Body Leaping Backward

by Maureen Stanton

  Shoplifting made me nervous, which sometimes manifested as uncontrollable silent laughing. Once at a somewhat upscale store called Foxmoor Casuals, I watched my friend Paula Fournier shove an entire suede suit—a skirt and matching jacket—under her snorkel coat, and it seemed so preposterously bold that we could not stop laughing, though no noise came out of our mouths. I laughed so hard I had to cross my legs so I wouldn’t pee my pants, bent over in the middle of Foxmoor Casuals, tears streaming down my face as I stuffed a blouse down the front of my coat, feeling slightly dizzy and removed, as if I were in a slow-motion film looking down upon myself, or underwater.

  On the first day of school at West Junior High, my old friends from sixth grade didn’t save a place for me at lunch, so I sat alone until Grace Giordano and Marlene Hample, who were on the town drill team with my sister Sue, sat with me, and thereafter they became my friends. That’s how it seemed to work when I was a kid—sudden tectonic changes, after which you were on the other side of a divide. Martha Wilkins, my former best friend, said the next day that she “hated my guts,” my stomach and intestines and liver and kidneys, as if I were the Visible Woman, that anatomy kit Sally had, a foot-tall clear polymer shell in the shape of a woman that you filled with red and yellow die-cast plastic organs. Once assembled, you could see her guts, her tiny pink heart.

  Marlene Hample had gone to the Barbizon School of Modeling, which advertised frequently on the UHF stations that carried reruns of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, and in magazines. “Be a Model. (or . . . just look like one),” read the ad, with a clip-out form to send for information. All the girls fantasized about going to Barbizon, but it was expensive and models were tall, so that excluded everyone but Marlene. We thought Barbizon screened applicants based on beauty rather than accepting anyone who could pay.

  Marlene had a crush on Gordon McGee, a Longview Farm boy. Longview Farm, or “the Farm,” as we called it, was a branch of the New England Home for Little Wanderers, a residential program for boys with emotional, learning, and/or behavioral disabilities. The Farm was set on 166 acres less than two miles from Norfolk and Walpole Prisons. The geographic proximity of Walpole Prison, Norfolk Prison, and the Farm created a sort of triangle of troubled men and boys—it implied a relationship: starting at the Farm as a delinquent, a boy might wind up as an adult in medium-security Norfolk, continue his life of crime, and graduate to Walpole, the Farm like a training ground, a minor league team, where one apprenticed for a life of crime.

  Or not. Sometimes the sequence was reversed; inmates were moved from Walpole to Norfolk after a period of good behavior and then released into society. The Farm’s mission, at least, was rehabilitation, education. Every year boys from the Farm were enrolled in Walpole schools. At West Junior High, we could tell the Farm boys: they were tougher, citified, cool. They had histories of trouble, broken families, infractions with the law. They had pencil-thin mustaches and shadows of sideburns, were swarthy and long-haired. They were like young outlaws, and we girls liked them best.

  One day at lunch Marlene said she was going to seduce Gordon McGee that weekend. I confessed that I didn’t know what seduce meant. Marlene and Grace looked at me incredulously, these girls who’d recently taught me how to smoke cigarettes. To seduce, Grace Giordano said, was to make a boy like you. I thought this required some kind of magic power, something Marlene had since she’d gone to the Barbizon School of Modeling. Grace and Marlene talked about sixty-nine as a verb. As explanation, Grace drew a picture on a napkin.

  In seventh, eighth, and ninth grades I would be schooled by books I lifted from my mother’s nightstand—The Happy Hooker, by Xaviera Hollander (the name Xaviera itself seemed X-rated, sexy), and Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann. I skimmed Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, looking for the juicy parts (declared “non-obscene” in 1964 by the U.S. Supreme Court), and Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, with its handy Q&A format. Most helpful was The Sensuous Woman (#3 on the New York Times bestseller list), which contained such risqué material that its author was known only as “J.” There in black and white were instructions for sex, as if you were making a cake, or learning yoga as my mother had in our living room, listening to Jack LaLanne on a 33 rpm, following step-by-step instructions. I tried to grasp the techniques for fellatio: the butterfly flick, the Hoover, the silken swirl, a name that brought to mind my favorite dessert, Whip ’n Chill, a box-mix chocolate mousse that was fluffy and smooth.

