True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness

by Christine Lahti

  10

  Losing Virginity

  “We vow to stay virgins until marriage,” my best friend Pam and I whisper-swore to each other, linking our freshly manicured pinkies together. Now seniors in high school, we’d already bonded as blood sisters in third grade. We’d pricked our fingers with my mom’s sewing needle, and then kissed the drops of blood together. Today we confirmed our virginity sisterhood.

  We weren’t about to follow in “stacked Wendy’s” X-rated footsteps. Although none of us had any actual proof that she went “all the way,” we’d shunned her since junior high. She sure as hell looked like she did, with those pointy boobs that strained the pearl buttons on her tight cardigans, that bottle-blond hair. She didn’t have many friends, except for all the boys who waddled after her like little ducklings. She sashayed around the cafeteria, much too comfortable in that busty body of hers. The slut.

  Pam and I were adamant about heading off to college with our respect and hymens intact, goddamn it. Besides, I’d already learned from my dad that having sex without being “in love” and married would be the biggest mistake I could ever make, as dire as drinking a gallon of cyanide. His favorite mantra—“Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?”—made complete sense to me at the time. Nobody was taking my only valuable commodity without putting a fucking ring on it!

  So I waited and waited and waited some more for “love” to arrive. But it never did. Who knew what love even meant? When you couldn’t live without someone? If your heart stopped when you saw him enter a room? When you got misty holding his hand? If you simply had to have a baby with him? Centuries away from having any of those feelings, I assumed I’d have to stay a virgin for the rest of my life.

  Throughout the remainder of high school and well into my sophomore year in college, I remained true to our pact. Somehow, blow jobs and getting fondled and fingered were permissible with just a “like” or “almost love,” but penis-in-vagina penetration still had to be saved for the whole “true love” shebang.

  Then, at nineteen, I started feeling like the oldest living virgin at the University of Michigan. After all, this was the pre-AIDS era of free love! After quitting the sorority that proudly claimed to have the most coeds engaged to be married, I evolved into an antimarriage, pro-making-love-not-war activist. Except I hadn’t made any love. After shamefully confessing my inexperience to my flower-child friends, I’d hear “You’re a freak, Chris! What are you waiting for? Just get it the fuck over with!” What was I holding out for, and why? Because of my dad? That seemed messed up in so many ways. So after several boyfriends came close, literally millimeters close, I finally decided I would lose this albatross once and for all.

  I woke up that Indian-summer Saturday morning in 1969 knowing this would be the day. I got semi-dolled-up in my best clothes—tie-dyed bell-bottoms with a tank top—and headed to the Diag, the meadowlike place on campus where I’d spent many an afternoon sitting on the grass, harmonizing Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Helplessly Hoping” and Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” with friends. I perched myself on a bench and let the games begin.

  Contrary to all my brainwashing, I set out to have my first full sexual encounter with a complete stranger. Of course, I had no idea if anyone would be interested, but I felt confident I’d eventually find a willing party. I sat there silently rating every boy who strolled past. I didn’t know exactly what I was searching for. Probably someone tall and handsome, definitely freshly showered. Most importantly, I couldn’t know the guy or give a shit about him.

  I watched the unsuspecting parade of potential lovers go by for about an hour. Then I saw him: a lanky, sandy-haired boy sitting across from me. As he read his highlighted copy of Alan Watts’s Wisdom of Insecurity, I prayed he would soon be mine. He looked model gorgeous, kind, possibly even a little shy. I approached my target and asked if I could join him. After chatting for a while about our mutually beloved book and the unseasonable weather, we decided to go to a nearby coffee shop.

  First, I inquired about his family and his major, but I didn’t listen to his answers. I lit a cigarette. Then took a deep inhale.

  “So I know this is going to sound weird and more than a little abrupt, but I’m very attracted to you, and I’m really sick of being a virgin. So . . . is there any way you might want to go to your apartment and fuck?” I took another puff, trying to look cooler and more casual than I felt. I had two nosey roommates at the time who I knew would be home, so my place wasn’t an option.

