by Sachi Parker
All eyes then turned on me expectantly, waiting for my en-dorsement.
“Uh, I don’t think I want to do this.”
“But you should,” Eberhard said with solemn gravity.
Phyllis chimed in: “Better this way than in the backseat of a car or in some dirty alleyway—no offense, Brad, I don’t know you, but statistics show that for most people the first time can be very unpleasant. Lots of psychological scars result.”
“It’s not my first time,” Brad said.
“Even better. You can help her through this, too.”
“We’re all here to help you, sweetheart,” Mom said, beaming.
I felt like Mia Farrow surrounded by the Satanists in Rosemary’s Baby. There were three powerful personalities bearing down on me, forcing me to their collective will, and I couldn’t fight them off. How to negotiate this situation? I couldn’t say I didn’t want to have sex with Brad, because of course I did. Besides, how often do you find your own mother coaching you to lose your virginity?
“Well, I guess…if you think it’s all right…”
“Of course it’s all right!” Phyllis said.
“In sex, everything is all right,” Eberhard assured.
As if to prove their point, they fetched some books from their room. These were books they had written themselves, about erotic art and sexual fantasies, and they were liberally illustrated. We sat on the couch and Phyllis flipped through the pages with me. “This is a good position,” she suggested. “Oh, and this one allows for maximum penetration. You could try this one, too. You’re young and flexible.” Many of the positions seemed to entail a lot of squatting and bending and standing on your head.
“Take the book with you,” Eberhard suggested.
So, having been given our assignment, Brad and I went down the hall to my bedroom. It was as dry and unerotic a prelude to sex as I could imagine, but I went along with it because I didn’t want the Kronhausens to think I wasn’t cool.
“And if you have any questions,” Phyllis called, “we’re right out here.”
“We’ll be waiting,” Eberhard said.
My room was pretty cramped. We had to use the lower tier of a twin bunk bed. It would have been a lot more comfortable in Mom’s expansive bedroom, but that would have been a little too weird, even for her.
We took off our clothes and climbed into the bunk. We weren’t going to use any of the Kronhausens’ fancy positions; it was hard enough to pull off the missionary position in that tight space. I remember being pushed up against the wall, my neck bent sideways, as we started going at it. There was no foreplay to speak of. People were waiting.
There was also no birth control to speak of. Brad didn’t use a condom—I don’t think I ever saw a condom until I was in my late twenties—and I certainly wasn’t on the pill. At the time, I didn’t realize how odd it was that my mother was encouraging me to have sex and didn’t express any concern that I might get pregnant or contract a social disease. I guess everyone just got caught up in the giddiness of the moment.
Except Brad. I felt sorry for him. I don’t know what was going through his mind. He couldn’t have been enjoying this; it was more like an onerous duty. (Although I don’t know that a seventeen-year-old boy could ever not enjoy sex.)
I was very thin by this time. I’d been losing weight steadily, and now, at five foot six I was about eighty pounds. Although I didn’t realize it, I was suffering from anorexia. I don’t know when it started—I’m tempted to think when I was put on that starvation diet after we lost the airline tickets, but I can’t say for sure. Somewhere along the line, I had just stopped eating, and by this time I was pretty bony. I couldn’t have cut a very seductive figure for poor Brad—there was very little there to arouse him—but he gave it the old college try nonetheless.
Suddenly I felt pain inside. “Wait, stop!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Something hurts.”
Brad apologized and said he’d try to be gentler. He started again, and— “Ow!”
I was terrified. Why was this painful? Sex was supposed to be a pleasant experience, wasn’t it? Was there something wrong with me?
Brad, drawing on his measure of experience, explained the situation to me. I was a virgin. My hymen hadn’t broken yet.
“My hymen? What are you talking about?” I really had no clue. They hadn’t taught us about this at boarding school—and the celebrated sex therapists in the next room had forgotten to mention it.
