Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (20 page)

“Listen to me, this is a beautiful thing, okay?” Michelle said, putting her arms around me. “Don’t worry. We’ll fix you up nice. Now here,” she said, handing me a joint roughly the size of a tampon. “Take another toke and think to yourself, ‘It’s not just a bra, why, it’s
lingerie.’
”

When we finally stumbled off the escalator at Macy’s, I was so stoned, I was practically catatonic. But this was okay: with all of its flesh-colored rubber, restraining straps, and eerie, empty bodices, a bra department can be a fairly sinister place even when you’re not fried out of your mind.

“You’re still tense. Why are you tense?” said Michelle. “Look, I’m ordering you not to be tense, okay?”

She grabbed a giant, pointy bullet bra off one of the racks and stuck it on her head like a pair of ears. “Give to da Easter Bunny,” she yipped, then hopped around the underwear display like a rabbit. I slid down on the floor and started laughing like a lunatic. Then I reached up for a black bra, draped it over my eyes and shouted, “Hey. Who turned off all the lights?”

“Bunny, bunny, bunny,” said Michelle.

At this point, one of the salesladies decided it was in everyone’s best interests to pick me up off the floor and hustle me into a dressing room as quickly as possible.

“Let me guess,” she deadpanned. “You’re here for your first bra.” She was a rotund woman in a tight apricot sweater and big plastic glasses hanging on a chain around her neck. Her name tag read “Barbara.”

“Wow. ‘Barbara.’ That’s almost like being named Bra-Bra, isn’t it?” Michelle said. “How lucky are you? Bra-Bra and you’re selling bras? I mean, it wouldn’t be nearly as funny if you were, like, in the lawn mower department.”

I could tell by the way Barbara ignored this that she was used to all sorts of imbecilic behavior and that ours was not impressing her. Pinning a measuring tape quickly around my torso, she announced, “You’re a 36-C. You’ll do best with an underwire. I’ll bring you a couple of styles. Any particular color?”

“Pink!” I nearly shouted. “Hot pink, baby pink, pink-pink!”

“Of course,” Barbara said dryly. “To match the color of your eyes.”

By the end of sophomore year, my body had become like a creation of science fiction, a mad doctor’s concoction that spins out of control and accidentally takes on a life of its own, growing to full maturity in a matter of seconds, sprouting appendages, swelling and erupting with muscles and flesh that expand to the point of bursting. In the six months after Mick Jagger himself had declared my breasts officially large, I grew yet another bra size, shot up three inches in height and went up two and a half shoe sizes. Although I dieted furiously, my jeans became inexplicably tighter. Sometimes I had to excuse myself from Geometry, go to the bathroom, and sit in a stall with my pants unzipped for a few minutes to ease the strange aching pressure I felt on my hip bones, straining outward against the fabric as if they were being jacked apart by machinery.

No longer was I “Fatso,” “Flatsy,” or even “Lil Sis” and “Kiddo.” Oh no. Now, whenever I walked into history class, my friend Victor climbed up on top of his desk, pointed at me, and shouted like an ecstatic hillbilly, “Why, look, boys! There’s gold in them thar hills!”

By age fifteen, I’d inhabited four different body types. I’d been chubby, skinny, flat-chested, and voluptuous. From this, I’d learned a crucial lesson: size didn’t matter. No matter what kind of figure you had, someone always felt compelled to dream up some sort of asinine and degrading nickname for you.

Once I had breasts, however, it seemed that boys wanted to play with them. Better yet, I wanted them to. The same hormones that had caused my body to go into overdrive were doing the same thing to my libido. I felt feverish, almost dizzy with longing. I walked around Stuyvesant High School and the whole of New York City in a fugue of perpetual arousal, writhing inside my skin, tingling, emboldened and ambitious with yearning.

In the past, my mind had been occupied with occasional, semi-useful thoughts such as:
If you make decorative covers for all your book reports, you may be able to create the illusion of actually having read the books.
Or:
By moving the bathroom scale to where the floor warps and climbing onto it after you pee, you can knock a half-pound off your weight.
But now, besides becoming famous for as-yet-undetermined talents, almost all I ever thought about was sex. The moment something even remotely reminded me of fooling around, it was like hearing “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” on oldies radio—it inevitably took up permanent residence in my head for the next seven weeks, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.

