Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (19 page)

Maybe it was different elsewhere. No doubt, I imagined, there were plenty of God-fearing farm communities somewhere in the South or Midwest where girls still walked around in lace-trimmed ankle socks with matching headbands, and boys said “gosh darn” and “ma’am” and held their car doors open for you in the church parking lot. No doubt, these were places where chastity was still considered a virtue, where every year at the county fair, some flannel-shirted guy named Billy Dwayne Jr. went around pinning blue ribbons on all of the virgins along with the prize heifers and award-winning wheels of cheese.

But as far as I and my equally smug, pretentious friends were concerned, virginity was what separated the girls from the women, and we knew which camp we wanted to be in. We scoffed at the idea that “saving yourself” was a matter of morality or willpower. Who was anyone kidding? If you were a virgin, it was simply because no one wanted to fuck you. “She is chaste who is not asked,” my friend William liked to say.

“Really? Getting laid meant all that to you?” said a friend of mine later—a friend who had, in fact, come from one of those very God-fearing farm communities I’d imagined beyond the Hudson. “Jeez. For us, sex was just something to do once we ran out of beer.”

Just about the only person I knew who seemed to think the word “virgin” carried positive connotations was my biology teacher, a tiny, gray-haired spitfire who practically ricocheted off the walls with energy. She was named, aptly and improbably enough, Electra Demas. With her starched white blouses pinned neatly at her neck and her severe gray bun, Mrs. Demas appeared to have been teaching biology for at least two hundred years, yet this had done nothing to diminish her passion for it.

When she spoke, her eyes glittered feverishly and her words tumbled over themselves as if her voice was on fast-forward. “Okay. Today. Class,” she’d say breathlessly. “The inner respiratory and reproductive systems of gladioli. Xylem and phloem. Photosynthesis. Stamen and seeds. Augh, it is all so compactly beautiful, you won’t believe it.” She clasped her hands together rapturously, then flung them wide open.

“Don’t look at your textbooks. Don’t look at your watch either, Louis Tedesco. Don’t think I don’t see you in the back row there. Look at me. Look at what I’m drawing on the board. The xylem. The phloem. Like this. They’re long. They’re striated. And they’re precisely designed to transport nutrients, to perform a simple yet complicated exchange. Repeat after me, ‘Xylem and phloem. Xylem and phloem.’”

You could come to class whacked out of your mind on crystal meth and fourteen cups of coffee and still not be able to keep up. Mrs. Demas spent the entire class zooming from one end of the blackboard to the other scribbling down elaborate formulas, rapidly sketching out diagrams of the digestive tracts of reptiles, and firing off scientific terminology. Watching her ping-pong across the room was like watching speeded-up footage from Wimbledon. By the end of each class I had neck strain from looking back and forth, and my friend Gary Cutick would throw down his pen in exhaustion. “Forget it,” he’d say. “Who can keep up with this nut?”

“I’m not a nut, Gary Cutick,” Mrs. Demas would call out without even turning around from the blackboard, where she was engaged in diagramming the complete nervous system of an iguana. “I, like you, am a mammal. Now pick up your pen.”

As our biology teacher, Mrs. Demas was required by the New York City Board of Ed to teach us a unit on human reproduction and sexuality. As jaded and oversexed eleventh graders, we thought this requirement was beyond stupid, and so did Mrs. Demas.

“I’m not going to waste valuable class time reminding you how babies are made when half of you are already dry-humping in the hallways,” she announced. Hearing her say the words “dry-humping” in her high, knitted grandmotherly voice made all of us titter and squirm.

“Oh suddenly, you’re all uncomfortable?” said Mrs. Demas. “You think no one sees you, necking in the hallways every day? Well I do, and let me tell you, it’s bad for your education. You boys, you kiss your girlfriends before class, then you get an enormous erection, and you can’t think about anything else for the rest of the day.”

Now no one was laughing. We had all developed a sudden interest in the floorboards.

“I’m a biologist. And I know better than any of you the risks involved with having sexual intercourse,” said Mrs. Demas fervently. “In the end, there’s only one way to protect yourselves. It’s just one little word. One little word with just two letters. Can anyone tell me what that word is?”

For a moment, no one said anything. Then Louis Tedesco raised his hand.

“Go,” he said. “G-O. Go.”

“No, not ‘go,’ Louis,” said Mrs. Demas, ignoring the symphony of hooting he’d inspired. “The correct word is
‘no’
—N-O—no. Not
go.
As long as you say ‘no,’ you’ll save yourselves a lot of heartache.”

