by Jane Juska
I fire off an offended e-mail offering not to show up at all, and reminding her that those students who had read the book would already be offended—or not—and that so far as I am concerned, offending people is one way of getting them to care about what’s going on, and to think about whatever that may be (though the two things rarely happen at the same time). So, unless she is going to rescind my parking permit, I am going to be there.
The truth is that I want to escape the impending drama in my front yard, but there’s another truth as well: I miss being with kids. I miss the tension of a good classroom, the storms that threaten, the excitement of it all. I miss the insouciance of kids, even their bad manners: the lack of attention, the rude outbursts. I want—just one more time—the challenge of grabbing their minds and making those minds work. So into the valley I ride, kids to the right of me, kids to the left of me. My mission: to offend them and to make them think. If A Round-Heeled Woman has done its job, my mission is halfway completed. Now, about the thinking.
“We’ve combined two classes,” says the instructor, “and a few faculty will be joining us. Your reputation precedes you.” Another packed house.
A classroom is a pile of kindling; the least little thing can start it up, and before you know it, you’ve got a three-alarm fire. My highfalutin pedagogy aside, it has been a long time since I have shared space with assorted young people, and I am nervous as hell, so I have written a lesson plan. I will not go in there unarmed. This lesson plan is so boring it will deflect any outrage from any person under thirty: I will tell them how the book came to be—the writing of it, the publishing of it, the changes in my life brought about by the book. The kids will be asleep in no time, and I can claim victory. I am a stealth fighter.
And then I get a look at them. They are diverse all right: All the colors of the world shine from their faces; they wear costumes from exotic lands, from their sisters’ closets, from the mall. The boys’ trousers threaten to fall, the girls’ T-shirts to rise. They are all beautiful. They look at me expectantly, warily, politely, curiously. Can it be that they want to learn something? I throw out my lesson plan.
What the hell, I decide to begin by reading my ad aloud. I read it slowly, loudly enough for everyone to hear, and don’t look up until the end. Nobody looks outraged or offended; a few faces register mild disgust, nothing that would send me into retreat. I decide to read some of the letters that came in response to the ad. “I put each letter into one of three piles—yes, no, and maybe; I’ll read some of them, you tell me which pile they should go in.” This is a goddam brilliant stratagem, student involvement right off the bat in a subject of (prurient) interest. I can’t fail.
“Call me at the office between two and five on Thursdays.” “Yes!” they call. Uh-oh, we’re off to a bad start.
“A letter from you and I’ll spend more time with warm glaciers and cuddly icebergs.” “Bogus!” yell the boys. “Yes!” from the girls.
“Have Viagra, will travel!” A unanimous “Yes.” They are getting all these wrong.
“I’m seventy-two and very horny.” “Yes!” Oh, God.
“Much of what goes on in the world amuses me, and I tend toward the sardonic view while remaining appreciative of life’s ironies and serendipities.” The drop-in faculty are into this: “Yes!” they cry in unison. The kids are, “Maybe.”
It’s a good thing I’m not grading this. Every single answer is the opposite from my own when I first took these letters from their envelopes, but that’s okay. Now we are all warmed up and can talk with ease and candor. I dig my little green notebook from my purse and say, “Is the word ‘slut’ still in use?” My pen is poised over the notebook. This is a fine bit of teaching: The teacher becomes the student and the students become the experts. In this case the turnabout is genuine, since I no longer know what’s really going on in the valley of the kids. “‘Slut,’” they tell me, “is still used and sometimes for guys as well as girls.”
Argument breaks out. “No, guys can’t be sluts.”
“If you go with a lot of guys or girls, you can be a slut.”
“I never heard a guy called that.”
“Well, start listening.”
I break in. “Do you talk openly with each other about sex?”
The girls do. The guys not so much. In the front row a terrific-looking young woman—she is quietly but unquestionably more experienced than a girl—says, “I think sex for a woman is different than for a man.” The room grows quiet. This is a bold statement. I nod my encouragement, and she continues: “In sex a woman is being penetrated and she may feel assaulted. So she may be more reluctant than a guy.”
