Virgins

by Caryl Rivers

  He never quite knew what to say to me, after all these years. He didn’t have any daughters, and he was uncomfortable around girls. He tried to be nice, but I had the feeling he had never really forgiven me for messing around with Sean with his pants down.

  “Hi, Dr. McCaffrey.”

  “How’s school, Peggy?”

  “It’s just fine.”

  “The basketball team going to take it this year?”

  “We’re going to try. I’ve been practicing my jump shot. We only got beat by Nativity by two points last year.”

  “Well, that’s good.” He looked at me, and then he looked again.

  “Well, Peggy, you’ve really grown up. You’re quite a young lady.”

  And he was staring right at my boobs as he said it. Really staring. I shifted my weight uncomfortably, and then I guess he realized what he was doing and flicked his eyes away from my chest.

  I couldn’t really blame him for being fascinated with my boobs. I certainly was. They came late, sort of a hormonal afterthought. It was as if my body thought it had done all its work at puberty, and it rested for a while, leaving me certain I was going to go through life with a chest as flat as a picket fence. Then it said, oops, forgot something, and a pair of boobs just popped out, in my junior year, surprising everybody, me most of all.

  I wanted to say, “Where the hell were you?” every time I looked at them, but they added a whole new dimension to my movie star fantasies, which I thought I’d outgrown. I’d wrap a scarf around them and lean into the bathroom sink and gaze into the mirror. I’d let my lips open and my eyelids droop, the way Marilyn Monroe always did, but I wasn’t sure if I looked sexy or like I was coming down with mono. If I hunched my shoulders a lot, I could come up with enough cleavage to give the Nemesis of Smut a heart seizure. From the front I looked like Marilyn—sort of—and from the side like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  “Oh, Sean,” Dr. McCaffrey said, “a letter came from the seminary today. The class begins June 24th. And you’re in, it’s definite.”

  “Oh,” Sean said.

  Then Dr. McCaffrey put his arm around Sean’s shoulder, but in a way that didn’t seem natural; it was sort of a fake “hearty” pose, like he was getting his picture taken with the student who’s just won the essay contest on “How Catholic Youth Can Fight Dirty Movies.”

  “We’re very proud of Sean, Peggy,” he said. “It was always a dream that Sean’s mother and I had to give one of our sons to God.”

  The way he said it made it sound as if he were wrapping Sean up with a bow and sending him parcel post to God the way you sent Christmas presents to an aunt in Chicago. It seemed to me it was Sean who was doing the giving, not his father.

  “Well, that’s wonderful, sir,” I said.

  Dr. McCaffrey gave Sean’s shoulder a fatherly squeeze, and as they stood together that way, I tried to see the resemblance, but I couldn’t. Everybody remarked on how handsome Sean’s father was; distinguished, they said, probably because of the gray hair around his temples. But I thought he had a pig-like face, because his eyes were small and beady, and his skin always seemed to have a reddish tinge to it; that might have had something to do with the Scotch and water that always seemed riveted to his hand. He seemed huge next to Sean—he wasn’t fat, but he had large shoulders and a massive chest, while Sean was tall and rangy, and as slim as an arrow. I could never imagine Sean being fat. Sean’s eyes, the ones that could look so innocent, were cool and green and they looked out from beneath eyelashes that were long and silky. I’d have killed to have Sean’s eyelashes. I had nice eyes, but the lashes were short and sparse, and when I tried to put mascara on them to make them longer it always ran—even when the label swore in blood that you could only get the stuff off with a substance used in chemical warfare—and it made me look like a raccoon. It wasn’t fair, it seemed to me, that Sean got the eyelashes. What was a priest going to do with lashes like those?

  “He’s going to make a fine priest,” Dr. McCaffrey said, beaming. “A Jesuit. Maybe even teach at Georgetown someday, right, Sean?”

  That was where Sean’s father wanted to teach, Georgetown, where even the freshmen drove Jags and wore English tweed. At St. Anselm’s, to which flocked the sons and daughters of cab drivers and G.S. fives, Dr. McCaffrey thought he was casting his Speech Dynamics as pearls before swine.

  “I want to go to the missions,” Sean said.

