The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is the third George and Lisa story. A Broken Vase was the first, Hide and Seek was the second.
This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons.
I have told versions of this story before in other venues. It took place over fifty years ago, during the height of the Cold War, which explains some anachronisms. George was nine and in the third grade and his sister Lisa was seven and in the first grade. They lived in a place where they seemed to know and be related in some way to everyone around them. In a way it was a fairy-tale existence. Because the adults, traumatised themselves, did not burden their children with knowledge of world events.
Told in the voice of Lisa:
We sat in our elementary school, which was across from the high school a few blocks down the parish road towards the ferry. We were taught that, for five decades after the revolution, various treaties were made between Great Britain, Spain, France, and the young united States.
(Many independent, autonomous -- lowercase “united” -- plural, united “States.” All equals in a confederation, not the singular, reborn through blood and fire, “United States” that we knew.)
These treaties legally made the many swamps, bayous, rivers, and inlets on the Gulf of Mexico a “no-man's-land” where armies and sheriffs had no jurisdiction. Parts of the parish had been the refuge of Jean Lafitte and other pirates who served as Andrew Jackson’s private navy helping achieve victory at the Battle of New Orleans. A century later these private islands had ignored prohibition and state laws enforcing it with impunity.
Four decades after prohibition-- when George was nine, and I was seven years old -- we were planning on going out “trick or treating” on Halloween with our cousins. Hugh, Monica, and Jamie were the children of mom’s oldest sister Edith and her husband Dean. Then our cousins from dad’s side, Paul and his older brother Kevin joined us. Hugh was twelve and Kevin eleven; Paul and Monica were George's age.
I’ve always been especially close to Jamie, who is eleven days my junior. We always seemed to be causing some commotion together. “Dear Mrs. Deveraux,” a note home from my teacher would predictably say. One time it continued to say: “Lisa and Jamie have been annoying together in my class once again.” Mom’s reply to that note read: “Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention. I shall request of them that they annoy you separately in the future…”
Is it any wonder that I am as I am?
Nobody that we knew had store-bought Halloween costumes back then. All of us made our own. George and Paul decided that the two of them, Jamie, and I would be part of an ensemble. So they went through some old trunks and found things to make us all costumes. Paul was a pirate ship captain wearing an oversized blue blazer. It had yellow cord epaulettes and a blue tri cornered hat made of painted cardboard. George was the first mate. He wore a red and white horizontal striped shirt and a black bandana on his head.
As we went from house to house about our neighborhood, Hugh, Kevin, and Monica were much faster. Soon we had split into two groups. George and Paul helped us up and down steps and over curbs. They carried our bags of treats, greeted people at the door for us, and thanked them for their compliments on the originality of our costumes and for their offerings -- because we were unable to. Jamie and I couldn’t even wave because of our costumes.
They had us girls wear long dresses. Then they coiled a long rope around each of us from our knees up to our arms -- which the rope pinned to our sides -- then up almost to our shoulders. We were hemp encased mummies. As a finishing touch, they tied a bandanna in each of our mouths.
An older lady who lived across the street from the lake looked at us when we came to her door. “Who are you?” she asked.
George bowed and said to her: “Madame, may I present Monsieur Captain Jean Laftte, I am his able bodied First Mate, and these lovely ladies are our prisoners.” Mixing in the story line from ‘Last of the Mohicans’, a book that he loved, George said: “We believe them to be the daughters of Admiral Cochrane himself.”
It was not a large town. So we soon returned home to eat out treats and just hang out together in our basement.
Pretending to be unable to untie me, George said. “Gee, Lisa, uh…”
“What?”
“The knot… It’s pulled tighter.”
“We could cut it off,” Paul said, abandoning his half-finished work at freeing Jamie while smiling a cat-ate-the-canary-grin.
“Naww, might cut her,” said George.
“So, what are we going to do?” asked Paul.
“No idea…”
“Knock it off. It isn’t funny,” Jamie said.
“Yes, it is,” said George. But he started to untie me.
It really was funny, or at least I thought so.
As we ate some very hard peanut brittle we role played Alice and Cora Munro -- the colonel’s daughters captured by Indians evacuating Fort William Henry in James Cooper’s masterpiece. We didn’t have a television set yet. For entertainment we read the “good” parts of books to each other. We tossed in what we knew, messed up and fudged the details a bit, and often mixed in parts of different stories.
Kids today have no idea what they are missing, we thoroughly enjoyed it.
Being older -- I never let Jamie forget that fact -- I played the dark haired Cora, and Jamie was the fair-haired Alice. Paul was Uncas and George was Hawk-eye. They had just rescued us from Magua, whom in a rewrite, Uncas had defeated mano-a-mano at the cliff’s edge. At first the pairing was me with Paul, and Jamie was with George. We tentatively kissed and touched.
