“Losing your virginity” was a phrase all over our house, a companion as regular as another sister. This thing that had to happen. That would happen.
I spent the summer in Taos before I started junior year at the new boarding school. My mother had purchased a house in Ranchos. She was proud. She didn’t explain the finances of it, just that the realtor was wonderful, and her man at the bank was a brick. The house sat on the west side of a small plaza, presided over by a tiny church. We had a scruffy yard in the back with one crooked apricot tree and a clothesline we used to dry towels. There were a few other houses, also adobe. I don’t remember any of us knowing the neighbors or looking inside the church.
“It’s Sue’s sixteenth birthday!” my mother said into the phone. “We’re going to our bar, our fave.” A few miles toward town, the place had live music and made good tequila sunrises, heavy on the cassis, which swamped out the taste of alcohol. Kids got served if their parents brought them.
I had taken my driver’s test in the morning and had the scrap of paper, the temporary notice, until the plastic one with the photo came. I was eager to be behind the wheel. In the morning, our mother was taking us to Colorado, and I hoped she’d let me do some of the driving. Penelope didn’t want to go to boarding school, but my mother said the education would be good and, besides, she’d have me. Duffels and boxes sat in the hallway, waiting to be loaded into the car.
All three of us filled the bathroom. My mother and I were still in our John Kloss Lily of France underwires with the front closure. “It looks better to a man when you open your bra from the front,” she once told me. Our nipples showed through the sheer fabric, hers larger than mine and darker. She dusted blush on the bridge of Penelope’s nose. We put on lacy sweaters and tailored pants. In my room I applied lip gloss with a little gold brush my mother had given me. She came in with my presents.
“First this,” she said. We sat down on the bed, and I unwrapped a slim silver Montblanc fountain pen. She plucked it from its case and balanced it between her fingers. “Marvelous weight, isn’t it? This is the finest pen ever made. It’s for your writing.”
“I love it. Thank you.”
“I know you.”
She handed me the next gift, a blank book.
“For your diary.”
“Thank you.”
“And, because you’re sixteen.” Her eyes teared up. “My baby.” She opened her palm, where the folded white packet was nesting.
“Oh,” I said.
“Your own gram. I cut it. It’s fabulous,” she said. She gripped my wrist. “Please, please, darling, don’t ever do someone else’s coke. You never know what it’s cut with. Promise?”
“I promise.”
She spooned up a hit and held it steady for me, then snorted two hits herself. We tasted the metallic trickle in our throats at the same time, sniffed together to keep our noses from running. I imagined I could already feel the coke’s electric command in me. She wiped her nostrils quickly, a gesture of hers I’d been trying to develop. She refolded the sno-seal and popped it in my purse. For a birthday treat I got to wear her shoes, thin red straps around my ankles, ungainly height. She put on her white cowboy hat, and we drove in a hurry to the bar so we could catch the first set. We liked the band. I liked the drummer, Theo, who smiled at me whenever I sat near the platform.
When my mother walked in, an alert rippled through the room. “Enter laughing,” she used to joke, but she actually did it, and Penelope and I could see it worked. We surveyed the crowded dance floor. Theo was playing on the stage, and I felt the twitch run through me, the nervous current of sexual prowess and coke-fueled buzz. Wasn’t I beautiful and sexy? My hair fell in shiny ringlets, my skin was the “best in the family,” my mother said, and I had that great ass. Penelope pushed between chairs and flopped down at a table an annoying distance from the stage.
“I want to sit closer,” I said. “It’s my birthday.” I pulled on her arm, but she wouldn’t move. I kicked out a chair and sat.
Over the music my mother yelled, “You want him, Sue?” She was pointing at Theo. She made a thumbs-up. “I’ll get him for you. A birthday present.” Then she went to the bathroom. I never liked it in there, women packed in tight, the narrow countertop loaded with wads of cash. People were always checking their Kleenex for blood.
The waitress set down napkin squares and took my order for three tequila sunrises. My mother came back wired. She tucked herself into the chair. “Okay, I’ve got great news.” She wiped each nostril quickly. “I just ran into that waitress in the bathroom, she works here on Sundays? And she told me that Theo fancies you. He thinks you’re gorgeous.”
After a couple of hours, she let me drive the car home. My sister in the passenger seat was cranky with being up too late. My high-strung anticipation had sagged, the brightness off the night. I drove slowly because you were supposed to pay extra attention if you’d had a drink. My mother was going to explain to Theo how tonight was special for me, my sixteenth birthday, my very last night before starting a new school, and she’d bring him back to our house.