  “Oh, of course, a few years in the missions is good training for any young priest. But Sean, you have too fine a mind to spend your life saving the souls of—” he paused—“colored people.”

  “There’s a quota on that, Pop,” Sean said. “Only 200 colored souls per priest. You save too many of ‘em and heaven starts to look like Seventh and U, full of jungle bunnies.”

  “Sean!” his father said. “I don’t like to hear you use language like that. Not in this house!”

  “Yes, sir,” Sean said. His face was blank as a billiard ball. I had to turn away again. Dr. McCaffrey had recently discovered his black brethren when he got an award and 500 bucks from a black parish to speak at a fund-raising dinner. He regaled the black Catholics with dire warnings about Jane Russell, which must have puzzled them somewhat. Black people had a few other things to worry about in those days besides large white mammary glands. But before Dr. McCaffrey discovered Brotherhood, “jungle bunny” was one of the more complimentary phrases he used about black folks.

  “Pop, I’m going to walk Peggy home,” Sean said, and we walked out the back door and up the well-worn path to my house. I thought that if I had a dollar for every time I’d come this way, I’d be rich as Rockefeller. Sean was quiet, and as usual, I knew what he was thinking

  “He is proud of you, Sean,” I said. “I mean, he’s an asshole, but he’s proud of you."Sean shrugged. “No, it’s not me. It’s the future Father McCaffrey he’s proud of—some guy in a black suit. But I’m not him yet.”

  “You will be.”

  “Yeah, that’ll really give the Nemesis of Smut an orgasm.”

  I laughed. Sean had learned that one from me, but he had a pretty foul mouth on his own.

  “God, Sean, you’re going to have to learn to talk all over again in the seminary. Everything you say is either obscene or blasphemous.”

  He grinned. “Ego te absolvo, Mr. Smith. And stay the fuck away from mortal sin.”

  He took my hand as we walked to my back door. I reached for the door handle but he put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me close to him. That was a surprise; we usually got ourselves necked out in the Caddy. He opened his mouth right away and he held me hard against him, as if he were afraid I might just float away. The way he was kissing me wasn’t safe or relaxing. I thought, suddenly, that he was kissing me like a man, not like a boy, and I started to feel exactly the way I did when I read page 128 of Savage Warrior, when Soldered the Viking starts to unlace the smock of the maiden Ingrid so his lips can taste the nectar of her honeyed breasts.

  Sean just kept kissing me, hard, and I felt the Natural Wonder getting very stiff and pressing against my thighs. I was sure the lights on the Illuminated Map of Sin were flashing, but Sean didn’t even seem to notice. He just kept on kissing and kissing and my knees were getting weak and I was starting to get all tingly and I wondered about the theology of that. I decided tingly was only venial, but I was a little worried about Sean. He was kissing away like there was no tomorrow and if this kept up, he’d never get the Natural Wonder back to where it belonged.

  “I got algebra,” I said.

  “What?” he said, his eyes sort of glazed.

  “Algebra.”

  “Right. Oh yeah, algebra,” he said. “Me too.” And off he ran.

  I went into the house, and my dad was in the kitchen, having a glass of milk and a ham sandwich, his favorite nighttime snack.

  “Out with Sean again, Peg?” He smiled at me, his brownish-gray eyes lighting up a little, as they always did when
he teased me. “You two are getting to be an item.”

  “Oh, Dad!’

  “Sean still saying he’s going to be a priest?”

  “Yeah, he is.”

  He sighed, and put down his glass of milk. I looked at his hands, long and tapered, strong but graceful. I had the same hands—the hands of a pianist—or a basketball player—he said when he looked at them. He had dark, wavy hair, and he was as lean and hard as he must have been in the days when he played semi-pro basketball, not all paunchy in the chest like Sean’s father.

  “Liam’s putting that nonsense into his head,” he said. “There’s such a thing as too much religion.”

  I chuckled. “Sister Justinian would croak if she heard you say that.”

  “Sister Justinian is not God,” he said to me sternly. “Just because you’re a Catholic, Peg, that doesn’t mean you can’t think for yourself.”

  “Dad, what if the Church said one thing and you think, deep in your heart, that it’s wrong?”

  “The Church is just people, Peg,” he said. “People can be wrong. The Church said Galileo was wrong because he said the earth revolved around the sun.”