  One Friday night at a junior high dance I sat next to Ricky Strickland on the wooden floor of Blackburn Hall, a small function hall behind the police station downtown. My back pressed to the wall, his arm awkwardly around my shoulder, a local band hammering “Johnny B. Goode” or “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” I waited for him to work up the nerve to kiss me. Ricky Strickland had shoulder-length ash-blond hair, brown eyes, and a mischievous smile. He and Vinnie Fontana, who had lopsided Brillo-pad hair and a crooked nose, zoomed through the school corridors as if they were on motorcycles, their hands torquing the invisible throttles, spraying saliva as they brrrm-brrrmed, race-walking down the halls. Ricky, this thirteen-year-old boy who occupied the pages of my diary for a couple of months, who was shy about kissing, who my diary notes would ask me out again and again after I broke up with him, would land in Walpole Prison before he turned thirty, for rape, or, in legal terms, “indecent assault and battery on a person aged fourteen or older.”

  On another Friday night at Blackburn Hall I left the dance early with Al Malone, and with three other couples we lay inside the dugout of a nearby ball field, lined up like sardines. It was strangely quiet, our desire enormous and silent. Al’s kisses tasted like the Juicy Fruit gum he snapped, but everything about him was annoying. Al gave me a gold band, though we’d only been going out for nine days. I didn’t like the band, which was ugly and matronly and obviously stolen from either a department store or his grandmother’s jewelry box. I felt stupid wearing the wedding-band-like ring, so I broke up with him. He wrote me a note saying that he was going to bury the ring in his backyard, a symbol of grief and loss, but two weeks later I saw the same ring on the finger of Grace Giordano, shiny and polished. It was a happy ending, though, because Grace liked Al Malone and she liked the ring and they stayed together for a long time—many weeks.

  In my diary I’d written that the ring was “gold and beautiful,” even though I hated that horrid ugly ring. But all the girls made such a fuss, and everyone seemed in awe of Al’s gesture, and he, I suspected, felt magnanimous in his big display of affection, so I went along, pretended I liked the ring, tried to convince myself by writing it in the diary. This single lie writ small was a step down a treacherous path of fitting in, being popular, the cost of which was losing something I didn’t realize I possessed: myself.

  My mother prepared for our teenhood architecturally. She built a room, or at least finished one, in the cellar, a room of our own, a room to contain us, a door with a lock for privacy, to seal ourselves inside, like house arrest. At night, reading instructions from a library book, she cut two-by-fours with a handsaw and framed in walls. She stuffed pink fiberglass insulation between the studs, then nailed sheets of plywood to the frame. Sometimes I helped by holding the wood steady while she sawed, or by hammering finish nails into the plywood. She installed a drop ceiling, a grid of lightweight pressed-paper squares that interlocked, one or another of us handing panels to her as she stood on a ladder. At Building 19 she bought a roll of burnt-orange indoor-outdoor carpet and laid this directly over the cement floor, and thus we christened the Orange Room. My mother obtained a black couch—probably from Building 19 again—and a hanging lamp with ponytailed go-go girls painted on the frosted glass shade. We bought black-light posters, a lava lamp, a beanbag chair. One year for Christmas the four older girls shared a present—a stereo system.

  The Orange Room was like a cave—it had no windows, so you could wake up at 3 p.m. and feel like it was early morning, or any time
in the timeless room. But the Orange Room hastened time. When I was ten, my parents forbade me to play their Hair soundtrack album, because of the song called “Sodomy”: Sodomy / fellatio / cunnilingus / pederasty / Father, why do these words sound so nasty? / Masturbation / Can be fun / Join the holy orgy / Kama Sutra / Everyone. They’d seen Hair in Boston in spite of, or perhaps because of, protests over its “lewd and lascivious” content. The debut performance of Hair at the Wilbur Theater was shut down, but eventually the show reopened after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of free expression. My parents brought home the playbill and the album, but like the court they censored the music. Not long after, in the Orange Room, I listened to Sally’s Ten Years After album, the song “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,” with its screeching refrain, I want to ball you.

