“Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll just go on being a sexual ignoramus the rest of my life, and on my wedding night I’ll tell my husband I’m a lot stupider than he thought, because I couldn’t find anyone who would—”
“Okay, okay,” Carol said. “In the movies, a couple has intercourse, and the man and woman climax at the same time. In real life, some men and women like to make love in other ways. Every woman is different, so it’s up to her to tell her partner what she really likes. Same goes for the man. That’s one of the problems with having sex with someone you don’t know too well.”
“Why?”
“Because girls want guys to think they’re sexy, so they sigh and moan and do all the stuff they see women do in the movies. Then the guy thinks he’s a real stud, so he goes right on doing what feels good to him, and it may never do much for the girl. Wait for someone you really love, Alice—love enough to marry—and then you can talk about things like that.”
I swallowed. It was embarrassing enough trying to imagine Patrick and me, for example, having sexual intercourse. I couldn’t even imagine having to give him instructions!
“I don’t think I can do that, Carol,” I said finally. “It’s too embarrassing.”
“Alice! You’re thirteen! Of course it’s embarrassing!”
“Fourteen,” I corrected. “Almost.”
“You don’t have to think about these things for years yet! It would have been embarrassing for me at fourteen too. Heck, it was embarrassing enough at nineteen when I married The Jerk. The main thing about sex is that you should feel comfortable and just enjoy being together, touching and kissing and not worrying too much about the rest. If a man really loves you, he’ll want to keep you happy and will make love however you want.”
I thought about that awhile. “If I don’t like intercourse so much, what are the other ways?”
“Almost anything you can imagine. Sometimes you may want your husband to touch you with his hands and sometimes with his lips, and you’ll try different things and see what’s best. You’ll want to ask him what he’d like you to do to him. You’re just two people in love, giving each other pleasure.”
We lay so long then without talking that I realized finally Carol had fallen asleep. Her breathing came slower, more steady, and one of her legs gave a little twitch. Sex was a lot more complicated than I had thought. I’d always imagined that the woman just lay down on her back, and the man got on top of her, and something wonderful happened. All the woman had to do was wear a sexy nightgown. I never imagined she had to talk! To give directions, yet!
Elizabeth invited Pamela and me for a sleepover Sunday after Aunt Sally and Carol flew back to Chicago. We were sitting there cross-legged on Elizabeth’s bed—one of the two twin beds with white ruffles in her room—and were eating Pringles when I said, “Well, I asked the question.”
“What question?” asked Pamela, her mouth full of chips.
“About sex. What intercourse is really, really like.”
Elizabeth looked embarrassed already. “Do we have to discuss this?” she asked.
“No, Elizabeth. Pamela and I can sit in the bathroom and talk about it, and you can go your whole life not knowing what to expect on your wedding night,” I said.
“All right, go on then,” she said reluctantly.
“I already know what sex is like,” said Pamela. “I see it on the adult channel all the time. Men groan and women moan and then they both smoke cigarettes.”
“Wrong,” I said, and for once I knew something Pamela didn’t. “That’s the movie version, Pamela. That’s not real life.”
Pamela leaned back against one of the pillows. “Well, I know that once you start having sex, you’re addicted,” she said. “When mothers write to advice columns to say their teenage daughters are having sex, the doctors always say you’d better make sure they know all about birth control, because once they start, they can’t stop.”
“What?” cried Elizabeth, alarmed. “Like perpetual motion or something?”
“Oh, Pamela!” I scolded. Pamela always exaggerates.
“Okay, what is sex really, really like? Carol should know,” she said.
“Well,” I told her importantly, “it’s the same kind of climax you feel if you touch yourself, except you have a man kissing you too, which makes it more exciting. Some people like intercourse best, and some people like other things, and it doesn’t matter what.”
“You mean you can try a whole bunch of stuff to see what you like the most?” asked Pamela, looking interested.
“I don’t even want to think about it,” said Elizabeth.
“The main thing, Carol said, is that a woman sort of has to give a man directions—tell him where to touch her and everything,” I said.
Elizabeth looked horrified. In fact, she choked on a Pringle. “You have to talk about it? Out loud?”
“You could probably type it on a piece of paper,” Pamela told her.
“I can’t do this!” Elizabeth gasped. “I won’t!”
“Carol would say that if you can’t talk about things like this with a man, then you shouldn’t be in bed with him in the first place. She says if a man really loves you, he’ll make love any way you want.” And then I added jokingly, “Standing on his head, even!”
We were all quiet. Elizabeth had her eyes tightly closed. I think we’d all had the idea that with sex, women just let it happen.
“Whoever invented sex must have had a sense of humor,” I said at last.
And Pamela said, “Why couldn’t we make love like amoebas—just dissolve together and not have to worry about giving instructions?”
“Why couldn’t we make babies just by shaking hands?” said Elizabeth. “Why do our sexual parts have to be down there, for heaven’s sake?”
“And if sex isn’t like it is in the movies, why do women keep on getting married and having intercourse? They must like something about it,” Pamela said.