  “Uhhhh, really? Okay, um, sure,” said the man, whose name I don’t remember, laughing.

  Most women I knew rarely screwed on the first date. Even my counterculture girlfriends played the bases, consecutively. But you had to run the whole field first. So my virginity savior looked flabbergasted and a little like he’d just won the World Series.

  Once at his tiny studio apartment, we smoked a joint. It suddenly got crickets-quiet except for the Moody Blues, the eight-track he’d popped into his player as soon as we’d arrived. Neither of us knew how to make the first move. So to break the ice, I asked, “Would you mind if we take off our clothes and do the mirror exercise first?” I’m not sure why I believed engaging in some naked sensitivity training together would enhance our encounter, but thankfully he agreed.

  I’d recently learned “mirroring” in my acting class. Standing in front of your partner, you’d take turns leading a slow-motion movement while the other followed as precisely as possible. It supposedly built trust. So even if we weren’t “in love,” we could at least have a little spiritual bonding! Stoned, we mirrored each other to “Nights in White Satin,” as if we were students in a nudist Twyla Tharp modern dance class. Then we laid down on his extra-long single bed.

  High as kites, we could barely look at each other. Then I began to stare at this unknown person, hoping to will a connection with him. His eyes seemed cloudy and distant, like he might actually be thinking of his former girlfriend. However, something profoundly life-changing was about to occur (at least for me), and I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss a second of it. Even if I had to fake it, even if I had to play both parts, I would make this as meaningful a movie in my head as possible.

  It was over in a minute and a half. He came. I didn’t. He gently stroked my cheek. I cried—but not because of any newly found intimacy. I just felt relieved not to be a virgin anymore. The whole affair proved hugely disappointing. Just like that time when, at eight years old, I devoured what looked like a large piece of homemade fudge off our kitchen counter, and it turned out to be a large piece of canned dog food.

  Really? That’s all? I thought as I lay lost in the shiny hairlessness of his chest. Jesus Christ. That’s what I should never “lose”? Precisely what the fuck was I losing? And would I ever find it again?

  I had to get to my Comparative Religion class. I didn’t know what to say to him. “Thanks for the dick?” No, I thought, better to lie through my teeth. “Wow. Thanks for making this so special. I’ll see you around sometime. Definitely!” I whispered, squeezing a hand that was softer than mine, peering one last time at his finely featured Adonis face.

  I grew angry as I walked to class. Newly a feminist, I thought about how much I’d been duped. How rooted in misogyny was my (and my dad’s) obsession with my precious virginity? My dad had never encouraged my brothers to save theirs for their future wives. Boys I knew who had lots of sex were considered studs. Girls who did got called whores. Having bought the whole women-as-property package for nineteen years, I wanted a full refund.

  I wished my parents had told me that sex was beautiful and fun, especially with someone you care about. Instead of saving my virginity, why couldn’t they have said . . . save your heart, or your talent, or your intelligence, for someone worthy of you? But they made my “cherry” the thing to guard, the most priceless gift I could give to someone.

  I missed out on a lot of good sex in my early college years, but by the time I graduated and moved to New York
City I had made up for lost time. In addition, my best girlfriend introduced me to the vibrator, which led to the discovery of whole new worlds within my body. Yes, it felt better to make love with men I knew and liked, but sometimes a one-nighter or all-by-myself sufficed just fine. At last I felt in charge. Well, almost in charge.

  During this awakening, as a second-wave feminist, I also demanded to be valued for other things besides my body. So I devoted a lot of energy to obsessively downplaying, even denying, any potential sexiness. Of course, the effort to look not sexy took just as much time as it did to look sexy. I still tried hard to look like I didn’t try.

  A longtime boyfriend used to beg me to dress more “womanly.” We literally wrote our lists of grievances and gave them to each other. I wanted him to be less threatened by my success and not chew with his mouth open. He wanted me to wear more makeup and dresses. I refused. Objectify myself?! Our culture did that all on its own without my help, thank you very much.

