I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (20 page)

“Hmmmmmp,” the boy was saying, shaking his head, as in Wouldn’t-that-just-take-the-cake, as in Wouldn’t-that-just-be-the-greatest-thing-ever.

 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t stop talking to the boy about sex. Every so often, something would inspire me—the banana I was about to slice over his Cheerios, say, or the cigar the old man at the bus stop was chewing on, or the tubelike water balloon he was itchy to throw at me—and I’d point at the boy, I’d remind him, “You always wear a condom! Do you hear me? You always wear a condom!”

As the boy got older, he grew sick of hearing about it. “I know! I know!” he’d say. “You don’t have to keep telling me that.”

“You’re torturing him,” my friend Steven told me. “Ten years from now, when he’s finally having sex, he’s going to hear his mother’s voice in his head. And that’s not something any guy wants to hear.” Steven looked mournful. He was thirty-four years old and spoke to his mother every morning at seven o’clock; if he didn’t call her at seven, she called him at seven-oh-five. Steven patted my hand, saying, “It’s not good for a guy to learn about sex from his mother. Let him learn from his friends. That’s how I learned, and that’s where my son will learn. It really is the best way.”

When my son came home from the sex ed talk he received in fifth grade, I asked him how it went. I was feeling pretty smug, pretty satisfied with my parenting skills, but the boy was furious with me. He said, “You said you told me everything! You did not tell me everything!”

Apparently, I’d neglected to tell him about his vas deferens, a part of the male anatomy I’d never given much thought to. In fact, I wasn’t even sure where it was or what it was for. Later that night, after the boy had gone to bed, I’d look
vas deferens
up on
WebMD.com
.

But right now, I was playing it cool. “Vas deferens?” I said. “Oh, yes. That’s the German rock band, right?”

The boy did not find me amusing.

“A Swedish pastry chef?”

He glared, and I couldn’t help myself, I said it: “Between men and women, there is a vas deferens.”

The boy said if that was supposed to be a joke, he didn’t get it, and I told him you will someday. I have always hated the You-will-someday response. It’s another way adults can say I know something you don’t know, but it’s also a way adults can avoid discussing matters for which they have no answers.

 

 

 

 

 

It was easier to talk to my son when he was too young to do anything with the information. Now that he’s older, it’s more worrisome. I’ve been trying to think of what I could say to the boy about sex that I haven’t already said. If he feels like he’s justified to call a girl a slut, then I feel like I’ve done something wrong, like I haven’t said the right thing, I haven’t said enough, like I’ve somehow done him a wrong. I’ve talked plenty about penises and vaginas but maybe I haven’t talked enough about the heart. Maybe I haven’t said enough how easy it is to confuse love with lust, loneliness with longing. Maybe I need to say something about how important it is to be kind and careful with someone else’s heart.

I was younger than my son is right now the first time I got my heart broken. I got my first kiss from Mickey Galileo, who claimed he was a direct descendant of the Italian astronomer who invented the telescope and studied the stars. For a twelve-year-old’s pickup line, it wasn’t so bad. In fact, it must have had its charm, because Mickey Galileo planted first kisses on all the girls in my neighborhood.

During our senior year of high school, Mickey would mullet his hair, and then he would perm his mullet, but now it flopped flat in a long shaggy cap over his head. I didn’t like Mickey’s hair, or the way he stared at my chest, or how he ran his hand up and down my back to feel if I was wearing a bra, but I did like when he pressed his chap-lipped mouth against mine, and because I liked it, I really liked it, I thought I really liked Mickey Galileo. I thought I might even love him. When Mickey told me he needed his mom’s gold bracelet back because he didn’t like me anymore, he was Brenda Tucci’s boyfriend now, I cried. I was sad because Mickey didn’t love me, but what really got me down was that without Mickey, there would be no more kissing. There was no one else for me to kiss.

But then, one day after school, Nathan Evans and I stood in my backyard, and while Nella and Duchess and Schmitty, our family mongrels, wagged their tails and watched, Nathan pushed me up against the steel-gray siding of my house so he could uncurl his tongue in my mouth. Nathan was not particularly good-looking. His eyelashes and eyebrows were so pale he might as well not have had any at all. His face was long and narrow. His teeth were humongous, and his neck was skinny except for his Adam’s apple.

