Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (21 page)

I’d sooner stab myself in the head with an ice pick than let a guy get that close to me. Although I pined away for “a serious boyfriend,” the thought of actually bringing one home made me physically ill. My home life was atrocious. My mother and I fought constantly. We had arguments that were prototypes for parents and teenagers everywhere, based largely on my mother’s fascistic belief that our house was not a hotel, and my reasonable insistence that I was old enough to stay out until 2:00
A.M.
on weekends.

“As long as you’re living in my house, you’re subject to my rules,” my mother would shout. “Do you understand me?”

“Well, whoever said I wanted to live in your house, huh?” I’d scream back. “I never asked to be born. I never asked to live here. I never asked to have you as my mother with your STUPID, INSANE, TOTALITARIAN CURFEWS. All my other friends get to stay out AT LEAST an hour later than I do!”

“YOU DON’T LIKE IT HERE? THEN LEAVE!”

“FINE! I WILL!” (At this point, I’d dramatically yank a duffel bag out of the closet and start stuffing my underwear into it.)

Not coincidently, most of my girlfriends had equally lousy relationships with their mothers; we were constantly telephoning one another in tears or turning up on each other’s doorsteps. One weekend when Vanessa was home from boarding school, I arrived at her apartment with my duffel bag.

“Oh, Susan. How very nice to see you,” Vanessa’s mother said sweetly, opening the door. “Are you all right?”

“Yuunnhh,” I started to sob. “I just had a fight with my mother. She threw me out again.”

“Oh, sweetie,” said Vanessa’s mom. “I’m so sorry. I would invite you in for a nice cup of tea, but as you can see,” she gestured down the hallway of the apartment, where I could see Vanessa hurling clothes into an opened suitcase on the rug, “I’M THROWING VANESSA OUT THIS VERY MINUTE!” she shouted.

“YOU’RE NOT THROWING ME OUT!” Vanessa hollered. “I’M LEAVING!”

“SO GO!” yelled her mother. “TAKE YOUR BLOODY THINGS AND GO!” She turned back to me. “Ever so sorry, Susan,” she said cheerily. “Perhaps next time.”

Yet like most teenagers, of course, I believed that my family alone was straight out of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” No doubt, if I brought my boyfriends home, my father would wind up telling them one belly-flop of a joke after another, while my mother would walk around in her favorite novelty T-shirt that said “Don’t Let the Turkeys Get You Down,” and ask them what their zodiac sign was.

Worse still, what would guys discover if they really saw
me?
What if they thought my record collection wasn’t cool enough? What if they saw I still had a dollhouse stored in my closet? What if they noticed that my inner thighs touched and I had to keep flipping my hair to keep it from falling flat? Whenever I was with a boy, I assumed that if he knew the “real me,” all he’d see was the former outcast:
Fatso, skinny bones, flatsy. Eeeewww.

Whenever a guy liked me, his desire for me almost instantly branded him a loser. I was as merciless on boys as I was on myself; I could forgive them nothing. A guy could be sweet, doting, and intelligent, but God help him if he met me at the movies wearing a dorky terry cloth shirt and a puka shell bracelet. God help him if he sweated too much, related an inane joke he’d seen on TV, or ordered a silly-sounding cocktail. I couldn’t bear to be around anyone as imperfect as myself, as vulnerable, insecure, or unfinished. A boy’s humanness mirrored my own, and I couldn’t stand the sight of it. Fooling around for a night was one thing, but I wanted—no, I needed—anyone I slept with to be commanding, sophisticated, and more than a little unreal.

Three of my so-called boyfriends were high school seniors who’d gone on to college. Such age and distance, in my mind, gave them special cachet and worthiness: they were, after all, older men! Whenever they came back to New York during school breaks, I mentally auditioned them.

Keith was a photographer, a free-spirited Frisbee player. I adored him, and sometimes, when we walked around Greenwich Village and did the I-Ching together, I believed he was my soul mate. But for soul mates, we had an awful lot of parents constantly walking in on us, and then he always headed back to college.

Jeremy was gorgeous and an excellent kisser, but had the irritating habit of tweaking me on the nose playfully, then chiding, “Virginity isn’t an incurable disease, you know,” which invariably made me feel like I was six years old and sitting on the knee of some perverted Santa Claus.

