Part One, Chapter 2

Part One, Chapter 2

Copyright 2006, 2007 by Harvard Perspectives Press

II

As it turned out, I was not on the road to marrying Carter Cobb. I discovered feminism, of a sort, while volunteering at a battered women’s center in Chicago that summer, and I returned to Cabot Academy in September with a healthy disdain for the notion of marrying anyone. I wanted to do great things in the world and I did not want to be burdened with any kind of bondage, neither the claims of my family’s manufacturing empire or emotional entanglements, nor the expectations of some preppy husband-to-be who had been raised to think that he could simply select me to accessorize his life of privilege and power. Nor was I in any danger of being enchained in this latter fashion. I was still just 17.

But I returned to campus under a full head of steam and persuaded CC to allow me to substitute Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Sarah Orne Jewett and Kate Chopin for Hardy and Lawrence and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who I told CC were just a bunch of “shopworn whitebread male novelists. (It must have made CC wonder what I would make of his novel if and when he ever finished it! I wish that someone had at least introduced me to Sue Miller and Toni Morrison and Francine Prose and saved me from some of the lethal boredom I inflicted upon myself).
For CC’s creative writing class I tried to write poems and stories about oppressed women and triumphant women, but I never succeeded so much that I created anything close to what I would call a real woman. What I trial teaching must be for someone like Carter Cobb, always trying to strike the right balance between indulging and educating these overwrought 17-year-old intellects!

But there were benefits for him, no doubt. Even without the occasional pleasures that he must have experienced as a committed lifelong teacher leading me (or, for that matter, any of my classmates) into moments of revelation, heightened consciousness, and imaginative frenzy, there was the simple biological juxtaposition of a 40-something man and a 17-year-old girl. He was a discreet, respectful, and very sober man, who was reticent to take me anywhere I did not want to go, and our warm and very engaged student-teacher relationship never took a pedestrian turn into the ugly, the actual, or the explicit, so there is no need for justifications or euphemisms here, but CC was a man who appreciated females, probably almost irregardless of our ages, and it was manifest to me in every hour of our togetherness -- whether it was in a one-to-one tutorial session, or in some seminar with a dozen other girls, or in the activity upon which we soon embarked together -- that he found the wholly and wholesomely enchanting. Whether the private imaginative uses to which he subjected my charms were equally wholesome, I cannot hazard any guess since that is entirely his private business. Perhaps I am only projecting here, because of my very own very active and vivid imagination; after all, I must disclose if I am to be entirely honest that on more than one occasion during my senior year, I invited myself to sample privately and I should say in an exquisitely relaxed and solitary state, my imaginings of CC’s most private reciprocal charms, and I found them equal to every imaginary test.

It was after all, an extraordinary year of self exploration. Our headmistress, Miss Hermione Shohet, welcomed the seniors back that September with a lovely and well-intentioned talk that unfortunately became fodder for frequent parodies in the weeks that followed. She began by noting that in their senior years, Cabot girls had always been known to explore the world beyond our lovely little campus and to secure for themselves, primarily through the college admissions process of course, excellent perches from which to later access their fitting places in the worlds of the imagination and the intellect, of business and government and spiritual leadership, and of service. This introduction was perhaps too replete with statistics summarizing the matriculation histories of Cabot's recent graduating classes, but who can blame Miss Shohet for being as obsessed with benchmarks and measurables as any other headmistress, after all. In any case, she was talking about our futures, and self-absorption is no less the primary industry of Cabot seniors than any other group of 17-year-old girls, so she held our rapt attention.

It was only then, as she tried to divert our attention from our places in the world to a more introspective focus, that she perhaps began to miss her rhetorical marks. And in the process -- since I began the morning a little exhausted after flying into Boston the evening before and staying up all night catching up with my friends after the summer’s separation -- I have to admit that she began to lose me, and I drifted to the edge of waking and sleeping, a place that can be quite pleasurable lying in a hammock at our summer cottage on Lake Michigan or in my bed at night, but a little risky, if one is sitting in public, in the chapel no less, with several dozen classmates and one's teachers.

“But as we explore together the great world that beckons us beyond the cozy confines of the Cabot campus," Miss Shohet entreated us with the kind of sweeping polemical flourish that we "old girls" had come to expect of her, "let us also never forget or give short shrift to the delicious pleasures of self exploration."

