Virgins

by Caryl Rivers

  Then we curled up in each other’s arms and I felt good and warm and safe with Sean. It was funny, I was supposed to be feeling sinful and wretched, because I’d just done most of the sinful things I’d ever heard about with Sean—except for actually Doing It of course—and I just felt good all over.

  He went right off to sleep in my arms; Sean had always been able to do that, even when we were kids. He’d just curl up in the sandbox and he’d be asleep before I could finish a sentence. I ran my finger across his lips, and I kissed his cheek, the way I always used to do when he fell asleep in the sandbox and I thought he wouldn’t know I was doing it. I had known him my whole life, I thought, and I couldn’t imagine a time when he wouldn’t be there. He was like a twin, part of me. I felt so awful inside, empty and aching, when I thought of him going away, that I decided not to think about it; I closed my eyes and went to sleep too.

  When I woke up Sean was already awake, and looking very serious and thoughtful. I sat up and hooked my bra and buttoned my blouse. He looked at me and said, “I just want you to know I really respect you.”

  It sounded so ridiculous that I started to giggle and Sean looked puzzled for a minute and then the absurdity of it hit him too, and he cracked up. We both just kept laughing and laughing—I laughed so hard I almost peed in my pants. When we simply couldn’t laugh any more, Sean peered down at the floor of the car and said, “Yuck.”

  “We’ve got to clean it up,” I said.

  “Peggy,” he said, “did you think it was—disgusting or anything?”

  “Oh no,” I said, “I thought it was neat. Really. Course, after the stuff lies around for a while it probably gets rancid, you know, like old hamburger.” I fished around in my purse. “Here, use this hanky. You can just tell your dad somebody spilled Coke in the back seat.”

  Sean did his best to tidy up the floor of the car, and then he tossed the hanky out the window. He put his arms around me and said, “Peggy, are you sorry?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not. Are you?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not.” I noticed he didn’t say anything at all about sin. We just sat there, quietly, close together, and I thought it’s only April; we have two months before Sean has to go away. Two months. I rolled the words around in my head, trying to make it sound like a long long time. Two months.

  Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.

  Kidnapping Christ

  “LOOK INTO my eyes!” Con commanded. We were sitting in the Messenger room, under the Little Flower with her boobs half out.

  I looked. They were different, smokier, I thought, sensuous, sultry.

  “Oh my God! You did it! Con, you’re a woman!”

  She smiled enigmatically, and I looked at her in awe. I felt a great chasm open up between us, like the San Francisco earthquake splitting the very floor under our feet. Con wasn’t a virgin anymore. Con was a woman. I was still a girl.

  Suddenly, I felt shy and tongue-tied. So did Con, a little bit at least. We just sat there and looked at each other, not knowing what to say.

  “Well,” I said, “you did it!”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I did it.”

  “Well. . .” I said. I supposed I shouldn’t pry. After all, it was her body. What right did I have to get nosy. But this was Con. I couldn’t stand not knowing.

  “Shit, Con, what was it like?”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m not sure it’s all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “It isn’t?” I said.

  I must have looked terribly forlorn, because Con added hastily, “The first time, I mean. They say after that it just gets better and better. It’s just that at first it’s a little, ah, difficult.”

  “Yeah? Like how?”

  “Well. . .” she said.

  It seems that Con was alone with Lee in the Annapolis apartment where I’d seen my second real live penis, and they had been talking about The Red Menace. That always seemed to turn Lee on, Con said, because after they talked about J. Edgar Hoover he’d get real passionate. (I wondered if that would work on most guys. I wondered if some guy was being real cool and aloof, and I just whispered in his ear, “Herbert Philbrick! Pumpkin Papers! Roy Cohn!” he’d throw me down on the couch and kiss my ear lobe.) They started necking real hot and heavy and Con thought, “What the hell, why not?”

  She told this to Lee, who was delighted, but she informed him that she was a virgin and no way was she going to get pregnant, and he had to use something.

