You might think I’d been vaccinated against drinking from the examples at home, but when I was fifteen I went along with the group that trawled Joe’s Liquors looking for someone who could be bribed into buying us quarts of Miller Black Label. An old man leaning against the store’s gyrating Sputnik-shaped neon sign was easily persuaded, and my few ounces of the purloined stuff, guzzled out of the bottle in a brown paper bag, created a quick buzz. I found myself dancing to “When a Man Loves a Woman” and nuzzling against the sweet-smelling neck of a nineteen-year-old boy with a doughy little cleft where his chin should be, Mick Jagger lips, and bleached blond hair cut in a long mop. When Mike picked me up for a movie date a few days later, he displayed excellent credentials for a first boyfriend: my parents hated him on sight.
My tradition of sex and lies began when I started sneaking out to see Mike using Jane as an alibi. Jane owed me big time since I had saved her from drowning at Shoals Creek--she had jumped off the pier to chase a toy football that my brother threw downriver, got tired fighting the current, and was about to go under when I got to her with a life preserver. But she did not appreciate her role as a beard, nor the fact that I bailed on her if there was a chance of seeing Mike. We had to find other venues when he left a racy, unsealed note for me on Jane’s front porch, and her father got to it first. We steamed up the windows of his MGB all around town, arms and legs splayed in ungainly positions when a policeman interrupted our foreplay with a flashlight’s beam. But our preferred sanctuary was behind my grandparents’ house when they were out of town: once past the porte cochere, we were hidden from the street, safe from discovery.
I was absolutely stunned by the intense pleasure of kissing and caressing, a visceral experience I had no right to expect, given my motherrsquo;s counsel. After six months of exquisite teasing, we’d done everything but “go all the way.” On a clear cold night I walked out on our front lawn, across the grass that was crunchy with frost, gazed at the starry night sky, and negotiated with God in what has come to be known as Clintonian logic. “It’s not intercourse,” I offered, “it’s just outercourse. And I won’t do it anymore.” Then I went inside, looked at the photograph of Mike I kept hidden under the library card in my wallet, and thought: Who am I kidding? I stuffed rollers into a hairnet, placed it on my pillow, and arranged a lump of clothes under the blanket in a vaguely human shape. I climbed out the window and found Mike’s car around the corner.
I felt oddly detached from my first time, as if it were more a rite of initiation to be crossed off a list than a sexual epiphany, but Mike had warned me that it would get so much better. As I climbed back through the window of my bedroom, the ceiling light suddenly switched on, illuminating my father’s face. Wordlessly, he walked down the hall to the room where he kept his toolbox, his silence more frightening than the usual bluster of his anger. My throat seemed closed tight, but I managed to mumble, “What are you doing?”
“Nailing the windows shut,” he said.
“But what if there’s a fire?” I asked, watching helplessly. “I won’t be able to get out.”
He never looked back at me as he took out a ball peen hammer and answered, “That’s not the fire I’m worried about.”
It was too late to safeguard my virtue. Mike and I were already scouting locations for the next time, and the next, and the next, exploring the various versions of lovers’ lane in town. I walked out the front door to meet him now, sanguine behind a careful lattice-work of lies. A subtle change occurred at home: once I became a sexual creature, nobody in my family seemed to like me anymore. My father sensibly realized he could not act as full-time sentry, but he glowered across the dinner table and spoke to me in staccato bursts, as if conversation was expensive. I knew from the rearrangements in my bureau drawers that my mother was looking through my papers, finding letters from Mike, but she referred to my behavior only obliquely, with thinly veiled references to men who don’t buy cows when the milk is free. I kept up my own part in the pretense, wearing Mike’s school ring on a chain hidden under my blouse when I was home and putting it on my finger at school, the fraying bits of white surgical tape wrapped around the band to make it fit.
