A Round-Heeled Woman (6 page)

No wonder Miss Levi didn't want me reading this stuff. She undoubtedly understood that Scarlett and Janice and Lady Diana were, in fact, raped, that these novels showed women who enjoyed going limp, having it done to them against their will; for, after all, what nice girl would do it willingly? That's what I learned, and although Miss Levi tried her best to keep me in the dark, she probably knew, too, that sex education begins at home.

In real life, my best friend's father was fire chief and roughly handsome. Her mother was delicately beautiful and played the violin. Life imitates art, don't you think?

So I went about my mother's business once I got to college, though I was dreadfully confused about what that business was. Still, the safe road is the high road. A few kisses, but more than that—no, no matter what Simon wanted. I subdued him, and me along with him. In fact, if I had been able to put two and two together, Simon, at six feet four inches and oh so fond of me, was the embodiment of all those fictional heroes. However, I was my mother's daughter, I was pretty sure, and I chose not to put anything together.

THESE WERE the fabulous fifties. In 1955 the pill was yet to be invented,
Roe
v.
Wade
was eighteen years away, but I was a twenty-two-year-old virgin living in San Francisco. (“I suppose you couldn't find anywhere farther away,” my mother remarked acidly.) I fell in love.

I did not own a diaphragm. I had never heard of Planned Parenthood. And Jack made me come for the first time in my life, and I wanted him to do it again and again. And I loved him inside of me and I made myself not think about wanting this and him. And I hated condoms, which he wore most of the time; they were yucky, especially with all that gunk in them afterward. I had failed miserably at subduing his animal passions and, worse, I had to admit to having some of my own. I was on my way to hell. There was only one answer: we would marry.

Jack taught me oral sex. Not that he did it on me. Me going down on him was what he taught. It was our form of birth control. It was better for him than having to pull out of me before he came. I loved giving him pleasure. I got right to it when I felt his insistent hand on the top of my head and listened to him groan as I swallowed his sperm, which I began to do regularly, after I forgot the Kleenex one night. For the first time in my life, I was powerful. Of course, I also knew I was a slut. So I didn't think about it. And I didn't think about what it might feel like if Jack reciprocated on me. I knew the words
blow job.
I knew boys got them. I had never heard of girls getting them, so they didn't because there was no such thing. I was Jack's to command. But I was the Keeper of the Flame.

In between times of lovemaking, and sometimes during, Jack got drunk. Sometimes he drank himself sick and threw up, more than once all over me, all over my sheets and pillow, and, as he leaned over the bed, into his shoes. This ought to have bothered me. He did it far too often, and once should have been enough for me to figure out that something was wrong. I knew that the young man I loved was not happy. But gosh, I honestly believed that I would make him happy and all things right once I became his wife. I had not the slightest doubt that, once we were married, his behavior would change.

What was going on here? What was going on here was that I wanted Jack to marry me so he could continue to fuck me. I loved Jack's lovemaking. He was sexy in a sloppy sort of way. To keep him in my bed or his bed or any bed at all with me in it, too, I tolerated vomit, long silences, slurred speech when speech came at all, and driving under the influence. I cleaned up after him, mixed his highballs, baked pies, knitted sweaters (I actually did all that) in the belief that surely he would see the light and that it would be at the end of the center aisle of the church. Poor Jack. Poor me.

After five years of this, one day the thought struck me that Jack was getting tired of pulling out, that, despite the eloquence of my mouth and tongue, he was getting tired. I ought to get a diaphragm, that is, if I wanted to keep him, if I wanted him to marry me, which of course I did—why else would I be committing sin all over the place?

Mary McCarthy's
The Group
became my sex guide, even though it arrived in my life after Jack had departed from it
.
Mary McCarthy's novel, which informed me as no other book had, concerned a group of college girls and their sex lives. My god, every one of them had one. And they were nice girls, too, from well-to-do families. They had gone to one of those fancy girls' schools in the East, which may have accounted for their being way, way ahead of Midwestern Me. But reading that novel I felt a rush of cool air. Sex was public. Mary McCarthy had made it so. Sex was not dirty. Unless nasty people had it. Happy and unhappy people had sex; sometimes the sex was wonderful, sometimes it wasn't. But definitely it was something that normal girls and boys did. And not always inside marriage. Maybe I hadn't been so bad after all.

