Sunlight on My Shadow

by Judy Liautaud

  Oh, how I wanted that bra in the display case. I could throw out my undershirts and start living like a real woman. I thought of putting the little cup holders around my would-be breasts and standing in front of the mirror. I would put one hand on my hip and one hand behind my head and push my hair up into a fountain of glamour. I would put the bra on first thing in the morning and no one would know I had it on, but I would feel it all the time, during class, during recess, clasped tight around my body, reminding me I was now a woman.

  But how was I going to ask Mom for the stretchy-cupped bra? Mom was already highly invested with the pile of clothes on the counter. I was afraid she would think it was ridiculous because whenever she introduced me to people, she still called me the baby of the family. But I had to ask. I could come right out with it and say, “Mom, can I have that bra?” No. I didn’t think the word “bra” was the right one. I never heard Mom use it. She always said something like, “Just a minute, I’ll be right there after I put on my braazzzeeeerr.” Brassiere? No, that word was for something much larger than the thing in the case. This wasn’t a brassiere: it was a tiny set of hummingbird’s nests. After I went back and forth, groping for the right terminology, I decided to avoid the dilemma altogether.

  When Mom pulled out her wallet to pay for the clothes, I said, “Mom, come here. I want to show you something.”

  “What do you want to show me?” She already seemed impatient.

  “Just come here.” I curled my finger, beckoning her toward me. She pushed the carpet with her feet so she could back the wheelchair over to me. Her hands were too sore to work the wheels. My palms were sweaty and my voice was weak. I had a lot invested in this request.

  “Mom?” I paused. “Can I have that?” I pointed down through the glass.

  “What are you talking about?” she said, loud enough to make my ears curl.

  “That,” I said quietly, so the counter clerk didn’t hear me. I pointed again.

  “What is THAT?” Mom squinted her eyes.

  Oh, geez, does Mom have to be so dumb? I thought.

  “THAT,” I said again, tapping the glass case right above the royal-blue velvet.

  “That brazzzeeerrr?” she bellowed loud enough to wake the people of Kansas.

  “Mmm-hmmm.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, you don’t need THAT.”

  Then she opened her wallet and turned to the saleslady and said,

  “How much do I owe you?”

  Shot down. I turned and walked away from the counter so Mom couldn’t see the tears that spilled from my eyes. I sucked in my breath as I remembered the doctor-playing episode and thought the NO was another reprimand. Like I was veering into sexy territory and Mom had to put a stop to it. The tears just showed I was a baby and not mature enough for something so grown up. If my throat hadn’t seized up from stuffing the tears, I could have said something like, “All the girls at school wear bras. Please, Mom.” Mom thought she was doing me a great favor with the new clothes, but all I really wanted was the simple little bra. I felt misunderstood and insignificant. Anything having to do with my sexuality or impending womanhood twisted me with a nasty dose of shame.

  It wasn’t too long after the Marshall Field’s debacle that I noticed I had something the size of lemon heads forming under my skin. I was finally blessed with two tiny drops to warrant my desire for a bra. It felt like semi-hardened fish eggs. You could move them around a little, but it hurt. Then my nipples puffed out like they were raisins soaked in rainwater. They were full and puffy but still sitting on a flat chest. I expected that once I started developing, I would soon be strutting around like Nancy Griffin from fourth grade. But the growth was retarded. Little by little my breasts formed until they were the size of kiwi fruit—and then they stopped as quickly as they had started. Even though Mom hadn’t bought me the stretchy-cupped bra, Auntie Stell gave me a Christmas present that year that blew me away with delight. She must not have checked with Mom first. It was a powder-blue flowered bra and pantie set. It was too big at first; the cups sagged in a crease when I snapped it in back. Then, after I grew some more, I still needed a swipe of Kleenex to fill out the crease. I was hoping I was still growing. I waited and waited, but my cup never did runneth over.

