!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Tuesday night, Jeanne showed up at dinner in a shimmery black cape, tall conical hat, wand, and black mask. “Where’s your costume? Aren’t you going to the Yard, protect the little kids knocking on doors?”
I was not a fan of Halloween. “I have a hard enough time just being me, much less dressing up as someone else. Can I just go with you, keep you company?” I looked at Jeanne in her witch’s outfit, and Marcia, dressed as a cheerleader, tight ribbed letter sweater hanging down to her jeans below. She jiggled pom-poms in my face. “Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“Didn’t I tell you? Junior year, I was actually a cheerleader. Of course, with no football team, it was more of an honorary position, I guess.” She threw one arm up, the other down, stuck one hip out, and, pirouetting around, danced out the door.
Outside, Jeanne asked, “So you went to New York on Saturday. But you didn’t come home until Sunday afternoon. Um, what did you guys do? Where did you stay?”
Marcia added, “Jeanne and I decided, while you were gone, we need to make a pact together. About boys. And sex.”
“Everything but…” Jeanne explained.
“Everything but?” I wondered.
Marcia went on. “In high school, boys were always looking at me, taking me out, expecting me to … do things. The school was mostly Catholic, and some of the girls, we vowed, ‘Never”, we’re not going to let our lives get messed up just because some boy wants to, how do I say it, “experiment” on us. But we didn’t want to be seen as prudes, so we drew up some ground rules, and all swore to each other. I’m starting to feel the need for that again.” She paused as we came to Mass. Ave, the traffic halting us as we crossed over to Harvard. “The TA in my childhood development class, Esther, she’s married. I asked her about it, about how she handled it when she was in school. She’s really cool, she said she’d show us some things.”
That Friday, we went to Esther’s apartment. She’d convinced her husband Nathan to have a boys’ night out.
Esther was short, wiry, almost hyperkinetic. Large black glasses framed her face under short black hair, giving her an owlish appearance. She turned to the television, switching off Walter Cronkite in mid-sentence while khakied GIs slogged through a swamp, rifles held up over their heads.
“Men…” she whispered, more to herself than us. Louder, she went on. “You all want to be shrinks, right? What was it Socrates said, ‘Know thyself’? You may think he means, your mind, who you are.” Esther was about 5 years older than us, married, graduated the previous year from Brandeis. She exuded worldly self assurance. “When I was your age, high school and starting college, I didn’t know much. About myself. About my body, what it wanted, what it could do. I found out a lot, by making a lot of mistakes, stupid things. No reason you should have to make the same ones. Let’s see what we can learn together.”
That night, we talked about what we’d done, or really hadn’t done, with boys. What we’d learned, or really hadn’t learned in high school health class. We shared our knowledge, or really our lack of it. Esther just let us talk, looking around our little group, eyebrows raised, a human talking stick keeping the conversation moving.
Jeanne: “At school, in class, it all sounded so mechanical, so anatomical. “Penis’, ‘Vagina’, “Spermatozoa’, ‘Ovaries, tubes’.”
Me: “I know. Never anything about what do do with physical feelings, just vague talk about love and responsibility.”
Marcia: “And why did we have to be separate, boys and girls? Wouldn’t it be better to talk about this with them, rather than just talk about them?”
Me: “Yeah, the same’s true when we try to learn from each other. Anybody ever had a conversation about sex, a serious conversation, I mean, with boys and girls – women – together. And don’t start about mothers, or sisters…they either clam up, or make jokes. At least mine did.”
Jeanne: “Have any of you ever looked at yourself? Or someone else? Down there, I mean. I’m gonna be a doctor, and I’ve looked at those anatomy books and drawings. But that’s isolated, and two dimensional. I wish I knew more, and I don’t even have a boyfriend, not like Janie.”
Esther looked back at me, raising an eyebrow and cocking her head to one side. “Well…?”
I considered her unasked question. Mike and never did talk about what we were doing, kissing, feeling, lying together. “It almost seems a cliche, but I want him to love me…I think…I feel the way to do that is hold him close, have him feel that without me asking or telling him. Does that make any sense?”
“Has he asked you to do anything you don’t want to?”
“Nooo. He’s unsure, I think, maybe even a little frightened of scaring me away.”
