by Alix Shulman
Actually, there was plenty for them to whisper about if they only knew. Between my legs I had found an invisible button of flesh, sweet and nameless, which I knew how to caress to a nameless joy. I was pretty sure no one else had one, for there was no joy button in the hygiene book, and there was not even a dirty name for it. Though I listened carefully, I never heard anyone, boy or girl, so much as allude to it, nor was it pictured on the diagram in the Kotex box. Once, my anxiety overcoming my embarrassment, I had tried to ask my friend Jackie about it. But lacking a name or description for it, I couldn’t even present the subject. When Jackie simply looked at me blankly, little beads of shame dampened my forehead, and I shut up. After that, I never dared question anyone. Evidently, only starfish like me had joy buttons. Accepting my difference, I scrambled anxiously to keep it secret as best I could. Suddenly swimming out of my depth, I felt weighted down by more and more shameful secrets until it was difficult just to stay afloat. At night in bed I would swear to caress my joy button only once, and then, breaking my promise, give myself up to it. I expected something terrible to happen, but I couldn’t help it. Trying to control my controlling obsession, I led myself into strange nocturnal rituals and odd compulsions. The more I could prolong my caress before my joy button “went on,” the more often I allowed myself to stroke it. I would count the strokes and try to break my record. I was torn between prolonging the joy and getting it over with before I heard my parents coming upstairs.
There were other secrets I was powerless to control. In the Majestic Theater where we congregated on Saturday afternoons to watch Frances Gifford in her leopard sarong enact another episode of Jungle Girl, the boys who scrambled to sit beside me sometimes tried to rest their hands on my thigh or, slipping their arms around my shoulders, dangle their fingers down on my breast. If they really liked me, would they handle me so? I knew I shouldn’t let them, but I was afraid to stop them and cause a scene. If I sat quietly and held my breath, maybe the other girls wouldn’t find out. The dilemma was too shameful to face straight on; nothing could make one scandal-proof. I crossed and uncrossed my legs, folded and unfolded my arms, and prayed the hands would go away but leave the boys.
It was the same at the swimming pool in the summer: I was ashamed to be seen in a bathing suit, but more ashamed to be ashamed. I forced myself into the pool every day to disguise my shame, and blushed to be seen inside my body. And when I could I hunched my shoulders to conceal my breasts or hid under a towel.
On the way home from the pool, there was no hiding. Walking home with the other girls we would run the gauntlet among gangs of marauding boys from other schools who hooted at us from passing cars, pulled up beside us, or followed along behind making lewd remarks. Frightened, we’d tense up, step fast, and keep our eyes straight ahead, pretending to ignore them until they finally got bored and left us alone. We had no other defense. Sometimes we’d be followed all the way home; sometimes we’d be threatened and cursed. The worst of it was not knowing a tease from the real thing. After a while I decided it was safer to take a bus than walk home from the pool or the movies, even if I had a long wait for the bus by myself. I lived farther out than the other girls and always had some distance to walk alone. Better to be insulted at a bus stop than followed on a lonely suburban road.
One evening I was waiting for the bus alone, carrying my wet suit rolled up in a towel under my arm, when a station wagon full of boys pulled up beside me. As usual, I pretended not to see them, until someone called my name.
“What’s the matter, Sasha, stuck up?”
I looked up. Inside the wagon I saw Al Maxwell, an older boy from my block, and what seemed to be half the football team.
“Want a ride, Sasha? Come on, we’ll take you home.”
“No thanks,” I said politely, “I’ll wait for a bus.” I didn’t trust them.
“What’s the matter, you scared?” said someone. They were all laughing. “Come on, we won’t hurt you.”
I was flattered and frightened at once, the old dilemma. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t know how to refuse without appearing ridiculous or chicken or hurting their feelings. I wanted to be a good sport.
I hesitated and looked behind me. There was no bus in sight.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” said Jimmy Brennan, a star, opening the door for me. “Get in.” When he smiled at me, I wavered. “Don’t worry,” he said kindly.