  In the Orange Room with Glen Arpin, my boyfriend in ninth grade, I practiced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which I’d learned in a junior lifesaving class, and he showed me wrestling moves, takedowns that left me pinned. We progressed from kissing to second base—his hands under my shirt and then my bra—but everything got dicey at third base, the line between acceptable petting and slut territory. Baseball was All-American, as was the sporting event of trying to score with girls—first, second, third base, home run. The body of the girl was the field on which the boy played to win. But how did the girl win? By stopping play? By scoring? We wanted to play, but the rules were unclear, or stacked against us. We had no bat; we had no balls.

  In 1971, when I was in sixth grade, Nixon declared drug abuse to be public enemy number one. At Fisher Elementary, I’d signed a pledge to be mailed to me in the future—a vow never to smoke cigarettes, drink, or take drugs. I’d heard about drugs vaguely from songs, like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” a code for LSD, and Grace Slick promising that one pill makes you smaller / and one pill makes you tall, Grace Slick singing about the call, calling Alice, like Circe calling us from the past, the 1960s, into the future. The next year, 1972, Nixon escalated his “total war” on drugs and I smoked my first cigarette, drank alcohol, smoked marijuana in a little pipe. The following year, 1973, Nixon declared an “all-out, global war on the drug menace” and formed a superagency, the DEA. Now in eighth grade, I smoked dope regularly and drank nearly every weekend.

  One weekend night six girls slept over at Alison Preston’s house, our sleeping bags spread on the floor in the partly finished basement rec room, staying up past midnight choreographing dance moves to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Chicago,” harmonizing as we stepped and turned, kicked and pivoted, singing about changing the world, rearranging it, about rebellion, a harbinger of the path that Alison and I, among these girls, would soon take—rules and regulations, who needs them?

  One day a couple of months later in that basement, at the built-in wet bar, Alison poured two cups of grape soda and then added whiskey, brazenly, as if toying with the possibility of getting caught, since her father was just three feet away at his desk, working at home that day, his back to us. We drank our plastic cups of booze as we walked back to West Junior High to watch a game after school, the drink hitting me on the mile-long walk. I felt silly and giddy. I said whatever came to my mind, and Alison and I laughed at everything. I felt wild and free, and in that spot in the woods off school property where kids smoked, I swung around the skinny supple trunk of a birch tree. I was not nervous or self-conscious. I was funny, a better, improved me.

  Alison Preston was beautiful in a hard way, her alabaster skin poreless, her jet-black hair falling silkily in her face when she bent her head. Her eyes were ice blue, with short dark eyelashes that looked like liner. She couldn’t wear watches, she told us. They stopped ticking when strapped to her wrist, as if she had a certain kind of energy unlike the ordinary rest of us, an electric force field radiating from within her, a member of a rare subset of humans, like geniuses, schizophrenics, lefties. Alison was the girl everyone turned to heliotropically when she entered a room. Her hourglass figure drew boys’ attention, men’s, always, everywhere. Mr. Braun, the science teacher, chose Alison to fetch something from the supply room, then followed her in there and tried to “feel her up,” she told us. Was this true? Why else did we consider him a creepy perv? What else could he have done to inspire Alison’s exquisite revenge? When Mr. Braun left the room, Alison spat in the Mason jar of distilled water on his desk, and we waited in gleeful horror for him to sip.

  Alison was charismatic; it was hard to say no to her. I wrote in my diary, “Alison wants those guys to sleep over Saturday night.” When I read this later, at first I thought Alison wanted “those guys” to sleep over at her house, but then I saw that Alison had wanted everyone to sleep over at my house. “I hope they’re not so drunk that they puke because Mom will probably be home. I hope she goes out.” Filled with anxiety, against my own judgment, I acquiesced to Alison’s suggestion.

  Paula Fournier lived a few blocks from me, and so in junior high we walked to school together. Paula was tall and big-boned, with a mane of auburn hair and light-brown eyes to match, more handsome than pretty, the dimple in her chin a reply to her prominent widow’s peak. She was quiet, but quick to laugh and game for anything. One day, with Loretta Petty, we shot beers on the way to school. To “shoot” a beer, you punched a hole in the base of the can with an opener and affixed your mouth to this hole. Then you popped the tab on the top and the beer geysered down your throat. The first time I did this—drank a beer in under ten seconds at 7:30 in the morning—I felt a roiling in my empty, breakfastless stomach. Within seconds the beer projected out of my mouth, just as foamy and effervescent as it had been going down. My sensible body rejected the beer. My nonsensible mind paid no attention and tried again.

