Virgins

by Caryl Rivers

  Jeez, Sean thought to himself, what have I gone and done?

  “Mr. Kasten, I think I have to go now.”

  Mr. Kasten was breathing faster, and his hand moved up another inch on Sean’s thigh.

  “You need my help more than any girl I have ever met, Shirley,” he said. “We must have more conferences. Now, what else has this beast made you do?”

  “More girls are waiting,” Sean said, nervously.

  “Oh Shirley!” Mr. Kasten moaned; he made a grab, and his hand landed squarely on Sean’s scrotum. Sean let out a yell, and leaped off the couch, and Mr. Kasten’s jaw fell practically to his knees; and he stared at Sean, not able to utter a word.

  “You’ve been a big help, Mr. Kasten,” Sean said, backing toward the door. “I’m going to be a temple of the Holy Ghost from now on, I promise!” he said.

  “Shirley!” Mr. Kasten called out with a strangled cry as Sean ran out of the teachers’ room and made it up the stairs two at a time. He banged on the door of the Messenger room; we opened it and he came running in and dropped in a chair, out of breath. He took a deep gulp of air, and exhaled, slowly.

  “Where in God’s name were you?” Con asked. “We thought the nuns had grabbed you!”

  “Worse than that,” he said. “The author of Straight Talk for Teens just copped a feel.”

  “What!”

  “When you weren’t there,” he said to me, “Sister Justinian grabbed me and made me go to a conference with Mr. Kasten.”

  “And he tried to touch you?” I said.

  “Not tried. Did.”

  “You mean he grabbed your boobs?” Con said, astounded.

  “Nope. He went right for the Big V.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Con said.

  “He got more than he bargained for,” Sean said. “You should have seen his face when he grabbed me, right by the balls.”

  “My God, the man is a pervert!” I said.

  “He can’t go around to high schools feeling people up!” Mollie said.

  “He sure is a strange one,” Sean said.

  “We have to do something,” I said.

  “What?” Con said. “We can’t very well march down to Sister Robert Mary and tell him Mr. Kasten just felt this girl up, only it wasn’t a girl, it was Sean in drag.”

  “Look, we’ve got to stop this sex fiend,” I said. I grabbed Con by the hand. “Come on!”

  We caught up with Mr. Kasten just as he was walking down the front hall to the door. He seemed to be in something of a hurry.

  “Mr. Kasten, we’re the editors of the Messenger, and we’d like to thank you for coming,” I said.

  Mr. Kasten didn’t break his stride. “Thank you, girls,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “Our friend Shirley said you were such a wonderful help!”

  “Shirley?” Mr. Kasten said. He blinked.

  “Yes, she’s going to write a letter to the archbishop telling how helpful you were,” Con said.

  “Maybe to the cardinal,” I said.

  “The pope!” Con said, cheerfully,

  Mr. Kasten took one look at us and practically flew out the front door.

  The next week, Sacred Heart had its retreat, and all the boys were excited about the Big Sex Talk, to be given by the author of Straight Talk for Teens. But at the last minute it was announced that Mr. Kasten wasn’t coming. He was too busy with his new book to do any more lectures at high schools. So poor old Father Milliken was dragged out of retirement. Sean went to the assembly, and he reported that when Father Milliken got to his big show-stopping story—“You are the woman I choose to marry and have my children!"—half the school was asleep.

  Naval Operations

  THE YEAR WAS going too fast. It was already time for the Thanksgiving dance, The Turkey Trot. I had asked Sean to be my date. Actually, I hadn’t asked him; we just started talking about it as if he assumed he was going with me, and so did I. I was trying to get things sorted out in my head about me and Sean. Not as Best Friends, we would always be that, but the boyfriend-girlfriend stuff. We were back to the old illuminated Map of Sin rules—with a few new twists—because we were both pretty scared about what happened that night in the parking lot. I didn’t use to believe the stuff the nuns handed out about being swept away by carnal passion, but I had to admit there was something to it. We weren’t just kissing that night; Sean had his tongue right up against my tonsils and the Natural Wonder right up against my you know what and we were right on the verge of getting swept away. We knew we had to be careful. Sean was better at that than I was. I tried, but I kept forgetting.