Those were her words, and I do not embellish by even a single syllable. On either side of me, Nicole and Bebe cracked totally up simultaneously, barely stifling their explosions of laughter sufficiently so as not to bring on some form of institutional discipline. I enjoyed the moment myself, a little sleepily and a little less consciously than my friends. My dimly formed impression was that, all up and down the chapel pews, girls were winking at one another or raising eyebrows or gesturing knowingly, if also in some cases a bit lewdly. Were we a bit cruel? Were we a bit dirty minded? Should good breeding and its concomitant call to repression have kept us from even noticing Miss Shohet’s unintended double entendre? Possibly so, but we were just 17, as I think I have already mentioned, and we could not be held responsible, could we?

"Let your intellects serve as a lubricant for your young imaginations," Miss Shohet exhorted us, and my well-lubricated young imagination, still teetering on the edge of sleep and wakefulness, began to wander deliciously quite in spite of every ounce of practical sense that I possessed. My eyes fluttered and closed and I was transported timelessly to a scene of total fantasy, borrowing much from the chapel scene where I began my imaginative pursuit is that morning, yet wildly different. My kitty cat purred as my dreamfingers petted her gently and then firmly through my little plaid skirt, and I began to experience a vision of other girls, my classmates I imagine, as much as they were anyone, caressing themselves in wanton fashion to the left and right of me, their bums sliding a bit forward in the pews as their tanned and slender legs splayed involuntarily open, their underpants were pushed down, pulled aside, and probed through, with fingers working hungrily in, well, delicious self-exploration.

I lifted my own hands to my face, touched fingertips against my cheeks and lips, and wet my fingers lightly and inexpertly on my lips and tongue, still gone, but blissful in my enjoyment of this journey. My own hands could not help moving downward in the kind of dreamy, empowering solidarity with my dreamsisters to busy themselves in pleasuring me as if they had been the hands of boys I had imagined, even if I had never known them, pressing at first gently and then harder, harder on the uncovered mound and the fuzz fringed opening, which just then was my very center. For a few seconds or a few hours then I must have been asleep, must have fallen totally down this rabbit hole, but the waking world still pulled at me like guilt so I tried to be discreet, to keep my posture rigid, but slide forward I did, my knees parting, then falling limp as I continued the pressure and my kittycat began rising up, champing almost against the palm of my hand and the splay of my fingers with a rhythm of its own as I pressed down again and again, and then again, as my left hand fluttered up and I pressed in hard and sharp against my tender nipple, twisting it, smothering it, cutting at it, hurting it, oh. That guilty monitor watching over me from inside would have been embarrassed by my breathing with its quick catches had I not felt wholly taken away already to the dream chapel where other girls were rubbing themselves with half-closed eyes, their plaid skirts riding high, underpants forlornly down at their knees and ankles, feral moans of pleasure almost drowning out Miss Shohet as she exhorted us from the dream pulpit, “Explore yourselves! Lubricate yourselves! Let me watch you and taste your delicious pleasures!”

I gasped and arched my back and then it was starting to happen for me right there in the real chapel, but thank god Nicole gave me a swift, sharp elbow in the ribs and I caught my breath and smoothed my skirt and sat up straight in the pew.

"Geesh, Ali, who are you thinking about?" she whispered.

Later, I protested that I had fallen asleep and had been dreaming, and hadn’t my friends ever heard of the notion that people couldn't be held morally responsible for their dreams? Nicole and Bebe had a great deal of fun at my expense, but they eventually assured me that my reverie had appeared to them to last only a few seconds, no matter how long it seemed to go on for me as its dreamer. I suppose their hearts went out to me a bit because at first I was truly worried that I ruined my reputation for ever if the entire senior class had seen me pleasuring myself in the chapel, but Nicole took pains to let me know that nothing of the sort had occurred that morning. And besides, she added with a characteristic mix of mischief and generosity, if they had seen me and been able to figure out exactly what I was doing or imagining, well, I would probably be a heroine to at least half of them for helping them to find the keys and unlock the doors to the only real sexual pleasure they were likely to experience during their final year at Cabot.

