Julie Klam
Do you want to hear something embarrassing? My daughter who is just turning six thought until last week that her vagina was called “the front.” And I told her the right word because she asked why boys have penises and girls just have fronts. If I could’ve gotten away with never naming a body part other than the tushy, I would’ve. The reason she knew the word penis is because we have one boy dog and three girls. One day she said, “Mom, what is that?”
And I took a deep breath and said, “A penis.” Because, you know, I’m very forward thinking and progressive. I just said penis right like that for the first time in her six years.
And she looked at me and said, “Do all boys have them?”
“Yes,” I openly confirmed, “they do.”
“Are they really sad that they have them?” she asked, genuinely concerned.
“No, darling,” I broke it to her. “They’re quite pleased with them.”
Thus ended the sex talk.
I know I’m warped. I had to write about sex once before, and my face was red for a month. I actually gave myself rosacea. The piece was about making your man better in bed—ick, I wanted to scream at “your man” and “better in bed.” (I still think “better in bed” means more hours of sleep.) I wrote from the point of view of the Victorian school marm I see myself as. A little more modest than Sister Wendy. It was like a challenge from the universe (in the form of a glossy women’s magazine). Write about the stuff that makes you want to cringe and curl up like a roly-poly bug. I was paid the most money I’d ever made, not only that, after I wrote it, dozens of foreign magazines optioned it for years after, and I kept getting paid again. Clearly this was a topic other people had less trouble with than I.
I am not the product of an all-girls Catholic school upbringing. Oh no, I grew up in a very open, liberal, hippy-ish household. Nary a day went by when I didn’t have to see someone’s tushy. My parents were fiercely naked. When I got to the age where I finally demanded that my dad cover up around me, I still had run-ins with him because he was always being naked somewhere. Rather than walk inside and use the bathroom, he goes behind a tree. My mother’s a nudie, too. My husband has said he’s seen my mother naked (accidentally) more than he’s seen me. They love being without clothes! They have an outdoor shower with nothing to keep someone from seeing you naked, except an alert system—a thumbtacked playing card by the back door that leads to the shower. A queen if a girl is taking a shower and a king if it’s a male. If someone happens to be walking around the back of the house though, then they won’t know about the playing card. My parents sleep naked; they swim naked. Whereas if I could shower wearing a T-shirt and underwear, I would. And before you wonder, I did once hear them doing it. I wanted to pour boiling oil in my ears. If evil governments are really looking to torture prisoners, they should forget waterboarding and just make them sit in a room beside their parents having loud sex. I’d talk!
When I was in the eighth grade trying to grow up normally in the bucolic town of Katonah, New York, one of my high school-aged brothers was regularly having sex with his girlfriend—in his bedroom—down the hall from me. I came home from school one day, and he and his girlfriend were coming out of the shower together, she a giggling mass of boobies and bubbles. I went down the hall to my pink room, closed the door, and sat on my bed with my hands folded and decided I would make it my business to find a good Jewish convent.
Very reluctantly, I went on a date with an actual boy, my first, shortly after that. Here’s how it went. Cliff Covey, a ninth grade Lacrosse stud, asked his guy friend to ask his girlfriend if she would ask me if I’d go to the movies with him. I passed the note back and said yes. A lot of girls liked him; I was not one of them. Still, the idea of having contact with a boy, with your friend and her boyfriend acting as go-between, seemed like something I could handle.
I was told by my friend, the operative, to meet him at the movies. Everyone in school went to the same movie theater on Friday nights and whatever was playing was what you saw, whether it was Pippi Longstocking or Das Boot. That night it happened to be Peter Sellers in Being There. A perfect junior high date movie.
During the day I felt nervous, not like a happy giddy anxiety, more like a gallows walk feeling. I thought a lot about what to wear. I still considered dressing up in terms of my Jewish high holiday outfits. I had a pastel flowered skirt that had a matching French-cut T-shirt with a pocket in the same pastel flowered pattern that I wore with a lavender string and ceramic necklace and white sandals. I sat in the backseat of my mother’s car after school while she and my Aunt Mattie, who was up visiting us from Manhattan, ran errands to The Mousetrap, our town’s cheese shop and the Village Market, where Mattie looked into the butcher’s eyes and said, “This is the most gawjus meat I have evah seen!” My mother told Mattie I was going on my first date. “Mazel tov!” she said, tapping her cigarette ashes out the window. “Don’t let him feel you up.” She and my mother laughed; I didn’t know what that meant.
I came home and got dressed and my brother told me the outfit was stupid. I should wear jeans and “like a cool shirt.” I was totally clueless. I had another skirt outfit with strawberries on the skirt and the shirt. I had no idea that dressing for a date was different from dressing to go out to dinner with my grandparents.