  CHAPTER 6

  EIGHTH-GRADE SEX EDUCATION

  I didn’t get pregnant because I was ignorant. I knew full well how babies were made. I learned it from Mom before I was really ready and then again in eighth grade, when I was more eager. Eighth-graders attended a six-week class held in the basement of the church. The nuns walked us in single file at 8:45 am every Tuesday so we could be seated and attentive by 9:00 am. This was when Father Monson walked in the room to conduct The Class. The windowless basement had this musty smell like the bowels of the earth. Ghastly fluorescent lights made everything look flat, like a black-and-white drawing, but if you had a zit, that stuck out in perfect 3-D. They called the class Eighth Grade Preparation. I guess we were being prepared to fly off to high school, where we would meet all the challenges of boy–girl relationships. Preparation was a euphemism. The real name would have been “Sex: Stay Away or Go to Hell.”

  Father Monson asked, “Who can repeat the lesson we just learned?” He looked around, and when no one volunteered, he glanced over to the left of the lectern and then scanned my row.

  My heart thumped as I prayed, “Not me, not me.” His eyes stopped in front.

  “You,” he pointed. “Please come up here on stage and explain for the girls and boys the term “menstruation.”

  “Me?” she asked.

  “Yes, you.”

  Father coached her along, making sure she used the proper clinical terms. Her face was red and her voice soft. For the rest of the year, every time I ran into Carol Bromley, I could see her up there in front of one hundred eighth-graders, talking into the microphone and saying words like uterus and blood and vagina. Father made her say it.

  When she tried to fudge, using more common words, he said, “Weren’t you listening to the lesson, Miss Bromley? Use the correct terms.”

  Father Monson was the pastor at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church and thought it was his duty to educate us in the proper moral direction. He said necking and petting were serious sins. He said sexual intercourse outside of marriage is the worst sin of all, a mortal sin.

  The words “sexual intercourse” haunted me. I hadn’t heard the term since Mom gave me the sex talk when I was nine. I don’t think Mom was planning to tell me about the birds and the bees this particular day, but she was forced into it. My cousin Pamela was sleeping over at my house. In the morning Pamela went into the bathroom; a few seconds later she cracked open the door, poked her head out, and called, “Aunt Ethel, could you come in here?” She sounded like she was about to cry, like something was terribly wrong. I couldn’t imagine what could be so bad that she needed my mom to come in the bathroom with her. I ran into the kitchen, where Mom was chopping up onions.

  “Mom,” I said, “Pamela’s in the bathroom. She wants you.”

  Mom rinsed her hands and wiped them on the towel by the stove. She rushed into the bathroom with Pamela and closed the door behind her. I sat on the stairs and tried to listen. I heard Mom mumbling in a low tone, like she was teaching a serious lesson. She came out of the bathroom with a stern look on her face. She walked past me and went up to the second-floor bathroom. She came down with a blue-and-white box and went back inside the bathroom, closing the sliding door. I could hear Pamela sobbing.

  When Mom came out I asked her, “Is something wrong with Pamela?”

  “Oh, dear,” Mom sighed. “She has her menstrual period.”

  I was scared to ask the next question. I was almost sure it had to do with Pamela’s private parts, but I said it before I thought of the consequences.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well,” Mom said, “come into the living room. I want to talk to you about something.”

&nbs
p; She sat on the couch, patted the spot next to her, and said, “Sit down here, Judy.” This was before Mom quit smoking, so she opened a fresh pack of Pall Malls and scooted back on the couch. She lit the cigarette. Mom was making a big production out of this. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. Her face was serious and I couldn’t imagine what was coming next. Mom took a big puff and talked as smoke wafted out of her mouth.

  “Auntie Stell hasn’t had a chance to talk to Pamela. It’s too bad because she got so scared. Poor thing, she thought she was bleeding to death.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Oh, it was her period. Honey, when a girl goes into puberty, that’s around twelve or so, she gets what’s called a menstrual period. You ever heard a that?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s bleeding from the vagina. It happens every month for a woman. It’s a natural thing.” Mom took another puff.

  “Bleeding?” I said.

  “Yes, from the vagina.”

  I choked down an inadvertent giggle. I squirmed and stared at the floor, afraid that Mom would see the smirk on my face. Did she have to keep saying that word? I wished she could just say “down there.”

