They say it’s worse to be ugly. I think it must only be different. If you’re pretty, you are subject to one set of assaults; if you’re plain you are subject to another. Pretty, you may have more men to choose from, but you have more anxiety too, knowing your looks, which really have nothing to do with you, will disappear. Pretty girls have few friends. Kicked out of mankind in elementary school, and then kicked out of womankind in junior high, pretty girls have a lower birth rate and a higher mortality. It is the beauties like Marilyn Monroe who swallow twenty-five Nembutals on a Saturday night and kill themselves in their thirties.
Pretty or plain, by the time you survive puberty, your job in life is pretty much cut out for you. In either case, you must somehow wheedle back into that humanity from which you have been systematically excluded since you learned to walk. Among the ruling fraternity whose members can often barely hide their contempt for you, you must find one sponsor willing to brave ridicule for love of you. You must make him desire you more than manliness. For boys are taught that it is weak to need a woman, as girls are taught it is their strength to win a man.
When on the brink of puberty I emerged from behind my braces with a radiant smile, long black eyelashes, and a pink glowing skin, my troubles were only beginning. I suppose I should have expected a hitch: in the fairy tales too there was usually a steep price to pay for a wish fulfilled. The Blue Fairy had blessed my face all right, but suddenly there was my body. I loathed it. It frightened me, it was so unpredictable. It was nothing if not trouble. People were always ready to make fun of it. They made fun of it for not having breasts, and then they made fun of it for having them. It had once supported me in the trees and on the exercise bars, but I could no longer trust it. I hated walking on the street inside it. On the slightest provocation I blushed crimson, and then they made fun of it for that. My very blood betrayed me. What had my body to do with the me inside?
One day I got out of the bath bleeding down there, and from the nervous way my mother said it was “natural” after I screamed for her from the bathroom, I knew for sure I was a freak.
“Stay calm. I’m going to explain the whole thing to you,” she said. “It’s really nothing to get upset about, dear.” She smiled and patted my cheek as blood trickled down my rippleless thigh to my unshaven calf.
I was way past being upset. I was so horrified by my sudden wound that I was detached, as though I were watching a mildly interesting home movie of myself. My leg had known blood before—there were scabs and scrapes along the shinbone and around the ankles, and cinders permanently imbedded under the skin of both knees—but never blood before from there. That it didn’t burn or sting like other wounds only made it more sinister. I was sure my curious finger had injured something. I was probably ruined. It was likely too late even to confess.
“Sit down on the toilet and wait a minute while I go get something. And don’t worry, darling.” She sounded almost pleased as, leaving the room and closing the door behind her, she chuckled to herself, “Well, well, well.”
I examined the water still in the tub, lapping gently at the dirty ring. A faint trail of blood led from the tub to the sink where I, a good girl, had stood avoiding the bathmat. Was there blood in the bath water too? Oh, no! There was blood on my fingers and now blood smeared on the towel which other days polished to gleaming my sunburnt skin, cleansed in the chlorine of the public pool. What was taking her so long? Everything I touched was getting soiled.
Seated on the toilet, I looked down at myself. It was hard to see, not like my brother’s. The mysteries were inside—to keep us, I guessed, from seeing them. To use a mirror, even in this crisis, would have been suspect (suppose she walked in and saw me?), though indeed it might have helped, as my father had taught me it helped to watch the dentist in a mirror drilling out tooth decay. I had always hidden it so carefully, a mirror now would be doubly suspect. I could hear my father urging over the hum of the drill: watch and relax, reeeelax, let go, and the pain had somehow slipped away. But my father couldn’t advise me now. Anyway, if I relaxed now, wouldn’t the blood come streaming out? I tightened up.
The blood wasn’t flowing, exactly. Every so often, when I thought it had stopped and formed a scab, more would ooze out without registering as sensation at all. Like cells seen through a microscope, the blood moved slowly, surreptitiously. It wasn’t the familiar color, either—it was ominously deeper.
At last mother came back, carrying equipment. She locked the door behind her and shored me up with a smile. “Now,” she began. “This is called a sanitary belt.” She held it up. “It holds the sanitary napkin.” Like a stewardess demonstrating the oxygen mask, she held them up, the long bandage dangling by its tail from her index finger and thumb. Sterile.
“Stand up, dear. Now, slip the belt around your waist. The tabs in the front and back. That’s right. There. Now the napkin. It absorbs the flow. I’ll keep them in here now, with the towels, so you’ll know where to find them each month.” (She smiled for the future: “I always tried to be a good mother,” I would someday hear her say.) “I’ll put it on for you this time, but you’ll have to learn to do it yourself. The side with the blue thread goes on the outside, like this. First you fold in the edges, like this, test it to make sure it’s secure, like this, then turn it around to the back and do the other end the same way. Not too tight or it’ll chafe. There. Now turn around. … Good! Now let me explain.”
My mother’s textbook words droned on and curdled like sour milk. Every month? If it happened once a month for a lifetime, why had I never seen these bandages before? If it happened to everyone, why hadn’t my best friend Jackie, who had large breasts, told me about it? Now I knew I was an anomaly. One of my breasts was larger than the other, like one of my feet. Some of the girls had hair under their arms and between their legs, but not I. Instead of having hair down there I would have this awful bleeding. People would know. The sanitary napkin which hung between my legs was already molding to the shape of my thighs, a parasite sucking my blood. I shuddered. How could I possibly go out of the house wearing it?
“… and passes through the vagina.”
In our family we had never called it anything, and now she was calling it a “vagina.” Unutterable word. It was better than “cunt” or “pussy”—boys’ words—but for me they were all unutterable. Twelve years old and I had never called it anything but “down there.” Except for the one time I had furtively looked at it in a hand mirror, I had never seen one. I had caught flashes of my mother’s large breasts, and a rare glimpse of her pubic hair, but that was all. I had giggled over the hygiene book of a friend’s older sister (we too would have hygiene in high school), but there were no pictures in it—only diagrams of inside organs, like liver, uterus, bladder, and tubes, all as invisible as lungs, and as disgusting.
Finished and self-satisfied, my mother put her arm around me and kissed the tip of my nose. “My sweet Sasha, one night you go to sleep a little girl, and the next day you wake up a young woman. You’ll be a lovely woman, Sasha.” But I knew I was not a woman. I was a child, frightened, unable to comprehend what was happening. Nothing had been explained; everything had at least two meanings. I tried to pass as normal, but inside I knew I was a freak.
Submerging myself in junior high, I found all my classmates plunging recklessly into the pulsing Baybury swim. They dived and surfaced and turned in unison with the precision of mackerel, as though their medium were the world. How was it, I wondered, that they all seemed to know exactly what they were about, following currents I never felt? They politicked at lunch hour, dipping their ears into one another’s secrets, living on lemon cokes and loyalty, while I, watching from the edges, a starfish clinging to a rock, waited for the current to slow down enough for me to get the feel of it. One week they decorated one Barbara for her “perfect” legs and another week another Barbara, and I, studying those imponderables, couldn’t even understand what they meant. Were my legs good or bad? There was no knowing. I pretended to understand, acquiescing in my classmates’ verdict that Barbara H.’s legs were the best there were, like Susan S.’s sense of humor, and I whispered with the others as they swam by. But to me a leg was a leg, and, unsure of myself, I remained mystified. If I were really pretty, why, I wondered, did boys ridicule me? Why did girls whisper when I walked by?
