Bad Mother

by Ayelet Waldman

  10. Sexy Witches and Cereal Boxes

  There are two kinds of twelve-year-old girls: sexy witches and cereal boxes. Older teens still go trick-or-treating on Halloween, but they do so ironically, wearing casual, thrown-together costumes and affecting a jaded superiority to the hordes of smaller children for whom Halloween is Nirvana, the celestial circle closest to God. Twelve or thirteen is the last gasp of innocent devotion to the holiday. It’s the last year that costumes are planned in the winter, refined in the spring, and constructed in the fall. It’s the last year that a full-sized Twix bar will elicit rhapsody and too many vanilla Tootsie Rolls will make you cry.

  In seventh grade, some of the girls will apply black eyeliner with a novice’s shaky fingers, beg their mothers for false eyelashes, and slink around the neighborhood in their sexy witch (or sexy kitty, or sexy devil, or sexy vampire) costumes. The other kind of girl will construct bulky costumes that conceal as much of her body as possible, making liberal use of cardboard packing boxes with holes cut for her arms and legs. She’ll go as a box of cereal, or a jack-in-the-box, or a box of movie popcorn.

  When Sophie was in fourth grade, I was standing in the school yard watching the Halloween parade. The seventh grade trooped by, a column of sexy witches and cereal boxes. I turned to the woman standing next to me and said, “Which is yours?”

  With a sigh she pointed to the sexy dead flight attendant: stiletto heels, tattered and burned uniform (with plunging neckline) spattered with Halloween blood. “At least she’s not dressed like her older sister,” the mother said, nodding in the direction of an eighth grader wearing hot pants, fishnet stockings, a bustier, and Vegas showgirl makeup and tottering along in five-inch heels.

  “Wow,” I said. With neither a cute set of ears, a tail, or devil’s horns, it was hard to determine exactly what species of sexy the costume was going for. “What is she?”

  The mother gave another one of those convulsive pick your battles sighs. “A ho.”

  “A ho?” I asked. “A ho?!”

  “Yep,” the mother said.

  We looked back at the line of children, the lower grades now making their giddy way across the blacktop. “I wonder what kind of seventh grader I’m going to have?” I said. “A cereal box or a ho?”

  “Which is your kid?” the mother asked.

  I pointed out Sophie marching along with the rest of the fourth grade.

  “Oh, honey,” the mother said, sizing up my miniature flapper in her black fringed minidress, sequined headband, and rolled stockings. “You’ve got yourself a ho.”

  Sophie is fourteen years old now, and soon I expect her to issue an edict that I may no longer say her name in public, let alone publish it in a book. But while I am still allowed to describe her, let me state for the record that she is smart and thoughtful, funny and wise. She is just beginning to think about boys, and so far has concluded that most of them are either boring or gross. Last Halloween she appeared as Death from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. She is no ho. But I’d be deluding myself if I called her a cereal box.

  Sophie is not only smart—the kind of girl who chooses to spend her summer learning Japanese—but also tall and beautiful, with a head full of curls, lips more luscious than Angelina Jolie’s, and a figure at once shapely and lean. Her legs are longer than her father’s. Boys look at her as if they were starving and thirsty and she were a ripe pink peach.

  In seventh grade I went trick-or-treating as a cancan dancer. I don’t remember what I was in eighth grade, but there were high heels and leotards involved. And no cereal boxes. Within two years I had lost my virginity. I know for sure that Sophie is not ready for sex. She knows it, too, and has greeted my fumbling attempts to talk about the subject with horrified gagging noises and beet-red blushes. Sophie is, like I said and true to her name, wise, and I do not think she will make the same mistakes I did, but I worry. Oh, Lord, how I worry. And with good reason.

