Chapter 11 - Teaching

America was going wild. Everywhere was protest and upheaval, boundaries being pushed past their limits in heady growth spurts of positive energy and negative energy, a tug of war for the future of the American culture. It was a rush, and many of us seemed swept along with a current of change that was exhilarating or crushing, depending on the issue and your previously held beliefs.
Guilt was bubbling over the fire of America. End the war, end American “apartheid”, end the raping of the earth, and stop pigging out on the earth’s finite resources.
No more women as “second class citizens”, we were freed by the birth control pill to take charge of our destiny. Once our bodies were free we could free our minds and our spirits. We could become cultural warriors, along with our men, like our Amazonian forbears. We could go out and conquer the canyons of our great cities.
But danger was also afoot. While heroes were being made, our greatest leaders were being assassinated, right here in America. When Kennedy was shot, I was downtown in our little northern college town shopping with my roommates. We were just about to enter the jewelry store, which was broadcasting a radio station in the entryway near the display windows. When we heard the so shocking news we left downtown immediately, in tears, and arrived back at the dorm to sit with all our friends in the lounge and see the fifties end in 1963 on national television. The pink and navy suit that Jacqueline wore – the funeral cortege – John Jr., manly little toddler, holding his mother’s hand and saluting his dad. Our president murdered.
Yin and yang – who knew that we Westerners would suddenly need the comfort of Eastern religion to understand events in the “land of the free”, the “home of the brave”. Black panthers, right fists knuckled and raised proudly, “Black Power”, sent shivers down the spine of white America, both of fear and of pride.
Buses were loaded to go to Washington to protest the war, more buses to protest segregated schools or school bussing, more buses to fight for the rights of women, and even more buses to protest the protesters. The buses rolled out with the brave radical or reactionary souls to fight the good fight or protect the status quo. There was fear in this. Something could go wrong, you could end up in jail or dead. There was camaraderie in this, solidarity with a community of like-minded contemporaries. Usually Martin Luther King’s example of peaceful civil disobedience held sway, perhaps diverting serious bloody rage-outs. We owe him.
The SDS, college campus heroes staged sit-in, be-ins. Our fathers and mothers who were in charge of our institutions were stunned, uncomprehending, angry. They fought back, and when slammed by massive outrage, reluctantly agreed to change.
Music was also gone mad, Bob Dylan, who could have said it better? It was all happening to a beat,: from Motown, “Baby Love, Oh Baby Love’, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”, from space, “Light My Fire”, from Liverpool, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Norwegian Wood”, from the west coast, “I Get Around”, and from another planet, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The beat was the bass that underlined each day and pounded the whole glorious adventure into our “collective unconscious.”
In the midst of this I had to move into my new apartment and start my first year of teaching. But I had smelled marijuana, I had seen our president shot, I had seen Tyler off to war in Vietnam, and all my 50’s security was toppling.
Two weeks into my first semester of teaching I knew I was in deep shit. It wasn’t going well. I had two classes of ninth grade English and two of tenth. These were not the goal-oriented, studious young people I had invented. They drew the battle lines. Last year they got rid of two teacher, they said, this year they were shooting for four. I planted my high heels. I wasn’t going anywhere. It was war. But I didn’t have a discipline gene.
We did study English, but I took such an academic approach that I lost them, or maybe they were just too intent on sabotage. We did some good stuff, we did anti-utopias, Animal Farm and an offshoot writing assignment. We did “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Sniper” by Liam O’Flaherty. We did poetry, haiku, Shakespeare and grammar. We did a unit on Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau and Gandhi, but my classroom was unusually chaotic. We had a whirl-I-gigs siege which involved the construction of dozens of notebook paper whirl-i-gigs which somehow appeared mysteriously on the ground under my windows in the courtyard.
I often had to shut my classroom door because other people complained about the noise. Once my tenth graders planned a B-B attack. Ten minutes into the class I was bombarded with copper B-B’s. I was rolling around on them. They were pinging against the blackboard. I did, at least, stand in front of the classroom door just before the bell rang and tell my darlings they couldn’t leave until the B-B’s were all picked up. I had to write a lot of passes, which I refused to do. I eventually had to relent because students without late passes had nothing to do but roam the halls. I should have reported them all, called their parents. No one had given us an arsenal of techniques for dealing with classroom war. I was embarrassed. If I gave detention, then I had to manage the perpetrators in the after school detention room. There was obviously more to this teaching stuff than knowing your subject matter.