The most safety and seclusion was in a new development off Walnut Grove Road, where the streets were paved but the houses not yet built. When the weather turned warm, we spent every weekend at the drive-in movie, facilitated by Mike’s new Nash Rambler with collapsible seats. We were hardly the only teenagers grabbing illicit Saturday night sex--by daylight, the grounds of the drive-in were littered with more discarded condoms than popcorn kernels. Emboldened by lust, we planned on adding a Wednesday night and a real bed to our repertoire, since that was when Mike’s parents and younger brother went to Bible meetings. Watching from a safe distance as the family car pulled out of the driveway, we left the Rambler down the block and crept into the house like burglars. We’d barely undressed when there was the unmistakable sound of a key in the front door and a young boy’s voice saying that he did so have a stomachache. Grabbing our clothes, we whispered a frantic escape plan, which entailed my climbing out a chest-high window, running half-naked across the vacant lot behind the house, and waiting behind a magnolia tree until Mike retrieved me.
Longing for a place where we couldn’t get caught and wouldn’t be arrested, we saved up for a room at the Rebetel on Lamar Avenue, the highway south toward Mississippi. There was a flashing confederate soldier’s cap over the VACANCY sign as we pulled into the parking lot. Although we were unlikely to see or be seen by anyone familiar, I was technically jailbait and ducked beneath the dashboard while Mike paid nineteen dollars for a room with cinder block walls painted the color of iceberg lettuce. I refused to touch the frayed graying towels. Only the magnitude of pent-up teenaged hormones could overcome the bed, made with matching gray sheets over a mattress that smelled of mildew and collapsed in the middle like a taco. But the privacy and lack of interruption overcame the lack of aesthetics. This was the real first time. It was daylight when we arrived, and I was shocked to see that it was dark when we left.
Mike was slightly schizophrenic about birth control: he was always prepared with condoms but delayed using one until the last possible moment, relying on the notoriously imprecise method of withdrawal, which I naively accepted. I went through craven watchful waiting for my period every month. One day late, and I couldn’t eat or sleep. Three days late, and I was stumbling in a trance through the green-tiled halls of the school, chastising God for combining the pleasures of the flesh with the only occasional need to reproduce. Five days late, and I was swearing off sex forever, convinced that my life was over. At the first twinge of cramps I’d start to breathe easier, and with the first sign of blood, I dropped to my knees in prayer. Hallelujah! Pregnancy anxiety forever changed my attitude about menstruation--never again “the curse” that my mother described but reason to rejoice.
When I told Mother that my periods were irregular, she made an appointment for me with her doctor, a family friend who used to hunt squirrel and invite us over for stew. Nate Atherton was as wide as he was tall, with a narrow circumference of hair that made him look like a tonsured monk, but he was kind and avuncular as he questioned me, obviously aware that I was sexually active.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked. Unable to meet his eyes, I mumbled yes. “Are you in love?” he asked. Again I said yes, and assured him that we planned to get married one day. He wrote something illegible on a prescription pad, and I blithely handed it to the same pharmacist who’d given me penicillin when I was five, cough medicine for innumerable childhood viruses, Jean Nate for many Mother’s Days. I almost choked when I looked in the bag and saw a pink plastic container with thirty tiny pills on a round dial. Speaking in a hoarse whisper of excitement, I called Mike and said, “I think this is birth control!” We drove to the other side of town, and I cowered in the car while he confirmed that I had been given the miraculous Pill from a druggist I felt certain wouldn’t be bumping into my father at
the hardware store.
I still marvel at the doctor’s act of compassion: he knew I would discover that I’d been given a way to escape unwanted pregnancy but avoided any direct conversation about it, saving me from a confrontation with my mother and allowing her to continue being an ostrich. Twenty-five years later I asked my mother, “Did you know that Dr. Atherton gave me birth control pills when I was sixteen?”
“No!” she said, but allowed as to how it was probably a good idea.
THAT SUMMER, MY PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS WERE going to an appliance convention (the Philco Hawaiian Holiday), and their invitation for me to come along was camouflage for a plot to drive a wedge between Mike and me. Even though the plan was pathetically transparent, I figured true love could survive a vacation, and I could hardly pass up a trip to Honolulu--I’d never been north of the Mason-Dixon line. As we stepped off the plane, we were greeted by glorious women with burnished skin who placed leis of fragrat white plumeria around our necks, and by an attractive young mainlander introduced as Joseph Graham Davis, a Columbia Law student who’d taken a summer job with the travel agency that arranged our trip. He called himself Gray, a patrician name to match his preppy clothes (cotton T-shirt tucked into khakis) and prodigal swath of Kennedy hair. He offered to show me around the island, and with the sense of urgency and speeded-up time of a vacation, it didn’t take long to progress from whiskey sours on the deck of an oceanfront bar to passionate necking on Waikiki Beach. That evening when we returned to the hotel, my father was pacing the lobby with a security guard, a walkie-talkie belching static as he conferred with colleagues around the property. My parents took one look at my disheveled clothes, my shoes and pockets filled with sand, and decreed that I was to remain within spitting distance for the rest of the trip.
