Cybill Disobedience (6 page)
I singed off my eyelashes and eyebrows when I tried to light the gas grill of our backyard barbecue, but I dutifully rubbed them with petroleum jelly, a therapy I’d used on horses to help their hair grow in over scars. When my lashes came back longer and thicker, Mother stopped just short of recommending conflagration as a beauty treatment to her friends. In her continuing obsession with my hair color, she marveled at a new product called Summer Blonde.
“This is great,” she said in a hushed tone as she hurried me into the bathroom with the box of magical elixir. “All you do is spray it on, and we don’t have to worry about your hair getting darker ever again.”
My whole life I had encountered disbelief when I insisted that my hair color was natural. Now I would have to lie. “What am I going to say when people ask if I dye my hair?” I fretted.
“This is not dye,” she insisted. “It’s a lightener, just like sitting in the sun.” With maternal endorsement for the white lie, I dutifully sprayed on what I discovered, only years later when the FDA became more rigorous about labeling, to be peroxide.
Shopping with my mother usually involved the Casual Corner on Union Avenue, then lunch at the Pig ‘n Whistle Bar-B-Q, where she’d gone as a girl. The implicit uniform of junior high consisted of a white oxford cloth blouse, circle pin at the rounded collar, cabled cardigan sweater with matching kneesocks, and plaid wraparound skirt. The outfit had to include black and white saddle shoes or Bass Weejuns (I favored tassels over penny loafers, since I could never squeeze the coins in the slots). We were fashion lemmings so early in the game, but occasionally I was downright rebellious. Once I got sent home from school for wearing culottes, which were deemed too closely related tants. The assistant principal called my mother to say, “Please come pick up your daughter and have her return in a skirt.” Mother thought it was ridiculous and took me out for barbecue.
She didn’t know she was quoting Dorothy Parker when she said, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” but I knew there were no Barbie dolls with spectacles. I was fifteen when I failed the eye exam for my driver’s permit, and my mother, refusing to believe the results, got a family friend who was an eye doctor to write a note certifying that I did not need glasses to drive. This explanation did not impress the civil servant at the Tennessee Highway Patrol, nor did my failing the eye exam a second time. I was finally permitted to consult an optometrist for the glasses I so obviously required--I’d been squinting at blackboards, movie screens, and my competition on the basketball court for years. Mother sat next to me while I was fitted with owlish round black frames, a stoic look of loss and resignation on her face, the reflection of the perfect daughter created in her image once again marred. When I reported passing the eye exam on my third try, she said “Fine” in a dull tone that implied nothing fine at all.
The commandments of beauty seemed even more stringent than those of the church, but I didn’t have to wait for the hereafter to reap the rewards. Despite my glasses, the boys did make passes. And I was a born receiver.
I CAN TAKE A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE JUST BY
walking past the men’s cologne counter of any department store. English Leather--that’s Mike. Canoe--that’s Sam. Jade East--that’s Lawrence. British Sterling...
I did not vomit from my first kiss, but I spit into the sink for a good five minutes and then used half a tube of Crest. I was fourteen and it was at night on my front porch, after a Memphis Chicks minor league baseball game. I had gotten tired of watching the make-out scene from the sidelines and vowed to get it over with.
You might think I’d been vaccinated against drinking from the examples at home, but when I was fifteen I went along with the group that trawled Joe’s Liquors looking for someone who could be bribed into buying us quarts of Miller Black Label. An old man leaning against the store’s gyrating Sputnik-shaped neon sign was easily persuaded, and my few ounces of the purloined stuff, guzzled out of the bottle in a brown paper bag, created a quick buzz. I found myself dancing to “When a Man Loves a Woman” and nuzzling against the sweet-smelling neck of a nineteen-year-old boy with a doughy little cleft where his chin should be, Mick Jagger lips, and bleached blond hair cut in a long mop. When Mike picked me up for a movie date a few days later, he displayed excellent credentials for a first boyfriend: my parents hated him on sight.
My tradition of sex and lies began when I started sneaking out to see Mike using Jane as an alibi. Jane owed me big time since I had saved her from drowning at Shoals Creek--she had jumped off the pier to chase a toy football that my brother threw downriver, got tired fighting the current, and was about to go under when I got to her with a life preserver. But she did not appreciate her role as a beard, nor the fact that I bailed on her if there was a chance of seeing Mike. We had to find other venues when he left a racy, unsealed note for me on Jane’s front porch, and her father got to it first. We steamed up the windows of his MGB all around town, arms and legs splayed in ungainly positions when a policeman interrupted our foreplay with a flashlight’s beam. But our preferred sanctuary was behind my grandparents’ house when they were out of town: once past the porte cochere, we were hidden from the street, safe from discovery.