Everybody in the room looks at me. What do I think? What I think is not important. What I think, if I make it public, will end the discussion, for the teacher will have spoken, end of argument. Rather than my opinion, I offer another view: “There are those who believe that when a woman is entered, the void is made full and the woman completed.” The passive voice has its advantages.
I look at the clock, five minutes to go. I say, pointing to the young woman in their midst, “I think you are lucky to have in your class a most intelligent and articulate young woman.” Three minutes to go; kids are performing their velcro symphony, opening and closing their backpacks, and in the noise I say—well I just can’t help it, I have an opinion, and what the hell, they’ll never see me again, so—”The quality of sex”—the symphony pauses—“depends on the people having it.”
A boy shifts his backpack onto his back and calls out, “I just want to say that guys think about sex all the time.”
From somewhere in the crowd a sweet, high voice answers, “So do girls.”
I am exhausted. How did I do this sort of thing—five periods a day, five days a week—for thirty-three years? I am also elated. Nothing profound got decided. Nothing life-changing. At least I don’t think so, though teachers can never be sure. What did happen is that all these minds—every single one was working, I could tell—filled this room with the electricity of thought. Mission accomplished. I am ready for a nap.
Not yet. The line of girls waiting to talk to me is out the door. “Would you write an advice column for our newspaper?” “Will you give me your agent’s name for my dad?” “Would you speak at our Christian youth group?” Near the end of the line stands a tall blond, blue-eyed girl, a California girl if there ever was one. Her turn come ’round at last, she looks at me shyly and says, in uptalk, as if she were asking a question, “I have this problem with my boyfriend?” My smile is her encouragement. “We’ve been going together for six months and three days, and we agreed right from the start that we would see other people, not just each other, but lately I don’t want to see other people, I want to just see him and he doesn’t feel that way, I don’t think, and . . .” She takes a breath. “I’m jealous. I hate myself.”
Sometimes you just have to give advice. Sometimes you just can’t get out of drawing a conclusion, forming an opinion, saying it out loud. This lovely creature standing before me is in pain, so I say, still in my avoidance mode, “Have you talked about this with him?” She shakes her head. I tell her what to do, and it’s not “Go online.” “Give yourself three weeks,” I say. “See what happens. After that, if the problem still exists, explain it to him.” The sun breaks through. “Thank you so much,” she says, and off she goes.
On the way home—a soldier home from the war, a sailor home from the sea—I congratulate myself on a successful campaign in which no limbs were torn, no lives lost, not one drop of blood spilled. I wallow happily in the possibility that the kids in that class will be more respectful of each other, will listen to each other, will think about sex and its rightful place in our lives. Peace, it’s wonderful.
MY LANDLADY IS in the swing, her belly the size of a beach ball. Holy god, how did she get her feet through those stirrups? She smiles at me! and says, “We’re hoping this will widen the birth canal and make it easier for the baby to pass through.”
Oh. I certainly hope it works. I offer a reminiscence of my own labor pains, more than thirty years ago: “I’ll always be grateful to the nurse who gave me that shot.”
“I’m having natural childbirth,” she says. “No drugs.” She’s still smiling!
Her husband joins her on my lawn and helps her out of the contraption and back into the house. That evening my landlady’s moans fill the cool spring air. The neighbor on the left, herself a physician, paces nervously in her backyard. On the right the neighbor, who works at home, has given up working at home. He tosses his briefcase into his BMW, and roars off. Across the street the woman who gave birth to twins when she was forty-eight and has lived to tell about it wrings her hands. Natural childbirth is wonderful. But NIMBY. Or in my case, NIMFY.
Isn’t anything private anymore? I know, I have just promoted an open discussion about sex to thirty-three young adults and their teachers. I write about sex, I talk about sex, but I do not urge a public display of sex: I don’t go around saying, Do it on the sidewalk! Likewise I support all the talk in the world about birthing—upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber—but dammit, do I have to watch?! I suppose I could move, couldn’t I? Nobody’s forcing me to stay here. Maybe I could hide out in my car till it’s all over.