“Maybe they like having somebody to snuggle up to on cold nights,” I suggested. “Maybe it’s nice having somebody around to talk to and do things with—plan a life together and everything.”
“Maybe what they really want is children,” said Elizabeth.
Pamela began to grin. “And maybe they really do like to take off their clothes and get naked together and have sex and make love no matter how they do it. By land or sea, underwater, in the air, in the trees… .”
“Whatever works,” I said.
The more we thought about it, the better it seemed. If I got married when I was twenty-five, say, that gave me at least eleven years to get used to telling my future husband how I wanted him to make love to me. Once I figured it out myself, I mean.
We turned on Elizabeth’s TV and saw a man and woman starting to make love. The woman’s hair wasn’t even messed up. She had gorgeous breasts. Their bedroom overlooked the sea. Gulls were calling. The man was groaning, the woman was moaning, and waves crashed up on the shore.
“Get serious,” I said to the couple on TV.
“Get real,” said Pamela.
“Get another channel,” said Elizabeth.
So we did.
3
A STARTLING ANNOUNCEMENT
I WORRIED THAT DAD MIGHT FIND THE house sort of quiet and depressing after Carol and Aunt Sally went home. He’s always saying we need more stimulating conversation at mealtimes, so when I came to the table Monday evening, I said, “March twenty-first is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Prejudice.”
“Oh?” said Dad. “I didn’t realize that.”
“Never heard of it,” said Lester. “Are we supposed to put up a flag or something?”
“For your information,” I told him, “we learned about it from Mrs. Willis in social studies. The U.N. started it in 1966 to remember everyone who has ever been the victim of racial prejudice.”
“Very noble indeed,” said Dad, and passed the applesauce.
Actually, Patrick told me that they’d dis
cussed it in Student Council, and the real reason we were observing March 21 was that a couple of neighborhoods in Montgomery County had experienced racial incidents. Our school decided to head them off before they started, and get kids thinking about prejudice now.
Our school is about two-thirds white. The rest are mostly African American or Asian. I hadn’t paid much attention to this before because I usually hung out with kids I’d known from elementary school. Everyone had sort of his own special group. There were the really smart kids, the Brains; the sports kids, the Jocks; the Bikers—a bunch of guys who bleached their hair and rode dirt bikes to school; the Barbs—a group of flashily dressed girls with money … I guess that up until now, each group didn’t pay much attention to anyone else.
“Anyway, the school’s making a big deal of it this semester,” I went on. “We’ve been talking about prejudice a lot, and how you deal with it.”
“I didn’t know that was a particular problem in your school,” said Dad.
“It isn’t! There’s a lot more prejudice toward kids who don’t have the right clothes than there is toward minorities. Last September the guys were teasing some poor seventh-grader who came to school with a Darth Vader backpack. They asked if it belonged to his kid brother.”
“Ye gods,” said Lester. “Now it’s not enough to have the right jacket or the right shoes? You have to have the right backpack? What is this? The army?”
“There’s one small difference in that kind of discrimination,” said Dad. “If you don’t have the kind of clothes that happen to be ‘in,’ there’s always the possibility of getting them. But if your skin color isn’t ‘in,’ you’re stuck.”
“Well, I certainly haven’t seen that kind of prejudice in our school,” I said.
“You being a green-eyed strawberry blonde, I doubt you would,” Dad told me.
What I don’t like is the way Dad and Lester talk about my generation, and my school, when they don’t know anything about it. Lester isn’t my age! Dad doesn’t go to my school! What do they know?
“There isn’t any prejudice at my school!” I declared hotly. “Everybody gets along.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Dad.
“One big happy family, huh?” said Lester. “As long as you have the right backpack?”
“We’re doing just fine,” I retorted.
I noticed, though, that I went out of my way on Tuesday to talk with Gwen, the short black girl in my math class. She’s the brain in general math, and she helps me sometimes when I’m stuck on something.
“How’s it going?” I asked, falling in beside her on the way to gym. She’s the one who told me about being a candy striper too.
“Heavy,” she said, flashing a smile. “I’ve got one too many courses. I think I’d do fine if I just had one less thing to study at night.”
“Wait’ll we get to high school,” I moaned.
“Yeah, that’s what’s worrying me,” she said.
“You taking college prep, then?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know what you want to do?”
“Uh-uh. Not really. I’m thinking about teaching. I always wanted to be a singer, but you have to be really, really good to make it big time. I’ll probably settle for second best and be a music teacher.” She glanced at me. “Do you sing?”
“Are you kidding? I’m the only member of my family who can’t carry a tune.”
She laughed. “You go with that drummer, don’t you?”
“Yeah, Patrick. He can’t understand me, either.”
We went to our lockers, still smiling. See? I told myself. Where’s the prejudice here?
It was when I got to social studies that afternoon that I heard about what we were going to do the week of March 21. Mrs. Willis talked about the many target groups of prejudice based on race or sex or age or money, and that the week of March 21 would be declared Consciousness-Raising Week, or CRW, for the whole school.
In fifth-period class that day, every student was handed a list of rules for CRW, during which the school would be run by an arbitrary sort of caste system based on the color of the student’s hair.