Actually, there was plenty for them to whisper about if they only knew. Between my legs I had found an invisible button of flesh, sweet and nameless, which I knew how to caress to a nameless joy. I was pretty sure no one else had one, for there was no joy button in the hygiene book, and there was not even a dirty name for it. Though I listened carefully, I never heard anyone, boy or girl, so much as allude to it, nor was it pictured on the diagram in the Kotex box. Once, my anxiety overcoming my embarrassment, I had tried to ask my friend Jackie about it. But lacking a name or description for it, I couldn’t even present the subject. When Jackie simply looked at me blankly, little beads of shame dampened my forehead, and I shut up. After that, I never dared question anyone. Evidently, only starfish like me had joy buttons. Accepting my difference, I scrambled anxiously to keep it secret as best I could. Suddenly swimming out of my depth, I felt weighted down by more and more shameful secrets until it was difficult just to stay afloat. At night in bed I would swear to caress my joy button only once, and then, breaking my promise, give myself up to it. I expected something terrible to happen, but I couldn’t help it. Trying to control my controlling obsession, I led myself into strange nocturnal rituals and odd compulsions. The more I could prolong my caress before my joy button “went on,” the more often I allowed myself to stroke it. I would count the strokes and try to break my record. I was torn between prolonging the joy and getting it over with before I heard my parents coming upstairs.
There were other secrets I was powerless to control. In the Majestic Theater where we congregated on Saturday afternoons to watch Frances Gifford in her leopard sarong enact another episode of Jungle Girl, the boys who scrambled to sit beside me sometimes tried to rest their hands on my thigh or, slipping their arms around my shoulders, dangle their fingers down on my breast. If they really liked me, would they handle me so? I knew I shouldn’t let them, but I was afraid to stop them and cause a scene. If I sat quietly and held my breath, maybe the other girls wouldn’t find out. The dilemma was too shameful to face straight on; nothing could make one scandal-proof. I crossed and uncrossed my legs, folded and unfolded my arms, and prayed the hands would go away but leave the boys.
It was the same at the swimming pool in the summer: I was ashamed to be seen in a bathing suit, but more ashamed to be ashamed. I forced myself into the pool every day to disguise my shame, and blushed to be seen inside my body. And when I could I hunched my shoulders to conceal my breasts or hid under a towel.
On the way home from the pool, there was no hiding. Walking home with the other girls we would run the gauntlet among gangs of marauding boys from other schools who hooted at us from passing cars, pulled up beside us, or followed along behind making lewd remarks. Frightened, we’d tense up, step fast, and keep our eyes straight ahead, pretending to ignore them until they finally got bored and left us alone. We had no other defense. Sometimes we’d be followed all the way home; sometimes we’d be threatened and cursed. The worst of it was not knowing a tease from the real thing. After a while I decided it was safer to take a bus than walk home from the pool or the movies, even if I had a long wait for the bus by myself. I lived farther out than the other girls and always had some distance to walk alone. Better to be insulted at a bus stop than followed on a lonely suburban road.
One evening I was waiting for the bus alone, carrying my wet suit rolled up in a towel under my arm, when a station wagon full of boys pulled up beside me. As usual, I pretended not to see them, until someone called my name.
“What’s the matter, Sasha, stuck up?”
I looked up. Inside the wagon I saw Al Maxwell, an older boy from my block, and what seemed to be half the football team.
“Want a ride, Sasha? Come on, we’ll take you home.”
“No thanks,” I said politely, “I’ll wait for a bus.” I didn’t trust them.
“What’s the matter, you scared?” said someone. They were all laughing. “Come on, we won’t hurt you.”
I was flattered and frightened at once, the old dilemma. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t know how to refuse without appearing ridiculous or chicken or hurting their feelings. I wanted to be a good sport.
I hesitated and looked behind me. There was no bus in sight.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” said Jimmy Brennan, a star, opening the door for me. “Get in.” When he smiled at me, I wavered. “Don’t worry,” he said kindly.
I swallowed hard and got in.
Ten minutes later we were driving on a road I’d never seen.
“Where are we going?”
“Oh, just for a little ride. Don’t worry.”
When we were all the way out to Sharon Falls, halfway to Akron, they parked the wagon in the woods and Jimmy Brennan unzipped his fly and took out his thing. I started to cry. They said if I didn’t touch it they’d kick me out of the wagon and make me walk home.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to stay a nice girl. Besides, I was terrified of Jimmy’s thing. Part of me wanted to see it with an evil desire, but I was afraid if I actually touched it I’d throw up. I saw it gleaming white out of the corner of my eye while the boys were busy making jokes, and I could tell it was hideous and enormous. Oh, why me? I hated myself.
“It won’t bite you.”
“You better touch it soon, or we’ll make you kiss it.”
“If you don’t touch Jimmy’s, you’ll have to touch Al’s. His is much bigger.” They all laughed.
“Touch it.” “Touch it.” “Touch it.” “We won’t tell.”
I knew there were too many of them not to tell. I was going to have to touch it—there were so many of them and only one of me. I knew that the longer I waited the worse it would be. But even after my will had capitulated, it was a long time before I could bring myself even to look at it.
It was hairy and repulsive. Quickly I turned my eyes as far from it as I could and jabbed at it with a finger on an outstretched arm. The smooth, slippery skin brushed my hand, slimy as worms. I squeezed my eyes closed until, satisfied, they drove me home.
Inside and outside I was transformed by puberty. But though the evidence of it was all around me, I couldn’t understand my metamorphosis. The evidence was there in the corridors, on the telephone, at the movies, in Clark’s Restaurant at lunchtime, after sorority meetings on Friday nights. Yet it was all strangely inconclusive. Could it be that the prettier I grew the worse I would be treated? Much likelier, I thought, I wasn’t really pretty.
People whose names I didn’t know said hello to me in the halls in tones I didn’t understand. People called me on the telephone and hung up when I answered. Football star Iggy Friedman and jitterbug champion Larry Bruder came to my house, ostensibly to study math with me or to practice dancing, but something told me they really came for some other reason that I couldn’t imagine. If I was really pretty I needed proof. Like those who will always think of themselves as fat no matter how many pounds they lose, I continued to think of myself as freaky. To protect myself, I remained aloof, a starfish on a rock.
There were weekly opinion polls called Slam Books which told in black and white what people thought of each other; yet even they told me almost nothing. Filled between classes in composition books from the five-and-ten, one charm per page, when completed the Slam Books yielded one perfect Composite Girl. As early as the eighth grade my name began to turn up in their pages, and by the ninth grade it appeared regularly. But it was usually on the nose page, or under best complexion. True, my skin concealed me well enough, and I was pert in profile, but what about inside and straight on? My avowed distinctions were purely negative; they did not even photograph well. The excellence of my nose was its insignificance; the virtue of my skin was its odd refusal to erupt. When everyone else’s pimples cleared up, what then? Could my looks outlive the disappearance of their blackheads? Could I base my future on anything so trivial as skin? Unlike bust, charm, sex appeal, personality, poise, sense of humor, and hair, which as they grew in mass grew in value, my acknowledged assets were self-limiting. While the girls with positive charms, even immaterial ones, could look for daily gains, the best I could hope for was relief that no flaws had yet surfaced. There was nothing I could do to help. Baffled, I clung to my rock, filtering data from the passing stream, and withdrew further into myself. If I couldn’t control my body, at least I could control my mind. Self-control, my father said, is the key to the world.