I swallowed hard and got in.
Ten minutes later we were driving on a road I’d never seen.
“Where are we going?”
“Oh, just for a little ride. Don’t worry.”
When we were all the way out to Sharon Falls, halfway to Akron, they parked the wagon in the woods and Jimmy Brennan unzipped his fly and took out his thing. I started to cry. They said if I didn’t touch it they’d kick me out of the wagon and make me walk home.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to stay a nice girl. Besides, I was terrified of Jimmy’s thing. Part of me wanted to see it with an evil desire, but I was afraid if I actually touched it I’d throw up. I saw it gleaming white out of the corner of my eye while the boys were busy making jokes, and I could tell it was hideous and enormous. Oh, why me? I hated myself.
“It won’t bite you.”
“You better touch it soon, or we’ll make you kiss it.”
“If you don’t touch Jimmy’s, you’ll have to touch Al’s. His is much bigger.” They all laughed.
“Touch it.” “Touch it.” “Touch it.” “We won’t tell.”
I knew there were too many of them not to tell. I was going to have to touch it—there were so many of them and only one of me. I knew that the longer I waited the worse it would be. But even after my will had capitulated, it was a long time before I could bring myself even to look at it.
It was hairy and repulsive. Quickly I turned my eyes as far from it as I could and jabbed at it with a finger on an outstretched arm. The smooth, slippery skin brushed my hand, slimy as worms. I squeezed my eyes closed until, satisfied, they drove me home.
Inside and outside I was transformed by puberty. But though the evidence of it was all around me, I couldn’t understand my metamorphosis. The evidence was there in the corridors, on the telephone, at the movies, in Clark’s Restaurant at lunchtime, after sorority meetings on Friday nights. Yet it was all strangely inconclusive. Could it be that the prettier I grew the worse I would be treated? Much likelier, I thought, I wasn’t really pretty.
People whose names I didn’t know said hello to me in the halls in tones I didn’t understand. People called me on the telephone and hung up when I answered. Football star Iggy Friedman and jitterbug champion Larry Bruder came to my house, ostensibly to study math with me or to practice dancing, but something told me they really came for some other reason that I couldn’t imagine. If I was really pretty I needed proof. Like those who will always think of themselves as fat no matter how many pounds they lose, I continued to think of myself as freaky. To protect myself, I remained aloof, a starfish on a rock.
There were weekly opinion polls called Slam Books which told in black and white what people thought of each other; yet even they told me almost nothing. Filled between classes in composition books from the five-and-ten, one charm per page, when completed the Slam Books yielded one perfect Composite Girl. As early as the eighth grade my name began to turn up in their pages, and by the ninth grade it appeared regularly. But it was usually on the NOSE page, or under BEST COMPLEXION. True, my skin concealed me well enough, and I was pert in profile, but what about inside and straight on? My avowed distinctions were purely negative; they did not even photograph well. The excellence of my nose was its insignificance; the virtue of my skin was its odd refusal to erupt. When everyone else’s pimples cleared up, what then? Could my looks outlive the disappearance of their blackheads? Could I base my future on anything so trivial as skin? Unlike BUST, CHARM, SEX APPEAL, PERSONALITY, POISE, SENSE OF HUMOR, and HAIR, which as they grew in mass grew in va
lue, my acknowledged assets were self-limiting. While the girls with positive charms, even immaterial ones, could look for daily gains, the best I could hope for was relief that no flaws had yet surfaced. There was nothing I could do to help. Baffled, I clung to my rock, filtering data from the passing stream, and withdrew further into myself. If I couldn’t control my body, at least I could control my mind. Self-control, my father said, is the key to the world.
