City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  I couldn’t stay away from the place.

  I once bought the most vividly violet-colored Edwardian dress for Celia at Lowtsky’s. It was the homeliest looking rag you ever saw, and Celia recoiled when I first showed it to her. But when I pulled off the sleeves, cut a deep V in the back, lowered the neckline, and belted it with a thick, black satin sash, I transformed this ancient beast of a dress into an evening gown that made my friend look like a millionaire’s mistress. Every woman in the room would gasp with envy when Celia walked in wearing that gown—and all that for only two dollars!

  When the other girls saw what I could make for Celia, they all wanted me to create special dresses for them, as well. And so, just as at boarding school, I was soon given a portal to popularity through the auspices of my trusty old Singer 201. The girls at the Lily were always handing me bits of things that needed to be mended—dresses without zippers, or zippers without dresses—and asking me if I could do something to fix it. (I remember Gladys once saying to me, “I need a whole new rig, Vivvie! I look like somebody’s uncle!”)

  Maybe it sounds as if I was playing the role of the tragic stepsister in a fairy tale here—constantly working and spinning, while the more beautiful girls were all heading to the ball—but you must understand that I was so grateful just to be around these showgirls. If anything, this exchange was more beneficial for me than it was for them. Listening to their gossip was an education—the only education I had ever really longed for. And because somebody always needed my sewing talents for something, inevitably the showgirls started to coalesce around me and my powerful Singer. Soon, my apartment had turned into the company gathering place—for females, anyhow. (It helped that my rooms were nicer than the moldy old dressing rooms down in the basement, and also nearer to the kitchen.)

  And so it came to pass that one day—less than two weeks into my stay at the Lily—a few of the girls were in my room, smoking cigarettes and watching me sew. I was making a simple capelet for a showgirl named Jennie—a vivacious, adorable, gap-toothed girl from Brooklyn whom everyone liked. She was going on a date that night, and had complained that she didn’t have anything to throw over her dress in case the temperature dropped. I’d told her I would make her something nice, so that’s what I was doing. It was the kind of task that was nearly effortless, but would forever endear Jennie to me.

  It was on this day—a day like any other, as the saying goes—that it came to the attention of the showgirls that I was still a virgin.

  The subject came up that afternoon because the girls were talking about sex—which was the only thing they ever talked about, when they weren’t talking about clothing, money, where to eat, how to become a movie star, how to marry a movie star, or whether they should have their wisdom teeth removed (as they claimed Marlene Dietrich had done, in order to create more dramatic cheekbones).

  Gladys the dance captain—who was sitting next to Celia on the floor in a pile of Celia’s dirty laundry—asked me if I had a boyfriend. Her exact words were, “You got anything permanent going with anybody?”

  Now, it is worth noting that this was the first question of substance that any of the girls had ever asked about my life. (The fascination, needless to say, did not run in both directions.) I was only sorry that I didn’t have something more exciting to report.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend, no,” I said.

  Gladys seemed alarmed.

  “But you’re pretty,” she said. “You must have a guy back home. Guys must be giving you the pitch all the time!”

  I explained that I’d been in girls’ schools my whole life, so I hadn’t had much opportunity to meet boys.

  “But you’ve done it, right?” asked Jennie, cutting to the chase. “You’ve gone the limit before?”

  “Never,” I said.

  “Not even once, you haven’t gone the limit?” Gladys asked me, wide-eyed in disbelief. “Not even by accident?”

  “Not even by accident,” I said, wondering how it was that a person could ever have sex by accident.

  (Don’t worry, Angela—I know now. Accidental sex is the easiest thing to do, once you get in the habit of it. I’ve had plenty of accidental sex in my life since then, believe me, but at that moment I was not yet so cosmopolitan.)

  “Do you go to church?” Jennie asked, as if that could be the only possible explanation for my still being a virgin at age nineteen. “Are you saving it?”

  “No! I’m not saving it. I just haven’t had the chance.”