In the book one of the characters, Dottie, does what I ought to have done at the very beginning of my love affair with Jack. Dottie goes to a doctor to be fitted with a diaphragm. Surely, I thought, the doctor will castigate her—an unmarried woman— and very possibly refuse her request for contraception. No such worries plague Dottie, for she is here at the request of the young man she loves. “A female contraceptive, a plug,” he tells her. “Get it from a doctor.”

Jack had never been this forthright with me. Jack didn't talk much at all, actually, and never about making love to me. I suspect he felt guilty for turning me into a slut. In the novel, Dottie believes her lover must really like her, must love her, to want her to keep herself safe from his desire: he must want to make love to her terribly. Surely, this must have been true of Jack, too. If I had had a diaphragm, if I could have made it possible for Jack, free of messy condoms, to stay in me, not to have to pull out at the last minute, maybe he would have liked sex with me instead of groaning at the last minute and throwing himself toward the other side of the bed and the box of Kleenex.

And, according to Mary McCarthy, getting fixed up was legal, pretty much. Doctors were allowed to prescribe contraceptives for the prevention or cure of disease. In my case, pregnancy would be a disease if I weren't married, the worst disease possible. Abortion was out of the question. When I was still in high school, I asked my mother what would happen if I got pregnant before I was married. “Don't any doctors [thinking of my doctor father] help?”

“No reputable physician would touch you,” my mother answered, “and those who would are filthy and you would die from the infection.”

That is what happened to one of my friends who returned from Europe pregnant by her Italian lover. She found an abortionist in New York and, sure enough, developed an infection that put her in the hospital. Her mother visited her there, looked down at her daughter, and said, “We will never speak of this again.” I knew this was exactly what my mother would do.

Another friend, finding herself pregnant by her married boyfriend, journeyed to Mexico. She returned infected physically and emotionally. I spent long nights listening to her describe the horrors of the dirty table in the dirty room, of the pain with no anesthesia, of the humiliation when the abortionist held up the fetus and ordered her to “Look! Shame!” It was a boy, my friend said, before she killed it.

So, for better or for worse, babies and sex went together. Unless there were other ways of doing it. In the novel, Dottie's doctor—a woman!—tells Dottie, “Any techniques that give both partners pleasure are perfectly allowable and natural. There are no practices, oral or manual, that are wrong in lovemaking, as long as both partners enjoy them.” My skin crawled. Could this doctor mean that oral sex, which I knew I had practiced on Jack, went both ways—that a man might “go down” on me? God, no. I would never put a man through that. Think of the smell.

I didn't go to the doctor. I did not get fitted with a diaphragm. I just couldn't. If I had taken such a bold step I would have had to face the fact that I was having illicit sex, that I was enjoying it, and that I was a whore without the money. I was getting so good at pretending—most of the time I believed Jack was in love with me—that facing Science in the person of a doctor would blow my cover. Not far below the surface of my pretending was my guilty secret that if I did get pregnant, Jack would have to marry me. And way below even that lay my desire to get pregnant, to do the very thing my mother had warned me most fiercely about. Revenge, how sweet.

Besides, I knew from my reading that I would have to have a pelvic examination. I had never had one, but I had seen one happen. The summer of my sophomore year in college, I worked in my father's office as a receptionist for him and the two other doctors who made up his practice. One afternoon, Jeanine Monroe, a girl two years ahead of me in high school, came in for her pregnancy checkup. I did not know the law mandated that someone in addition to the doctor be present during a pelvic exam. My father did not explain this to me. He said, from the examining room, “Come in here.” I do not remember my demur, but there must have been one because he said loudly, “Get in here and behave like an adult.”

