And the two of us had what I thought was the perfect relationship. He always wanted to be with me but he was never remotely possessive or jealous. He was always interested in me and interested in the things I had to say. We would spend hours on end just talking about one thing after another. Most of the boys I had gone out with previously had never really talked to me. In fact I would say that most boys don’t talk to girls, and vice versa. There’s no communication, not in the real sense of the word. Everyone’s too busy trying to make a good impression, and the guys are concentrating too hard on seduction, and the girls on holding out, and, oh, it’s all so damned phony. When I think of teenage sex that’s what I really think of first, the overwhelming phoniness of it all. Girls trying to get the guy to give them a fraternity pin before they put out. Guys hoping the pin will guarantee that the girl will let them go all the way. That whole pretentious artificial routine that they call the dating game in modern America.
I missed all that with Greg. And thought at the time how lucky I was.
We went together for two full years. And in all that time he never tried to seduce me. We would kiss, and even do a little petting, but it really never went any further than that. I’m sure it would have gone further if he had wanted it to. I was very much in love with him, and very impressionable at the time. I suspect I would have gone along with anything that he wanted to do. But I just told myself that he loved and respected me, and that he and I weren’t the average sort of people. That instead of catering to animalistic impulses we could honestly respect one another.
I suppose you know how the story ends.
JWW: I could probably guess.
RONA: Of course. The crazy thing is that I couldn’t. All the time that I was with Greg, I never suspected a thing. When I look back on it now I guess he dropped a million unconscious hints, but I didn’t have the subtlety to pick them up. Besides, I don’t think you sense that sort of thing unless you’re looking for it. You know the saying that it takes one to know one? That’s true I think, but that’s only because it takes another one to be looking for that sort of thing, and you just don’t see it unless you’re looking out for it.
JWW: Then he was homosexual.
RONA: Of course.
There were times afterward when I thought back on it all very bitterly and felt that he had been using me as a front to keep the rest of the school from knowing the truth about him. Of course that wasn’t it at all, and it was uncharitable of me even to think so. When I think back on it now I realize what a horrible time it must have been for Greg himself. He had to keep all of this to himself, you see. It was his secret, his private hell that he had to live with. He was trying to fight this part of himself, this homosexual aspect. I guess he honestly thought that he and I could have a chance together, and that we could make some kind of a life for ourselves.
What hurts is that we probably could have, if we could have brought it out into the open early enough in our relationship. No one is all one thing, you know, and I think we might have had a chance. But instead we evolved into this artificially sexless relationship, and we built secret walls between each other, and he had another life that I never knew about, he would go into the city every once in a while and spend a night at the YMCA, and he would meet some total stranger and they would do things to each other . . .
There was a scene, of course. Ultimately we were almost getting to the stage of discussing marriage, and we tried to go to bed together, and he was impotent. I thought it was my fault, that I had done something wrong. He suggested—I wish there was a proper way to put this, but there isn’t. He suggested that I take him in my mouth, and I did, and he got hard and had an orgasm all in an instant.
If I hadn’t been such a child! In retrospect, I don’t see anything that objectionable about fellatio. But when it happened, when he ejaculated in my mouth, I was just sick. Literally sick. I retched and threw up all over the place. I couldn’t help it.
And then after that there was a long talk in which everything came out, and we broke up. That did it. We broke up.
JWW: And that one experience turned you off men? That seems an extreme reaction.
RONA: No, it didn’t work that way. I did keep to myself for a while after that, because I was really torn up emotionally, but as a matter of fact one of my first reactions, or you could say one of the first parts of my reaction, was a desire to prove to myself that I was a woman after all. Because whether it was Greg’s fault or not, I naturally had loads of self-doubts and wanted to make sure I was adequate myself. You know the sort of Freudian questions girls ask themselves at that age. I was wondering if maybe there wasn’t something wrong with me, or else why would a homosexual have been attracted to me in the first place? And why would I have been drawn to him? So I wanted to go out and lose my virginity as soon as possible.
JWW: Yes, I would have expected that sort of reaction.
RONA: But it didn’t quite work, damn it.
JWW: Oh?
RONA: I don’t know what it was, exactly. I guess I was a little bit of a social retard, for one thing. Two years of Greg had spoiled me for other boys. I was used to this great rapport, and at the same time I was afraid of sensitivity on a boy’s part because I was afraid it meant he was a homosexual or afraid of sex. And of course the obviously masculine types, the ultra-virile sort, put me off completely. I had built things up in my mind to such a point where I was afraid to go out with them . . .
I dated, but my social life was nothing too spectacular. I had cut myself off from other boys while I was with Greg. And from girls, too, as far as that goes. When I did begin circulating again, and began having dates, I must have been very awkward with boys. I know for example that I dated a lot of boys who never asked me out a second time. I used to tell myself that it was because I wouldn’t have sex with them, but at our school not that many boys expected anything on a first date. It wasn’t that. I was just a massive drag, that’s all. I got tongue-tied or else I babbled and I was, oh, a drag, that’s the only word for it.