She looked at all of us plainly, with something that bordered on pity. “Do not be ashamed of virginity, class. Embrace it. Take pride in it. Repeat after me, ‘I’m proud to be a virgin. I’m proud to be a virgin.’” She pumped her fists back and forth vigorously, as if she were leading a marching band. “I’m proud to be a virgin,” she chanted. “I’m proud to be a virgin.”

“Easy for
her
to say,” Gary muttered under his breath. “It’s not exactly like she’s beating them off with a stick.”

As teachers went, Mrs. Demas might have been one of the sharper knives in the drawer, but God only knew where she got the idea that horniness and patience were in any way compatible, especially in us teenagers, who, as we all know, were not exactly renowned for our impulse control to begin with. Being told to “wait until marriage” was like being ordered to hold our breath for twelve years: it was physically impossible. I was so overheated and agitated myself, I was sure I’d spontaneously combust by eighteen.

Granted, my budding sexuality had not begun auspiciously. Back in junior high school, I’d been enrolled in a seminary run by the New York Quaker Society. Quakers, my mother had reasoned, were pacifists. With the exception of Richard Nixon, they were calm, wise, meditative people—people ideally suited, she believed, to handle the tsunami of melodrama known as my puberty.

The summer before I’d started seventh grade, I lost pounds and pounds of baby fat, turning from “round” to “petite” in a matter of months. When I set foot in the Friends’ Meetinghouse that September, I found myself among the smallest girls in my class. Yet while the peacenik, abolitionist Quakers might have worked miracles on the Underground Railroad, they proved to be no match for a lunchroom full of twelve-year-old boys. Soon, I was getting teased all over again.

“Hey, Flatsy,” Nathaniel Eggers hooted across the lunch room, holding up a Popsicle stick. “We found your long-lost twin here!”

“Why is Susan Gilman a ‘carpenter’s delight’?” Nelson McClintock called out. “Because she’s thin and flat as a board and has yet to be screwed!”

“Susan is a pirate’s treasure,” announced Carter Rowe, pausing to reload mustard into the end of his straw. “Why? Because she’s got a sunken chest! Get it? Get it?”

Oh, I got it all right.

I had no breasts. I couldn’t even fit into a training bra. Those useless, 32 AAA bits of lace—designed mostly to humor anxious, pubescent girls anyway—flopped around my waist. Only my mother seemed to think this was okay.

“By the time I was eleven, I was a 32-D. It was awful,” she groaned. “I used to carry all my books pressed against my chest, trying to flatten it down. Thank God you don’t have to go through that.”

She didn’t seem to realize that while other kids my age were preparing for confirmations and bat mitzvahs, I’d developed a relationship with God that consisted solely of begging for breasts.
Please, just a 32-A or B. It doesn’t have to be much. Just enough to put an end to what passes for wit in the seventh grade cafeteria.

By the end of eighth grade, I was also the only girl who hadn’t gotten her period. Anytime someone stormed into the bathroom, flung down her backpack, and moaned desperately, “Oh, shit. Does
anyone
here have a tampon?” I became secretly convinced that I had cervical cancer.

It was only when I was fourteen, and already in high school at Stuyvesant, that I, too, could finally tear into the girls’ bathroom with a look of knowing distress on my face.

“Please, does anyone here have an extra tampon?” I’d plead, trying to contain my pride and glee.

“Sorry,” one of my classmates would say, stubbing her cigarette out on the window ledge, “but I’ve stopped getting my period ever since I went on the pill.”

One morning at the beginning of my sophomore year, I arrived at school late. Only my friends David and Andy were still hanging around outside.

“Hey, kiddo,” said David, rumpling my hair.

To compensate for having no discernible figure, I’d adopted a funky “individual” style that I’d actually stolen wholesale from Diane Keaton. By wearing oversized men’s shirts and antique vests, I managed to camouflage my immaturity while earning the respectable nickname of “Annie Hall” among my classmates. I was essentially a flower child in drag, but what did I know? I liked to think that I’d developed a persona that was “cool,” “artsy,” and “sophisticated.” A lot of the hottest alpha boys, however, just called me “little sis” and “kiddo” and all those other degrading euphemisms which meant, essentially, that they found me entertaining but unfuckable. I was somewhat popular, I supposed, but popular like a soft drink or a Casio watch.

