Sputterpub's Blog

“I get it now. I know she wasn’t a virgin. But I have no idea why she lied to me.”

“Come on. For the same reason a man would lie about sex. More or less. To create or avoid reputation.”

“No, I don’t mean that. Although I did think Cindy and I were friends, and that she would have told me if she and Bruce were going all the way, I’m not all that surprised that she kept it from me. But that she went out of her way to advocate virginity as if it were her aim: that’s what I resent as a lie.”

“Is it possible her advocacy was rueful? Like, she knew from experience why virginity is valuable? That’s a common sort of testimony…”

“No, no. It was nothing like that. Picture us: it’s fall, late 1966, and Cindy and I are seniors at Redwood High. She’s cute; looking back on it, I’m probably attractive, but I sure didn’t appreciate that then. We’re in the college-track classes, and we’re neither popular nor pariahs.”

“Pari-ah-h-h-h-hs.”

“Be good, or go to your room. And I’ll take a little more of that coffee. Thanks. Where was I?”

“High school winter, I think.”

“Yeah. We used to take walks. My parents wouldn’t let me go out alone at night. It didn’t matter how safe it was outside; I was their only daughter and their oldest kid, and there was no way they were letting me out. So I had to find friends to walk with. And there was Cindy. I can’t say I really liked her. I mean, there was nothing not to like, but she wasn’t very interesting. I guess maybe I used her as a prop. Judy and Janet and Stephanie too. Greg and Wayne. They were all people who lived near enough, fellow walkers at night in Corte Madera. Not close friends. Available.

“During our junior year we’d sometimes meet in the sanctuary of the Presbyterian Church. Especially when it was cold or rainy. But starting in the fall of 1966 they began locking that church at night. I don’t know why; I never heard about any incident.”

“Fall of ‘66? Weren’t we into the thick of generational distrust then? Weren’t we erecting that wall around age 30?”

“Not quite. Not if I remember right. We were into Simon and Garfunkel and Paul Revere & the Raiders. The Beatles and the Stones, sure, but the Beach Boys too. Some of us were dealing a little acid, cutting white powder with Accent and shoveling the mix into clear capsules in front of my romantic eyes, but none of us were doing the drug, and pot wouldn’t be prevalent for another six months … We were starting to irritate our parents with clothing and hair then. The girls wore homemade cotton print smocks over black leotards and tights and crafted sandals. The boys stopped visiting barbers.

“We irritated our folks but we didn’t rebel. There weren’t any teen centers for us. So when they started locking the church we were forced to stay outside. I would take a walk with whoever was willing, and we’d talk about life, the universe, and other things. Sometimes the other person wouldn’t have anything to say on the subject. As you can imagine, that was never my problem. In fact, often it was kind of like talking aloud to myself, except I was ‘covered,’ if you know what I mean, by the presence of the other person.”

“I know, I know. The best example of that I ever saw – oh, I’m sure I must have told you about it – I was on the #15 Muni, and this crazy guy got on, and he carried an undoubtedly-broken cellphone. But he held the phone up to his ear the whole ride, conversing into and with it, sharing his cockeyed thoughts with it so all of us could hear. I never saw a cellphone put to better use.”

“Exactly. In our culture it is not okay to talk aloud to oneself when walking or dining in public, so we sometimes need prop people. Preople? But here’s the thing. Cindy was an actual interlocutor when it came to a couple of subjects, and it happened that premarital sex was one of them.

“I can see us in memory, walking south along Magnolia toward the S-curve at the old 7-Eleven …”

“How come there? You and Cindy must have taken other walks that year.”

“I know we did, and I’m sure we talked about guys, but I think I’m remembering this walk so vividly because it’s when we put the virginity subject to bed, so to speak. When we agreed to disagree about it. I remember where we were, our orientation, the same way I remember where on a book page I’ll find some text I recollect. There’s a spatial cue that gets connected to the words. In this case, Cindy and I are walking south, just after dark, probably around 7 o’clock on a fall night. She’s on the traffic side, to my left, and she’s just enough shorter so that I glance slightly downward when I look sideways at her. But most of the time we don’t look at each other; we’re walking briskly and we’re looking straight ahead. She’s wearing her hair down – I remember she had very thick light brown hair, shoulder-length and a little wavy – and I detect its swinging movement out of the corner of my eye. She says – ”

“ – You mean, ‘she goes.’”

“Huh?”

“She goes, you go: that’s how the young people report dialogue nowadays. You’ve gotta say, ‘first she goes … and then I go …’ and so on.”

“Young people? Nowadays?”

