Virgins

by Caryl Rivers

  “Ruthiiiieeee . . . Ruthieeeeeeeee . . .” I called, softly, hoping she would mistake my voice inside her head for the authentic baritone of the Almighty. “It’s God calling you. I want you to be a nun. Nun, Ruthie. N-U-N. It’s God, Ruthieeee.”

  I figured Ruthie would be a terrific nun because she was skinny and never dated and got A’s in religion. I saw The Call boring through her skull the way my father’s drill skewered hardwood, and I thought I could even hear its little whirring sound. A week later I heard that Ruthie had told Sister Robert Mary that she was going to be a nun, and I broke out in a cold sweat. Did Ruthie have my vocation? Did I give it to her the way I gave Sean the chicken pox? Would God be mad? Would I be unhappy? But I figured God got a good deal out of the whole thing, because I would have been a rotten nun and Ruthie would be a good one. “Thank You, God, for taking Ruthie instead of me!” I prayed.

  But still, I wondered about The Call, so one day, when I was walking to Mass with Sean, I asked him about it.

  He looked at me, in a sort of embarrassed way, peering out from under those long eyelashes of his, and he said, “You won’t laugh at me?”

  “No, of course I won’t.”

  “Well,” he said, “I did have a Call.”

  “You did?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Well, I was thinking about how I wanted to do something good with my life. Something really good. Not like my father, who tries to make people do what they don’t want to do. I wanted to do something to help people, you know how I mean.”

  I nodded.

  “Some people,” Sean said, “they just spend their whole lives getting rich or trying to be big shots. They don’t help people. If I’m a priest, my life will mean something.”

  Sean was always able to make me feel a little selfish when he talked like that. I could tell myself that I wanted to help people too; that I wanted to be a journalist to right the evils of the world. But it was really the glory I coveted, the byline. I had already pictured the banquet where I’d get my Pulitzer; we’d have steak and French fries—and no peas—and everybody would cheer and cheer. It was the alternate ending to The Peg Morrison Story, where I didn’t get shot and die in Sean’s arms. It wasn’t as romantic, but at least I’d get to see the movie.

  Sean never could stand to see anything hurt. Before he decided to be a priest, he was going to be a veterinarian. He always dragged home wounded birds and cats and mice. It was probably a good thing he abandoned his plans to be a vet, because while he was well-intentioned, he was also clumsy. If the wounded animal didn’t die of natural causes, he was sure to croak from Sean’s ministrations. Sean usually dropped his patients while he was trying to put iodine on them, and then we’d have a requiem mass in the backyard, with Sean, of course, officiating. Sean had jars and jars of holy water—he filled up at the baptismal font almost as often as his father filled up with Esso—and he’d sprinkle the deceased with handfuls of it. The grass always grew great in Sean’s backyard, thanks to the nitrogen enrichment and the sanctification caused by all those little corpses soaked with holy water.

  Sean had what I thought of as pain sensors—he knew when someone or something was hurting when nobody else did. Once we walked all through the little woods at the back of my yard because Sean said he heard a hurt animal. I told him he was crazy, but sure enough, we found a bird on the ground flapping a broken wing. Sean took it home—and dropped it on the floor and broke its other wing. At least as a priest, Sean wouldn’t be able to injure anybody physically, unless he accidentally stuck a candle in somebody’s eye when he was doing the Blessing of the Throats.

  Sean explained to me about The Call. He said, “I was walking in the park one morning, and the sun was out and it was warm, and suddenly I knew that God was there, all around me. I felt Him. I saw Him.”

  “Saw Him? Like at Fatima?”

  “No, you know I don’t believe in that stuff. Visions. Why should God have to put on a slide show when he can talk to you inside your mind?”

  “Did He? Talk to you?”

  “I think so. All of a sudden everything just seemed all golden and I had this feeling that God was all through me—inside my bones. It was—I can’t describe it, I just never felt anything like it before.”

