Chapter 1
Peggy Stewart sat in the baking heat, only a slip around her-and that damp with her sweat. The city was undergoing one of its regular "unusually severe heat spells." Not that Peggy knew. She rarely saw a newspaper-that didn't come in Grandma's budget which was restricted to minimal groceries and maximum bottles of gin-and when Peggy did see a paper she didn't read it. Sometimes she looked at the funnies. She giggled over Pogo though she wasn't always sure she understood the sometimes funny printing and she often lingered over Li'l Abner, studying the lush forms of Daisy Mae and Moonbeam McSwine, comparing them with her own thirteen-year-old anatomy, which was skimpy-but only by comparison.
Peggy had, for instance, much more figure than the gaunt sketches of models wearing what professed to be the latest mod fashions, but not the ballooning bosom of Moonbeam or Daisy Mae. Nor their swell of hip. Peggy's hips were trim, rounded and went rather well with her small, tight rear.
At the moment, Peggy had discarded the paper as reading matter, preferring it, folded, as a fan. She could lift the edge of her slip and fan a brief breeze up her legs and over her pussy, a momentary relief from the heat. Or pull the torn lace top away from her bubbies and fan them, peering down her front.
The bubbies were small but firm, well rounded, with little amber-colored nipples that, for reasons Peggy didn't yet understand, could get hard and stand up stiffly. That happened, she noted, when her little box got hot. Or was it the other way around?
Her little box was hot now, but not the type of heat Peggy meant. The kind that made her feel excited was an inside heat, something that started in her little box and radiated out, warming her stomach and tightening her chest. And that was when her nipples got hard.
It often happened when she sat at this window watching the two whores across the alley. One of them was old and tired, with odd blue splotches, like old bruises, on her legs and across her breasts. And the breasts! Out of their confining bra the breasts sprawled and sagged.
They jiggled when she walked and flopped around as she turned, smiling coquettishly at some man, seated, Peggy assumed, on the sagging bed.
Not that Peggy had seen the bed. She just assumed it was sagging because Grandma's bed- never really made up and the sheets grimy unless Peggy changed them-was sagging. A onetime masterpiece of brass pipes in torturous design, it now leaned inward at both ends and drooped in the middle. And Grandma flung herself into it and snored with hiccupy irregularity. Especially after a bottle of gin.
Never having seen the bed, how did she know there was a man seated on it-or lying on it watching the old babe's ponderous cavortings? Well, the man usually came in with the old broad, rarely the same man twice, Peggy had noticed. Usually a little drunk. Sometimes very drunk. Knowing Grandma, Peggy was a competent judge of the degrees of drunkenness -from the swearing-at-fate stage to falling-down-blind staggers.
After a few slobbery kisses or inept pawings, the man usually staggered out of Peggy's range. By twisting and leaning, Peggy had seen the foot of a bed, not unlike Grandma's. With a gleaming brass knob and a segment of curlicued pipe.
So, since the man didn't show up again for some time-until after the old bag had played her wearied version of a strip-tease and gone out of view toward the bed-Peggy could assume that was where he was.
There was no doubt in Peggy's mind what the old bag and the man did. They screwed. They fucked. They fornicated. Peggy could recite a whole list of such words. And did, because sometimes just the words made her little box get hot and start excitements way up her belly and under her bubbies.
The younger one was lots more fun to watch. Peggy wasn't sure she was really a whore, though obviously she got paid for entertaining men. Peggy had actually seen the money change hands. But mostly the young one sort of stuck with a dark, almost handsome young man, who kind of acted as if he owned her. Peggy considered him bossy and officious, but obviously the young woman liked him. Or maybe she tolerated him. From the tired way she sometimes acted, Peggy suspected she only tolerated him.
And sometimes they had violent quarrels, usually ending when he slapped her and knocked her back on the bed.
Peggy could see that bed. And what went on. Sometimes. When the young one forgot to pull down the shade or just didn't bother.
The love-making in that apartment often got very interesting. Peggy would watch, sitting up on her couch, whenever she saw the reflection of the light from the young one's apartment. The bedroom light made a special pattern on Peggy's wall, hitting the framed motto on the wall. The motto was printed to look like somebody had done it in embroidery, but it wasn't real embroidery. The motto was kind of odd, too. It said:
"O wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursills as ithers see us.
It wad from mony a blunder free us
And foolish notion."
Peggy had thought the spelling funny. Real crazy. But teacher had said that was Scotch writing, and quite proper. But even that hadn't made the motto make sense. Except vaguely. Occasionally Peggy got a glimmer.
