An Intimate Life (9 page)

On my first day back, I went up to a second-story science classroom to retake a lab. As I approached the door, a few lanky members of the basketball team stood chatting in the hall. At fourteen, I was self-conscious and shy. I would have never dared to talk to them. I might have been a teenage raconteur with my girlfriends, but around boys I became timid.

My outgoing personality may have masked it, but I harbored deep insecurities about my appearance. I didn’t think I was pretty enough and I had plenty of complaints about my body, starting with breasts that I thought were too floppy. I wanted the ones that stuck out like rosebuds. When I compared myself to some of the prettier girls in school or the movie stars of the time, I came out painfully short. Around these high school jocks I instantly felt hyperconscious of my physical flaws.

One of the boys milling around the hall was a good-looking guy with short blond hair and blue-grey eyes. I walked past them and knocked on the door to the classroom, but no one answered. I waited a few seconds and knocked again. Nothing. Just then the cute guy walked over and knocked on the wall and, almost instantly, the teacher came to the door and let me in. “See?” he said, and flashed a bright smile. “Thanks,” I said, wondering who the hunk with the magic knock was.

In those days dances were a popular social event. In the last week of October I attended the Freshman Frolic, which was held every fall in the gym at Salem High School. When I walked in Ritchie Valens’s “Come on, Let’s Go” was on the jukebox and a group of my friends were standing on the rim of the dance floor, sipping Cokes, laughing, and bopping to the music. Becky had on a teal strapless taffeta dress with a wide skirt and white high heels. Marcie wore an emerald green pencil skirt and a white collared shirt with a sweetheart neckline. I wore a red dress with a fitted bodice and a pleated skirt. In retrospect I think I probably looked pretty good, but at the time all I could feel was self-conscious about not being pretty enough, not sophisticated enough—not anything enough, except maybe for fat. I was definitely fat enough. Never mind that I was a normal weight; like many young women, I still considered myself too fat. I chatted for a few minutes and then I saw him. Actually, I think I saw her first. Judy Tolton walked by hand in hand with the guy from the hallway outside of science class. She had a chain around her neck with a ring dangling from it. “Hi Judy, hi Bill,” Becky said when she saw them. So, now I knew his name. Of course, I also knew that he was going steady with the snootiest girl in town, and I guess I could see why. Judy Tolton, who had been in Miss Duffy’s Dancing School with me for years but barely spoke a word to me, was gorgeous. She had lustrous beige-blonde hair that hung down to the middle of her back and pouty lips. She also had a slim waist and long legs. But what a snob! My heart sank. I slunk away to get a Coke. Since seeing Bill that day outside of my science classroom I had lost myself in fantasies that we would become a couple and that he would fall madly, hopelessly in love with me. It made me feel giddy with excitement. Now I just felt like a fool. I was only thankful that I had kept my longings secret. He was Judy Tolton’s boyfriend. Judy Tolton, the girl everyone wanted to look like.

A few weeks later, when I had pretty much dismissed my fantasies of being Bill’s dream girl, my friend Angela told me about Teen Town. Teen Town sprouted up every Saturday night at the Salem YMCA. You could dance, play pool or ping-pong, or just hang out. “It’s so much fun. You’ve got to go,” Angela said. When Saturday night finally arrived I put on a jersey dress, a bolero jacket, and pair of dressy suede flats. My stomach fluttered with nerves. The kids who went to Teen Town came from both the public and Catholic high schools and from all grades. At the time, mingling with seventeen-year-old seniors seemed pretty special. After all, they were within inches of adulthood and I was just out of grammar school. I checked myself for probably the tenth time in the mirror, got into my dad’s car, and within a few minutes we were at Teen Town.