My father was proof of it. He had lifted himself from a ghetto high school to a position of eminence in Cleveland’s legal establishment by sheer will, or so the family story went. Now I realize that my father was merely filling his destined slot in the professional scheme of things for hard-working sons of frugal and ambitious Jewish immigrants: his older brother had become a doctor, his younger brother a dentist, and all his sisters teachers until they turned into wives. My father, the middle son, had of course to be a lawyer. But close up it is hard to distinguish ambition from destiny, and I heard only my family’s version. In high school my father had used his cunning to study shorthand and typing instead of shop, and landed a job as private secretary to one of Cleveland’s industrial tycoons. He played chess with the boss, attended law school at night, and in between, with that single-mindedness he passed to me, he learned at least ten new multisyllable words a day, practiced oratory before the mirror, and studied the classics of literature in the tiny nickel volumes of the Little Leather Library series. When the time came for him to take the bar exam, he passed with the highest score in Ohio. It was predicted he would have a brilliant career.
My mother, as clever and ambitious as he, heeded the predictions and married him. Already loved by my father at a distance, my mother, the youngest and fairest of a family of lovely sisters on my father’s ghetto block, had no trouble at all—so went the story. In America beautiful clever girls do not long remain schoolteachers.
They passed their hopes to their children. My mother, wanting happiness for me, gave me braces and dancing lessons; my father, valuing learning and success, gave me his library of Little Leather books. My brother Ben mastered the Baybury hills no-handed on his bike and managed a paper route; and I entered the Little Leather Library. I read and re-read each volume, fleeing from my baffling outer life. Their contents came in such small, sweet packages that I could digest them piecemeal and savor them at length. I never suspected that a book measuring three inches by four inches might be considered suitable only for adults or that in larger bindings those very treasures might have struck me as impossibly difficult. Starting with the fairy tales and the Arabian Nights, I moved easily through Candide, Gulliver, and Rasselas without noticing any difference in genre, and then on to the plays, stories, and essays my father had studied. While my brother played football and read baseball books, and my classmates read beauty books and movie magazines, I went through plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, and Molière; stories of Tolstoy, Kipling, Balzac, William Morris, de Maupassant; meditations of Marcus Aurelius; words of Jesus; addresses of Lincoln; essays of Mill, Thoreau, Shaw, Voltaire, and Emerson; dialogues of Plato; and even selected reflections of Madame de Sévigné. They were so fanciful and cerebral that they made me forget I was a piece of meat, albeit a prime piece according to the specifications of my mounting pile of Seventeen magazines. My father, glowing with pride to see me following behind him, discussed the classics with me as an equal, using long, latinate words (a language I dubbed “lawish”); and my mother, imagining me in a better college, saw me marrying a better man. To me, however, the little books imparted Truth, all dipped out of a single vat of life’s wisdom. My one-time belief in miracles mellowed to a belief in the printed word, and wide-eyed still, I read every romance as a parable for the future, every essay as personal advice. Coupled with looks, knowledge was surely power.
A cunning freak, I learned to keep my knowledge and ambitions to myself. In school, I tried to pass as smart instead of studious. I refused to learn typing and shorthand out of the same wisdom that had led my father to study them. I wanted to be admired, not a secretary. I realized that for a girl “business skills” were sure to lock the very doors they had opened for my father. Instead, I cultivated other, more useful skills. Without neglecting to brush my hair assiduously according to the instructions in Seventeen, I used my electives on math and commercial law, and mastered forging my father’s signature for report cards and excuses. I started a notebook, with sections for words to learn, quotations to contemplate, reforms to accomplish. Ten resolutions each New Year’s Eve. In everything I set myself records to beat, as I did at night with my joy button. What I couldn’t master, like spelling, I disdained, claiming I could always use a dictionary. I wouldn’t compete unless I could win. Borrowing from Marcus Aurelius a philosophy of sour grapes, I hedged all my bets: I wanted to be the smartest since I couldn’t be sure I was the prettiest; I wanted to be the prettiest since I couldn’t be sure I was the smartest. With a vanity refined to perversion, I cut school to hide that I cared to be smart, telling no one about my books, and I affected sloppiness to hide how much I wanted to be beautiful, locking away my beauty charts in my desk drawer. I began to look for trouble so it wouldn’t take me by surprise. If I asked for it, I thought, maybe I could control it.
Unlike other truants who cut school to shoplift, go to the movies or a burlesque show, miss a test, or play pool, I had another purpose. I went downtown where no one knew me and, standing at a bus stop on some busy corner, I tried to stare down strange men on buses that passed by, testing my audacity. I would stare at someone till I caught his eye, then force myself to continue no matter what he did, until I stared him down and made him look away. I wanted to beat the boys at their own vile game. I would rather hate them than fear them; best of all I would make them fear me. I wanted to pick my mark, hold his eye, control his mind, bend his will to mine. I didn’t dare try it in Baybury. Instead, I cut school and went downtown to play my Bus Stop Game. It was a dangerous game, for I could never tell when a man would call my bluff by leering back and force my eyes into humiliating retreat. But I had to do it: it was part of my nameless joy-life. If I succeeded at the Bus Stop Game by outstaring my mark, I rewarded myself with my button’s joy; but if I failed by looking away first, I forbade myself to touch it. My father’s daughter, I was very strict.
Eventually I got so good at the game that I was able to board the buses and try it on passengers from whom I couldn’t escape. I selected the most frightening men to root out my fear. I wanted to make my eyes into such powerful beams that I could bend strangers and enemies to my will. I studied audacity, determined that if I couldn’t be sure I had the power that comes with beauty, I would have another kind of power.
But it all turned out to be unnecessary. One balmy Friday night in early October—a Round Table night—I suddenly got the proof I had lacked that I was indeed beautiful.
The seventeen girls of Sigma Lambda Tau (the best sorority? the second-best?) all sat cross-legged in a circle on the plush cranberry carpet of Maggie West’s living room. The previous Friday and the following were for business; but this one was for Round Table only: pure confrontation. Around the circle clockwise the word would pass, exploding in scandal, wrath, or outrage. One at a time the month’s transgressions and oversights would be named, complaints registered, warnings given, accusers faced.
In our pleated skirts and cashmere sweaters over white dickies, we sat fiddling with our charm bracelets and straightening our sox, waiting for the President to start. Some of us gave last-minute orders to the pledges, writing merits and demerits in their conduct books. Others of us checked our new breasts in their Carousel bras like tips of sausages in their casings, looking from one to the other: were the straps adjusted evenly?
