Literary Sex

Making Sense of Metaphor

I think the library saved my life. I sat on the floor looking at books about nudist colonies filled with black-and-white pictures of naked people in sneakers, playing volleyball, practicing archery, grilling hamburgers, and generally being naked, which I found bizarre but also helpful since there were no boys in our family and my father was not a naked person ever. Also, I read all of Jane Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Louisa May Alcott, piles and piles of books. I read magazines about teenage life, girls who gave cute parties with refreshments that looked like doll food, crustless sandwiches, heart-shaped cookies, and sherbet punch. These girls had long, shiny, brushed hair, small, oval faces, and huge eyes. They stood gracefully, knees jutted out at attractive angles; they seemed like space creatures, but they were just models.
 
I had tried makeup. When we lived in London in 1967-68, I had turned eleven, and Mary Quant introduced false eyelashes, pearly pink lip- gloss, and Pop into the fashion world. But then we returned to New Jersey, and no one wore the Liberty print dresses my mother sewed from Vogue patterns with enormous sleeves, short and trendy and original, while girls at Lawrence High were still in polyester skirts to their knees. Catherine was kicked out of school because her skirt was too short.

"Her math teacher was staring at her legs," my mother reported over dinner. "If she were fat, no one would have said anything."

Sixth grade was supposed to be the best year ever, with me finally having a teacher both my sisters had adored. Mr. Hallet was a storyteller, gentle, and a fan of the Moynahan girls with their massive vocabulary and travels abroad. However, several weeks into the year, he announced he was leaving us to join the FBI. This decision was made after a spectacular kidnapping of a young woman from a wealthy family named Barbara Jane Markle.

"Barbara Jane was found at week's end when the kidnapers telephoned the FBI and said that she could be located in a wooded area some 20 miles northeast of Atlanta. The kidnappers had hidden her well. Barbara Jane had been placed in a coffin-like box, which had then been buried under 18 inches of earth. Her tomb had been equipped with food, water, two flexible vent tubes which protruded above ground, a fan, and a small light which failed some hours before she was found. She had spent an estimated 80 hours underground." — Crime: The Girl in the Box, Time Magazine

The FBI led the investigation and subsequent rescue of the young college student, and the agents were regarded as national heroes. I felt abandoned. I had waited to have this wonderful teacher and now he was leaving. His replacement was a middle-aged woman who targeted me as both a class leader and someone who asked questions she could not answer. Children like pretty people, and she was hideous, given to fits that ended with her crying in the parking lot outside of our temporary classroom, all of us watching from the windows. I was often the cause of these fits, which inspired her to send me to the principal so many times that he put an extra chair in his office. When my mother finally came to see her, she told her I was destroying her marriage. "Molly is eleven years old," my mother said. Returning home, she announced, "That woman is bonkers." But I remained in her class

The year I was born, 1957, women stayed home to keep house or went to work until they met the man they would marry, and then they stayed home and kept house or put on nail polish and curled their hair and wore fancy dresses to make dinner. Unhappy, gifted, smart women like Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Shirley Jackson drank martinis or took drugs or killed themselves, unable to face the fact their lives had so little substance. Communists were lurking, and girls still wore stockings. A nice girl didn't kiss on the first date; boys paid, opened doors, and stood when a woman entered the room. Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Ava Gardner, Dorothy Dandridge, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Doris Day, Kim Novak, and Lana Turner were the hot women on screen, bosomy goddesses who embodied femininity alien to my mother or, in the case of Doris Day, a femininity bushwhacked by cuteness. Ten years later, everything had changed. The new list included Diana Rigg, a smart, cat-suited femme fatale who always knew what to do on The Avengers, and Jane Fonda, whose politics and penchant for marrying powerful men and taking on their personalities and beliefs identified her as a perfect representative of the strange era of feminism crossed with intense sexism that marked my coming of age. You must be willing to have sex with a stranger but be careful not to be labeled a whore.

I was deeply confused. By the time I turned fifteen, I knew an enormous amount about sex but knew nothing about boys or men. Growing up with two sisters and a father who made a single statement, "Boys are a bad lot," I was a grenade with the pin pulled, totally romantic, naïve, and completely clueless. We were three girls, and my father was a mystery as far as any of that went. I had read vivid descriptions of sex written by D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Nabokov, and Anaïs Nin, but somehow, there was a dearth of reality and a plethora of flowers, picnics, and swooning. Driving across France on our way to stay for the summer in the south of Spain, I was eleven and bored senseless. I picked up a book in the back seat, Women in Love, and asked, "What's a 'luminous loin?'" I hoped it was something sexy, but Catherine said it was a leg.

This question became an oft-told story about my reading such an advanced book at the age of eleven, but I read it like a guide to male/female relationships and what I thought was men and women had lots of sex, and then they died. I imagined the world spinning out of control, but then what?

"And she, she was the great bath of life, he worshipped her. Mother and substance of all life she was. And he, child and man, received of her and was made whole. His pure body was almost killed. But the miraculous, soft effluence of her breast suffused over him, over his seared, damaged brain, like a healing lymph, like a soft, soothing flow of life itself, perfect as if he were bathed in the womb again." Women in Love, page 337.