CHAPTER 18
just one of the boys
IT’S A BOY. Nine pounds ten ounces. No wonder it took so long for him to come out. He is adorable and everyone flutters around him and his mother, cooing and oohing and blowing germs on him. Of course, I don’t hate a baby; besides, this one is too cute to hate; however, he will need a yard, like next week. And there’s just one yard. Hey, kid, this yard is not big enough for both of us; one of us will have to move. Already the house in which he was born looks smaller. Are his parents going to move? I don’t know, but the anxiety of not knowing grows every day. On the other hand maybe I’m paranoid; maybe I have nothing to worry about. But yes, I do: My cottage is not mine, never will be. The winds of change blow hard without ceasing.
They have blown me into my seventy-first birthday, and where is everybody? No one is paying any attention to me. Where’s my party? My son and daughter-in-law gave me a surprise party last year on my seventieth birthday, so they no doubt think they’re off the hook for the rest of my life. And since it’s Sunday, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to pry out all those cards, letters, and small gifts that undoubtedly crowd my post office box. Is anybody going to phone me? Take me out to dinner? Pour me a little champagne? Give me a present? Be my date?
Fifty years ago today, when I turned twenty-one, by god there was a party. It took place at the Pretzel Bell in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan, where, those being the good old days, students were forbidden to drive cars, a rule sensible and enforceable then, now only sensible. As a bona fide sorority girl, complete in my camel hair coat (My father was so stingy he refused to pay for a 100 percent camel hair coat, so this one I am wearing is part wool. God, what if anybody finds out?), I hop onto my bike (I wanted one of those English bikes, a Raleigh, but no, my dad buys American, so here I am on this embarrassing Schwinn, green no less), and off we ride in the dead of winter, our coats open to the icy cold, heads bare, gloves absent, kneesocks in Keds. We are cool, though to those of us living in the sorority houses of 1954, “cool” denoted temperature, not attitude: the movie West Side Story was seven years away, and Marlon Brando wasn’t cool, he was soooo neat! Back then “neat” was the word, and that was what we tried to be.
The Bell was where everybody went to drink beer. It was one great big room with a great big round table in the middle, where the birthday person sat with her chums, who were numerous enough, let us hope, to fill up the table. There was nothing so pitiful as a birthday person sitting there with three people who obviously didn’t want to go there in the first place, just felt sorry for her or him, but really her, because boys seemed to be able to round up hordes at a moment’s notice, probably by bribing them with the promise of free beer, something girls hadn’t yet warmed to.
The birthday honoree got a free pitcher of beer, and whenever someone rang the big bell, the honoree had to chugalug while everyone else sang “so drink chugalug, chugalug, chugalug, so drink chugalug, chugalug.” And while everybody was singing that (in unison, three-part harmony would happen a little later), the birthday person was required to keep drinking, until everybody ceased their singing, and being the good sport I was and a fun gal to boot, I did as expected.
Chugging was not hard for me. By the time I turned twenty-one, the legal age for drinking, I had graduated into the colony of guys and a few girls who were serious drinkers. The Pi Phis, very neat girls, came in the dark of night to tap me for membership in their drinking club, the Blue Blazers, the initiation being to set on fire a shot glass of gin and drink it without burning your eyes, nose, hair, lips, tongue, or chin—or the floor when you got too scared, literally, to hold your liquor. At three o’clock in the morning, ten girls standing around my bed in (100 percent, Dad) camel hair coats, kneesocks in Keds, I did it, thank you very much. This was a great honor, for the Pi Phis had so far restricted membership to their own house, and here I was a Delta Gamma. What that meant was that my reputation had broken out beyond our sorority house on Hill Street and found its way to the Pi Phi house on Forest, and I could not be denied. What probably secured my reputation was my friendship with a couple of dissolute DKEs, Dekes, the fraternity of our nation’s current president, the most disreputable fraternity on campus, always on probation for one thing or another, filled with rich boys intent on humiliating their fathers by behaving badly. The fathers, unimpressed, posted bail, paid their sons’ fines, found abortionists, argued their sons back into school, and returned to making money. Not long after, the boys joined their dads in the firms and eventually turned into them.