I was absolutely stunned by the intense pleasure of kissing and caressing, a visceral experience I had no right to expect, given my motherrsquo;s counsel. After six months of exquisite teasing, we’d done everything but “go all the way.” On a clear cold night I walked out on our front lawn, across the grass that was crunchy with frost, gazed at the starry night sky, and negotiated with God in what has come to be known as Clintonian logic. “It’s not intercourse,” I offered, “it’s just outercourse. And I won’t do it anymore.” Then I went inside, looked at the photograph of Mike I kept hidden under the library card in my wallet, and thought:
Who am
I
kidding? I
stuffed rollers into a hairnet, placed it on my pillow, and arranged a lump of clothes under the blanket in a vaguely human shape. I climbed out the window and found Mike’s car around the corner.
I felt oddly detached from my first time, as if it were more a rite of initiation to be crossed off a list than a sexual epiphany, but Mike had warned me that it would get so much better. As I climbed back through the window of my bedroom, the ceiling light suddenly switched on, illuminating my father’s face. Wordlessly, he walked down the hall to the room where he kept his toolbox, his silence more frightening than the usual bluster of his anger. My throat seemed closed tight, but I managed to mumble, “What are you doing?”
“Nailing the windows shut,” he said.
“But what if there’s a fire?” I asked, watching helplessly. “I won’t be able to get out.”
He never looked back at me as he took out a ball peen hammer and answered, “That’s not the fire I’m worried about.”
It was too late to safeguard my virtue. Mike and I were already scouting locations for the next time, and the next, and the next, exploring the various versions of lovers’ lane in town. I walked out the front door to meet him now, sanguine behind a careful lattice-work of lies. A subtle change occurred at home: once I became a sexual creature, nobody in my family seemed to like me anymore. My father sensibly realized he could not act as full-time sentry, but he glowered across the dinner table and spoke to me in staccato bursts, as if conversation was expensive. I knew from the rearrangements in my bureau drawers that my mother was looking through my papers, finding letters from Mike, but she referred to my behavior only obliquely, with thinly veiled references to men who don’t buy cows when the milk is free. I kept up my own part in the pretense, wearing Mike’s school ring on a chain hidden under my blouse when I was home and putting it on my finger at school, the fraying bits of white surgical tape wrapped around the band to make it fit.
The most safety and seclusion was in a new development off Walnut Grove Road, where the streets were paved but the houses not yet built. When the weather turned warm, we spent every weekend at the drive-in movie, facilitated by Mike’s new Nash Rambler with collapsible seats. We were hardly the only teenagers grabbing illicit Saturday night sex--by daylight, the grounds of the drive-in were littered with more discarded condoms than popcorn kernels. Emboldened by lust, we planned on adding a Wednesday night and a real bed to our repertoire, since that was when Mike’s parents and younger brother went to Bible meetings. Watching from a safe distance as the family car pulled out of the driveway, we left the Rambler down the block and crept into the house like burglars. We’d barely undressed when there was the unmistakable sound of a key in the front door and a young boy’s voice saying that he did so have a stomachache. Grabbing our clothes, we whispered a frantic escape plan, which entailed my climbing out a chest-high window, running half-naked across the vacant lot behind the house, and waiting behind a magnolia tree until Mike retrieved me.
Longing for a place where we couldn’t get caught and wouldn’t be arrested, we saved up for a room at the Rebetel on Lamar Avenue, the highway south toward Mississippi. There was a flashing confederate soldier’s cap over the VACANCY sign as we pulled into the parking lot. Although we were unlikely to see or be seen by anyone familiar, I was technically jailbait and ducked beneath the dashboard while Mike paid nineteen dollars for a room with cinder block walls painted the color of iceberg lettuce. I refused to touch the frayed graying towels. Only the magnitude of pent-up teenaged hormones could overcome the bed, made with matching gray sheets over a mattress that smelled of mildew and collapsed in the middle like a taco. But the privacy and lack of interruption overcame the lack of aesthetics. This was the real first time. It was daylight when we arrived, and I was shocked to see that it was dark when we left.
