Sugar in My Bowl (4 page)

That was in my senior year, and that particular memory suggests a drift into cynicism that would pick up fast when I got to college and finally figured out what Elizabeth Taylor was up to with Richard Burton. The civil rights and antiwar movements did an excellent job of convincing us that anything anyone in authority said was automatically suspect and that rules were made to be broken. When my friends wanted to start a branch of the antiestablishment vanguard, Students for a Democratic Society, I had no objections as soon as I was assured that SDS didn’t stand for Students for Decent Styles.

Peekaboo I See You

Anne Roiphe

H
is nurse and my nurse were friends. They were both German. His was named Gretchen. Mine was called Geigi, a child’s version of Gisele. We lived in the same apartment building. The nurses went to church on Sunday mornings together while we were watched by the cook or maid in one of our apartments. The nurses wore white starched uniforms and no makeup and smelled of soap, while our mothers wore sequins and hats with veils, open-toed Cuban shoes with heels, gold bracelets and ruby rings, and smelled of perfume on those occasions when we saw them.

His name was Jimmy and he loved to draw and he loved me. We were five years old or thereabouts. I had bad dreams and was afraid a witch lived in my closet. He was a little round in the belly and always had paint stains on his fingers, which were blue or red or orange or all of those at once. Our nurses were afraid of germs and taught us to be careful of bathrooms, doorknobs, sneezing children, dirt. Geigi knitted mittens for me. Gretchen knitted scarves. We were at war with Germany. We were Jewish children. The adult world moved around us the way fetid water in a fish tank surrounds the little fish within.

It is raining. The nurses are in the kitchen drinking tea with the back elevator man on his break. We are playing in Jimmy’s room. We decide to play doctor. Jimmy has a doctor’s kit. We pretend to listen to each other’s hearts. Jimmy bandages my thumb. I tap on his stomach. We pretend to examine each other’s ears. First he is the patient and then I am the patient. We know how to play together, better perhaps than when we met others later in life. Jimmy draws with his charcoal on my arm. He draws a broken bone and then he sets it and I pretend to cry with pain and he says no, don’t cry. I don’t like it when you do that. So I stop pretending to cry.

How does a man get you into the bedroom? As many ways as there are men I suppose. How did Jimmy get me into the closet? It’s possible I got him. I remember that we went into his closet. I remember the neat rows of shoes, the little folded shirts, a blue jacket with a gold monogram on a small hanger and the cold floor. Jimmy pulled a chair from his small table into the closet, and standing on it he pulled the cord and the light came on. This is the doctor’s office he said and now we should take off our clothes so we can examine each other. I remember a feeling of awe and interested fright. I’ve had that feeling on later occasions: something is about to happen, something good and something worrisome, something that ought not to be but is, something I want but maybe I don’t. Something that marks the point where you can’t turn back and still keep your claim to sanity.

Jimmy says I have to take my underpants off. I say I will if he will. We have left the doctor’s kit on the other side of the door, which Jimmy has firmly closed. I am concerned. I look in the corners of the closet. I see in a shoe an old sock the maid didn’t find. I don’t see any dragons or other malevolent creatures. We are naked facing each other. I am looking at his face. He is intent, focused, and he is memorizing what he sees. I don’t dare look down. I want to look down. I look. I see, for the first time in my life, a penis, a small penis. I see beneath it two small spheres. I see Jimmy looking at me down there. I can’t see it he says. You have to lie down. I don’t want him to be mad at me. I see my underpants just an arm’s reach away. I think about grabbing them but I don’t. I lie down. Jimmy kneels over me. Open your legs he says. I need to see. I do. I want to touch it, he says. I know as well as I know my name that Geigi would not approve of this game. She would be angry with me. On the other hand she is not in the closet. She is in the kitchen drinking tea. She will not know. I open my legs. I lift them up and realize I have left on my socks with the little fairies embroidered on the cuff, and Jimmy puts his hand on my wee wee and he leans down to examine it carefully. I feel his hands. I feel the forbiddance of the act. I feel worried but not so worried that I jump to my feet. I lay there as he explored and peered. I think he said there are two holes. Is that right. No I said, just one. He poked with his fingers. I want to look at you too I said and he said all right. It was my turn. He lay down and I bent over him and his little penis lay flat on his thigh and I picked it up gently. I kissed it. Jimmy laughed. I tickled his belly. He jumped to his feet and began to tickle me. We were playing. I said, what do you do with the things below your penis. Nothing he said, they’re just there for decoration. Oh, I said. He spit on my chest. I said that’s disgusting and I got angry. He said he was sorry and suddenly the door was opened and there was Gretchen and Geigi and one of them shouted put your clothes on. Geigi grabbed me and wouldn’t let me pull my own dress over my head but roughly so I knew she was angry pulled it over my ears. A button scratched my cheek on the way down.