  Throughout my girlhood, my mother regaled me with tales of the dozens of boys lining up to dance the Lindy Hop with her or to take her out for an egg cream or to pile their books in the library carrel closest to hers. The list of college boyfriends and lovers was long and diverse. African nobility and Quaker scientists. Boys from every side of the tracks. “Popular” is how she describes her teenage self. “Had a lot of boyfriends.” But I can read between the lines. Girls in the late 1950s and early 1960s didn’t have a lot of boyfriends; they “got around.” They weren’t “popular”; they were “easy.” I know this is true, because the same was so in the 1980s, when I was earning my own reputation.

  My undoing came in seventh grade, as the result of a sleepover party and a game of Truth or Dare? The question posed to me was simple. “When,” I was asked, “are you going to lose your virginity?”

  Today the proper pubescent answer might be sixteen or eighteen, or even, given the rise in popularity of campus clubs celebrating virginity, “when I get married.” Back then, any idiot knew what she was supposed to say. We all planned to have a serious boyfriend in high school and—like the heroine of Forever …, the Judy Blume novel that was making the rounds of the junior-high-school set, its spine worn so that it flopped open to the sexy parts—present to him the gift of our hymen as a graduation present.

  But I was a mama’s girl, tied fast to the apron strings of a woman who had committed to memory entire chapters of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I understood that the personal was political, and that women’s sexuality had been used for millennia as an agent of repression and oppression. I knew exactly why the Pill was so important, and why women like my mother were willing to lay down their lives for Roe v. Wade. Liberated women owned their own sexuality, my mother had taught me. Look at her! With her glamorous list of exotic boyfriends, she was ahead of her time.

  “I don’t know when I’m going to have sex,” I said to the giggling girls lying in their sleeping bags in the basement rumpus room. “Whenever I feel ready. It could be when I’m fourteen, or when I’m twenty-four.”

  I didn’t recognize my mistake until a few days later, when the prank phone calls started. It seemed one of the girls had spread the rumor that I wanted to have sex before my fourteenth birthday. She told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on and so on, until finally as many people were aware of my supposed sexual ambition as were using Fabergé shampoo. Making my solitary way through junior high school, I was both sophisticated and bitter enough to find a certain dark humor in the idea of having been branded the class slut when I had not yet done more than peck a boy on the lips during a game of spin the bottle.

  It was perhaps because I had labored for so long under its undeserving cloud that when the opportunity at last presented itself, I eagerly matched my behavior to the sobriquet. In my sophomore year of high school, I was sent away to school in Israel. My parents hoped that a year on a kibbutz would inoculate me against the seductions of Jordache jeans, green eye shadow, and a too-literal adherence to the teachings of Bruce Springsteen. It worked; I was saved from becoming a New Jersey mall rat. However, on the kibbutz I was introduced to a whole different kind of danger: young men in uniform.

  Ironically (to me, but not, I imagine, to those girls at the slumber party), I ended up having sex at precisely the age that had so horrified the students of George Washington Junior High. I was only fourteen when I slept with a twenty-two-year-old Israeli soldier. With the benefit of adult perspective, I would now classify him as a creepy and unpleasant sexual predator with a predilection for teenage girls. I was neither the first nor the last young girl of whom he made a conquest. Years later, when I was caught up in the Andrea Dworkin–Catharine MacKinnon brand of academic feminism, which vilified virtually all sexual contact between men and women, and certainly that between a fourteen-year-old virgin and a man eight years her senior, I started referring to what happened that night as date rape. When my infatuation with the anti pornography crusaders ebbed, I stopped using that language and simply described it, if at all, as the night I lost
my virginity to an asshole.

  The truth, however, was that although I was not an eager par ticipant in that night’s activities, although it was scary and painful, and I regretted it even as it was happening, I did not say no. Nor did I say no to the other five or six soldiers with whom I slept that year. One of those young men could reasonably have been considered my boyfriend—we were together a couple of months—but the rest were one-night encounters from which one or the other of us ran, and about which I felt nothing but shame. And they were all far too old for me.