I scanned the room for my friends, and when I didn’t see them I bought a Coke and sat down at one of the empty tables. Did anyone even notice me? What if none of my friends showed and I spent the night alone sipping Cokes. I was imagining just what a pathetic sight I would be when I heard someone say, “Wanna dance?” I looked up and there was Bill. I felt my stomach tighten. I took a deep breath, tried to settle down, and said “sure.” We headed to the dance floor and Bill gently took my hand in his. It was then that he noticed I was shaking and asked if I wanted to wear his jacket. I almost said yes so he would believe that I was shivering from cold, instead of trembling with nerves. He asked me my name and then asked how old I was. I wished he hadn’t because I wanted him to think that I was older than I was. I confessed to being fourteen and asked him how old he was. “Seventeen,” he said. We started dancing and I felt myself loosening up a bit. Finally, I felt composed enough to ask him about Judy. “Aren’t you and Judy going steady? Why isn’t she here?”

“Oh, we broke up.”

Suddenly I felt like my whole body was smiling. “Oh . . . really,” I said, trying to play it cool. Bill and I danced all of the slow dances together that evening. When it was over he asked if he could drive me home, but my father had already made arrangements to pick me up. “Well, let me meet him” was his response. Whoa! This guy was really confident. He was confident and sweet, a great combination. I introduced Bill to my father, and, to my delight, my dad said Bill could drive me home from Teen Town the following week.

I couldn’t wait to see Bill again. As I got to know him, I realized how truly nice he was and how much he had going for him. He was a star athlete. He played varsity basketball and baseball, and he was a good swimmer. And was he cute! I couldn’t believe my luck.

Looking back I realize that it wasn’t exactly luck that drew Bill to me. I’m fairly certain that Bill fell for me because of my personality. After all, I was no Judy Tolton. If I could have remade myself then it would have been in the sultry image of Kim Novak or Marilyn Monroe or other popular actresses of the time. I thought of myself as cute, but nothing special. I was vivacious and had energy to burn. I am an extrovert by nature and I thrive on social interactions. In those years, I was everyone’s friend. My vibrant, outgoing personality was my best feature, and I used it to the fullest extent I could. Other kids wanted to be around me, and I often found myself at the hub of my social scene. My energy was magnetic, and when they were around me they had fun whether we were going to the movies, ice skating, or just hanging out.

Bill and I soon spent every moment we could together. We not only had electric physical chemistry, but also a real friendship. I learned a lot about myself and what I liked with him. We spent hours in his car on Kernwood Road in the neighboring town of Beverly, where everyone went to park. It was wooded and just off the town’s golf course. At the time there was a rumor going around that a rogue cop was pulling girls out of cars and raping them, but Bill made me feel safe. “I would never let that happen to you,” he assured me.

It wasn’t just the specter of a criminal cop that frightened me. My Catholic training told me that what I was doing was a mortal sin. I had taken the next logical and sinful step after masturbation. Once again, I was torn in two. Experimenting with Bill felt so good. He was almost as new to sexual play as I was and we fumbled around together, trying different things and having fun. We kissed passionately, exploring with our tongues. I had heard of French kissing before and now I was doing it. At the same time, I felt crushing guilt and shame. I wondered, again, why something that felt so good had to be so evil. Now, my Saturday confessions included two hell-worthy sins.

On one of our regular weekend night dates I wore a button-down sweater, and Bill and I created a little game. He opened the top button. There were, I think, around eight in all. We decided that I would wear something similar on each of our next eight Saturday night dates and each time we met he would undo one additional button.

I started to become concerned around that time by how much I really liked sexual arousal. I knew other girls were curious. My friends and I passed around books like
Tropic of Cancer
and
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, and we talked about sex, but it was always in an oblique way. We never discussed what we liked or what felt good or what we wanted to try. I assumed that my friends kept their hands above the covers at night and didn’t feel the kind of excitement I did. No doubt, they wanted to know about sex, but I wanted to know about it and experience it. I worried that I was the only girl who really liked sexual feelings. What did this mean about me? If girls who did it before marriage were whores, what were girls who did it and liked it? I didn’t know the word for those girls, and I worried that I was the sole member of my gender who craved sex. For young women of this era, sex was currency and virginity was a bargaining chip. Your sex appeal wasn’t about how much pleasure you could get, it was about what kind of man you could land. It was to be parlayed into a stable, monogamous future life. Virginity was not to be squandered on pleasure. I couldn’t stop exploring with my boyfriend, though. I started experimenting with touching Bill’s penis. At first I just ran my fingers over the bulge in his trousers. Then I put my hand down his pants and held it. I didn’t know what, exactly, you were supposed to do with these things, but I was learning.