My mom drove me to the movies, and I felt ill the entire way. How did I get myself into this? I would’ve rather been home watching Family Ties with some blueberry cake and ice cream. We got there and I wordlessly got out of the car, silently cursing my mother for borning me into the second sex. The movie had already started; everyone was inside. I opened my pink Perry Ellis purse and pulled out my money and bought my ticket, looking at the kid in the booth with deep envy. Through the darkened theater, my eyes adjusting, my feet sticking to the floor, I found the one person who wasn’t coupled up and making out: my date. He’d saved me a seat. I don’t remember if he said hello before he put his arm around me and then proceeded to paint my throat with his tongue. You know a kiss is top-notch when after it ends you have need of a tennis towel to wipe your face. Each kiss was punctuated with me turning away and blotting my face into my sleeve. Blech! This went on for an hour or so, at which time Cliff asked me if I would “go out with him,” i.e., go steady.
I looked at the screen. What was Peter Sellers doing? Was he retarded? What was this movie? Where were the grown-ups?
“Sure,” I said gamely, even though I felt like I was serving a sentence. The very idea of saying no or even I don’t know didn’t occur to me. I’d read Forever by Judy Blume, and I could safely say I felt no tingling anywhere except where I’d missed some of his saliva on my cheek.
“Are you going to our lacrosse game tomorrow?” he whispered.
“Yes,” I said robotically.
“It’s an away game,” he said. “How will you get there?”
I sat in silence and shrugged, watching Chauncey Gardner falling from one situation to another, not unlike me and this giant tongue in the Lacoste shirt. When the movie ended we said good-bye and went out of the theater, and I race-walked to my mother’s station wagon in the sea of other parents’ cars.
I got in and slammed the door.
“How was it?” she asked.
“Okay,” I said morosely and looked out the window. My mother squeezed my leg.
When I got home my two brothers were giddily waiting at the top of the staircase to taunt me for being in luh-huh-huh-huh-hove. I walked up the stairs with grim determination like I’d just come home from taking the bar exam.
“Julie,” my brothers sang, “did you enjoy your night of passion?” they said in Robin Leachy voices, gleefully taunting me until they noticed I wasn’t smiling.
“What happened?” one said.
“It was horrible,” I murmured. “I hated it.” I went on to tell them about the Saint Bernard-style make-out session I’d endured from this ninth grade spittoon. They were almost angry with me.
“That’s what you have to do!” one said.
“You better get used to it!” the other added.
They left me in my room. Was it true? Did I have to get used to that? Was this the thing that everyone else in the world actually enjoyed? How could I have possibly gotten it so wrong? How would I be able to keep it up? My face was already covered in a mild diaper rash. I lay awake all night, thinking about my friends joyously sneaking out of their houses to kiss boys. Something was really off with me, but I didn’t care what my brothers said. I wasn’t ever going to get used to it.
On Monday morning, I went to Cliff Covey’s locker and broke up with him. I actually said, “I really don’t think this is working out.”
After that, I stuck to crushes on movie stars and staying home with my friend Barbara, who also didn’t date, on Friday nights. We’d watch movies and plot how when we grew up we’d marry Kevin Bacon and Matthew Broderick. It was safe . . . and they seemed dry.
It wasn’t until college that I started kissing again. The first guy I kissed was a fellow film major. He was nothing special, just kind of funny and dorky, and we all went to see The Manchurian Candidate together. He sat next to me and sort of let his leg hit my leg. After, he walked me home and kissed me. It was nothing like I’d remembered. Soft and slow and sexy and at no time did he test my gag reflex. I was still really scared of boys, and so when he asked me out again I made up a story about some far-off boyfriend in England whom I’d broken up with but now we were getting back together.
Now it wasn’t the kissing, that was fine. But there was something terrifying in that all of the moves came from the boys. So after we kissed, then what? Would I have to take my shirt off? Or my pants? I had sat in that Peter Sellers movie like a dumb robot saying yes to everything and then my brothers told me that was how it was supposed to be. I just didn’t want anything to do with it. In my brain, I thought being with a man meant giving over any personal choices and becoming a Stepford gal. A good kiss would lead to being felt up and then sex and moving in and no longer being able to choose my own TV shows or restaurants to order from. That just sounded terrible. So I abstained, oh, not out of choice, I made myself believe. Just suddenly, no one was interested in me and I decided it was because of those ten pounds I had to lose . . . and my nails were a mess . . . and my bangs hadn’t grown out. I also equated the idea of having sex with letting go, being loose and out of control and unbuttoned—kind of like my yicky naked parents. That brought me back to my eighth grade self, who hadn’t been able to say no or slow down.
Did I get “better”? Sure. Never underestimate the power of twenty-six years of therapy. I needed to stop seeing myself in relation to my parents and my brothers to become comfortable with who I am. And one day, I’m going to educate my daughter about sex. She’s already started asking me about it. Fortunately, I stammer so long she loses interest. But soon enough, it’s going to come, that moment. . . .
Violet: Mommy, where do babies come from?
Me: Why don’t you ever ask me where hot dogs or Barbies come from?
Violet: Please tell me.
Me: (Sigh) Oh fine. How would you like a box of raisins?
(She stares at me.)
Me: Okay, this is hard for me to talk about because I’m not comfortable with the topic, but I certainly appreciate your need to know. (And here’s where I will start double-talking her with psychological shit about repression and then maybe cough and cough and I’ll ask for a glass of water and then hopefully, God willing, my bursitis will flare up.) And if none of that works, and my back’s against the wall, I will pull two chairs beside each other and together we will Google it.