Only, I didn’t care how he looked. I only cared about the kissing, how it made me feel a feeling that at the time seemed indescribable, though I would now identify that feeling as horny. Very horny. I was thirteen years old.

I thought I was in love with Nathan Evans. I imagined we’d get married so we could kiss like this every day, but I’d have to adopt children since I wouldn’t want any kid of mine to inherit those icky invisible eyebrows. As his mouth slurped and sucked at mine, I tried it out, those words. I murmured, “I love you, Nathan Evans.” We kissed and kissed. We kissed from three-thirty to five, which was when Nella and Duchess and Schmitty started barking for their supper. Once their barking turned into howling, my mother hollered for me to feed them, and Nathan Evans, whose lips were red and puffy and swollen from all that kissing, rode away on his bike. I’d never been so happy.

Until the next day at school.

There was noise rising out of the hallways at John F. Kennedy Junior High School, and there was noise rolling out of the lunch-room and slamming off the walls in the gym, the library, my homeroom, my math class, English, social studies, home ec, and everywhere else in the school. The noise was loud and it got louder, and it all seemed to be about me. How I had sex with Nathan Evans. How I fucked him right there in my parents’ backyard.

Bruce Carleton, a boy I’d known since kindergarten, licked his tongue across his lips when I passed him in the hall. Jonas Jones stuck his tongue out and wagged it at me. During lunch, Raymond Dantico kept his tongue in his mouth, but thrust it against his cheek while making throaty little moans. Billy Argot and Mark Haven and William Wikiera moaned and grunted, while Freddie Stone asked me did it hurt.

All day that day, I kept it together. I was humiliated, I was heartbroken, but I kept my head up, I didn’t cry. While I was putting forth the notion that the very idea of Nathan Evans made me want to vomit, Nathan Evans was avoiding me, going out of his way not to look at me. As far as he was concerned, his work was done. In the eyes of his peers, he’d become a man, while I became a slut. A tramp. A whore. A Girl with a Bad Reputation.

I think back to that day, and there he is, I see him, the boy. Not Nathan Evans, or Freddie Stone, or Bruce Carleton, but the only boy who matters. My son. I see him wandering through the hallways of John F. Kennedy Junior High with the rest of them. He’s wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and a Penn State hat even though it’s against the rules to wear a baseball cap in the school. He’s chewing on a toothpick. He’s slouching against the lockers. He’s admiring his biceps. He’s as arrogant as only a thirteen-year-old boy can be. He’s sure of himself and his place in the world, just as he’s sure that girl walking by is a slut. Hey, he shouts at her. Hey! Did you remember to use a condom? Well? Did you?

 

 

 

 

 

There are still other things I could tell the boy.

At age sixteen, during the National Academic Games Tournament, I lost my virginity to a boy named Keith from the New Orleans team: something about that Louisiana accent, something about the way he called me honey like he was a grown man and I was a small child. He’s a doctor now.

When I was seventeen, I dated a guy named Pete who was majoring in physical education at Youngstown State University. Every Friday night, he took me to a movie, he bought me an ice cream cone, he made out with me in his basement, he took me home in time for my curfew. It never went any further than that. He said he respected me too much to have sex with me, though I didn’t see what respect had to do with my pounding heart, my hot skin. Years later, I ran into his best friend, Ed, at a Rolling Stones concert. Ed informed me that after Pete took me home, he went to a strip club, he spent his student loan money on lap dances. Pete is a fireman now, and I wonder does he know that after the Stones concert, I made out with his best friend, Ed, out of spite and years too late, payback for all those lap dances.

At eighteen, I was crazy about a philosophy major named Rick, who was long and lean, black-haired and green-eyed, whom I let condescend to me just because I liked the way he looked. He’s the unemployed father of daughters now, but back then he was so smooth.

I could tell my son that I said yes a lot, but I did sometimes say no.

I did!

I said no to a guy named Jimmy who asked me out during a parenting class. Such a class was required by the State of Colorado when a divorcing couple has a minor child. Jimmy was fat. Hairy. Wearing a thick gold chain. He wanted to know would I like to go out dancing with him after parenting class?