“Well …”

“Calling them ‘young people’ makes me feel older than ‘ma’am.’ And actually, I think you’re a bit behind the times with your colloquialisms. The young I hear lately, on the local buses and around the bike messenger wall, are using ‘like.’ Thusly:

“Cindy is like: I think there’s no sweeter gift you can give your husband than your maidenhood.

“And I’m like: You mean ‘maidenhead.’ And I think the idea is overly romantic. The man that I marry will want an experienced woman. We’ll want to know that the sexual part of our union works too.

“And Cindy is like: But of course it will work. When two people love one another …

“And I’m like: Get out of here! Now you sound like our mothers! I may not have any experience, but I’ve read as much as I could get my hands on and I’ve thought about it a lot. I think there’s four ingredients necessary to make a good lover. Ready? They’re consideration, imagination, coordination and practice. Maybe in that order. I want to bring all of that to my love, including the practice part.

“And she’s like: But think what a gift you could bring to your beloved. To assure him that no other man had ever been there; I think it’s romantic. It’s like a thoroughbred horse that will only allow one rider.

“And I’m like: Listen to you! You’re talking about yourself as if you’re property or livestock. That is not romantic. I think it’s more romantic to aim to be some kind of femme fatale: you know, get to be so good at sex that you can control men with it … That will take practice.

“And she’s like: Well, I intend to save myself.

“While I’m like: Lots and lots of practice …

“I can replay that, or something very close to that, like a movie. I swear she asserted her intention to be a virgin bride. And right about then, Bruce pulled up in his little Austin. Rick was with him. We piled in the back seat and drove to the headlands.”

“Wasn’t that your and Rick’s big moment?”

“Yeah, if you count three kisses and a fumble. We started that night and we ended when I removed his left palm from my right breast. And the tragic thing, when I look back on that evening, was that I had no objection to that sort of groping. But I was so self-conscious about my breasts then. I thought they were too small and I knew my nipples were neither prominent enough nor sufficiently reactive. I actually removed his hand to spare him disappointment! If I had even an inkling then of what I now understand of adolescent male libido (talk about fishing in a barrel!) …”

“And Bruce and Cindy?”

“Oh I discovered nothing that night. They made out, sure. We were all used to that. No. Cindy and I didn’t revisit the sex subject the rest of our senior year, and then I went off to Cal and she to Sac State. The other half of the conversation didn’t occur until December of 1967, when we were home for our first winter break from college. And she didn’t even participate in it.”

“Come again? And shall we walk?”

“Yes, let’s. If I have any more coffee my teeth will float.

“Cindy didn’t participate in the conversation because she wasn’t in the room. By then I was smoking pot, and I think we drank mulled wine that night too, so my memory is a little foggy. We were at Stephanie’s house. She and Janet and I were in the basement family room and Cindy and Judy were upstairs in Stephanie’s bedroom. The basement talk turned to sex. I was still a virgin but had almost immediate expectations with regard to my new college boyfriend. Stephanie was headed for be(maiden)heading too, but Janet had succumbed to Greg’s chronic complaints about blue balls and done the deed.

“We were full of questions for her. She left us with a favorable impression of the sport. But I’ll never forget laughing with her and telling her she’d have to fill Cindy in on the advantages; then Cindy might change her mind about preserving her hymen. Janet gaped at me. ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked. ‘Cindy lost her virginity back in Hawaii, before she even moved here. Didn’t you realize that she and Bruce were having sex regularly even when we were juniors?’

“I remember feeling foolish. I wondered aloud why Cindy hadn’t told me. Stephanie said something about me thinking I had to be in on everything, how the world went on without me, you know. I was even more confused. I sensed her resentment and I didn’t understand its basis.”

“Oh you poor baby; I hope you got out of there soon.”

“I think so. I can’t remember anything about the evening after that, and I don’t think I’ve seen Cindy or Stephanie or Janet since. Not that I’ve avoided them or anything. I just lost interest. It was a confusing conversation though. Like they were trying to shame me. And I never knew why. It left a bad taste.”

“Want a mint?”

“Sure. Why the …? oh, the new case.”

“Yes. Wintergreen. But tell me, isn’t it delightful to be a fool sometimes?”

“Positively a privilege, nowadays. Good mint.”

I guess the crisis with my cousins came when I was twelve. That’s when they really got into scrubland hunting, and I became a pacifist. They’d take their air guns and hike behind their houses to the undeveloped low mesa. There among the dust and tumbleweeds and sage and manzanita they would shoot at rabbits and birds. They never brought anything home. They rarely sought the victims they managed to hit. I know they left countless small creatures to die under dry bushes of bloody wounds.

I was horrified. I began debating about it with them (they literally turned deaf ears and walked away from me, brown guns slung dangerously over their shoulders). I wrote protest poetry. I gave them another way to make me the object of family mockery.