Beverly Katz, President, whispered something surreptitiously in someone’s ear, then, smoothing down the pleats of her baby-blue skirt, called the meeting to order. How was it, I wondered, that her pimples did not affect her eminence? Neither her big bosom (best bust) nor her sly black eyes that so perfectly expressed disdain explained her mysterious authority. She ruled by mean glances, not good looks. I studied her, wondering why everyone laughed when she cracked those jokes I never got; why even I laughed.
“Okay, let’s get going. You wanna start, Sally?” said Beverly Katz, turning to the girl at her side. And off went Sally, around the circle, loosing her rhetoric on us, passing compliments and hurling insults. When she finally came to me, she frowned and hesitated a moment; then, changing her mind as I held my breath, passed on to the next sister. I was still cringing when she began on my neighbor in a voice that, like everyone’s, emulated Beverly’s. “I’m not saying who told me,” she said, “but I happen to know …”
I tuned out, relieved. Why had she even hesitated over me? How could I have offended her? From my bayside perch I tried only to please, giving offense to no one. I went to their meetings, observed their taboos, admired their figures, studied their styles, always keeping my mouth carefully shut. My joy-life was secret. I wanted only to belong.
Some of the girls—perhaps the guilty ones—hung on Sally’s words. Others scanned their notes, rehearsing for their own turns to talk, soon to come up. Between turns Beverly Katz popped bubbles or cracked jokes, though, as everyone knew, she had little reason to be jovial. It was already three weeks since she had received her S.L.T. pin back from Iggy Friedman, tackle, with whom she was certainly still in love and had probably already gone too far. And without Iggy, as everyone knew, she would never be re-elected President.
If Beverly Katz was at twelve o’clock, then I was at nine o’clock. Around the circle passed the word, coming closer to me. Each girl in turn had a chance to speak her mind to all or none, as she was moved. From Sally to Sue to Maggie to May. Six o’clock, seven o’clock, eight o’clock.
“Sasha?” said Beverly, popping a bubble.
I shook my head. My thoughts, questions all, were too tentative to expose to them, the slightest of whom seemed so certain, so powerful. As always, I passed.
On we moved toward the ultimate moment after Round Table when the Cokes and potato chips would be passed around, a record would be started on the phonograph, we would separate, the doors would be thrown open, and the boys, who had been waiting noisily on the lawn outside, would at last be invited in. We were all needles for that moment. Rumor had it that the football team was gradually defecting to Alpha Phi Beta. Not many of them had shown up at our meeting the week before, and without the right boys we’d never get the right pledges, and then before we knew it S.L.T. would be going down; perhaps it was already slipping. As the last few sisters spoke, we shifted on our pastel skirts and plucked at our sweaters, combing our hair and checking our bras again, till finally, circle completed, we were back to the President.
“Before we adjourn,” began Beverly, holding everyone back with her black eyes, “I have a few things to say myself.” She turned directly to me. Smoothing the pleats of her skirt she rose on her knees and measured the distance between our eyeballs before going into her venomous trance.
I was ready. Our eyeballs met. Now.
“You don’t seem to care who you step on to get a guy. You think you’re pretty hot shit. But watch out. We’re all on to you now. We know how you operate!”
I take off, slowly at first, then at increasing speeds, swimming through space.
I hear my mother shouting in comforting farewell from some vast distance, “Just you wait, someday they’ll be sorry!” while “Liar! Schemer!” resounds in my ears.
Sitting on pastel clouds receding rapidly, the sisters glance at each other with assenting smiles. They are passing a long bubble pipe from cloud to cloud, all in cahoots. In their center a black-eyed medium sings out the prophecy, Katz’s Curse. (Of course she is only a medium with acne and not responsible for what she says.) “You can’t get away with this shit forever!” she shouts.
I am shocked. Can she know about the Bus Stop Game? My joy button? If not, what can she be talking about? Jimmy Brennan’s thing? Iggy’s phone calls?
“Glub, glub, glub,” she mouths, diving under a circle of whitecaps and up through baby-blue waves.
At last I come to rest on my rock. Up she swims to my face inside a huge, expanding bubble. “You think that just because you’re beautiful you can do anything you please and get away with it. But you can’t! Someday it’ll all catch up with you and then you’ll pay! You’ll pay for everything!”
The bubble bursts, drenching us all.
Everything? I wonder, as in the bubble’s circular wake the prophecy echoes like a curse.
Though I decide it is a sane prophecy, the conclusions reasonable—no one should expect to get away with anything indefinitely—I nevertheless begin to tremble.
When the wave recedes, Beverly sits down again, being careful that the pleats in her skirt are smooth. She surveys the circle with triumphant eyes and everyone smiles back at her. I smile too, trying not to offend.
I remember something, but I don’t know what. It is something strong and delicious, stuck between my teeth. Strong enough, I wonder, to sweeten the rue? I suck it out and roll it over my tongue, and then I realize: Beverly Katz has called me beautiful, and not one word about nose or skin.
She gets up to open the door. Out come the Cokes.
Surely I must be beautiful if she hates me for it! Well, let her hate me then, what do I care? Obviously this hatchery is not the world.
In come the boys. “Hi.” “Hi.” “Hi.” “Hi, Sasha. Who got it tonight?” says, of all people, Iggy Friedman.
“I did,” I say, surpassing protocol, and trying to master my pain by naming it. “From Beverly.”
“Gee. That’s too bad.” Iggy looks down, slightly embarrassed. I shrug. Nat King Cole proposes that it’s only a paper moon hanging over a cardboard sea.
“C’mon,” says Iggy, touching my elbow. “I’ll take you home tonight. We can go to Lenny’s for a Lennyburger and you can tell me about it if you want to.”
I taste sin. “Swell,” I say. “Just let me get my sweater.” For the first of what will be many times, I toss my head with a hint of defiance, like Veronica Lake. Beverly Katz may not see me, but she will hear.
I return in a moment with my sweater. “Ready,” I say flashing my prettiest smile. And linking my arm in Iggy’s I walk with him out the door.
What but destiny or extraordinary luck could have kept me apart from them, clinging to my rock? To have swum along with them once would have meant forever. I would make my way differently. With an eye at the end of each of my rays, I was better off a starfish. After having studied all the fairy tales and Candide and Rasselas, I knew there were some who crossed over the mountains and seas. At fourteen I believed that somewhere there must be a vast green ocean, deep and mysterious, with other currents more swift and powerful than those of this bay. There were some who escaped. Let my sisters curse me then, since their love was out of the question. Beautiful, I could try for the ocean.
Music was splling out of the cafeteria into the corridors of Baybury High. “Stardust,” the S.L.T. theme song, announced that the annual S.L.T. Bunny Hop, celebrating spring and the big basketball game, was now under way.
I loved dances. But even before we arrived at the dance, I was already giddy from the evening. In a series of brilliant maneuvers beyond the hopes of anyone in Baybury Heights, my own Joey Ross had demolished snotty Shaker Heights and led Baybury to victory by scoring one spectacular basket after another. Of the eighty-one points scored by Baybury High against Shaker High’s bleak thirty-four, Joey, still a sophomore, had made forty himself. After such a dazzling performance, he would surely be made captain of the team.