  My father was one of the few people I’d ever met who talked like that. Most kids’ parents said the nuns and the priests were right, and that was that. My dad wasn’t even a college graduate, like Dr. McCaffrey. He dropped out of school to start his electrical business. He read all the time, though—hard books, like philosophy, not just novels like The Robe.

  “Hey,” he said, “Have you been practicing the jump shot?”

  In response, I grabbed his napkin, crumpled it up, went up off my left foot and dropped it neatly in the wastebasket across the room.

  “That’s good. Remember, you’ve got to get the ball off the backboard and take it back up. You can’t wait for the ball to come to you.”

  “Life is like basketball,” I said, mimicking him perfectly. “Go after the ball.”

  He laughed. “Don’t be fresh, young lady. Who do you play this week?”

  “Nativity. We’ll mash their faces in.”

  He laughed. “That’s the spirit. None of that ladylike stuff.” He gave me the elbow. I hipped him neatly in return.

  “Good. Very good. Say, Peg, is Sean going out for the team at Sacred Heart this year?”

  “No. He doesn’t think he’d make it.”

  Dad had tried to teach Sean a jump shot, but Sean never quite got the hang of getting the ball off at exactly the right second, at the top of the jump. I would say to him, “Sean, you can feel when it’s right,” and he’d scowl and say, “You can, but I can’t.” We used to play Horse together a lot at my backyard hoop, but lately Sean was getting pissed because I beat him all the time. Sean had a well-muscled, finely proportioned body. To look at him, you’d think he was well-coordinated, but he wasn’t somehow.

  “If I could just have a few months with that kid!” my father said. “He’s tall, he’s strong. I know I could make a player out of him.”

  “Sean hasn’t got the killer instinct,” I said.

  “Neither did you, little Miss Goody Two-Shoes.” He laughed and elbowed me again. “Now look at you. A tiger!”

  I growled, and lapped him good and shoved him right into the refrigerator. He made an elaborate show of falling and being hurt, real hammy.

  “I can’t believe the refs would fall for that!”

  “All the time,” he said with an elfish grin. In semi-pro, he was so good at faking injuries and throwing fouls that they called him “Fall Down Morrison.”

  He took his glass and put it in the sink and said, “Have you finished your homework?”

  “Just got my algebra.”

  “Well, get to it. You know, Peg—”

  I knew exactly what was coming. Lecture Number Seventeen. I raised my finger in a cautionary gesture.

  “Just because you’re an athlete, Peg,” I said, “you can’t neglect your studies. Brain, not brawn, is what gets you ahead in this world. Basketball is not life!”

  He picked up a dishtowel and threw it at me. “Get out of here,” he said.

  I grinned and ran up stairs to do my algebra, propped up in bed with my papers on my knees. I did three problems and started daydreaming, looking at the picture of Bob Cousy I had pasted on my door. He was the centerpiece of my collection of pictures of Great Catholic Athletes. I used to want to be him, play for the Celts, be a star. Lately, though, I’d reconsidered—especially since I got the boobs. I really wouldn’t want to have a flat, hairy chest, even if I could score thirty-five points a game. If I was Bob Cousy, I probably wouldn’t want to kiss Sean, and he certainly wouldn’t want to kiss me.

  I slipped right into one of my “What if?” daydreams. I had them a lot, and the scenario was always the same. Some higher power, probably God, was offering me an awful choice—you know, like would you rather freeze to death or be burned at the stake. I thought, What if I had to choose between Sean’s lips and my jump shot? There was a toughie. It was one of the best feelings in the world, letting go of the ball, feeling in the tips of your fingers that it was good, hearing the clean swoosh of the ropes. On the other hand, Sean’s lips were warm and sweet—honeyed nectar, just like Ingrid’s breasts.

  Fortunately, I thought, as I went back to my math, God’s attention was focused elsewhere. He was too busy being God to dream up Terrible Choices for Peggy Morrison, girl jock and kisser extraordinaire. God was in his heaven, all was well with the world, and I could go on dunking and kissing to my heart’s content.

  Senior year was going to be absolutely swell.

  Con

  “I’M GOING to be a comet, blazing across the sky!” said Con (short for Constance Marie Wepplener) taking a bite of a Mars bar. “And then I’ll disappear. I’ll probably die young.”

