Queen of the Fall

by Sonja Livingston

  Catholic school, but more like an outreach program to inner-city kids run by the Sisters of St. Joseph. No bottled sexuality, no shaming of students who chased each other during lunch break, boys corralling girls into the back of the parking lot where the fence was broken and the hedge grew wild.

  “Stop that,” a teacher or lunch mother might call out, and “Leave those girls alone.” But the Sisters in their Birkenstocks and plain skirts seemed at home in their bodies, and even when religion reared its head, nothing was trumpeted so much as love.

  The body is what it carries, and since the Sisters said we were children of God, surely we carried goodness, which meant the body itself was good. Even if they’d tried to send different messages, who could have been fooled about the pleasures of the body? Why else would the boys run so hard, arms flailing, reaching out in the shadows of the back lot while we crossed our arms over newly budded breasts, protecting ourselves from the very same force they celebrated. Why else would we—so skilled in the shooing away of the boys—sometimes let ourselves be touched?

  Even as a Catholic girl, I was first and foremost a poor girl, and my virginity was not so much a virtue as salvation. Any fear I had about letting myself be swept up was less about purity than the ability to transform my body into another kind of vessel. A vessel to carry poetry by Langston Hughes alongside facts about the human heart and strings of perfectly diagrammed sentences. A vessel to transport me from an inner-city parking lot. My body was an airship then, leaning into wing and wind, and I strove only to leave room enough to someday have a chance at flight.

  It’s easy to see why I mixed them up, those 1980s movies. Neither was high art. They were only two of many teen movies featuring pods of boys trying to get lucky. Films in which beautiful girls were inevitably duped by bad boys, who cocked and strutted and got what they wanted but who eventually fell from grace, thereby allowing the goodhearted misfit to emerge as victor and claim the girl, who always served as the prize. Whether the movies were set in high schools or summer camps, the lessons were the same: (1) girls often made bad choices where boys where concerned; (2) lovers could go from sweet-talking to heartless in the space of an hour; but (3) goodness always won out in the end.

  Besides the sight of a boy bringing oranges to the girl he loves, the reason The Last American Virgin stands out—even after all these years—is because it was the only movie of its sort to veer from the formula, the one film in which love and kindness do not prevail.

  By middle school I’d learned the fruitlessness of being a good girl. I no longer cared to be the highest scorer on the weekly spelling test. It was no longer enough to know the answer before everyone else. Most of all, I wanted Sister Eileen to swoop into my classroom with a small wrapped box that might contain a bracelet or necklace or even a rosary, I suppose—for nothing speaks of possibility like a small wrapped box.

  Sister Eileen was the principal, a woman with short dark hair and an easy smile who reminded me of Shirley Feeney from Laverne & Shirley. I wanted her to walk over to my desk with a wrapped box like she’d done with Louise Baird, whose blonde hair and sweet features belied a badness so spectacular that even the Puerto Rican girls were impressed.

  The gift Sister Eileen gave Louise was a small flip-up alarm clock meant to remedy her habit of tardy arrivals. It might have been a cast-off, from a garage sale, the sort of thing no one would ever want. But the gentleness with which it was delivered and the way the Sisters of St. Joseph version of Shirley Feeney waited with such expectation made it clear that even our principal was head over heels for the baddest girl at school.

  “There,” I said to myself while watching Louise unwrap the tiny package under the watch of the entire class, everyone leaning in as she took her time with the tape. “Here’s what I want.”

  Virginity never made sense as commodity, as if an action of the body (verb) was something to be given away (noun), an object to be taken or stolen, as if it were a gold coin. The loss of it was especially hard to fathom, for it seemed to me not even a discrete event. In theory it was clear enough: a girl succumbed, let a boy into her body, and there it went—her virginity evaporated like water in the desert. But the world seemed murkier than that, the actions we took sloppier and by degree—so many ways of touching, so many ways to open oneself to another.