  I looked at Sean; he wasn’t talking to me, really; he was lost in the memory, and his face seemed to be glowing, as if it were lit up by some inner fire. It seemed to me that he was just shining brighter and brighter, and if I kept looking at him I’d burn out my eyes. It was like staring into the sun.

  “I can’t tell you how I felt,” he said. “It was like—I was part of everything on Earth and it was part of me, and I could never die; I’d just live forever, and I just stood there and hoped the feeling would never go away. It did. But I knew then that God was touching me, calling me.”

  We walked along in silence for a while, and I thought, Phew! Maybe I hadn’t gotten a Call after all, because nothing like that had ever happened to me. Maybe it was just the hot dog. I thought of Sean standing by slimy old Sligo Creek and God turning everything golden, and oh, how I envied him, at least for a minute. Nothing I had ever felt even approached Divine Rapture. Masturbating came closest, maybe, because it felt so good, but it was probably a sin just even to think about it in the same breath with The Call.

  “I wish I’d been there,” I said. “I wish I’d felt it too.”

  “So do I,” Sean said. “But I’m glad I told you about it.”

  “So am I,” I said, and I reached out to take his hand and we just kept walking along quietly together. I don’t think I’ve ever been as close to another human being as I was to Sean at that moment. I wanted to take him in my arms and kiss him all over, which seems a strange reaction to having somebody tell you about how he got called by God, but there it was.

  After that, it was impossible to pretend to myself that Sean wasn’t really going to be a priest, and I decided Con was right; I had to start dating other guys. I told Con I was ready, and she said she’d start working on Annapolis.

  Her aunt, the one who was married to the Navy commander, had promised that she’d get Con invited down to the Naval Academy when she turned eighteen. Con had her eighteenth birthday on the first day of December, and her aunt, true to her word, delivered a present. Her husband taught at the Academy, so it was easy for her to get dates for us to the big Winter Hop. Con said that uniforms really turned her on, which seemed strange to me, because the military seemed the least likely institution to be compatible with Con’s anarchistic tendencies.

  “I just can’t help it; I see those uniforms and I practically have orgasms,” she said. “I just look at them and all I can think of is sex, sex, sex.”

  “How about I get you a troop of Boy Scouts?”

  “Oh, you’re quick on the draw these days, Peg. Not Dorothy Parker, but you’re getting there.”

  I told Sean that Con and I were going to Annapolis, and he seemed a little upset about it.

  “Look,” he said, “You watch out for yourself down there. Most of those guys probably aren’t even Catholics.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “one bunny hop with one of those guys and I won’t believe in transubstantiation anymore. I will scream across the dance floor, ‘GOD DOES NOT LIVE IN THE HOST.’”

  “You know what I mean. Those guys don’t care anything about sin. Just because they wear those neat uniforms they expect girls to rip their clothes off and come running.”

  “I promise, Sean, I won’t rip my clothes off, even if all the guys look like Tab Hunter.”

  Sean looked at me crossly. He knew I didn’t like Tab Hunter.

  “What if one of them looks like James Dean?”

  “Then I’ll rip his clothes off.”

  “Oh, Peggy, be serious for a second. I mean these guys are older. They know all the tricks for getting girls, you know, worked up.”

  “Sean, I am not an infant.
I have been out on dates with guys who know tricks. Last year I went out with Go-Go Gunderson.”

  “So?”

  “This is the big Catholic athlete of the year, goes to Mass every day, right? I barely got in the car when he stuck his tongue in my ear.”

  “Go-Go has no class. These guys are smooth. Devious.”

  “What will they do, stick their tongues in my eye?”

  “Don’t drink anything,” he ordered. “They’ll ply you with liquor.”

  “O.K., I won’t.”

  “Don’t kiss anybody.”

  “For Chrissake, Sean, this is really going to be some fun weekend. Maybe I’ll suggest we all just say the Rosary for a good time. O.K., everybody, let’s hear it nice and loud, the fourth glorious Mystery!”

  “You don’t have to be snotty. I just don’t want you to come back pregnant or anything.”

