Swimming Sweet Arrow: A Novel Read online

  Acclaim for Maureen Gibbon’s

  SWIMMING SWEET ARROW

  “An amazing novel of hard lives and hard sex. Vangie Raybuck is a riveting original who goes all the way and then some—and who is able to look truth in the eye without blinking. Swimming Sweet Arrow is unflinching in its honesty and integrity. A wonderful debut!”

  — Paulette Bates Alden, author of Crossing the Moon

  “If a female Ernest Hemingway were contemporary and were to write a story of two young women and their raw, visceral, small-town lives, the story might well be Swimming Sweet Arrow.”

  — Kristianna Bertelsen, Express Books (San Francisco)

  “It’s exhilarating to find a fictional character who’s in control of her desires—even when they lead her into dangerous territory…. [Gibbon writes] with an artistry as straightforward as the arrow in the tide of her novel.”

  — Independent Weekly (Durham, NC)

  “I read Swimming Sweet Arrow in one impassioned sitting. Maureen Gibbon has done something brave and intelligent—and erotic.”

  — Susanna Moore, author of In the Cut

  “A startlingly candid debut novel.”

  — Chris Waddington, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “A sexually explicit novel that’s neither repulsively blunt nor falsely lyrical. For men who wonder what girls talk about when they talk about lust.”

  — Walter Kirn, GQ

  “The accomplishment of Swimming Sweet Arrow is in the voice—an affecting blend of innocence and experience, an attempt to give words to what seems inarticulate about love…. This coming-of-age story is both satisfying and unexpected, an account of swimming in deep water and navigating its currents alone.”

  — Maile Meloy, New York Times Book Review

  “Swimming Sweet Arrow is an almost crazily courageous knockout of a first novel, beautiful in its risky honesty.”

  — Elizabeth Tallent, author of Honey

  “Gibbon convincingly pinpoints the unembarrassed drives of late teenhood and the curious way that such energetic openings up to love, sex, and the world can cause some major shutdowns as well.”

  — Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “As the reader tumbles through this admittedly explicit novel, the realization dawns that it is merely written in the language of sex…. The words and vivid description provide a racy vehicle for deeper concepts of love, life, decisions, and growing up.”

  — Gina Temple, Ripsaw (Duluth, MN)

  “Refreshing…. The two friends’ closeness and unpredictability, even to each other, is one of the best things about Swimming Sweet Arrow.”

  — Ann Ryan, Creative Loafing (Charlotte, NC)

  “A harrowingly impressive debut… Gibbon’s writing is blessedly free of condescension…. She skillfully immerses us in this world of chicken factories and greasy spoons, of keg parties and drunken couplings. And she ultimately persuades us to care —deeply—about her unlikely but strangely endearing heroine.”

  — Kevin Riordan, New Jersey Courier-Post

  “Powerful…. An impressive accomplishment…. Maureen Gibbon’s first novel explores the many elements—violence, poverty, drug abuse, and religion—that can intertwine in unfathomable ways…. The sex scenes alone are enough to keep any hot-blooded reader turning pages.”

  — Kara Jesella, Nylon

  “There now it is all written down. The broken, working-class families, the sex, drugs, dead-end lives, and through it all the thing one really longs for: a true decency. Luminous, simple, tough, and written with stunning candor.”

  —James Salter, author of A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2000 by Maureen Gibbon

  Reading Group Guide copyright © 2001

  by Maureen Gibbon and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  “What Is This Gypsy Passion for Separation,” from The Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Elaine Feinstein, copyright © 1971,1981 by Elaine Feinstein. Used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: December 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-09310-1

  This is a work of fiction. While there is a real lake called Sweet Arrow, all other names, characters, places, and incidents are entirely the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, incidents, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Acclaim for Maureen Gibbon’s

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  A Reading Group Guide

  For my family

  … how completely and

  how deeply faithless we are, which is

  to say: how true we are to ourselves.

  — MARINA TSVETAEVA

  1

  WHEN I was eighteen, I went parking with my boyfriend Del, my best friend June, and her boyfriend Ray. What I mean is that June fucked Ray and I fucked Del in the same car, at the same time.

  The first time it happened was an accident. We’d been at a formal dance at the school, and we all wanted to go parking and kissing for a while. The speed we did—in the bath-rooms just outside the gym—was still in our systems, but the whooshing of June’s long, fancy dress and my long, fancy dress on the car seats drove us all over the edge. I think Del and Ray even came at the same time, what with all the rocking in the car and general excitement.