Brad tried to explain. “The hymen is like a membrane that stretches across the—you know. And the first time you make love…” I eventually got the picture. He promised to go very easy. Over and over, though, he would bang up against it, and I would yelp, and he would pull back. It was getting annoying.
“Look,” said Brad, “we don’t have to do this…”
“But I want to,” I said. I really did. I couldn’t go back out into that living room and face my mom and her friends and admit failure. I wanted their approval. I wanted to be cool.
“Okay, well…On the count of three, then, I’ll push really hard and break it, and it’ll probably hurt a lot, but then it’ll be over.”
The scenario didn’t sound too appetizing, but it had to be done. “Okay, let’s do it.” I lay back and braced myself against the wall.
Brad got into position. “One, two, three!” He lunged into me, and oh my god! It hurt like hell. I thought I was going to die. It was all I could do to keep from screaming.
But it was done. Brad held me tight. He felt so sorry that he’d hurt me. He kept saying, “I love you, I love you,” over and over.
Then, to my horror, I looked down and saw blood on the sheets. Now what? Had he perforated something important? Was I having an early period, or hemorrhaging to death?
Brad calmed me down and reassured me that it was all very natural. I really was so lucky to have had such a patient, understanding guy for my first time.
And he was right: it didn’t hurt anymore after that initial thrust. In fact, it felt pretty damn good.
Once our mission was accomplished, we had to face the next hurdle: reporting back to the Kronhausens. We dreaded the thought; there was something so weird and cultish about them. We hid out in the bedroom until we heard a light knock on the door, and Mom’s voice: “Is everything okay in there?”
We emerged from the bedroom and went out to the living room, where Phyllis and Eberhard sat placidly on the couch.
“So, how did it go?” Phyllis asked.
“It was great.”
“Did you achieve climax?” Eberhard asked.
We both nodded vigorously. They smiled smugly.
I hated them.
• • •
THE one positive result of this strange interlude was that I fell madly in love with Brad. He had been a model of chivalry throughout the ordeal, and now I was crazy about him. Brad was my first real lover, and I wanted him to be the only one—and he wanted me.
So after he went back home to San Francisco, I made plans to join him. We were going to live together.
I told Mom the good news, fully expecting her to share in the excitement. She didn’t.
“You’re only seventeen. You can’t move in with a man. You’re not ready.”
“I was ready enough to sleep with him. It was your idea!”
“That’s different,” she contended. “I was helping you become a woman. Sexual maturity and emotional maturity are two different things. You don’t want to get tied down in a serious relationship now. You have your whole life ahead of you.”
“But it’s not like I have any other plans. I’m not going to college,” I helpfully reminded her.
She ignored this point. “Besides, you don’t love him.”
“Yes, I do!”
She smiled understandingly. “I’m sure you have feelings for him. But let’s give it some time. If he really loves you, he’ll wait for you.”
I didn’t want to wait. I was in love
with Brad, and we were going to live together. Mom had pushed us into bed, and now she would have to live with the consequences.
A few days later, as I was preparing for my great life move, Dad called out of the blue from Japan with some exciting news: he’d lined up a job for me in Tokyo, as a television newscaster.
A newscaster! On television! I couldn’t believe it. I’d never really thought about doing anything in show business—not since my role in To Kill a Mockingbird got shot down—but once the offer came in, I suddenly realized that it was the one thing in life I wanted to do. Had to do. I knew I’d probably gotten the job by trading on my mom’s name, but I didn’t care. It was a gig! I was going to be a star!
Yes, I would now have to give up the idea of living with Brad in San Francisco, and that gave me serious misgivings.
“Hey, opportunities like this don’t come around that often,” Mom said. “You have to jump on them.” She reminded me, “If he loves you, he’ll wait.”
Armed with these time-tested clichés, I called Brad and told him I was heading back to Japan, and we’d have to postpone moving in together, but it would only be for a short while, and if he loved me…It all sounded like total bullshit. I knew if I left, things with him would be over, and so did he.