Just suppose the old bag across the alley could see her own ponderous cavortings. Would that change her? Would it free her from blunders? Peggy doubted it, with thirteen-year-old practicality. Seeing herself through other eyes more than likely would just make her unhappy.
So maybe the motto wasn't so smart-or Mister Robert Burns who wrote it. People don't change. Not deep down. Take Grandma. Every week, just before the check arrived and she had been rather spectacularly and nauseously sober for several hours, she studied herself in the mirror out of bleary eyes, touching her sagging mouth, her stringy, greasy hair.
"Ain't never gonna touch the stuff again. Not ever! Look what it done to me! Handsome I was. Downright handsome..." Then make those ghastly coquettish smirks at the mirror. "Men thought I was beautiful." And she'd cry a little, sloppily, the tears furrowing through the gray accumulation of dirt and old powder on her cheeks. "Could be again? If I just could kick the sauce..."
Grandma soon fell off the wagon. And for some obscure reason blamed Peggy. And Peggy's mother, long dead.
"Yeah, long dead and out of it! Left me with a brat to raise. That she did. Her own misbegotten brat." Grandma sometimes forgot Peggy was that brat and talked to her-no, talked at her as if she were somebody else, maybe even somebody who could set things right, like God.
"She coulda lived. He'd 'a married her. He was an honorable man. Why'd she have to take all them pills-and quit. And leave me with her brat. Somebody coulda changed things.... He was a fine man. Look what he done for me. And the brat. Every week, regular as clockwork, I get my check. If'n you just hadn't let her die, he'd 'a married her. And we'd all live in that fine house of his."
Like it was Peggy's fault Mommy had died. Which, in a way, it was. Even Peggy understood that, but only dimly. And as if Peggy-or whoever Grandma was talking to (aiming it at Peggy) could have changed things. Could even change them now. Grandma often pleaded with that someone to change things, to make things "right." And then send Peggy out for a fifth of gin, "to cure my ills, child, to cure my ills."
Grandma's ills needed curing at very regular intervals, like every few minutes if the gin was handy-and Peggy sent out for another bottle if it wasn't. Peggy didn't mind. Grandma was more tolerable drunk than sober. Drunk she only wept and mumbled to herself and fell into bed, to snore away the day. Or the night. Sober she blamed Peggy for all her miseries including her arthritis and her varicose veins. Or talked wildly to that someone who might have changed things. Still might.
So Peggy kept her little window on a small portion of the world and lived there, vicariously. Or watched it, as a spectator at a play. The old bag and the young whore-who just might not be a whore but was certainly liberal in her attitudes.
The young one intrigued Peggy. She had a slim body-Peggy often saw her naked, even when there wasn't a man around-with bubbies not much bigger than Peggy's. Her hips were wider and more voluptuously curved, but her legs weren't any rounder or prettier than Peggy's-and Peggy set herself some arbitrary and oddly impersonal standards, the cartoons, the few newspaper pictures she saw of fashion models and the occasional beauty queens-who were always over-endowed, as if they had entered a milk production contest and won.
But what Peggy enjoyed most were the sessions with a man. The young one did a slow strip tease as if she enjoyed it, as if she were aware of her body and proud of it, wanting to show it off.
Lots of times the man didn't let her finish the strip tease. He'd just grab her and start nuzzling at her neck and kissing her bubbies and playing with her box-which had a nice little muff over it, while Peggy's was still as bare as a baby's ass.
The man would finger that little box, opening the lips and playing inside with his finger. Peggy, watching, tried that and found it excruciatingly delightful. A kind of pain that felt so good you didn't want to stop until something happened, which it usually did.
Something very breathtaking, tightening Peggy's chest and making her legs feel weak-and fireworks going off inside her.
It probably didn't compare with the things happening to the young woman, who had a real live man playing with her and then stabbing her with his pecker, right up the little cunt. Peggy tried to imagine what that felt like and sometimes, if she worked hard enough on her own little box while watching the man screw the young woman, she thought maybe she had reached it-whatever it was.
It made the man hump very hard and very fast and the young woman writhed and twisted and slammed her little cunt right up at the man. And then they were both very still, holding each other tight, and then, with quick, jerky movements-and a final big shudder before they both went limp.
Peggy had long since decided that, if she could find a man willing and the opportunity, she would fuck. And yet she was afraid, with an oddly vague and nameless fear. A sort of "suppose something happened" fear. Not that she quite knew what might happen. Except, of course, a baby. But any silly knew how to take care of that. There were devices-they seemed clumsy and ineffectual to Peggy but some of the older girls at school said they were fine and you didn't really feel them. For her own part, Peggy preferred The Pill but had never had any occasion to dip into the small bottle of them she had swiped from a school locker.