  Of course, I understood the technical rules for avoiding sex and must have bought in on some level, understanding the precise actions to be avoided and letting myself go only so far, sneering at loose girls and feeling strong at my refusals, but even then, my actions were based more on fear than goodness. And even if I sometimes managed goodness, where was the reward in that? Halos were for the holy, a virtue that extended beyond mere goodness. Holiness demanded more than sensible decisions; it required not only the forgoing of pleasure, for instance, but also the seeking out and endurance of suffering. Beatrice of Nazareth was said to have worn a girdle of thorns. Catherine of Siena refused food. Such women were admired by the world, their lives celebrated, their images kept alive on prayer cards, where they were rendered with sweet sad smiles, and outfitted with roses and halos.

  Saints aren’t the only ones given halos. Jesus gets one, of course, as does Our Lady, who is often depicted with light crowning her head—she may be the mortal most likely to be haloed, in fact, so much do we adore the Virgin. In early frescos, the Madonna is topped by yellow discs of light. The Byzantines added gold leaf, encircling the Virgin’s head with thick helmets of gold. Renaissance masters were more delicate: Raphael’s halos are thin ribbons, Botticelli’s are barely visible, while Sassoferrato’s are more like radiant fuzz. Later artists chose halos dependent upon mood or scene (or patrons’ preferences), sometimes depicting Our Lady with intricately gilded crowns or translucent mantles, while at other times adorning her with garlands of roses or ciclets of hovering stars.

  Where were the halos for girls who did not let the boys touch them for too long under their butter yellow uniform shirts, who resisted the warm slip of hand in the shadows of the school? Girls who helped their mothers with dishes without complaint, who remembered to say please and thank you and tried hard not to let themselves get hickeys on the weekend of their confirmations? Such girls were neither venerated nor lavished with light. Whether the decision to stay virgins was made as a gift to our eventual husbands (as it had been for our mothers) or to provide us with a shot at better lives—we made it. And if life imitated art and everyday goodness was rewarded with gold leaf spangles blooming from my head every time I did my homework or said no, well, then virtue might have been enough.

  And so I learned to be bad enough to be sent to Sister Eileen’s office while remaining good enough to hedge my bets in case there might be something more in store for me. There were no counselors in Catholic schools, at least not in poorly funded inner-city schools like Corpus Christi, but Sister Eileen was a good listener, and no matter what nonsense came from my mouth, she’d laugh and shake her head.

  “What happened next?” she’d say while moving about her office with her work, or “Why do you think that?”

  I’d never seen everyday nuns depicted in paintings or tapestries, and if they were, they certainly were not given halos. I thought of the priests and bishops, their words and actions highlighted and praised by the Church while the legion of Sisters facing the children of a dying city day after day were as invisible as the girls they taught to write their names in cursive, as instructed, on the upper-left side of their papers. Who made the rules about boys and girls anyway? I wondered. And why should women be vessels of goodness, when some of its very best practitioners went unnoticed by the world?

  Humility is a decent enough virtue. But there were times when the covering of the body while the boys ran hard and shouted their desire seemed a burden by comparison. Because when it comes down to it—no matter how shy or how good or how kind—what person does not want to fling herself into the face of the world and be properly regarded (seen and heard and maybe even admired)
if only just once in her life?

  Her timing was perfect. Named for her mother who was in turn named for Our Lady, Madonna’s Like a Virgin album came out in 1984 and nothing was ever the same. The singer offended and enthralled, using the word virgin to call up images of the Holy Mother, pairing baubles and bustiers with sacred symbols and baring herself to the world—this woman named for the mother of God whose every last cell simmered sex.

  On the album cover, Madonna sprawls onto satin sheets, body pushing out of white lace that stands no chance of containing it. Flowers in her lap and wearing a pearl choker, she’s a sultry bride. Smoky eyes, mouth partly opened, as if captured between expectant breaths. No gilded crown sits atop her tousled hair, no light emanates from her body, but allure surrounds her like a nimbus, so that Madonna becomes, in 1984, the virgin most worthy of veneration.