  After that, we planned the nights together. Each couple still had their private times—unlike Del, I couldn’t come with the others in the car—but all four of us liked the feel of the extra kissing, sucking, and nakedness going on. We went to the same cornfield each time, parked beneath the trees on the property line, and drank a case of beer. We drank and talked until, by some cue, the touching started and the talking stopped. When we fucked, Del and I didn’t talk to June and Ray, and they didn’t talk to us. The only sounds in the car were small groans and sighs and sometimes the slippery sound of cock moving into pussy. We used either Del’s or Ray’s car, and we took turns being in the backseat.

  On this particular night, we were in Ray’s car and Del and I had the front seat. After we screwed, I lay with Del between my legs, my knees opened as far as they could be between the seat and the dash. Two of our feet were up on the seat, and two were down there by the gas and brake.

  “I can’t believe we do this,” June said from the backseat. I could tell from her voice that she was feeling silly. “I’m best friends with you, V
angie, and there you are.”

  She and I could see each other —just eyes and the tops of heads—in the space between the seat and the door.

  “You broke my rhythm with all your humping,” Ray said from the back to tease Del, and when we all laughed, Del slipped out of me, slip, just like that.

  “Now I’m cold,” I said, and meant the wet place between my legs, but Del reached down on the floor of the car and gave me my shirt.

  “Cover up,” he said. “I’m going to piss.”

  “I’m out,” Ray said, and he climbed off June. He and Del straddled the car doors, legs going through the open windows. They had to climb out of the car like that because June and I never wanted them to open the doors and make the light go on. We liked to get dressed in the dark, grabbing our clothes from the floor, talking and laughing.

  “Their asses look so funny when they do that,” June said, and it was true. The whole side of the car filled with butt, and I couldn’t stop myself from watching. I mostly watched Del, but I snuck looks at Ray, too. He had dark hair that almost looked black, but his skin was ten times fairer than Del’s. He was taller than Del, and thicker through the chest, and I thought that made him seem right for June. When I squeezed June’s arm when we were acting crazy or when I wanted to bug her, it was soft in a way that made me want to go on touching it. I thought holding her had to be that way, too, and that Ray would be good at it.

  “They look silvery in the moonlight,” I said, and June nodded. She was sneaking looks at Del, too, but like the rest of what we did together, the looking June and I did at the other’s boyfriend did not seem strange or unnatural.

  By the time Del and Ray were coming back, June and I had put on our bras and shirts. I watched Del walk barefoot and naked across the ground. He looked handsome. He wore his hair long in the back, and the black hair framed his face and shoulders. Because his eyes seemed half closed and because of a small, crooked scar that split an eyebrow, Del’s face had a tough, lazy look that I liked. I also liked seeing behind that look when he smiled or was being sweet with me, or when he was on top of me, fucking me, and the skin around his eyes puffed up because he was moving into me so hard.

  There was something good about being able to see Del naked and walking toward me. I was able to look at his face and his chest and his penis, all at the same time. His body looked like it fit together, and it seemed like a dark, natural thing. What I liked best was how dark his cock and balls were, darker than the skin of his thighs and belly. I could not stop looking at the dark, good color, and just seeing him loosened something inside me. Of course he saw me looking—I was staring—and he smiled as he got back in the car.

  “So you like my cock,” he whispered when he slid onto the seat beside me. His teeth were crooked and doubled back on themselves in places, and I passed my tongue hard over them when I kissed him to give him his answer. He took my left hand and moved it to cover him, to hold him, and I thought what I always thought when I touched him there: that skin couldn’t be softer. It was like the skin behind your ear but even softer, and now he was damp against my hand.

  “I like it,” I said. I knew June and Ray probably heard the whole thing, but I didn’t care. I liked that Del talked to me like that, and I liked the way his face looked when he said those kinds of things to me. He was not afraid to do things, not afraid to try things with me, with my body.

  “Are you ready?” June asked.

  We always went to pee together, not because we were afraid of the woods or anything, but because it was friendlier to do it with someone else. She couldn’t see where my hand was, but I think she knew anyway. I let go.

  “Sure, now the lights can go on,” Ray said when we opened the car doors. We all laughed because he was sitting in the backseat, holding his shirt over himself. A line of hair snaked down his belly, and that’s where I could see how white his skin was.

  June and I walked to the first line of trees, where we could squat and pee. I even liked doing that: being outside and feeling the cool air between my thighs, the leaves and bits of dirt beneath my toes. We didn’t bring tissues to wipe ourselves but stayed and air-dried a bit.

  “I just leave it all here,” June said to me.

  “What?”

  “Everything,” she said. “Piss, come. It all just runs out of me.”