  “Oh Con, don’t say that!” I said.

  “Who wants to live to be old, all wrinkled and ugly? Ugh. I’ll probably die at thirty-five.”

  “Oh, I thought you meant young.”

  Con smiled.

  I burn the candle at both ends

  It will not last the night.

  But Oh my friends and Oh my foes

  It gives such lovely light.

  “Did you make that up, Con?”

  “Peggy, you nerd, that’s Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  “A saint wrote that?”

  “God, Peggy, she’s not a saint. She’s a famous poet.” She rolled her eyes upward in dismay. I had failed her again.

  I thought Con was the most sophisticated girl I had ever met, and I was proud that she was my best friend. She had moved to Crystal Springs, Maryland, from Long Island, and maybe that was why she knew all those things

  She actually knew Condé Nast was a person and she had read four books on the Index she could quote Omar Khayyám verbatim, and she knew a lot of real neat stuff about sex. She’s the one who taught me to say, “Oh, don’t have an orgasm!” When I met Con, freshman year, I thought an orgasm was some kind of big monkey.

  But Con had really shocked me the day she announced, “I’m going to have lovers.” I thought that was the most sophisticated thing I had ever heard anybody say, anywhere.

  “Wow!” I said. “Real lovers?” The very word tingled inside my mouth, like an illegal substance. Just saying it was probably some kind of sin.

  “Of course. Aren’t you?”

  “Well, sure,” I said. I tried to picture a lover. He was a guy in a black suit with his hair parted in the middle and slicked down with Vitalis and he wore patent leather shoes and had a cigarette holder sticking out of his mouth. I imagined Con with her lover. She’d be wearing her uniform dress—navy-blue serge with a white collar and cuffs and a little red tie—and brown oxford shoes, and her lover would be pressing her to his breast as they did the tango. But I guessed Con wouldn’t be wearing her uniform by the time she got her lover. She said she certainly wasn’t going to have some drippy high
school kid as a lover, some ick whose idea of romance was buying you a Mighty Mo and a chocolate shake at the Hot Shoppes and then trying to stick his tongue in your ear in the back seat of a Chevy.

  “Love is an art, Peggy,” Con said. “It’s like a beautiful painting. It has to be done just right.”

  Con kept changing the candidate for her first lover. The current one was Aly Khan, who ought to be good at love because he was an international playboy, had been married to Rita Hayworth, and had pots of money.

  “Yeah, I guess Aly Khan wouldn’t stick his tongue in your ear,” I said.

  “He might,” Con said thoughtfully. “But first he’d pour in champagne, and then he’d sip it out very, very slowly.”

  But what if you hadn’t cleaned your ears, Con? Poor Aly’d get a mouthful of ear wax.”

  Con looked at me as if I were a stupid child. “Aly Khan would never, never make love to anyone with ear wax,” she said.

  That let me out. I mean, I cleaned my ears a lot, but my ears were just big waxers, I guess. I went through tons of Q-tips. But how would Aly know, I wondered. Did he just go up to people and say, “Hi, I’m Aly Khan, and I want to make passionate love to you on my yacht. But first, one question: Do you now have, or have you ever had, ear wax?”

  But maybe some people, you just looked at them and you knew. Rita Hayworth, for example, didn’t have ear wax or dandruff or lint in her navel. You couldn’t, and be a Love Goddess. Aly Khan probably poured champagne in her navel. I was beginning to have my doubts about sophisticated lovers. I mean, maybe high school kids were sort of clumsy, but at least you didn’t have to worry about being so goddamn clean. You knew they weren’t going to try to lick their chocolate malteds out of your belly button. With Aly Khan, you’d have to spend your whole life in the shower.

  But I could see Con and Aly together. Con, I thought, could do any thing. She was the first freshman in history to get appointed a page editor on the school paper, the Marian Messenger, at Immaculate Heart High School. Immaculate Heart was the girls’ high in Crystal Springs, and Sacred Heart, the boys’ school that Sean went to, was half a block away. Con and I first started being friends when I wrote a story for the paper about the junior varsity basketball team, modestly taking note of my own efforts in its behalf. Con read my story and gave a little whoop of pleasure.