Now I put down my book bag and gave David the usual hug hello. So, kiddo, you going to English?” he yawned. Then, suddenly, he paused. “Wow,” he said.

“What?”

He squeezed me and sort of patted me down. When he pulled back, he looked slightly astonished.

“Andy,” he said. “Come over here and say hi to Susie.”

“What? Oh. Hey, Suze,” Andy said. He walked over and gave me his usual bear hug, too. Then he went rigid. “Whoa,” he laughed. Then he held me tighter. “Whoa ho.”

“What?” I said.

Andrew grinned not at me, but at David. “Someone’s growing up,” he chuckled.

By fifth period that day, Andrew had hugged me twice again in the hallway. “Yep,” he said happily each time. “Still there.” ‘

His friend Mark, who usually completely ignored me, sauntered up to me in the hallway, too. “Hey, Susie,” he grinned, slapping my hand as if we’d been co-conspirators all year. “How’s it going, babe?” Then he, too, gave me an enormous, doting hug.

After Geometry class, Ira, another fantastically popular boy, came up to me. “Someone told me you really need a hug today,” he said, embracing me warmly.

“Me too,” said his friend, Adrian, softly. “Wow, that is amazing,” he said after disengaging. “Thanks.”

“Hey, Susie-Q,” said Jeremy, a popular
senior
boy, no less, “Did I hear that somebody needs a hug?”

Everywhere I went, from the biology lab to the auditorium to gym, boys I barely knew were coming up and offering to hug me out of what they insisted was a profound concern for my happiness and welfare. It was like someone had sounded a dinner gong over my head or—from the way some guys were acting—an enormous dog whistle. Meanwhile, girls were starting to glare at me. My classmates Nancy and Margo pointedly snubbed me when I said hi in the bathroom.

“I don’t know who the hell you think you are now,” my friend Erica said after school. “But stay away from my goddamn boyfriend.”

As soon as I got home, I called my friend Vanessa at boarding school and burst into tears, recounting every interaction to her in minute detail—the strange, amazed looks from my guy friends, the sudden, seething anger from girls—the spooky, unsettled feeling of being a monkey-in-the-middle, the unwitting punch line of some big group joke.

“Oh, Vanessa,” I sniffled. “Can you figure out what’s going on?”

“Well, I can’t be sure,” Vanessa said, “but it sounds like what’s going on is that you probably need a bra.”

I cradled the phone with one shoulder, unloosened my pink satin tie, and peeked down the front of my oversized shirt. It was true: for the first time, I couldn’t see clear to my feet.

When Michelle got home from school, I dragged her out into the stairwell. “What do you think?” I said anxiously, gathering up the extra material of my shirt and pulling it tight against me. “Have I grown?”

Michelle lit a cigarette, shook out the match, and appraised me coolly.

“Girl,” she said after a moment. “Your tits are enormous.” I flushed with embarrassment. “No. C’mon,” I said. “Really.”

“I’m serious. All of a sudden, you’ve got these really big-ass breasts.”

“Nuh-uh,” I said.

“You don’t even know it because you’re still walking around in those baggy Annie Hall get-ups. But I’m telling you, you’ve at least doubled in size since the summer.”

“So, like, I’ve finally caught up?”

“Caught up? Oh, you’re way beyond ‘caught up,’” Michelle laughed. “What the hell have you been doing? Taking growth hormones?”

I shrugged. “Praying?”

“Well, stop praying,” Michelle laughed. “Look at you. You’ve proved there’s a God. And let me tell you, He has one sick sense of humor.”

Before going bra shopping, Michelle thought it was a good idea for us to get really, really stoned first. Even though I usually avoided smoking pot because it made me paranoid and almost suicidally depressed, this time it seemed like a really good idea. Wanting breasts was one thing, but actually getting them the way I had was profoundly distressing. It was sort of like wishing for a puppy, then waking up one morning with a pit bull.

There were some girls I knew who were brought up to view their bodies as power tools. “With tits like those,” my friend Dani’s mother told her, “you can have anything in the world.” But I’d never felt any command over my body, any sense of its potential for dominion. I tended to regard it, instead, as a kind of novelty store whose inventory was constantly changing—a curiosity of sorts that occasionally amused or offended the public. While I hadn’t been thrilled with my role as everyone’s cute little sister at school, it was at least something familiar, comfortable, nonthreatening. Big bazooms catapulted me into a whole new social stratum charged with competition and sexuality—where boys would behave like rabid dogs and girls would view me hostilely just for stepping into a party.