Gretchen pulled Jimmy into another room. Geigi slammed the door to Jimmy’s apartment behind her and as we were waiting for the elevator she slapped my hand hard. “You,” she said, “are a bad girl.” “We were just playing doctor,” I cried. “Never, never do that again,” she said. “All right, I won’t,” I said.

I lied.

By supper time she had forgiven me. When she brought me my supper on the small tray that I always ate on in my room she sat down on the bed and watched me eat. “When I grow up,” I said, “I want to be a doctor.” “You can’t,” she said. “Girls cannot become doctors.” “I don’t care,” I said. “I’ll be a patient.”

Years later when Jimmy and I were thirteen we were kissing in the dark at a party. We were sitting on a table in my classmates’ living room. Couples were curled up together in every corner of the floor, despite the fact that the carpet was rough and scratchy. Louis Armstrong was playing softly in the background. Abandoned in a corner was the Coke bottle that had begun it all. It was a game of spin the bottle that had brought Jimmy and I to the moment. “Do you remember,” I said, “when we played doctor.” “Yes,” he said. “Do you have hair there now?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “I really need to see it,” he said. We found a closet. I showed it to him. He showed me his penis, larger, straight penis, full of some mysterious fluid.

No more Gretchen, no more Geigi, just fear of life stopped us from going all the way. But it was good, very good anyway.

The thing about sex is that each act while different from the other even with the same person, even with the same person for forty years, is not a single act. It builds on the sex the night before, the year before, the decade before. Sex is a matter that unfolds like an accordion in the brain, the past is connected to the near past to the present and the future stands there waiting to be attached. So the feelings in the body, the feelings for someone else, the excitement of the new or the welcome of the familiar rises and falls, depends on memory, gains its depth from what happened at the beginning, a while ago, in the imagination, in reality. Jimmy was my beginning and the beginning was fine. Everything after that wasn’t always so fine. Sometimes I was scared. Sometimes I found myself with someone I didn’t like. Sometimes I wanted to be touched and wasn’t and sometimes I was touched and didn’t want it. But I think of us in that closet, like Adam and Eve, if God had created them as five year olds. I think of Adam and Eve as poking at each other’s navels and laughing.

No one is innocent very long.

Prude

Jean Hanff Korelitz

I
am now and I have ever—as in always—been a prude.

I was a prude at age ten, when my older sister told me one of her classmates had a
mattress
in the back of his
van,
on which he had
sex
with his
girlfriend
.

I was a prude at age thirteen, when I discovered that the girls from my bunk at camp were sneaking into the woods with boys, to
make out
.

I was a prude all through high school, reacting with stunned disbelief whenever the rumor of another girl losing her virginity swept down the grapevine, completely scandalized when the class heartthrob (who would later, unsurprisingly, become a performer with an international reputation) “forgot” to put his shirt back on after gym class, and waltzed, half-naked, past my locker. (
Half naked!
) And I was regularly tormented by a classmate who considered my obvious anxiety about sex a source of personal hilarity.

All of this in spite of the fact that my own development wasn’t particularly arrested. I freely attest that I played those sweaty, silly games in basements. I had boyfriends and did the expected things with them. I also had sex at seventeen with a boy I really loved (after holding him off for a year). But in spite of all this, my prudishness was of obvious, epic proportions.

