Peanut

1949. Wendy, who lived in the house to one side of ours, was the sort of friend you just didn’t see for weeks, and then all of a sudden, there she was, in charge of one of the big events in your life. She was like a pony, filled with spirit and pride and determined to live life in precisely the way that made the most sense and would bring her the most fun.

I liked that. Occasionally, it made me want to involve her in my life more often. I mean, there was nothing resembling romance here—I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in romance yet, though I didn’t, like many of my male friends, think girls were yucky and gross. She just sometimes seemed an apt friend, someone I could rely on. Even though, in many ways, she always proved that she wasn’t. She was sort of like a toy gun that had a way of going off at the wrong time, leaving scars.

In any case, she decided that we should meet behind her house one afternoon after school while the sun was still warming the grass and give one another an anatomy lesson. We would hide behind her parents’ garage, lower our shorts, and compare our private parts.

I was rather pleased with this project. I’d never seen what a girl looked like in the nether regions and I wanted to know. And there was an odd, indescribable thrill to the idea of showing off my own apparatus. My whatsit, thingie, “wee-wee” was a total mystery to me, of course. It could suddenly get smaller or larger or it could change shape, sort of like a snail’s antenna but, of course, it served quite well the purposes of peeing, which I often found very important…but also rather funny, for some reason. My best friend T.J. and I sometimes peed patterns into the dust with great pleasure, or left our mark far from our homes on the fences of vacant lots.

So Wendy and I marched rather giddily into her yard, behind her garage, and stood for a moment, each of us waiting for the other to be the first. Wendy was never to be outdone, though, so she pulled her shorts to the ground abruptly as if she were showing them she was definitely in charge. Showing me, as well.

Not yet looking at her, I pulled my own down as gracefully as I could. And we stood there.

I was shocked. “Wendy!” I said, looking with interest and concern at her crotch. “There’s nothing there!”

“Is too!” she responded, looking down. It’s called a vergina, and my mom has told me that mine is very healthy.”

She added, “I had hoped you might have found it attractive—you know—compared to other verginas.”

“But I don’t have any other verginas to compare it to, Wendy! And so far, it doesn’t look like a vergina is anything but a few little folds in your skin.”

Wendy looked at me with fierce anger in her eyes. Then she did a deep knee bend and pointed at herself. “See?” she said. I looked at her young apparatus. I saw.

“This,” she explained is where I go pee-pee. It’s a very handy thing.”

“But you can’t point it,” I said. “You can’t aim it.”

“Yes I can. I never miss the potty. I can aim.”

She looked at my young apparatus. “And what is that funny thing? It’s so small. Compared to my Dad’s wee-wee, it’s an itsy-bitsy midget.”

This was not going entirely well. “It gets the job done,” I said, starting to pull my shorts back up.

“Okay,” she said. “Fine. But what is it called?”

“Like you just said about your Dad’s. It’s a wee-wee.”

“No,” she countered. “It has an older people name. You could call mine a wee-wee, too, but it’s really a vergina.”

I zipped up my shorts. “Well,” I said, my voice darkened by regret, “I really don’t know what it’s called. I just call it my wee-wee.”

“What does your mom call it?”

I was silent again. “Wee-wee, I think.”

“We’re not getting anywhere here, are we, Billy? I think that, as soon as you can, you should ask your Mom what it’s called. Will you do that for me?” That, as it turns out, was the way her mother talked to her when she was getting angry, and when her mother yelled at her, you could hear it—easily—four streets away. So I quickly promised her, “Okay, I’ll find out,” and started out of the yard.

“Find out today,” she called to me. “Or I may get mad.”

Suddenly, I remembered once again why I didn’t play with Wendy all that often.

>>> 

I aroused my mother’s suspicion later that afternoon by saying I wanted to take a bath. “What’s up?” she asked. “You’ve never wanted to take a bath before.”

“I do today,” I explained pithily. “I actually like playing in the bathtub,” I explained.

Mother looked at me sternly. “Well, don’t splash water all over the place. If I have to clean up a bunch of water on the floor, I’m going to be very angry.”

“I know,” I said, as cheerily as I could. “I’ll be careful.”

“Darn right you will,” she affirmed, and marched me unceremoniously into the bathroom. “Take off your clothes while I fill the bathtub,” she ordered, “then bring your Howdy Doody towel over here. And don’t drop it on the floor.

When she had filled the tub, the water, as always, was far too hot, but I got into it without complaint. I dropped my World War II combat destroyer in and it quickly got lost among the bubbles. So I steered it carefully to a safe port and called to shore on what I pretended to be the boat’s radio, “We are taking on water. SOS. We are taking on water.” Then, ceremoniously, I pushed the boat underwater and it made its back-and-forth way to the bottom of the bathtub.

“Um, Mom?” I said, off-handedly. “What is my thing—you know, my wee-wee—really called?”

“Who wants to know?” Mother asked, and I hoped she didn’t see the flash of fear light up my eyes.

“I want to know,” I said. “I think I’m old enough to know what it’s called.”

She started to laugh. It was more of a sympathetic laughter than a derisive laughter. I was glad for that.

“It’s called a--” She was splashing the soap from my body and I didn’t quite hear what she said.

“A what?” I asked.

She repeated herself. But she couldn’t possibly have said that. A peanut? I distinctly heard her say, ‘a peanut.’ I would never, ever live this down. What would I do?

Finding no alternative, and hoping she would set me straight, I told Wendy that very evening, “My mother told me it’s called a ‘peanut.’”

“What?” Wendy cried out, laughing. “A peanut?”

“That’s what she said,” I affirmed.

“You’re crazy!” Wendy declared, and started to laugh and, once she had started to laugh, she started to howl.

“Billy’s got a peanut!” she yelled for the neighborhood to hear. “Billy’s got a PEANUT.”

I ran home. Waiting at the door for me was my Mom.

“Billy’s got a what?” she asked, slowly and evenly.

“It’s what you said!” I shouted, accusingly.

“And you, Mr. Dumbhead, went and told that to Wendy?”

I started to cry, feeling utterly trapped.

It only earned me one powerful slap on the bottom. Then Mom gave me a little lecture. “Be careful what you say to girls, especially that little girl. If you give her something that she can make you feel bad with, she’ll use it. It’s as simple as that.”

I nodded my head earnestly.

“Is that why you wanted to take a bath last night?” she asked and I kept nodding. “For some god-forsaken reason—and I don’t want to know what it was—you wanted to find out what your penis is called?” I stopped nodding.

“Penis?” I asked, sensing my way out of this mess.

“Yes,” Mom said. “Penis. But you haven’t really shown me you’re old enough to know that, like you said last night.”

As soon as I could sneak away, I ran next door and told Wendy—who was in the process of making a sign that read, simply, “Boys has peanuts”—that she had misheard me. “I said ‘penis,’ not ‘peanut’! This information I delivered with as much dignity as I could muster.

“What kind of word is ‘pee-niss’?” she demanded.

“What kind of word is ‘vergina’?” I countered.

She looked at me blankly.

“And Wendy,” I declared solemnly, “ I won’t be telling you any more secret things. Ever. Especially about…you know.”

“No, Billy, I don’t know.”

“Do too,” I argued.

“Not,” she said.

“Too,” I said. And I left, clutching at least a fragment of my dignity, which was buoyed by my resolve not to tell something like this to a girl again. Ever.