“No, but I was wondering. About you and Mom. She wasn’t that young when you married. I wondered what you would have thought of her if she hadn’t been, you know, a virgin, when you married. If she’d done it before she met you.”
The words were difficult to say. My father and I had never before had a discussion that dealt with any bodily functions, let alone sex. The warm glow of the lamplight as I came in the door, watching him as he comfortably read the paper in his pajamas, must have deluded me into thinking that my father was not who he was and that we could have this conversation that he was not equipped to have.
There was a long silence as my father reached down and slipped his bare, calloused feet back into his slippers, probably both stalling for time as well as reducing the intimacy that I’d forced upon us. Once his slippers were on, he sat up straight on the couch and stared ahead.
“I can’t imagine what made you think that your mother’s age when we got married had anything to do with anything,” he said.
“Dad, she was twenty-six. Wasn’t that old back then for a woman to get married? She must have had other boyfriends before you.”
“Maybe she was on the older side. Not old. But that had nothing to do with her decision to be a good woman. Your mother always was a good woman. Someone I could respect,” he said, and removed his reading glasses.
“But Dad, why would it have made any difference to you if she had slept with someone before marriage? Even, for example”—and here I took a deep breath—“you.”
“Judith, I don’t know what’s gotten into you tonight.” He began to crack his knuckles, which he did whenever he was feeling strongly about something, pulling each knobby finger until it made a satisfying pop. “I told you how I respected your mother.” He was getting angry, a rare occurrence.
“I understand that,” I said. “Of course you respect Mom. But would sleeping with her before you got married have changed anything? Why would that have affected if you respected her or not?”
For the first time that I ever remembered, my father raised his voice. “Of course it would have changed things,” he said and looked more outraged with every word he spoke. “I never would have married a woman I did not respect. And any respectable woman saves herself for marriage. What’s the matter with you? You know all this. Why are you asking me these questions?” He picked up his paper and unfolded it with a lot of noise.
“Now go to bed before we wake your mother, Judith. This conversation would kill her,” he said. And as I walked away, he added, “I certainly hope you haven’t already done something with that Elliot. Something that would make us ashamed.”
“No, Dad. I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said, defeated.
I didn’t ask any more questions. My father picked up his reading glasses and disappeared behind the Guardian. I slunk off to bed.
In the months to come, we never stopped our exhausting routine of arousing each other, but always stopped short of intercourse. I loved the feelings of your fingers searching my body, finding places that made me shiver and moan, and yet I kept hearing my father’s distraught voice from that night, confirmation that if I had sex with you, I would be crossing over into territory so dangerous that I might spend a lifetime regretting it.
As the time approached when we were to go away to our separate schools, I became even more powerfully conflicted. Some days it seemed that sleeping with you before we went off to college would be the right thing to do. I’d plan it and think about it, but could never find the courage to initiate it. And I would have to initiate it, as you were convinced that because I wasn’t one of the fast girls, you were supposed to stop.
Away at Michigan those first weeks, I wondered if perhaps the reason that I wasn’t hearing from Elliot was because I hadn’t been brave enough to have sex with him. Everyone was experimenting with sex. It wasn’t like high school with lines drawn between those who did it and those who did not. In the bigger world of college, virginity increasingly seemed an oddity. Caroline and Audrey, my roommates in the dorm triple room, had come to Michigan, like me, as virgins. When we discovered this, we laughingly wondered if there was some way the administration grouped us. Were there virgin rooms versus non-virgin rooms? But soon, tall, confident Caroline and beautiful blond Audrey both had boyfriends, and we began endless discussions about whether to go all the way or not. This would seem unbearably boring to young people today, to think that this subject caused so many hours of debate and discussion, but we were on the far side of the cusp of the sexual revolution. Finally, one night, I was nearly asleep, but I woke up completely when the door to our room opened and shut and I heard Caroline and Audrey begin to whisper on their side of the room.
“I did it,” I heard Caroline exultantly whisper.