Esther just nodded. I couldn’t think of what else to say, so she turned to Jeanne. “You know, maybe we should all bring a mirror when we meet again. And is it OK if I ask a couple of others to come? The more we are, the more we know together, is what I say.”
Two weeks later, Nathan away at a Celtics’ game, seven of us were gathered in a circle. We each had a mirror – compacts, handheld, round, square, all kinds. Esther brought out two flashlights, and trained her floor lamps into the center.
“Is anybody going to feel uncomfortable if we take our clothes off, and look at ourselves? Has anyone tried to do that before?”
Marcia giggled nervously. “Playing doctor?”
“No, I mean since you grew up, got bigger, filled out, started having periods, all that.”
Another girl said, “How would you do that? We’re not dogs, we can’t, like, lick ourselves.”
Jeanne lifted her hand mirror and waved it a bit. “I get it. That’s what this is for, right?”
It felt a little funny – no it felt a lot funny – but we all took off our pants or skirts, shed our underwear, drew up our knees, and held the mirrors between them. Gasps, laughs, and sighs emanated softly from the circle.
Esther was speaking. “Now, if you’ve ever put a tampon in, you probably have a general idea. Uh, nobody’s on her period now, right?” No response. She went on. “Though maybe you never stopped to look, you just wanted to get it out and in, didn’t pay any attention to anything else down there. So. Take your hand, your free hand, and make a ‘V’ with the first two fingers, pointing down. You see those wrinkly things in the middle?”
“Labia?” someone said.
“Right. Labia. Means lips. Let’s call ‘em that, OK? Try to push them apart gently, slowly, with your two fingers, push them wider.”
It was a little tricky for me, someone without a lot of hand/eye coordination, to navigate that maneuver looking through a mirror, but I soon got it. “My hair keeps getting in the way!” I groused.
One of the new girls, a blond with thin wispy locks, grumbled, “At least you’ve got some.”
“Ah, there it is!” I exclaimed.
Next to me, Jeanne turned her head. “What is?”
“My hymen!”
That same blond, a bit more dejectedly this time, said, “At least you’ve got one…” Giggles all around.
Pale pink inside the darker crescent of those lips, a few stray black curly hairs tickling the folds radiating from its center, it looked so small, so vulnerable, so … lonely? “No way anything fits through there, Esther.” I whined.
“Have you ever seen a new born baby’s head? We can’t see it well, ‘cause we’re not looking all the way inside, but the vagina, that whole area, is pretty elastic. Think of one of those little drink umbrellas, or a fan. It’s all compact when folded. But open it up, see how big it is.”
Jeanne blurted out, “Where’s my clitoris?”
Marcia snickered, “You sure you’ve got one?”
One of the other girls said, “Clit..Clit-us? That’s not something they told us about in Health. They named it, pointed to it in those drawings, but didn’t seem to say much about it.”
“OK, the clitoris,” Esther declaimed. “To me, this is where the magic happens. Anatomically, it’s the same thing as a penis on a boy.”
“But it just never grows or gets big?” someone asked.
“Oh, it can grow, can get bigger. But that’s not the point. You know how sometimes a boys’ head seems to be focussed on nothing but his dick?” More laughs. “Well, we’ve got all those same nerves they have there, but all compressed, compacted into that little spot. So much more sensitive, so much more…powerful…when it comes to feeling sex.”
On the way back to Cabot, Jeanne wondered, “I don’t know if that helped or not. I’m still afraid of doing anything with a boy, even more afraid now, they might hurt me there. Marcia, Janie…?”
Marcia slowed, looked away, and, keeping her head down, said, “There was this guy, senior year. He took me to the prom, in his parents’ station wagon. Somebody must have put something into the punch, or maybe he just did it to my drink. I was so tired, I couldn’t fight, after he folded the seat down in the back of the car. I don’t know if he did anything or not, I was so out of it. It didn’t feel like it afterwards, my clothes were still clean. But he still bragged about it to his friends the next week. Nobody said anything to me, but they all gave me looks, like, ‘Oh, the great Marcia Levine, she’s not so smart after all…”
Thanksgiving was the next week. Mike and were both staying at school, ostensibly to study, write papers. He planned to drive up Friday morning, we’d spend the day in Cambridge and Boston, maybe go to Lynn shore Drive where he was born, seen Nahant and Salem. I realised we hadn’t talked about what to do after that.
********