  “I want to tell you about this now so you won’t be scared when it happens to you. You’re getting to be a young lady now, you know. It’s nothing to be afraid of. Okay, honey?”

  “Okay.”

  Mom flicked her cigarette over the ashtray.

  “It’s just nature’s way of getting the uterus ready for the time when you get pregnant and have a baby. The baby is kept inside the uterus. It’s kind of like a basket that carries the baby while it’s growing in you.”

  “A basket?”

  “Yes, honey. You know, like a container that has food for the baby. During the month, if you don’t get pregnant, the lining, which is the food, gets dumped out ‘cause there is no baby. They call it the menstrual period. It’s all very natural. It happens once a month.”

  This news didn’t seem natural at all. Every month? Every woman? Just in case? It seemed like a whole lot of rigmarole for something that might not even happen, kind of like checking the mailbox on Sundays. Wasn’t there some way to just turn off the fountain until you wanted to have a baby?

  She scooted back on the couch and continued. “Now, there’s more. I might as well tell you the whole story. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this.”

  I was afraid of that.

  “In order to get pregnant, you have sex.”

  At this point in my life, I thought that sex was some intense kind of kissing, but I wasn’t exactly sure of the details. I couldn’t get my head around what came next.

  “The man places his penis in the woman’s vagina. This is called sexual intercourse.”

  At nine years old, I did suspect there was some activity like this that adults engaged in, but I had no idea the man put his entire hot dog in the bun. When she said “places his penis,” I imagined him taking the thing and carefully laying it inside the lady’s lips. You know, lengthwise, like a hot dog in a bun. Whoa … this put a whole new meaning on the word “sex.” I thought it strange and wondered why he would want to do that.

  “Do you have any questions?” Mom asked with a sigh that sounded like a period at the end of a sentence. I was too embarrassed to think.

  “No, Mom,” I whispered.

  Mom took a big puff of the cigarette, let it out, and said, “Well, if you’ve got any questions, Judy, you just come and ask, okay?”

  “Okay, Mom,” I said.

  But in my heart I knew there was no way I would be bringing up this subject of my own accord.

  Mom’s explanation was thorough, except for the missing detail that there was a hole in the woman in which to place the hot dog. When Father Monson explained the mechanics of sexual intercourse with medical diagrams, I learned how the anatomy fit together: the man plugged into the woman like a toaster cord into the wall. The sex words startled my ears and brought embarrassment as I sat in close proximity to the popular boys in my eighth-grade class. I could hear myself breathing while Carol Bromley continued the explanation. As Father coached her along, not letting her gloss over the proper terms, my face got hot. I choked down a giggle.

  We had been instructed by the nuns, before class, to refrain from laughing or talking. The nuns said the subject matter was “mature” and it wouldn’t do to be snickering or giggling when we were talking about adult things. We obeyed and sat with our hands folded in our laps, staring at the floor, and then glancing at the clock, wishing Father would hurry and wrap up the lesson—before we got called on.

  After I had settled down from the shock, I pondered Father’s words. I thought his assessment was a little harsh and that if a boy wanted to hold my hand, I would go ahead and let him. Anyway, I had already committed that sin. By now I was also used to the impure thoughts and not all that convinced that they were serious sins. But I knew I would draw the line, somewhere after necking and before petting. I would never do that. Father Monson also had said that we should never kiss. Kissing was like a drug, he said: once you started it was too hard to stop, and it would lead to other things. I invented my own question on the SAT test. Marijuana is to heroin like kissing is to blank; the answer, of course, is the hot dog in the bun thing.