I sat up in bed, looking in the darkness toward where the other two were sitting on Audrey’s bed. “No you don’t. You’ve got to tell both of us,” I said. “Turn on the light.”
And Caroline described how she and her boyfriend, an upperclassman who majored in engineering and had his own apartment, had had sex that night. He’d had a condom ready in his nightstand drawer, she said with feigned casualness. I was so jealous I could barely stand it. Even though she downplayed the importance of her announcement, I heard the triumph and excitement in her voice. Caroline immediately seemed more mature, and, of course, we saw her in our dorm room less and less. We covered for her, even signing her in at night so that she could stay at her boyfriend’s. Within the month, Audrey began sleeping with her boyfriend as well, a boy with long hair who followed her adoringly everywhere on campus. Soon I was alone in that room most evenings. A single in a room for three. I slept by myself and imagined that all the other girls I saw in classes, on the quad, or in the library were having happy, exuberant sex with their boyfriends, while I went back to my lonely single.
I could not, for the life of me, figure out what use this virginity thing had now. My father’s advice came to seem irrelevant and quaint, and besides, he was hundreds of miles away from Ann Arbor. I began to detest my virginity. It became an unattractive burden. I did not, however, want to have sex with anyone besides Elliot. After all that deferred passion, it seemed absurd to lose my virginity with anyone less significant than the great love of my life, Elliot. Now, more than half a century later, an old woman, I regret few things in my life. But I do regret not sleeping with you, Elliot, that summer before we went to college. I regretted it back then and I tried to blame my father, but since I listened to very little other advice either of my parents gave, why had I so desperately clung to this particular advice? I decided that during that winter break, in December, I would stop all this virginity nonsense and tell Elliot that the time had come for us to maturely express our emotions. I rehearsed the conversation again and again.
Within a day of coming home for the December vacation, I called you. I plunged in headlong. The time for hesitation and reticence was long past.
“Elliot, when can you come over? I’m dying to see you. Weren’t we other people when we went away to school last September? I’ve never changed so much in so short a time.”
“Yeah, I know exactly what you mean,” you said. “We thought we knew so much when we went away. But it’s a much bigger world out there, isn’t it?”
“Let’s go for coffee tomorrow. And catch up,” I said, with whatever seductiveness I could muster, knowing that on a weekday afternoon there was a greater chance that we could be alone at his house. With his father at work, and his brothers no longer living at home, the sprawling apartment would be empty.
“Yeah. That’d be great. I’ll pick you up around noon. I’m really wiped out, still on East Coast time,” you said.
I finally fell asleep that night, in my girl’s virginal bed, wondering if I’d be feeling differently the next night. I hoped for two things: first, that my father, more finely attuned to my moods than anyone else on earth, would be preoccupied when he came home for dinner that night, and second, that my mother wou
ldn’t keep Elliot too long when he came for me. I feared that her endless questions and prying would spoil any chance of romance for the afternoon. I could imagine her saying, “Elliot, tell me about your classes. Elliot, tell me how your brothers are doing. Elliot, do you want some milk and homemade rugelach?” When she started talking to my friends, she never stopped.
But luck was with me when it came to my mother that day. Although she looked disappointed, she had already made plans for mah-jongg and lunch with her friends and would not be home when Elliot arrived.
However, for an hour before she left, she made my nerves even more jangled by sitting on the bed and questioning me about everything I planned to wear. She inspected each thing that I pulled out of my drawers—even the bra and panties I gathered to take with me into the bathroom. She almost managed to dampen my own romantic anticipation with her hovering. When I came out of the bathroom and put on a nice pair of charcoal gray slacks and a pale gray V-neck sweater, she made a face.
“Those are nice slacks, Judith,” she said in the Russian accent I could barely detect, but that others commented on. (“Where’s your mother from?” people asked me immediately after they met her.) Then she sniffed loudly, always the sign that more was to come. “Quality material. But a little tight. That dorm food has settled somewhere around your tuchus. Exactly where my weight goes as well.” She patted her own backside. “Besides, you have a panty line.”