Nicole's point, in which Bebe and I were quick to concur, was that, whatever the percentages for early sexual experience might be in the world at large, and whatever experiences we might be able to enjoy her (or not) during summer or Christmas or spring vacations, there simply was not much chance for such pastimes -- except the most solitary of them -- on the Cabot campus during the academic year. Our little dances with the boys from Middlesex or Belmont Hill School were heavily chaperoned, so you could have a little fun grinding a preppy or two into submission on the dance floor, but where did that leave you? High and dry?

"Or low and wet," quipped Bebe. We both looked at her with the kind of mock look of haughty disdain that we might expect of our mothers, if we said something very vulgar or, say, confessed that we were dating Catholic boys.

What other options were there?

We had heard of a few girls who had experimented with each other, but it all seemed so entangling. Who wanted to worry about whether you would be respected in the morning by your own roommate? We all just knew each other too well.

There was, theoretically at least, the possibility of an affair with CC, or some other faculty member, but that would take a level of idiocy on the part of both parties that hardly seemed likely absent extreme desperation. People got caught. They got fired or bounced out of school. Lives got ruined.

One or twice a week we rode the commuter rail train into Harvard Square and naturally there were girls who fantasized regularly about finding true love with a Harvard boy. Perhaps there were even some who tried to pull it off. But the disappointing truth was that Harvard boys had just too damned many choices, sexually speaking, and consequently had no need to fool around with nice little plaid-skirted girls who had to be signed in back in our dormitory rooms at Cabot Academy most evenings by 10 o'clock, no matter how cute we might be. One of us could have paraded across Harvard Yard clad only in her little plaid skirt, holding a sign that said

HONEST!
I AM NOT JAILBAIT!
TRY ME!

and not attracted as much as a turned ahead from the brilliant young Harvard boys.

So it began, under Miss Shohet's mandate, as a year of delicious self-exploration. All three of us were still virgins, although each of us -- according to the perhaps slightly embellished reports we brought back to Concord at the end of the summer -- had expanded her experience and developed certain advanced ancillary skills with older boys that summer, myself and the toney suburbs of Chicago, Nicole in and around Grosse Pointe Farms, and Bebe on the Upper East Side and the environs of her family's summer cottage at Saratoga Springs. They had all been nice enough boys, and they had respected our prim and proper limits, all the more all the more so as we developed and demonstrated other skills at bringing things to a conclusion as aptly as if we had each been born wearing kneepads. And here we were back at Cabot Academy, each with a mental treasure trove of vivid memories to fuel our delicious self-explorations. It was a wonder any of us got any school work done!

Without ever intending such a thing Miss Shohet had freed a good number of the girls in the senior class to overcome their inhibitions and make masturbation a topic of open and candid conversation, one I might add that held our attention for months. Some of us have never tried it, some had been trained in their cabins at summer camp and had been practicing it as if it had been ballet or gymnastics from the age of 10 or 11, and one girl had learned it and tried it mutually with a college boy (who just happen to be her cousin) the previous summer on the Vineyard. We discussed fantasies and techniques and even the taboo possibilities of semi-public self-pleasuring, and it would be only the slightest exaggeration to say that we came to constitute a kind of cult ,one that selected as our anthem the Cyndi Lauper song "She-Bop" and as our cult goddess not one of our own number but a middle-aged woman named Betty Dodson who had authored a delightful and informative (and very well illustrated) book called Sex for One, which the members of Cabot Academy's senior class made into a local bestseller at the nearby Concord Bookshop, a few blocks down Main Street in the village center.

So, I will say again, that for many of my senior sisters. It was a year of so of delicious self-exploration. And so also for me, until one, lovely, crisp and sun-filled afternoon that October, when Carter Cobb stopped me as I crossed the school green and offered me a proposition that I simply could not refuse.

Part One: Chapter 1

Part One: Chapter 1

Copyright 2007 by Harvard Perspectives Press

PART ONE:

BREAKDOWN

I

On the campus of Cabot Academy, which likes to refer to itself as “an elite girls’ boarding and preparatory school set in bucolic Concord, Massachusetts,” Mr. Carter Cobb was a god. A frequently published poet and short story writer who for some vague number of years had been teaching only half the usual load of classes so as to leave him time to work on a novel, he had an avuncular and caring manner, sparkling bespectacled green eyes, and an acerbic wit that, taken together and in spite of his diminutive and usually rumpled physical presence, somehow made him seem the nearest we Cabot girls could envision to “sexy,” at least on the Cabot faculty.