Then, some days later, it was Paul with Jamie and me with George. We kissed each other in front of our cousins and it was just part of the game. Sometimes the boys tied us girls up before rescuing us. Sometimes we thanked our rescuers before they untied us. Sometimes Magua’s braves kissed and touched us after they tied us up. We always went slow while we played. Then afterward, we talked about what we had done, and planned what we were going to do next.
It was such an invaluable learning experience. We learned true empathy -- to feel for our playmates as if we were them -- and to read a situation. We didn’t detract from the game by breaking character. We pushed boundaries, but with understanding. We learned how to communicate and share at an early stage when it was lots of fun but there wasn’t any hurry. Jamie and I could be completely vulnerable with George and Paul and they made sure that we were both happy and safe.
Once, when we had the house all to ourselves, George took me by the hand.
“Come with me Alice,” he said.
Hmm, this was new. I was always Cora, never Alice. But I went along. “Yes, Uncas.”
He led me up the stairs to the bathroom where he started to undress me. Unbuttoning, and then sliding the shoulders of my jumper down. I smiled and moved this way and that way to make the job easier. He knelt and removed my shoes and socks.
I watched him. Both of us were smiling as he stood up and he took off all of his clothing.
As he turned the shower on he said: “Isn’t the waterfall beautiful, Alice?”
“Yes, Uncas, it is.”
When the water temperature was comfortable he extended his hand.
“Step into it with me.”
I stepped into the shower with my big brother. He kissed me on the mouth just as we imagined that the two lovers had in the novel.
“I love you Alice,” Uncas said, in between kisses.
“I love you Uncas,” Alice said, between returning those kisses.
We rarely broke character. So when we did it was for a good reason.
“I love you Lisa,” George whispered very, very softly into my ear.
I knew that my brother loved me. He had told me so out loud on occasion, often in front of others. But somehow -- naked in the shower and me holding him as he held me -- it was a much more significant emotion that he was communicating. Something personal as well as familiar...
“I love you too, George,” I whispered very softly into his ear as the spray from the showerhead enveloped us. Then I kissed him again.
After we had read a story about Olive Oatman -- who had been taken by Indians as a girl -- the four of us “rebooted” the story. Cora and Alice fell in love with two Indian braves from Magua’s group -- also portrayed by George and Paul. We thanked them with kisses for rescuing us from the English. Remember, our ancestors had been on the losing side back then. Saving us from living boring lives as the wives of British Army Officers.
Jamie and I took off our clothes and asked them to make us “real Indian maidens,” and we knew what that meant, at least in the broad strokes.
The boys marked our chins with lines from the juice of some berries we had just enjoyed beforehand. Marks of belonging to a tribe, ownership by a family group. Then they both took their clothes off.
We had read how Indian families were small working groups rather than individual pairings. So it wasn’t as two pairs, but rather as a group of four that we laid down naked on the rug and started touching and exploring one another’s bodies.
The boys have never been into one another “in that sort of way.” Not that it would really bother me. I explored and kissed Jamie’s prissy and she did the same with mine. But it was so much fun the way that every ounce of the energy flowed through me or Jamie when both of the boys were touching us at the same time.
George and Paul each tried really hard to see deep up inside of me, and inside of Jamie. But they couldn’t see past those two little flaps of skin barring the entryway. The boys stroked me and found nice spots where I reacted to their fingertips. I hadn’t read the term “orgasm” yet, but I had one. Yes, it’s possible. But it was different before. Maybe because our hormone levels spiked later, or maybe we just got better at it.
The guys made both me and Jamie feel really nice. Then they kissed our prissys and told us that we were beautiful. Neither of them made a big deal over kissing or touching where the other boy had kissed or touched. Then we touched the guys. We played with their chests, and butts, and of course their penises.
I’d done it before with George. So I showed Jamie how to take two fingers and gently roll a foreskin back over the head so we could get a really good look at Willie’s one-eye. I knew that rubbing the folded skin over the shaft felt really good, so naturally I did just that. Then Jamie did the same thing that she saw me do with George with Paul.
George had licked his finger to transfer some saliva to his foreskin’s opening, to make peeling it back easier. I did as I had done before with George in private. I cut out the middleman. I gave Paul’s willy a quick lick to transfer my saliva to the opening.
Jamie and I played with the boy’s penises and they became erect from the stimulation. Not as big as they would get when we played with them later… Again, was it just because of the lack of hormones in sufficient quantities, or because we were all physically smaller back then?
I don’t know. But both of the boys had nice pleasurable dry orgasms. Then I played with Jamie much more intensely than I had before. I went right for that bud at the apex of Jamie’s curtains in a way she would not be able to stand today -- it would just be too much, too fast. But back then “the direct route” truly worked wonders.
-- Lisa Ann
For the next story in this series, go to The George and Lisa Story, Part 4 of 8: Playing House