Jeanine Monroe used to sit in the back booth of the City Drugstore and smoke cigarettes—in high school! The boys would come in after basketball practice and stand around while Jeanine blew smoke rings and drank the cherry Cokes they bought her. She would look up from under her long eyelashes, through the veil of smoke, and sometimes she would smile at the boys, sometimes she just looked back at them. I admired her tremendously. The boys on the team—Babe and Paul and Guy and Roger, the crushes of every girl in school including me—rocked back and forth on their heels and punched each other out of the way so they could squeeze into the booth with Jeanine.

Pretty soon something would happen, like Rutheda Dimke, wearing something see-through and flimsy and tacky, would come in—she was secretary at the ladder factory—and buy something from Ray Klopfenstein, the owner of the store and father of the adopted boy who could dance, Johnny. All conversation in the store would stop, the boys would shush each other, and Jeanine would pause in her smoking while we listened to hear what Rutheda would order. If she asked Ray for a box of Kotex, it meant that she had her period and couldn't meet him upstairs in the attic of the store for their affair. The attic of the City Drug was where Stinky Burkholder did it to Lauretta Riegsecker, too, and had to go to the army. Everybody in the store, everybody in town, knew what was going on and didn't really blame Ray. Ray's wife, Louella, was not the world's greatest-looking woman. We did, of course, blame Rutheda; we were scandalized by her. No wonder she wasn't married. The City Drug absolutely teemed with sex.

Only a few short years later, in my father's office, there I was in the examining room, Jeanine, now properly married and pregnant, on the table. I stood, my back against the wall, my eyes on the ceiling, while my father put his fingers into Jeanine. It lasted forever. I thought I would be sick. I don't know if this was my father's idea of sex education or if he was just grossly insensitive, probably both.

And now, in my own real life as a young sexual person in need of a diaphragm, a doctor—of course, he would be male— would put his finger right up me. The picture in my mind of me lying on an examining table, legs spread, while some strange man peered into my very self terrified me. Sex was dark; it belonged to the night, to the back booth of the City Drug, to the backseat of a car, to a blanket on the ground after midnight. Sex was furtive, dangerous, secret, forbidden, and therefore very exciting. Besides all that, look what happens to Dottie in the book: she gets her diaphragm, calls her lover, aptly named Dick, who is not at home and is never at home to her ever again. That's what you get when you go crazy outside of marriage.

So no diaphragm for me, and I continued to feel guilty as the times Jack and I made love grew fewer and fewer. I continued also to repress any thinking about what we were doing. I just waited for Jack to come round and marry me. Marriage would keep me from being a nymphomaniac.

When Jack betrayed me with another girl, when I found them in his bed, our bed, I forgave him. So he disappeared. He ran away. He fled. My sexual neediness, my desires, my requests, everything my mother had told me was improper—unless they belonged to men—had done this, had driven away forever the man who might have married me and made me respectable. So once again, I gave up on sex, tucked it way down deep, out of sight, out of mind. Until my biological clock, the phrase having yet to be born, began to chime.

Jack had done something terribly important for me besides introducing me to the thrill of the orgasm. Wordless though he usually was, he said near what would be the end of our affair, “Why don't you do something for yourself?” What was he talking about? Doing for myself meant getting married, having children, and making everybody happy the way all my friends were doing. What would doing something for myself be? What had I ever liked doing? The answer came quickly. I had liked going to school. I had liked getting taught by smart people, all men, of course. And so I went back to find them. To the University of California at Berkeley. I have Jack to thank for starting me off on what would be the happiest time of my life. Until now, of course.

SIX

My Very Own Jew

I grew up a Jew in a neighborhood peopled by Polish foundry workers
whose children, in packs, would surround me shouting, “Christ
killer!” Until I would go berserk and drive them away, large and
small, by the fearsomeness of my rage and fear.

