4
VIRGIN OR NOT
Along with most of the kids from public school, I enrolled in high school, a large prosaic brick building across the street from my house. Although I had been staring at it for years, I never really knew what went on inside. The excitement, mixed with trepidation as to what high school was all about, dissolved when classes began and my timidity evaporated. It was school, just like before, with a bit more freedom. I went to the afternoon dances and felt insecure at not being asked to dance as often as the other girls. My self-esteem was at an all-time low, having just discovered I was alone in the world, although my outward life went on apparently uninterrupted. I had a crush on a boy I sat next to in some of my classes but we never danced together. To achieve that I asked him to a club party. My friend Judy and I, both of us terribly shy, got together and phoned our dates. Much to our surprise they accepted. Wearing shirtdresses with cinched waistbands, crinolines and black pumps, we were picked up and escorted to the YMHA where a chaperoned, programmed party ensued. It was exciting, slightly intimidating, and when he walked me home, a quick kiss on the doorstep brought the evening to a close.
Sixteen-year-old Canadian Judy Bell swam forty-two miles across Lake Ontario from Youngstown, New York, to Toronto in twenty-one hours and I remember how we listened anxiously on the radio as they followed her progress and talked about the temperature of the water and how strong she was still, even after so many hours. Elvis Presley, 19, made his first record.
"Penny loafers, cashmere sweaters, brown and white saddle shoes, jitterbugging, 'sh-boom, sh-boom' by the Crewcuts," 1 and ponytails were in vogue.
I would never wear my hair in a ponytail because a girlfriend had told me I had big ears. Until well after being married I was utterly paranoid and self-conscious about my ears.
I was fourteen when my mother took me, unsuspectingly, to a female physician to have me checked. She never admitted the real reason for the visit, which was to see if I was still a virgin, but I received an internal examination that made me feel embarrassed and violated. I heard the doctor tell her in the adjoining room my hymen was intact and my protruding tummy was just fatty tissue. I knew then that there wasn't any trust in my family although that fact didn't surface clearly until I was eighteen and my father called me down to the furnace room and disgustedly thrust my opened diary at me. How could I write such things, he demanded over and over again - then indignantly forced me to throw it into the furnace, burning the unforgivable facts forever. I was devastated. My journal where I had written all my secrets was private. I hated him and once again felt embarrassed and violated. Little did I know he was projecting his actions onto me, and instead of admitting his affairs to my mother, he directed at me his misplaced shame, anger and mistrust. I wonder if I had been their real child, would there have been more trust in our relationship. Trust and love go together.
"Adopted children often do not feel entitled to express any negative feelings such as grief or anger at being cut off from their origins. Some become so successful at splitting off their feelings and keeping up a cheerful facade that they do not even know when they are angry." 2
In Montgomery, Alabama, forty-three year old Mrs. Rosa Parks sat in the white section of the bus and was arrested. A boycott of all city buses by the blacks resulted in the Supreme Court outlawing segregation on local bus lines in 1956. Princess Margaret renounced the crown for commoner Peter Townsend. All over the U.S. kids were wearing Davy Crockett hats.
After we moved to the suburbs, I transferred to another high school, a bit closer to our new home, where some of my camp friends were going, and used a relative's address who lived in that school district so I could register. It meant a long streetcar ride with three transfers, but I didn't want to go to the suburban high school where I didn't know anybody. I would once again be an outsider.
The growth of the suburbs was explosive with new subdivisions sprouting up all over. It didn't matter that we were on the approach route to Dorval Airport where planes began their descent over our rooftops causing the windows to vibrate; the land was what my parents could afford and it was the thing to do. Our modern ranch-style bungalow, one of three different designs, with front and back lawn, rock garden, weeping willow and soon-to-be finished basement, was so different from the downtown gritty streets of the crowded neighborhood to which we were accustomed.
I returned to camp as a senior for the next two summers and a counselor's aide after that. It was then that I was introduced to the wilderness and outdoor living. Being too young in previous years to go on overnight expeditions, I remember enviously watching the older girls leave on canoe trips. I wanted so much to do this but we had to "swim the lake," just over a quarter of a mile, and pass a critical canoe test before our names could be added to the list of candidates. My counselor, who was head of the waterfront, helped me through these tests, and one morning about twenty of us sang our way out of camp as the truck pulling six canoes headed north for five days in the Quebec wilderness. We paddled until we couldn't feel our arms, mostly ate canned peaches because one of the supply canoes had tipped over while we rushed to get across a lake one stormy afternoon, slept in a long tent made up of a tarp stretched between two distant trees and pegged along each side, and arrived back at camp, heroic, drenched and dirty but very happy. I couldn't wait to do it all again.
I could forget who I was and where I came from in the outdoors. There was more sky, trees, mountains and water; a summer storm with nowhere to hide; eating outside with no table manners; being dirty without reprimand; away from all that was familiar and taking risks rather than remaining in reassured comfort. It was all about freedom.
"At first you're a stranger to the forest. Then, without noticing a difference, you feel more at home here than anywhere else. It happens, not quickly or simply; it happens in your bones, a promise that can't be taken back." 3
I was chosen to be the bride in the mock-wedding, though I still didn't think I was popular or pretty. Jerome, a senior at the boy's camp, fell head over heels in love with me and became my steady boyfriend. He was tall, dark, skinny, and comical, almost silly at times. I was so serious because being silly had been discouraged - maybe that's what attracted me to him. We were in the spotlight as far as camp romances went and I loved the attention I got being his girl. On visiting day when I pointed him out to my parents they thought he was funny-looking.
There's a certain part of you that you have repressed because if you let it out you may be silly, a part of you that you need to own and integrate into the rest of your life - to be really whole. If you have had frustrations in expressing yourself, that is where the source point is. It goes back to the energy from your real mother - very bubbly energy and your parents saw that in you and you learned to hold it in - it wasn't encouraged - you learned not to go out there and get wild.
Psychic Reading by Joy, 1985
Kissing and necking were the extent of my sex life; "going all the way" was uncommon in my circle of friends. Jerome and I attended the same school and our romance blossomed. It was fun to hang out with him at lunch time amongst all the other couples. I had a steady and felt better about myself. I remember persuading my mother to buy me a pair of winter boots, the same style my boyfriend and everybody else had, and wore them unzippered with the tongues hanging out. They looked grotesque and very unladylike but I didn't care. Fitting in and being cool were much more important at fifteen.
Art, music and biology were my strengths, while history and geography left a lot to be desired. Tenth year graduation got me a proficiency badge, two honors and a first in biology; the rest I can't recall.
Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco. "Egypt took control of the Suez Canal and was immediately attacked by Israel, France and Britain. Lester Pearson, Canada's external minister, proposed a compromise of sending a major U.N. peace-keeping contingent to Suez which successfully restored order." 4
My relationship with Jerome was on the wane when my Sweet Sixteen Party arrived but it was too late to change my mind on another escort. Everything my parents dreamed of was planned for that event, more like a low-budget Jewish wedding, and my mother called me selfish when I balked at her intentions, rebellious at being forced to conform. She was a self-indulgent, spoiled woman who praised me to her friends and criticized me to my face, complaining that I didn't appreciate anything she did for me.