  They all seemed concerned now. They were all looking at me as if I’d just said that I’d never learned how to cross a street by myself.

  “But you’ve fooled around,” Celia said.

  “You’ve necked, right?” asked Jennie. “You’ve got to have necked!”

  “A little,” I said.

  This was an honest answer; my sexual experience up until that point was very little. At a school dance back at Emma Willard—where they’d bused in for the occasion the sorts of boys whom we were expected to someday marry—I’d let a boy from the Hotchkiss School feel my breasts while we were dancing. (As best as he could find my breasts, anyway, which took some problem solving on his part.) Or maybe it’s too generous to say that I let him feel my breasts. It would be more accurate to say that he just went ahead and handled them, and I didn’t stop him. I didn’t want to be rude, for one thing. For another thing, I found the experience to be interesting. I would have liked for it to continue, but the dance ended and then the boy was on a bus back to Hotchkiss before we could take it any further.

  I’d also been kissed by a man in a bar in Poughkeepsie, on one of those nights when I’d escaped the Vassar hall wardens and ridden my bike into town. He and I had been talking about jazz (which is to say that he had been talking about jazz, and I had been listening to him talk about jazz, because that is how you talk to a man about jazz) and suddenly the next moment—wow! He had pressed me up against a wall and was rubbing his erection against my hip. He kissed me until my thighs shook with desire. But when he’d reached his hand between my legs I had balked, and slipped from his grasp. I’d ridden my bicycle back to campus that night with a sense of wobbly unease—both fearing and hoping that he was following me.

  I had wanted more, and I had not wanted more.

  A familiar old tale, from the lives of girls.

  What else did I have on my sexual résumé? My childhood best friend, Betty, and I had practiced with each other some inexpert renditions of what we called “romantic kisses”—but then again we had also practiced “having babies” by stuffing pillows under our shirts so that we looked pregnant, and the latter experiment was just about as biologically convincing as the former.

  I’d once had my vagina examined by my mother’s gynecologist, when my mother grew concerned that I had not yet begun menstruating by the age of fourteen. The man had poked around down there for a bit—while my mother watched—and then he told me I needed to be eating more liver. It had not been an erotic experience for anyone involved.

  Also, between the ages of ten and eighteen, I’d fallen in love about twenty dozen times with some of my brother Walter’s friends. The choice benefit of having a popular and handsome brother was that he was always surrounded by his popular and handsome friends. But Walter’s friends were always too hypnotized by him—their ringleader, the captain of every team, the most admired boy in town—to pay much attention to anyone else in the room.

  I was not totally ignorant. I touched myself now and again, which made me feel both electrified and guilty, but I knew that wasn’t the same thing as sex. (Let’s just say this: my attempts at self-pleasure were something akin to dry swimming lessons.) And I understood the basics of human sexual function, having taken a required seminar at Vassar called “Hygiene”—a class that taught us about everything without telling us about anything. (In addition to presenting diagrams of ovaries and testicles, the teacher gave us a rather concerning admonition that douching with Lysol was neither a modern nor a
safe means of contraception—thus planting in my head a vision that disturbed me then and still disturbs me now.)

  “Well, when will you go the limit, then?” Jennie asked. “You’re not getting any younger!”

  “What you don’t want to have happen,” said Gladys, “is that you meet a fellow now, and you really like him, and then you’ve got to break the bad news to him that you’re a virgin.”

  “Yeah, a lot of guys don’t care for that,” Celia said.

  “That’s right, they don’t want the responsibility,” said Gladys. “And you don’t want your first time to be with somebody you like.”

  “Yeah, what if it goes all wrong?” said Jennie.

  “What could go wrong?” I asked.

  “Everything!” said Gladys. “You won’t know what you’re doing, and you could look like a dummy! And if it hurts, you don’t want to find yourself blubbering in the arms of some guy you like!”