  Punishment was not a good motivator for me, even if it was an eternity in hell. I tried to follow the advice of the good Father, but when I came up short, guilt and remorse were my constant companions, stalking me like an ominous ghost. I don’t really know why I did exactly what Father Monson said NOT to do, and I had thought I wouldn’t do it, but when I finally got to kissing Bob Flannigan later on in eighth grade, I let his hand wander to forbidden territory. Mom and Dad must have been out somewhere, and we ended up lying on the orange tweed couch down in our rec room. We kissed. He rubbed my back. We fell over like I imagined we would, so we were now lying side by side in a tight embrace. After a bit, his hand went under my shirt and rubbed my back, then it slowly migrated to the front. I didn’t stop him. I thought it felt good, but at the same time I was surprised that I was letting him do this. I became self-conscious about the size of my niblets. Suddenly, he pulled his hand away and sat up. “I better get on home,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

  I felt uneasy and strange. I didn’t see much harm in letting him cop a feel; I wouldn’t have let him go further than that. Yet I felt misunderstood and wished there was some way to tell him I was just about to cut the advances. I wished I had been the one to draw the line. I wanted him to know I wasn’t that kind of a girl.

  He didn’t call me again, so I felt even worse about what we did on the couch. I wondered if I was too easy, or if he didn’t like what he felt, or if he was just testing me. I wished so bad I had never let him do it. I assumed he thought I lacked moral fiber and he didn’t want a pushover for a girlfriend. The social convention in the 1960s was that a boy wasn’t a man if he didn’t try something, and the girl wasn’t a lady if she didn’t stop him. I guess I showed I wasn’t a lady. I walked past him the next week at school and he just kept his head down, pretending he didn’t see me. Later I found out he was back with Sally Stilleti. That broke my heart. He probably always liked her better and was just using me to make her jealous.

  After the episode with Bob Flannigan, I didn’t have a boyfriend for two more years.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE ROLLING STONE NIGHTCLUB

  Most of the girls from Our Lady of Perpetual Help went to Regina Dominican High School and the boys went to Loyola. Since we couldn’t meet boys in class, the Rolling Stone in Wilmette was a godsend. They converted the auto-body garage into a teen nightclub by painting the cement floor a woody color and suspending strobe lights and glistening mirror balls from the ceiling. The atmosphere gave me a comforting incognito feeling. The strobe lights made us look like Tin Men from the Wizard of Oz as we moved in jerky staccato. I felt unusually brave, alive, and excited to meet the boys. I didn’t h
ave to worry about whether my hair was parting to expose a bare scalp or if the Clearasil on my zit was still camouflaging the red.

  The place had a musty smell mixed with wisps of Brut aftershave and Shalimar cologne. Sexy innuendos bounced off the walls, filling the air with pheromones and agitated sexual tension. For me, it coalesced and focused on a boy from Glenbrook South named Mick Romano. The guy was short as far as boys go, and I found that reassuring. My dad and brothers were over six feet tall, and their propensity for loudness and bouts of temper had me intimidated by large men. Mick was approachable and soft spoken. He had dark-brown eyes and a sinister little laugh that erupted from his innards, causing his eyes to squint in a way that melted me with rapt interest. He could dance too. A lot of the boys had bad rhythm or just stood on the sidelines talking to each other, but Mick broke the gaggle of Regina girls and approached me. Granted, his friend Kurt had already picked out Annie, so the competition was lessened. I felt like the golden girl, getting asked to dance by a boy who didn’t even know me.

  Ever since I was nine and my brother Jim taught me the cha-cha, I have been intoxicated by dancing. In eighth grade my partner and I took first place at a dance contest. Tonight I felt like a puppet being moved by the strings of the drum beat. The words to the song jazzed me up a notch. I felt free and uninhibited. It went something like this: You know she comes around here at just about midnight—She makes ya feel so good, Lord—She makes ya feel all right—And her name is G-L-O-R-I-A.

  As Mick and I danced, I felt a surge of sexiness oozing out of my body. I wondered if he liked the way I was shaking my butt. My boldness shocked me. Eventually a slow dance came on. I could smell his spicy cologne and see the stubble on his clean-shaven face. They weren’t those newly clipped peach-fuzz whiskers, but well established, like he’d been shaving for years. He was so manly. He put his hand on the small of my back and led me around like I’d sprouted wings. I skipped my ride home with Diane’s mother and even though I wasn’t allowed to go in a boy’s car until I was sixteen, I let Mick drive me in his ‘62 white Chevy Biscayne. Not only was this guy cute—he had a car, and he knew how to drive it.