I managed to slip Gray my address as I was boarding the plane home, and we exchanged long, philosophical letters about our ambitions and goals (his were written on a yellow legal pad so the lawyers at the New York firm where he was clerking would think he was hard at work). Our relationship probably should have remained epistolary: when I went to New York almost two years later, I was thrilled at seeing him again--a built-in boyfriend. We drove to his parents’ empty house in Westchester County and climbed into their bed, in an old-fashioned frame high off the floor, but our fondling was interrupted by his parents’ unexpected return--a classic scenario in my sex life. I dived under the bed just before his mother came into the room and could see her pink pumps from my hiding place, barely breathing until her bathroom needs gave me a window of escape. A few days later we tried again at the family beach house on the Jersey shore, deserted for the winter, but we both sensed that we were trying too hard and ended up in bunk beds. Driving back to New York in silence was a glaring contrast to our lively conversations before attempting to be sexual. Gray Davis always drove twenty miles faster than the speed limit and was still always two hours late. I would guess that he’s stopped speeding and is more punctual now that he is the governor of California.
The trip to Hawaii did derail my romance with Mike, to the delight of my parents. It’s a bittersweet moment, the recognition that a first love is just that. The person who evoked such hunger and longing and indiscretion isn’t going to walk into the future with you. There will be others with voices like tupelo honey, whose touch will make your palms damp. I broke up with Mike (on the telephone--remarkably easy) and moved on.
Sam wore Canoe. He dressed in preppy blazers from Brooks Brothers and was a founding member of a young men’s social club called the Midnight Revelers, famous for their parties. He was one of the lifeguards I had periodically dunked at Chickasaw Country Club and was considered so socially acceptable by my parents that I was granted permission to visit him that fall for homecoming weekend at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, on the edge of the Smoky Mountains. The campus seemed to glow with an unearthly light from the preponderance of clothing in the school colors: Day-Glo orange and white. Just before the football game, Sam gave me a corsage, a huge white mum trailing orange and white ribbons, and as I sat in the stadium, baking in the noonday sun, I kept sticking my face in the flower, inhaling the mushy coolness. We were so highly chaperoned that the only time we got to touch was when we were dancing. The proctor in Sam’s dorm wrote to my mother expressing her delight in such a well-mannered guest.
When Sam came home to Memphis for weekends and holidays, there were no chaperones, and we borrowed his grandmother’s basement--the ultimate den of iniquity, with a fireplace, pool table, TV, wet bar, and a plush velveteen sofa. Grandma rarely left the secoas still aloor of her weathered white-brick house, sometimes yelling downstairs, “Y’all okay down there?” Sam would holler, “Doin’ Jim Dandy,” with a surfeit of enthusiasm and peel off my clothing to the accompaniment of Ella Fitzgerald and Sinatra LPs. Unlike my girl friends, who were fooling around to the Four Tops and the Temptations, I was wooed with the music of my parents.
Sam recognized that the way to my heart was through my stomach. I can still taste the pompano almondine and three kinds of oysters (bienville, casino, and Rockefeller) at Justine’s, the most exclusive restaurant in Memphis, in an antebellum mansion with a rose garden (even my grandparents had only been there a few times). I worshiped at the altar of the killer pecan pie Sam’s mother made from a recipe on the bottle of dark Karo syrup. On Valentine’s Day he left the industrial-size Whitman’s sampler at my door, along with a giant wooden heart inscribed “I love you” on the front lawn, pounded into the frozen earth on a garden spike. But I was restless and bored with college-boy sex. I’d be graduating from high school in a few months, and despite the number of ways I found to write “Mrs.” in front of Sam’s name on my loose-leaf notebook, I was pretty sure that his circumscribed image of our life together would grate. Fat tears slid down his cheeks and his face fissured as we sat in his Mustang on a chilly autumn day, but he wasn’t fooled for an instant as I lied that I’d been chatting with God about the sin of sex before marriage. A month or so after our breakup, I was kissing a new beau good night at my front door. Turning to go inside the house, I looked through to the backyard to see Sam watching, wearing his Revelers tuxedo and scowling like Heathcliff.