I said no to the boy who asked me out while standing in line at McDonald’s. This was, of course, when I still ate at McDonald’s, before I saw
Super Size Me
, when I was still greedy for a McDonald’s cheeseburger and chocolate shake. I was twenty-eight years old, my would-be suitor was maybe sixteen.

I don’t know what I said to Billy Zeigler, a boy I knew in college. I don’t know what I did with Billy Zeigler. I don’t know what happened that night except that I drank a lot, too much, I passed out, and when I woke up, blurry and stiff, sticky and fuzzy-headed, Billy Zeigler informed me it wasn’t rape, he did not rape me. “You better never say I raped you,” he said, “because I didn’t.” Then he said here’s your coat, I’ll walk you to your dorm.

I try not to think about that night, what may or may not have happened.

There are still other things I could tell him, the boy, my son.

Things like:

If I had fucked Nathan Evans, then you’d have no eyebrows! The point is, if a girl’s been nice enough to let you touch her boob, the respectful thing to do is keep it to yourself.

And:

Though your father and I did have sex in the car on the first date, and I did throw up afterward, he was really sweet about it, holding back my hair and offering to buy me some 7Up. Of course, none of this is why we got a divorce.

And:

It really is very simple. When a girl is too drunk to know she’s having sex, one should not have sex with her.

And:

I liked falling in love with boys. I fell in love easily, happily, a lot. I fell in love with gay boys and bad boys, boys I’d met at the bar, frat boys, and the boy my college roommate liked. From the age of thirteen to the present, I have fallen in love with a red-headed paraplegic and a balding mathematician and the French student who bagged my groceries. I fell in love with a logger, a poet, a colleague. I was smitten with the doctor who delivered my son, I had a crush on an arrogant dark-haired musician with a trust fund, I was so wildly infatuated with a potter who had big hands and long fingers that in an attempt to show him how desirable and fun and sexy I was, I came on to his friend the filmmaker right in front of him. Two days later, when the filmmaker invited me to go away for a weekend, I didn’t go.

See? I could say. Sometimes I really did say no!

But only sometimes, the boy might point out. There were still a lot of guys. There’s no denying you’ve been with a lot of guys.

I could ask him if he thinks “a lot” means the same as “too many.” I could prepare myself for his answer. I could try to change his mind about sluts, like me, like the girl in his eighth-grade yearbook, like so many girls he’s yet to meet. I could tell him that he shouldn’t call a girl a slut because someday she might be somebody’s mother. I could tell him maybe she’s a slut because she’s lonely, she’s sad, she’s hoping someone or something will make the lonely and sad go away.

It won’t, of course. It never does. But nonetheless, there’s not a girl who’s more hopeful than a slut, more optimistic. She may give in but she doesn’t give up. She keeps looking, she keeps hoping, she’s always waiting for that someone who will say it: I love you, too.

I
t was love-hate. It was passive-aggressive, it was self-destructive and unnecessarily complicated, and I cared what he thought of me way too much and for much too long.

And he wasn’t even my father or someone I was sleeping with.

The first time I saw Gerry Hawthorne, he was standing outside Wilkinson Hall, smoking a cigarette. I was newly hired to teach two sections of freshmen composition at the same state college where Gerry was the English department chair. He was wearing shorts and sandals and a purple T-shirt with a pocket that contained a pack of Camels. Because he was my boss, I thought he’d be an important person to make nice to, especially since I wanted to someday go from teaching part-time to teaching full-time, and he seemed approachable, easygoing, fun. I was certain I’d like him.

Mostly, it was the Camels that gave me this impression. I was a smoker, too, and because I had no reason to believe otherwise, I thought all people who smoked were cool.

At this time, smokers were relegated to smoking outside. We grumbled about it, of course, especially if it was rainy or windy, too hot or too cold—smokers prefer to smoke in comfort—but rough weather should never quell the desire to light up. If it does, you are but a dabbler, a poser, an I-only-smoke-when-I’m-drinking-can-I-bum-one dilettante. You are a phony.