  Somehow we discovered Tango, a premixed screwdriver, vodka and an uncarbonated orange drink like Tang, the beverage of astronauts. Tango became the drink of choice on weekends, when a mob of kids hung around the junior high. Sometimes Paula’s brother, Duane, who was five years older, bought for us, or else we stood behind the liquor store and asked a likely-looking stranger, an older boy or man usually. It was amazing how many people were willing to buy alcohol for fourteen-year-olds. Our success rate was 100 percent.

  Usually I was in control when we partied, not sloppy like Tina Baronski, who lost a shoe and cried all night searching for it, or Grace Giordano, who peed all over her pants. But one weekend only two of us instead of the usual three girls split a quart of Tango. I took long gulps of the bottle, greedily it seems, and soon I was drunker than I’d ever been. The world around me swirled and there was only sensation—the astringent orange taste in my mouth, the black starry sky, the rich smell of decaying leaves that I fell onto with Glen Arpin, who was kissing me. I felt cool air float over my stomach as he lifted my shirt, his warm hands on my skin, the damp cold ground beneath me, his crotch pressed against my pelvis, his heavy legs pinning me, his hot breath and soft, soft lips.

  Then he told me to be quiet—I wasn’t aware I was making noise. We lay still, bright lights shining on us, headlights of a police car. The police usually peeled into West Junior High at least once on weekend nights, and we ran from them as if it were a game, thrilling and breathtaking like Flashlight Tag, only this time the cops were “it.” The cops never caught us. We knew the woods and we were young and fast. But that night I was too drunk to run. Glen helped me up and we stood in front of the cruiser, squinting into headlights. The cop said, “What would your parents think if they saw you now?” I was a wiseass, a smart aleck, a back-talker. Fresh. “They don’t care,” I said. It felt like the truth.

  Even before my father moved out, there was always the chance of being forgotten, like in sixth grade, when I’d stay late for basketball or softball practice and afterward stand outside the front doors of Fisher School alone, my teammates picked up already, the sky dimming as the janitor passed back and forth with his broad dry mop, glancing at me still there, the chains clanging as he looped them through the door handles, and then my m
other would screech into the circular drive. Always after I opened the car door to her apologies I burst into tears. I hated being forgotten, but now I used it to my advantage.

  Glen promised the cops he’d take me straight home. He said I didn’t live too far. Did Glen walk me all the way home? I lived only a mile away, a fifteen-minute walk through the woods. How did I get home? I don’t remember, but my diary does.

  April 11, 1974—Went drinking. We were on our asses. The pigs came up and talked to me and Glen. When I got over Nora’s house (everyone slept over there) those guys had to undress me and put me in my pajamas because I was dead asleep. Thank god we didn’t get caught.

  I didn’t remember much from that night, but Glen did, and he told his friends that he made it to third base with me, that I was wild, moaning with pleasure, unlike his previous girlfriend, Suzanne, who just lay there “like a cold fish,” he reported. He told his chums, who told their girlfriends, who told everyone else, it seemed. On Monday at school, I was the subject of rumors. I was the loose one. I was the slut. I denied the rumors, but several people had seen me walk out of the woods with my belt undone. “I forgot to buckle my belt after I peed,” I told Loretta Petty, who I knew would disseminate this alternative narrative, this spin. Walking home from school, Loretta told me what Glen had told everyone I’d said: “Fuck me.” Glen said he could have, but he’d restrained himself. He was good and prudent; I was bad and easy.

  When I heard those words I had a shock of memory like lightning illuminating a dark path, the scene flash-lit, and I knew suddenly that I’d said them. I denied it, horrified that my libido had been unbelted, exposed to the world. I was mortified to be confronted with this outsized desire, embarrassed, but beneath the surface I was secretly glad that I was not a cold fish who just lay there. I was confused; I was not a slut, I was a slut. Glen was not a slut. There was no word to characterize his actions. Sluthood was a sorority to which no respectable girl wanted to belong, though every girl was measured by this calculus.