The V-Word

by Amber J. Keyser

  In the New England winter, the neighbors’ garage becomes a movie house where I run the projector on “old movie night.” The black-and-white actors walk on a distant screen, film clattering in the sprockets. At intermission I try to dodge the old men who circle the hors d’oeuvre table and try to touch my butt or brush against my braless breasts. When I mention the way the men act to my sisters, they say, “Oh, that’s Mr. So-and-So,” as if how long he’s been misbehaving excuses him, as if I’m the one with the problem for saying something out loud.

  In the left hand, hold silence, greasy and clotted. Let the middle section hang free (for now).

  A girl at school changes the words to a camp song:

  My Daddy lies over the ocean,

  My Daddy lies over the sea,

  My Daddy lies over my Mommy,

  And that’s what became of me.

  When I get home that day, I chase my mother who is retreating into her office and sing it for her because my pubescent mind thinks the song clever. In the dim autumn light, her face drains like the painting called The Scream, and she turns around and walks away.

  Her office door closes.

  Rumor has it that an eighth-grade girl had an abortion. Other girls I know are sneaking out of their homes at night to meet boys. The mysteries of body and boy are beyond me. When I start my period at age eleven, my mother hands me a Kotex pamphlet about menstruation and never brings the topic up again. No one takes the time to have The Talk with me. There is no sex ed. No one in biology explains reproductive organs.

  In biology class, when the teacher asks us to write what we feel about sex, he says, “Be honest.” When I write, “The topic of sex embarrasses me,” the teacher reads out loud what I’ve written, points me out, cannot contain his laugh. My hippie sister with long blond braids comes home from college and tells me to use tampons because they will help with sex. The blush on my face hides the gap in understanding.

  Cross the left section over the middle section.

  That middle section of the braid is my body.

  At my all-girls boarding school I discover Want. Taller than most girls, more developed than many, with no men prowling to rub themselves on me, I grow into my body a little.

  Before I am sixteen years old, I go home from boarding school for a weekend to help an old friend and his wife who have a new baby. During the night, this man stumbles into the room where I sleep, and he is drunk, and he kisses me, pouring his beer-sour breath into me, putting his big fingers into me, too. When his hand tries to open my legs wider, I push him away, and he moves away. When he leaves, I don’t sleep. The irony keeps me awake—sweet sixteen and never been kissed. When the saying leaves my head, I wonder about men and fingers and hymens. I don’t know if I’m a virgin anymore.

  During the rest of high school, the middle section of the braid—my body—lifts to the top. I hug friends too long. I play varsity sports. One night two friends and I look for mischief and find the door unlocked to the old gym, and the girls and I lie on a stack of gymnastics mats and roll into each other and onto each other and never say a word.

  A week before college starts, my mother drops me off to see the town pediatrician who no longer touches my breasts because a nurse is required to be in the room when I undress. He gives a speech about boys in college and how they drink and how, if they jump on top of me, I should “sit back and enjoy the ride.” My mother and I do not speak when she picks me up from the doctor’s office.

  Between freshman and sophomore year of college, I ride a train to Arizona to become a counselor at a horse camp. At eighteen years old I’ve never been to a camp, been a counselor, or seen the desert. Horses scare me. The first night the assistant director, whose camp name is Lizard, stands up to welcome everyone, and I think, “That is the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen.” My body cringes.

  By the third night in the Arizona mountains, I am freezing because I assumed Arizona would be hot and only brought shorts and T-shirts. Lizard and I meet late at night outdoors, which is very dark and dangerous. (New England doesn’t have mountain lions, bears, scorpions, tarantulas. Arizona does.) For the first time in my life, my body tops my mind. The cringe of a few days ago turns to jitters in Lizard’s presence, her overt desire, her lean twenty-four-year-old body.

  Lizard puts her arm around me, and when her skin meets my skin, I feel the earth open up and welcome me as part of all creation. I connect with stars and planets and space. When she kisses me, I’m equally sure that I will grow warts, turn green, and burn in hell.

