Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (25 page)

At college, horniness was pretty much a full-time occupation. You could read all the Schopenhauer you wanted, but eventually, every late-night intellectual discussion over a Domino’s pizza devolved into sex talk. My hall mates and I were seventeen and eighteen years old, but we liked to think of ourselves as erotic experts, brimming with sexual
savoir faire.
“Come on in,” my friend Lisa would say blithely when I knocked on her door. “I’m just putting cornstarch on my diaphragm.”

Both Henry and I secretly worried we weren’t getting it nearly enough. The few pathetic liaisons we’d had at college had been even more pathetic than we’d talked them up to be. I’d dated only two guys, one of whom turned out to have a steady girlfriend, the other of whom announced, after three impassioned evenings, that he “just wasn’t into women with serious breasts.”

“
Serious breasts.
That was the phrase he used,” I said to Henry. “You want to go near that one?”

“Hell, at least you’ve been dumped by two people. I’ve only had one reject me,” Henry said, gnawing at a fingernail. For all his Texas swagger, Henry was a surprisingly delicate boy. He was cherub-faced and built like an Irish wolfhound—slight, sinewy, taut with nervous energy. His skin was milky white, like tracing paper. The girl who’d rejected him had stood him up on his birthday in order to go out with the best friend of JFK Jr.

As soon as we finished our last midterm, Henry and I loaded up his silver Toyota Supra as quickly as possible. Everyone else was heading home for Easter. They were squeezing themselves onto Amtrak’s
Yankee Clipper
train that lurched along the Northeast corridor stinking of overheated hot dog buns. They were flying home standby. They were sharing rides in hatchbacks crammed with dirty laundry. Henry and I made a point of “casually” ambling through the hallways, asking if anyone had extra condoms.

“That’s right. Rub it in, you lucky bastards,” said our friend Burr.

We could barely contain our glee. Settling in to Henry’s sports car with a bag full of birth control, Diet Pepsi, and Twix, we felt like outlaws, renegades, sexual mercenaries.

Now, as Henry gunned the engine, I shouted, “We’re flying!”

“Shit. This is nothing. Hang on.” Henry jammed down on the accelerator. The Supra growled and we careened down the highway with a burst of propulsion.

“Next stop,” he called out, “Poontang, North Carolina.”

I stretched back and propped my legs up on the dashboard, letting the wind ravage me. The moment Henry and I hatched our plan, I’d telephoned my boyfriend, Jeremy. It was 5:30 in the morning but he was wide awake in the kitchen with some of his fraternity brothers, building a yard-long bong out of a piece of industrial tubing they’d removed from the dishwasher.

“Whoa. You’re coming down? When?” he shouted. The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” was blasting insanely in the background.

“After my last midterm,” I shouted back. “But I won’t get to your place until, like, 3:00
A.M.
tomorrow. Is that cool with you?”

There was a pause. “Only if you don’t wear any panties,” he yelled.

And so, now, I wasn’t. Sitting bare-assed beneath a silver miniskirt in a matching silver sports car that smelled like shoe polish and onion rings, I felt positively sensual, feline, and heady with confidence. I was a wild woman—chafing a bit, perhaps—but unleashed in all my reckless glory. For I moment, I actually believed I was the only girl ever to go on a road trip, too. It seemed to me like women so rarely tore off down the highway in a blaze of adventure. Then again, this might’ve been because none of my New York friends or I had a driver’s license. And urban hillbillies that we were, we were actually proud of this fact, too: So what if we couldn’t drive a car? Cars were for people who lived in the suburbs. Besides, the only thing we ever really associated with driving was the phrase “vehicular manslaughter.”

Henry had expected Interstate 95 to be a parking lot, but we zoomed across Connecticut without a hitch. Since he was from Texas and I was from New York City, both of us were chauvinists. People from other states, we believed, were inferior simply by virtue of their geography. As we stood on line for the bathrooms at the Friendly’s outside New Haven, we elbowed each other knowingly. Look at these New England bumpkins with their beer bellies, their souvenir sweatshirts, their whiny, scabby-kneed children. These were small-town, “average Americans,” leading pathetic lives of ordinariness and quiet desperation. As opposed to us, of course. We were merely driving l,200 miles in seventeen hours for the sole purpose of getting laid. How clever were we?

