The V-Word (8 page)

“Whose streets?!” they shouted. “Our streets!” we shouted back.

If you missed your quota—eighty-six dollars—for two nights in a row, it didn't matter how cool or peppy or experienced you were, you would be automatically fired. Tension ran through the office like a rubber band. We were a peppy, tight-knit crew always on the verge of snapping.

I'm not sure if the humiliation of asking strangers for money was worse than the rejection of being turned down ninety-five times out of one hundred, but either way, I spent at least a few hours of each shift sitting alone on the sidewalk. I would stare at the sky. I would stare at the ground. I would stare at my hands. I would stare at anything other than my list of doors and savor the few moments I had to myself.

After two weeks, I was the only person left from the group hired on my day. I was a professional, a survivor.

During those weeks, I discovered that you were supposed to be eighteen to work as a full-time canvasser. In the craziness of hiring and firing dozens of people a week, the office had forgotten to check my ID. Oops.

As we counted our money into piles at the end of the night, I responded to the older canvassers' questions about my life by spinning a fantasy identity, imagining where I'd be in a year when I really would be eighteen. I told them I had just finished my first year of college. I waxed on about my school's environmental group and about my dorm full of eccentric friends. I told great stories about the radio show I hosted on the campus station. I definitely wasn't a virgin—hell no! I divulged some choice details about my imaginary boyfriend. We'd had great sex but he'd been a jerk and I'd dumped him.

Each night after we'd wrapped up the financial paperwork, the veteran crowd would go out. They started to invite me out to bars and house parties. After a few weeks of working and partying together, we became real friends. Except that everything I told them was sort of a lie. I told myself that my identity wasn't so much a fabrication as not-yet-true but the fake stories kept a convenient wall between me and all the people who I thought were infinitely cooler than me.

I started to think about sex all the time. I'd walk into a house party full of twenty-three and twenty-four-year-olds (ancient!) and think about how I was the only virgin in the room.

I never liked the language around virginity. I hated the concept of
losing
part of myself, especially when it involved a guy
taking
it away. In high school, I'd seen a couple of close friends fall into relationships with guys whom they described as
sweet
and I described as
greasy
. These friends told me stories about going farther than they wanted to, about sweaty hands under their bras.

People built up virginity to be such a special, powerful thing, and I never wanted some man to have that much power over me. What if we shared some special thing and then he told his gross friends all about it? I felt like I could never trust a guy enough to give him my body.

But now I was very aware of being a virgin. The word ran through my head as I hung out on the edge of each house party.

Virgin, virgin, virgin.

I didn't want to walk around with the word hanging around my neck as my friends downed cheap beer, but I was too nervous to get close enough to anyone to have sex either.

At those summer house parties I got good at snagging an empty Olympia can and filling it with water in the bathroom so I could sit there and sip along with everyone else. I felt like I needed to be in control of myself. Being sober made me feel safe. Each night, when it got late, the canvassers would start slurrily telling me how they had a lot of respect for me and I'd know it was time to leave.

I'd take the bus back downtown to my apartment. I was too proud to buy a map and I could never figure out where exactly my apartment was. I'd just wander around the streets, navigating by landmarks. With my headphones in, I followed the train tracks, took a left at the stadium, went up a hill. If I walked in a big enough circle, I'd eventually come across my own bendy road. My feet would hurt, and I'd flop on my dorm room bed, lights off, sheets off, alone.

I was afraid to even kiss anyone.

What else would they want?

After about six weeks, I was invited to join a “camping canvass.” Many of the nonprofit's exploitive endeavors were branded as “fun opportunities,” and I jumped at the chance to drive to Las Vegas, Nevada, with Jeff, David, and the usual crew. We pulled into Las Vegas just after dawn. I had accidentally left my wallet on my bed back in Portland so Jeff lent me $20, and I spent the next week eating two meals a day at the Golden Nugget casino, which had a $1.99 breakfast special.

The canvassing was the worst anyone had ever seen. The subdivisions were vast and hostile. I scraped by, barely making quota every night until the last one, when a guy in another nondescript tract home pulled a gun on me and told me to get off his lawn. I spent the rest of my shift in an empty park, lying underneath the swings and trying not to cry as I looked up at the big Nevada sky.

When we met up at the end of the night in a local brewery, people who were over quota peeled donations off their piles and handed them to me. Jeff, who was in charge, recorded them on my tally. The week ended with all of us keeping our jobs. To celebrate, everyone except for me got raging drunk

Jeff proposed a toast. “To being young and stupid!”

We all cheered.

The tediousness of the drive home was hysterical. We laughed at road signs and played word games until we ran out of both road signs and word games. In the desert near Mount Shasta, we switched drivers, and I squeezed in back next to Jeff, our thighs and arms touching through layers of sweat and cotton. He offered to give me a neck massage. I turned sideways in my seat, and as he laid his hands on my shoulders, the car seemed to disappear. He leaned in and his breath raised the hair on my neck.

There was no horrible job. There was no guy in Las Vegas with a gun. There was no eighty-six dollar quota. There was no week of casino pancakes. I closed my eyes and there were just his hands on my neck. He leaned his head against mine and I breathed in the smell of him.

We stayed that way for what felt like three hundred miles.

At a party a few nights later, I got cornered by a raw foodist and was enduring a lecture about dehydrators and numerology when I caught Jeff's eye from across the room. He grabbed my hand and led me upstairs. I don't know whose bedroom we locked ourselves in but we made out on the filthy mattress until my lips hurt. We'd gotten down to our underwear, and Jeff put his fingers up inside me. It was a surprise but it felt damn good. Drunk on lust, I got lost in sensations only to realize Jeff was whispering something to me.