I floated out of the gym on Joey’s arm, madly in love. “Great game, Joey,” called Rooney Rogoff on his way to the locker room, snapping his towel at us.
“You too, stud,” said Joey.
Hand in hand we mounted the stairs to the cafeteria. On the landing Joey shot one hand to the wall to trap me; then pressing his sinewy body flat against mine, he kissed me hard. When his tongue glided into the corners of my mouth I went limp like warm butter; I could have melted right down the stairs. “Don’t,” I managed to say. “They’ll be judging us soon.”
“So what?” said Joey, “you’re gorgeous.” But he lowered his arm obligingly and in we went.
The darkened cafeteria was undulating with mute couples grinding to a very slow instrumental. A canopy of paper streamers hung overhead. “Great game, Joey,” someone said as we walked through the door.
“How ya doin’?” Joey answered modestly.
“Great game,” said my friend Eloise the ticket taker. It was useless trying to hide my rapture.
At the opposite end of the large room Freddy and Fink (More sound than you think/With Freddy and Fink) had set up their amplifiers and turntables and were playing records on request. Behind them the girls on the Dance Committee were putting last-minute decorations on the table that would serve as a platform for the coronation. Tonight a new Queen would be chosen. My stomach sank when once again I remembered the contest, but Joey grabbed me around the waist and pulled me onto the dance floor and made everything all right again. Pressing thighs, eyes closed, we melted together and swayed as one. Nearing the open window where the April breeze was puffing out the cafeteria curtains like parachutes, we floated slowly down to a standstill and kissed again. Oh Joey.
The music stopped. “Great game!” said Nat Karlan, one of Joey’s Keystone brothers. They twined their arms over each other’s shoulders and moved away. But not before I overheard Nat whisper to Joey, with an intimacy I never achieved, “If you don’t get in tonight, friend, you never will!”
I was stung by the thought. Of course: those forty points overwhelmingly weighted the scales. Tonight Joey would have a powerful advantage. But even if I managed to resist again tonight, who would believe me?
In the five months I had been going with Joey he’d come closer to “getting in” than anyone else, but I had always managed to resist. What happened to the girls who gave in, and even to those only suspected of giving in, was an unthinkable nightmare. I had myself sat through the now-famous S.L.T. meeting in which Renee Thomas had been expelled for allegedly going all the way. Only a year had passed and already Renee’s name was legend. Girls sneered at her, boys abused her, her name appeared in all the graffiti, freshmen gaped at her in disbelief. She would never marry in Baybury. She’d have been better off dead. If only she had heeded the warnings that one thing inevitably leads to another.
Between me and Joey already one thing had led to another—kissing had led to French kissing, French kissing to necking, necking to petting, petting to bare-titting, bare-titting to dry humping—but somehow, thank God, I had always managed to stop at that penultimate step. When the Sunday morning telephone wires buzzed with intimate questions (“What did he try?” “How far did he get?”) I bluffed my way through them with respectable answers, always a few steps behind the truth. But how long, I wondered, could I be believed? And how long could I go on holding out?
I knew there was some Renee in me, as there probably was in each of us. Renee, too, it was said, had started out by falling madly in love. So precariously did I totter between yes and no—from the first delicious kiss that made my knees go limp, to the very brink—that this new possibility appalled me. If you don’t get in tonight, friend, you never will.
Actually, I had grown to dread necking with Joey, it had come to be such a struggle. Whatever I did, he wanted more. It wasn’t even safe to neck in my house any more, where my parents trusted me. Gone were those long, voluptuous hours of kissing on my living-room sofa or in the car at Shaker Lakes when I could abandon myself to Joey’s sweet mouth, love his sinuous arms with my fingertips, and tickle my palms on his crew cut. The kissing and French kissing and petting I had so enjoyed had been reduced to a five-minute warm-up before the struggle, and I had been forced to trade abandon for vigilance.
“Please let me, Sasha.”
“I can’t, Joey.”
“Please.”
“No.”
Now, after five kisses or ten, he’d slip his hand under my sweater or skirt and begin to tinker with me mechanically, then pin me under him on the back seat of his father’s car and proceed to please himself. He was much too strong for me. In the beginning he used to lie on top of me so I could hardly move or breathe and rub his stiff clothed body against mine for a few minutes until a series of jerks let me know he was done and I could breathe again. I was bewildered by the shame and the thrill of it. Later he stopped short of the jerks, turned suddenly away, opened his pants, and came into his handkerchief. Once he secretly unzipped and rubbed his bare penis on my thigh without my knowing until, suddenly aware, I managed to push him off and make him finish by himself.
Though he never again forced me to touch it, he started taking it out and begging me to feel it with my hand or let him rub it on my leg, and he would whine when I refused. “Come on, Sasha, you’re torturing me,” he would say. But it was really he who was torturing me, squeezing me between two guilts. I cowered whenever a car approached. I felt that if anyone ever discovered what Joey did with me in that car, I would have to run away. Poor Mother. Poor Daddy. Poor, poor Sasha.
It disgusted me to see Joey close his eyes and groan in ecstasy, his handkerchief over his crotch. When I had melted from his kisses it had been for love of him. But he certainly couldn’t be groaning for love of me, it was all for himself. It was a tossup which was worse: to be appreciated as a mechanical ejaculator with all the attendant risks, or to be despised as a prude.
I had become so anxious over our sex that though we were going together and were therefore permitted to neck, I tried my best to avoid it. Passionate as I was, I looked for excuses to go straight home from a date. When Joey invariably parked the car anyway, I kept my coat buttoned all the way up as an act of protest. But of course, my protests went unheeded. I didn’t dare get Joey really angry for fear he’d spread things about me. The girls’ axiom about the boys was true: they always go as far as they can, and never backwards. By fifteen I knew love was a dangerous emotion. It was dynamite. I knew it was safer to be a sex reject than a sex object, but it was already too late for me to choose.
Freddy and Fink put on a fast record. Joey stepped back with his arm around his buddy Nat, while a Deltan twirled me off into the crowd. Athlete Joey, like all Keystones, danced only slow; the articulate Deltans danced as fast and as smoothly as they talked. As girls were divided by their looks and permissiveness, boys were divided by their accomplishments. I would have been a Deltan if I’d been a boy; maybe that was why I fell in love with a Keystone.
Whirling and bobbing and double-stepping, I danced with one Deltan after another. Couple after couple dropped off the floor while I danced on. Around us the circle of spectators swelled until it seemed the whole school was there. Breathless, pulse throbbing, I kept on going, to record after record, until Fink stopped the music and Freddy announced a break. I felt my face flush burgundy. Everyone exploded in applause. An intoxicating evening.
Freddy and Fink moved the coronation platform and mike into the center of the floor. “One-two-three-testing, one-two-three-testing.” Time for the contest.
While the judges arranged their chairs in front of the platform, I ran to the girls’ room with the three other finalists to primp and calm ourselves. My God, I thought, looking down the long mirror at those beautiful older girls, I haven’t a chance. They seemed so poised, while I was falling apart. Long eyelashes, a tiny nose, and glowing skin simply couldn’t be enough. The one power I had developed to perfection, the power of my glance, I didn’t dare use on the judges. There was not a single way to improve my chances: I could only stand up and be judged.
