“We’ll get you a pessary later,” said Gladys. “All us girls have pessaries.”
(I didn’t know what that was, either, till I figured out later it’s what my Hygiene professor called a “diaphragm.”)
“I don’t have a pessary anymore!” said Jennie. “My grandmother found mine! When she asked me what it was, I told her it was for cleaning fine jewelry. She took it.”
“For cleaning fine jewelry?” Gladys shrieked.
“Well, I had to say something, Gladys!”
“But I don’t understand how you could even use a pessary for cleaning fine jewelry,” Gladys pushed.
“I dunno! Ask my grandma, that’s what she’s using it for now!”
“Well, then what are you using now?” said Gladys. “For precaution?”
“Well, gee, nothing right now . . . because my grandmother has my pessary in her jewelry box.”
“Jennie!” cried Celia and Gladys at the same time.
“I know, I know. But I’m careful.”
“No, you’re not!” said Gladys. “You’re never careful! Vivian, don’t be a dumb kid like Jennie. You’ve got to think about these things!”
Celia reached into her purse and handed me something wrapped in brown paper. I opened it up and found a small, white terry-cloth hand towel, folded neatly, never used. It still had a store price tag on it.
“I got you this,” said Celia. “It’s a towel. It’s for in case you bleed.”
“Thank you, Celia.”
She shrugged, looked away, and—to my shock—blushed. “Sometimes people bleed. You’ll want to be able to clean yourself up.”
“Yeah, and you don’t want to use Mrs. Kellogg’s good towels,” said Gladys.
“Yeah, don’t touch anything that belongs to Mrs. Kellogg!” said Jennie.
“Except her husband!” shrieked Gladys, and all the girls laughed again.
“Ooh! It’s after ten, Vivvie,” said Celia. “You should get moving.”
I made an effort to stand up, but suddenly felt dizzy. I sat back down in the dinette booth again, hard. My legs had almost gone out from under me. I hadn’t thought I was nervous, but my body seemed to have a different opinion.
“You okay, Vivvie?” Celia asked. “You sure you want to do this?”
“I want to do it,” I said. “I’m sure I want to do it.”
“My suggestion,” said Gladys, “is that you don’t think about it too much. I never do.”
This seemed wise. So I took a few deep breaths—as my mother had taught me to do before you jump a horse—stood up, and headed for the exit.
“See you girls later!” I said, with a bright and slightly surreal sense of cheer.
“We’ll be waiting for you right here!” said Gladys.
“Shouldn’t take too long!” said Jennie.
SIX
Dr. Kellogg was waiting for me just inside the servants’ entrance to his town house. I’d barely knocked before the door flew open and he hustled me in.
“Welcome, welcome,” he said, glancing about him, to make sure no neighbors were spying. “Let’s get that door shut behind you, my dear.”
He was a medium-sized man with an average-looking face whose hair was one of the regular colors of hair, and who was dressed in the sort of suit that one might expect a respectable middle-aged gentleman of his class to be wearing. (If it sounds like I have completely forgotten what he looked like, it’s because I have completely forgotten what he looked like. He was the kind of man whose face you forget even when you are standing right in front of him, looking directly at his face.)
“Vivian,” he said, and extended a handshake. “Thank you for coming in today. Let’s head upstairs and get ourselves situated.”
He sounded every bit like the doctor he was. He sounded just like my pediatrician back home in Clinton. I might as well have been there to have an ear infection looked at. There was something both reassuring and immensely silly about this to me. I felt a giggle rising in my chest, but kept it suppressed.
We walked through his home, which was proper and elegant, but unmemorable. There were probably a hundred homes within a few blocks of us decorated exactly the same way. All I can remember were some silk-upholstered couches with doilies. I have always hated doilies. He led me straight to the guest room, where he had two glasses of champagne waiting on a small table. The curtains were drawn—so that we could pretend it wasn’t ten o’clock in the morning, I suppose—and he closed the door behind him.
“Make yourself comfortable on the bed, Vivian,” he said, handing me one of the champagne flutes.
I sat primly on the edge of the bed. I was half expecting him to wash his hands and come at me with a stethoscope, but instead he pulled over a wooden chair from a corner of the room, and sat directly across from me. He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, in the manner of one whose job it is to diagnose.
“So, Vivian. Our friend Gladys tells me that you’re a virgin.”
“That’s correct, Doctor,” I said.
“There’s no need to call me Doctor. We are friends. You may call me Harold.”
“Why, thank you, Harold,” I said.
And from that moment on, Angela, the situation became hilarious to me. Whatever nervousness I’d felt up until that point was gone now, replaced by a sense of pure comedy. It was something about the sound of my voice saying, “Why, thank you, Harold,” in that small guest room with its stupid mint-green acetate quilted bedspread (I can’t remember Dr. Kellogg’s face, but I cannot forget that hideous goddamn bedspread) that struck me as the pinnacle of absurdity. There he was in his suit, and there I was in my buttercup-yellow rayon day dress—and if Dr. Kellogg didn’t believe that I was a virgin before we met, the little yellow frock alone should have convinced him.
The whole scene was absurd. He was accustomed to showgirls, and he was getting me.
“Now, Gladys informs me that you wish to have your virginity”—he was searching for a delicate word—“removed?”
“That’s correct, Harold,” I said. “I wish to have it expunged.”
(To this day, I believe that this line was the first intentionally funny thing I’d ever said in my life—and the fact that I said it with a straight face gave me no end of satisfaction. Expunged! Brilliant.)
He nodded; a good clinician with a bad sense of humor.
“Why don’t you get undressed,” he said, “and I will also get undressed, and we’ll start.”
I wasn’t sure if I should take off everything. Usually at the doctor’s office, I kept on my “step-ins”—as my mother always called my underwear. (But why was I thinking about my mother right now?) Then again, usually at the doctor’s office I wasn’t about to have sex with the doctor. I made a hasty decision to strip down completely. I didn’t want to look like a modest little dolt. I lay down on my back on that nauseating acetate bedspread, naked as can be. Arms straight down at my side and legs stiff. You know: like a proper temptress.
Dr. Kellogg stripped to his shorts and undershirt. This hardly seemed fair. Why was he allowed to remain partially dressed, when I had to be naked?
“Now if you’ll just kindly move over an inch or so, and make a bit of room for me . . .” he said. “There we go. . . . That’s it. . . . Let’s have a look at you.”
He lay beside me, head propped by his elbow, and had a look at me. I didn’t hate this moment as much as you might think. I was a vain young woman, and something within me thought it quite right that I should be looked at. Appearancewise, my chief concern was my bosom—or, rather, my near absence of a bosom. It didn’t seem to be an issue with Dr. Kellogg, though, despite the fact that he was used to a different class of figure altogether. In fact he seemed delighted with all that was offered up before him.