Mike was slightly schizophrenic about birth control: he was always prepared with condoms but delayed using one until the last possible moment, relying on the notoriously imprecise method of withdrawal, which I naively accepted. I went through craven watchful waiting for my period every month. One day late, and I couldn’t eat or sleep. Three days late, and I was stumbling in a trance through the green-tiled halls of the school, chastising God for combining the pleasures of the flesh with the only occasional need to reproduce. Five days late, and I was swearing off sex forever, convinced that my life was over. At the first twinge of cramps I’d start to breathe easier, and with the first sign of blood, I dropped to my knees in prayer. Hallelujah! Pregnancy anxiety forever changed my attitude about menstruation--never again “the curse” that my mother described but reason to rejoice.
When I told Mother that my periods were irregular, she made an appointment for me with her doctor, a family friend who used to hunt squirrel and invite us over for stew. Nate Atherton was as wide as he was tall, with a narrow circumference of hair that made him look like a tonsured monk, but he was kind and avuncular as he questioned me, obviously aware that I was sexually active.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked. Unable to meet his eyes, I mumbled yes. “Are you in love?” he asked. Again I said yes, and assured him that we planned to get married one day. He wrote something illegible on a prescription pad, and I blithely handed it to the same pharmacist who’d given me penicillin when I was five, cough medicine for innumerable childhood viruses, Jean Nate for many Mother’s Days. I almost choked when I looked in the bag and saw a pink plastic container with thirty tiny pills on a round dial. Speaking in a hoarse whisper of excitement, I called Mike and said, “I think this is birth control!” We drove to the other side of town, and I cowered in the car while he confirmed that I had been given the miraculous Pill from a druggist I felt certain wouldn’t be bumping into my father at the hardware store.
I still marvel at the doctor’s act of compassion: he knew I would discover that I’d been given a way to escape unwanted pregnancy but avoided any direct conversation about it, saving me from a confrontation with my mother and allowing her to continue being an ostrich. Twenty-five years later I asked my mother, “Did you know that Dr. Atherton gave me birth control pills when I was sixteen?”
“No!” she said, but allowed as to how it was probably a good idea.
THAT SUMMER, MY PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS WERE
going to an appliance convention (the Philco Hawaiian Holiday), and their invitation for me to come along was camouflage for a plot to drive a wedge between Mike and me. Even though the plan was pathetically transparent, I figured true love could survive a vacation, and I could hardly pass up a trip to Honolulu--I’d never been north of the Mason-Dixon line. As we stepped off the plane, we were greeted by glorious women with burnished skin who placed leis of fragrat white plumeria around our necks, and by an attractive young mainlander introduced as Joseph Graham Davis, a Columbia Law student who’d taken a summer job with the travel agency that arranged our trip. He called himself Gray, a patrician name to match his preppy clothes (cotton T-shirt tucked into khakis) and prodigal swath of Kennedy hair. He offered to show me around the island, and with the sense of urgency and speeded-up time of a vacation, it didn’t take long to progress from whiskey sours on the deck of an oceanfront bar to passionate necking on Waikiki Beach. That evening when we returned to the hotel, my father was pacing the lobby with a security guard, a walkie-talkie belching static as he conferred with colleagues around the property. My parents took one look at my disheveled clothes, my shoes and pockets filled with sand, and decreed that I was to remain within spitting distance for the rest of the trip.
I managed to slip Gray my address as I was boarding the plane home, and we exchanged long, philosophical letters about our ambitions and goals (his were written on a yellow legal pad so the lawyers at the New York firm where he was clerking would think he was hard at work). Our relationship probably should have remained epistolary: when I went to New York almost two years later, I was thrilled at seeing him again--a built-in boyfriend. We drove to his parents’ empty house in Westchester County and climbed into their bed, in an old-fashioned frame high off the floor, but our fondling was interrupted by his parents’ unexpected return--a classic scenario in my sex life. I dived under the bed just before his mother came into the room and could see her pink pumps from my hiding place, barely breathing until her bathroom needs gave me a window of escape. A few days later we tried again at the family beach house on the Jersey shore, deserted for the winter, but we both sensed that we were trying too hard and ended up in bunk beds. Driving back to New York in silence was a glaring contrast to our lively conversations before attempting to be sexual. Gray Davis always drove twenty miles faster than the speed limit and was still always two hours late. I would guess that he’s stopped speeding and is more punctual now that he is the governor of California.