Then there was Jake, who had all the charm and dazzling good looks of a young presidential candidate and just about as little sincerity. Whenever he saw me, he’d stagger backward and clutch his chest dramatically, feigning a heart attack. “Whoa, Susie,” he’d gasp. He’d then proceed to use lines on me that he’d clearly picked up from movies. Seeing as I myself was a creature of self-invention, this actually impressed me. Unlike most of the guys I knew, whose idea of seduction was to say, “Hey, wanna check out the stairwell?” Ivy League Jake would take me to wine bars and order for us both in French. Then he’d lean over the hurricane candle, entwine his fingers in mine, and say, coyly, “So, what are your thoughts on Nietzsche?”

“Oh, I absolutely love him,” I’d purr. “Especially his earlier films.”

Best yet, Jake had about a zillion other girlfriends and a sexual appetite that bordered on Attention Deficit Disorder. He was someone I could become completely infatuated with—without any threat of prolonged, actual contact.

One weekend when he was home, he encouraged me to visit him at college. “You’d love university life,” he said magnanimously. “With your mind and your body, you
deserve
university life.”

I don’t think he expected for a minute that I’d actually take him up on his offer, but little did he know: I’d made up my mind. So, in fact, had my friend Jill. We’d decided to lose our virginity on the same night so we could compare notes afterward and talk about it incessantly. “Ohmygod,” we squealed to each other in whispers over the phone, “how totally cool would
that
be?”

After the requisite lies-to-parents and logistics were all worked out, I surprised Jake in his dorm room in New England on Valentine’s Day in subzero weather. Conveniently, I neglected to mention to him that I was still, in fact, a virgin, because the weekend, in my mind, was about being fabulously sexy and passionate, which as far as I could tell were qualities that almost by definition required people to misrepresent themselves. As I liked to see it, Jake and I were two brilliant, sophisticated lovers having a weekend tryst that might kick off an epic, decades-long affair that would span several foreign cities and perhaps even cause an international scandal, but that would never, under any circumstances, run the risk of him having to meet my parents or see me in my sweat pants.

And so.

What is there to say about losing your virginity that hasn’t been said a zillion times before? Probably nothing. Assembling a bookshelf from IKEA requires greater dexterity. From everything friends had told me, I was expecting obliterating pain, and when this didn’t happen, the relief I felt was as good as pleasure. Jake was probably as skilled and valiant as any nineteen-year-old lover could be, but to tell you the truth, I wasn’t paying much attention. I was too busy thinking about how cool it was that he’d lit candles beforehand and put on Ravel’s
Bolero
—just like in the movie “
10
” with Bo Derek!
This is it,
I kept thinking.
I’m losing my virginity.
Then I’d look at Jake’s Indian bedspread, at his muscular shoulders, at his art history books, and the illuminated dials blinking on his stereo and think:
Okay, now remember every single detail of this night, because you’re losing your virginity.
What was I planning to do? Tell my grandchildren about it one day? Apparently so.

I’m losing my virginity!
I thought ecstatically.

I’m losing my virginity!

“Do you like this?” Jake asked at one point. “You seem a little distracted.”

“What? Yeah. No. Great. Whatever,” I said.

I’m losing my virginity!

Had I been doing this in an ancient culture, I thought, I might have been considered ruined for the gods. I might have been forced to become a concubine. I might have been stoned to death, or banished from my village, or sent off to a nunnery. Why, I might have been deemed unmarriageable, or cursed for bringing shame upon my family. I’d be branded a fallen woman, a harlot, a Jezebel.

Wow, I thought excitedly.
Wait till I tell my friends about this.

It was close to midnight on Valentine’s Day, and I was crossing a threshold, permanently altering my status in the world: just as my friend Jill was doing at that very moment, just as billions of lovers had done before and would certainly do again. This was the moment that all my speculating and desire had come down to. It was, in its way, poignant and beautiful, but it was also really no big deal.

Maybe that was the reason that sex received so much hype, it occurred to me later. It was actually one of the simplest acts to perform. As I myself had proven, any idiot could do it. It was the easiest club in the world to get into, but you never knew it until you became a member yourself. And so, people tried to make it elite. My friends and I had yearned to be in it, and in the end, we lost our virginity more for each other and ourselves than for any of the boys we were actually with. We lost our virginity for the glamorous creatures, we hoped to become, for the privileges we imagined we’d enjoy, for the experiences we longed to understand and master.

