Sugar in My Bowl (13 page)

“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.

My Best Friend’s Boyfriend

Fay Weldon

O
n the occasion that I lost my virginity, I was, I remember, wearing a dreary sage green woollen dressing gown. It had been run up on the sewing machine by my mother in the interest of my warmth and decency. Glamour did not come into my mother’s vocabulary, though words like
prudence
and
dignity
did.

When my boyfriend—though actually he was my best friend’s boyfriend, and an ex-serviceman—saw the dressing gown, he laughed, I had no idea why.

I was eighteen. It was a long time ago, in 1949 to be exact. Already you will be working out my age, so I will spare you the bother and explain to you that I am seventy-nine. Between forty-five and seventy it is only sensible for a lady writer to disguise her age, try not to let slip that she was around at the time of the Korean War, the original
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
the invention of the pill, Watergate, and so on—but after seventy-five some other element enters in: you are so old you gain shamus status and people tend to hang on your words, no matter how foolish they may be, impressed because you still have the capacity to say them. Just get through the forty-five-to-seventy-five bit and you’ll be fine.

For most women these days, I daresay, their first sexual encounter is not going to be much to write home about, let alone text or Twitter: it will have been a gradual escalation from one intimacy to another. But in 1949, sex was a private and secret activity, and not the focused rush to orgasm by all possible means that it is today. Anything but the missionary position was considered indecent and unnecessary—and some indeed were actually illegal—and no nice girl supposed it to be anything else. Rather, it was about the creation of new life, and the problem was to have the sex but not have a baby. Contraception was up to the male and consisted of “I’ll only put it in a little way” or “I’ll withdraw, I promise.” Which was pretty much the same as no contraception at all. As a result sex was a dangerous thing, far more interesting and erotic than it is now. This; this summonsing to the bed (or in my case the floor of the student pad) of the forces that create new life, mixed up and heady with a sense of the forbidden, a fear of pregnancy, and an understanding that what you are doing was a deliberate act of social outrage, made the event remarkable.

And besides, I had been fed, on the rug, before the fire, almost a whole half bottle of Cointreau, a sticky sweet orange liqueur, which I still choose today if circumstances arise, rather than brandy or grappa or whiskey, in order to feel a whisper of that same breathless excitement, that mixture of lust, languor, fear, and sin. If the women of Catholic countries today still choose to obey the decree of the pope in Rome and avoid contraception, it isn’t that they’re out of their minds; it’s that they just like the sensations of significant sex.

It was more curiosity than love, I admit, which drove me on. The one who plied the Cointreau was my best friend’s boyfriend, she being out of town for the night. After that, I fell in love with him quite desperately, and he would climb the stairs to visit me whenever she went away, which was never often enough, and many was the night I spent secretly weeping and mad with jealousy. She was quite conceited and viewed me, I think, as plain, fat, and funny (which I was at the time) and didn’t see me as any kind of danger. I showed her!

Men were rare and exotic creatures. I lived until I was fifteen in New Zealand, in an all-female household composed of my mother, my grandmother, and my sister. I went to an all-girls school. Nor was my mother keen on male company—my father was a charming philanderer and my mother virtuous, but he divorced her when I was five on the grounds of a single night’s infidelity on her part, and the injustice rankled. She did not marry again. “What me, wash some man’s socks?” Her reluctance mystified me. To sleep in the same bed as a man seemed to me the highest good and still does. (I was paid half a crown a page to learn John Stuart Mill’s
Subjugation of Women
by heart, and concepts of highest good and so forth came easily to me.) It must be so warm and companionable under the blankets. But Mother was having none of it.

Not just rare and exotic, men were liable to turn on the instant into wild and unrestrained beasts. “Always be careful not to lead a man on: if you do they can’t stop themselves,” we nice girls were told. But stop what? We had only a vague idea. It is hard for younger generations to realize the extent of our ignorance on sexual matters. No girls of my acquaintance had ever seen a naked man, very few men a naked girl. Parents did not appear unclothed in front of children. Only in the
National Geographic
magazine did you get a glimpse of dusky female breasts. No TV, no computers, no Internet porn. What men and women did together was a mystery, and you didn’t let your mind go there.