  So he put his pants on and ran out into the night, only it took him forty-five minutes to find a drugstore that was open, while Con waited anxiously in the apartment, certain that Lee had been run over by a car, and that her insatiable lust had murdered the man who was destined to deflower her, so she might as well become a nun. (When things were going badly, Con always declared she was going to be a nun. She thought of the convent as one big Valium.)

  By the time Lee got back, Con had cooled down considerably, so she suggested maybe they should go to a movie instead. But Lee looked so crestfallen—he’d run a half mile back to the apartment with the rubbers clutched in his hand like a relay runner’s baton—that Con didn’t have the heart to insist.

  If she’d been using her head, Con said, she’d have done the whole thing differently, because when she saw the dimensions of Lee’s equipment, she began to worry. This was the girl who couldn’t get a junior Tampax in without a sledgehammer. Lee might have been thinking of The Song of Songs, but Con could only think of The Charge of the Light Brigade.

  “See, I could have gotten it stretched,” she said. “Then I would have been O.K.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Where?”

  “A doctor’s office.”

  I thought of my pediatrician, Dr. Norman Parkinson, who’d been my doctor ever since I was born, and who would put on bunny ears sometimes to make me laugh. I couldn’t imagine saying to him, “Doc, the bunny ears are a blast, but how about stretching my vagina?”

  “How do they do it?” I asked Con, momentarily diverted from her story. Con knew lots about medicine.

  “How? They have machines. Stretching machines. All doctors have them. You just have to make an appointment to use the stretcher, you know, like an X-ray.”

  “All doctors have them? Like even foot doctors?”

  “I don’t guess a foot doctor would have a vagina-stretcher,” Con said grumpily. She was eager to get back to her saga.

  Anyhow, Con said, she was in the bedroom, lying on the bed, starkers, and the big moment came and she closed her eyes, expecting this awful pain. But nothing happened.

  She opened her eyes and there was Lee, pushing away, but every time he tried he kept bouncing out of her. It was like he was on a trampoline, Con said, going Boing! Boing! Boing!—bouncing further away each time.

  “I swear, honey,” he said somewhat breathlessly, “you certainly are strong down there.”

  Great, Con thought, most girls got teeny weeny pieces of skin. How come I got the Iron Curtain?

  “Lee, just keep on going. I know you’ll do it!”

  And Lee went back to work, plunging away like a pile driver, but not making much progress.

  “Honey, I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up!” Lee said, plaintively. He was sweating like a native bearer in the Congo, and Con was bouncing up and down on the bed from his frantic efforts. Con resorted to praying. “Please, I’ll do the nine First Fridays, I’ll say the Rosary for twenty decades, only please, please let him get it in.”

  Maybe the prayers did it, because Con felt this little tearing sensation inside—like a Band-Aid being ripped off, she said—and then Lee said, “Thank goodness!” and he moved around a little, then more, and then he lay still.

  Con was too exhausted to feel anything but relief. But she thought she would be real sophisticated and lie there naked, smoking a cigarette, basking in her newfound status
as a woman. There was only one problem. She was bleeding.

  “Like a pig,” Con said.

  “Oh no!” I couldn’t suppress a giggle. Con was a big bleeder. She once had a nosebleed in Bible History and you’d have thought the Holy Innocents had been massacred right there in Room Five. The whole floor was awash with blood.

  Con lit her cigarette and tried to be real cool, but that is hard to do, she said, when you are pumping fluid like an oil well that’s just come in.

  “Honey, are you O.K.?” Lee asked, and Con placed a towel in a strategic place and kept smoking, until Lee said, alarmed, “Honey, you are still bleeding.”

  She went through three towels and a blanket, and that’s when she started to get worried.

  “What would they say in my obit? ‘Constance Marie Wepplener, 18, died suddenly of screwing too hard.’ I’d be mortified!”

  “Oh Con, what happened?”

