City of Girls

This was an honest answer; my sexual experience up until that point was very little. At a school dance back at Emma Willard—where they’d bused in for the occasion the sorts of boys whom we were expected to someday marry—I’d let a boy from the Hotchkiss School feel my breasts while we were dancing. (As best as he could find my breasts, anyway, which took some problem solving on his part.) Or maybe it’s too generous to say that I let him feel my breasts. It would be more accurate to say that he just went ahead and handled them, and I didn’t stop him. I didn’t want to be rude, for one thing. For another thing, I found the experience to be interesting. I would have liked for it to continue, but the dance ended and then the boy was on a bus back to Hotchkiss before we could take it any further.

I’d also been kissed by a man in a bar in Poughkeepsie, on one of those nights when I’d escaped the Vassar hall wardens and ridden my bike into town. He and I had been talking about jazz (which is to say that he had been talking about jazz, and I had been listening to him talk about jazz, because that is how you talk to a man about jazz) and suddenly the next moment—wow! He had pressed me up against a wall and was rubbing his erection against my hip. He kissed me until my thighs shook with desire. But when he’d reached his hand between my legs I had balked, and slipped from his grasp. I’d ridden my bicycle back to campus that night with a sense of wobbly unease—both fearing and hoping that he was following me.

I had wanted more, and I had not wanted more.

A familiar old tale, from the lives of girls.

What else did I have on my sexual résumé? My childhood best friend, Betty, and I had practiced with each other some inexpert renditions of what we called “romantic kisses”—but then again we had also practiced “having babies” by stuffing pillows under our shirts so that we looked pregnant, and the latter experiment was just about as biologically convincing as the former.

I’d once had my vagina examined by my mother’s gynecologist, when my mother grew concerned that I had not yet begun menstruating by the age of fourteen. The man had poked around down there for a bit—while my mother watched—and then he told me I needed to be eating more liver. It had not been an erotic experience for anyone involved.

Also, between the ages of ten and eighteen, I’d fallen in love about twenty dozen times with some of my brother Walter’s friends. The choice benefit of having a popular and handsome brother was that he was always surrounded by his popular and handsome friends. But Walter’s friends were always too hypnotized by him—their ringleader, the captain of every team, the most admired boy in town—to pay much attention to anyone else in the room.

I was not totally ignorant. I touched myself now and again, which made me feel both electrified and guilty, but I knew that wasn’t the same thing as sex. (Let’s just say this: my attempts at self-pleasure were something akin to dry swimming lessons.) And I understood the basics of human sexual function, having taken a required seminar at Vassar called “Hygiene”—a class that taught us about everything without telling us about anything. (In addition to presenting diagrams of ovaries and testicles, the teacher gave us a rather concerning admonition that douching with Lysol was neither a modern nor a safe means of contraception—thus planting in my head a vision that disturbed me then and still disturbs me now.)

“Well, when will you go the limit, then?” Jennie asked. “You’re not getting any younger!”

“What you don’t want to have happen,” said Gladys, “is that you meet a fellow now, and you really like him, and then you’ve got to break the bad news to him that you’re a virgin.”

“Yeah, a lot of guys don’t care for that,” Celia said.

“That’s right, they don’t want the responsibility,” said Gladys. “And you don’t want your first time to be with somebody you like.”

“Yeah, what if it goes all wrong?” said Jennie.

“What could go wrong?” I asked.

“Everything!” said Gladys. “You won’t know what you’re doing, and you could look like a dummy! And if it hurts, you don’t want to find yourself blubbering in the arms of some guy you like!”

Now, this was the direct opposite of everything I’d been taught about sex thus far in life. My school friends and I had always been given to understand that a man would prefer it if we were virgins. We had also been instructed to save the flower of our girlhood for somebody whom we not only liked, but loved. The ideal scenario—the aspiration which we’d all been raised to embrace—was that you were supposed to have sex with only one person in your entire life, and that person should be your husband, whom you met at an Emma Willard school prom.