by Caryl Rivers
Con had Lee’s card to use the commissary at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and she was in charge of getting the rubbers, because everything was a lot cheaper there. The only problem was you had to buy in bulk.
We lugged the carton of condoms to the black Ford. “If I drop these, it’s goodbye tootsies,” I said. “How do I explain to Dr. Parkinson that I broke my foot when a ton of Trojans fell on them?”
Con and I had driven out to Bethesda in the Ford, laughing, giggling, singing, and feeling newly grown up. We were now bona fide high school graduates. Con was getting married in two days, and going out to get the rubbers (Sister Justinian would have croaked) was the most sophisticated thing we’d ever done.
“Just think, Con, two days and it’s O.K. to screw.”
“Yeah, that’ll really be weird. Just for old time’s sake, now and then I’ll scream, ‘I am a child of Mary!’”
“Are you scared, Con? I mean, this is life!”
“I know,” she said. “And I’d never get divorced—unless he was a real rat or something. And then I couldn’t get married ever again.”
“You could have lovers.”
“Yeah, but it’s not the same. This is forever.”
The word was so awesome that we just sat there for a minute, letting it hang in the air between us like a visitation from the Holy Spirit.
“You’ll write me. Promise.”
Lee hadn’t gotten Patuxent; he had been assigned to Great Lakes Naval Training Station, and Con and Lee were off to Michigan right after the wedding. Con had her traveling outfit all picked out—a blue suit with a red blouse, and a little blue pillbox hat with a veil to match.
“I’ll write, Peggy, I promise. Hey Peg, you’ll never guess who’s getting married right before me and Lee.”
“Who?”
“Dolly.”
“You’re kidding!” (Dolly’s image was stamped forever on my mind the way I had first seen her, bra on and pubic hair hanging out.) “Is she marrying the guy she was with that night, what’s his name?”
“No, another one.”
“Another one? Con, she must have screwed half the fleet.”
“Just about. But you should see her carrying on now. She’s doing the whole demure virgin bit.”
“Dolly?’
“Yeah. She even said to me with a straight face that she was going to give her unsullied body to her husband on her wedding night.”
“Con, bodies don’t come any more sullied than Dolly’s.”
“She blanked it all out. I think she’s convinced herself she’s actually the Virgin Mary.”
I had this sudden image of Dolly, clad in a blue mantle and a bra, her pubic hair flashing, appearing to a couple of Portuguese children and saying, “Russia must be converted.” They sure wouldn’t put that on a Holy Card.
I had gone shopping with Con to pick out the dress I would wear as Con’s maid of honor. We picked a blue one, since Con said that was my color, and she wanted one that wasn’t too “bridey.” We found a dress in Promtime, and it had a neckline that would never have gotten the approval of Father Clement Kliblicki, and a full skirt. We bought a cartwheel hat to match the dress, and I had shoes dyed to match. The morning of the wedding I got up and put on my makeup, then I slipped into my dress and put on the hat, and I looked into the mirror. I was astonished to find a lovely young woman staring back at me. Could that be me? That woman? What had happened to the kid who always used to be there?
My mother came in and smiled at me.
“Peg,” she said. “You’re grown up. How did it happen so fast?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She looked at me, quietly, and then a frown crossed her face. I noticed that there were shadows around her eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“Peg, whatever you do, finish your education. Learn to do something. Don’t ever—don’t ever let life hit you like a truck.”
I nodded. It wasn’t until years later, of course, that I realized what she had done. She moved in to take over Dad’s business; she paid the bills; she kept the house repaired; kept our lives rolling on pretty much as they had before—like a bus that had stopped, but had then resumed its appointed course. She never let me know that we had been at the edge of an abyss, that she had thrown a safety net across it and we hadn’t fallen in.
“If your father hadn’t had the business,” she said, “if he’d just been working for a salary someplace—I don’t know what I would have done.” She shook her head. “And I never thought about it. I never worried. Learn to take care of yourself, Peg.”
“I will, Mom.”
