City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  By now, it was the autumn of 1941. Our plan was to get married the following spring, when Jim would have enough money saved to buy us a house we could share comfortably with his mother. He had purchased a small engagement ring that was pretty enough, but that made my hand look like a stranger’s.

  Now that we were engaged, our sensual activities escalated. Now when we parked the Buick out by the lake, he would take off my shirt, and delight himself with my breasts—making sure at every turn, of course, that I was comfortable with this arrangement. We would lie together across that big backseat and grind against each other—or, rather, he would grind against me, and I would allow it. (I didn’t dare to be so forward as to grind back. I also didn’t really want to grind back.)

  “Oh, Vee,” he would say, with simple rapture. “You are the prettiest girl in the whole wide world.”

  Then one night the grinding got more heated, until he pulled back from me with considerable effort and scrubbed his hands over his face, collecting himself.

  “I don’t want to do anything more with you until we’re married,” he said, once he could speak again.

  I was lying there with my skirt up around my waist, and my breasts naked to the cool autumn air. I could sense that his pulse was racing wildly, but mine was not.

  “I would never be able to look your father in the face if I took your virginity before you were my wife,” he said.

  I gasped. It was an honest and unfettered reaction. I audibly gasped. Just the mention of the word “virginity” gave me a shock. I hadn’t thought of this! Even though I had been playing the role of an unsullied girl, I hadn’t thought he truly imagined I was one, all the way through. But why wouldn’t he have imagined it? What sign had I ever given him that I was anything less than pure?

  This was a problem. He would know. We were getting married, and he would want to take me on our wedding night—and then he would know. The moment we had sex for the first time, he would know that he was not my first visitor.

  “What is it, Vee?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Angela, I was not one for telling the truth back then. Truth telling was not my first instinct in any situation—especially in stressful situations. It took me many years to become an honest person, and I know why: because the truth is often terrifying. Once you introduce truth into a room, the room may never be the same again.

  Nonetheless, I said it.

  “I’m not a virgin, Jim.”

  I don’t know why I said it. Maybe because I was panicking. Maybe because I wasn’t smart enough to make up a plausible lie. Or maybe because there’s only so long a person can endure wearing a mask of falseness before a trace of one’s true self starts to gleam through.

  He stared at me for a long while before asking, “What do you mean by that?”

  Jesus Christ, what did he think I meant by it?

  “I’m not a virgin, Jim,” I repeated—as though the problem had been that he hadn’t heard me correctly the first time.

  He sat up and stared ahead for a long time, collecting himself.

  Quietly, I put my shirt back on. This is not the sort of conversation that you want to be having while your boobs are hanging out.

  “Why?” he asked finally, his face hard with pain and betrayal. “Why aren’t you a virgin, Vee?”

  That’s when I started crying.

  Angela, I must pause here for a moment to tell you something.

  I am an old woman now. As such, I have reached an age where I cannot stand the tears of young girls. It exasperates me to no end. I especially cannot stand the tears of pretty young girls—pretty young affluent girls, worst of all—who have never had to struggle or work for anything in their lives, and who thus fall apart at the slightest disturbance. When I see pretty young girls crying at the drop of a hat these days, it makes me want to strangle them.

  But falling apart is something that all pretty young girls seem to know how to do instinctively—and they do it because it works. It works for the same reason that an octopus is able to escape in a cloud of ink: because tears provide a distracting screen. Buckets of tears can divert difficult conversations and alter the flow of natural consequences. The reason for this is that most people (men especially) hate to see a pretty young girl crying, and they will automatically rush to comfort her—forgetting what they were talking about only a moment before. At the very least, a thick showering of tears can create a pause—and in that pause, a pretty young girl can buy herself some time.

  I want you to know, Angela, that there came a point in my life when I stopped doing this—when I stopped responding to life’s challenges with floods of tears. Because really, there is no dignity in it. These days, I am the sort of tough-skinned old battle-ax who would rather stand dry-eyed and undefended in the most hostile underbrush of truth than degrade herself and everyone else by collapsing into a swamp of manipulative tears.

  But in the autumn of 1941, I had not yet become that woman.

  So I wept and wept, in the backseat of Jim Larsen’s Buick—the prettiest and most copious tears you ever saw.

  “What is it, Vee?” Jim’s voice betrayed an undertow of desperation. He had never before seen me cry. Instantly, his attention turned from his own shock to my care. “Why are you crying, dear?”

  His solicitousness only made me sob harder.

  He was so good, and I was such trash!

  He gathered me in his arms, begging me to stop. And because I could not speak in that moment, and because I could not stop crying, he just went right ahead and made up a story for himself about why I was not a virgin.

  He said, “Somebody did something horrible to you, didn’t they, Vee? Somebody in New York City?”

  Well, Jim, lots of people did lots of things to me in New York City—but I can’t say that any of it was particularly horrible.

  That would have been the correct and honest answer. But I couldn’t very well give that answer, so I said nothing, and just sobbed away in his competent arms—my heaving voicelessness giving him plenty of time to embellish his own details.