  That weekend she takes me to a hotel in town.

  Continue braiding the three strands.

  When we drive up to the hotel to get a room, Lizard tells me to duck in my seat so the manager can’t see me. Two young women renting a room is suspect. Homosexuality in Arizona at the time is a crime. Two girls who are one planet, all body and Want, are in danger. She gets the room. We drive around back, and Lizard goes in without me.

  Sneaking is part of the strand that was once in my left hand—silence.

  When I go to the door and open it, smoke and sour carpet and Lysol hit me. Lizard’s hands pull me in, and her hands and my hands fill with shirts and zippers and skin. My lips are full of lips and fingers and the sinew of her neck. The curtains are closed, and we draw the grimy cover off one bed and fall into it. We have no clothes. I have never felt the long, lean body of someone else on my long, lean body, skin-to-skin, hands all over. When her hand reaches into me, her fingers find spots I didn’t know I had—places of silence and rumor and old-movie innuendo, the place my sister said tampons should go.

  I’m sure I will go supernova.

  We don’t sleep. Her fingers are in me. My fingers are in her. My tongue tastes her salt. Her tongue tastes my salt. At times I’m not sure which breast is hers and which is mine, and I don’t know what is happening. I have no frame of reference from book, movie, or rumor. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are black-and-white dancers, and this dance is color and grit and girl.

  In the morning the edges of the smelly curtains let light in, and the wall-size mirror facing the bed shows bare legs and shoulders and messed-up hair. The room is full of smoke and sour carpet and Lysol and sex. The bathroom is across the room and to get there means crossing in front of the mirror and that means seeing my body so I crawl under the mirror to avoid it. My body is wrong.

  In the bathroom I shut the door, and I sit on the toilet, and I think, “What is happening?” I have no answer. When I walk out of the bathroom, Lizard has the light on, and I ask her to turn it off. In the dark, our bodies are a little more right than wrong, and somehow skin touching skin soothes the friction of the sin I believe I’m committing. We spend the day in bed. By the time we return to camp that evening, I can barely walk I am so sore.

  By the end of the summer, the camp counselors and the camp administration have split over the issue of counselors loving counselors. I am an outsider, an East Coast girl, and I am blamed for corrupting the camp. Lizard drives me from Arizona to Connecticut and drops me off.

  Tie the braid tight.

  Silence braids into shame and body.

  It takes years to realize that I lost my virginity. All those long winters of growing up, with movie reels turning and the films clicking through the projector, I learned what virginity was and wasn’t in black-and-white. I thought losing virginity required a penis and penetration and blood and the back seat of a Chevy, so I don’t connect fingers and tongues and fists and clitoris and vagina to a summer of dark hotel rooms and secret meetings and sex between girls.

  It takes years to recognize the loss and the gain, the rite of passage, the murky way my body expressed Want. It takes many more years before I untie that braid and finally stand in front of a mirror to see my long, lean body, naked.

  Maybe you’re the romantic type—

  Sex is going to be magical, wild, fireworks! The two of us will be together forever.

  Maybe you’re more cynical—

 
It’s going to hurt. This is the only way to keep my guy interested. Let’s just get it over with.

  Or maybe you’re practical—

  This sex thing is no big deal. It couldn’t be harder than driving a car. I’ve got this.

  Whatever your attitude, whether you’re focused on having fun or deepening a relationship, what matters most is sexual agency. You get to decide what happens. It’s up to you when you have sex and why you have sex. Every kiss, every touch, every time.

  Justina thought about what she wanted. She laid down her ground rules. And when opportunity presented itself, she got down to business.

  15

  Me, Some Random Guy, and the Army of Darkness

  Justina Ireland

  This is the story of the first time I had sex in all of its awkward, poorly planned glory. But before I tell you about it I should probably tell you this: I never thought my first time would be special.