“I’m very proud of you, Peg,” she said. “I hope you know that.”
Sean came to pick me up and he took both my hands in his and he looked me up and down. “Peggy,” he said, “you’re beautiful! You look so beautiful!” He looked pretty good himself, I thought, all dressed up in a blue suit and tie, and when we walked out the door together, I imagined it wasn’t just my old house, but the St. Regis, and people on the sidewalk were stopping to stare at us, we were such a glamorous couple.
“That’s Peg Morrison, the Pulitzer Prize winner,” they’d say.
“Who’s that with her?”
“That’s her lover, Sean McCaffrey, the Hero-Priest of the Amazon.”
“They let priests do that?”
“Not usually, but he saved so many souls that they gave him celibacy leave.”
We drove down to Annapolis in the Caddy, and Sean went to take a seat in the chapel and I went back to the dressing room to help Con get ready. I promised her I’d do it; she said no way was she going to let her mother back there. I said that was kind of mean, but she stuck to her guns. She was alone, sitting at a vanity, when I came in. She was wearing a longline bra and a girdle, and her stockings and shoes. She gave a low wolf whistle when I came in and said, “Oh Peg, you look fantastic! Hey, this bra pulls in my waist, but it pushes everything out down below. Do my hips look eight miles wide?” She took a bite of a half-eaten Mars bar that was lying on the vanity. “I just had to have something in my stomach so I wouldn’t throw up.”
“You’ve got a full skirt, so nobody’s even going to notice your hips.”
“I know they’re there. They keep sending me little messages: ‘Hello, it’s your hips. One more bite of that candy bar and we’re going to bust this girdle wide open.’” She peered into the mirror.
“Oh shit, I got a zit. My wedding day and God sends me a zit.”
“It’s hardly noticeable. Besides, I don’t think God sent it.”
“Yes He did. Probably because we kidnapped Him and rolled Him up like a rug. ‘Take that, Constance Marie Wepplener. Shazam, a zit!”
“Well, it’s no problem.”
“So you say. If Lee sees it, he’ll stop the ceremony and he’ll say, ‘Everyone go home. I’m not marrying anyone with a zit!’ And then I’ll have to become a fucking nun. Come on help me into the damn dress.”
I went to get the dress out of the plastic bag, but Con said, “Wait, I have something for you,” and she fished around in her pocketbook a minute, and pulled out a large black notebook and handed it to me.
“Your journal. Con, it’s your journal!”
“Yeah,” she said. “It is.”
“But don’t you want it?”
“I want you to have it, Peggy. It’s yours. You keep it.”
“But Con—”
“You keep it, Peggy. You’re the one—I just want you to have it.”
“We were the greatest, Con. There’ll never be another bunch like us.”
“There never will be,” she said. “We’re immortal! And maybe someday you can use it. To write something about us. So people will remember.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise.”
We just stood and looked at each other, and then Con said, “Omigod, the dress!”
I helped Con slip it on over her head, and I zipped
it up. Then I helped her put on her veil, adjusting it so that it sat the right way on her head, not tilted or anything.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“You look beautiful, Con.”
And she did look beautiful, swathed in yards and yards of white lace, her curls held stiff in place by frozen droplets of hair spray. But as I looked at her, she seemed smaller, diminished somehow by the dress. It was as if all her fire had been dampened by the lace, simply extinguished by acres of frilly bridal fabric, as if it were some kind of chemical foam. The whole outfit, it seemed to me, conspired to restrain her—the dress, the girdle, the veil, even the hairspray; it was all holding her in place—woman’s place, I thought suddenly. She didn’t look like a comet that would blaze across the sky. She looked like every ordinary girl whose picture appeared in the bridal section of the Washington Post.
Con, my Con, who taught me about being beautiful and damned and burning the candle at both ends and tasting the well of life, was going to be a Navy wife. She was going to pour tea for admirals’ ladies and play bridge on long, dull afternoons and traipse around the country, from one Navy base to another, for the rest of her life.