—JONAH

I stood at the corner of College and Ashby, one of the busiest intersections of Berkeley, and listened intently to my friend Sandy. I love this corner. Almost always it is crowded with people walking and talking, young and old, homeless and not. It is a university corner and has a vitality I find in no other city, with the possible exceptions of Florence, Oxford, Ann Arbor, Cam-bridge, and I could go on. Be patient while I outgrow an adolescent addiction to hyperbole.

Thanksgiving, not far away, will empty Berkeley of many of its young—about thirty thousand—but now, the air sang with the energy of people of all ages busy with ideas and each other. I stepped back from the curb as an old BMW roared around the corner, heedless of those who might be waiting to cross. Always interesting, Berkeley is not always friendly.

Sandy's voice, its Chicago accent outperforming all the noises of the street, says, “This Jonah guy's coming when? This weekend? You've got to be kidding me!” I smile shyly. Sandy says, “Condoms! Have you got condoms?” A passing couple looks at us and smiles. I put my head down and my hand up to one side of my face. “You don't!” Sandy yells. “Your generation never thinks of things like that. That's why I'm talking to you.” Today, Sandy looks like Margaret O'Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis dressed for Halloween. Sandy's clothes are big, long, wide on her slim little body. The top is green, the pants some shade of magenta. The sleeves fall over her wrists, the hems of her pants cover her shoes. Even without the voice, Sandy is someone people notice. The more excited she gets, the more she flaps. She is a sail whose sheets no one can catch. She is three sheets to the wind without a need for alcohol to put her there.

“Let's have a cup of tea.” I point at the café across the street. I am regretting sharing my joyful secret. But I had had to. Keeping the deliciousness all to myself was more than I could manage. As the days passed since I had answered the first letters, tension had mounted. Sometimes, inside my own silence, I felt terror and desire wrapped in a ball, starting somewhere in my middle, rising into my chest, then dropping suddenly to the parts of me I wasn't used to feeling at all. It might really happen, a man might really touch me. Sometimes, I thought I might faint. So I had told a few friends, one of them Sandy, this young woman with the pink-tipped hair.

Sandy is on a roll. She throws her hands into the air. Birds dart away. “My generation? Condoms are just part of everyday life. They're de rigueur. We wouldn't think of having sex without some kind of protection.” She softens and puts her hand on my shoulder. “But sweetie, I know. I know guys your age, they go way back, they go back to the time when they didn't use anything, or if they did, it was the girl who was supposed to provide the protection, a diaphragm, something like that. STDs? Never heard of 'em.” I refrain from lecturing her on syphilis and the generations it had ravaged before penicillin. Let her rant. It is too late to stop her or the people who slow to hear her. I hear titters.

Sandy and I met at a nearby exercise studio where we are regulars. Like her, I am a fervent exerciser. Now. Not always. In the past I had subscribed to Mark Twain's “Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until it passes.” And so I grew fat.

In 1983, I turned fifty. I weighed 234 pounds. My son was a runaway living on the streets of Berkeley. I was polishing off a goodly amount of scotch each evening. I was living in a house I couldn't afford, and I was working sixty hours a week. I had not had sex in fifteen years, save with myself, an act grown increasingly unappealing with each ten pounds I added to my five-foot-three-inch frame. Paradoxically, I was a successful teacher of English in a California public high school. I was good at one thing. I was a helluva teacher. Teaching saved me from becoming a full-time drunk but not from becoming an obese, middle-aged, unhappy, distraught, frantic woman. I was bound for an early death.

At my fiftieth birthday party, one of my friends—in what surely he meant as a friendly, not a hostile, gesture—took many photographs of the people gathered to celebrate this important birthday, of the lavish buffet, the fully stocked bar, the hors d'oeuvres, the gifts, and of me. What he did was a kind of intervention. Nobody knew how to tell me I was out of control. So Rob did this: he put those photographs, carefully selected so that I was in every one of them, into an album, and a few days later, he gave the album to me. There I was, multiple images of me on every single page for pages and pages. Dreadful, absolutely dreadful. My color was high, like my blood pressure, which is to say, my cheeks were flushed; my chins rolled over the collar of my dress. (Yes, I had found a dress at the store for large women, which is where I shopped when absolute necessity made me do it; otherwise, I went to school to teach in one of three muumuus a friend had run up on her sewing machine.) My front self stuck out, way out, my breasts were enormous of course—surely you know by now—and I looked awful. So I never looked anywhere that might show my reflection—not in a mirror, not into a store window, and never into the faces of people I saw coming toward me on the street; their quick glances, their quicker turning away, telling me everything I did not want to know.