I think it broke Brad’s heart when I went back to Japan. I know it broke mine. He was the love of my life—and it would be a long, long time before I found another one.
• • •
WHEN I arrived back in Tokyo in the fall of 1974, there was no one waiting for me at the airport. That struck me as a little odd, but—whatever. I took a cab to the house—and there was no one waiting there, either. In fact, there was no one waiting for me in the entire city. Dad and Miki were gone.
What about my newscaster job? I called the television station. No one seemed to know what I was talking about.
I was getting that stranded feeling again. In my heart, I sort of knew that my parents had used this job as a pretext to get me away from Brad. Still, I’d assumed that at least there would be a job.
At this point, I guess I could have flown back to Brad and continued the life I’d dreamed of, but I didn’t. For one thing, I didn’t have the airfare. More significantly, I was still being guided by my Japanese upbringing, which, in the face of all obstacles and disappointments, counseled stoic acceptance. My father had summoned me back home, and it wasn’t in my nature to question that. If I were to leave now and go against his unspoken wishes, he would lose face. Being Japanese is a complicated business.
So as I’d come to Tokyo for work, I would simply find work. As it happened, the local noodle shop was looking for waitresses. I’d never waitressed before, but I’d never been out of school and broke before, either, so I took the job.
Noodle shops are a staple of Japanese casual dining, much like coffee shops in the States, and they’re not to be confused with teahouses. While the customers in both emporiums are overwhelmingly male, they don’t go to noodle shops for relaxation or ritual observances or stimulating conversation. They go for noodles and sake—and that’s it. There are no geishas flitting about, being charming and flirtatious, and floating the vague possibility that there might be a little something extra available for the right price. The men wouldn’t be interested anyway; they kept their noses buried in their noodle bowls, and for the most part they left the waitresses alone—but not me.
Maybe because my body was more substantial than that of the average noodle waitress—even with anorexia, I was bigger and curvier in certain critical areas—but I was constantly getting pinched and pawed and squeezed by the clientele. I tried to maintain a polite smile and ignore them, but it was getting increasingly hard to serve the soup when I was being fondled at one end and goosed at the other.
The other waitresses were sympathetic to my plight, but also a little envious. Their behinds were generally flat, while my all-American ass stuck out like an increasingly sore thumb. “How does it do that?” they’d marvel in the dressing room as they helped me put on my kimono. All the waitresses had to wear kimonos, and there were several layers, which had to be draped just so. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but even after I did, they still helped me dress. It became a bonding ritual between us. I loved hanging out with them. The dressing room was like a women’s haven, where they could relax, have a smoke, and talk about their lives, and their husbands, and sex. When I complained about being pinched, they tried to figure out ways to flatten my breasts and behind, wrapping them tight with linens and so forth. Nothing helped. I still got groped. More than once the chef came charging out of the kitchen, cleaver in hand, to protect me.
I didn’t stick with the noodle shop long. I heard that there was a need for ski instructors up north. I’d been skiing ever since I was a child, and my tenure in Switzerland had really sharpened my skills, so I got a children’s ski instructor license and spent the winter of 1975 in the Japan Alps teaching kids how to ski.
When the season ended, I went back to work at the noodle shop. The gropers were still in season, so with summer approaching, I started looking for a new job somewhere. Anywhere.
Anywhere turned out to be New Zealand. It was winter down below, the skiing was sensational, and they needed ski instructors. I took the next plane.
If you’ve seen the Lord of the Rings movies, you know how spectacular the New Zealand scenery can be. When I landed at Christchurch and took the bus southwest to Queenstown, I was astounded by the natural beauty surrounding me on all sides. Towering snowcapped mountains, primeval forests, glacier-cut fjords—you name it, they had it. Queenstown itself was a beautiful resort town on the shore of Lake Wakatipu, right at the edge of the Southern Alps. The lake was so crystal clear you couldn’t tell the mountains from their reflection in the water. Gold had been discovered there in the 1860s, and the ensuing rush created a boom for the area. They still had some working mines when I was there.