“What?” I whispered back, hoarsely.

“Will you toss my cookies?” he murmured.

My body froze. I had no idea what
toss my cookies
meant. Was that even what he'd said? I didn't want to ask him to repeat himself or to let on that I had no idea what cookies were. Too proud for a map, I plunged onward, deciding the request must have something to do with touching his dick. I stuck my hand down his boxers and fumbled around. His penis felt like a bizarre, alien object, a fleshy Washington Monument. I was caught between horror and desperately trying to play it cool. I frantically fumbled around and managed to poke him hard in his swampy testicles. Then I rolled over and fell asleep. We woke up together, gross and groggy, and took the bus our separate ways.

Despite my clear ineptitude, the next night Jeff invited me out for a proper date: just us, no one else from work. We met up in Pioneer Square and talked about where we grew up and walked a few blocks to see his favorite fountain in the city. He was sweet. I felt good with him. He opened up to me about his life after college, his favorite people, his interests, and I felt bad that I wasn't being honest with him.

We meandered back from the cool downtown dusk to my dorm. The air in my little room was hot and stagnant. I didn't have any way to put on music—I'd been living in my headphones all summer—so we made out in silence on the narrow, plastic-sheeted bed. It was way too small for both of us so after some awkward snuggling, I grabbed the cushions off the suite's sofa, put them on the floor, and dragged my mattress down next to them. The lights were off, but we could still see each other in the light streaming through the small, locked window.

Now that we were here, in this moment, about to do exactly what I'd wanted to do, I got nervous. I didn't get self-conscious about my body, but I suddenly felt weird about his. I didn't know this person, I realized, with rising anxiety. His body was so foreign, so fuzzy, so lean. His chest and legs and arms felt strange and tough under my hands. His strange sweat was all over me. When he opened the condom wrapper, the unfamiliar, chemical smell hit me and I tensed. In this most intimate moment, I felt very alone.

But I was committed.

This was the way to escape virginity, to destroy its power over me.

I had to go it alone.

I lay still underneath him as his penis pushed inside me. I both wanted him there and didn't want him there at all. I tried to keep my hands on him while my brain floated away. I kept my eyes squeezed shut and thought about how soon it would be over. I wasn't paying attention to his thrusting or the way that it felt both a little painful and a little good, I distracted myself by thinking in intense detail about what we'd do the next day. Would we get coffee after? How would we walk there? Should I try to make breakfast? What groceries did I have? Was the milk in the fridge expired? Maybe it was expired. Very quickly, it seemed like his body shivered and he stopped. I came back to reality. He slid out of me and leaned up to my face, kissing me. He felt cold with sweat and I still didn't open my eyes. The whole thing felt absurd, like something animals did, not even a part of me or who I was.

I was grateful to fall asleep and wake up a few hours later as myself, having gone through this undesirable ritual. We rose early and walked to the coffee shop like I'd seen in my head. We made pleasant small talk as I walked Jeff to his bus stop and kissed him good-bye. My flight back home was the next day and I never saw him again.

That year at college, I did help out at the radio station. I did join the environmental club. I did make friends with the adventurous, eccentric girls on my hall. And I met a boy who became my best friend and then my boyfriend. Before we had sex, we talked about our histories. It felt
good
being honest with him. We confessed the things we were nervous to do and laughed about the things we liked.

Slowly, I let my anxious boundaries dissolve and was surprised to find that trusting someone made me stronger not weaker. Just as I'd imagined for my future self, we had lots of sex. But he didn't wield desire over my head like a weapon or abandon me when I revealed myself. Back in high school, I could never have imagined this sweet spot—a friend with whom I could safely shed my armor, someone I could learn from, and whom I would want to have stick around and know me for years. Being young and stupid is fun, but being young and honest is even better.

Many women feel their relationship to their own bodies is a stumbling block to good sexual experiences. In the pursuit of some imaginary ideal, you might be pretty hard on yourself:
Look at my bulging tummy, teeny breasts, bushy pubes, lumpy thighs, enormous cleavage, scrawny ass. I hate my zitty skin, sweaty armpits, bony knees. My period.

It's exhausting to worry so much about how you look and smell and feel.

But maybe you don't have to agonize. Maybe none of it matters. Maybe when you're with someone who really loves you, every single inch of you will be good.

So good.

I
t happened in that singular summer: those sultry months that separate high school from college. We swam in a pool of sex, or at least the idea of having sex, and the water was fine. DJs hired for our high school dances in this rural Midwestern town were known to introduce slow songs by saying, “Ladies, here's your chance to polish your man's belt buckle.”

Yes, they did say that.

I was eighteen, and by that time I had brought a few of those large, elaborately decorated cowboy belt buckles to a high shine. Of course, I brought a high shine to my own damn self during those slow dances—and after, in the back seats of cars and in the hayloft and once, sticky with the juice of a stolen watermelon spiked with vodka, in the middle of an abandoned blacktop road.

I was raised in a conservative Baptist home where there was no discussion about safe sex or any kind of sex for that matter. No sex before marriage was a given. I considered myself a virgin, although I suspected that I possessed that title only on a technicality. I'd done everything up to actual penetration, and until Sam came along I was okay with that. It allowed me to think of myself as a “good girl.”