parents and enrolled in a roiling junior high school with boys in it. Most of it was the times, but who knows about the “times” when they’re in the middle of those “times”?
Three things saved my life.
(1) Annie, my Darien best friend. She straightened my head out about sex, which turned out to be exactly what my mother had told me, but without barnyard animals. Annie didn’t laugh at my embarrassment. “Your mother jumped the gun”—we both thought that was impossibly hilarious— “and scared you shitless. A trauma.” I liked this new word trauma. “But it doesn’t mean you’re abnormal. I read about it.” When I went home and told my mother that Annie had told me all about sex, she turned and muttered to the air, “I don’t understand that girl. I told her about sex years ago.” I guessed my mother didn’t know much about sex herself, but at least I was unraveling the knot and could begin my sexual career. All I needed was a boy, blood, and boobs.
(2) The Holy Bible. I read it from cover to cover, night after night, though I only skimmed Leviticus. I was looking for dating advice and the holy book was a bust. God got a girl pregnant, apparently a good thing back then, but not the 1950s when getting pregnant meant scandal and exile. Biblical stories, especially in the Old Testament, were pretty juicy though. People did really bad things; God was moody, even tempermental, like a teenager, yet somehow God and people kept getting back together again, even after the worst sins, disasters, breakups, and traumas, some of them caused by God. The Bible made me laugh but there wasn’t a damn thing in there to help me get a period or boobs. I tortured my mother with dramatic laments about being deformed for life. Exasperated, she one day turned on me and almost shouted, “Lynnie, for God’s sake shut up, you come from a long line of bosoms. You’ll get them!”
(3) Bill Brakeman. I met him at a party, one of those high school, hope-soaked, loosely chaperoned events at the home of an overweight girl whose popularity was enhanced by such parties and the feasts her mother prepared for her friends. In one room a couple spent the whole evening with bodies pressed and shuffling in a movement no one could call a dance. I was in the dining room grazing on celery, longing to gorge on chocolate cake, and imagining myself fat when I saw Bill standing in the corner. He smiled. I smiled. We smiled and exchanged shy “hi’s.” Bill was swoonishly handsome with dark hair, and a look full of innocent wistfulness. My heart sprang into his.
“Are you here with Beebe?”
“I was, but . . .”
“I’m here alone,” I said.
Our conversation proceeded at its teenage halting best.
“Maybe we should hit the Driftwood Diner for a hamburger after the party,” Bill said.
“What about her?” I said.
“We’ll drop her home first. You sit up front,” he said.
Bill’s plan felt romantic, daring, even scandalous—ditching Beebe after she’d been callous toward him. I hopped into the front seat of his, yes, chartreuse Chevy convertible. We dropped Beebe off then drove to the diner. I felt sorry for her, a little.
The diner served the most succulent hamburgers I’d ever tasted. Ketchup oozed from the bun and my tongue darted out to catch it. I wasn’t embarrassed to eat in front of Bill.
“I hate it here,” I said.
“This diner?” he said.
“No, this town. I miss my city. This place makes my father drink more than ever.”
“My father too. I miss Chicago. But this burger is the best. So are you.”
Bill had great wit. His stories joined us in laughter.
“Just after we moved the school had to test me,” he told me.
“Yeah, me too,” I said.
“You should have seen my mother’s face when the test lady called to tell her that I had an IQ status of moronic. No kidding,” he said. “She wanted to know how I’d find a lost ball in a field.”
“Just head to where it landed and look,” I said.
“Of course, but the dumb woman wanted me to start at the edge of the field and circle inwards.” We split our sides laughing.
Bill and I became a couple, an “item,” to my mother, who was thrilled. I felt happy and safe with Bill, and proud of my emergent boobs. We mattered together. In the teen testing lab called high school, we joined the “middle class”—solidly friendly, not nerds or hoods or cheerleader/football greats or prom kings and queens.
“Darling, it’s you,” my mother said after we visited Smith College. Dad had lobbied for Vassar because his mother had gone there and was sure I’d get a scholarship. He lost. Mom’s support encouraged me to bare a tiny corner of my soul and tell her about the theater trauma.
“By the way, Mom, did I ever tell you what happened to me in the theater when I was eight and went with Aunt Tink to see the Rockettes?”
“No dear, what?”
“This old man molested me by putting his hand up my leg.” I stopped there and waited.
“Oh no. How awful. Well, such things happen, perverts you know,” she said, and then turned and walked into the kitchen.
My ploy for unlocking her heart hadn’t worked. I felt sad. “Such things happen” in fact helped us both avoid the pain of the old man.
At Smith College I was back with girls again. I fell passionately in love with ideas in any field including that of my own mind, and also with a few professors and the madness of weekend beer binges. I’d broken up with Bill, which infuriated my mother, but I wanted to check the pulse of my libido and to have dates at Harvard, Dartmouth, Amherst, my whole narrow little Ivy League world. My heart was set on achieving academic success, but I also worried about marriage, babies, having real sex with orgasms, Bill, and the whereabouts of God. Bill and I, never very far apart, resumed dating. Almost flippantly I suggested I accompany a good friend to Mass. She had to go, she said. Or what? I asked. Sin, she said. So I went to Mass, and bingo!—or more biblically, Behold!—there it was, my under-the-table meal the Holy Eucharist, all laid out for me to remember and relive.
I was riveted watching these worshipers—sitting, standing, making signs of the cross on themselves, walking together up the aisle to kneel at the altar rail, rubbing shoulders, sticking out their tongues to be fed like baby birds. I inhaled sweet incense, listened to murmured Latin, and watched. I noticed a woman up front, too, a statue and bad art but unmistakably female. I secretly imagined that this was how God might worship.
Communion in the Presbyterian Church where I’d grown up had felt lonely. Everyone sat motionless in their pews while trays of neatly cubed bread were passed around, followed by more trays of glass cups, each with a “jigger” of grape juice. It was tidy sacramental individualism.
I wanted my meal and oh, I craved my God.
I took instructions one summer to become Roman Catholic. My mother was so horrified that she invited the priest for dinner. It was her way of overcoming her disgust at rosary-bound piety and her own sister’s conversionary zeal. She needn’t have worried however, because it wasn’t long before I discovered that this church was male with no hope. There was the one stone virginal woman up front, yes, but no room for flesh-and-blood women up front.
Back in college for my senior year I consulted Mr. Unsworth, the handsome college chaplain whom Dad called “pipe smoking and tweedy.”
“You have some religious yearning,” he said. “I wonder why you didn’t major in religion.”
“I thought of it but I chose Spanish because I’m good at language and wanted to go deeper into Hispanic literature and culture,” I said, omitting mention of the fact that I also had a crush on one of the Spanish professors, an olive-skinned Iberian poet with huge eyes.
“Tell me about your religious background,” the chaplain said.