  By the time I returned to New Jersey, I knew exactly what a slut was supposed to do and I’d gotten pretty adept at doing it. During my last two years of high school I had sex with boys in their cars, on top of piles of coats in darkened rooms at parties, in the back rows of the school theater. I snuck up to boys’ bedrooms and smuggled them into mine. I cannot recall ever rejecting an advance, and I know I never felt good afterward. On the contrary, I felt used and dirty, at once manipulative and manipulated. I hated my reputation; I hated the sex.

  I have tried, over the years, to figure out why I so readily adopted the mantle of school slut. At various times I’ve attributed it to a perverse need to fulfill the worst expectations of those around me, and at others to an irresistible hormonal imperative, the same one that inspired my sixth-grade Halloween costume—sexy Dorothy. It is very likely that it had much to do with simple insecurity. I desperately wanted to be liked, and although I knew there was no guarantee—and often no chance—of the boy’s affection lasting beyond those few, groping minutes, I was so gratified by the attention that I could not refuse it.

  But there is someone else I can blame. And really, who can resist fobbing responsibility for one’s own faults off on another? At the risk of pissing off my long-suffering mother, I’m going to blame this one on her, too.* If I hadn’t heard all those stories of whirlwind teen romance, if my mother hadn’t made a glamorous mythology of her sexual history, perhaps I wouldn’t have ended up emulating it.†

  College came to me, as to most kids, as a tremendous relief. Another month of high school might have found me out shopping for a black trench coat and an AK-47. But when I left home, I did not, as you might imagine, seize the opportunity to turn over a more chaste leaf. On the contrary, I had as much sex as ever—more perhaps. But at Wesleyan University there was no dishonor in being a slut. We were supposed to be free and easy, proud warriors in the sexual revolution. I slept with roommates and bandmates (although never at the same time), with frat boys and stoners, with exchange students and grad students.

  By the time I was twenty years old, I was well into the double digits. Then I met Elan, my first serious boyfriend, and went into a six-year slump, in which for the most part I had sex only with him, and that infrequently enough. By the time we broke up, I was eager to dive back into the pool.

  My dozen years of membership in the sorority of sluts ended on May 9, 1992, when I met Michael. It was a good run, productive enough so that when we engaged in the mutual confession of sexual history it caused the blood to drain from his face. The single digit I added a week after our first romantic dinner in SoHo is it for me (kanehara).

  My sexual history before my husband is irrelevant, and my past as a slut is something that I mythologize, committing exactly the same offense I berated my mother for. And with two daughters, one of whom is approaching the age I was during the summer of my Israeli soldier, what am I thinking? Am I trying to guarantee that they follow in their mother’s and grandmother’s promiscuous footsteps? Am I dooming them to end up women like us, who lose count and are finally reduced to saying, “More than a football team, fewer than a marching band”?

  Although I remember like it was yesterday two-year-old Sophie stuffed into a dinosaur costume, toddling from door to door on Halloween, my sexy witch is a teenager now. I watch her with her brand-new body like a too-fast car that she has not yet acquired the skills to drive. She revs her engines, sashaying across the room in an exaggerated approximation of J. Lo’s groove. And the young men stare. There is something different about the older boys’ gaze: they know how to drive that car. When I was fourteen, what I wanted in a boyfriend was just that confidence and swagger. I wanted someone who knew what he was doing, because I was just faking it. What I want for my daughter is the exact opposite. I want her boyfriend to be a pimply-faced boy her own age, blushing and gawking, with no more idea of what to make of a teenage girl than she has herself. I want this for my daughter not because I want to protect her virginity. I know someday she’s going to have sex. Bumbling, incompetent sex, hopefully protected by lots of latex.

  I want for her what I didn’t have. I wish with all my heart now that I had had that first Forever … sexual experience, with a boy who loved me and whom I loved, after debating the pros and cons and planning carefully for the event itself. I wish I’d had candles and roses. I wish I’d had a condom. My first time lasted about eleven minutes, and I rushed from the room as soon as it was over. I don’t even know how much blood I left on his sheets. With the perfect vision of hindsight I can see that it would have served me better to have fumbled through my first experiences with sex alongside someone just as unworldly. Perhaps then I could have kept the pace slower, not been tempted to try things before I was really ready for them. Perhaps then I would not have ended up living up to my reputation. One of the reasons we tell stories is to find meaning in events that seem devoid of it, to make sense of the senseless. Perhaps if my first time had meant something, I wouldn’t feel like I had to talk about it at all.