My department chair, Mitchell Gerard, was a distinguished gentleman and a beloved teacher. He called me into his office several times. He summarized for me what was going on in my classroom , which I already knew quite enough about, but he gave me no ideas about where to go from there. Teacher’s classrooms are their domains. Perhaps he didn’t want to interfere. There was also a social studies teacher, Mr. Boyd. He tried to convince me to relax and not take it all so seriously. He spirited me away to a local cider mill during my first period each day, which was a planning period, for coffee and donuts. We weren’t supposed to leave the building, but no one really cared. He sort of bucked me up to face each new day. My mom sometimes shared her Librium with me, when I totally lost courage. I had never failed before at academics.
Part of the problem, I reasoned, was that my students were way ahead of me emotionally. Their parents were young and had way too much money. They worked a lot and they went out a lot. The kids would meet at a home where parents were absent and they were free to drink, smoke, party, and experiment with sex every night.
The girl’s classroom attire was outrageous. They wore short, short skirts with garters which showed below their hemlines and which were fastened to their stocking. I had never encountered this style of dress before, and have not since. The school did not disallow it. They were not at all ladylike about the way they sat. I tried to talk to them about the pitfall of living their lives to please men, but they weren’t buying it.
The boys were flirtatious and pretended to be in love with me. I finally did several lessons on courtly and unrequited love. I received several illuminated medieval love scrolls. I complimented the artists and this trend died out.
I had one young student who, although bright, would not hand in any assignments. He would only hand me, each time, a sheet of paper that read “I’m Jimmy Carl Black, I’m the Indian of the group.” This, I eventually learned could be credited to the Mothers of Invention of “Boobs-a-lot” fame. He said he did this to get his father’s attention. It wasn’t working with his father. He certainly had my attention though. Although we talked to his parents, threatened to drop him from the football team and eventually did drop him from the football team, he stubbornly remained “Jimmie Carl Black” for the entire school year. Except for his refusal to complete a single school assignment he had a delightful personality and was very popular.
I made it through the year and then resigned. I though that perhaps my lack of “life experience” made it difficult to manage a classroom with the perfect blend of compassion and sternness. I was relieved, but also deflated. Perhaps if I wasn’t still a virgin when the year began, perhaps if I had learned to inhale sooner?

Chapter 10 - Falling in Love Inappropriately

You would think that graduating from college with high honors, as I did that summer of 1967, would mean that I was mature and smart. I did have a head full of knowledge and a heart full of the desire to be an excellent high school teacher. I also had a job in September at a high school in a well-to-do neighborhood where I expected to find ambitious dedicated students.
Okay, we’ve already established that books aren’t everything, but I was so inspired, so bursting with the beauty of language and literature and the cosmic connections between human history, art, music, and language, that I felt as if I had swallowed the Milky Way. My excitement beamed from me. I was incandescent. We didn’t know “Emotional IQ.” Mine was probably about equal to that of a sixteen year old.
And that’s who I hung out with that summer after college ended and before I started teaching, sixteen year olds. My brother Robert had a new friend, Luke, who was attracted by the drums that Bobby banged away on in the basement next to the washing machine and dryer. Luke looked like a Liverpool, England boy with dark blond hair fringing his handsome face. He was a naturally smart kid, but destined for blue-collar physical labor. Many a woman’s life has probably been derailed by an inappropriate love interest. Not a new story, but for someone who was supposedly headed out into the wide adult world, it can bring progress to a screeching halt, make you want to stay in the moment. That June I spent many hours talking to Luke while we sat in my turquoise Chevy Impala convertible at the end of my parent’s street, watching the planes take off and land. We talked about what we wanted and what we believed, but it was really all about attraction, hormones, pheromones; chemistry. I don’t know what Luke felt, I never asked. I assumed the pleasure he took in my company was not purely intellectual, was visceral and chemical, like mine. I think the attraction must be mutual for it to generate this much energy. I waited all day for the evenings in the car watching the smoky blue lights that lined the runways and feeling pretty smoky blue myself.
That June I was only alive when we were together and I was oblivious to social embarrassment, parental disapproval, all of it. It was all pretty innocent after all. In spite of my obsession I was passive, waiting for the first move to come from Luke. All we did was talk.
In July Luke suggested that I could get an apartment with his sister Lena, who was ready to move away from her parents and needed a roommate. I liked her, she was alive, somewhat witty, and so full of self-confident energy that she was positively loaded with an earthy charisma. She had not gone to college and she had already been married and divorced. Even so she was younger than me. She also had blonde hair, and a full, sensual face and figure. There were whispers that she was a “homosexual”. I was incredulous, never having given a thought to such a predilection. (I didn’t even know about Rock Hudson.) I decided it was just small town gossip. I hated gossip. It was like those tacky “True Confessions” magazines we all passed around in our teens that recounted the tales of the million ways an unsuspecting girl could lose her reputation. “My Baby’s Father Beats Me”, My Baby’s Father is My Father” and other horrific permutations of the victimization of women by men. It never dawned on me that a woman could be victimized by another woman. That’s how sheltered my beginnings were.