As soon as we walked back into the cafeteria, Fink played a few bars of “Stardust” through the amplifier to set the ceremonial mood. Freddy caressed the mike and announced the contestants’ names and fraternal sponsors. When he called my name I stepped up on a chair, then out onto the platform. Somehow I managed a smile for the eight judges below, two from each fraternity. Please let me be chosen, I prayed, climbing down again and taking my place beside the other contestants before the judges. I felt helpless, like a passenger riding in a “chicken” race.
Fink put on a slow ballad and a few couples danced in the corners. The judges consulted with Freddy, then whispered gravely among themselves. Feeling foolish, we whispered together too, not daring to look out, plucking at our sweaters nervously, waiting. “Who wants to be Queen anyway?” we said, hating each other. I needed to go to the bathroom again.
Freddy ran up to us. “Would you mind walking back and forth across the cafeteria once, girls, so these guys can get a better look at you?” he said.
“Oh, no!” we squealed. Didn’t they see us every day? But of course, one at a time, we paraded before the judges. I remember making a little deferential curtsey at the end to camouflage my trembling knees—and I remember to my shame hearing someone laugh.
An eternity passed before Freddy ran back up to the front and tenderly took the mike in his hand. Fink stopped the music. “Okay, folks,” said Freddy, “your attention please.” He frowned and tapped the microphone until it hummed. Then he began again, laying on the famous Deltan smooth.
“There’s such a stack of pulchritude up for Queen tonight that our judges have had a hard time making up their minds between these four gorgeous glamour girls.” Everyone moved in a little closer. “But I’m happy to announce that they’ve finally reached a verdict.”
He nodded to Fink, who started “Stardust” over again from the beginning, a little louder this time. Everyone fell silent. All suckers for ceremony.
My hands began shaking so hard that I clasped them behind my back. I wondered about my blushing skin. I had to go to the bathroom desperately. I thought about how it would feel to be Chinese or to live on the West Side, and then snapped back to Baybury Heights. Though I knew the decision was already settled, so there was no longer any possibility of influencing it, abandoning all prudence, I offered up one last wish to the Blue Fairy: Make me Queen and I’ll never ask for anything more.
“I have the pleasure,” said Freddy like a professional, “to present to you the new Queen of the S.L.T. Bunny Hop—I might even say the Basketball Queen of Baybury Heights.”
Not me, throbbed my temples. Never me.
“—that beautiful miss from Sigma Lambda Tau, the Keystone’s choice, the sweetest profile in Ohio, the Queen of the Bunny Hop, Sasha Davis!”
The music blared. Me! I couldn’t believe it!
“That’s you, Sasha,” said Freddy, hugging me tightly and bending over to plant a loud kiss on my cheek. He pushed me up onto the platform. “Get up there now, honey, it’s all yours!” I didn’t dare take my eyes off him. “You’re the Queen, Sasha,” he yells up from below. “Smile!”
The others have disappeared. ’I’m all alone on the platform. The silver S.L.T. crown is on my head, and my arms enfold a huge bouquet of daffodils, tied with a blue satin ribbon on which are stitched in gold the letters S-L-T. In a circle below me everyone is singing out our song to the tune of “Stardust” and watching me. I smile till my gums show. I feel tears stream down my cheeks. Cameras are flashing. I feel so foolish and so happy. I am the Queen.
I confess, my coronation was such an undiluted triumph that I took it down in one long, sweet gulp that went straight to my head. Rashly I forgot that in the fall there would be another queen and the following spring another. Barely fifteen, that April night I reached such heady heights that the triumphs of the rest of my life were bound to seem anti-climactic.
Directly after my coronation I risked everything, celebrating with an act that wiped out months of restraint. Parked in our regular spot at Shaker Lakes, at last Joey got in. By allowing him to lie on me with his fly open, accepting his kisses with the delicious abandon of former days, I signaled that the struggle was over. It wasn’t the forty points, or even Nat Karlan’s prediction. It was simply that, being Queen, I dared to believe I could get away with it. There was something regal about going all the way.
I didn’t get to remove my underpants, so eager was Joey to cross my threshold. He stretched the elastic of one leg and slipped his organ in; then with a little moan of joy he began humping me the same as always, plus in and out like an animal, wrinkling my skirt with his belly.
This is it! I said to myself. This is love! Enjoy it! I knew my daffodils were being crushed; nevertheless I tried to enjoy it, at least to attend to this celebrated moment in the most touted of acts.
It wasn’t unpleasant with Joey inside me, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant either. It didn’t even hurt. I was surprised not to be feeling much, for Joey had pushed his entire appendage, so much larger than a finger, inside my opening. I couldn’t imagine how it all fit in. Watching him move up and down on me in the darkness, I wondered: is this all there is to it? I had loved Joey to the melting point, but now I resented him. I received each thrust of his body like a doubt. Really all? When it was over a few moments later and Joey came groaning into his handkerchief as always, it struck me as hardly different from our usual sex. The only thing to recommend it was that it was ultimate. But, really, kissing felt much nicer.
Joey sat up. “I love you, Sasha. You’ll never be sorry, I promise you.”
He sounded so pious. I eyed him suspiciously. I wondered if I had done it all correctly, and if so, if it might not show or smell. Suppose some of the sperm had gotten in? Suppose Joey wouldn’t keep his mouth shut? As I saw him wiping away the last traces of sperm, looking proud and lavishing on his withered organ more care than it deserved, I suddenly felt the enormity of my breach. I was utterly vulnerable.
I pulled down my skirt, hoping to become again inviolable. But there was clearly no going back.
If I get away with this, I consoled myself, I can probably get away with anything.
An hour later when Joey kissed me goodnight on my doorstep, I dutifully said “I love you,” knowing Joey’s new power to injure me. But for the first time, my knees did not go limp when he kissed me.
I was no longer simply “Joey’s girl.” I was a Queen myself with a life of my own.
I flush the toilet with sweaty palms, aware of the risk, and wait to face the consequences. At home and at school my Kotex disposal was down to an art. Even in public restrooms there were almost always special containers, and if not—if I had to leave a soiled napkin rolled neatly in toilet paper on the edge of the sink or exposed unswallowed in a toilet bowl—I would not be around to take the blame.
Here at Joey’s house I am trapped.
I’d stayed at the table as long as I could, hoping to get through the agonizing dinner and wear my napkin out of the house. But when I felt the sticky blood seep through my underwear onto my thigh I realized that however skillfully I shifted in the chair or crossed my legs, it was only a matter of moments before it would penetrate to my skirt and thence to Mrs. Ross’s flowered cushion to disgrace me forever.
Now, locked inside the bathroom, I am impaled on my monthly dilemma: how to dispose of it? I can’t walk into the kitchen past everyone at table, sheepishly carrying my dirty rag to the garbage can. I can’t snoop around the bedrooms for a wastebasket or a bottom bureau drawer to bury it in, knowing that eventually they will sniff it out and despise me the more. No; there is only one thing to do, however risky: flush it down the toilet.