Henry and I hadn’t let our parents know we wouldn’t be returning home that evening. Now that we were already on the road, it seemed that Friendly’s was as good a place as any to issue our little declarations of independence. Neither of us was under the illusion that our families would be thrilled.

Henry went first. I leaned against the bank of pay phones and watched him dial. He cradled the receiver with one shoulder and picked at his cuticles.

“Hello, sir,” I heard him say after a moment. “Well, no. Actually … North Carolina … Kitty’s down there … the one I took to the prom … Yes, I realize … Well, no, I didn’t know it’s black tie … well, she didn’t say … sir, I didn’t promise.” Glancing at me, Henry winked, then pantomimed slitting his throat.

Henry’s father, Henry Charles, Sr., kept Henry on a tight leash. Despite his fortune, he paid Henry’s tuition in installments only after receiving proof that Henry was maintaining a 3.8 grade average. Each month, Henry was also expected to send home a detailed finance report, explaining each of his expenses. These included every cup of coffee and package of cigarettes he purchased.

I myself was on financial aid. Three times a week, I worked in the university kitchen, scouring racks of humid dishware, scrubbing down tables, and serving plates of inedible turkey tetrazzini to my classmates on the dinner line. While some people considered this degrading, it seemed no worse to me than what Henry had to go through each month, adding up every receipt for chewing gum and Wite-Out.

A moment later, Henry hung up. “Well, there’s one parent pissed off.” He began kicking the heel of one of his boots against the toe of the other, then forced a laugh, a sort of high-pitched guffaw. “At least Dad was drunker than shit, so maybe he won’t remember.” He handed me the phone. “Okay, princess. You’re up.”

I hunkered in the corner with my fistful of laundry quarters.

“Sweetie,” my mother said. “Are you at Penn Station yet?”

“Um, no,” I said. “The Connecticut Turnpike.”

“Oh?”

“It’s in Connecticut,” I said.

“I realize that.”

“Guess what?” I said, deciding to attempt enthusiasm. “It turns out that my friend Henry’s girlfriend goes to the same school as Jeremy. So we’re driving down to Duke.”

“Right now?”

“Isn’t that great?” I said. “I mean, what are the chances?”

“But I thought you were coming home tonight. How long are you going for? Not the entire week, I hope?”

“Probably,” I said. “I guess.”

“Well,” my mother said, clearly displeased. “Where are you going to stay?”

Although I’d anticipated this question, once my mother actually asked it, it hung in the air like a wrecking ball. It was one thing, I realized, to promote the idea among my peers that I was this fabulous nymphomaniac. It was quite another, however, to promote it to my parents.

Some girls probably never admitted it. They simply got married, had children, and their parents lived with the happy illusion that their daughters were virgins until their wedding night—much the same way a lot of us daughters harbored the same illusions about our parents. On the other extreme were girls like my friend Dani, who “accidentally” left her birth control pills on the edge of the sink for her mother to find. Or Judy, who got pregnant in tenth grade. Some of my friends mentioned it almost casually, the way you might announce you’d gotten your period or flunked geometry. But in high school, I’d gone to great lengths to conceal any inkling of my sex life from my parents. Whatever freedoms they granted me, I was sure, were based on their illusion that I was a straight-A goody-goody.

Now, I was on a road trip staged to announce otherwise. Yet hearing my mother’s voice, I was amazed how quickly my bravado dissolved; it was like Weetabix in milk. I twisted the metallic snake of the phone cord around my knuckles, willing myself to the truth.

“I’m staying with Jeremy,” I said finally. Then I added, for emphasis, “It’s not like I haven’t before, you know.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

My mother cleared her throat. For a moment, I had the sensation of standing too close to an enormous bell that had just sounded; the reverberations felt palpable, physically jarring.

“Well,” my mother said distractedly, after another second, “I’m annoyed you didn’t let me know sooner. I just cooked up a big pot of brown rice and seaweed, you know. And I just put out fresh towels. And I just. Oh. Well. Fine.”

With that, she hung up.

Back on the road, Henry and I carried on as if we’d pulled off a jewel heist. We were positively punchy, vibrating with anxiousness and relief and incredulity over what we’d just done.