A couple of times I began to get involved sexually with boys, but it never worked. It was a horrible situation because I absolutely couldn’t relax about it. I suppose that must be the best thing of all, if you can just be very relaxed and normal about sex and then it just happens when it’s time. That’s what would have happened with Greg, if he hadn’t been the way he was. Because I had had more than enough time to get to know him and to like him, so there would have been no abrupt leap into sex, you know, a sexual situation, and I think it would have worked out much better.
But as it was, it seemed as though all a boy had to do was touch me and I would freeze. Literally freeze. I used to wonder why they had that expression for not being a sexual dynamo. Why it’s always put in terms of hot and cold, you know, they say a girl is fiery or an iceberg—
JWW: It’s not just colloquial. Frigidity describes temperature, but also describes sexual temperament.
RONA: That’s right, and I always wondered why, and it’s because you really do get cold. It’s a physical coldness that you feel. All tight and cold . . .
I began to develop into a terrible tease. That honestly wasn’t what I had in mind, either, which made it all the worse. I would go with a boy, and I would honestly be hoping not only that I could respond to him but that we would go all the way. I wouldn’t spell this out because, oh, I just wouldn’t have been comfortable saying to a boy in advance that I wanted him to have intercourse with me. Actually I think any boy would have been turned off by that sort of approach anyway. But I couldn’t have done it because—and this is part of the whole point—because I didn’t have that kind of feeling for these boys, any of them, that sort of rapport.
I would go with them to their place, or in their car, or wherever they would take a girl for the purposes of having sex. My God, but that sounds cut and dried! For the purposes of having sex. You know what I mean—the places kids go to make out. Usually a car. And we would kiss, and it wasn’t exactly
exciting but then it wasn’t bad either, and it would even begin to give me a sort of warm feeling. Nothing fiery but kind of warm. And I would think, well, maybe this will do it, maybe I’ll really get involved this time.
But it wouldn’t work that way. Somewhere along the line something would hit a snag and I would just know that I couldn’t go through with it. This happened several times. And then after that I just told myself I had to force myself to grow up, that nobody ever died from sexual intercourse and that even if I did it would be better than living like this. I was dramatizing like mad but that’s what you do when something like that reaches the obsession stage.
JWW: So you tried to go through with it?
RONA: Yes.
JWW: And couldn’t?
RONA: That’s right. I . . . I forced myself not to fight it. The first time it went that far, I was in this boy’s car, and I was absolutely determined to carry through with it. I had been with him two nights before and had stopped him at the very last moment, which didn’t exactly thrill him. He was frustrated then, and I had to do him with my hand in order to satisfy him. Which wasn’t what he had in mind, but I guess either he had hopes for something more or the hand job—please pardon the way I’m talking—it did something for him, because here it was two nights later and he was back for more. Or maybe he was just a masochist.
JWW: Or maybe he liked the challenge.
RONA: That’s a thought . . . he kissed me and went through the usual college ritual. Kissing, soul kissing, feel the breast, take off the bra, kiss the breast, hand up the skirt—the approach is so standardized you would think every college sophomore learned it step by precious step in phys ed class.
JWW: They learn it when they pledge fraternities.
RONA: Honestly?
JWW: The same time they learn the secret handclasp.
RONA: Oh, you’re putting me on. I’m a fairly gullible person, as you may have gathered. Where was I?
JWW: In the back seat of the car with his hand up your skirt.
RONA: Good grief! “When last seen, little Nell was in the back seat of a two-door Ford sedan with a boy’s hand up her skirt.” That’s too much. Seriously, I just told myself, all right, whatever happens, this is it. And I let him get my skirt up and my panties down, and I watched while he got a rubber out of his wallet and put it on him, and then I valiantly kept my lily-white thighs wide apart while he got in position, and then nothing.
JWW: He was impotent?
RONA: No. I was locked up. I used to know the technical term for it—
JWW: Vaginismus, I think.
RONA: That sounds about right. What it meant was that some muscles down there refused to cooperate. The door was locked forever. I absolutely couldn’t relax. He tried, and I tried, and ultimately he came all over me, and that was it for that night.
I could go on, but it was just more of the same. And for a long time. It didn’t have to happen too many more times before I learned to stop trying. I was almost through with college by then anyway, and I virtually forced the whole subject of sex out of my mind. Or out of the front of my mind—that’s probably more like it. Out of the front of my mind and off into the back of my mind where I didn’t have to think about it, but where it could just fester and breed germs.
• • •
Unlike the majority of girls I interviewed, Rona had not had ambitions of becoming a stewardess for any length of time before entering stewardess training. Shortly before graduation a recruiter visited the campus, and on a sudden impulse she had an interview and set her sights on becoming a stew.
“I was drifting at the time,” she explained. “I was completely at loose ends. For the longest time I had had vague plans—that I would marry Greg and go whither he goeth and all that. When that fell through I couldn’t make any kind of plans because at the time I was too involved with my own hang-ups and too intent on solving the big problem of losing my virginity. I sort of planned on some extension of what I was doing—grad school, or maybe a job in New York, or any of the usual things girls do when they haven’t caught a husband during four years of college.