When we moved to England in 1946 I hoped things might be different, but no . . . I was fifteen. Still no men. Another all-girls school. No dating (a newfangled concept anyway) until you were out of school uniform. More warnings. “It’s bad for men’s health if they’re stopped. They get pains. You must be considerate.” So in consideration for male health, as we grew into women, we wore blouses buttoned up to the neck and sleeves buttoned at the wrist, lisle stockings with suspender belts to keep them up (their erotic possibilities unexplored), and an elastic girdle over the hips to make sure the shape of the body didn’t bring itself to male attention. And we kept our eyes discreetly lowered in case somehow by mistake we “led men on.” A friend’s brother kissed me when I was sixteen and said I had nice thighs, but that was the sum of my sexual experience.

On my eighteenth birthday I arrived at the University of St. Andrews in distant Scotland, lured by the pull of the scarlet gown the students wore then and still do today, with my one suitcase of decent clothing plus the green cloth dressing gown my mother had made for me. It was so bulky the suitcase would barely shut. On that same day she closed up our home, her maternal duty done, and went to live as a bohemian in St. Ives, in even more distant Cornwall. She’d whirled the map and put in a pin and that was where it landed. That was how, in our house, decisions were made. And I was on my own, without a home, without a country, and only a scholarship from a benign state for company.

But here at the last were all the men, a 20 percent female-to-male quota (girls were seen as so
dangerous
to male morality), and a high proportion of the men were back from the wars on ex-servicemen grants. They were grown men in their twenties, and we girls were straight out of school. I hated my own ignorance. It was my instant ambition to lose my virginity. This turned out to be oddly difficult, partly I suspect because of my total lack of feminine wiles, and partly because men were not all lascivious, predatory beasts, but decent, and knew that sex led to babies, and babies led to marriage.

Virginity is a vague kind of concept these days, there being so many stages between childhood and the breaking of a hymen that many would be at a loss to remember or describe when it ceased to be. But then, moving on into the 1950s, virginity was a kind of concrete, before-and-after reality; a thing you “lost” at your peril, because a woman was obliged to live on the goodwill of men—being rarely able to earn enough to support herself. So you remembered all right. And reputation was important. You certainly did not want the name of the village bicycle, the one everyone rode.

But I was bold. I moved out of the hall of residence and rented a house with three other free-thinking girls. Hall was all rules. You were allowed men visitors in your room at teatime, but you had to move your bed out into the corridor first. It was embarrassing.

And it was one evening when the house was empty that X—I cannot bear to give you his name: I don’t know quite why, but it feels like a disloyalty—pulled up on his motorbike—ah, the thrum, thrum, thrum, all that—and found me there alone, sitting on the floor beside the fire with my books, and sat beside me, and we opened my best friend’s bottle of Cointreau. He didn’t even have to ring the bell because in those days no one felt the need to lock front doors. He’d just come in. And before long he said “supposing you go and put on something more comfortable,” and puzzled but obedient I went upstairs and came down in my sage green wool dressing gown, which was the only thing I could think of, and he laughed. But laid on top of the rug it was thick enough to make the floor really quite comfortable, or at any rate not sufficiently uncomfortable to worry, and my bed too far away to get to anyway, and I realized, my eyes finally unlowered, that he was beautiful, with glossy black hair and full red lips and a skin so different from my own, raspy where mine was silky. And even as I was coming to terms with the remarkable way my female body suddenly linked together with the male in the fashion evolution had clearly designed them for—I once watched a shapeless tadpole take its first breath on dry land: and it turned before my eyes into a baby frog, exquisite and articulated and full of bright awareness—how do we
know
how to do all this—I was born again: I turned from girl to woman. Actual sensation beyond this I cannot remember, if only because I was in the far corner of the ceiling, looking down with fascination at what was going on between the man and the girl: an out-of-body experience, but it scarcely mattered.

A psychoanalyst told me later the out-of-body experience was a symptom of shock, but I don’t think so—I was just becoming part of something greater than me, whose servant I was to be. And even since then I have been convinced not just of the significance and marvel of sex, but also of its sanctity, and its healing power, and the importance it plays in our lives, and how it is wrong to deny this. And if for a time thereafter, as I fled from bed to bed in search of love, I became a positive priestess of Aphrodite, it was not for long. I had a baby, as I was bound to, and steadied up. The psychoanalyst told me I suffered from low self-esteem, but my version is I was just born to like sex, and inherited the tendency from my father.