“CC,” as we called him, taught only two classes, and the distinction I had just attained in achieving acceptance in both of these tiny seminars for my senior year at Cabot was every bit as much a reason for envy among my peers as if my parents had shipped out my favorite Arabian pony, and wired the funds for the school’s annual stable fee, from our home in Deerfield, Illinois. As it was, my mother and father had done these things, and I am well aware that I will betray a certain tendency toward complacent entitlement by saying here that I had been no more surprised by this fact than I was to learn that I was accepted in CC’s Creative Writing and AP English Fiction seminars for the coming fall.

But if it is true that I had been raised to expect privilege and distinction, let me hasten to add that I never wanted them. Au contraire! I wanted to rebel violently against these and indeed all the trappings of my family’s obscene wealth, but where was a girl to start? Probably not at Cabot Academy, where one was considered almost a revolutionary if she, say, joined in the annual Walk for Hunger. So I bided my time.

“Ali, CC is going to marry you,” gushed my girl Nic Beaudry as I rode up to the bulletin board in front of the English Department building on my roan pony, Luis Aparicio, who I had named, as a little girl, after my father’s favorite Chicago White Sox baseball player. “You’ll be sitting in class with him twice as much as anyone else and he won’t be able to resist you.”

Nicole stood with a couple of other rising seniors who were checking the acceptance lists for various of the more coveted course offerings for the coming fall. It was the last day of the spring term, and Nicole had not been accepted for either of CC’s seminars, but she was on an even shorter acceptance list for AP Physics, an acceptance that probably would have driven me to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills. As it was, the AP English Fiction class was going to require me to read a novel a week all summer in preparation, but I didn’t mind. I loved to read, and it pleased me that it would be CC who would be making the selections for my summer reading list.

“Sure he’s going to marry Alicia,” chimed in our roommate Bebe Dodd. “Just as soon as he switches his sexual orientation and decides that he prefers boys instead or girls.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I adlibbed a bit tartly, preferring to law down a reference to a recent TV comedy show rather than so suffer any further discussion of my boyish, decidedly late-blooming body. Probably because I had so many things in my life that were the envy of “my girls,” as I called Nicole and Bebe, they were always ready to zing me with these little barbs, and my body gave them plenty of ammunition. I had always been very athletic, which may have been part of the reason I hadn’t had my first period until just a few months earlier, and even now my period seemed to follow its own quirky schedule rather than coming along every 28 days like it was supposed to. My hips and legs were straight and angular, there wasn’t the usual pleasing fat on my butt, and my breasts, well, even to use the word “breasts” was to stretch the definition of the word a bit. They were all nipple, although in my defense I should add that the nipples themselves were very lovely and prominent, pert and brown and quite often standing at full attention.

Luis Aparicio and I cantered off in a minor huff, since we preferred – rather than endure any more of Bebe’s smart mouth -- to enjoy a good last run around the campus before Luis Aparicio was trucked back to Deerfield for the summer. I may have been a late bloomer physically but my flesh burned just as much as that of any girl of seventeen for the attention and the touch that would make me feel at peace, at one, in love with another person. I knew this about myself from the way my breathing changed sometimes in the presence of certain boys, from the occasional effects of a slow dance with one of the more industrious boys from Middlesex School or Belmont Hill School at one of our Saturday night social travesties, but most of all I knew it from my nipples, which sent wild signals up and down my body at the slightest, most incidental brushing contact with a male, or sometimes, to be perfectly honest, with anyone.

I had become used to the delays in my development and I was even able to handle most of the jokes, but not very many months before I had been shy even to address in front of my friends or my Cabot teammates on the cross-country and lacrosse teams, afraid they would tease me and call me a boy for my lack of the full curves they were developing, the perky, full, upturned breasts and the womanly flaring of their hips and their otherwise flat bellies. My belly wasn’t otherwise flat,” it was just plain flat. Even the signature womanly adornment – a tuft of precious fur where it was most desired – was all but denied me. If I was not completely hairless there, below my belly button there was nothing but the thinnest growth of golden peach fuzz and I was worried already that I would stay innocent forever: that neither boy nor man would ever sample the peach itself.