  I’ll never forget when a famous film director gave me some of his career advice. We were sitting next to each other on a dais at some awards event. “You’re too busy looking for respect, Christine. You need to dirty yourself up and be more sexy,” he said, as if “respect” and “sexy” were mutually exclusive.

  It even took me a while to feel comfortable playing a very sexualized character like Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But I finally got inside her skin and understood her power (or lack thereof). She used her attractiveness to get what she wanted, but tragically it was the only value she felt she had.

  As recently as a few years ago, I found myself confused about Kim Kardashian. I mean, wait just a feminist fuckin’ minute! Selling herself as a sex object and calling it “empowering”? Isn’t that like eating ketchup and calling it a vegetable? I regarded her as kind of a joke, an extremely rich joke, with a massive social media following: an insecure narcissist desperate for attention.

  Then I learned from third-wave feminists that, just like when we bullied Wendy in high school, I was “slut shaming” Kim Kardashian; that she actually had full control of her “art” and was merely celebrating her beauty and sexuality. Who was I to grade her feminism? God knows I’d flunked mine on numerous occasions. Hello, Joy dishwashing liquid!

  These millennials have taught me that their “pro-sex feminism” is the undeniable next step in empowerment. If men choose to regard them as “objects,” tough shit, that is their problem. Men aren’t exploiting them; these women call their own shots, fully in charge and emboldened. Unlike myself and many of my generation, maybe these bright, brazen young women grew up already comprehending their full worth. They didn’t have to prove, downplay, or hide anything.

  Evolving as a feminist has been as messy and complicated for me as it has been essential. It’s not been easy to keep up sometimes. I’ve had to reckon with my own sexism when I’ve also judged women for other choices—like being stay-at-home moms. (Wasn’t the whole point simply that they had a choice?)

  My generation thought we had all the answers. Clearly we didn’t. These younger women will find more of them. Hopefully, a part of their evolution will include challenging this absurd concept of virginity that we were shackled with.

  I recently heard about brides in China who surgically restore their hymens so that their husbands can believe they are still virgins. And hundreds of young women are actually selling their virginities online. It’s a big thing, apparently. Why can’t we females just own our sexuality as simply one of the many powerful things about ourselves? Instead of obsessing about saving it, selling it, or losing it, perhaps we should just lose the whole notion of it altogether. Why can’t losing our virginity be just another glorious rite of passage, like taking our first road trip or voting for the first time or tasting our first glass of a Tuscan Barolo?

  If you’re reading this and you’re one of the boys I left confused and frustrated back then, I’d like to say I’m sorry—I was confused and frustrated, too. But more importantly, I’d like to apologize to Wendy. You didn’t deserve our gossip. You just scared us. You were onto something. Positively, beautifully, ahead of your time.

  11

  Kidnapped

  In 1986 the ticking of my biological time clock became deafening. While my husband had been eager to start a family for several years, I still felt ambivalent, reluctant to stop working even for a minute. I’d always just assumed I’d be one of those older actresses wearing the T-shirt with the picture of a woman holding her aghast face saying, “Oops! I can’t believe I forgot to have children!”

  Besides, I couldn’t quite locate my “maternal instinct.” It was just nowhere to be found. I didn’t even feel the urge when I’d meet friends’ babies. They all looked like mini Winston Churchills, and I’d always have to fake the gushing. And it wasn’t clear to me exactly what I should be searching for when it came to that instinct. Girlfriends described their desire for having a child as an “undeniable, gnawing hunger to have a child, like you can’t feel whole unless you have one.” I only hungered like that for an Oscar, an African safari, and hot-fudge sundaes with walnuts. Even though it seemed I was born without that mothering urge, I didn’t feel too concerned about it; it was just like missing a toenail or the ability to do a backbend.

