Sugar in My Bowl (12 page)

On the second Friday at Yaddo, I gave up on the charade. I first booked a round-trip train ticket, so as not to lose my blinding sense of intention, and then explained to the writer who ran the colony with his much older (and more famous) wife that a dire family emergency had suddenly burst over the horizon and required my immediate but short-lived attendance back home. I was torn, I assured the director, about whether to go and interrupt this extraordinary opportunity to convene with the woods
à la
Thoreau, but I would make it as quick a stay as I could. He bought into my bald excuses with utmost grace. How was he to know that under my serious-seeming writerly self was a creature deranged by sexual longing, an updated and less provincial version of Madame Bovary, dying to escape her small-town existence and have another fling with the callous Rodolphe?

I was back in the city and in J.C.’s low and not particularly comfortable bed by Friday evening, but something had gone wrong by the next day, after we had subwayed and ferried over to Fire Island. I may have said something mocking but affectionate that he took to be merely mocking; he was always misreading my tone that way. I only know that by the time I walked out of the ocean, we were no longer on speaking terms. J.C. ignored me as I settled myself back on the expansive beach towel he had brought; he continued to lie silently on his side of the towel, his arms folded behind his head and his eyes closed as he gave himself up to the peak rays. I lay on my stomach, staring out onto the crowded beach that seemed to shimmer in the heat, wondering why I had ever succumbed to a man who, right from the start, disliked me as much as he lusted after me. For the next hour or two, as the afternoon grew cooler and my skin took on the crunchy texture of sand mixed with tanning cream, we continued to coexist without a word passing between us. I made several firm decisions in my head, scrambling to find a foothold in the chaos of J.C.’s intermittent affections. (1) I would pay more attention to my writing when I returned to Yaddo. (2) From here on in, I’d stop trying to endear myself to men who viewed me with a mixture of hostility and curiosity, as though I were an exotic species of female that happened to crawl out from under a rock. (3) On a more specific level, I would try to bring this day to a close without getting teary or angry, and then, calling on whatever lingering strength of character I had, I would put J.C. and his bedroom skills behind me forever.

Somewhere between leaving the beach and the ferry ride, we started talking again. Once he decided he had been punitive or distancing enough, J.C.’s relational style was to act as if nothing had ever gone awry—no rift, no icy walls put up between us. By this point, I was so reduced by his ability to leave me behind like a piece of debris that I embraced the chance to be part of a couple again, my girlfriend to his boyfriend. It was in this humbled but also agitated spirit that I went back to his apartment with him. He warmed up some uninspired leftovers, and we sat at the small half-circle of a table that stood against an unwelcoming bare wall in his minimalist studio apartment and made desultory conversation. I had spent 10 days at Yaddo daydreaming about going to bed with him, which was why I went home with him rather than holding my head up high and bidding him a collected adieu the minute we hit the city. I assume he knew this as well as—if not better than—I did, but at some point I gathered up the few remaining shreds of false dignity I had and murmured that I had to make the last train back to Saratoga Springs. As if on cue, J.C. got up and sauntered over to his bed, which was all of a few feet away, and lay down on it.
Come over here,
he said.
You don’t really want to go now
,
do you? I bet I know what you want
.

You bet he did. What’s the point of fighting the insinuating nature of desire when it won’t leave you alone, won’t shut up until you attend to it? I walked over to the far side of J.C.’s bed and stood there shyly, like a girl fresh off a Nebraska farm. I was wearing a long, flimsy summer skirt, and I stood there silently, wondering how to move the scene forward without completely selling myself out. And then, in his deft, wordless way, J.C. rolled toward my side and pulled me toward him. He stared into my face with his large, somewhat wary brown eyes, as though he understood that things were difficult for me, a girl dealing with too many inner conflicts (none of which, it was understood, had anything to do with him), and then he put his hand up under my skirt and pulled down my underpants—not all the way down, but somewhere in the vicinity of my ankles. He continued to watch me closely as he put his hand up under my skirt.

The frenzied feeling of being away from him, followed by the thwarted day at the beach, followed now by the way he seemed to coax me into my own need for him, all worked in desire’s favor. You feel so milky, he said, as he continued to keep his finger inside me. When he came inside me, smelling of Old Spice and the faintest whiff of something musky coming off his skin—he was the most excretion-less man I’ve ever been with, I don’t think I ever saw him sweat—it all made sense again.
Do I own you now?
he asked, as though the whole point of our tortuous dance was to corral me like some undomesticated beast and lead me on a rope into the tent he had pitched against the encroaching darkness.
Yes,
I whispered, like I always did.

I returned to Yaddo the following day, after J.C. went to work, dressed in his aspiring professional uniform, but by then it was already too late to pretend I was serious about becoming part of a writerly community. I was a loner at heart, looking to be taken up by another loner—someone who understood that under my barricaded demeanor I was bursting to open my gates to the next proprietary male. Ownership made sense to me, it always had, suggesting a kind of safety in confinement. It couldn’t last, of course, that kind of is-this-love-or-is-this-hate entanglement, but I swear it makes my brain smoke just to consider it all these years later.

Let’s Not Talk About Sex

Julie Klam

D
o 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.