  “That’s why you came home from the city, isn’t it?” he said, as though it were all dawning on him now. “Because somebody violated you, didn’t they? That’s why you’re always so meek. Oh, Vee. You poor, poor girl.”

  I heaved some more.

  “Just nod if it’s true,” he said.

  Oh, Jesus. How do you get out of this one?

  You don’t. You can’t get out of this one. Unless you’re able to be honest, which of course I could not do. By admitting that I wasn’t a virgin, I had already played my one card of truthfulness for the year; I didn’t have another one in the deck. His story was preferable, anyway.

  God forgive me, I nodded.

  (I know. It was awful of me. And it feels just as awful for me to write that sentence as it did for you to read it. But I didn’t come here to lie to you, Angela. I want you to know exactly who I was back then—and that’s what happened.)

  “I won’t make you talk about it,” he said, petting my head and staring off into the middle distance.

  I nodded through my tears: Yes, please don’t make me talk about it.

  If anything, he seemed relieved not to hear the details.

  He held me for a long time, until my crying had subsided. Then he smiled at me valiantly (if a little shakily) and said, “It’s all going to be all right, Vee. You’re safe now. I want you to know that I will never treat you like you are tainted. And you needn’t worry—I’ll never tell anyone. I love you, Vee. I will marry you despite this.”

  His words were noble, but his face said: Somehow I will learn to bear this repugnant hunk of awfulness.

  “I love you, too, Jim,” I lied, and I kissed him with something that might have been interpreted as gratitude and relief.

  But if you would like to know when—in all my years of life—I felt the most sordid and vile, it was right then.

  Winter came.

  The days got shorter and colder.
My commute to work with my father was executed both morning and night in pitch darkness.

  I was working on knitting Jim a sweater for Christmas. I had not unpacked my sewing machine since returning home nine months earlier—even looking at its case made me feel sad and grim—but I had recently taken up knitting. I was good with my hands, and handling the thick wool came easily. I’d ordered a pattern through the mail for a classic Norwegian sweater—blue and white, with a snowflake pattern—and I worked on it whenever I was alone. Jim was proud of his Norwegian heritage, and I thought he might like a gift that reminded him of his father’s country. In making this sweater, I pushed myself to the same level of excellence my grandmother would have demanded of me, ripping back whole rows of stitches when they were not perfect, and trying them again and again. It would be my first sweater, yes, but its excellence would be beyond reproach.

  Other than that, I was doing nothing with myself but going where I was told, filing whatever needed to be filed (more or less alphabetically), and doing whatever anyone else did.

  It was a Sunday. Jim and I had gone to church together, and then we went off to see a matinee of Dumbo. When we came out of the movie theater, the news was already all over town: The Japanese had just attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.

  By the next day, we were at war.

  Jim didn’t need to enlist.

  He could have dodged the war for so many reasons. For one thing, he was old enough that the draft would not necessarily have caught him. For another, he was the sole financial provider of a widowed mother. And lastly, he worked in a position of authority at the hematite mine, which was an industry essential to the war effort. There would have been deferments available in all directions, should he have wished to reach for them.

  But you can’t be a man with the constitution of Jim Larsen and let other boys go to war on your behalf. That’s not how he was forged. And on December 9, he sat me down for a conversation about it. We were alone at Jim’s house—his mother was at lunch with her sister in another town—and he asked if he could have a serious talk. He was determined to join up, he said. This was his duty, he said. He would never be able to live with himself if he didn’t help his country in its hour of need, he said.

  I think he expected me to try to talk him out of it, but I didn’t.

  “I understand,” I said.

  “And there’s something else we should discuss.” Jim took a deep breath. “I don’t want to upset you, Vee. But I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought. Given the circumstances of the war, I think we should cancel our engagement.”

  Again, he looked at me carefully, waiting for me to protest.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I can’t ask you to wait for me, Vee. It’s not right. I don’t know how long this war will last, or what will become of me. I could come back injured, or not come back at all. You’re a young girl. You shouldn’t put your life away on my account.”

  Now, let me point out a few things here.

  For one thing, I wasn’t a young girl. I was twenty-one—which by the standards of the day practically made me a crone. (Back in 1941, it was no joke for a twenty-one-year-old woman to lose her wedding engagement, believe me.) For another thing, a lot of young couples across America that week were in exactly the straits as Jim and I. Millions of American boys were shipping off to war in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Vast numbers of them, though, hastened to get married before they departed. Some of this rush to the altar surely had to do with romance, or with fear, or with the desire to have sex before facing possible death. Or maybe it was driven by an anxiety about pregnancy, for couples who’d already begun having sex. Some of it probably had to do with an urgent push to pack as much life as possible into a short amount of time. (Your father, Angela, was one of the many young American men who sealed himself up in swift matrimony to his neighborhood sweetheart before being thrown into battle. But of course you would know that.)

  And there were millions of American girls eager to nail down their sweethearts before the war took all the boys away. There were even girls who angled to marry soldiers whom they barely knew, anticipating that the boy might be killed in battle and his widow would receive a ten-thousand-dollar allotment for his death. (These kinds of girls were called “Allotment Annies”—and when I heard about them, I felt some relief in knowing that there were actually worse people out there than me.)