Nancy and Debbie didn’t show them disapproval. Even my brother went along with it; we didn’t have any guns at home, and he was eager to learn how to shoot. Now that I think about it, there were some small set fires then too (one in the schoolyard on a Saturday evening kind of got out of hand), and my brother actively participated in the arsonettes.

One ally emerged for me out of the mess. My cousin Lloyd began to drop back and walk with me, to talk with me earnestly, to listen with what started out as sympathy and became empathy. It meant a lot to me, especially because he was three years older than I and the best-looking of the cousins. Maybe he was different from the others because he was an only child and they all had siblings. Or perhaps it was the fact that his father died when he was seven, so he lived alone with his mother and became more feminized/sensitized. Probably it was both of those, but mostly I think it was because he was smart.

I’ve talked to many children of divorce (of course!) and I guess the saddest part of it to me is the surprise. Just about everyone really thought their family was a happy one, no matter how much arguing they heard, until the split came. It rocked their world to lose the ballast of that assumed-happy foundation.

That didn’t happen to me. My parents are still married and probably happy. But I grew up assuming my whole family was smart. My parents are intelligent, there are books everywhere in their home, and our mealtime discussions and excursions were often laced with history, astronomy or mathematical puzzles. We’re Jews, and I thought we valued justice, education, and the rights of the underdog. I just assumed my father’s siblings would have IQs like his. And maybe they did (I think not). Maybe they were subsumed under marital behavior and maternal worries. It doesn’t matter. They acted stupid. And my cousins, except for Lloyd, were moronic.

“Don’t go getting intellectual on us,” my oldest cousin Bruce would warn. Or: “Eeeww, she’s getting all heavy again” I’d hear from Mitch.

My cousins are grown now, and have mostly reproduced themselves. The next generation seems even duller to me, which is probably the combined effects of low genetic intelligence, poor parenting, and the increasingly toxic environment in the LA basin. I have an old friend named Peter, brilliant and funny and difficult, whose parents were born in Greece. He visited the old country (Sparta) a few years ago, and he reported that his cousins were nice but stupid. Peter conjectured that the smart ones had come to the new world, and that made sense to me at first. But Peter has three younger brothers who are illiterate idiots. He’s a doctor who decided at 23 that he couldn’t risk reproducing any of his siblings, and who used his medical connections to arrange his own vasectomy at 25. I think Peter’s brothers disprove his theory. I think new immigrants have bustle and energy and challenge, and the vigor wanes for each succeeding generation in this great land of ours. My grandparents were heroic, my parents were energetic, my cousins are morons. I almost never see them.

Except for Lloyd. We remained close. We were a couple for awhile and shocked them all by planning to marry. But we each fell for another after college. We’re like best friends though. And as childless as we would have been if we’d gone ahead with it.

We weren’t ever worried about the cousin thing. It’s more that we’ve both gone from thinking we came from intelligent stock to concluding the opposite. We know we’re smart, but we think that’s a fluke or a throwback or something. We’re not confident that we’d pass genes for intelligence on to our offspring. And neither of us could bear to bear a kid like one of our cousins.

It was pretty obvious. Not like now, when hair color is mostly supposed to be recognized, either applied to young heads in odd patches and harsh colors, or modeled in natural tones of auburn or ash by middle-aged women in the company of gray-tufted men. Back in the late 50s and early 60s, only one’s hairdresser was supposed to know for sure, but anybody looking at my aunts would know, for sure. They could have been septuplets, the way they matched each other’s bouffant, apricot-Danish coiffures. Their hair looked like straw around their tan faces and I remember, it felt stiff. They all had cans of hairspray in their bathroom cabinets: Aquanet, with a design like a spiderweb on its shiny surface.

My brother and I spent time there with our cousins, who were almost all not-blonde, but I will always carry the image with me of my seven aunts sitting inside. I’m sure my mother was with them and the men probably weren’t far from the food, but it’s my blonde aunts I see in memory, with their legs crossed at the knees and their free feet bobbing, all with gold around their necks and fingers and most with cigarettes in their hands.

My cousins, as I mentioned, were mostly not blonde. Of the thirteen boys only Lloyd wasn’t dark-haired, and his curls were more red than yellow. My girl cousins had lighter hair than me or any of the boys, but Nancy’s was dull light brown and Debbie’s, while definitely blonde, was so frizzy it didn’t resemble anyone’s in the family. I’m rusty about my high school genetics, but my aunts didn’t marry particularly dark guys; we probably would see more light hair in our clan if any of my father’s sisters had been natural blondes.

My cousins, as I mentioned, were rambunctious. At their best they were high-spirited and at their worst, which is where they were most often, they were tiresome. They were all older than my brother and I, and they were together all the time when we weren’t there, so we exerted no influence over them.