“Are you all right?” Jake whispered when it was over.

“Yeah. Absolutely. Great,” I said, smiling at him in the candlelight. Though what I really wanted to say to him, of course, was, “Hey, now that it’s over, mind if I borrow your phone?”

Chapter 8

My Brilliant Career

IT’S A TRIBUTE
to my father that he never took much of what I said as a teenager to heart, but saw it instead as an endless source of entertainment for him and his friends. My senior year of high school, I came up with a brilliant career plan. It was so brilliant, in fact, that I believed it required me to leave school early and go downtown to his office to tell him about it.

Instead of becoming something dreary like a federal prosecutor or a brain surgeon, I announced, I was going to become a belly-dancing astrologer. My days would be spent alternately reading people’s horoscopes and delivering Bellygrams. Bellygrams, along with strip-a-grams and singing gorillas, were at that moment one of the newer and more imaginative ways to humiliate your loved ones on special occasions.

“Think of it,” I said. “I’ll be my own boss. I’ll never get bored. And I’ll get to subvert the patriarchy.”

“Subvert the patriarchy” was a term I’d recently picked up from one of the many feminist texts I’d been reading. As far as I could tell, it meant any activity that disrupted men’s business-as-usual.

By delivering Bellygrams, I imagined, I’d be called upon to regularly surprise corporate CEOs for their birthdays. By interrupting their meetings with shareholders, climbing on top of conference tables, and gyrating wildly, I figured I’d be disrupting business-as-usual every day—in a gold lame bikini, no less. Plus, I’d acquire killer abs, free up my afternoons to do people’s astrology charts, and possibly arrange to sleep late. What more could anyone possibly want from a career?

“See, Dad?” I said. “I’ve got it all figured out.”

Earlier that month, my father had shelled out roughly three million dollars in application fees for various colleges I’d applied to. Nevertheless, as soon as I finished explaining my plans to him, he declared them “ingenious.”

“And the fact that you’ve never taken a single belly-dancing class in your life should in no way stop you,” he proclaimed, pounding his desktop with conviction. “You go full speed ahead.”

“Really?” I said.

“Absolutely,” my father enthused. “I mean, who needs another doctor or scientist or do-gooder in this world? I say, bring on the dancing girls. In fact,” he said, “it’s such a good idea, I think we have to share it with your Uncle Arthur.”

He reached over, pressed a speed-dial number, then said, “Arthur? You ready for something? Listen to my kid’s latest career plan.” Then he motioned for me to talk into the speakerphone. When I finished, he said, “Isn’t that great, Arthur? Isn’t that just too much?”

“Oh, it’s too much, all right,” said Arthur’s disembodied voice. “A feminist belly-dancing singing telegram with a side business in the occult. Who could want more for their daughter?”

“I mean, you can’t make this stuff up, can you Arth?” my father said.

“No,” Arthur said, “you certainly can’t.”

“Hey,” I said, frowning. “You two aren’t just humoring me, are you?”

“Of course not,” said Arthur. “What makes you say that?”

“We’re just being supportive,” said my father. “In fact, you know who else I think would be really supportive? Your Uncle Fred. Let’s call him next.”

My father, I realize now, was only too used to my histrionics and politics. In first grade, when Christopher Kleinhaus led the boys in a rousing chorus of “Boys Rule, Girls Drool” I’d come up with the witty rejoinder, “Girls Smart, Boys Fart,” which I’d proceeded to chant around the house for weeks afterward. In grade school, annoyed that history only seemed to be about men, I made a point of reading hundreds of biographies of famous women, then sprinkled my dinnertime conversation with statements like, “Well, Phillis Wheatley, the black American poet, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor, probably didn’t eat their vegetables either.”

To me, it was always a foregone conclusion that girls were at least as good as boys. How could we not be? For starters, we were prettier. And we had better clothes.

My parents, to their credit, encouraged me. In an act of supreme masochism, they even bought me the single of Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” knowing full well I’d play it no less than eighty-seven times in a row on my portable record player. And when I had to get glasses in sixth grade, they consoled me by saying I looked exactly like “a miniature Gloria Steinem,” even though, as we were all well aware, my resemblance was actually a lot closer to R2-D2.