Finally, the Saturday night came when it was time to undo the last button. We sat in Bill’s car on Kernwood Road kissing and caressing each other. Then Bill ran his eyes up and down the stack of buttons on my shirt. We climbed over the white vinyl seats of his Studebaker. He undid the first seven buttons of my blouse. It was early spring and suddenly it struck me that we had gone from winter to spring in the course of eight buttons. We looked at each other and laughed. He undid the last button and I sat there in my bra, which he quickly unhooked.

Luckily, Bill couldn’t fully see my body. The only light that filtered in came from the moon and the weak streetlight a couple of yards away from us. Also, I was lying back, which made me look slimmer than when I stood. Yet, there were also fleeting moments when Bill made me feel so beautiful that my insecurities melted away, and I was fully in the delightful moment.

Bill kissed my breasts and pulled gently at my nipples. I was already wet when he took off his pants.

I discovered with Bill that night that I loved finger fucking. I also learned that when I got really excited I got wet, wetter than I had ever gotten when I masturbated. Sometimes I worried I’d peed after a make-out session with Bill. Remember, this was the late fifties, when sex education for most girls consisted of “If you do it before you’re married you’re a slut.” For Catholic girls like me it was “If you do it before you’re married you’re a slut and you’ll fry in hell unless you confess.”

He slowly slid his finger inside of me and my vagina started to pulse. Then he gently glided his finger out and slid his penis in. I panicked. Would I get pregnant? He must have seen the fear in me because he whispered, “I promise I’ll pull out.” I was so anxious that all I could think was that I wanted this to be over. I loved the foreplay, but penis-in-vagina sex had consequences so dire that I couldn’t possibly relax enough to enjoy it. He thrust in and out of me and I held my breath. Finally, he pulled out and came on my mons. Oh, no! Did sperm have some kind of homing device that propelled it into the vagina? I tilted my pelvis up just to be on the safe side.

Bill and I started going “all the way” almost every time we could be alone. I wasn’t happy about this. I was still terrified of becoming pregnant. I didn’t know how to talk about this with Bill, or even if I had any right to turn back. I had already gone all the way with him. Some unspoken rule dictated that I couldn’t hold out now. Bill knew as much about sex as I did. He was convinced that if we had intercourse during my period I couldn’t get pregnant, so he came inside of me on those occasions. We were incredibly lucky. As much as I adored Bill, I also started to resent him. He wanted to have intercourse every time we saw each other, while I preferred the risk-free thrill of foreplay. Then I could relax and enjoy the electrifying sensation of arousal and usually I could have an orgasm by being stimulated by only his finger. But for Bill, sexual play had to culminate with his penis inside my vagina or he was unsatisfied. Since I had no vocabulary for expressing my sexual preferences and no belief that I had a right to, I quietly went along and did my best to keep my resentment under wraps.

Around this time, I started having a problem with my skirts: The zippers kept breaking. One Saturday as I sat in the living room reading a magazine, my mother came into the room clutching one of my skirts. “I don’t understand how this keeps happening,” she said, showing me the ripped zipper. “I told you,” I said, “I broke it pulling it too hard in the bathroom.” My dad, who was fiddling with the radio in the corner of the room, shot me a look that made it plain he didn’t buy it. My zippers got torn in Bill’s cramped, steamed-up Studebaker, not in a rush to pee. Dad didn’t know this exactly, but he knew my excuse was fishy.