Part 6

After that I would still get calls from my parents, but they weren’t weekly and after a year they tapered off to once every few months. The calls would always be the same theme, leave Sodom and Gomorrah and come home to marry a Holden boy and all will be forgiven.

Occasionally they would ask about Cynthia Rose and Jake and in the same breath condemn them to hell for their chosen life styles. But both of them would ask me to tell the others if they’d stop sinning and repent that the same offer stood for them. They could come home, be forgiven and resume a life of righteousness. Momma and Daddy just never got it that it wasn’t something either one of them could help, Cyn had always had a bit of a wild streak and Jake could no more help his own sexual orientation than the sea could stop hitting the shore.

Life went on. Jake enrolled in the local community college to take a year old graphic design class when he wasn’t out on the fishing boat and Cynthia Rose kept dancing, moving to a new casino and becoming one of the headliner featured dancers, pulling down serious money.

We spent our free time doing those things that had always been forbidden in our parent’s world, such as staying up all night long to watch gory horror movies and eat pizza. I tried hang gliding that summer and Cynthia took her first lover before moving out of the apartment and in with a man. Jake tried surfing and casual sex with strangers he met on the beach and in bars. I stayed celibate as always.

I watched the ease with which my siblings paired and partnered up with others for romance or sex in horrified fascination. And I realized for the first time that I had no desire to allow a man or a woman sexual access to my body. I also didn’t feel like I could ever be bothered enough to let down the emotional walls around myself to be able to have a romantic relationship with anyone. I felt no desire for any of it. I was fascinated with others ability to do so or how strongly it drove them but I couldn’t comprehend why exactly.

When I asked Roberta about love and sex she exclaimed, “Oh honey, it’s just something instinctual, like a moth being drawn to a flame.”

I still didn’t understand because I’d never felt that tug in any way, shape or form. It made me feel like an alien spying on a primitive culture that did puzzling things for the most part and it created a lot of awkwardness for me. I wasn’t as beautiful as Cynthia Rose but I must have been attractive in my own right because throughout my time in college I had a number of young men ask me for a date or try to flirt with me. It only served to make me feel even more weird and out of place.

The biggest mistake I made about my feelings dealing with romance and sex was to confess to my sister that I just didn’t get it, I didn’t understand it and I’d never felt it. Cynthia just thought it was because I hadn’t tasted it for myself and she immediately called for a weekend in New Orleans for the two of us. We both took off from work that late October evening and took the short several hour drive over to Louisiana, ending up at the bars of Bourbon Street.

Cynthia had taken care with my appearance but it only made me feel self conscience. I wore her revealing clothes with tottering high heels and too much makeup. It wasn’t long before we were joined by two very good looking young men, who stayed with us the rest of the evening. I realized pretty quickly that Cynthia has called someone and the man she was with was someone she’d known awhile and that the man hovering around me, Julian, was an obvious fix up.

I went along with everything they did that night, deciding to treat this as a quasi scientific sociological experiment, seeking to see what drove everyone else like magnets smashing together, tugged by an irresistible force. But I just didn’t get it.
Julian would kiss me passionately every now and again and I’d feel nothing more than his lips against mine, not pleasant, not unpleasant but a bit more intimate than a stranger pushing against you on a bus. I certainly felt no zing, za za zou or any other thing described by my friends.

We went along like this all night, me allowing Julian increasingly intimate access to my person, me not objecting or throwing up any roadblocks yet feeling nothing. I wondered what was wrong with me.

Even as Julian was on top of me, making rather passionate love to me I remember thinking I just wanted it to be over with, that I couldn’t breath because his bulk was squashing me to the mattress. When he caressed my bare breasts he might as well have been rubbing cantaloupe melons at the market. No response. The only thing I do remember feeling that night was a fleeting sharp pain as his hard cock penetrated my maidenhead. It eased after a moment but nothing he did made me feel pleasure, not all the foreplay before hand. I felt a strange fullness as he ploughed into me over and over again before the pressure of a pulsing wetness exploded inside. Afterwards I lay beneath him thinking, ‘Is this it?” while he lay collapsed over me, whispering, wanting to know if I came.