Detroit was only forty miles from our university, and surely, there, some ghost of a person was smoking marijuana or even shooting up. But we never thought about Detroit or Cleveland or Pittsburgh or anywhere else; on the campus we knew, drugs were unknown except as stories in newspapers, which we rarely read, or in the books that I did read—not one of them on any college reading list—about “mary jane” and smack and the denizens of the underworld who made money from buying and selling them. Our drug was tobacco: No one knew of its addictiveness and its far-reaching consequences; it was simply something everybody did, even my roommate, the single Phi Beta Kappa in our sorority, who referred to cigarettes as “coffin nails” just before she lit up. Our clothes reeked of tobacco. Camel hair coats became sponges for the smoke from Pall Malls, and our hair was infused with the carcinogens of Chesterfields and Luckies. A very neat thing to do was to light a kitchen match on your teeth, spark your tube that way. I was the only girl who would do that and did. Made me one of the gang, kind of a guy-girl.
But while everybody—absolutely everybody—smoked, drinking—hard drinking—was something else, and not many girls won medals in that category. Nice girls, girls who would marry fraternity boys, watched their ways. Got tiddly, sure, silly enough to let their boyfriends undo their bras, but rarely if ever lost total control. Girls who did got reps overnight. I never lost control and hardly ever got tiddly, just remained a good ole virgin, never offended by the vilest joke and always capable of finding my way home alone. Every weekend offered the opportunity to get drunk, to pass out, to wake up with a hangover and swear never to do it again. If one were a guy, doing all that stuff was desirable and necessary for personal growth. In addition you had to get decent grades, not a 4.0, for god’s sake, but nothing much below a 3.0. B’s you could get on a hangover, A’s required protracted periods of sobriety.
Since I tried to be as much like a guy as a girl could get, I got fairly steady B’s with fairly little studying after my roommate took me in hand and impressed on me the importance of memorization. Once I learned to memorize huge chunks of text and reams of lecture notes, all of which I deposited into the blue boo
k, even though I forgot every single item of information I had “learned” the minute the final exam was over, a 3.0 was mine. My parents were relieved and left the socialization of their eldest daughter up to the sorority, sensing, I suspect, that I was lagging behind my peers in that regard, but not knowing what to do about it. I didn’t know what to do about it either, and I was terrified of doing what some of my sorority sisters were doing: climbing out of the window at night, kissing right under the porch light, getting pinned, staying out after hours, trying on the scents and shades of womanhood. So I did the only thing I knew how to do; I did what I had done when I was fifteen: I hung out with boys who would treat me, if not exactly as one of them, then like a buddy, not a date. I was happy to drink beer with Ted and Barry whenever they couldn’t find a girl who would go all the way in the arboretum. And I was popular, sort of, though not exactly in the way my parents had imagined. I could hold my liquor and had a ringing laugh. I had friends who were boys but no boyfriend. The distinction made all the difference.
My four years of drinking at Michigan prepared me well for graduate school in 1959 at the University of California at Berkeley, where I lived in a one-room cottage in a courtyard. On the other side Frank and Bob and Bruce and Tom, PhD candidates in one science or another, lived and studied; at least, they must have studied, because they all got their degrees and went off to positions at ritzy universities. As graduate students in the sciences much of their studying and their TA-ing went on in the labs of the university, where there lived an apparently inexhaustible supply of grain alcohol. At Michigan we had injected oranges with vodka or gin and sucked them throughout the football games on those cold autumn Saturdays. At Berkeley we drank 90 proof lab alcohol cut with ice. Every so often, when the guys decided to throw a party and invite girls who might come across, they injected watermelons with the stuff, cut it up, and made it look, in its big round bowl, like punch with pretty little bites of pink fruit in it. The girls took to it like water and, not long after, ended up in the bathroom or, if they had a strong stomach and a weak brain, in a bed not their own. By this time I had a boyfriend who ingested the stuff as if it were water, and who much of the time ended up in my bed ranting incoherently, throwing up in my shoes, and eventually rendering himself comatose until the following noon. Sweetly apologetic then, he did it all over the next night. If I had stayed to get a PhD, I would have died early. As it happened, my boyfriend did: He died early, though not of drink but by his own hand.