  One night, when we were out in the Caddy, we were taking a break from kissing and Sean was stretched out on the back seat and I was lying on top of him, very comfy, my head resting on his chest. I started kissing the nice soft spot in the hollow of his neck, and he sighed, and then I guess I started moving a little. I didn’t mean to, but all of a sudden there it was, the old Natural Wonder, pressing against my jeans. I just kept moving and Sean said, sternly, “Peg!”

  “Umm.”

  “Stop moving.”

  “I wasn’t. I was just trying to get comfortable.”

  “Well, stop.”

  I stopped, immediately. “Can I just be here, like this?”

  “I guess that’s O.K. See, I can control myself if you stay still, but if you move around, I can’t.”

  “O.K. I’ll be real still.” And I just nestled against him, liking the feeling of that pressure in a certain spot, just letting it make me feel tingly.

  “Is this nice?’ I asked.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “It really is.”

  He gave a little sigh, and then another, and we just rested that way for a bit. But then something was moving up against me and it wasn’t me moving this time.

  “Sean?” I said.

  He didn’t stop. He just kept moving, and his eyes were closed.

  “Ohhhhhh,” he said. “Ohhhhh!”

  His eyes popped open. “Oh shit!” he said, and he scrambled up and jumped out of the car, dropped on his face and started doing push-ups. He did thirty-five of them, very fast, and when he got up he was sweaty, but the Natural Wonder was back down again.

  “Jeez, that was a close one!” he said. “I don’t know, I think my self-control is going all to hell. I used to be pretty good at it.”

  “Oh Sean,” I sighed, “sometimes I wish we weren’t Catholic. It’s so hard.”

  “Well, we are. We just have to be better than other people because we have informed consciences.”

  “I guess so,” I said. I thought of all those Protestants at Hoover High who could just grope each other in the back seats of cars without a care in the world. It didn’t seem fair.

  “Come on,” he said, “I got a civics midterm tomorrow.”

  “I’d rather stay here.”

  “So would I, Peggy, but look”—and at this point his voice sounded a little plaintive—“I think I’ve exercised all the self-control I can for one night.”

  “I’m sorry, Sean. I guess it’s harder for guys than it is for girls.”

  He looked at me. “Is it hard for you, Peg? I mean, when I kiss you, does it, does it—”

  “Oh yeah, drives me crazy,” I said. “I just don’t have any self-control at all when you kiss me, so I’m glad you’re strong.”

  He grinned at me. “Like really wild? Like you can’t help yourself?”

  I nodded. “Only with you, Sean. No other guy affects me like that.”

  He sat up a little straighter, and he looked smug, and I’d swear he was preening a little bit. He said, solemnly, “You are just very lucky, Peg, that it’s me who drives you crazy. Because I won’t ever take advantage even though you can’t resist me.”

  “Thanks a bunch, Sean.”

  He grinned again. “Even if you come at me and start tearing my clothes off, crazed with lust—”

  “Cra
zed with lust? Did you say, ‘Crazed with lust’?”

  “Yeah. That’s what Brother Peter says, all the time.”

  “In school he says this?”

  “Oh yeah. He says it’s what happens to guys who—uh—jerk off, you know. He says they go crazy.”

  “Crazy? Like insane?”

  “Yeah. Bonkers.”

  I felt a sudden cold chill, right around my heart. Could that happen to girls? “You think it’s true?” I asked.

  He looked thoughtful. “I don’t think so. I looked it up in a medical book and it said that it was just natural and you wouldn’t go crazy. ’Course, it’s a sin, but it doesn’t make you nutso.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “It is?”

  I was glad it was dark so he wouldn’t see that my face was beet red.

  “Well, I’d just hate to think of all those poor Catholic boys going bonkers. Just for—you know.”

  “Yeah, it’s probably no fun being crazy.”