  Now, this was the direct opposite of everything I’d been taught about sex thus far in life. My school friends and I had always been given to understand that a man would prefer it if we were virgins. We had also been instructed to save the flower of our girlhood for somebody whom we not only liked, but loved. The ideal scenario—the aspiration which we’d all been raised to embrace—was that you were supposed to have sex with only one person in your entire life, and that person should be your husband, whom you met at an Emma Willard school prom.

  But I had been misinformed! These girls thought otherwise, and they knew things. Moreover, I now felt a sudden sting of anxiety about how old I was! For heaven’s sake, I was nineteen already; what had I been doing with my time? And I’d been in New York already for two entire weeks. What was I waiting for?

  “Is that hard to do?” I asked. “I mean, for the first time?”

  “Oh, God no, Vivvie, don’t be dense,” said Gladys. “It’s the easiest thing there ever was. In fact, you don’t have to do anything. The man will do it for you. But you must get started, at least.”

  “Yes, she must get started,” said Jennie definitively.

  But Celia was looking at me with an expression of concern.

  “Do you want to stay a virgin, Vivvie?” she asked, fixing me with that unsettlingly beautiful gaze of hers. And while she might as well have been asking, “Do you want to stay an ignorant child, seen as pitiable by this gathering of mature and worldly women?” the intention behind the question was sweet. I think she was looking out for me—making sure I wasn’t being pushed.

  But the truth was, quite suddenly I did not want to be a virgin anymore. Not even for another day.

  “No,” I said. “I want to get started.”

  “We’d be only too glad to help, dear,” said Jennie.

  “Are you on your monthlies right now? Gladys asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then we can get started right away. Who do we know . . . ?” Gladys pondered.

  “It needs to be someone nice,” said Jennie. “Someone considerate.”

  “A real gentleman,” said Gladys.

  “Not some lunkhead,” said Jennie.

  “Someone who’ll take precautions,” Gladys said.

  “Not someone who’ll get rough with her,” said Jennie.

  Celia said, “I know who.”

  And that’s how their plan took shape.

  Dr. Harold Kellogg lived in an elegant town house just off Gramercy Park. His wife was out of town, because it was a Saturday. (Mrs. Kellogg took the train to Danbury every Saturday, to visit her mother in the country.) And so the appointment for my deflowering was set at the exceedingly unromantic hour of ten o’clock on a Saturday morning.

  Dr. and Mrs. Kellogg were respected members of the community. They were the sorts of people my parents knew. This is part of the reason Celia thought he might be good for me—because we came from the same social class. The Kelloggs had two sons at Columbia University who were both studying medicine. Dr. Kellogg was a member of the Metropolitan Club. In his free time, he enjoyed bird-watching, collecting stamps, and having sex with showgirls.

  But Dr. Kellogg was discreet about his liaisons. A man of his reputation could not afford to be seen about town with a young woman whose physical composition made her look like the figurehead of a sailing ship (it would be noticed), so the showgirls visited him at his town house—and always on Saturday mornings, when his wife was gone. He would let them in through the service entrance, offer them champagne, and entertain them in the privacy of his guest room. Dr. Kellogg gave the girls money for their time and trouble, and then sent them on their way. It all had to be over by lunchtime, because he saw patients in the afternoon.

  All the showgirls at the Lily knew Dr. Kellogg. They rotated visits to him, depending on who was least hungover on a Saturday morning, or who was “down to buttons” and needed a bit of pocket money for the week.

  When the girls told me the financial details of this arrangement, I said in shock, “Do you mean to tell me that Dr. Kellogg pays you for sex?”

  Gladys looked at me with disbelief: “Well, what’d you think, Vivvie? That we pay him?”

  Now, Angela, listen: I understand that there is a word for women who offer sexual favors to gentlemen in exchange for money. In fact, there are many words for this. But none of the showgirls with whom I associated in New York City in 1940 described themselves in that manner—not even as they were actively taking money from gentlemen in exchange for sexual favors. They couldn’t possibly be prostitutes; they were showgirls. They had quite a lot of pride in that designation, having worked hard to achieve it, and it’s the only title they would answer to. But the situation was simply this: showgirls did not earn a great deal of money, you see, and everyone has to get by in this world somehow (shoes are expensive!), and so these girls had developed a system of alternative arrangements for earning a bit of extra cash on the side. The Dr. Kelloggs of the world were part of that system.

  Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure that Dr. Kellogg himself regarded these young women as prostitutes. He more likely called them his “girlfriends”—an aspirational, if somewhat delusional, designation which surely would have made him feel better about himself, too.

  In other words, despite all evidence that sex was being exchanged for money (and sex was being exchanged for money, make no mistake about it) nobody here was engaging in prostitution. This was merely an alternative arrangement that suited everyone involved. You know: from each according to their abilities; to each according to their needs.

  I’m so glad we were able to clear that up, Angela.

  I certainly wouldn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.

  “Now, Vivvie, what you have to understand is that he’s boring,” said Jennie. “If you get bored, don’t go thinking this is always how it feels to fool around.”

  “But he’s a doctor,” said Celia. “He’ll do right for our Vivvie. That’s what matters this time.”

  (Our Vivvie! Were there ever more heartwarming words? I was their Vivvie!)

  It was now Saturday morning, and the four of us were sitting at a cheap diner on Third Avenue and Eighteenth Street, beneath the shadow of the el, waiting for it to be ten o’clock. The girls had already showed me Dr. Kellogg’s town house and the back entrance I was to use, which was just around the corner. Now we were drinking coffee and eating pancakes while the girls gave me excited last-minute instructions. It was awfully early in the day—on a weekend, no less—for three showgirls to be wide awake and lively, but none of them had wanted to miss this.

  “He’s going to use a safety, Vivvie,” Gladys said. “He always does, so you don’t need to worry.”

  “It doesn’t feel as good with a safety,” Jennie said, “but you’ll need it.”

  I’d never heard the term “safety” before, but I guessed from context that it was probably a sheath, or a rubber—a device I’d learned about in my Hygiene seminar at Vassar. (I’d even handled one, which had been passed from girl to girl like
a limp, dissected toad.) If it meant something else, I supposed I would find out soon enough, but I wasn’t about to ask.

  “We’ll get you a pessary later,” said Gladys. “All us girls have pessaries.”

  (I didn’t know what that was, either, till I figured out later it’s what my Hygiene professor called a “diaphragm.”)

  “I don’t have a pessary anymore!” said Jennie. “My grandmother found mine! When she asked me what it was, I told her it was for cleaning fine jewelry. She took it.”

  “For cleaning fine jewelry?” Gladys shrieked.

  “Well, I had to say something, Gladys!”

  “But I don’t understand how you could even use a pessary for cleaning fine jewelry,” Gladys pushed.

  “I dunno! Ask my grandma, that’s what she’s using it for now!”

  “Well, then what are you using now?” said Gladys. “For precaution?”

  “Well, gee, nothing right now . . . because my grandmother has my pessary in her jewelry box.”

  “Jennie!” cried Celia and Gladys at the same time.

  “I know, I know. But I’m careful.”

  “No, you’re not!” said Gladys. “You’re never careful! Vivian, don’t be a dumb kid like Jennie. You’ve got to think about these things!”

  Celia reached into her purse and handed me something wrapped in brown paper. I opened it up and found a small, white terry-cloth hand towel, folded neatly, never used. It still had a store price tag on it.

  “I got you this,” said Celia. “It’s a towel. It’s for in case you bleed.”

  “Thank you, Celia.”

  She shrugged, looked away, and—to my shock—blushed. “Sometimes people bleed. You’ll want to be able to clean yourself up.”

  “Yeah, and you don’t want to use Mrs. Kellogg’s good towels,” said Gladys.

  “Yeah, don’t touch anything that belongs to Mrs. Kellogg!” said Jennie.

  “Except her husband!” shrieked Gladys, and all the girls laughed again.