  I’d transferred from the all-girl Nazareth Academy to the local public high school, trading in uniforms for tight jeans and torn sweatshirts inspired by Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. Nineteen eighty-four, a time of coming undone. I attended Mass of my own accord—drinking in the language and the symbols, the incense, the altar cloth—and was ripe for the mixing of the thump of desire with the icons of the Church.

  My friends were similarly struck. We strung our wrists with black bangles, practiced penciling beauty marks above puckered snarls, sewed skirts that fitted like slinky tubes over our legs, imagined the cool weight of the belt she wore, the words Boy Toy falling beneath an exposed belly. We all wore lace dresses to prom, donned long gloves and cut our hair into wavy bobs, remaking ourselves as best we could into the woman on the album cover. We wanted the boldness—the way she behaved more like a boy than any girl we ever knew—but the lined eyes and lace dress were easier to duplicate.

  My favorite Virgin was the statue at church. She was serene, standing up on the altar day after day, candles flickering at her feet, surrounded by all those statues of serious men with their pens and chiseled faces—there she was, presiding calmly in front of the church, her robe the color of morning glories.

  In the early years, Our Lady was strung with a garland of plastic roses that some part of me knew was tacky, even as a kid from a house with paneling and mismatched chairs. But the flowers also made her seem worldly somehow, as if she made trips to Hawaii or Aruba after everyone slipped from the church—I imagined the Virgin hovering up and over the roof with a suitcase and her garland of flowers. Still I did not miss them once they were gone, the pink flowers—only the idea of them, which is a different thing entirely.

  The body is built for many things. Hauling and walking, studying and pleasure, creating and healing. Mine might have been built for a boy, but I waited and instead gave it to a man, so that body became just right for a motel room and the sound of a voice giving directions I didn’t understand, in part because I was frozen, but also because the words became lush in his Cuban mouth. Cloz yu ice, took minutes to unravel. Close your eyes. It’s no less than miraculous the way the body adapts, so that I found that I was built for closing my eyes, for the tube top I wore, the green bedspread, and the taste of beer in the mouth of another.

  The body persists. One day it will be older than seventeen and better understand the many ways of loving and giving and coming undone. But first I am seventeen in a rented bed, the technical requirements for the loss of virginity met, though I feel no loss, nothing changing in me except the memorizing of the pattern of a strange ceiling and realizing that in this as in many other things, more fuss had been made than was warranted. What looms larger than the mechanics of that day or the memory of the bedspread is the betrayal that follows. He has another woman, I learn. The man with the green eyes and mash of lush words has lied. When I understand this, then and only then, do I feel the loss of something like a gold coin.

  Which brings me to the end of The Last American Virgin, where the good boy has sold everything to pay for his beloved’s abortion. The beautiful girl finally kisses him and it’s like birds soaring, the feeling of seeing our sweet boy finally rewarded. She invites him to her eighteenth birthday party the next week; he arrives with a locket, only to find her back in the arms of the one who’d used her in the first place. Everything stops in the moment of her looking over her shoulder at the good boy, the one she will never love. And the boy, the one who’d loved so openly, has no choice but to turn and leave, locket clenched in hand, tears streaking his face.

  I think of the end of the 1980s film and begin to understand that virginity is not about refusal, the saying of no a thousand and one times, nor the granting of halos and crowns.

  The body becomes what it gives up too, I suppose, so that the loss of virginity is marked by the movement of the human heart from chart and diagram to muscle and smooth pink flesh. It is the gathering up of left and right ventricle, the stashing of inferior and superior vena cava into a bag like oranges, and the bringing of them to a misguided French girl who looks over her shoulder but does not see the treasure of what is offered. It is saying yes to another despite the hard stone the world sometimes shows itself to be. The loss of virginity is all of this and more. It is the opening of the rind with one’s fingers. It is the revelation of the tenderest flesh, the lifting of it and placing it into the waiting mouth of another.