In school, I’d arrange my face into something I hoped approximated interest, then spend entire class periods staring off into space and reliving some torrid episode in which I’d made out with Mark in the hallway during Ronit Simantov’s Sweet Sixteen.

“Jesus, what’s wrong with me?” I asked my friend Jeff one day. “I think about sex constantly. It never lets up.”

“Welcome to my world, sweetheart,” Jeff said grimly, clomping me on the back. “And let me tell you: it’s a bitter, bitter place.”

Having a liberal, hippy-dippy upbringing has its drawbacks, but restraint, sexual repression, and guilt are not three of them. Boys wanted to fool around with me, and I wanted to fool around with them, and we all ended up feeling like we’d just won the lottery.

I loved fooling around. I loved the buildup to the very first kiss, then the frantic, semi-inept scramble of it. I loved the mounting adrenaline, and the way boys looked at me with astonishment, with reverence. The way their fingertips burned into me, branding my skin with the memory of it.

But it was also funny. Sexually, boys were about as complicated as a Pez dispenser. You showed them a nipple, they got an erection. It was Pavlovian, not exactly the stuff of higher primates. When boys were aroused and you fooled around with them, they were reduced to babies. Naked in their hunger, greedy in their needs, they whimpered and begged, then became prostrate with gratitude.
Oh please. Oh yes. Oh mama,
they moaned, crumpling to their knees. Yet afterward, they strutted around purporting to be these great studs, masters of the bedroom, steely with virility. “Oh, man, did I get some this weekend,” they bragged to each other in the hallway at school, as if they’d stolen or won something—when really, of course, we girls were merely being
charitable.
After all, we were at least as horny as they were.

This was another discovery, in fact: most of my girlfriends felt at least as overheated as I did.

“Augh. Don’t you wish we could make out for college credit?” said my friend Jill.

Every time Jill or I hooked up with somebody, we immediately had to tell each other about it in painstaking detail. We were obsessed:
first he was like, then I was like, then he said, then I went
… The majority of fooling around we did took place fleetingly and clandestinely, in the urban equivalent of the back seat of a car: in stairwells, on park benches, in apartments where someone’s parent was expected home imminently. Since this was in the Teenage Dark Ages when no one had pagers, cell phones, or e-mail yet, my friends and I actually had to call each other on the family phone and communicate to each other in code.

“Hey. Can you talk?”

“Um. We’re just, uh, finishing dinner.”

“So just say the first initial.”

“Okay. M.”

“Michael? Michael Barlow?”

“Uh huh.”

“That guy from your chemistry class?”

“Yuh uh. Can you believe?”

“How far?”

“Um—hang on a second. No, Ma, I don’t want any more chicken, thanks. Um—”

“Just give a number.”

“Well, sort of two. Between two and three.”

“Between?”

“You know,
on
—”

“But not
in?
”

“Exactly!”

“Ohmygod!”

Occasionally, as I mashed against walls and wriggled out of my bra, I worried that I’d get branded a slut. But then, after having been called Fatso, Flatsy, Skinny Bones, and Kiddo, “Slut” actually sounded pretty terrific to me. Who, after all, called girls “sluts”? Boys who wanted desperately to fool around with them, and other girls who were jealous. “Slut” was the height of flattery, when you really thought about it.

Oh, how I loved the idea of being considered wild—a sexual tempest, a roiling tidal wave of desire, a paragon of erotic expertise. “Wow, that Susie Gilman,” I imagined the boys at school saying. “That girl is a volcano.”

There was only one small problem: how could you be a volcano when you were still a virgin?

Of course, no matter where you grow up, if you’re female, you somehow get the message that there’s only one way you’re
really
supposed to lose your virginity. Teenage boys, of course, are encouraged to approach sex like shoplifting—
who cares who, what, or where
—
grab it whenever you can!
But girls still get the idea that there’s a
right
way to lose it, and a
wrong way.

The right way is with a guy you’re totally, completely in love with, and who is so totally, completely in love with you that he’d be willing to die for you—or at least do the next best thing and marry you.

The wrong way to lose your virginity is, of course, every way else.