  But finally, after doing the movie Housekeeping, something creatively profound was satisfied in me. At last I felt sufficiently established in my career. So I figured it might be a good time to start thinking about starting a family. Besides, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a mom, I just didn’t want to be my mom. And the only way to prevent that was to make sure certain mandatory conditions were understood and accepted.

  “Okay, fine, I’m ready to have kids now, but we need to be perfectly clear about the rules,” I announced to my husband, referencing a key chapter from one of my dog-eared feminist handbooks. “We have to be completely equal partners, Tommy, all responsibilities shared fifty/fifty. We’re both going to be breadwinners, why shouldn’t we both be hands-on raising our children? Just because I’ll be the mother, don’t go assuming that I’m automatically the ‘primary’ parent.”

  Tommy agreed without hesitation. I wasn’t surprised. From the moment I met him, I knew he’d be an all-in father. In fact, it was one of the reasons I’d married him. As I prepared to throw away my diaphragm, I decided I’d just have to time the pregnancy somehow to occur during the slower months of movie and TV casting.

  But I never got the memo that by the time you’re thirty-seven, your eggs, just like your breasts, won’t be quite as sprightly as they once were. It had never occurred to me that I should have frozen a few of those suckers back in my early thirties. Month after month, our high hopes were crushed by those few drops of blood in my underwear. After seeing an infertility specialist and requiring many hormone injections, I was starting to feel like I’d never wanted anything more in my life.

  But wait, was this partly because I couldn’t do it? Could this be similar to one of those acting parts I became obsessed about getting because I was told I was “too tall”? Or were those fucking hormones responsible, the ones that forced my ovaries to churn out eight eggs per month instead of the one wrinkly, gasping, thirty-seven-year-old egg? I didn’t have a clue. Until I got pregnant.

  Those first two months were surprisingly sublime. I thought maybe what grew inside me was not only a human life but also a real maternal proclivity. We knew enough not to tell too many people, so I secretly started imagining a life with a family in it. Everything I looked at, I saw through the lens of our future child—things like a shoe box, a spiderweb, and mud all seemed remarkable and newly invented. Objects took on a kind of sheen I’d never before imagined—except during that one good acid trip in college when I beheld a pinecone for two hours as if, within its scaly brown body, it held all seven of the wonders of the world.

  Then, at exactly ten weeks into my pregnancy, I took a long bike ride in the Hamptons with my husband. That night I started to bleed. My doctor sa
id to take it easy, just get some bed rest. But when I got up in the middle of the night to pee, whatever was trying to be a baby fell out of me and splashed into the toilet bowl. I looked for signs of a person, the beginning of a head, maybe an arm bud or a leg sprout, but there was nothing but a gooey mass of black blood. “Not viable,” my doctor told me. “Nothing to do with the bike ride. And no, your early ambivalence about having children didn’t jinx it at all.”

  “Just not meant to be,” friends said, trying to be supportive. I wanted to snap their necks. Didn’t they know that I’d already heard his laugh and knew that he loved the wind as much as I did? Didn’t they realize I’d made big plans for this person, that I already knew this child’s favorite books would be Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny? That I’d even designed the silver-starred cardboard crowns he’d wear for his birthdays—like the ones my mom had made for me?

  “Don’t worry. There will be other children,” one well-meaning friend said to me. That’s like someone saying after your husband dies suddenly in a horrible car crash, “Don’t worry, there will be other husbands.”

  It surprised me that the loss of this maybe-baby had left me so gutted. But after a few months of mourning and healing, we were ready to try again. Several more egg-boosting injections later, it took. Finally, viably pregnant! The first few nauseating months dragged by, but during months three through five, I felt creatively on fire. Not only was this life growing within me, but I got to bring to life one of my favorite characters, Alma in Summer and Smoke. I did worry what our developing fetus might be experiencing as I rode my character’s emotional roller coaster every night, eight full-blown nervous breakdowns a week. As soon as I’d arrive home from the theater, I’d rush to play Mozart with the speakers lying on my belly to help calm any potential baby trauma.