  Actually, that’s not entirely true. When I was younger, too young to really get the sexy scenes in R-rated movies but too old for Disney princesses, I did believe my first times would be special: first date, first kiss, first whatever came next. Can you blame me? When you think there are faraway lands filled with talking animals, it’s easy to believe that some special guy will rescue you from your craptastic life.

  As I got older, reality chipped away at the fantasy. My first kiss was from a guy that had just smoked his weight in marijuana and tasted like Doritos and cotton mouth. My first date was walking around the mall with a guy who was just using me to get close to my friend, since everyone knew she was a sure thing. And even though I hadn’t had sex, I’d heard about plenty of terrible, awful, heartbreaking first times.

  All of my friends seemed to be having sex and their secondhand accounts didn’t exactly make me want to declare myself open for business, so to speak. If their story wasn’t about someone walking in, then it was about how much it hurt, felt weird, or just generally sucked, especially when they found out they’d gotten the gift that keeps on giving (herpes!). Sex was generally terrifying, first-time sex even more so.

  And the girls who did have a wonderful first time weren’t convincing me to get naked with some guy, either. Their stories reeked of self-delusion. Experience had taught me that teenage boys did not have the sensitivity and consideration I’d come to expect from a life spent reading romance novels. No boy was going to suddenly turn into Prince Charming once his pants were down, no matter what some girls would tell you.

  So when it came to sex I was pretty cynical about the whole thing. Expectations of rose petals and soft music changed to a bed and a condom. That’s right. My ground rules for my sexual debut were:

  Rule #1: It had to happen in a bed. No cars, no bathrooms, no couches. I wanted a bedroom and a locked door, dammit. No one’s little brother was going to walk in while I was sprawled on a bed with my hooty-hoo bared to the world.

  Rule #2: I was not getting knocked up, and chlamydia just sounded gross, so that meant there had to be protection. I wasn’t going to go on birth control pills because they were expensive, and besides, the thought of oozing sores (oozing sores!) on my muffin was mentally paralyzing. That meant the guy had to have a condom. If I was going to invite someone into my lady business, the least they could do was wrap it up. No exceptions. I was not going to end up a statistic.

  And that was it. It had to be clean and private. I didn’t think that was too much to ask.

  But . . . it was. My ground rules were a little too ambitious, it seemed. And it’s really hard to expect too much after your best friend tells you about losing her virginity in the bathroom of a fast-food restaurant.

  Even if my standards were low they were still standards. I was putting myself first, in a way. However, I wasn’t holding out for having my world rocked or really much fun at all. I’d explored my hidden valley often enough that I knew what felt good, and none of the fumbly-handed interactions I’d had with boys came close. If I wasn’t going to end up with an orgasm I definitely wasn’t going to end up someone’s mommy or a viral incubator. Boys who wanted in my pants had to meet my standards. Otherwise I was out.

  I made it through high school and into the United States Army a card-carrying member of the V club. It wasn’t something I really thought much about, to be honest. I mean, I thought about sex, but any sexy daydreams were quickly ruined by the thought of the guys that usually liked me: broke, shiftless, selfish. These guys didn’t work and called every girl they knew a bitch or a slut. There were some real peaches playing in my league and I’d found every single one of them.

  Daydreams were only safe if I thought about having sex with someone I didn’t know and would never meet, like movie stars. I can’t tell you how many times I surrendered to passion in Leonardo DiCaprio’s capable arms. Or, you know, Kate Winslet’s. My fantasies weren’t picky. But that just made the reality of sex seem even further away. It was a catch-22: I didn’t have sex because I couldn’t find a decent guy, but I didn’t find a decent guy because I wasn’t really all that concerned about having sex.

  But all of that was before I went to language school at the Defense Language Institute, DLI for short, in beautiful Monterey, California.