I send up a prayer and press down the lever. The water rises inexorably toward the rim of the bowl. I jiggle the handle, my pulse pounding. Past the normal water ring it rises, past the porcelain lip. Then just in time at the very brink the water crests, turned back by some Neptune of the sewer. It stands and waits, the Kotex caught in the toilet’s hole, its tail protruding like a drowning cat’s, and I draw breath.
But it is a false reprieve, for whatever the dangers, I will have to flush again.
Blocking my nose from the inside, I pull up the sopping Kotex by its tail. It is saturated. Slowly the water recedes: a blessing. With index fingers and thumbs I strip off the gauze and begin shredding the bloody pad; if the toilet won’t swallow it whole, I will feed it bit by bit.
Another prayer, another tug on the lever, and at last the water whirls my clots and rags down the hole, letting me slip past one more month without facing disgrace.
I fasten a new napkin, wash my hands with soap, fix my smile before the mirror, and return demurely to the table.
School let out in June; after that we were doing it regularly every couple of weeks, except when I had my period or pretended to be having my period.
Joey would pick me up at the Baybury Pool on his way home from work at his uncle’s shoe store. From the pool where I had spent the day developing a tan, we either went to the ball court at Eastwood Park, where Joey worked out shooting baskets while I watched admiringly with the other girls, or if he could get his father’s car we’d drive up to Shaker Lakes, where he worked out on me.
Driving up the Lake Road giggling nervously over our destination, I received odd premonitions. I imagined the car crashing or the police stopping us for questioning.
“Surprise,” said Joey one evening, opening the car door for me and tossing my swimming bag in the back seat. He seemed to be full of giggles himself for once.
“What’s up?”
“A present for you.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll see.” He turned onto the Lake Road.
“Tell me,” I pleaded.
“Unh-unh. I’ve had it more than a week without telling you. You can wait a few minutes more.”
As soon as he had parked the car at the shore of the lake and taken me into the back seat, Joey opened his wallet and took out a foil-wrapped Trojan condom. “Here,” he said, presenting it to me as though it were an orchid.
I recoiled. I knew all about Trojans from dirty jokes, but I had never seen one. And here I was holding one. It was so unequivocal; what kind of a girl must he think me? There were two more in his wallet, leaving little ovals on the outside leather, dead giveaways.
“My God, Joey! If you carry them around in your wallet, every-one will know! ” I dropped it in his lap, offended. How stupid I had been to assume we wouldn’t get caught.
Joey stroked his so-precious prick a few times to make it hard, then placing the rubber over the head of it, rolled it carefully down the shank. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I just say they’re for whores if anyone asks. Or for Renee. Everyone carries them for whores.”
I slipped my underpants off one leg, and Joey moved on top of me. Being careful not to disturb the condom, he pressed himself inside me.
Once in, it felt almost the same as without the condom. But it gave me the jitters anyway. When I heard a car pass on the road below, instead of just holding my breath and crossing my fingers as I usually did, I jerked so hard that Joey came out. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Hey, take it easy!” said Joey pushing it back into me with his fingers. He was annoyed. “If you jerk like that it’ll take twice as long.” Then, gently, he added, “There’s nothing to worry about, baby. They can’t see us way back here.”
He was right. Unless someone actually parked, came up to the car, and caught us in the act, it didn’t matter what people merely suspected. As long as I was willing to do it, Joey would be a fool to betray me, and without Joey’s testimony, no one could prove a thing. We were unlikely to be caught because Joey always did it very quickly and fully clothed, out of consideration for me. Even his carrying condoms proved nothing. I would deny every-thing if anyone accused me. Though I was uneasy whenever I saw people whispering at the pool, I realized it would take more than rumor to ruin a Queen.
While half of me trembled at fugitive sounds, the other half was proud of my daring and happy to be done with the agony of anticipation. Fifteen, flat on my back with Captain Joey Ross pumping up a storm between my knees, I thought “Oh yeah?” to Beverly Katz and all the other S.L.T. girls. They dared not accuse the Keystone’s choice, one half of a perfect couple. Let them try to make Renee of me!
But my feelings of triumph barely justified my nervousness or the plain discomfort of sex. The eleventh time we did it was more unpleasant than the first. I grew to dread it, but I could never come up with a good enough reason to get Joey to stop. “What’s got into you, Sasha? We never got caught before,” he would pout, and the record just kept on mounting. As the girls always said, boys go as far as they can, and never backwards. Watching Joey drop the sticky condoms into Shaker Lake, I was baffled that I could ever have thought I loved him. Oh, he was sweet in his way, and the biggest fish in Baybury, but he was my tormentor. Definitely not for me. As everyone said, it was never too early to think about marriage, and I had large inexpressible yearnings Joey could never satisfy. Whether or not he was the Captain, I was still the Queen. If only I could somehow escape from the back seat of Joey’s father’s car, I knew I could do much better.
“Marry for love,” said my mother, “but remember, it’s just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man.” Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief—if it was foolish for my brother to leave to chance which type he would be, it was foolish for me to leave to chance which type I would marry. My mother’s advice to me was as sensible as her comparable advice to Ben: “study hard and be somebody.” Both tips were perfectly suited to our possibilities.
More beautiful by far than other mothers, my mother deserved to be listened to. Her cheeks had a soft pink smell, a ripeness, which made me happy just to be sitting next to her. I overflowed with pride when she showed up at school or when her picture appeared in the Cleveland Post from time to time as chairman of one committee or president of another; who would not want to elect chairman or exhibit on the social page such a perfect face? Even more in matters of love and matrimony my mother’s face, which could have enchanted any man, commanded respect. Having herself married well, she certainly knew what she was talking about. And in our own interminable adolescent discussions of whom to marry, no girl among us ever suggested that it would be better to marry poor, unless the alternative were not to marry at all. My mother was right. There was only one way for a girl to control her future: choose her man.
There weren’t many things a girl could do to command the choice, but fortunately there were a few. First, she could make sure she did nothing to be kicked out of the market. Second, she could make herself available to the most eligible types. Third, and most important of all, whatever her natural endowment she could enhance her fine points to make herself as attractive as possible. It was no secret. Methods for achieving all three were spelled out for us in each new issue of Seventeen that arrived in the mail and in all the books, like Boy Meets Girl, Junior Miss, Girl Alive, we were given for our birthdays. But the instructions were only the beginning. It was up to each girl on her own to make, as my mother called it, “the most of herself.”
When summer ended and my junior year began, I had my first chance to branch out. Cookie Margolis of Elyria, Ohio, a premed student at Ohio State, invited me to the university’s great Homecoming Weekend, and, Joey or no, I accepted.
I had met Cookie in August at Geneva-on-the-Lake, the decaying summer resort on Lake Erie’s shore where the Baybury Heights sororities and fraternities rented cottages for two weeks every summer. With only one chaperone per cottage, and Joey stuck sorting shoes in Cleveland, I had found plenty of opportunity at Geneva to experiment with other kinds of Lake Erie fish. My sisters (virgins all, I believed) were so busy concentrating their efforts on our own Baybury boys that none of them noticed me searching the dance hall and the skating rink for odd species or wandering alone on the far end of the beach seeking adventure. Right there under their noses, if they had only troubled to look, they too might have found tall Cookie Margolis industriously cutting bait, his summer job. While they saw no further than their noses, I managed to bring off a hot romance, prudently remaining chaste in case they bothered to investigate.
