June 26, 2007

• Womanhood

  When does a girl become a woman?  The answer to that question, I know, is a matter of culture.  Generally, the feminist answer is, when she begins to menstruate.  In the patriarchal culture of my youth, perpetuated in movies, fairy tales and soap opera, some people believed that it took a man to turn a girl into a woman.  Penetration of the hymen by a penis had that magical, mystical power.  In this polyglot culture of ours, in the absence of a single monolithic tradition and orthodox rites of passage, we must wing it.  In my case, there were complications.

  By the time I had my first menstrual period, at age ten (or maybe eleven), I had been orgasmic for three years, had read the little book about where babies come from, and had my hymen accidentally ruptured by my mother while she was applying ointment for a yeast infection I contracted after taking antibiotics.  I had been earnestly seeking a boy to wave his magic wand in my direction ever since Leroy Coy first groped, stroked, petted and teased me in the back row at the movies when I was eight or nine.  If I hadn’t been prospecting among my age cohort, I might have found someone sooner, but I had never been attracted to men much older than myself.

  At thirteen, I had no doubt that I was a woman.  There were the biological markers of menstruation, breasts and body hair.  There were also a number of adult responsibilities, such as keeping my mother’s checkbook balanced, filling out tax returns, routine automobile maintenance, fix-it chores such as replacing faucet washers or driving nails and screws, setting and emptying mousetraps:  all those things that there was often no man around our house to do and Mama either didn’t know how or didn’t think of as “woman’s work.”

  Mama held ambiguous beliefs.  On the one hand, she had told me I was a woman when I started menstruating.  On the other hand, she continually referred to me as her “baby,” and never hesitated to express how much she hated to see her baby grow up.  During my father’s lifetime, he had been my advocate for freedom and independence.  When he died, Mama’s overprotection went unchecked, at the same time that she laid a lot of Daddy’s former responsibilities on me and, due to her work schedules, left me unsupervised much of the time.  Knowing her hangups about sex, even though I wanted her to think of me as grown-up, I certainly didn’t tell her about my having had sex with Ford in the back of a Chevy.

  My boyfriend had dropped out, but I was still in school and not allowed to go out on school nights.  Both of our mothers and both of our step-fathers began to complain about all the time we spent “tying up the phone lines.”  In those conversations, there were avowals of love, confessions of loneliness and eagerness to get together at the next opportunity.  We might have talked about other things, too.  I remember that we both liked the Pogo comic strip, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly, so we might have talked about them.  Mama had taught me that boys like girls who share their interests, so we probably talked about any subject Ford brought up.  I really don’t recall much except for the mushy stuff.

  I also don’t recall how often we had sex after that, but it wasn’t many times and was always fraught with difficulties.  I suppose that, even though she never once mentioned it to me, Mama had known about or at least suspected my lost virginity about as soon as it happened.  Her knowing, and her not talking about it, both would have been typical for her.  There wasn’t much I could ever get away with around her, and sex was something she just never talked about except in the most vague and euphemistic terms.

  Our mothers were in cahoots to keep us separated or else chaperoned.   We messed around a lot, stole kisses and caresses, but had very few chances to really do the dirty.  In the slang of the times, by the way, it was, “making it,” or “balling.”  People of our parents’ generation usually said, “screwing.”  I could always tell whether Ford had the phone to himself or if there was someone else in the room by whether he said he couldn’t wait until he could see me again, or if he said he couldn’t wait until his next chance to ball me.

  At his house, one or both of his little brothers could be counted on to follow us around or to pop up at odd moments.  Even so, we did manage at least once to have sex on Ford’s bed in the back bedroom of their house.  It didn’t take long:  no foreplay, just a little up and down, in and out and he was done.  Life was foreplay at that time.  We both went around aroused and ready constantly.  When we made it, it did feel good and always left me wanting more.  Eventually, before long, Ford would be wanting it again, too.

  One evening at my house, Ford and I were on the couch watching TV.  My step-father’s sister, Bee, the crazy kleptomaniac old maid, was in her room with my little dog Button.  Mama and Bill were in their room watching something different on TV.  When Mama and Bill moved in together, it gave us a second TV in the household, something few people in our socioeconomic class had in 1958.

  That night, we sat side by side on the couch and cuddled and kissed as long as we could stand it.  I moved onto his lap and after a little squirming around, feeling his erection through his jeans and my clothes, I turned to face him, straddling his lap, with my full skirt and two crinoline petticoats spread around me.  He unzipped, popped his penis out of his jeans, pushed the crotch of my panties to one side and slipped himself into me.

  And that’s the moment when Bee, standing in the hallway between the front room and her bedroom door, pitched Button through the doorway and chased after him, shrilling, “Buttons! Come to Momma, little Buttons.”  It wasn’t the first time she’d ever pulled something like that.  It was one of the old bat’s favorite moves.

  Ford and I went motionless.  We and Bee glared at each other as she tried to catch Button.  It took a while.  Since she was staring at us and not looking where she was going, she collided with the little black dog, who hadn’t had time to recover from being tossed into the room, and booted him under my bed.  He wouldn’t come out, so she had to crawl under the bed and drag him out. 

  The interruption had broken the spell, spoiled the moment, deflated the erection.  As Bee left the room with Button tucked under her arm, she looked at us, shook her head slowly back and forth, and stroked one forefinger down the other in a shame-on-you gesture.  I hovered over Ford’s lap, covering him with my skirt long enough for him to get himself put away and zipped up, then I sat primly back down next to him in case Bee decided to tattle on us.