My father was proof of it. He had lifted himself from a ghetto high school to a position of eminence in Cleveland’s legal establishment by sheer will, or so the family story went. Now I realize that my father was merely filling his destined slot in the professional scheme of things for hard-working sons of frugal and ambitious Jewish immigrants: his older brother had become a doctor, his younger brother a dentist, and all his sisters teachers until they turned into wives. My father, the middle son, had of course to be a lawyer. But close up it is hard to distinguish ambition from destiny, and I heard only my family’s version. In high school my father had used his cunning to study shorthand and typing instead of shop, and landed a job as private secretary to one of Cleveland’s industrial tycoons. He played chess with the boss, attended law school at night, and in between, with that single-mindedness he passed to me, he learned at least ten new multisyllable words a day, practiced oratory before the mirror, and studied the classics of literature in the tiny nickel volumes of the Little Leather Library series. When the time came for him to take the bar exam, he passed with the highest score in Ohio. It was predicted he would have a brilliant career.
My mother, as clever and ambitious as he, heeded the predictions and married him. Already loved by my father at a distance, my mother, the youngest and fairest of a family of lovely sisters on my father’s ghetto block, had no trouble at all—so went the story. In America beautiful clever girls do not long remain schoolteachers.
They passed their hopes to their children. My mother, wanting happiness for me, gave me braces and dancing lessons; my father, valuing learning and success, gave me his library of Little Leather books. My brother Ben mastered the Baybury hills no-handed on his bike and managed a paper route; and I entered the Little Leather Library. I read and re-read each volume, fleeing from my baffling outer life. Their contents came in such small, sweet packages that I could digest them piecemeal and savor them at length. I never suspected that a book measuring three inches by four inches might be considered suitable only for adults or that in larger bindings those very treasures might have struck me as impossibly difficult. Starting with the fairy tales and the Arabian Nights, I moved easily through Candide, Gulliver, and Rasselas without noticing any difference in genre, and then on to the plays, stories, and essays my father had studied. While my brother played football and read baseball books, and my classmates read beauty books and movie magazines, I went through plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, and Molière; stories of Tolstoy, Kipling, Balzac, William Morris, de Maupassant; meditations of Marcus Aurelius; words of Jesus; addresses of Lincoln; essays of Mill, Thoreau, Shaw, Voltaire, and Emerson; dialogues of Plato; and even selected reflections of Madame de Sévigné. They were so fanciful and cerebral that they made me forget I was a piece of meat, albeit a prime piece according to the specifications of my mounting pile of Seventeen magazines. My father, glowing with pride to see me following behind him, discussed the classics with me as an equal, using long, latinate words (a language I dubbed “lawish”); and my mother, imagining me in a better college, saw me marrying a better man. To me, however, the little books imparted Truth, all dipped out of a single vat of life’s wisdom. My one-time belief in miracles mellowed to a belief in the printed word, and wide-eyed still, I read every romance as a parable for the future, every essay as personal advice. Coupled with looks, knowledge was surely power.
A cunning freak, I learned to keep my knowledge and ambitions to myself. In school, I tried to pass as smart instead of studious. I refused to learn typing and shorthand out of the same wisdom that had led my father to study them. I wanted to be admired, not a secretary. I realized that for a girl “business skills” were sure to lock the very doors they had opened for my father. Instead, I cultivated other, more useful skills. Without neglecting to brush my hair assiduously according to the instructions in Seventeen, I used my electives on math and commercial law, and mastered forging my father’s signature for report cards and excuses. I started a notebook, with sections for words to learn, quotations to contemplate, reforms to accomplish. Ten resolutions each New Year’s Eve. In everything I set myself records to beat, as I did at night with my joy button. What I couldn’t master, like spelling, I disdained, claiming I could always use a dictionary. I wouldn’t compete unless I could win. Borrowing from Marcus Aurelius a philosophy of sour grapes, I hedged all my bets: I wanted to be the smartest .since I couldn’t be sure I was the prettiest; I wanted to be the prettiest since I couldn’t be sure I was the smartest. With a vanity refined to perversion, I cut school to hide that I cared to be smart, telling no one about my books, and I affected sloppiness to hide how much I wanted to be beautiful, locking away my beauty charts in my desk drawer. I began to look for trouble so it wouldn’t take me by surprise. If I asked for it, I thought, maybe I could control it.