  It is possible, I suppose, that today’s “hooking up” culture about which the mainstream media are so fond of agonizing has ended at least the social-stigma part of the teenage sexual equation. If I suppress my impulse to make light of my sexual experiences and use them as material for jokes, and instead tell my daughters how much I wish I’d waited, perhaps they’ll just react with a kind of confused pity. People used to ostracize you for having sex?

  But I doubt it. Things have changed so little. In my daughter’s progressive middle school, a wonderful school in which a seventh grade boy can happily announce that he’s bisexual to no outrage or, frankly, surprise, they still use the same hateful language. Girls who do “too much” are sluts. The boys? There’s no real word for them, or at least not one the boys are afraid of. “Dawg” and “playa” are plaudits, not epithets.

  I have no social research to support this claim, but I see something hollow in all the boasting about teenage hookups. If in fact this boasting even occurs. How many times have we seen a wave of adult hysteria in reaction to a supposed teenage fad that turns out to be nonsense? There were those high-school girls in Massa chusetts who in the end hadn’t made a pact to get pregnant and raise their children together. And then there were those “rainbow parties,” which involved fellatio and different shades of lipstick and turned out not to be sweeping the country after all. I don’t imagine today’s teenage sluts feel much better about themselves than I did, back when I penned a missive at once frantic and miserable, begging my mother to come to Israel to help me because I was sure, after that first Israeli soldier, that I was pregnant.

  I have no idea how to help my daughters traverse these rocky shoals. I have to trust in my guiding principle of motherhood: when in doubt, tell the truth. As seductive as it is to lie (“No, darling, I’ve never smoked pot,” “I never spoke to my mother the way you speak to me,” “I was a virgin when I married your dad”), it never works out the way you hope it will. Children are remarkably adept at sussing out the truth. Moreover, once you lose their trust, it’s hard to regain it. And the price of losing that trust when it comes to sex in the age of AIDS, hepatitis C, and periodic miniepidemics of syphilis is too high.

  So I’m going to be honest with my girls while at the same time resisting the impulse either to make light of or to overdramatize my sexual experience. Because while I fear that making promiscuity sound beguiling and chic will lead them astray, I also
know that the best way to ensure that your children dispense with your advice is to exaggerate the damage of the activity you want them to avoid.

  It’s like the D.A.R.E. program that was found by the surgeon general to correlate with drug use, rather than avoidance. If you tell children that all drugs will kill you (or all sex will get you pregnant and cause you to break out in pustulant, fatal sores), as soon as they are old enough to realize that their pothead cousin not only is not dead but has just graduated magna cum laude from Yale, they will dismiss all your warnings, just as the townsfolk dismissed the warnings of the boy who cried wolf. They won’t listen to you about pot or pregnancy, and they’ll also ignore what you have to say about heroin and methamphetamine, and having sex without a condom with a twenty-five-year-old you just met at a friend’s sweet sixteen.

  Moreover, I want my girls to feel good about sex. I don’t want them to think there’s something wrong with making love. The last thing I could handle would be to have Sophie show up one day wearing a gold promise-keepers ring and proclaiming her intention of “saving herself” for her husband. Don’t forget that I was raised on a steady diet of Erica Jong and Marilyn French, and that I’m married to a man who turns me on as much now as he did sixteen years ago. In spite of my history, I love sex, and I want them to love it, too. The truth is that as unpleasant as it was to be called a slut in high school, and as hollow as most of those early encounters were, they didn’t damage me. I long for different memories, but I am not a worse person for it all. I was hurt, but I am not harmed.