  I stopped walking and looked at him. “Pregnant! Sean, four years of high school and I haven’t even unbuttoned my blouse! You think all of a sudden I’m going to get pregnant!”

  “Well, you’re just so pretty, and—um—sexy, that I think maybe some guys might just get carried away.”

  “I’m sexy?” I said.

  “Oh God, yes,” Sean said, and he grabbed me and kissed me, right there in front of People’s Drug, so hard it made my head spin. All of a sudden I didn’t want to go to Annapolis and dance with gorgeous guys in their uniforms; I didn’t want to do anything but just stay around good old Crystal Springs and keep kissing Sean. That was when I knew I really was addicted. Half the kids in the school were green with envy because Con and I were going to the Naval Academy. They certainly wouldn’t be jealous of me because I kissed a kid from Sacred Heart High School. They could do that any old time.

  So the next weekend Con and I climbed on a bus, with our suitcases, heading for Annapolis. I had never felt so utterly grown up in my life. We were going to stay overnight at a “drag house” (dates at the Naval Academy were called drags) and our dates would pick us up there for the Hop.

  “Nervous?” Con asked, as we lugged our suitcases along the cobbled streets.

  “A little,” I said. “Are you?”

  “Me? Of course not. Remember, they put their pants on one leg at a time.”

  “It’s not their putting their pants on that has me worried,” I said. “It’s their taking them off.”

  “I have created a monster,” Con sighed.

  When we got to the drag house, a modest two-story building on a quiet street, we went inside and met Mrs. Belcher, who ran the house, and she told us we would be sharing a room on the second floor with two other girls. I dragged my suitcase up the stairs and through the door of the room, and then I stopped short, flabbergasted. A woman, totally naked, was sitting at the vanity bench putting on makeup. I mean, she was starkers! She just sat there, calm as you please, with her boobs resting on the table. At Immaculate Heart, all the showers had curtains, and nobody ever walked around just in panties and bra. When we had slumber parties we all wore heavy flannel nighties with little flowers on them. Sister Justinian even told us that when we took a bath we ought to put talcum powder on the surface of the water, so we wouldn’t see our own bodies and be tempted to impurity. I tried it once—more out of curiosity than out of concern for purity—and it didn’t work very well. The powder turned slimy, and it was like taking a bath in the Johnson & Johnson version of the Great Dismal Swamp.

  “Hi!” said the naked woman, “I’m Marianne.”

  “I’m Dolly,” came a voice from the top bunk. Dolly was wearing a bra—that was it. She was just lying around with her pubic hair waving in the breeze (there wasn’t any breeze, but you know what I mean) and that shocked me more than the lady who was starkers. I mean, it was pretty mortifying to grow hair down there in the first place, but to sit around flaunting it had to be some kind of sin.

  “Where y’all from,” said Dolly, in a voice drenched with magnolias.

  “Immaculate Heart High School,” I said. Con rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, and I knew I had blown it.

  “Gawd, a couple of high school virgins,” Marianne said, with a sigh.

  Con slung her suitcase on the top bunk of the bed opposite Dolly, and she said, “Honey, if there’s any virgins in this room, look for a star in the East, because it’s a miracle!”

  Dolly and Marianne chuckled appreciatively. Con took out a cigarette, lit it, and took a sensual puff, just like Lauren Bacall. 1 was bowled over with admiration, and proud that Con was my friend.

  Dolly laughed and said, “This your first time here?”

  “Yeah,” Con said, taking a puff. “Giving the Navy a try. West Point’s where Peg and I usually hang out.”

  My blood froze. Con was lying. We’d never been near West Point. I wondered if that could qualify as a mental reservation. I didn’t quite see how, though.

  “How are the guys up there?” Marianne asked.

  Con actually leered. I didn’t even think she knew how to do it, but she cranked up a genuine leer, like Mae West. “The only problem is that they have all those damn buttons on their pants,” she said.

  “Yeah, but it’s worth the wait,” I said, and Con flashed me an approving glance. Take that, Dorothy Parker, I thought.