“But nothing really appealed to me. The last few months at school were miserable ones. At times I didn’t think I could get through. Not that I was having trouble in my classes—I never had trouble in my classes. But I couldn’t stand it there and I kept having the overwhelming urge to just pack up and get out. It was nothing in particular. In fact it was nothing to do with the school. It was me I wanted to run away from, and it had reached the point where I was afraid I might leave without my diploma just because of this.
“So the thought of grad school, even in some other part of the country, it just seemed to me as though it would be a case of more of the same. A change of scene but no major change in my life. I would still be involved with the academic crowd and the same general pattern of life, and I didn’t want it. And a job, the usual sort of job, it seemed just about as grim. I would still be involved in the same general type of social situation, and if anything it sounded like an emptier life than the one I was leaving.
“So, like a lot of girls who find themselves at completely loose ends, I wanted something utterly different from what I was leaving. If I had been a boy I would have joined the army. In fact I did think of becoming a WAC or something, but then someone told me or I read somewhere that they are all either nymphomaniacs or lesbians, and I certainly wasn’t the first and was terrified of finding out I was the second, so I gave up on that idea. I don’t suppose it’s true—they say the same things about stews, you know—but it scared the hell out of me at the time. Innocent me.
“The stew recruiter came along at the right time. There was never the slightest doubt in my mind. I would be a stew and it would be a brand-new life.”
While she said those last few words with a note of readily discernible sarcasm, Rona did in fact find a very new life in her new career. And she was quick to confirm that it was preferable to her old life.
“I’ve always liked it,” she stated. “From stew school on, I’ve always gotten a tremendous kick out of flying. It’s a great life for a girl, you know. We all of us talk about the enormous pressures, and about the hard work we do and the lousy pay we get, and about the adjustment you have to make when your world shifts every time you get on and off a plane. And we may mean it when we say it, but to get back to those war movies we were talking about earlier, well, the parallel still holds. When stews bitch about the life it’s the same as soldiers griping. We’d hate it if we didn’t have something to bitch about.
“But when it comes right down to it, we wouldn’t want to do anything else. We get married, and we get grounded by the airlines, but how many of us actually ground ourselves? Very few. And on the other hand, look at all the girls who get married in secret so that they can go on flying. There’s no question about it, I don’t think.”
Along with the new pressures which life as a stewardess brought, there was also relief from some old pressures, if in a limited way.
“I thought of it as a fresh start, you know, but there’s no such thing as a completely new start, not when you have to carry the same old mind and body along with you. That takes some of the freshness out of it, doesn’t it?
“But it was different, really it was. For one thing, I did make some excellent relationships with girls for the first time in years. If my life were a novel, of course those relationships would have turned into lesbian affairs and I would next be seen wearing pants in a Greenwich Village bar. Thanks, but not little Rona. As a matter of fact I don’t know a single lesbian, at least not to my knowledge, and I’ve never had anyone make any kind of a pass at me in that way, nor have I ever felt the slightest attraction to any other girl, at least not to my knowledge. If you want to get Freudian I’m sure one can prove all kinds of things, and there was a time when I worried about every last one of them, as I’m sure you can imagine, but those times are long gone now and that’s all.
“But I had friendships. That m
akes a difference in a person’s life, you know. Good healthy friendships. I had been living within myself so long that I was going crazy—and while I just meant that as an expression, I have a feeling it comes pretty close to the literal truth. I was getting kind of weird as a human being, thinking crazy thoughts, having a tough time functioning from one day to the next. ‘Oh, hurray, a triumph, I’ve managed to get out of bed and put my shoes on. An affirmation of the beauty of life, a gesture at my willingness to participate in it. Oh, joy!’ Believe me, John, toward the end of the college scene I was having all too many days like that, and a real deep-down loneliness had more than a little to do with it. And those days stopped when I became a stew, and never came back. Not that every day is roses and sunshine, but the bads are never as bad as they used to be.”
And sex?
“It’s still a problem. Face it, of course it’s still a problem, or otherwise I wouldn’t still be a virgin. All this time in the air and I would have gotten over that particular hang-up, wouldn’t I?
“But even so, it’s not the hang-up it once was. Or maybe I don’t let it get me down as I once did. I don’t know which you would call it, exactly.
“I go out on dates. I’m not a lunatic about this the way some girls are because to be perfectly honest I have nothing to prove in that direction. Some of these girls, especially the ones who have just gotten their wings, are absolutely convinced that in order to prove to the world that they’re all-out swingers and born stewardesses they have to be out swinging until dawn every goddamned night and drink their weight in booze and party party party all the time. And others, the ones who’ve been in the air long enough to get nervous about still being single, they don’t want to miss a chance at anything that might turn out to be a husband. And I suppose there are other personal hang-ups that make a girl want to swing her heels off. God knows I’ve got problems of my own, so I’m not going to begrudge other kids their problems.
Sex and the Stewardess (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 9