  “I know,” I said. It was why we never put on more than our shirts and bras—because we knew our pussies were so wet. I liked knowing that it wasn’t just piss running out of me but also Del. Something about being wet with his come made me happy in a way I didn’t have words for. It made me feel wild, I guess, and like a woman—but those words didn’t get at how I felt when I smelled that sharp smell or felt that slipperiness. When June and I talked about sex we sometimes used this one phrase: young and dumb and full of come. I didn’t feel dumb, but I liked the saying because it rhymed and because it used the word come. I didn’t wash any of it away before I went to bed, either. I might wash my feet, dirty from walking barefoot, but I’d leave that smell on me.

  “Are you staying over?”

  “I told my mom I was,” June said.

  “Good. I don’t want to be alone.”

  “I’m someone.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I’d heard talk in school about other couples screwing together, but as June and I walked back half-naked to the car, I knew that no one could ever be like us. No one would be better friends than June and me, and no one would screw like us. What other people did inside their cars or beside the lake didn’t matter. The four of us were inside our own web.

  All the way out to the house, Del and I sat in the backseat. He kept one arm on the door, his hand in the open air, and one hand between my thighs. I squeezed his hand with the muscles in my legs to get him to think of the other way I squeezed him —with the muscles in my pussy—and I put my arm around his shoulders. I felt tough and older when I put my arm around him. Del was a year older than I was, and I saw him as a man, different from other guys in our grade.

  “One time we’ll have to go camping,” Del said to me. “You can tell your dad you’re with her.” He rubbed his fingers over the wet part of my jeans.

  “Maybe she and Ray can go.”

  “I don’t give a shit what they do. I want to be with you.”

  I thought about how good it would be to sleep in a tent with him, and I smiled and made a secret sign on his shoulder blade with my fingernail—a butterfly. Sitting like that with him, I knew what I always knew after we’d been together: that it was sweet to Del, too. That’s what I saw in his face when he walked back to the car and asked me if I liked his cock. He was glad I liked his body, he was glad I liked to touch him. He would never say it that way, but I knew he felt it. Sweet, sweet, I thought when we were driving around the lake, which was called Sweet Arrow. Sweet arrow means straight arrow, an arrow that flies straight and true.

  “What are you thinking about?” Del asked me.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just about you.”

  NEITHER OF my parents wanted me, so I lived by myself in a run-down apartment my dad found for me. I shouldn’t say it like that. My mom offered to have me come and live with her in New Mexico, but I didn’t want to change schools and I didn’t want to leave Del. My dad wanted to be a bachelor again, so it seemed like the best plan for me to live on my own in the kitchenette. That was what my dad called the place he found for me. It was one room with a kitchen area and a sofa bed, and a separate little bathroom. The apartment was above a small-engine repair place on the way out of town, and I think my dad picked it because he was only about five miles down the road. He bought me groceries and checked on me once each night—to see how I was, and to make sure I didn’t have Del over. I guess that’s what he thought a dad did: buy groceries and be ready to raise hell.

  When the four of us got to the apartment that night, June and Ray and Del and I spent a long time hanging in the windows of Ray’s car, saying goodbye and kissing in the night air.
After being so long outside and feeling coolness on our skin, when June and I came in, we thought the apartment seemed stuffy. We opened windows and then started pulling the cushions off the sofa bed so we could go to sleep.

  “Do you think we’ll get tired of it?” June said when we were folding back the blankets.

  “Probably. After a while.”

  “Do you ever look at Ray?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “When I’m looking at Del sometimes I can’t stop from looking over.”

  “I look at Del.”

  “I know,” I said, nodding. “You can.”

  She went into the tiny bathroom then, to change into her nightgown. It didn’t matter that she and I had just been naked and screwing our boyfriends in the same car —June and I always gave each other privacy for getting changed. I knew her breasts were covered with Ray’s hickeys, and she knew my breasts and thighs were covered with Del’s. But for whatever reason, we did not come out and stare at each other.

  When June came out of the bathroom, I already had our water pipe and pot out on the sofa bed.

  “Do you ever think we should stop smoking so much?” she said.

  “Come on. Young and dumb. We’ll stop another night.”

  “We always say that, too,” she said, and we laughed.

  I didn’t care. I wanted to smoke and think about Del. June sat up cross-legged on the bed while I filled the pipe with dope we’d cleaned the other night. Sometimes I thought of what it would be like to sneak Del into the apartment and sleep with him all night, but I did not want to take a chance on my father’s wrath. Besides, it was all right to be sitting there with June. She was more than a friend, and more than even a best friend.

  After I was high, I said, “Sometimes Del gets really deep inside me.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It hurts sometimes, but I still like it. It’s like he’s at the very end of me.”