  That may have been the first time the subject of marriage came up.  We both knew that if we were married nobody could keep us from balling each other whenever we felt like it.  There hadn’t been, and never would be, anything like a formal proposal and acceptance, no engagement ring.  We just knew we were going to get married, just as soon as we could find a way.

  That Thanksgiving, 1958, Ford’s step-father’s huge extended family was planning their usual gathering at Grandma’s house.  It was a mid-day feast.  Since Mama and Bill both had to work that day – she in a cafe, he in a gas station – our Thanksgiving dinner was scheduled for the evening, and I was doing almost all the cooking.  I wanted to invite Ford, and nobody had any objections.  It was to be the first meal I would cook for my future husband.

  I was already an experienced and fairly skillful cook, but I had never roasted a turkey before.  I had the Joy of Cooking, which I’d gotten with Blue Chip Stamps.  Mama and I had baked pie ahead of time, and we bought brown’n'serve rolls for the dinner.  I stuffed my turkey and put it into the oven on time, and went on preparing Jello salad and other side dishes, basting the turkey every half hour as the cookbook said.  Bee was pretty much staying out of my way, having gotten herself in trouble with her brother by sabotaging a blackberry cobbler I’d made the previous summer.

  It was getting close to time for everyone to get there, and my potatoes were boiled and ready to mash, when I discovered I didn’t have any milk to put in the mashed potatoes.  There was some buttermilk.  Thinking that it would make the mashed potatoes extra special, I used it.  I had all the dishes prepared and either keeping cold in the fridge or warm on the stove, and the table was set.  The turkey didn’t look right, but I wasn’t too alarmed because I’d been following directions.

  Mama, Bill, and Ford got there about the same time.  When I pulled the turkey out of the oven, Mama noticed that it wasn’t browned and asked me how long it had been cooking.  Apparently, I was too slow with the basting procedure and our oven was too slow to get up to the right temperature after each opening, and the turkey wasn’t even close to done.  Dinner would be delayed.  Mama took over the turkey.  Too hungry to wait, and wanting to get to bed on time, Bill sat down with a full plate of the “trimmings.”  That was when I learned that buttermilk is not such a great idea in mashed potatoes.

  In retrospect, the meal wasn’t spoiled.  We had stuffing and sweet potatoes, so it was no hardship to do without the sour mashed potatoes.  An extra hour at a slightly higher oven temp with no interruptions for basting, and the turkey was beautifully browned and done clear through.  Everything else was delicious, and everyone except sour old Bee was effusive in assuring me of that, but I’m a Virgo, and was an obsessive perfectionist then, not having had these intervening years to transcend a little bit of that bullshit.  In my eyes it was a disaster and I was a failure.  I’d humiliated myself in front of my future husband.  I was scared that he would not want to marry me since I was such a lousy cook.

  I was wrong about that, however.  We must have come up with our scheme to get our parents to consent to our marriage not long after that, because two weeks after Thanksgiving that year, we were married.  First, I told Mama my period was late.  It had been a few days late, and that had been scary at first.  Then when I told Ford, and we both realized that we’d have to get married, and then nobody could keep us from having sex, it stopped being scary and started feeling like a golden opportunity.

  Then one day at school, before we had figured out how to break the news to our parents without getting killed for it, my period started.  I was devastated, my hopes dashed, my plans quashed.  I called Ford and he was disappointed, too.  I said, “Maybe I can just tell my mother I’m pregnant.”  We talked about it for a while, and Ford told me to go for it, and he’d tell his mother, too.

  When I told Mama, she cried.  She was blubbering and sniveling to Bill and he said, “I told you so.”  She wanted me to finish school.  She suggested that I take some time off, maybe go stay with Granny or go to a home for unwed mothers until the baby was born, then give it up for adoption.  Then I cried.  I was in love with Ford.  He loved me, too.  We both wanted our baby.  She caved.

  The plan was all worked out, both families had talked it out and we’d set a date, December 4th, when Mama found some unmistakable and undeniable  bloody evidence that I was in fact having my menstrual period right then.  Of course, she breathed a huge sigh of relief and assumed that the wedding was off.  I wasn’t going to give up that easily.

  There were discussions with Ford and his mother.  His step-father didn’t want to get involved.  None of the three boys was his, and other than bringing home the bacon, and some discipline when their mother wasn’t being effective, he preferred not to be involved in rearing them.  Ford’s mother had been sixteen when he was born.  She didn’t see any big problem with the idea of letting us get married.  My mother had been twenty-five when she got married and thirty-three when I was born.  She saw nothing but problems.  What about my PhD?!

  My Spanish teacher even came to the house to try and persuade me not to drop out.  She had no trouble persuading my mother it was a bad idea.  Mama agreed with her all the way.  But I kept arguing and crying.  I had made up my mind.  For those brief shining days that I thought I was pregnant, my future looked bright.  I’d be June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson, or Lucy Ricardo… or all of them in one with Gracie Allen thrown in for good measure.

  Finally, in one of our interminable tearful arguments, my step-father had the last word.  Bill looked disgustedly at Mama and said, “If you don’t let them get married now, they’ll have to get married anyway in another month or two.”  Mama shut up and dried her tears, though the tears kept coming back from time to time.

  I withdrew from school to get married, with everyone there assuming that I was pregnant.  The four of us: Ford and I and both our mothers, went to the courthouse and they signed for our marriage license, and Ford’s mother set it up for us to go to the preacher’s house for the wedding at 7 PM on Thursday, December 4, 1958.

  To be continued…
  

  • 8:10 pm
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