“Jesus, Mom. Somehow I’ve managed to get myself dressed every day these past few months. I don’t know how I did it all by myself, but I did.”
“No need to be rude, Miss College Girl. I see what my eyes see,” she said firmly. “And they see tight.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest and pursed her lips.
“What do you expect me to do about it?” I asked, my voice rising. “Go on a diet right now?” She made me crazy; I felt as if I was suffocating in this house.
“Of course not, Judith. There’s no need to get huffy. That’s what panty girdles are for. You pull one on, and you get a nice, smooth look. Believe me.”
I didn’t think I had the will to argue with her, so I opened my underwear drawer where there were several panty girdles, white, black, and beige, and took off my slacks. Then I stepped into the black one, and fiercely tugged it up around my hips. It tortuously encased my entire midsection and extended almost to my knees. The satin panel over the abdomen was so tight, I could no longer breathe adequately; but I must admit that when I turned and inspected myself in the mirror, I saw a much smoother profile in both back and front.
“Now, maybe you’ll listen to me once in a while,” said my mother with satisfaction. Then she looked at her watch. “Okay, I have to hurry and put my face on. The cab will be here any minute.”
The day was an especially cold one, the sky a drab, midwestern gray, and the sleet was turning to snow. After my mother closed the door, I stood at the front window and looked at the scene below: the stark red brick apartment buildings that lined my street, the trees, planted at regular intervals, which became barren sticks in winter. It was strangely quiet, and when the occasional car went by, it crawled clumsily past, its tires wrapped in bulky chains, the chains slicing into the ice. A cab stopped in front of our building and my mother appeared below on the street, her head wrapped in a babushka to preserve her hairdo from the still-falling snow, but her feet fashionable in short, black boots trimmed in Persian lamb, so in vogue that year. She walked carefully and slowly across the icy sidewalk. When she reached for the door of the waiting yellow cab, she turned and gave a jaunty wave up at me as I stood watching from the upstairs window. How did she know I was there, watching? I wondered.
You arrived at noon. I almost wished my mother had been at home chattering and asking questions. It would have diffused my shocked silence about the transformation you’d undergone. You didn’t look anything like the boy who had left Budlong Woods for Brown only a few months earlier. You must not have cut your hair since the summer. And it was greasy and scraggly, without its usual luster. You also had the beginnings of a beard. More shocking were your clothes. You’d always been turned out neat and tidily. In high school, you looked like a rising executive. When we became a couple, I self-consciously got rid of the frivolous, faddish pre-Elliot outfits in my closet and replaced them with severe and businesslike clothes as well—ironed button-down shirts and coordinating cardigans and blazers. I guess that’s why I chose the charcoal gray pants and sweater to wear that day.
But you no longer looked businesslike. Your meticulous dress had metamorphized into that of a wizard. Despite the gloomy winter weather outside, your clothes were bright and mismatched. Under an orange hooded parka, you wore a peacock blue T-shirt. Your jeans were striped, like those of a train engineer. They fit tight through the thighs, had rips in both knees, and then flared out widely at the bottom. Below your jeans, you wore high-topped sneakers which were a vivid shade of purple. Until I saw them, I hadn’t imagined that sneakers came in purple. Most remarkable of all, you were carrying a purse. And you seemed not at all shy about it. The purse was a fantastic mélange of fabrics patchworked together. You wore it over your left shoulder, where it crossed your body, then rested low on your right hip. Tiny mirrors were sewn onto the patchwork. I stood in the doorway hypnotized as you climbed the stairs. We gave each other a quick kiss of hello and I shut the door behind you. I saw then that the mirrors on your bag sprayed reflections of light all over my parents’ somber green couch, the chairs, as well as the beige walls. Each time you moved, the mirrors magically shifted and reflected yet other patterns, like a kaleidoscope. Our living room was transformed by these twinkling patterns, and I turned from you, watching the sparkles, unable to take my eyes from the magical lights the purse cast on my parents’ bland curtains and furniture.