Mr. Ormand, our principal, came over the public-address system and explained it to us. This was only an experiment in consciousness-raising, he said. Every student, in every class, had to turn in a one-page essay at the end of the week on how he or she felt during CRW. And then he read the rules aloud while we followed along on our instruction sheets.
Those with dark brown or black hair were the A group.
Those with light brown hair, red hair, or dark blond were group B.
Those with light blond or gray hair were the C group.
The A’s, Mr. Ormand said, were to be the privileged group. Only the A’s could use the front staircase. The B’s had to use the stairs at the side or back, and the C’s could use only the back staircase.
The A’s got to sit at the tables in the center of the cafeteria next to the salad bar and the ice-cream table. The B’s had to use the tables on either side, and the C’s were confined to the tables at one end. The A’s got to board the buses first, then the B’s, then the C’s.
And so it went. Everyone laughed, because it seemed so ridiculous. But to make sure everyone knew exactly what caste he or she belonged to, the fifth-period teachers passed out colored paper circles, which we had to pin to our clothes every day.
Elizabeth, with her long dark hair and eyelashes, got a big gold circle with an A in the center. I got an orange circle with a B in it. Pamela, with her short blond feather cut, got a white circle with a large black C in the center.
“What caste are you?” Patrick asked me when we went to the bus after school. “I’m a B.”
“So am I,” I told him. “What a joke! Teachers think up some pretty weird stuff sometimes.”
“I think that’s what they do on those in-service training days, sit around and figure out how they can make our lives miserable,” said Brian, who used to be the handsomest guy in school until Justin Collier came along, the boy who’s taking Elizabeth to the dance.
“You don’t see them wearing circles,” said Elizabeth, who didn’t have a thing to worry about because she was an A.
“Yes, you do,” Pamela told me. “I heard Miss Summers say she was a B. She and Mr. Everett were wondering what Mr. Ormand would be, because he’s bald as a cue ball.”
“He’s probably the one who thought the whole thing up. He can just sit back and play God,” said Brian.
Patrick slid onto the seat beside me. He’s got red hair—more like orange bronze. The hair on his arms and legs is orange too. He told me once that his mom was a ravishing redhead when she was younger.
“So was mine,” I said. “A redhead, anyway. More like me—strawberry blond. She was taller, though.”
“Do you remember her much?” asked Patrick.
“No. I wish I did. She liked to sing, and she wore slacks a lot. That’s what they tell me. I get my memories of her all mixed up with Aunt Sally, who took care of us for a while after Mom died. I was five. I guess you don’t remember too much before then.”
Elizabeth leaned over the back of our seat. “This isn’t a very good idea,” she said. “Everyone will be walking around wearing circles, like in a Jewish ghetto or something.”
“Or the caste system in India,” said Patrick, who has lived in a lot of different countries because his dad works for the State Department. “I think it will be interesting.”
“I think it will be embarrassing,” said Elizabeth. “I don’t know why I should get all these special privileges just because I’m a brunette.”
“That’s the whole point,” said Patrick. “You shouldn’t. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Pamela turned around and got up on her knees on the seat in front of us. “Then if it doesn’t make sense, why do it? I can see trying it for a day, maybe, but a week… .”
“So put that down in your essay,” Patrick told her. “Maybe you’ll end up wi
th an A and all the A’s will get C’s on their reports. That would be justice.” He laughed.
“Oh, it’ll be a blast,” Pamela decided. “I can be late for every single class because I have to use the back staircase, and no one can say a thing. If I have to be discriminated against, then I’m going to have some fun.”
It would be sort of fun, I thought. Something different.
When I told Dad and Lester later exactly how CRW was going to work, Dad said he had great admiration for our school. “They ought to try that in every school in Montgomery County!” he said. “It ought to be a required project in every school in Maryland. In the country!”
But Lester raised one eyebrow at me. “So what are you? One of the privileged class?”
“For your information, I’m a B,” I told him. “That’s one level down. So’s Patrick. Only the people with dark hair get to be number one, the A’s.”
Dad wanted to know all the details, of course—whether the teachers had to participate and whether Miss Summers was a B. But Lester seemed distracted. He sat hunched over his Hamburger Helper, and finally, when I had managed to bore them both silly, he said, “I thought the two of you might like to know that Marilyn and I are no longer ‘an item,’ as they say.”
We just looked at him, waiting.
“Oh? That’s news,” Dad said finally. “Was this by mutual agreement, Les, or should I ask?”
“We agreed, more or less. I suggested it, actually. I guess I felt that she’d been getting too serious about us, and I didn’t want any hurt feelings.”
I’m only thirteen-going-on-fourteen, but I know this much: If Lester thought that by cutting Marilyn off at the pass he could avoid hurt feelings, then he still believed in the tooth fairy.
“I’ve got news for you, Les,” I said. “She’s hurt already.”
“Why? You’ve talked to Marilyn?”
“I know Marilyn. She’s been going with you for two and a half years, and I’ll bet anything she hoped it would amount to something.”
“I never led her on,” said Lester. “I never said anything that would encourage her to think we’d be getting engaged.”