3 is not a Crowd

KAY: I, on the other hand, went through four years of public school and emerged intact. I would pet but I wouldn’t put out. Do you remember those articles. Do you have to pet to be popular? God, that dates me. Imagine an article like that today! For that matter, imagine a girl who doesn’t get laid in high school. You’ve come a long way, baby—

The answer to the question was yes, you had to pet to be popular, and I petted, and I was popular enough, but I didn’t put out. This wasn’t rare in my group. There were a couple of girls who did put out, but not too many. This was in my particular group, not in the whole school, where the percentage of virgins must have been much lower. But we were a very middle-class bunch. We might not be saving it for our husbands, but we were certainly saving it for our True Loves, and that meant wait until you’re in college and make sure he gives you his fraternity pin.

So I didn’t go to a school where there were boys, let alone fraternity pins. But I had relations with seven boys during my freshman year.

PEGGY: Eight.

KAY: No, it was seven, wasn’t it? Maybe it was eight. Why the hell should you remember if I don’t?

JERRY: Because she loves you, darling.

KAY: Sweet. The point is that once I started I didn’t know how to stop. I really was a slut. The classic tramp pattern. I felt very out of it socially. My group in high school was very snobby, the cream of the social order there, and all of a sudden I was with all of these private school people and I was snob enough to care about it at the time. I also decided I was pretty ignorant and mousy compared to all these polished preppie cunts. Typical low-estimate-of-self shit. Typical reaction formation. So of course I fucked around, and of course I didn’t enjoy it much, and this convinced me I was a lousy lay, which I very likely was.

JERRY: How you’ve changed!

KAY: And I got knocked up. Inevitably I got knocked up. And had an abortion, and at least I had the sense to do that right. No knitting needles routine. A real live doctor in a clean office, a quick scrape and no postoperative complications, thank God. Is it proper to thank God for a successful abortion? I don’t see why not.

The abortion put me off sex. I hit the old books just in time to save myself from flunking out. I spent the summer at home and dated the same crowd of boys I had dated during high school. Most of them had gone to schools like Michigan and Northwestern and pledged fraternities.

I laid a couple of them. Two of them. One of them decided he was in love with me and tried to give me his pin. I told him I wasn’t that kind of a girl.

When I went back to school and Peggy and I started rooming together, neither of us were particularly active socially. I had liked her well enough all along, but now we began to get really close. We talked quite a bit about men. Told each other what we had done sexually. Heterosexually, that is. She never said anything about fun and games at prep school.

Nor did it occur to me to ask, and I had nothing to report in that area myself. I was a complete innocent on the subject. If I ever had any subliminal urgings in that direction they were too subliminal ever to let me know about them. I suppose there were girls in my high school who had crushes on the gym teacher. That’s the usual pattern, isn’t it? And I suppose the gym teacher must have been a dyke. I suppose all lady gym teachers are dykes, whether they know it or not.

So here we were, the brainless tramp from the Midwest and the sexy two-way preppie, rooming together and spending more and more of our time with just each other for company, and discussing sex all the time, and telling each other how men were really a drag. And admiring each other’s bodies — I wished I were thin and long and lean and all like Miss Sophisticate here, and she had always wished she was like me, with a pair of tits that could qualify her as a stand-in for Elsie the Cow.

I think if Peggy had been as innocent in these matters as I was, we still would have wound up in bed together, because all the conditions were certainly right for it. All systems go, you know. But to make things easier she had been down this street before, and she did me the supreme favor of turning me out.

PEGGY: Actually I had a pretty hard time for a while that Kay didn’t know about. This big moral conflict thing. Like should I or should I not seduce my roomie? I wanted to a whole long time before I got around to doing anything about it. Kay was the first girl at college that I had felt this way about. The girl I had originally planned to room with that year, we were close, but in a completely sexless way. I would now and then see girls in a class or walking across campus and would say to myself that So-and-so would probably be fun to ball, but with no idea at all of doing anything about this. Pure window shopping and nothing but.