Suddenly I felt betrayed, deserted, and I had to look away. She must have known what I was thinking because she said, “I can go to college, Peg, wherever Lee is stationed. I’ll take courses. Why, all the traveling I’ll do, the experiences I’ll have—it’ll be perfect for a writer.”
But her eyes were uncertain, hesitant. The old sureness was gone. And for the first time, instead of me wanting her approval, she wanted mine; wanted it desperately.
“You bet your ass you’ll be a writer,” I said. “The best.”
She nodded, grimly. “I love him, Peg. I really do.”
“I know.”
“He loves me. I didn’t. . .” She paused. “I didn’t think anybody ever really would.”
I had to turn away again, because I suddenly felt as though I was going to cry. Was this the price you had to pay for someone to love you? To give up your dreams? I didn’t want the new loved Con. I wanted the old unloved one, who could swear like a trooper and blaspheme the biggest saint in heaven and who could make me feel special. I wondered if I would ever find her again.
Then Con’s father came in to take her arm, and the organ began to play. I walked out in front of Con, moving slowly down the aisle. I saw Con’s mother seated in a pew, the last faint tinges of a bruise hardly visible on her cheek beneath the heavy powder. But what really struck me were the rows and rows of white uniforms, waves of them. It made me realize that this was Lee’s world she was entering, a sea of maleness. I wondered if Con would simply disappear into it, like Jonah being swallowed up by the whale.
I snuck a glance back at Con as I turned the corner in front of the altar, and she had a tight, scared smile on her face. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing I was, if she had an idea for the first time of what she was up against. Rebelling against the system at Immaculate Heart wasn’t so very hard, after all. You could bum pictures of Mother Marie Claire and swipe Christ and get a boy into the Big Sex Talk, but how did you fight the U.S. Navy? Especially when the next promotion depended on your being nice to the captain’s wife? Navy wives were supposed to be like nice Catholic girls—polite, docile, better seen than heard. Suddenly, I felt the entire weight of the chain of command—hundreds and hundreds of those white uniforms. They seemed to reach up to the stars, pressing down on Con. And she seemed so frail, standing there by the altar in her white dress. She had never seemed that way before.
Oh Con, don’t let them do it to you, I thought. Fight them! Fight them!
The old Con could have done it, could have beaten them all. But the new Con, standing quietly beside Lee, looking up at his handsome, bland, unremarkable face—about her I wasn’t sure.
The ceremony was lovely, and when it ended, Lee took Con’s arm, guided her firmly under the arch of swords, and people threw rice. I didn’t get to see much of her at the reception—finger sandwiches, little cookies and domestic champagne before she disappeared to get into her going away outfit, and then she and Lee waved to everybody, and suddenly she was gone.
I was quiet on the long drive home, lost in my thoughts, and Sean was too. I looked over at him, thinking how much I loved his face in profile, its finely chiseled features, the eyelashes that were almost like a girl’s. He was leaving on the 8:45 train tomorrow morning. The future wasn’t the future anymore. It was now. The horses had run their course.
“Well,” Sean said. “She’s married. Con’s married.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“It was a nice wedding.”
“If you like weddings.”
“Don’t you like them? Weddings?”
“I’m not getting married. I’ll be too busy covering wars.”
I don’t want to marry anyone but you, I thought, and you’re going to be a stinking priest. But I said, “You all packed?”
“Train leaves early.”
“Yeah, it does.”
We rode in silence for a while. I thought about Con, in her white dress, about how much I owed her, and I thought about me. I wasn’t going to be a nice, polite little Catholic girl, ever again.
“Sean,” I said, “tonight we’re Doing It.”
“We are?”
“Yes.”
“Well—”
“What’s the matter, you think it’s a sin?”
“No,” he said. “Not with us.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“Well, it’s just—”
“I knew it. You’re chickening out.”
“No I’m not.”
“Just like you always used to do. You said you’d sneak into the movies with me and you never did. We were going to run away to Florida, remember, and I even packed my suitcase and you chickened out.”