Unlike other truants who cut school to shoplift, go to the movies or a burlesque show, miss a test, or play pool, I had another purpose. I went downtown where no one knew me and, standing at a bus stop on some busy corner, I tried to stare down strange men on buses that passed by, testing my audacity. I would stare at someone till I caught his eye, then force myself to continue no matter what he did, until I stared him down and made him look away. I wanted to beat the boys at their own vile game. I would rather hate them than fear them; best of all I would make them fear me. I wanted to pick my mark, hold his eye, control his mind, bend his will to mine. I didn’t dare try it in Baybury. Instead, I cut school and went downtown to play my Bus Stop Game. It was a dangerous game, for I could never tell when a man would call my bluff by leering back and force my eyes into humiliating retreat. But I had to do it: it was part of my nameless joy-life. If I succeeded at the Bus Stop Game by outstaring my mark, I rewarded myself with my button’s joy; but if I failed by looking away first, I forbade myself to touch it. My father’s daughter, I was very strict.
Eventually I got so good at the game that I was able to board the buses and try it on passengers from whom I couldn’t escape. I selected the most frightening men to root out my fear. I wanted to make my eyes into such powerful beams that I could bend strangers and enemies to my will. I studied audacity, determined that if I couldn’t be sure I had the power that comes with beauty, I would have another kind of power.
But it all turned out to be unnecessary. One balmy Friday night in early October—a Round Table night—I suddenly got the proof I had lacked that I was indeed beautiful.
The seventeen girls of Sigma Lambda Tau (the best sorority? the second-best?) all sat cross-legged in a circle on the plush cranberry carpet of Maggie West’s living room. The previous Friday and the following were for business; but this one was for Round Table only: pure confrontation. Around the circle clockwise the word would pass, exploding in scandal, wrath, or outrage. One at a time the month’s transgressions and oversights would be named, complaints registered, warnings given, accusers faced.
In our pleated skirts and cashmere sweaters over white dickies, we sat fiddling with our charm bracelets and straightening our sox, waiting for the President to start. Some of us gave last-minute orders to the pledges, writing merits and demerits in their conduct books. Others of us checked our new breasts in their Carousel bras like tips of sausages in their casings, looking from one to the other: were the straps adjusted evenly?
Beverly Katz, President, whispered something surreptitiously in someone’s ear, then, smoothing down the pleats of her baby-blue skirt, called the meeting to order. How was it, I wondered, that her pimples did not affect her eminence? Neither her big bosom (BEST BUST) nor her
sly black eyes that so perfectly expressed disdain explained her mysterious authority. She ruled by mean glances, not good looks. I studied her, wondering why everyone laughed when she cracked those jokes I never got; why even I laughed.
“Okay, let’s get going. You wanna start, Sally?” said Beverly Katz, turning to the girl at her side. And off went Sally, around the circle, loosing her rhetoric on us, passing compliments and hurling insults. When she finally came to me, she frowned and hesitated a moment; then, changing her mind as I held my breath, passed on to the next sister. I was still cringing when she began on my neighbor in a voice that, like everyone’s, emulated Beverly’s. “I’m not saying who told me,” she said, “but I happen to know …”
I tuned out, relieved. Why had she even hesitated over me? How could I have offended her? From my bayside perch I tried only to please, giving offense to no one. I went to their meetings, observed their taboos, admired their figures, studied their styles, always keeping my mouth carefully shut. My joy-life was secret. I wanted only to belong.
Some of the girls—perhaps the guilty ones—hung on Sally’s words. Others scanned their notes, rehearsing for their own turns to talk, soon to come up. Between turns Beverly Katz popped bubbles or cracked jokes, though, as everyone knew, she had little reason to be jovial. It was already three weeks since she had received her S.L.T. pin back from Iggy Friedman, tackle, with whom she was certainly still in love and had probably already gone too far. And without Iggy, as everyone knew, she would never be re-elected President.