When we were growing up in the late 1970s, my parents hired the nextdoor neighbor girl to babysit us. By "us" I mean Johnny and I. Johnny was my age. His mom was best friends with my mom, and so we became best friends, too. We shared babysitters, went off to camp together, and shared carpooling, all those things.
Marissa was the girl next door, and just saying that is funny, because she was. Seems like the concept of "The Girl Nextdoor" is far more fantasy than reality. But the truth was that she literally lived across the street in a ranch style house just like ours. Her family had a pool, but we had a big back deck. She style of babysitting was mostly to ignore us. We thought that was pretty cool. She'd watch American Bandstand with Dick Clark, and her favorite band was the Police and Tom Petty and Heartbreakers. She had turned 18 and went down to the state college for her freshman year. She was back for the summer, living at home. And our babysitter for those three months. She seemed like a grown up to us. Just a cool one, with a really hot body.
Johnny and I didn't have much sense of girls, other than what we'd learned from Daisy Duke in Dukes of Hazzard, and our favorite scene in Porky's, where the boys spy into the shower room. Or was that another movie? It's hard to recall, but there all the movies of that time seemed to involved boys our age spying on college girls. So, we followed suit. We'd often tell Marissa that we were heading up to the park (which was about six blocks up the hill by the water tower). She'd say, "whatever, don't get kidnapped." We'd take our baseball mitts and act like we were headed off to the park, and then, after rounding the corner, we'd cut back through our secret series of trails in the underbrush. We had small fort, command posts, three (yes three!) treehouses build and abandoned by past generations of kids in the suburban woods.
Marissa would love to mix home made "daquris" from my mom's supply. She'd water down the tequila bottles back up to the level, and mix in ice and hawaiian punch and blend it. She'd take her drink out on the porch, and spread our a towel, and sun tan. Eagerly, we'd wait for the moment of truth. We waited several times before Marissa felt certain that our trips to the park would last at least 2 hours. So after a while, she felt secure that we weren't going to come home and barge in on her. Finally, our secret plan paid off. She began peeling off her top when sun tanning.
We knew we had to get proof, though what we would do with such a photo had not been considered. It was more the James Bond thrill of snapping the spy photo. So we borrowed Johnny's mom's camera and snuck up into our lookout post.
One thing I should tell you about Marissa. Once she had her boyfriend over, which was against the rules. They were watching a movie about a swamp thing. I wanted to watch (Johnny wasn't over this time). They told me to beat it. They were on the couch, making out. I said I just wanted to watch the scary movie, and didn't care --they could kiss all they wanted. I said, I'd tell my mom if they didn't. Marissa yanked me over to her and laid a big, wet, sloppy tongue kiss on me. At least two minutes passed and then she pushed me away, and said: You were going to tell your mom what?
To be honest, her kiss horrified and stunned me. Her mouth tasted like licking a battery. I retreated to my room. She'd won, but now I had something to tell Johnny.
And so, I may never know if she knew or not that we watched her sunbathe. In hindsight, she might have been a lot wiser to boys than we could have imagined. The day we snuck a camera was the day she did something besides soak up sun and listen to her transistor AM radio. We watched as her hand slipped down between her legs and slowly began to massage. It dipped and disappeared. Her hips began to slowly churn. Her breathing became short and then sharp. and she gasped and then cried out and her hand flicked faster and faster. Then she napped.
And then we snuck back down our secret trail, out to the side path, around the corner and when to the park, where we sat and tried to figure out exactly what we'd just seen.
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