Lawrence wore Jade East. He went to Florida State, played golf like a pro, and drove a pale blue Thunderbird, which we would park on the far side of Galloway Golf Course. He was more... esoteric in his amorous tastes. “I’ll show you what I like,” he said during what I assumed to be a moment of high arousal. He undid the button at the wrist of his shirt and rolled his sleeve back slowly, all the way above the elbow. Then he said, “Just stroke my arm.” I was thinking: This guy is really weird. He doesn’t want to do anything. And I did it wrong, first too hard, then too soft, so he said, “Let me show you how.” From the vantage point of several experienced decades, the arm-stroking thing now seems fabulously sophisticated, not to mention the ultimate safe sex. And I came to think that a golf course is a rather erotic place, as long as you don’t get arrested.
SEX WAS TOO EARLY AND TOO URGENT IN MY LIFE, AND I wonder how my sexual energy might have been deferred or given another outlet. When I was growing up, there was no Joycelyn Elders to encourage masturbation rather than motel rooms. Academia might have sufficed as distraction, but it was given scant regard for girls in my family. The $150 scholarship I was offered to attend a private high school didn’t cover the cost of tuition, and my grandparents wouldn’t put up the additional money. Our household was big on Collier Junior Classics and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I read everything in the bookcase (“That girl always has her head in a book,” my mother said, and she didn’t mean it as a compliment). I even trained myself to read in the car without getting sick. The first time I went to the Highland Avenue branch of the Memphis Public Library, I was overwhelmed. “You mean I can take out as many books as I want?” I asked. I couldn’t understand why I got punished for bad behavior by having to bend over and get walloped with a belt, while my friend Martha got punish
ed by having to memorize “The Raven.”
As adolescent virgins, my friends and I had gabbed without much inforation about “going all the way,” but I stopped talking about sex when I started doing it, and lying about it extended to my best friends. I knew with an unshakable certainty that none of my crowd--all good southern girls--were experiencing what I was, and it was inconceivable to share the intimacies. Even within my troika of Jane, Patty, and Martha, our gossip about social pairings had tacit boundaries beyond which we didn’t venture, resorting to a discreet policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Later I would find out that I was indeed way ahead of the pack.
Certainly Delta Alpha Delta was virginal. High school sororities constituted a cherished Memphis heritage with a fixed protocol that brooked no deviation. During rush week, prospective pledges wearing themed name tags (in the shape of bongo drums, perhaps, or Nefertiti’s head) were invited to partake of cucumber sandwiches and Rotel dip (made with a can of Rotel brand spicy chiles and tomatoes melted with Velveeta cheese) at the homes of older “sisters.” On the weekend that votes were tallied, each girl would wait, hoping for an invitation to join, which was announced by a caravan of cars pulling up to her house, with crepe paper streamers and blaring horns. (Each sorority had a distinctive honk, recognizable from blocks away.) I didn’t just join D.A.D.; I became the class president in my senior year and immersed myself in its genteel traditions of charity work and partying. We formed a white girls’ version of a Motown group, performing at hospitals and nursing homes. To raise money for the parties, we sponsored pancake suppers and car washes, and once a month I’d rise at 5 A.M., drive to the Krispy Kreme, and pick up sixty dozen (or perhaps sixty thousand) doughnuts that we’d sell.
Despite these mannerly rituals, my waterloo in high school was the “charm notebook” required for Phys. Ed. I can only imagine what hyperkinetic gym teacher of an earlier era, perhaps damaged by overexposure to Gone With the Wind, conceived of such a curiosity, quaint even by 1960s standards. We were supposed to put together information about clothes, hair, makeup, and other womanly wiles. Surely this was an assignment for which I’d been in training since the crib, but I thought it was asinine and made an obviously slapdash effort, sloppily gluing pages from Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen on construction paper. I earned an F. (No small irony that in less than three years I would be on the covers of these magazines.) I’d played on the church softball and basketball teams and set a district record in the long jump (formerly called the broad jump, until the term was deemed politically incorrect). A contender for best female athlete, I failed gym.
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