  “Peg’s been on Flirtation Walk with so many guys they’re going to put her lip-prints in cement,” Con said. Oh God, she was brilliant today.

  “If all the guys at West Point who gave me hickeys dropped dead, we’d lose World War Three,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Con said, “the whole Joint Chiefs of Staff of 1980, wiped out in one blow. And speaking of blow, how are the guys down here?”

  Dolly hopped off the bed and started doing toetouches, and her boobs jiggled up and down. “A hard man is good to find, and there’s a lot of them in the Navy.”

  “I hear they put saltpeter in the food down here,” Con said. “That’s what they say at West Point.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t take,” laughed Dolly. “Hardly slows ‘em down.” I thought this had to be the most sophisticated conversation anybody had, anywhere, and I was thrilled right down to my toes. I’d probably committed five or six venial sins just listening.

  Marianne got up from the table and started walking around, picking out her clothes from the closet. The hair on her head was red, but the hair Down There was dark brown. I was stunned; Marianne dyed her hair. I tried not to stare at her crotch, without much success.

  Then Con not to be outdone, stripped off her blouse and then her bra, and started unpacking just like that, with her boobs showing. She didn’t strip any further; Con had a beautiful bust, but as sensitive as she was about her hips, she wasn’t going to flash them around. She glared at me—I was still standing there with my coat on and my blouse buttoned up to my Adam’s apple. I put my suitcase on the bed, and very slowly I took off my clothes, except for my bra and panties. I had a new lace bra and new panties. My old ones were all cotton, like kids wear, and I was really glad I thought to buy some new nylon ones. Dolly and Marianne would have laughed themselves silly to see me standing there in my little cotton panties from Sears Roebuck with the reinforced crotch and the daisies.

  I started unpacking and Con looked at me, expectantly, but this was it, as far as I was going. No way was I going to walk around flashing my tits for these two Scarlets. I wasn’t in their league, and I knew it.

  “You girls go to school?” Con asked. “Or do you just hang around here screwing Middies?”

  “Sweetwater College,” Dolly said. “Home of the most beautiful girls in the South. At least that’s what it says in the catalogue.”

  “What are you majoring in?” 1 asked Dolly politely. Con gave me another look.

  “My Mrs.,” said Dolly. “What the fuck else is there?”

  Dolly and Marianne finally finished dressing, tottering around on four-inch heels, getting ready to risk a broken ankle on the streets of Annapolis. They went out toget
her, laughing and chattering.

  “Oh God, Con, we are over our heads here,” I said. “This is the real world.”

  “We’re doing just fine, Peg. Remember, we’re the intellectual elite. We don’t have to be scared off by a couple of fake Southern belles.”

  “They’re not fake, Con. Not where it counts. I don’t think those bodies have ever been temples of the Holy Ghost.”

  Con laughed. “I wonder what they study at Sweetwater College—if anything.”

  “Well, it sure isn’t the Baltimore Catechism.” Con started to sashay around, imitating Dolly.

  “Honey chile, we sho’ do know the li’l ole Baltimo’ Catechism. Ask me that first li’l old question.”

  “Who made us?”

  “God made us—and then there was Freddie, and Billy, and Rhett, and then there was that cute ole Johnny.”

  I collapsed on the bed. “Do you think they really do it, with different guys?”

  “Oh yeah, they do. We’re just faking it, but they’re not virgins. You can tell by looking at their eyes.”

  “Is that really true?”

  We both walked to the mirror and looked in.

  “Pale, watery eyes,” said Con. “A pair of virgins if ever I saw them.”

  “Don’t you want to be a virgin when you get married?”

  “I don’t want to be a virgin yesterday.”

  “Con!”

  “Well, I don’t. What’s so great about being a virgin? Unless you’re the Blessed Virgin, and you know what? I think she got gypped. She had to have a baby and didn’t have sex. Whose idea is that of a good deal?”

  We sat in silence for a minute and Con said, “Don’t you want to get laid?”

  “Well, sure, eventually.”

  “Why eventually? And don’t give me that sin stuff. You don’t believe in it and neither do I.”