I lied and let him think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Once we got back home to Biloxi I found myself enduring a constant barrage of advice and questioning from Cynthia and Roberta at first and later Jake. It was just weird and broke my own personal boundaries. I realized I was more a child of my environment than I thought because sex wasn’t something I had any desire for. Perhaps all that repression and guilt as a child had seeped into my brain and I didn’t even know it.

I did know one thing. I could never have been married to one of the Holden boys and endured nightly bouts of sex like that. Not even to have a child, which we’d been taught was the ultimate task all women had been put on earth for. I didn’t want a relationship.

Unfortunately my experiment with sex had some unexpected consequences. First I started having strange painful feelings when I pee and several days later I would wake up sick to my stomach. I didn’t know what to think and I went to the university’s free clinic thinking I’d contracted a stomach virus. I remember thinking as I was driving to the clinic that thankfully I’d stopped cooking at the Seaside and now had a position at the university’s crisis hotline, talking my peers through their feelings of suicide, inadequacy, and other momentary crises. I earned credit towards my masters degree, practiced what I was learning and I make enough bank to get by on. If I’d still been cooking for a living I would have been throwing up even more having to smell greasy foods.

On that cold November afternoon I sat in a sterile tiny room, shivering, giving blood samples and urine after being examined by a practicing medical student. I remember than gray room, waiting, imagining the worst only to have a huge shock. The young doctor came into the room carrying a needle and told me that the burning and itching I was experiencing was because I’d managed to contract common gonorrhea, which one shot of penicillin would clear up. But the reason I was nauseous all the time was that I was about a month pregnant.

It seemed like he was telling me in slow motion, I saw the words leaving his mouth but it seemed to take a long time before the import of what he was saying hit my brain. When I did understand, that by allowing that stranger to shove his cock into my inner being I’d become a statistic and confirmed my parents worse fears, the room started to spin and I dropped like a stone to the floor. When I came to they were waving smelling salts under my nose and insisting that they call someone to come drive me home.

There was no way on this planet I was ready to face my siblings so I called a cab and while I waited the kind young doctor kept telling me about my options, abortion, adoption, having and keeping the baby and how I could find resources and help. I knew, even then, that there was no way I could contemplate abortion. I still had enough of my parents morals within me to know that I would feel damned to hell if I even contemplated destroying this innocent life created by my drunken coupling with a stranger. I could not compound my sin.

Yet I knew at the same time that I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to be a mother. I knew I would have to bear this child and put it into the arms of someone else. Adopt it out. Even though I knew this was the best thing for everyone involved, for me, for the child, for the future, I still sat in that institutional gray waiting room and wept. I didn’t want this.

Completely out of the question was calling up Julian and telling him that he was going to be a father. I barely knew him and there was nothing he could say that would sway me. I knew my parents could be appeased if they found out about this by marrying Julian but I couldn’t do that because I couldn’t image a lifetime living with him, having his body poking into mine in that degrading fashion every day or so. Plus telling him was no guarantee that he would want anything to do with the child. Swinging bachelor that he was he’d probably offer to pay for the abortion.

We did have some connection, Julian kept calling me every few days, trying to arrange another date, telling me he missed me and wanted to be with me, hinting that what he was really after was another sexual tryst.

When the cab finally came I didn’t go home, I went to the casinos lined up along the shore like glittering palaces. I walked through the garish interiors looking at the gamblers, people watching, wondering about their secrets. Did that blonde in the corner, with fake breasts and loud clothing have an abortion? Did she ever have to make this terrible choice? What about that man in pastel polyester pants, did he ever hump a stranger and get her pregnant?

I paced through the bright lights, bells and whistles trying to figure out for sure what I would do.