We'll get clean together

31 May 2011 06:03 AM Categories: Writing prompts

The scene: a teenaged couple, 1950s style, the boy with well-cropped slicked back hair, wearing khakis, a short-sleeved plaid shirt, the girl in ponytail, with a Peter Pan collared blouse and a skirt that sashays as she walks. They are at a fair with the cotton candy and the cheap stuffed animals and the rides that whirl around and around. His voice cracks and hers is soft and he waits until the night is almost over to reach for her hand (the free one, without the luridly colored toddler-sized teddy bear – he has to reposition himself without looking like he is repositioning himself). His palms are sweaty, hers are dry, and his dampness sucks them together.

Later, on her doorstep, the porch light on, the properly coiffed mother waiting in the kitchen, they kiss, a peck, hard lips, stiff shoulders.

The scene: blue jeans and tight shirts and fast cars, the James Dean wannabes with the whiskey and the rebellion and the Freudian underpinnings (see the mother with her clinging ways, her eyes lingering romantically on the boy as he slams the door and leaps into the heavy metal car?). The girl doesn’t wear skirts and smokes cigarettes and there they are groping in the back seat. Their hands are like smoke, they drift here and there, it’s the smell of seduction, of the hand down the underwear and the pressure of going beyond and the unbuttoning and unzipping, and who wants to go to fairs anyway unless you can start a fight?

He drops her off two blocks from home and she climbs up the trellis to her window. Ravished. Rebellious. His mother is waiting up for him with Ovaltine and crackers and runs her hands through his greased mop, tells him how handsome he looks. His entrance, all alcohol fumes and cigarette smoke, is dramatic. His father sleeps in the spare bedroom.

I want the bad dirty fun, the darkness of wrist holds and secret corners, the make-out sessions in tunnels. Don’t give me fresh-scrubbed young men or polite conversation. A friend recently told me that the stereotype is true, that every woman wants to be ravished on the dining room table, the cutlery and placemats pushed to the floor. We want the spontaneity, the badness of it.

And it might be true. It might. You can clean it all up later on, wash away the crumbs, attend to the scratches and marks, the moment of passion over.

From the prompt "Good clean fun." The post title comes from a White Stripes song, "Ball and Biscuit."

I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.

Image from a 1950s album cover by K'vitsh.

Tags: A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, writing prompt, good clean fun

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