“I’ll get him to give me a lift. You watch, darling. I’ll make it happen.”
“Mum,” I said. “I don’t want to go to bed with him.”
“No, of course not,” she said. “But don’t you want him to come over for a drink? An hour alone with him on your last night? Wouldn’t you like that? Take Penelope home, get her to bed and wait for us.”
My sister was happy to close her door, and I tidied up the living room, tossing clothes into my mother’s room, clearing plates and glasses back to the kitchen. Theo fancied me. I looked around my room as if he were in it. I sat down, I lay down, I sat up, I stood up, unable to decide how I should be when he arrived. The poster of the Degas ballerinas was embarrassing. I checked the name of the drummer on my Police album.
She did bring Theo in. I was asleep, propped up in the corner of the couch. When I woke, I could hear them talking in her bedroom. I went and got into my bed, shutting my door. I didn’t want to be seen slow with sleep and out of it. I woke up fully and listened as the murmuring changed to a higher register, as the sounds quickened. She fucked him. I listened to his boots on the terra-cotta tile when he passed my door. He started up his truck that had carried her home, the tires circling out of our little plaza and onto the blacktop.
In the morning I wouldn’t talk to her. She pointed out I’d been asleep when they came in. “I assumed you couldn’t have cared that much,” she said.
I couldn’t stand the mire of her arguments. Anything I answered would come back at me, and, anyway, wasn’t she right? That I hadn’t really cared about him. It was just a crush. He’d never kissed me or even called me. She had coaxed the crush along, which maybe made it hers more than mine. I dropped the subject of Theo.
I said, “It was my sixteenth birthday, and I had to hear you fucking in the next room.”
She was icy. “Well, I’m sorry you couldn’t lose your virginity on your special birthday, Susy.”
“Couldn’t you at least have closed your door all the way?” I said.
“The world,” she said, “does not revolve around you.”
The next morning, sunny and purposeful, we hurried our belongings into the rear of the hatchback. Penelope claimed shotgun. My mother, who loved the next new thing, was in a grand mood, hugging us and humming, eager to get going. We sang songs from musicals on the drive to Colorado Springs, and when we left the interstate, we got giddier and giddier with the adventure of decoding local directions. The street names seemed ridiculous to us. We were having such fun.
We dropped Penelope off at her freshman social and then found my dorm. It was tiny, a converted house, six bedrooms. In the distance mountains soared against the sky, but we didn’t know what they were called. After I put my bags and stereo in my single, we went to meet my sister. We held hands, trailing the narrow paths. We could smell hay in the breeze and the tangy scent of pine needles. You could cross the whole campus in under five minutes, the adobe buildings and hacienda-style library adorable and soothing after my other school’s Ivy League glaze. There were no mammoth structures to honor alumni, no grandeur to impress parents; the gym wasn’t in good repair, and some of the grass was yellowed where the sprinklers didn’t reach, but I felt I could learn where everything was, that I could be in charge.
“Maybe I should stay another day,” my mother said.
“You should go,” I said. “Go back home.” I realized that my mother had gone from boarding school to my father to us. After she left us tonight, she would be living without an audience. As far as I knew, she would sleep, cut coke, drink, do coke, meet friends for drinks and fight with men. She had no job, no business, though she had a lot of friends who counted on her advice about depression or bad relationships or debt. She read books about Watergate and went to the movies and enjoyed bad TV about Princess Di. When she did have a job—“He wants me to copyedit his manuscript!” “I’m going to sell art!”—it was forgotten after a few weeks. She had never lived alone.
She stopped the man as he crossed our path.
“Are you on the faculty? I’m Daphne, and this is my daughter Susy. She’s a new fifth-former.”
“Junior,” I said. We shook hands.
“Dr. Crawford,” he said. “I teach English.”
She made some doctor joke about the care the students needed, medicinal needs, and then, what had he written his dissertation on? While he was talking she whispered to me, showing him he was worth a secret. She whispered, “Redhead.” She didn’t like redheads, one of her violent and inexplicable tastes; except now she acted as if this were an asset.
When he’d moved on she said, “The doctor already has a real crush on you.”
“Mum, God.” I knew by now this wasn’t true, but her saying it reminded me of possibility, a particular outcome.
