And so I slid toward marriage, like a car sliding off the road on a scree of loose gravel.
—
By now, it was the autumn of 1941. Our plan was to get married the following spring, when Jim would have enough money saved to buy us a house we could share comfortably with his mother. He had purchased a small engagement ring that was pretty enough, but that made my hand look like a stranger’s.
Now that we were engaged, our sensual activities escalated. Now when we parked the Buick out by the lake, he would take off my shirt, and delight himself with my breasts—making sure at every turn, of course, that I was comfortable with this arrangement. We would lie together across that big backseat and grind against each other—or, rather, he would grind against me, and I would allow it. (I didn’t dare to be so forward as to grind back. I also didn’t really want to grind back.)
“Oh, Vee,” he would say, with simple rapture. “You are the prettiest girl in the whole wide world.”
Then one night the grinding got more heated, until he pulled back from me with considerable effort and scrubbed his hands over his face, collecting himself.
“I don’t want to do anything more with you until we’re married,” he said, once he could speak again.
I was lying there with my skirt up around my waist, and my breasts naked to the cool autumn air. I could sense that his pulse was racing wildly, but mine was not.
“I would never be able to look your father in the face if I took your virginity before you were my wife,” he said.
I gasped. It was an honest and unfettered reaction. I audibly gasped. Just the mention of the word “virginity” gave me a shock. I hadn’t thought of this! Even though I had been playing the role of an unsullied girl, I hadn’t thought he truly imagined I was one, all the way through. But why wouldn’t he have imagined it? What sign had I ever given him that I was anything less than pure?
This was a problem. He would know. We were getting married, and he would want to take me on our wedding night—and then he would know. The moment we had sex for the first time, he would know that he was not my first visitor.
“What is it, Vee?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
Angela, I was not one for telling the truth back then. Truth telling was not my first instinct in any situation—especially in stressful situations. It took me many years to become an honest person, and I know why: because the truth is often terrifying. Once you introduce truth into a room, the room may never be the same again.
Nonetheless, I said it.
“I’m not a virgin, Jim.”
I don’t know why I said it. Maybe because I was panicking. Maybe because I wasn’t smart enough to make up a plausible lie. Or maybe because there’s only so long a person can endure wearing a mask of falseness before a trace of one’s true self starts to gleam through.
He stared at me for a long while before asking, “What do you mean by that?”
Jesus Christ, what did he think I meant by it?
“I’m not a virgin, Jim,” I repeated—as though the problem had been that he hadn’t heard me correctly the first time.
He sat up and stared ahead for a long time, collecting himself.
Quietly, I put my shirt back on. This is not the sort of conversation that you want to be having while your boobs are hanging out.
“Why?” he asked finally, his face hard with pain and betrayal. “Why aren’t you a virgin, Vee?”
That’s when I started crying.
—
Angela, I must pause here for a moment to tell you something.
I am an old woman now. As such, I have reached an age where I cannot stand the tears of young girls. It exasperates me to no end. I especially cannot stand the tears of pretty young girls—pretty young affluent girls, worst of all—who have never had to struggle or work for anything in their lives, and who thus fall apart at the slightest disturbance. When I see pretty young girls crying at the drop of a hat these days, it makes me want to strangle them.
But falling apart is something that all pretty young girls seem to know how to do instinctively—and they do it because it works. It works for the same reason that an octopus is able to escape in a cloud of ink: because tears provide a distracting screen. Buckets of tears can divert difficult conversations and alter the flow of natural consequences. The reason for this is that most people (men especially) hate to see a pretty young girl crying, and they will automatically rush to comfort her—forgetting what they were talking about only a moment before. At the very least, a thick showering of tears can create a pause—and in that pause, a pretty young girl can buy herself some time.
I want you to know, Angela, that there came a point in my life when I stopped doing this—when I stopped responding to life’s challenges with floods of tears. Because really, there is no dignity in it. These days, I am the sort of tough-skinned old battle-ax who would rather stand dry-eyed and undefended in the most hostile underbrush of truth than degrade herself and everyone else by collapsing into a swamp of manipulative tears.
But in the autumn of 1941, I had not yet become that woman.
So I wept and wept, in the backseat of Jim Larsen’s Buick—the prettiest and most copious tears you ever saw.
“What is it, Vee?” Jim’s voice betrayed an undertow of desperation. He had never before seen me cry. Instantly, his attention turned from his own shock to my care. “Why are you crying, dear?”
His solicitousness only made me sob harder.
He was so good, and I was such trash!
He gathered me in his arms, begging me to stop. And because I could not speak in that moment, and because I could not stop crying, he just went right ahead and made up a story for himself about why I was not a virgin.
He said, “Somebody did something horrible to you, didn’t they, Vee? Somebody in New York City?”
Well, Jim, lots of people did lots of things to me in New York City—but I can’t say that any of it was particularly horrible.
That would have been the correct and honest answer. But I couldn’t very well give that answer, so I said nothing, and just sobbed away in his competent arms—my heaving voicelessness giving him plenty of time to embellish his own details.
“That’s why you came home from the city, isn’t it?” he said, as though it were all dawning on him now. “Because somebody violated you, didn’t they? That’s why you’re always so meek. Oh, Vee. You poor, poor girl.”
I heaved some more.
“Just nod if it’s true,” he said.
Oh, Jesus. How do you get out of this one?
You don’t. You can’t get out of this one. Unless you’re able to be honest, which of course I could not do. By admitting that I wasn’t a virgin, I had already played my one card of truthfulness for the year; I didn’t have another one in the deck. His story was preferable, anyway.
God forgive me, I nodded.
(I know. It was awful of me. And it feels just as awful for me to write that sentence as it did for you to read it. But I didn’t come here to lie to you, Angela. I want you to know exactly who I was back then—and that’s what happened.)
“I won’t make you talk about it,” he said, petting my head and staring off into the middle distance.
I nodded through my tears: Yes, please don’t make me talk about it.
If anything, he seemed relieved not to hear the details.
He held me for a long time, until my crying had subsided. Then he smiled at me valiantly (if a little shakily) and said, “It’s all going to be all right, Vee. You’re safe now. I want you to know that I will never treat you like you are tainted. And you needn’t worry—I’ll never tell anyone. I love you, Vee. I will marry you despite this.”