  Peace

  I

  IT’S POSSIBLE THOSE TIMES on the side of the road were not as peaceful as I recall. Hair might have stuck in clumps to sweaty necks, gnats may have swarmed, tensions might have run high. But I remember grass tall enough to tickle the backs of knees, a breeze making flutter of maple leaves, the clop of an Amish buggy as it passed. The guards on the other side of the fence—boys really—stood in uniformed lines, quiet except for the fact of their weapons and what they might need to do should one of our group disobey the law and scale the fence between us and them. Climbing the fence was a real possibility, one of the reasons for our drive to the region. Carved by the glacial scrape of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the Finger Lakes became a land of water and sky, where the Iroquois lived before the encroachment of the British and French—and us, in our cars and vans traveling to the Seneca Army Depot, which was said to house the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the country.

  Nineteen eighty-three. The Cold War wasn’t over, and talk of nuclear weapons and Soviets was part of daily life. Thousands of activists descended on the depot in the summer, setting up a Women’s Peace Encampment in an old farmhouse nearby. They came in buses and airplanes and sometimes on foot from all over the States to protest. The women nailed peace signs to trees, painted flowers and doves onto the sides of barns, scrawled slogans against nukes and the men who made them. Hundreds were arrested; women from the encampment and others who’d flocked to the area, including groups from Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, progressives who packed into vans, staring into cornfields and vineyards and the blue of lakes as we passed, eventually unloading outside the gates of the depot, where we stood holding hands and singing peace songs.

  I’m not sure I fully understood the threat of nuclear weapons. I knew what weapons were, of course, and must have understood at least some of why we were there, but nothing made as much sense as the strip of land between road and depot, the way it was dotted with goldenrod and chicory. Someone set an embroidered runner and vase of wildflowers onto a small table in a mowed section of grass, transforming it into an altar, the patch of weeds into a church. With the folk choir and the gleam of golden guitars, those masses for peace were like field trips to me. I should feel shame at admitting such a thing, given how old I was (ninth grade), what was at stake (nuclear armament), and the fact that the masses usually ended with someone climbing the fence and falling over. But even then, the bodies hoisted over the coil of barbed wire were received so gently by the open hands of the military boys, their landings cushioned by the grass nuzzling the fence’s interior, so that, in memory, the protests became a sort of ballet, the call of crows joined by the folk group singing Cat Stevens’s songs, everything on
both sides of the fence framed by the sway of maple trees.

  II

  How can I say I was a soldier for peace when I worried so much about how my hair would come out in my mug shot? I wore it long and curly then and wondered if the waves had held during so many hours of sitting-in. I’d allowed a smile to ruin the perfect scowl of my face when one of the arresting officers flirted while fastening my arms, setting me in the paddy wagon with such care, we might have been on a date.

  Nineteen ninety-one. Invasion in the Gulf. U.S. Forces sent to fight in Iraq, thousands dead. Eight years after the depot masses, I was old enough to understand, old enough to care, and decided it was time to scale my own fences instead of staring into drifts of pretty weeds. The protest itself came after weeks of planning and discussing tactics—peaceful resistance and how to make your body go limp while resisting arrest. Finally, we made our way as a group to the federal building in downtown Rochester, the twelve of us calling ourselves the D’Amato Dozen after the conservative state senator we’d targeted. Our coup was convincing his secretary to buzz us into the tiny office. She’d had her suspicions, D’Amato’s secretary, but eleven of us slipped behind a partition while the most confident sweet-talked: “We have a package to deliver,” he said. “Please open the door.”

  She saw what it might mean and wrung her hands and said she wasn’t sure; but he was persuasive—“Just a crack,” he said—his voice so velvet that our lady of the hidden buzzer could not hold out. One crack was all it took for a foot, an arm—and before you knew it, all twelve of us had stormed inside. And yes, it was lying, but somehow okay because we were for peace after all.