lester was seething mad at Mrs. Beechum for being too restrictive.

The Beechums came from Logan County, and their accent was different, more backwoods and country. Lester enjoyed comic books and dinosaurs, and Mrs. Beechum didn’t differentiate between the Superheroes and the extinct reptiles. They were all Lester’s monsters to her, but she added an extra vowel sound to the word, mon-a-sters. One Saturday afternoon when I was at the Beechums, my mother called me home. Before I left, Mrs. Beechum asked, “You’uns goin’ summers?” I had no idea what she meant. I asked her to repeat herself, but I still didn’t understand, so I left without answering. My face was red, and I felt deeply ashamed for being so dumb.

Mrs. Beechum dipped snuff, and she always had an old Maxwell House coffee can handy so she could spit into it. Sometimes, she would blow her nose and sink the snotty tissue into the brown juice. I was traumatized by the sheer, unabashed nastiness of Mrs. Beechum’s coffee can. I think she was oblivious to the fact that some might not like to see that.

Lester and I didn’t play sports. We didn’t play any games with rules. We never kept score. There were no winners or losers. Lester and I spent our time together engaging in make-believe. We sometimes used his plastic dinosaurs to aid us. We often played with toy cars including Matchbox cars. My Alfa Carabo was my favorite. We spent hours rolling those cars along the floor or on the ground outside while making car sounds. I’m sure it was maddening to anyone who had to listen to us, but no one ever complained. At least it kept us out of trouble. Other times we didn’t use toys at all. We acted out scenarios as if we were putting on a play, but we made it all up as we went along. We extemporized, riffing off of one another for what must have been hours. No one ever noticed or said anything, but I regularly played Lester’s wife or girlfriend. It seemed like a natural role for me, and I stepped right into it without giving it much thought.

I was never ashamed to pretend to be female, especially one attached to Lester’s male characters, but I must have understood there were limits that I dared not cross. I would continue to daydream about the little dramas we had acted out when I went home, and I nearly always pictured myself in Lester’s arms. I imagined Lester kissing me, too. They weren’t hot tongue kisses—maybe I was still too young for that—but they were romantic mouth-to-mouth kisses. I never told anyone about those fantasies, and I never tried to push the action in that direction when I was playing with Lester. But I wanted to. I wanted to. I wanted Lester to pretend to come home from work, and I wanted him to take hold of me, his missus. I wanted us to roll around on the floor, and when we stopped, I wanted him to be on top of me. I wanted him to look down at me, call me by a girl’s name, tell me he loved me, and kiss me and kiss me again. I was nine years old and writing a dime store paperback romance inside of my head. I loved Lester, at least as much as a kid that age can love. I went so far as to write his name in magic marker on the bottom of my sock drawer. I had that dresser until I was forty years old, so I was regularly reminded of my childhood crush.