  I really wanted to ask Sean if he ever did it, but I’d be too mortified to say any such thing. When we were little, we used to like to watch each other pee. We did it way deep in the woods, because we figured that would really make Dr. McCaffrey foam at the mouth. It was fun, and very naughty. Once, we peed on the same anthill and drowned a whole colony of ants, but we felt like murderers afterward and never peed on sentient beings again—except an old, slow-moving box turtle, and we didn’t hurt him, just sort of gave him a shower. As we got a little older, Sean got embarrassed about it, and he’d tell me not to watch when he’d go behind a tree. I did, anyhow. That was one of the problems of growing up, you couldn’t do some of the fun things you did as a kid. Grown-ups didn’t go around peeing on things together, and I felt that was a great loss. There probably would be fewer murders and wars and stuff if they did.

  He kissed me good night at the door, not the old quickie like he used to, but a long, lingering, tingly kind of kiss. I just wished he wouldn’t stop. I’d gotten to the point where I wasn’t even interested in kissing anybody else anymore, and I used to be. I used to look at guys and speculate about how they’d kiss, and I’d have them rated in my head, from Nauseating to Divine. I wondered if you could get addicted to kissing one person, so that nobody else would do. That could really be a problem since Sean was going to be a priest. What if I found out that I was hooked on his kisses, the way some people get strung out on heroin? I’d have to follow him around everywhere he went, to get my daily fix; I’d have to hide behind the water font in the sacristy and spring out at him when he came in from the rectory to say six o’clock Mass, kissing him madly while he put on his alb and his chasuble. He’d get sick of that pretty quick:

  “Kiss me! Kiss me, Father. I got to have my fix!”

  “Get away from me, you disgusting junkie!”

  “Please, just this once! I promise, after this I’ll go cold turkey.”

  “Don’t you have any pride?”

  “Oh God, just one smackeroo. Please, Sean, don’t make me beg!”

  “Oh, all right. But if you’re here again after the eleven o’clock Mass, I’ll have you thrown out on your ear.”

  “Oh bless you Father! Now pucker up!”

  Con was on my back all the time about my dating Sean. “How long have you been going out with him?”

  “Since we were freshmen. But I met him when I was two.”

  “Peg, why don’t you go out with other guys?”

  “I do.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “How many times?”

  “Once. Each.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Me? I’m not afraid of anything.”

  “I think you’re afraid of men. I think you’re repressed.”

  Con was always quoting Sigmund Freud, whom I’d never heard of before I met her. One day in junior year Sister Justinian mentioned him she said he said that children had dirty sex thoughts and so of course he was a pervert. And an atheist. But Con was very high on Freud. “Peggy,” she said darkly, “you may even be frigid!”

  “I don’t think I’m frigid,” I said. “I like kissing Sean a whole lot.”

  “That’s no sign. A lot of frigid people like to kiss.”

  “They do?”

  “Yes, but then when they get to the real thing, their muscles get all tense and they get paralyzed.”

  “You mean really paralyzed? Like can’t move?”

  “Yes. Sometimes they just stay that way for years and years. When you get like that they put you in the frigid ward in the hospital, and they have to feed you with tubes.”

  “How do you get better?”

  “You have to have an orgasm. But that’s hard to do when you’re paralyzed and have tubes up your nose.”

  “I guess so.”

  “There are men in the hospital, too,” Con said. “But they have castration anxiety.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Remember when Delilah cut Samson’s hair and he lost his strength? That’s why they have castration anxiety.”

  “They’re afraid of haircuts?”

  “No, of course not.” Con gave me one of those exasperated looks. “Hair is just a symbol for a penis. The whole story is about the fact that men are afraid women will take their penises away.”

  “Sister Justinian never said anything about that in Bible History.”

  “Sister Justinian doesn’t know about it. That’s probably a good thing.”

  I agreed Sister Justinian was certainly the type of person who’d take some poor guy’s penis. Heck, she’d do it just for talking in study hall.

  “Sister Justinian gives me castration anxiety, and I don’t even have a penis,” Con said. “See, men have castration anxiety because women have penis envy.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s when women want to have penises, of course.”