What accounts for this?

I haven’t the faintest, but I’m not about to waste the opportunity at hand on pointless self-analysis. Nature or nurture—who really cares? And I have bigger fish to fry. I’m here for literary confession and personal catharsis. I’m here to tell that jerk who bullied me in the hallways and the boys I didn’t kiss behind the bunk at camp and the guy who forgot to put his shirt back on after gym class and every single person in my life who will be shocked to hear this (in other words, nearly everyone) that there’s something about me they don’t know.

I am the author of a sex novel.

No, no, I don’t mean a novel with sex scenes. I copped to those a long time ago. I’m proud of my four novels, and I’m even proud of the sex scenes they contain, though naturally I can’t bear to reread them (they were
painful
to write) and tend to blush horribly whenever people tell me how well written they are.

I am the author of a sex novel. A novel about . . . you know . . .
sex
. A novel in which the sex scenes do not punctuate the narrative but in which the story exists merely to link the sex scenes. A novel you might hide from your kids, as I’ve hidden my allotted author copies (which I still have, of course—who on earth would I have given them to?) from mine. A novel you might, as it were, read with one hand (which I certainly have not!). A novel I decline, here, to name, by an author (me) whose pseudonym I decline to reveal.

What possessed me? That, as Tevye the Dairyman might say, I can tell you in one word:
frustration
. And not the kind you’re imagining. I’m talking professional frustration, career distress. I’m talking mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-gonna-take-it-anymore dismay of existential proportions.

In 1989, the year I wrote my heretofore secret opus, I was the author of two novels in manuscript that were in the process of being rejected by every publisher on the planet. I had just finished working as an assistant to the editor in chief of an august publishing house, and I had written the novels after work and on the weekends, endlessly tweaking and revising, trying to feel proud of the fact that I was actually, finally creating fiction, something I’d longed to do and been terrified to attempt. When I wasn’t writing I compulsively read the novels of recent college graduates (my contemporaries), accounts of young clubbers wasting their time getting wasted, and did my best not to feel cataclysmically jealous. (I was not successful.)

All the while, rejections were arriving regularly, in off-white envelopes with my agent’s preprinted return address in an elegant font. It wasn’t his fault. I still couldn’t believe I had landed this agent, a great guy with an amazing list of writers, some of whom were even published by the august publishing house I’d recently left. I know it hurt him to pass along those letters of rejection, but not nearly as much as it hurt me. As the months passed, the first and then the second manuscript made a slow but inexorable descent from the most elevated publishers to the second tier, down to the interesting paperback imprints and really respected small presses, until there were no more publishers to reject my work.

That’s how things stood in the summer of 1989 when I found myself at a tradition-soaked artists’ colony in New England, a place where poets and novelists joined visual artists and composers on a campus of splendidly isolated cottages. After breakfast, we would disperse to our cabins for long days of silent creation. Picnic baskets were set gently on each cabin porch at lunchtime, and the cardinal rule was not to approach anyone else’s cabin without invitation, lest the interloper disrupt the creation of “Kubla Khan.”

I was determined to make the most of this opportunity, and resolved to spend my time revising the second of my two novels, the one that had not yet reached the bottom of its long, excruciating slide down the mountain of potential publishers. That first morning I dutifully pulled out my poor rejected manuscript, set it before me on the rustic desk, and tried to brace myself for the assault.

I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t.

I was bitter about the editors who had briskly dispatched years of my work in letters written by their assistants. I was bewildered and offended by the druggy, barely fictionalized novels, written as senior projects at Bennington, snapped up by publishers for incomprehensible sums, and currently being read by every person on the subway who was not reading
Presumed Innocent
or
Bonfire of the Vanities
. Most of all, I was enraged at myself for spending such a long time writing novels that no one wanted to publish.

I wanted to publish.

I was suddenly determined to use these few, precious weeks to write an entire novel that someone would publish.