Even in hipper-than-thou New York City, in the pre-AIDS 1980s, Endless Love was still held up as the Gold Standard for Virginity Loss. And yet, almost every one of my friends—God bless ’em—opted to lose her virginity the “wrong” way. In fact, in the hundreds of virginity stories I’ve heard over the years, exactly three women I’ve ever met actually lost their virginity on a proverbial bed of rose petals to their worshipful One True Love. For the rest of us, when it came right down to it, Boredom, Curiosity, Horniness, and Inebriation pretty much won out.

“Getting it over with” ranked much higher, in the end, than romance. “Well, I don’t know, I was at this party, the guy was cute, and I just thought, ‘Why not?’” my friend Judy shrugged. “Besides, we were on top of a pool table. How cool is that?”

With so much expectation and gravitas attached to virginity for so long, a lot of girls I knew just said:
fuck it,
and proceeded to have sex for the first time with as little ceremony as they put into getting a haircut. More than a couple of my friends lost it to guys at “the parents are away” parties out in Brooklyn and Queens, where they fumbled through the act hastily in a paneled rec room while “Stairway to Heaven” blared over the stereo and other drunken kids pounded on the door yelling, “C’mon. Hurry up in there. Tony wants his bong!”

Yet literary aspirant and drama queen that I was, I wanted to lose my virginity in a way that was special—or that would at least make for good copy. On numerous occasions, I’d had the chance to have sex in a stairwell or on the rooftop of someone’s apartment building. But how would that sound? In the likely event that Hollywood one day turned my life into a made-for-TV biography, I didn’t want to be known as the glamorous, world-famous something-or-other who’ lost her virginity under a heating duct. I didn’t want to “just get it over with” with one of the cute, swaggering, beer-chugging guys at my school, who’d inevitably spend the next Monday morning high-fiving his friends in the hallway and bragging to everyone while treating me, personally, as if I had the plague.

But what if, by the end of senior year, I was the only virgin left in the entire Tristate Area? This actually struck me as a distinct possibility. And I was certain that, for the rest of my life, my sexual status as a sixteen-year-old would remain my only memorable and defining quality.
Oh yes. Susie Gilman,
my classmates would say at my twenty-fifth high school reunion.
That pathetic girl who was still a virgin at graduation.

At night, I’d lie awake, watching the lights of the city play over my ceiling, trying to imagine what sex really, actually felt like. I’d been to third base by then (whatever
that
was—apparently, it’s still being debated), but intercourse itself still seemed so far away somehow, so abstractly momentous.

“Tell me,” I begged my nonvirgin friends. “What does it feel like?”

I thought they’d be able to explain to me the exact sensation of having a boy inside you. I had the idea that during sex, you experienced some great shivery, physical epiphany that transformed you on an almost molecular level into a more sophisticated, more evolved human being.

But all my friend Judy could say was, “What did it feel like? Like I’d impaled my twat on a hockey stick, that’s what it felt like.”

The problem with wanting to lose my virginity to the “right person,” however, was that I had absolutely no idea who this might be. I had plenty of boyfriends—cute Frisbee players I regularly hung out with in the park—but none of the all-consumptive, gushy, monogamous love I saw portrayed in made-for-TV movies. When my friends
Gabi
and Melissa sat on the steps after school, describing their “perfect guy” and “ideal relationship,” it occurred to me that, while I had easily mapped out in my mind half a dozen elaborate scenarios in which I’d win the Pulitzer Prize before college, I had only the vaguest idea of what my “perfect guy” might be like. Other than looking like either a young Mick Jagger or an alive Jim Morrison, my “perfect” guy, as far as I could tell, had only one distinguishing characteristic: the ability to read minds. In the scenarios I imagined, he was able to divine all my romantic fantasies and secret longings almost telepathically, then effortlessly fulfill them. He’d be forever appearing on my doorstep with armfuls of roses, declaring his love for me over the school PA system, and making snow angels in the yard beneath my window (in the imaginary house I also happened to live in). To that end, my only concept of an “ideal relationship” consisted of a guy telling me I was beautiful about a thousand times a day and winning stuffed animals for me at amusement parks.

My friend Jill had an actual steady boyfriend named Kyle. Kyle came over to Jill’s apartment after school several times a week, sometimes staying for dinner or watching college football with Jill’s dad. Over the summer, he joined her family for weekends at their beach house in Fire Island, and conferred secretly with Jill’s mother about what jewelry to get Jill for her sixteenth birthday. He saw Jill every day at school, and once when she got really drunk, Kyle held her hair back for her as she threw up in the bathroom.