  “I don’t think I’d want one. I mean, they’re nice and all, but what would I do with it?”

  “Go around sticking it into people, I suppose. That’s what it’s for.”

  “Well, I don’t think I have penis envy. What happens to the men who get castration anxiety? Do they get put in the frigid ward too?”

  “With the women? Of course not. Then they’d be really anxious, because they’d be scared the women would creep over at night and steal their penises.”

  “But if the women were paralyzed with tubes up their noses, how could they do it?”

  “Well, they couldn’t, of course. But the men would worry.”

  I sighed. “Psychology is real complicated, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Con said, “but it’s very important.”

  Con certainly wasn’t repressed, I thought, enviously. She had a new guy, every dance. She really played the field, and she never cared if guys never asked her out more than once.

  “I want variety,” she said. “I want small ones, tall ones; I want to break their hearts, use them, and throw them away.” But it seemed that Con was always getting fixed up by somebody or other, because she had a lot of blind dates. Then, after she went out with a guy, and he didn’t call, she’d say he was a stupid child or a hopeless naif. I think Con intimidated people, boys especially. They didn’t know what to make of her, especially the Catholic guys. When she started talking about Omar and Freud and Dorothy Parker, they just blanked out. And Con didn’t care.

  Con was always putting her looks down, too—always saying her hips were too big or her fingers too stubby or her legs weren’t long enough. She always did it in a funny way though, making herself the butt of her own jokes.

  But Con’s attention was focused on me now; she really had a campaign going to get me over my fear of men. She made me promise I’d go out with other guys besides Sean. I promised, even though I really didn’t want to. Besides, Sean’s vocation to the priesthood really hadn’t been much of a problem before. It had al
ways seemed so far away. Sean had started talking about it freshman year, and then senior year seemed far off in the mists of the future.

  I wondered if Sean would really do it, after all. Would he go away to be a priest? One thing I had never asked Sean was if he had gotten a Call. That’s what the nuns said happened when you had a vocation to be a nun or a priest—God talked to you, like in a person-to-person phone call, and you just knew it.

  I had a near miss with The Call in my junior year. It was at the vocation seminar that Father Millenbarger from the archdiocese gave us every year. Father Millenbarger was a recruiter, but they didn’t call him that. He didn’t tack up posters saying, “God wants you!” or talk about re-upping. But I thought of him as a sergeant in God’s army, and he was very good at his job. He stood up on the auditorium stage, rocking back and forth on his heels, spewing forth a seductive mixture of romanticism and guilt. Nuns’ lives weren’t drab, he’d say; why, at the Mother House he’d just visited, there was pink toilet paper in the bathrooms. After he said that he stood there beaming at us, as if he expected us to practically have an orgasm over pink toilet paper. You’d have thought he’d just told us that nuns were allowed to go to proms or soul kiss every Thursday. The romance ploy left me cold. I was turned off right away by the fashion question. No way was I going to sweat through life in one of those long black dresses and the icky shoes. Besides, it was rumored that nuns shaved their heads, and no way were you going to get me to do that. I wanted to look like Susan Hayward, not Yul Brynner.

  But the guilt stuff kind of got to me, and Father Millenbarger was a specialist in guilt. Still rocking, smiling beatifically, he’d say that anyone who had The Call and refused it would be miserable for the rest of her life, because she had rejected God’s plan for her. He seemed to be looking right at me when he said it, and that was when I started to get this churning sensation in my stomach, which was either The Call or the first rumblings of food poisoning from the hot dog I ate for lunch. But I was clever. Just in case it was The Call, I set up, in my mind, a deflector shield like the ones I used to see on Captain Video, where the good guys aimed the bad guys’ death rays right back at them. Except I was aiming my deflector at Ruthie Harrigan, who was sitting in the row ahead of me. Mentally, I aimed The Call smack at the back of Ruthie’s head; she wore her hair in two ponytails, one over each ear, and I directed the beam right at the part where a few flecks of dandruff were anchored in her hair.