“You had twelve Tootsie Rolls and your bathing suit. And you were eight years old. How far did you think you’d get?”
“It’s the principle of the thing. You always chicken out. Chicken! Chicken! Chicken!”
“Peggy—”
“You don’t want my body, fine. I’ll go sell it on the street. ‘Step right up folks, one gen-yoo-ine Catholic virgin—don’t let the brown oxfords turn you off, she’ll untie ‘em.’”
“Peggy, stop that!”
“Why should I?”
“Jeez, you are in some mood today.”
“Why shouldn’t I be? My best friend is going off to fucking Michigan and my other best friend just rejected me. If the End of the World was tonight, that would be the good part of my day.”
“I’m not rejecting you.”
“It certainly sounds like it.”
“It’s just that, Peggy, I’ve never really done it before and I don’t know if I’ll get it right.”
“That didn’t seem to bother you the night you practically raped me in the back seat.”
“I did not practically rape you. Besides, you didn’t seem to object too much.”
“Oh, right, I’m just a slut. You’re like every other guy, you want a girl to make out with you, and when she does, you think she’s some kind of a tramp. Jesus, Sean!”
“Peggy, I never thought that! I swear to God I never did!”
“Let’s just drop the whole subject, O.K.?”
“You know I never thought that. You’re just trying to pick a fight with me, just like you always used to do. You always did, you know.”
“Sean,” I said with great, offended dignity, “I do not wish to discuss it.”
We drove in silence, Sean scowling and me trying to get the look on my face of a haughty queen far above the common herd. When we reached the entrance of the street where we lived, I said to Sean, “Just drop me at my house, please.” But he pulled the Caddy up in front of his house instead.
“Very well, I’ll walk. I know the way.”
“Peggy—”
&
nbsp; “Goodnight, Sean.” I tried to get out of the car but he grabbed me and pulled me to him and started kissing me. I pretended to be mad about it, but I couldn’t pretend for very long. Then he took my hand and guided me out of the car.
“Where are we going?”
“My bedroom.”
“Where’s your parents?”
“Out with the archbishop. They said they’d be home late.”
I walked with him into his bedroom, and I looked around; it was all so familiar. I wondered how many hours I’d spent playing in this room when we were kids. We used to line our fuzzy animals up against the bed and have make-believe banquets, with plates and silverware and peanut butter. Two of those old animals were still sitting on Sean’s bookshelf—Fuzzy and Teddy, their button eyes still bright and their red lips smiling. Were we going to Do It in front of Fuzzy and Teddy? I wondered what they’d think.
“Look, Fuzzy, it’s our old friends! Hi there, little Sean! Hi there, little Peggy. Oh, Fuzzy, isn’t it good to see them?”
“Sure is, Teddy.”
“Want to play banquet, Sean, Peggy? We’ll have lots of peanut butter.”
“Sean? Peggy? What are you doing? What are you doing? Oh my God Fuzzy, they’re screwing! Little Sean and little Peggy are screwing! Oh, I can’t watch!”
“I can, Teddy. Our own porno flick. It’s a lot neater than those stupid banquets.”
“Fuzzy, I always suspected you had a filthy mind.”
We got undressed and climbed into bed, and it was wonderful to be naked in a real bed with Sean. If we were married, I thought, we could do this every day, sleep together in a bed with no one to tell us what we shouldn’t do. I loved the feel of him against me under the crispness of the sheets, loved the way he tasted, the way he smelled, the way he looked. We just kissed for a long, long time, and then we kissed and touched and then we just touched and I lost count of how many times I’d been on the roller coaster. And Sean was moaning a lot—he was a big moaner, Sean was.
Finally he said, “Peggy, I want to do it now,” and I said yes and he reached up on the window sill and got the condom. (He’d had it for two weeks, he admitted later, in case he turned into a raging animal.) He slid it on and the next thing I knew, zip, he was inside me, no pain, no mess. People said some girls stretched their hymens playing sports. Did that mean I’d lost my virginity to a jump shot? What a downer that would be.