Before I Knew Any Better: Author’s Foreword

Before I Knew Any Better

Copyright 2007 by Harvard Perspectives Press

For Gen and for R, two real women

It is amazing how complete is the illusion that beauty is goodness.

--Tolstoy





Love is an angel

Disguised as lust,

Here in our bedroom

‘Til the morning comes.

--Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen





If it hadn’t been so good, baby,

It wouldn’t be so bad.

--Delbert McClinton, and others







Every word of this memoir is true,

Or my name’s not Alicia Wentworth.

--“Alicia Wentworth”




Author’s Foreword

A few years ago I was invited, by a member of my congregation, to attend a private film screening. The gentleman who extended the invitation is the owner of the theater, and he loves movies; this is a combination that I have appreciated in him from the first. He even likes movies that are rather widely considered “bad” movies. The movie to which he invited me, along with several dozen other people, probably fits well into that category. He never explained why he liked it, but he did offer the following preface as he stood in front of the screen before the film began to roll:

“I like this movie. There might be apologies for this and that, and sometimes you might have to stand on your tippy toes to see what I see in it, and there’s funny and wacky and silly stuff that happens, and it’s okay to laugh at that stuff, but please don’t laugh at the movie to show yourself or anyone else – least of all yourselves – how cool you are. Wait until something is funny and laugh at that. Because I want you to get into it, and if you put up a force field of smugness you never will. Just leave. I will give you your money back.”

We all laughed, because of course we had not paid anyway; we had been invited. But I loved what he said. How wonderful it would be, I am thinking now, if I could find some effective way to cut through the smugness of some readers (surely not you!) and get them to approach my memoir as my friend wanted to approach “his” movie. But I am not optimistic.

So I will try to render myself as simple-minded as possible, so as not to over-think my relationship with you. There was much, in these events, that was great fun. Funny and wacky and silly stuff. I do not intend to shy away from that, or to look for gravity on every page, even if now means embarrassing myself, a respectable thirty-something woman, and making myself blush.

I suspect you will apprehend a certain nostalgic exhibitionism in my relating of this memoir, and particularly in my choices of which memories to describe and which words to use in my descriptions. There does not seem to be any good way of making a measured ascent of this peak of experience. In my daily life, now, as a Unitarian minister, the parent of two gifted pre-adolescents, and a supporter of various good causes, I have grown (or atrophied) into a certain ornate way of expressing myself. One could say that I am a little long-winded, and I am sure that some members of my Sunday congregation would agree, and yet it is my own self-indulgent view that I do not waste words. Words are my stock in trade as a preacher, and I use them carefully to locate both the content and the nuances that I believe are important. When I write something down on paper, as now, my phrasing tends to become even more deliberate.

But now I am struggling a bit. I am finding that with every scene and incident, I want to charm myself into remembering selectively, and the charmers, the selectors, are the words themselves. My occasionally over-embroidered speech patterns of today seem at times especially effective at avoiding the kind of descriptions that might make me blush. Is there any more effective a hallucinogenic or delusionary device than the arsenal of one’s vocabulary and ready phrases? Some say that ontology recapitulates phylogeny; I simply do not know, but I do suspect that vocabulary recapitulates ontology.

So at times I will drive myself to recover the simple vocabulary and phrasings toward which I tended at seventeen and eighteen, when I inflicted the following experiences on myself as I am now inflicting them upon you. At other times, no doubt, I will step back to this more deliberate voice that serves me well enough today. Perhaps the process and the choices are at one with my selective memory, or perhaps it is my simple and humane tendency to protect myself, and you, from the harshness of experienced. I certainly mean you no harm, only good, just as I intended myself no harm, back then.

Life seems all a bit like trying to maintain one’s balance, and to be the speaker or narrator often carries with it some pretense of balance. Perhaps it would be better if I owned the theater and could simply show you the movie, although I fear I would need my friend to introduce it with his lovely appeal to your gentleness as an audience. I also fear that, if I were to choose the medium of movies rather than memoir I would have to make a clearer commitment from the outset on the basic question of whether the following is a cautionary tale, or just some silly, wacky fun. But it may be that that would merely be a failure of craft.

--Alicia Wentworth