  “They took me out in an ambulance,” she said. “An ambulance! Oh, I was mortified! And Lee was so nice, and so worried. He just sat beside me and held my hand and told me everything was going to be all right. Then we got to the hospital and this old biddy of a nurse asked me, real snotty, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ And I said, ‘I’m bleeding to death, you asshole!’ That sort of shocked Lee, because I don’t swear around him; he thinks it’s vulgar. But the doctor who treated me was real nice, and he said not to worry, I was going to be O.K. I just clot slow. It’s pretty rare, like one person in 100,000, but he could give me some stuff to help.”

  “Oh Con,” I said, “everything happens to you! You just have to be a writer.”

  “This one I could write for the Journal of the American Medical Association,” she said.

  I was worried for a while that the new, nonvirgin Con would be a lot different from the old one. I thought she wouldn’t want to run around and do crazy stuff and crack jokes and write blasphemous things about saints in the Messenger room. I had this idea that women who weren’t virgins sat around a lot in black negligees on red satin couches and thought about sex. I mean, I thought about sex too, but I did it while I was supposed to be translating stuff about the Punic Wars.

  But the nonvirgin Con seemed to dig doing the same stuff the virgin one did—like batting around in the black Ford with Mollie and me. We liked to do that a lot, just climb in the car and head off for no place in particular at night after dinner. Sometimes we didn’t really go anyplace, just drove around and we’d sing and swear and tell filthy jokes, like the one about the guy who had the blow job and wondered if he’d broken the Communion fast. We’d behave in all the ways that nice Catholic girls weren’t supposed to. But we never picked up boys. That was taboo, because we wanted it to be just us, together. We felt so free, zipping along in the Ford, as if we’d simply flown off into the blue ether someplace where the rules for girls had been outdistanced and the rules for women didn’t yet apply. We had dreams as grandiose as any boys might have had—Con, the New York writer; me, the war correspondent; Mollie, the engineer who wanted to put things in space.

  When I think of us, as we were then, I marvel at how vulnerable we were, and how brave; how little we knew of the world out there that would do its best to crush our spirits, break our dreams as if they were walnuts, herd us back into the tiny pens that were the part of the world that belonged to women. But for the moment, we were young, we were free, and we had each other.

  One night as we were zipping along in the Ford, I took a swig of beer and started to sing, “Roll me over, in the clover—”

  And Mollie and Con joined in: “Roll me over, lay me down and do it again.”

  “Amen!” Con said.

  And then inspiration struck. “Hey,” I said, “let’s steal the flag from Sacred Heart.”

  “They have to take it down at night,” Mollie said. “It’s the law.”

  “No, not the American flag. The Sacred Heart banner. The new one. They don’t take it in, because it’s waterproof.”

  “Holy shit,” said Con, “that would really do it. The Sacred Heart banner! The brothers would have orgasms!”

  “Yeah, we’d go out in a blaze of glory,” Mollie said.

  “Immortality,” I said, “in our grasp.”

  “Let’s do it!” Con whooped.

  The banner that hung from the roof of Sacred Heart High School was so long that it covered nearly the top two stories of the facade. It was a gift from a wealthy alum who had made a pile in electrical circuits and wanted to show his gratitude to the brothers. He commissioned the banner, which showed Christ, opening his chest to display his Sacred Heart crowned with thorns and pierced with a sword. The artist wasn’t very good at drawing organs, so the heart looked more like a liver, and the expression on Christ’s face, which was supposed to be one of pained rapture, looked more like sexual transport. It caused a great deal of comment when it was hung in a special ceremony two months ago, but I thought it was tacky to have a two-story Christ having an orgasm right there on the front of the school. Sean thought it was ugly too.

  “Did you get a look at Christ?” he grumbled. “He looks like Tony Curtis with a beard. And his clothes, for Chrissake!”

  “Well, Sean,” I said, “maybe Jesus really did wear chartreuse. Maybe he was a snappy dresser.”