  Monterey was the first place where I was really on my own. No curfew, no mom asking prying questions, no anyone. There were no rules at DLI save the ones the Army enforced, and those were flexible enough that I was finally able to feel alive. If I wanted to eat my weight in chocolate cake (and I did, who wouldn’t?) then I could. I could stay up all night watching bad television and roll out to class early the next morning, bleary-eyed and rumpled. There was no one to influence my choices, and no one to warn me about bad decisions. The only person responsible for me was me, and I was more intent on having fun than using good judgment.

  It was a great time to have some ill-advised nooky.

  Although sex was not my first thought when I arrived in Monterey it quickly became a priority. In a place where random hookups were the norm, being a virgin was a hassle. It was the social equivalent of having a nine o’clock curfew. People I was serving with were either college graduates or had lived on their own before joining the military. They’d had sex. Lots of sex. Cringe-worthy and swoon-worthy and just plain worthy sex. They had funny stories about sex gone wrong and horror stories of why you never want to have sex in the Atlantic Ocean at night (jellyfish!). I laughed at these stories and I nodded when appropriate but I never shared any of my own escapades.

  Um, because I didn’t have any.

  I was the youngest in my platoon and underage, so I was already excluded from the barhopping that comprised most social outings. I didn’t have a college degree and I had no stories about “the one that got away” to wistfully recall.

  But being a virgin?

  That marked me as a kid like nothing else.

  When sex talk came up and it was revealed, usually by someone else, that I’d never had sex, that’s when the head pats began. I was an adorable little kitten to be sheltered and protected. Being a virgin became an indicator of just how much I hadn’t lived, that I was completely inexperienced.

  And it was annoying as fuck.

  So I set out to get laid because somehow I figured that was going to fix the Oh, aren’t you just adorable? attitude people took toward me. I could be one of those girls or I could be a child, and being one of those girls was preferable. But I was going to be one of those girls in a room with a locked door, a bed, and protection. Those were still nonnegotiable.

  I learned quickly that guys are not necessarily eager to do it with everyone’s favorite little sister, which is what I’d become. No one wanted to deflower me because they liked me too much. They respected me too much.

  Mostly they were terrified of my expectations.

  “Virgins are a hassle,” one male friend told me. “They want flowers and special moments, and none of the other girls are expecting that kind of thing. They already know the deal. No one has to worry about them falling i
n love after hooking up, you know?”

  But I didn’t know. Because no one would have sex with me!

  I had a couple of close calls, but there was always something to ruin it (roommates walking in, lack of a condom). After nearly a year I’d given up on ever doing it. Life seemed determined to keep me celibate forever.

  I started to formulate these insane plans for how I was going to get laid. They were just as sad as they were impossible. I imagined approaching a male prostitute, assuming I could find one, and shoving a handful of dollars at him. Once I told him what I wanted he’d say, “Wait, you’re a virgin? Oh sweetie, no. Just . . . no.” Then he’d pat me on the shoulder, the kind of awkward tap you give someone when they’ve just had an elderly relative die, before he walked away.

  Even in my imagination I was trapped in virginhood.

  So, after nearly a year of trying to find a coconspirator, I stopped looking for one. And I focused on having fun. Meaning I started smoking and drinking heavily because that is how you spell fun when you’re nineteen and not having sex.

  And being deliriously, gloriously drunk is how I finally got laid.

  I was at a house party where I was supposed to hook up with some guy who liked me but that I didn’t know that well. Instead he decided to go after someone blonder and cuter, and I was a little crushed. Mostly because he’d been described as a sure thing, and even though I wasn’t looking, I still wanted to chuck my V card out the window.

  Rejection stinks, especially when you think you’re going to get some sex and it doesn’t happen. So once the sure thing started making out with the blond girl, I headed outside to babysit the keg.

  If you’re socially awkward and don’t know anyone and are slightly embarrassed because a boy you sort of like is making out with a girl you don’t know in the living room while everyone watches, the keg is the absolute best place to be. First, there’s beer. Unlimited beer. Second, it’s the social hub of any party. Everyone comes to visit the keg. Everyone. Even the people who prefer to pickle their liver with bottom shelf vodka that could double as paint remover.