Dirty Dreams
Kevin and my mom were married in an outdoor ceremony by my grandparents’ rabbi. They went to Puerto Rico for their honeymoon, and the following week my new stepfather moved in with us. It was weird having him around. Not weird in an uncomfortable way, just weird in a weird way. Unfamiliar is probably the word that best describes it. Having a new man around the house, especially one so young and good-looking, was unfamiliar, to say the least. Of course, thirty-one wasn’t that young to me at eighteen. At least not until I started feeling different around him. It all began with something Emily said one night when she slept over, a couple weeks after Kevin moved in.
“Do you realize there’s exactly the same number of years between you and Kevin as there is between Kevin and your mom?”
That was it. That was the line. I’d never thought about our ages like that before. But now that I had, it struck me as odd.
Not that I thought my mother’s new husband was some kind of stepchild-molesting pervert, but from then on I was extra careful about the way I presented myself around him. For one, I began wearing bras underneath my lounge-around T-shirts. I’d never done that before, but suddenly going braless around the house just didn’t seem like the most appropriate idea. I also started wearing pajama bottoms with my nightgowns, afraid that Kevin might see too much of my thighs otherwise or get an accidental flash of my underwear when I stood up from the couch.
This is hard to explain without sounding as if I had very little faith in my mother’s choice of men, or like I found myself so desirable that my own stepfather wouldn’t be able to resist me in lounge clothes and Tweety Bird nightgowns. It was just that Emily’s comment made me see him as more of a peer—granted, a significantly more mature one—but still a peer on some level. Kevin suddenly seemed more like the kind of guy who’d be the cool, young teacher at school, the kind you might even want to hang out with. He just didn’t seem like a father figure. I guess he never really did. But I’d thought the reason was because we didn’t know each other well enough. Now, I realized that there just weren’t enough years between us.
Aside from this realization, other things began to happen. I ran into Nelly Whiteman later that summer and learned she was dating a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer who worked in her father’s practice. Twenty-seven. Less than a week after that, I saw Wendy Welsley, a girl from my twelfth-grade psychology class, at the mall. She told me she was engaged—to a thirty-three-year-old man! This meant that someone my age was pledging her life to someone two years older than my stepdad. The generation gap had narrowed severely since high school, and no one cared how old you were as long as they couldn’t officially be deemed a pervert or criminal for sleeping with you. Not that I wanted to sleep with Kevin. And not that I was pompous enough to think Kevin wanted to sleep with me. But the fact that Nelly and Wendy were running around with men in their late twenties and early thirties—and doing so proudly and freely—made me realize that men Kevin’s age saw girls my age as sexual beings. The discovery made me feel like less of a stepdaughter and more of a, well, woman. And sometimes, that feeling led to another kind of self-definition. To be a little more precise, I felt dirty in a good way. And feeling dirty in a good way often led to bad dreams.
Perhaps in acknowledging that I was no longer a little girl and could actually run with the big boys if I chose, I had opened a door in my subconscious that didn’t necessarily want to be shut. My bad dreams were actually great dreams, but they made me feel like a gross, guilty pig the next morning—worse than a chocolate binge—and that’s why they were bad. They were always about Kevin. And we were always having sex. In one particularly raunchy one, we were on the lawn, getting wet from the sprinkler, and he kept trying to untie my black lace-up bra with his teeth. So many times, I woke up sweaty, half conscious, but still ashamed. I wrote about the dreams in my diary because I was too mortified to even tell Emily about them, and I wanted to make sense of them somehow. Deep down, I knew I didn’t want my stepfather. Yet my subconscious was definitely trying to tell me something. It took a little while, but I soon figured out what it was. It seemed I was finally ready to have sex.