When we reached the glittering Mecca of New York,
my city,
as I liked to call it, I bounced up and down in my seat like a lunatic. “Oh, New York,” I cried, pointing dementedly out the window at the skyline, resplendent in all its cubist overkill. For a moment, I flashed on my mother. I was barreling past her over a bridge less than ten minutes away. Somewhere in the nestle of skyscrapers, she was leaning over our dinner table, removing the place setting she’d lovingly put out for me just hours before. I felt a stab of sadness, then forced it away. “My sweet, shining city. Don’t worry, New York,” I called out as we crossed the Triboro, “I won’t abandon you. I’m coming back, New York, I promise.”

“Oh for fucks sake. You’re crossing a bridge, not emigrating,” Henry said.

“Humph. Easy for you to say, seeing as you don’t live in a
real city,
Scarlet,” I sniffed. “You don’t mind if I call you ‘Scarlet,’ do you?” I added. “You know, given that you’re Southern. And a redhead. And a little, you know, fey.”

“Oh, that’s good. That’s very good,” Henry grinned, keeping his eyes fixed on the road. “Just keep it up, you over-breasted Yankee nymphomaniac.”

I clapped my hands delightedly. “Over-breasted Yankee nymphomaniac” actually sounded pretty good to me. “I can take it, you know,” I informed Henry. “Seeing as I’m from New York City and all. The Center of the Universe.”

“Yeah, well just wait till we get you over the Mason-Dixon line, Ms. Noo Yawk.”

I rearranged myself in my seat. “Why, the South, I bet it’s just so cute,” I cooed. “With all those dilapidated plantations and lynch mobs walking around.”

Henry began whistling. “I’m just going to let you go on,” he said cheerily.

“Why, I’ll bet there’ll be little shotgun shacks,” I said, warming to the task. “With guys named Jethro and Willie Ray sittin’ on the porch, talking about how, one day, they’re fixin’ to fix the rusted car in their yard. And there’ll be some prissy little grandmother, too, complaining how General Sherman burned down the grain silo and stole the family silver.”

“Keep talking,” said Henry.

“And then,” I said rhapsodically, “we’ll stop at some quaint little country store, where two proprietors named Doc and Maw will say, ‘Well, howdy, stranger. If you’re lookin’ for some good, down-home cookin’, Lurleen over there makes just about the best pecan waffles ever you tasted in all of Virginny.’ Boy, I just can’t wait to see that South,” I said.

“You about finished?” Henry said with some amusement.

“I reckon I am,” I said, settling back contentedly.
‘’Reckon.
That’s what y’all say in the south, too, isn’t it?”

When we actually crossed the Mason-Dixon line it was dark. If there hadn’t been a small billboard, I wouldn’t have noticed. The Interstate was one long, mind-numbing stretch of asphalt, dark on either side except for an occasional warehouse or industrial park. We’d been traveling for over eight hours by then—we’d hit a lot of traffic passing through New York—and both Henry and I were starting to curdle from sleep deprivation and artificial stimulants. Strewn with Twix wrappers, cigarette butts, Coke cans, and McDonald’s bags, the Toyota began to feel like a giant ashtray. Since neither of us liked country & western music or Baptist preachers—just about all there was on the radio—we were pretty much left to Henry’s music collection, which consisted precisely of three tapes, Duran Duran, Thomas Dolby, and Kraftwerk, all of which I loathed. Nineteen-eighties music, to me, was manufactured and lazy. If you were going to be a musician, at least you could play your own instruments.

The Toyota’s ventilation system seemed to alternate between chilly and smelly, and I began to think that not wearing any underwear for a seventeen-hour car trip had been a mistake, too.

“Oh happy day,” said Henry, lighting another cigarette, then gesturing to the car in front of us going ten miles below the speed limit with its left blinker on. “We’ve got Grampa here taking his car for a walk.”

Just south of Washington, we pulled over to a gas station. Henry bought a cellophane cone full of pink and yellow daisies for Kitty, which he propped up on the floor of the back seat in an empty Mountain Dew bottle he’d filled up with water.

“I hope these’ll keep. You don’t think they’re too withered?” he said, nibbling at the cuticle on his thumb. “I wanted roses, but these were all they had left.” Then we walked over to a phalanx of pay phones by the roadside to let our paramours know we’d be late. It was eleven o’clock at night. The wind was hot and relentless. Cars tore by on the overpass, making it difficult to hear. On Jeremy’s end of the line, there was a ball game on in the background, which didn’t help any.

“What did you say?” I shouted.

“I said, ‘What?’” he said.

“I said, ‘We’re going to be even later!’” I yelled.

“Are you really coming down here?”