UNCONDITIONED CHAPTER 19
Temple of the Holy Ghost
When I got dressed for the first day of junior high, I had no idea my outfit would further erode my already shaky self-esteem. My mother laid out the starched blue and white cotton dress with a bow in the back she’d chosen for me to wear. Viv wore it and before her, my cousin, Carol, so it had been all the rage before I was born. It reminded me of Dorothy’s dress from the Wizard of Oz. My mother had taken me shopping for penny loafers, and I put shiny new pennies in the little stiff slots. She bought me a bag of bobby socks and new white cotton undershirts and underpants. Despite the outfit and my hair in a ponytail with a ribbon bow covering the elastic, I set off optimistically for my new school, a three-ring binder with pencil case still off-gassing PCVs as I clutched a brown paper lunch bag holding a Fluffernutter sandwich and a MacIntosh apple.
The school sat high on a hill with at least thirty steps leading to the closest entrance. Standing on the second landing smoking cigarettes were two girls with teased hair, drawn-in eyebrows, eyeliner, mascara, pale pink lipstick, pointy breasts under tight, sleeveless sweaters, tight black skirts, nylons, and pointy ballet flats. Now I understood why my mother whispered when she said, “developed.” The contrast between me and those girls couldn’t have been more extreme—Dorothy meets extras from Viva Las Vegas. Avoiding eye contact, I slinked by feeling like a big baby, but they were too preoccupied with their conversation to notice me.
Once inside the heavy door, four hundred students in varying stages of puberty ignored me. The hallways were packed and loud with boys, some already shaving, hooting and hollering and jostling each other. Bra straps were snapped, girls shrieked, lockers slammed shut, cigarette smoke seeped out of the bathrooms, girls whispered in unwelcoming circles, and teachers yelled. I found myself smack dab in the middle of Hieronymus Bosch-like hormonal pandemonium, fearful I was the only girl wearing a white cotton undershirt.
After eavesdropping on my classmates during the first few weeks, I learned the most significant rite of passage of junior high was making out, which went hand-in-hand with going steady. All the cool kids were partnered up, boasting of engaging in prolonged kissing sessions. Achieving these milestones became one of my goals, and I scanned the halls daily to identify a potential partner. I wasn’t interested in the boasting part, but I craved the experience because I hoped it would take me closer to an understanding of the world and maybe even acceptance by my peers. I longed to fit in somewhere.
At my locker one day, to my surprise, Rick Dooley told me Bobby Spina wanted to go steady with me and gave me Bobby’s ring, which I had to hide from my mother. I was pleased. Bobby was cute, but I only stared at him in the halls and never had the nerve to talk. He’d stare back but never said a word to me. Rick arranged for me to meet up with Bobby on Halloween at a ball field. We were with a group of other kids and walked around in the wide-open space. I was too shy to start a conversation, so I tried to intuit where he was heading so I could walk beside him. I hoped to make out with Bobby, but he never said a word, never even looked at me.
Almost every evening, Rick called and said, “Bobby wants to talk to you,” and then I held the receiver to my ear and listened to silence for several minutes until the phone was handed back to Rick so he could say goodbye. If my mother found out there was a boy on the other end of the line, she grabbed the phone and screamed into the receiver, “Christine’s not allowed to talk to boys.” Then she’d slam the phone down and punish me.
About a month later back at my locker, Rick told me Bobby wanted to break up and asked for his ring back. My pride was dented but seeing I didn’t even know what his voice sounded like, I wasn’t devastated. And at least I could tell myself I’d gone steady, even though in this case it had been a non-event, but I was accustomed to inferior versions of what my peers had.
The next year, I made out with Stephen Demoponopoulos at the movies one Saturday afternoon. We had no feelings of affection toward each other, in fact he once threw a rock at me and hit me in the forehead. We sat in the back row of the once-majestic Capital Theater on stained, red velvet seats and kissed with our mouths closed, moving our heads around to look like we knew what we were doing. It was not the least bit exciting, but I learned what kissing felt like, physically that is. I wasn’t yet capable of considering how emotions were crucial to the quality of intimate, physical experiences. This event changed nothing about my social status or my state of mind. I remained a confused and lonely outcast who still looked like a little girl.
At thirteen, I was unprepared for the surge of sexuality that electrified my childlike body—the physical signs of puberty had not kicked in yet. But I was aroused all the time even though I didn’t know yet the exact mechanics of what could be done about it. Masturbation never occurred to me because I didn’t know about orgasms. Nor did I know about vaginas or clitorises. Everything surrounding sex was a mystery.
The summer before entering junior high, my mother forbade me to play with Harold, my next-door neighbor and only friend at our summer camp because good girls, which I’d already given up being, don’t play with boys. This was the same age my grandmother forbade my mother from performing in community theater because good girls don’t belong on the stage. Despite my mother’s bitter recollection of how unfair this was, she inflicted a similar edict on me.
I preferred doing things that boys liked to do—fish, swim, catch turtles, frogs, and snakes, and wander the woods. There were no other girls around the pond who had the same interests, so that’s why I played with Harold. Plus, I liked him because he hardly talked. After my mother’s decree, I ended up doing jigsaw puzzles and eating potato chips on a screened porch with a seriously over-coiffed girl named Sheila. The only thing we had in common was the boredom while in each other’s company.
One evening back in Arlington my mother told me with tight lips and eyes averted, that she had something she wanted me to read. Her tone implied I’d already done something wrong again. Like an executioner leading the condemned, she walked me down our long, dark hallway and directed me to sit in the parlor. She left me alone with a booklet called Mother’s Little Helper, Twelve Heart-to-Heart Talks of a Mother to Her Daughter in Three Parts, published by the Franciscan Herald Press. She pointed to specific pages, “Read from here to here only,” and left me alone—her idea of heart-to-heart.