They could swim well, of course, but they were masters of deliberate belly flops just to wet the poolside people. They were accomplished with water balloons, rubberbands, pea-shooters, and even BB guns. They tended to run in packs, teasing or attacking kids, spying on girls or grownups.

My aunts didn’t intervene. They tsked sometimes, and talked about boys being boys and made of mischief, and poured themselves another cup of coffee or maybe mixed a gimlet. My uncles paid no attention. I guess my father was used to it, having grown up with my aunts. Mom was the only one who seemed aware and sometimes pulled me out of the cousinly fray, like the time she overheard the boys talking about surprising me in my bath. It’s hard to believe that they really would have invaded the room with their snickers and Polaroid, but I’ll never forget how Mom grabbed my wrist and kept me with her while she watered the garden, and let me overhear at least Bruce and Mikey as they conspired. On the other hand, Mom acted like she didn’t believe me when I told her how often Uncle Buddy had “accidently” let me see his penis, when he exited the bathroom and when he lounged around in his boxer shorts. But Mom considered herself and all the uncles to be out-laws in the family; she seemed to get along with the uncles better than the aunts, and her favorite always was Buddy, who was the best looking and the only one who liked to dance.

I couldn’t even cozy up to my girl cousins. Neither Nancy nor Debbie was mean to me, but they weren’t interesting either. They were two and three years older than I, they both developed at younger ages than I did, and as soon as they entered puberty they started becoming their mothers; as far as I could tell, their hobbies were bleaching their hair and coveting bling and competing for the attention of the boy cousins.

My father was the only son in a Jewish clutch of eight. His parents had been fruitful five times before he arrived, producing a pair of twin girls and four individual daughters. My grandmother permitted one more pregnancy after my dad, which became his closest sibling my Aunt Sadie, but family lore has it that Grandma called it quits after seven daughters and a boy, and underwent at least two back-alley abortions, and that surgical history may in fact be why I never met her. She died young and of something vascular, a year before I was born.

But her babies survived. (That’s not exactly true. I learned lately that she had an eighth daughter, because the twins were actually rare triplets, but that baby, named Ida, lived only five weeks.) All of the others lived and reproduced. I have more than a dozen cousins.

I remember it took me a long time to get my aunts’ names and birth order straight. My parents seemed to expect that I was born with the knowledge, but I must have been ten or eleven before I could recite them like the catechism my then-friend Norah knew. They aren’t important in this narrative, but I can still reel them off like a rosary: Lillian, Audrey, Esther, Elizabeth, Pauline and Dorothy (the twins Polly and Dolly) and Sarah (called Sadie). My father Leon arrived in 1925, two years after the twins and two years before Sadie.

They were all born in New York, of Eastern European immigrant parents. I guess their home language was Yiddish but none of them spoke it when I knew them; instead, they seemed to use it for proverbs (mitten d’rinnen) or to be incomprehensible around us kids (like us with Pig Latin) or to pepper their indignation and gossip with delicious “F” words like “f-schleppena” or “f-schtoonkena” or “f-krimpt.”

I was born in New York, too, but by then all but one of my aunts had transcontinented over to LA, and she (Aunt Audrey) was to move West in three years. My own nuclear family – my parents, myself, and my younger brother – migrated to California when I was five. We settled down in Bonita, an unincorporated area south of San Diego and north of Tijuana, which put us about three freeway hours from my aunts in the Valley, so we managed to make the trek to visit them about every month.

Six of my aunts had two sons, and one had one. I have thirteen boy cousins. Only Polly and Lillian had daughters, one each; we were a clan with alternating gender-heavy generations. Our get-togethers tended to reflect that composition, so the adults were always involved in the gentler arts, with women cooking and talking and shopping and tending while the menfolk read the paper or watched sports, and the generation of kid cousins were active, rambunctious, boyish.

My brother and I were more unlike our cousins than they were unlike each other. I’m sure part of the difference was that we didn’t live close and see them often, but mostly I think it was about parents. We had a relatively strange mother. Our father was as unlike his sisters as a single male after a long line of females is likely to be. He was the only one who went to college. He served in the army. He got away.

Our mother wasn’t strange compared to the family that reared her. But she was an alien among my father’s sisters. She had shorter legs, wider hips, and smaller breasts. She wore less jewelry and simpler clothes. She moved faster, darting around and always busy compared to my sedentary aunts. And she was never, even remotely, blonde.

I guess my aunts were born with light hair. They had paler skin than my mother and me. Especially after they moved to the LA area and started sunbathing and planning Vegas getaways, all seven of them got into the peroxide.