“Love the purse,” I said. “I mean it. I love it. I want it.”
You laughed. “This girl I know at school makes them,” you answered. “I’ll see if I can get her to make one for you. Each bag comes out differently, though.”
“You look different,” I said, staring. “You should have warned me.”
“Yeah, the first thing my dad said to me yesterday when I got off the plane was, ‘Get a haircut.’ He’s barely said anything to me since.” You looked at me. “You look the same.” He saw my face fall and then quickly added, as he stroked my cheek, “No, no that’s a good thing. You look great. But your hair is longer. I like it that way a lot.”
We went to our favorite hot dog stand on Petersen Avenue, nothing like it in Ann Arbor or Providence, we agreed. I was so nervous I couldn’t eat, so you finished mine as well. Then we went back to your house. You turned the key in the lock and we walked through the familiar and empty apartment back to your bedroom. It looked exactly the same, the Israeli posters, the neatly made-up bed. Seeing your bright clothing and long hair had made me expect that the room would be different, too. But the only change was the duffel bag at the foot of your bed, colorful wrinkled clothes spilling out it.
I sat on the bed, while you stood searching through a stack of albums on your desk.
“Here, you have to hear this,” you said, finally
You put on a single. It was “Eight Days a Week.” This was the first time I’d ever heard the Beatles. Then you played “Twist and Shout.” I tried to smile enthusiastically, but I wasn’t as excited by the music as you were. I suppose, when you think about it, hearing the Beatles for the first time is as big an event as losing one’s virginity. You’ll always remember where you were when it happened and who you were with. But I was preoccupied with my other mission, and it would be several months before I realized what genius I was being exposed to. When you finally joined me on the bed, you started to talk about the music. You were rambling, so I took a deep breath and interrupted.
“Elliot, one of the things I wanted to tell you today was that I’ve thought about the whole virginity thing. When I got to Michigan, I kept thinking back to how we always stopped.” I co
uldn’t meet your eyes. I was so scared, but kept talking. “I don’t want us to stop anymore.” My heart was pounding as I said this. “It’s stupid that we stop.”
You shrugged and said, “Okay,” as if what I’d said was so obvious it didn’t bear discussing. You sat beside me on the bed and started kissing me, but then hesitated and looked hard at me. “Wait, you’re still a virgin?” you asked.
I nodded, for the first time realizing that, of course, you were not.
“Wow,” you said and then we leaned back on the bed.
I should have taken it off before we left my house, but I had liked the smooth shape the panty girdle gave me under the gray pants too much. Elliot, do you remember how you struggled to get the damn thing off me, pulling and tugging and, finally successful, throwing it to the floor? It seemed to have taken forever. The offending garment lay next to your glittering mirrored patchwork bag. We stared as the elastic curled up on itself, the girdle resembling a large squashed cockroach.
The romance had evaporated. You began to laugh. We looked at the floor, at the ridiculous heap of our mismatched clothing: my heather gray sweater and your torn train conductor’s jeans, your purple sneakers and my gray flannel trousers. They were all tangled together, but the contrast represented the enormous chasm between us. This time, it was the black panty girdle that came between us.
You were still laughing. You couldn’t seem to stop. You were laughing so hard, tears were flowing. I stared at you, depressed. Was my panty girdle really all that funny?
“Sorry,” you said. “Sorry. I got stoned before I picked you up. That thing looks so weird, it just set me off,” you said, and pointed to the panty girdle and started laughing again. “I smoked the last of it. Sorry. I wish I had more, but I had to get rid of it. I didn’t want my father to find it. He would go nuts. Probably pull me out of school. But I’m still totally high. Have you tried pot?” you asked, still smiling, but more in control and looking at me with interest.
Love Is a Rebellious Bird Page 6