The head of the ski school in Queenstown was a young American named Larry Lasch, who also taught in Vail. I got my adult ski license from him, and taught throughout the summer. The skiing in New Zealand was beyond amazing. The mountains were so high that, instead of taking the endless tram lifts, people would fly up to the summits in helicopters and ski all the long way down.
The setting was incredible; the pay wasn’t. I didn’t make enough to stay at the ski resort, so I found lodgings on a nearby sheep ranch. The owner, Hildy, was a single woman in her sixties, tough and independent, with sinewy arms and a weather-beaten face. She had hundreds of sheep on her ranch, and she was busy looking after them from dawn till dark. So she was more than happy to let me stay there for free, if I cooked for her.
I cooked a lot of lamb. She had chickens on the farm, so every morning we had fresh, warm eggs with bright orange yolks. The butter was delicious; Hildy churned it herself.
Hildy also made classic New Zealand sweaters, from her own homegrown wool. She taught me how to shear the sheep. I would hold the sheep under the crook of my arm and take a pair of shearing clippers and run them right along the skin of the sheep. I still remember the feel of the soft wool as it gently fell over my hand and piled up at my feet. We would gather the sheared wool into huge baskets and carry it into the spinning room.
Hildy and I would sit by the spinning machines and pull heaps of raw wool from the basket and shape it into a ropy string. We’d feed the string into the spinner, and it would come out as spun wool. It was still in a natural state, sticky with lanolin oil. Hildy would knit the wool into chunky sweaters, which were super-warm and so comforting. The sweater wool was grayish and dirty, but you couldn’t wash it, or you’d lose the lanolin, which repelled water and insulated you from the cold.
Hildy gave me one of these sweaters as a gift, and I wore it constantly. The smell and the sticky feel of the lanolin reminded me of those trips I made with my dad up into the mountains of Japan, when we’d go ice-fishing and sit huddled in the tent while he spun magical tales of his past.
&nbs
p; I missed him. I wanted to see him again.
• • •
AFTER three months in New Zealand, I returned to Tokyo. Dad wasn’t there, but he had left a forwarding phone number.
“Hey, Sach the Pach! What’s up?”
“Hi, Dad. Where are you?”
“I’m in Hawaii. I’m doing some business.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Soon.”
Soon could be next week, next Christmas, or whenever he got bored with the palm trees. I didn’t want to wait. I was on a personal crusade to reconnect with my family, and I wasn’t going to be denied. I scraped the plane fare together and went down to Honolulu. I knew Dad kept a suite at the Halekulani Hotel on Waikiki Beach. Wouldn’t he be surprised when he saw me?
Once again, Dad surprised me. He was already gone. Where, I had no idea.
So now I was stranded in Honolulu. Not the worst place to be stuck, granted, but when you’re broke and alone, a picture-postcard sunset can offer only so much in the way of gratification.
I was really starting to feel sorry for myself. Nobody cared about me, nobody loved me! I was swimming in self-pity, and I desperately wanted attention.
So I came up with an ingenious idea: maybe if I pretended I was sick, my parents would rush to my side to help me. It worked in the movies all the time, right? I couldn’t make it anything really serious, because I wanted to recover fairly quickly, so I fell back on my Queenstown experience and manufactured a skiing injury: I’d messed up my knee badly, it was dislocated or torn up or something, and I was in real pain.
It was a good story. I called Mom.
“You hurt your knee skiing?”
“Yes,” I said, adding a little tremble to my voice.
“You hurt it in New Zealand, and it’s just bothering you now?”
“Well, it was always bothering me, but now it’s getting much worse.”
“Have you seen a doctor?” she asked.
“Uh—no…” This was not going exactly the way I planned.