Still, public humiliations were there to remind me. One day, I took my son, then about seven, to the little train up in Tilden Park. The little train is a miniature train in which kids and their parents may ride along a miniature track through the leafiness of the park. My son and I sat in one of the cars, my bulk overflowing its sides. Behind us sat a child who could talk and sing and who did. About me. “Lady, lady,” he chanted singsong over and over, “fat old lady.” It was the longest ride of my life. My son laughed—what else could he do? I was devastated. When I got the courage to face the facts of my obesity, I would realize that, in the four years since leaving my husband, I had gained seventy pounds. I was safe from men, to be sure, but not from children and other living things.

I was also not safe from illness. In my forties I began to get sick every so often and then regularly. At least once a year, during the Christmas holidays usually, I could count on a severe bronchitis attacking my lungs and staying there for months. I lost time from school, went to school sick, and was exhausted well into spring. I continued to smoke. When school ended in June, and I was able to force myself to look back on my year, I had to admit that it had been lousy: half of it I had spent dragging myself to school, half of it getting ready to drag myself there. And I am not accounting here—you can figure this out for yourself—for the quality of my mothering.

Then came the year the bronchitis turned into pneumonia. I coughed blood and I got scared. So, put it all together— my health, my appearance, my all-too-soon-to-be-orphaned son—and I changed my life.

At Alta Bates hospital in Berkeley, with the help of a nutritionist, a psychologist, an exercise physiologist, many aerobics teachers—every one of them heroic, every one of them memorable—I lost weight, one hundred pounds of it. My goals were three: (1) run the Bay to Breakers (seven miles through San Francisco to the Pacific Ocean, a hundred thousand people dressed in serious running shorts, dressed in costumes to shock and amuse, or dressed in nothing at all; (2) fit into 501 Levi's; and (3) go to the Black and White Ball (a benefit for the symphony in the middle of San Francisco, when all of the Civic Center—the enormous plaza bordered by the opera house, the symphony hall, City Hall, the library—becomes a dance floor where jazz bands and polka bands and rock bands and the San Francisco Symphony play music while men in black and white tuxedos and women in black and white ball gowns dance into the wee hours of the morning). It is the most romantic event in the city. In May I ran my first Bay to Breakers, and I ran three after that. I am wearing 501's as I write this. The ball? Two out of three's not bad.

One year later, in March 1984, I weighed 122 pounds. On my fifty-first birthday a friend took pictures of me. I looked awful: no color, scrawny, caved in everywhere. So I put back some. More or less, I've kept the weight off, though not without the help of Diet Center, Weight Watchers, and my own fear of being fat.

At the center of all this obsessiveness was the exercise studio. I was like Ben in
Death of a Salesman,
who boasted, “I went into the jungle and when I came out—by God—I was rich!” Me? I went into the gym and when I came out—by God—I was thin! You can never be too rich or too thin, right? Wrong. You can be either or both. But I have yet to meet a woman who thinks she's just right. Anyway, here's the gym:

In the eighties high-impact aerobic exercise was all the rage, even among serious-minded students of exercise and its benefits. Coaches at the university began requiring some of their athletes to enroll in aerobics classes as a way to develop balance and coordination. Physicians and counselors of addicts recommended aerobic exercise as a substitute for addiction, as a way to get high without benefit of illegal substances. Classes were full. Newspapers carried stories of exercisers who turned violent when someone took their space on the floor.