“Didn’t you notice? He couldn’t stop smiling at you. He adores you.”
“He was being nice,” I said. “It’s the first day. Can’t anything be normal with you?” I started to pull away but she held my sleeve.
“Trust me,” she said. “The world is about sex.”
I signed up for Dr. Crawford’s History of Satire and Shakespeare and his honors poetry elective. Two years of an eastern boarding school (and my father) had given me a sophisticated education, and I could flip literary allusions back at him. I read what he mentioned in passing and amassed notes if he let drop where he’d earned his BA or that he used to teach college. He lived off campus, which meant he didn’t have regular dorm duties, and he wasn’t findable. I never knew where I’d run into him, which loaded my walks with expectation. He looked older to me than I knew he was, his beard brushed through with gray, comforting, and he dressed in a cliché of prep-school style—brown loafers and a softened corduroy sports coat. English teachers were so easy. Everything was right there between Catherine and Heathcliff or splashing at the edges of Keats. I could give my precocious perspective on courtly love in Chaucer or on Hemingway’s stoic lust. I alone picked up on the bawdy innuendo in those Early English poems, and he noticed.
I settled into teen obsession, fueled by his appropriate obstacles. My dorm-mate Jane became my closest friend, patient with me and happy to talk about all the cute boys. Dr. Crawford wouldn’t let me hang around alone too long, often didn’t notice me in the dining hall. I was dying to see his house but didn’t get to until the night his wife made chili for all his advisees, had us over in a noisy herd. It annoyed me to be one of everybody. A couple of us snuck a look in their medicine cabinet, which contained Tums and nail polish remover and antibiotics, nothing my mother would have bothered to snatch. Dr. Crawford did invite me for homemade pizza a couple of times, inviting Penelope, too. She sat in the back of his car, and in the front seat I referred to things I knew she wouldn’t understand.
Dr. Crawford’s wife taught part-time at the school, and I grew familiar with the hours she was certain to be around and let my friends know I liked it better when she wasn’t. Susanna’s famous crush, her mighty crush. Nothing happened except silences made fraught by my imagination and, once, accidental coat sleeve against sleeve in the lunch line. Except for Jane, my friends and sister were bored to death by the subject of Dr. Crawford, and they teased me. Even Dr. Crawford teased me, imitating my nervous stammer. The crush was everybody’s joke.
But something changed. When my mother, on the phone, asked for news, at first I had babbled about the crush. She asked, and I wanted to tell all the little ins and outs of being obsessed with somebody. Then, for reasons I couldn’t identify, I started to keep it to myself. I sacrificed my desire to plumb Dr. Crawford’s every move. Instead, I colored in the boys, made up kisses, detailed who-said-whats, the politics she valued.
“I like Mrs. Crawford,” Penelope said one day, staring me down.
“So do I!” I insisted.
“Please don’t make me go to dinner there anymore,” and she wouldn’t let me talk about him.
My friends started to worry. “You’re going to mess up your life,” said Pete Spooner, who wanted to go out with me.
“Don’t be melodramatic,” I told him. My stomach tightened with glory.
One day Dr. Crawford called me back as my classmates left. I felt deliciously singled out, mine the only student voice in the last forty minutes as we’d traded rapid-fire theory. I’d been reading his copy of Northrop Frye, extra credit.
“Listen, Susy. You have a crush on me, right?”
The pleasure slipped, and I felt caught, a thief with contraband.
“I’m very flattered. You’re a tremendous girl, maybe even the most interesting girl I’ve ever known, but this is a little out of hand, and it’s making me uncomfortable.” My face was burning. “I love my wife very much.” I nodded. “We have an incredibly strong marriage. Twelve and a half years.” This was more than I wanted to know, more, I suspected, than he should be saying.
“Aren’t you going out with Spooner anyway?” he said.
“Him. Sort of. Not seriously. He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Well, you should have boyfriends. Don’t you like Pete?”
I seized his gaze and said, “He’s a good kisser.” Dr. Crawford raised an eyebrow. “We’ve made out. But his hands are always clammy, Dr. Crawford. And there’s a way he’s always too nervous.”
He laughed. “Sounds like high school. Exactly what you should be doing. Have boyfriends, Susy. Have lots of them. If you want, you can tell me about them, and I’ll help decode the mysteries of the adolescent male for you. And you can call me Wyatt. At least, when we’re alone like this.”