It had not been easy, lying with Cookie on the cool sand under the stars hearing the wavelets lapping the shore like kittens’ tongues, for Cookie’s presurgical fingers melted me as easily as Joey’s baskets ever had. But I had resisted, knowing better than to start doing it with two boys at once. I laughed tears for my poor lost virginity reading the relevant passages of Girls Alive, realizing how recklessly I had upped the ante.
If you kiss Mike tonight, the next time you go out with him it will be natural to kiss him again. Each date with him you may go a little further in what will become a dangerous game, because you are releasing in him and in yourself emotions that you may not be able to control.
Meanwhile, you will go out with other boys and it’s easy enough to slip into the same habits with them. In no time you have earned yourself the reputation of being a girl any boy can kiss. And if any boy can—well, … you will have saved nothing special for the man for whom you eventually feel genuine love.
What had I done? They were talking about kissing, and here I was applying it to …! Fifteen years old! I was overcome by more than sufficient fear and remorse to enable me to resist Cookie. It was bad enough to be doing it regularly with one person; two was the road to nymphomania. I was too young, too young. Just as I knew for a fact that kissing led to French kissing, I knew that “sleeping around” at fifteen would lead to nymphomania at sixteen, and prostitution at seventeen, no matter how good my grades or my family or my intentions.
Once I reached Ohio State I saw it was worth all the pains I had taken getting my parents’ permission to go. That brief first glimpse of the larger world was a revelation to me, whetting my appetite for the future as much as ten Little Leather Library books.
From the time I had read my first fairy tale I had tried to imagine what it would be like to live elsewhere and free. Even as a small child my pulse had quickened each time we drove over the Cuyahoga Bridge to Cleveland’s West Side, past the huge Sherwin Williams Paints sign on which a can of neon paint spilled over a spinning globe bearing the legend Cover the Earth. There in that strange west world of Cleveland people had different kinds of names and houses and, I imagined, lives.
At Ohio State I saw it might be true. In Columbus girls lived in dormitories where, by signing in and out for each other and telling lies, they could come and go almost as freely as the boys, who of course had no curfews. No mother in her negligee, arms folded across her breast, to shout from the head of the stairs, “It’s two o’clock in the morning! You were due home at midnight!” No father reading in the study, waiting in the bright lights (which would reveal one’s shameful dishevelment) to embarrass one before one’s friends by saying with the excessive formality of anger controlled, “Young man, I cannot permit you to see my daughter again if you cannot get her home before one thirty a.m.” Although in their talk the dorm girls were almost indistinguishable from the girls of Baybury—all sweaters and romance and marriage—their freedom seemed vast in comparison. How I envied them!
There was an even greater difference among the boys. At the football game on Saturday the college boys drank rye or gin out of pocket flasks. Besides cars and athletics they talked of life, mechanics, medicine, and the future. At the great Homecoming Dance on Saturday night, more than a dozen of them danced with me. Even the ugly ones seemed as accomplished and desirable as Cookie Margolis, more fascinating than any Keystone or Deltan I had ever known. From Columbus, Baybury Heights, where I was going to be stuck for two more years, looked like a puddle.
On my last night in Columbus, weakened by rye, I succumbed to Cookie in the attic of the fraternity house. He shamed me into bed, insinuating that anything less would be ingratitude, and took me as I was protesting. Of course, I alone was to blame; but, ignorant of college protocol and no virgin, I simply hadn’t known how to say no. When I discovered a few weeks later that Cookie was in love with someone else, I knew I would have to keep up my grades so I could go to some other college than Ohio State. I couldn’t afford to start out as a freshman with a reputation.
I was getting impatient with the whole problem of sex. Why did everyone consider it so important? Love was important, but sex was nothing but trouble. The philosophers I read didn’t waste their time with it.
As long as I had to spend two more years in boring Baybury, I decided to use the time well. In a strange scientific book from my father’s shelves, Behaviorism, by the famous Dr. John Watson, I had discovered certain indispensable facts. “Personality,” said Watson in italics, “is but the end product of our habit systems. … The situation we are in dominates us always and releases one or another of these all-powerful habit systems.”
If our situation dominates us, I would have to get out of my deadening situation. If personality is a result of habit, I would have to start forming the right habits. I would shun the rat race and prepare for college. I would practice raising an eyebrow, perfect my seductive glance, and cultivate a crooked smile. I would get top grades and harden myself.
Of course, I would let no one in on my plan. By some weird hypocrisy, it was considered as crass for a girl to improve herself by trying to get a better man as it was considered laudable for a boy to improve himself by trying to get a better job—even though everyone acknowledged that a girl’s only purpose was to marry, her only hope to marry “well.”
There was another, even more remarkable, passage in the book. “Between fifteen and eighteen,” reported Dr. Watson, summarizing his vast scientific researches,
a female changes from a child to a woman. At fifteen she is but the playmate of boys and girls of her own age. At eighteen she becomes a sex object to every man.
Every man! By all means, I must perfect my glance. But there was more:
After thirty, personality changes very slowly owing to the fact, as we brought out in our study of habit formation, that by that time most individuals, unless constantly stimulated by a new environment, are pretty well settled into a humdrum way of living. Habit patterns become set. If you have an adequate picture of the average individual at 30 you will have it with few changes for the rest of that individual’s life—as most lives are lived. A quacking, gossiping, neighbor-spying, disaster-enjoying woman of 30 will be, unless a miracle happens, the same at 40 and still the same at 60.
I no longer believed in miracles. I would have to take matters in my own hands. How foolish the others were to expect that all they had to do was sit around and wait for their prince to come along, all the time developing God-knows-what ruinous habit patterns! I copied the entire passage into my notebook. “Don’t believe everything you read,” my father had warned, but I believed. The passage, with its time schedule, seemed to have been written expressly for me.
Watson’s revelations tempered all I had discovered at Ohio State. There, the college girls, like the high school ones at home, were already planning to marry on graduation, if not before, and settle immediately into their ways. Their hopes were all pinned on it, their habit patterns already determined, their lives set. But it didn’t have to be so. According to the learned Watson, if I played it right I still had fifteen years—as many again as I had already lived—before my life would be set. Precious years to use carefully. I would not, like the others, become a “quacking, gossiping, neighbor-spying, disaster-enjoying woman”! I would not be like all those other women, so despicable to everyone, even the lofty Dr. Watson. I would make myself the exception, refusing to let that habit system take hold. If I could preserve my looks, I wouldn’t even have to marry until the last moment. I would fight and resist. I would arm myself like the boys with psychology and biology and a way to earn money. I would be somebody. I would be fastidious in my choice of “environment,” vigilant in my cultivation of habits. Thanks to my mother’s looks and my father’s books, I already had a good start. But a start, I knew, was not enough. It was the end that mattered. If, as the girls always said, it’s never too early to think about whom to marry, then it could certainly not be too early to think about who to be. Being somebody had to come first, because, of course, somebody could get a much better husband than nobody.