When I entered the studio for the very first time, at 234 pounds, dressed in the only exercise clothes that would fit— sweatpants and sweatshirt—one of the instructors barred the way to the floor. “Hi,” she said, her smile chock-full of teeth, “I'm Debi. And I'm sorry, but we'll have to see your doctor's written permission before you can take classes here.”

She was little and cute, bouncy as all get-out, perky even. She was no match for my girth. I swept her aside and walked to the middle of the floor. “Start the music,” I ordered. She did.

On my way home from the studio, I stopped at an athletic-shoe store. Inside, a young man asked me if he could help. “I want a pair of running shoes,” I said. “For whom?” he inquired. (Salespersons in Berkeley talk like that.) “For me,” I said. He looked doubtful. “How often do you plan to run?” he asked. “Every day.” The look on his face said, Humor her, she'll be dead in a week.

But I wasn't. I began to run from mailbox to mailbox. In the beginning weeks, I made it to the second mailbox. Before long, I wasn't counting mailboxes anymore, and not long after that, I began to run races. Uphill, downhill, far and near.

I discovered my body. It stretched, it bent, it bowed, it jumped and jiggled and reached and stepped and moved—to rhythm, to the commands—“Suck it in! Breathe! Pull it in! Inhale! Exhale!” I came alive.

One evening I found myself in the front row of the studio, only inches from the mirror that covered the entire front wall, the only place left on the crowded floor. Usually, I got to class early to claim my spot in the back row. This particular evening—I went to class after school so was sometimes late—I found myself next to a gigantic young man who could only be a linebacker. On my other side was a tall young man, well over six feet, heavily muscled, whom I had noticed before, who seemed to spend most of his day at the studio, taking two, three, and more aerobics classes. Later, I learned from one of the instructors that he had been sent by his drug counselor, that he was sweating out drugs and alcohol and using his time in a way that would keep him out of the hospital and out of jail. In between classes, outside, at the curb, he smoked furiously, one cigarette after another.

“It's Raining Men” roared through the studio, and we began to move to its insistent beat. On my left, the man's long blond hair swung from side to side as the music pumped its way into our bodies. On the other side of me the linebacker pounded his legs into the floor. For a brief moment, I feared I might be crushed between them. Then we caught the rhythm—“Back two, three, four; up two, three, four; pick up those knees!” I looked at the three of us in the mirror, waving our hands, raising our knees, and I knew that at age fifty-two, I could keep up with these boys who were no more than twenty. We grinned at each other in the mirror as the sweat streamed down our faces, and congratulated ourselves silently when the Weather Girls brought things to an end with “Hallelujah” and “Amen.”

Eventually, the young men disappeared; I stayed on and am there to this day. High-impact aerobics was followed by low-impact, safer for the joints. Things calmed down at the studio. Now, the regulars meet at 6:45 in the morning to exchange a bit of talk and to sweat against the coming of the new day. The times are different; people have calmed down; the energy is underground; the world seems to have grown up, not an altogether felicitous change. Given the seriousness—nay, the humorlessness—of the new century, I find Sandy especially precious.

“What about oral sex?” Sandy peers intently through her green-rimmed harlequin glasses, the scarlet spikes of her hair piercing the early morning fog. “Are you listening, Jane?” Now the passersby have definitely slowed. A crowd is about to gather. “AIDS,” Sandy shouts. She is impatient, like a teacher who has had to ask the same question too many times. “Can you get AIDS from oral sex? Do you know, Jane?” She reins herself in and says, as if speaking to a slow-minded child, “Do you plan on having oral sex?” Her patience is at an end. “Oral sex, are you going to do it or not?” A woman smiles as she passes. She nods yes.

“Listen,” says Sandy, “I've got to go. I'm due at my therapist.” She hugs me. “Don't worry. You'll do fine. Me, I'm crazy, I know it, everybody knows it. Don't listen to me.” And then, from the middle of the street, which she is crossing against the light, she turns and calls to me, “Call the San Francisco Hotline. Promise me!” I nod fervently, eager to do whatever I can to get Sandy out of traffic.