Penelope and I went home to Taos for the winter break. My mother asked about Wyatt, and I couldn’t resist her face, open, soft, hungry and focused on me. I knew a lot about him by now, and she was the best at interpreting such details.
“This isn’t healthy,” she said afterward. “Should I be concerned?”
“No,” I said. “God, he’s twice my age.”
“Lincoln’s back for the holiday,” she said. “I ran into his brother yesterday at the post office.”
I’d kissed Lincoln a year earlier. I should remember that kiss, so long predicted and desired. But as soon as it happened, it mattered less than wanting it, and then Lincoln mattered less. Still, when he entered the Christmas party my second night back, his laugh made me turn, and in spite of my junior-year indifference I felt a homecoming.
“Babe!” he said, and pulled me close with a large, sloppy arm around my shoulder. I wanted to be cool, but the habit of craving his attention was too strong, and I threw my arms around him. He wasn’t sarcastic anymore and didn’t recite manic Monty Python sketches with the other guys. He was calm and kind, and, anyway, we’d already done all that making out, so there wouldn’t be anything weird or tense. This was what you did on Christmas break. You welcomed the embrace of your old friends, and everyone wanted kissing, any kissing.
He’d forgotten his bong. “We’re going over to Harrison’s later,” he said. “You want to come, babe? You’re not still uptight about all that, are you? Daphne told me you’d mellowed out. You want to ride along while I stop over at my mom’s to get my stuff?”
I had to act like I didn’t know it was an excuse. We ended up alone, as we both wanted it, managing to lose the other kids.
We knocked around on the couch until our clothes were off, one piece at a time, a blanket over us. Lincoln naked. Would this be how Wyatt would kiss, how Wyatt undressed? I kept making it clear, have me, have this, you can have it. I slid half a hip under him and tried to bring his erection against me. I wasn’t scared.
“Losing your virginity is serious business, babe,” he said, and he wouldn’t do it. He made me look him in the eye. “You’re a kid.”
I stayed until 3 a.m. and crept inside my house when he dropped me off, disappointed, my skin roughed from stubble.
In the morning I brought coffee to my mother’s bed. “Well, I slept with him,” I said. The lie blossomed. With the friendly bruises emerging on my neck from Lincoln’s mouth, I elaborated. I crawled in next to her and made the night specific—his belt buckle got caught on my sweater, the television was on in the next room.
“How many times did he come?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I thought she’d see through me now. “Three.”
“What’d his come taste like?”
“No blow jobs,” I said.
I made everything up, except the fact of being with him. I described the new me and fed her feverish interest. Underneath the charge that came with creativity was the regret I’d never get to lose my virginity with her again.
She was pleased. “You had your diaphragm?”
“No, we used condoms.”
“Don’t you hate condoms?” she said. My sleepy sister padded in and got under the covers on the other side of my mother, who said, “Guess what Sue did last night?”
Later I sat in the living room writing in my diary with fanatical precision—at 7:15, at 9:20, we got in the car at 2:50—amazed that my mother had believed me. I watched the ink string along the paper in thin wet ribbons. In a little while we were going out with Penelope to celebrate the big event, chateaubriand and champagne, just the three of us. I could hear Billy Joel’s record from her room and the stream of my mother’s voice as she talked on the phone in hers. The windows showed blue evening on the snow outside, and my blood was charged by recent arousal. I was exactly in the place I liked best, and I wished Wyatt could see me.
My mother walked through, delivering plates to the kitchen. “We should light a fire.” She came back and sat close to me on the couch. She was grave, and my heart tightened. Had she phoned Lincoln to check?
“Listen, darling. You can’t just go jumping into bed with anyone who asks you. I know Lincoln’s special, and I always knew he’d be your first, but you have to behave like a lady. Otherwise you’ll get a reputation.” I stared at her. She went to her room, forgetting the fire, and I picked up my diary and struck the same notes of indignation any teenager would.
After dark we ran into Randall at the Stakeout, all of us dressed up, and we told him my news, my mother and I relating bits in turn, the pieces sliding together neatly. She played two fingers along my cheek and gazed at me. “Can you believe it?” The story flowed from Lincoln’s couch to his car, to my bed, to my mother’s bed, through the snowy afternoon and dressing for dinner. Time kept catching it all up, friends at the restaurant invited to hear, and the news kept getting augmented. It sounded better each time, event mastered by invention. I imagined how I’d tell Wyatt. Losing my virginity felt done.