  Con, Mollie, and I drove over to the boys’ high school and cased the joint. We drove around the grounds three times to make sure the coast was clear. There were no signs of life anywhere. The brothers lived in a house half a mile away, so there was no danger of them spotting us. They all had to be in by nine.

  We parked the car on a side street, out of sight, and made our way to the base of the fire escape by the side of the building that led to the roof.

  “I’ll stay here and be the lookout,” Con said.

  “Oh no you don’t,” I said. “We’re going to need all three of us to get that thing off the building.”

  “Oh shit!” Con moaned.

  Mollie and I climbed up the fire escape quickly, while Con climbed slowly, step by step, sweating and keeping her eyes riveted on the step above. When we reached the roof we hunched over and moved quickly and quietly to the front of the building.

  “Hey, this is neat,” Mollie said. “Like John Wayne.”

  “Lieutenant,” I said to Mollie, “did you bring the dynamite?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “The Nazis think we don’t know about their secret weapon.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t know about us commandos.”

  “Trained killers.”

  “It’s a suicide mission!” I said. “We know we’ll never come back.”

  Mollie started to sing, “Off we go, into the Wild Blue yonder—”

  “That’s the Air Force,” I said.

  “I don’t know the Trained Killer anthem.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” Con said, “I ought to have my head examined! What am I doing on the roof of Sacred Heart High School with two girls who think they’re John Wayne and Errol Flynn?”

  We crept over to the front ledge of the building, to examine the manner in which the banner was fastened. It was tied, with rope, to two pipes on the roof, so we wouldn’t have too much difficulty getting it loose. We decided to haul the banner up to the roof while it was still fastened; we didn’t want to risk dropping Christ four stories to the ground.

  We started to pull it up, very slowly, but ran into a problem. One edge of the banner caught on a drainpipe about two feet below the top ledge. We pulled at it, but it wouldn’t come. We were afraid that if we tugged too hard, the banner would rip.

  “We’ll have to free it by hand,” I said.

  “Good luck,” Con muttered.

  “I can do it,” I said. “I can just reach out with one hand and pull that edge free.”

  I lay on the ledge, on my stomach, and I wrapped part of the rope that held the banner around my wrist, just as a precaution. I stretched my free hand down to grab the edge of the bann
er. I shook it once; it stayed. I shook it again and it moved a bit.

  “I think I’ve got it!” I said. I gave one big pull and the banner came free. But in doing so—since I was leaning so far out over the ledge–I shifted the balance in my body and rolled right off the edge of the building.

  I found myself, an instant later, dangling four stories up by just a rope around my wrist, If I’d moved my foot just a little bit, I’d have kicked Christ in the teeth. It happened too fast for anyone to react, even scream. Suddenly there I was, hanging from the roof of Sacred Heart High School.

  “My God!” Con said, peering over the edge of the roof. “What are you doing down there?”

  I wasn’t scared really. It happened too fast for me to be scared, and there was an air of unreality about the whole thing. l still couldn’t believe I was dangling there, four stories up, in front of the Sacred Heart.

  “I am down here for my health, Con, you idiot,” I said. “For God’s sake, pull me back up!”

  I had this sudden fear that Con and Mollie would panic and run off, leaving me hanging there through the night, and when the kids from Sacred Heart came in for first period, there I’d be, strung up above Christ’s left molar. For punishment I’d be left hanging there, and eventually nothing but my skeleton would remain, dangling from the rope. Parents would ask about it when they came to visit the school to see about enrolling their kid:

  “What is that skeleton up there?” they’d ask.

  “That? Oh, that’s just Peggy Morrison. Was Peggy Morrison.”

  “What’s she doing up there?”

  “She tried to steal the banner of the Sacred Heart, so we just left her up there to starve to death.”

  “Brother, we’re going to enroll our little Freddie right now. You certainly don’t get discipline like that in the public schools.”

  Con and Mollie grabbed my arms and started to pull.

  “Ow!” I said, “you’re ripping my arms out of the sockets.”