Brigid was beautiful. Men stopped us in the street to ask her out, and I was expected to act like the mentally challenged younger sister to discourage them. I looked like a gypsy, something seen in the back of a tinker's caravan or an ad for kids who needed charity to take a bath. The drugstore magazines portrayed an ideal woman as skinny with big boobs or skinny with no boobs, impossibly long legs, hollowed-out cheeks, and huge, vacant eyes. Barbie, another item on my mother's forbidden list, was a wasp-waisted, slim-hipped, huge-bosomed, always tanned girl with feet permanently shaped for stilettos. My mother was beautiful but didn't fit the image; she was neither sexy nor a housewife; my mother seemed larger than life, glamorous, powerful, strong, and smart but somehow vulnerable. She could do anything: bake, sew, cook, garden, put up walls and knock them down again, design houses, her hands scarred yet still soft. When she twisted her thick chestnut hair into a bun and put on lipstick and black stockings, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Other mothers seemed merely human next to her, weak women who drove their kids around in a station wagon and just cared if they were happy. My mother had danced with James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.

Men walked on the moon, and my parents put Brigid and me in a Christian Science camp without knowing it was Christian Science and left for Europe. Brigid was bullied for not owning a bra, and I told the fat counselor my family didn't believe in God when she asked me whether I wanted to say my prayer aloud or to myself. "We don't believe in God," I told her, sitting up in my bunk bed. I heard my cabin mates gasp. "There is no God," I added helpfully.

"Oh! You, poor little girl." The counselor said. From then on, my identity at Camp Betsey Cox was the Poor Little Girl who didn't believe in God.

I wanted a love like the love The Phantom felt for Diana Palmer, or the love Illya Kuryakin, the gloomy Russian spy in The Man From U.N.C.L.E, had for his female costar who was invariably shot and died swearing eternal love, or the love James Bond felt for his bikini-clad spy women who were thinking about ending their slutty spy ways but were killed before they could reform or the love Rima felt for the jungle in Green Mansions or any number of other fictional characters like Nancy in Oliver Twist who is murdered trying to help Oliver or Beth in Little Women who died a virgin and the nicest sister because the nicest sister always died.

photo by Guzel Maksutova

I was a morbid, literary oddball who read the obituaries aloud to our cleaning lady, trying to involve her in the tragic demise of strangers, but when that failed, I read aloud the poem, The Highwayman, with its depiction of Bess, the landlord's black-eyed daughter, trussed up with a gun pointing at her breast waiting for her highwayman lover to come riding across the bridge. Everyone died in my stories, but first, they had great sex. If my parents had been paying attention, they might have packed me off to therapy with someone who could sever this embrace of sex and death, but they were too glamorous and busy, and they went to Rome without a contact number, leaving us with the crazy Christian Scientists and their hope to save me from my heathen childhood.

Seventh grade was heaven. The worst year of my life had finally ended. I had lost my stomach-curdling crush on Jeff Kramer, finally stopped wanting his chosen ice-skating partner to get hit by a bus, and finally stopped waking up, afraid my father had left forever and Catherine was going to get hurt protesting the war. I was less of a child. I had played spin-the-bottle and kissed someone in a closet for seven minutes in heaven, which was just stupid. I had survived the weird passion of the boy who lived across the street and used the N-word, who spent many afternoons sitting beside our mailbox, fatly, staring at our house. I had read Wuthering Heights, and Emma and David Copperfield and Catherine had read aloud from Naked Lunch, which made me cry. These were drug-fueled, violent visions of hell described by William Burroughs. "This is what Daddy teaches at Rutgers. Isn't it great?"

In the fashion magazines Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, and Glamour, I followed instructions for applying false eyelashes, turning my hair blonde with lemon juice, and sleeping in rag curlers, which made me look like Little Orphan Annie. I wanted to be exotic and grown-up like Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago or the blonde model that Robert Redford fell in love with in Downhill Racer. The model wore a suede coat with fur that I coveted for years. Instead of fantasizing about love or a boy, I thought about myself in that coat with long blonde hair and an Austrian accent, standing at the top of a ski lift.

Cynthia Isaly was not exotic. She came from Marion, Ohio, and said things like “quit it” and “Goddurn it” and “fudge!” She came to live in New Jersey when her father was transferred to run the Buxton's ice cream chain, famous for its massive cones. I said things like “bullshit,” “Goddamn it,” and “fuck!” Cynthia never swore or lied or was mean. I should have hated her, but I loved her. I loved her so much that when she moved back to Ohio, I thought my heart would break, and when she was killed at twenty, the understanding I had lost her forever pushed me closer to the dark edge. I had been in love with her, body and soul, but I never told her; I was afraid to tell her, afraid she might not love me back even though I know she did.