  What I’m saying is this: the general trend among people in these circumstances was to hurry up and get married already—not to call off their damn engagements. All over America that week, dreamy-eyed boys and girls were following the same romantic script, saying, “I’ll always love you! I’ll prove my love by marrying you right now! I’ll love you forever, come what may!”

  This isn’t what Jim was saying, though. He wasn’t following the script. And neither was I.

  I asked, “Would you like your ring back, Jim?”

  Unless I was dreaming—and I do not believe I was dreaming—an expression of enormous relief flickered across his face. In that moment, I knew what I was seeing. I was seeing a man who’d just realized he had an out—that he did not have to marry the frighteningly tainted girl now. And he could keep his honor. He looked so nakedly grateful. The reaction lasted only for an instant, but I saw it.

  Then he pulled himself back together. “You know I will always love you, Vee.”

  “And I will always love you, too, Jim,” I dutifully replied.

  Now we were back on script.

  I slid that ring off my finger and placed it firmly in his waiting palm. I do believe to this day that it felt just as good for him to get that ring back as it felt for me to shed it.

  And thus we were saved from each other.

  You see, Angela, history is not so busy shaping nations that it cannot take the time to shape the lives of two insignificant people. Among the many revisions and transformations that the Second World War would bring to the planet was this tiny plot twist: Jim Larsen and Vivian Morris were mercifully spared from matrimony.

  An hour after we had broken off our engagement, the two of us were having the most outrageous, memorable, backbreaking sex you could ever imagine.

  I suppose I had initiated it.

  All right, I’ll admit it: categorically, I had initiated it.

  Once I’d returned the ring, Jim had offered me a tender kiss and a warm embrace. There’s a way that a man can hold a woman that says, “I don’t want to hurt your gentle feelings, darling,” and that’s how he was holding me. But my gentle feelings had not been hurt. If anything, it felt like a cork had been yanked from my skull and I was now exploding with an intoxicating rush of freedom. Jim was going to be gone—and of his own volition, better still! I would come out of this situation looking blameless, and so would he. (But more important: me!) The threat had been lifted. There was nothing more to be pretended, nothing more to be disguised. From this moment onward—ring off my hand, engagement canceled, reputation intact—I had nothing more to lose.

  He gave me another one of those tender “I’m sorry if you’re hurting, baby” kisses, and I don’t mind saying that I responded by sticking my tongue so far down that man’s throat, it’s a miracle I didn’t lick the bottommost quadrant of his heart.

  Now, Jim was a good man. He was a churchgoing man. He was a respectful man. But he was still a man—and once I switched that toggle over to complete sexual permission, he responded. (I don’t know any man who wouldn’t have responded, she says modestly.) And who knows? Maybe he was drunk on the same spirit of freedom as I was. All I know is that within a few minutes, I had managed to push and pull him through his house to his bedroom, and gotten him situated on his narrow pine bed, where I could now tear off both his clothes and mine with unfettered abandon.

  I will say that I knew a good deal more about the act of love than Jim did. This was immediately obvious. If he’d ever had sex at all, he clearly hadn’t had much of it. He was navigating around my body the way you dr
ive a car around an unfamiliar neighborhood—slowly and carefully while nervously looking for street signs and landmarks. This would not do. Swiftly it became evident that I would need to be the one driving this car, so to speak. I had learned some things back in New York, and in no time at all, I employed my rusty old skills and took over the whole operation. I did this quickly and wordlessly—too quickly for him to have a chance to question what I was up to.

  I drove that man like a mule, Angela, is what I’m saying. I didn’t want to give him the slightest opportunity to reconsider, or to slow me down. He was breathless, he was carried away, he was fully consumed—and I kept him that way for as long as I could. And I will give him this—he had the most beautiful shoulders I’d ever seen.

  Christ, but I had missed having sex!

  What I will never forget about that occasion was glancing down at Jim’s all-American face as I rode him into oblivion, and seeing—almost lost amid his other expressions of passion and abandon—a look of baffled terror, as he stared up at me in excited, but panicked, wonderment. His guileless blue eyes, in that moment, seemed to be asking, “Who are you?”

  If I had to guess, I suppose my eyes were responding: “I don’t know, pal, but it’s none of your business.”

  When we were done, he could barely even look at me or speak to me.

  It’s incredible how much I didn’t mind.

  Jim departed the following day for basic training.

  As for me, I was delighted to learn three weeks down the line that I had not gotten pregnant. It had been quite a gamble I’d taken there—having sex with no precautions whatsoever—but I do believe it was worth it.

  As for the Norwegian sweater I’d been knitting, I finished it up and mailed it to my brother for Christmas. Walter was stationed in the South Pacific, so I’m not sure what use he had for a heavy wool sweater, but he wrote me a polite note of thanks. That was the first time he’d communicated with me directly since our dreadful drive home to Clinton. So that was a welcome development. A softening of relations, you could say.