Briefly, she made me stop hating myself. She thought I was beautiful and smart and funny and good. She thought I was graceful and strong and artistic. The first time I met her; I judged her clumsy and uncool. She reminded me of a Golden Retriever, all paws and long legs and huge eyes, heavy-lidded and blue. She was silly and childish. She hooted when the teacher told stupid jokes and raised her hand to tell us all about Ohio and her family as if we cared. Her self-confidence was awe-inspiring. She loved her family and admitted that she loved America, and when we pledged allegiance to the flag, she almost yelled, smiling like it was the best thing ever. She carried a lunchbox as a purse. "I don't think I like her," I told my mom as I set the table that night. "She's sort of weird."

Cynthia was open-hearted, fearless, and happy. She was happy, and I didn't know how to accept someone who still trusted the world was safe and good, loved her parents and sisters, and believed she would marry, have babies, and do something interesting. In my world, this was exotic. Uncomplicated people were an alien species, frequently Republican, probably lacking the Harvard education most of my family sported. Her people didn't get drunk, describe human existence as pointless, tell their daughters they were losers, and neglect their kids. Her family went to church; her bedroom was a girl's room, all frilly and cozy, unlike my monk's cell. Her father kissed and hugged her. Her mother made her lunch daily: a sandwich, cookies, an apple, and potato chips in small bags. On that first day of seventh grade, Cynthia asked me if I could spend the night on the weekend, a social behavior I found shocking because I equated rejection and meanness with desirability. However, I was desperate. "Okay," I said, writing her phone number on my wrist.

I pined for the sort of girlhood that supplied cute sleeping bags and fetching overnight cases. My sleeping bag was a survivor of Camp Betsy Cox, and my nightgown and toothbrush were in a brown paper A&P shopping bag. She didn't care. Her bedroom was a shrine to femininity, to her love of David Cassidy (I cured her of that), and to hobbies like stringing beads and embroidering things on her jeans. She had paper flowers and psychedelic posters and nearly no books. Her room was a paradise. It smelled like her, of patchouli and Love's Fresh Lemon spray, and then like her skin, of vanilla and lavender soap. My bedroom was so cold, with ice forming on the windows in the winter in an unheated attic, sweltering during the summer in the humidity and heat, white walls, no curtains, a few glass animals, and a few saved shells.

We talked all night about boys (I lied) and places we had lived (her: Ohio), me, (Ireland, England, Spain). She said her parents had voted for Nixon, and I told her my mother wanted to kill Nixon and the pope. She had two older sisters like me and a younger one who came to the door a few times, and we were mean to her. It was fun to be mean to someone who couldn't defend herself. On Saturday mornings, we watched hours of cartoons on a huge color TV while her mother made us snacks to eat in the living room; there were so many rules broken: daytime television, eating away from a table, and spending so much time idle. The family room (we didn't have one) had huge, overstuffed chairs called La-Z-Boys that my mother would have hated.

Their house had air-conditioning and heat and few books to mock you for your lack of industry or neurotic insecurity, mock you for your inability to comprehend why Gudrun was so mean to Gerald in Women in Love, so cruel he wandered off to freeze to death or why Ursula was so needy, why Beth had to die or why most characters in great novels suffered, drank, fucked the wrong people, took miserable care of their children, walked alone into the ocean to drown because they were frustrated artists or their lovers dumped them, or they were terrible mothers, or they just didn't know how to behave in a way that was socially acceptable.

I had been reading these books since I was beaten into literacy by my elderly first-grade teacher in Ireland, reading about famines, brutal orphanages, and sad, lost men like Henchard in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. I was doomed to love that kind of man over and over again, lost, unstable, unhappy, incapable of love, seductive, and treacherous. Men whose mothers had left them or, mocked them or committed suicide or were just plain mean and inarticulate about their unhappiness. But that night, tucked up into a La-Z-Boy, eating buttered popcorn and drinking forbidden soda, watching The Love Boat, I imagined myself happy, ordinary, and pretty. I wanted to live in a housing development, in a ranch house, on a cul-de-sac full of other children.

I went home the next day different. Now I had a best friend. I tried speaking to my family in a girlish, soft voice, a voice I imagined Amy in Little Women might have. In my new role as the sweetest, most spiritually developed member of my family, I walked outside after dinner to lie on my back and look at the stars. Since we had returned from London after my father's sabbatical year had ended, I had held my shoulders tight, ignoring the fact that, except for our suicidal handyman and a kind cleaning lady, I was alone. I tried to think about Cindy and all the fun we had, but then the story of The Bad Seed came back to me: a murder story about a child who has a genetic disposition for murdering those that she dislikes and inherited from her grandmother. Her mother must kill her when she has a flashback to her childhood when her mother stabbed her brothers and sisters and then called to her holding a bloody knife.

I looked back at our house, lights blazing, no murder there but the glint of glass that suggested my parents would continue to drink wine and maybe have a lovely time and end the evening peacefully, or maybe not, maybe my father would move into the whiskey and start his transformation from my daddy to the darkly unhappy stranger who silently came through the front door and took him away, a stranger who would look at me coldly and describe the world as a place of misery and humiliation.

— Molly Moynahan