So the adventure began. We moved into the “city,” the same city my family had left thirteen years earlier. The city had a university, so it had a university neighborhood. How hip. The apartment was at the top of an older apartment building that had five other apartments. It was a gray clapboard structure and the apartment was not awful, a one bedroom with a nice porch off the living. The rooms were good sized, there were lots of windows. I felt good about it. Then Lena introduced me to her girlfriend, Ivy, and I understood that the rumors were true. I would be tolerant, I decided. I wanted to experience everything life had to offer and I wanted a place to visit with Luke away from prying eyes. It would be good to learn about lesbians. It shouldn’t make any difference who we love. I didn’t want to have a “lesbian experience” of my own, but this should not be a problem. Lena was obviously in love with Ivy, who was a thin, shy likeable young black woman. Luke would be around a lot too after all, and school would keep me very busy.
It was a disaster. Lesbianism was the tip of Lena’s unconventionality iceberg. She did not have any serious career plans. She did sort of want to play house with Ivy, but that did not mean she wanted to make curtains, or buy knickknacks. They were always in the car off to somewhere, usually Lena’s mom’s house. I wasn’t really clear about why she left her mother’s house to begin with. I guess it was because sleepovers weren’t allowed. Lena was also into drugs. She smoked cigarettes, of course, but she also smoked marijuana. She had some kind of menial job, at a potato chip factory or something. When she got home, she got high while she waited for Ivy and then took off. Sometimes Luke would come over with his boys and they would also get high. I puffed my cigarettes, but I would not smoke marijuana.
Lena, it turned out, was an expert at abuse and manipulation. She knew how to take a weakness and tweak it. If you had an insecurity, she knew how to use it to her advantage. God help you if she wanted something from you and you were unwilling to give it. She was ruthless in her pursuit of absolute personal satisfaction.
Fortunately for me, she didn’t concentrate on me. She had Ivy. Ivy was not “out”. Her family had no idea of her inclinations. She had some big bruiser brothers who would not be happy. They even daunted Lena. This did not keep her, however, from exploiting Ivy’s fears of discovery in order to keep Ivy at heel. Ivy was very unhappy. Lena was way more than she bargained for, noisy, aggressive, not at all into nesting. I think Ivy wanted to settle down, come home from a day of nursing, put up her feet, and bask in the glow of someone who loved her. Lena loved her possessively and assertively, but had no immediate interest in settling down.
They fought constantly, Ivy quietly and stubbornly, Lena raging off into the night. Before the summer was even over I had had it. I told Lena I was moving out. I found an ad in the paper. Some girls in a flat needed a roommate. I went for an interview. Beautiful old flat on a tree-lined street right outside of a green city park with a big pool and a rose garden. The middle bedroom was empty. The living room had a fireplace, the kitchen a breakfast nook. There was a deep front porch along the front of the house. Two local girls who worked for downtown stockbrokers lived there already. We all liked each other. I could move in at the end of the month. Lena and I had a month-to-month rental so I did not have to worry about breaking a lease. Once Lena and Ivy broke up, Lena didn’t mind moving back home again.
I had to go to my roommate’s wedding on Long Island. Lena wanted to see her ex-husband and her uncle in New York City. She wanted to get some money from her uncle and her ex. Luke would go too, they would stay with their uncle while I went to the wedding. Lena and I still got along. This was OK with me. I liked to be anywhere Luke was. I just didn’t want to live with Lena.
Her ex-husband had decided that he was a musician. He was so hip he was scary. Thin, with spiky black hair and a leather jacket, he did reveal a continuing fondness for Lena. He lived in a disgusting apartment on Avenue C in the Village, crawling with cockroaches, with a dirty bathtub in the kitchen. A lot of joints were smoked, but there was no money here to spare. We went uptown to Uncle Chet. He lived in a rent-controlled building on Lexington. The elevator smelled like strawberries, it smelled like patchouli everywhere else. He was Lena’s gay uncle and his place was beautifully decorated in a toned-down mod style. He was an educated and amusing man, just nearing middle age, living on his own at the moment. He was “somebody” and he knew “people”.
It was hard to contain Lena’s energy in such an upholstered space but her uncle was genuinely fond of her and indulgent. I left to go to my exotic roommate’s wedding.
From all this immense culture shock I took enormous, although not uncomplicated, pleasure.
The paradoxes in my life totally parallel the extremes in this trip to New York City, from sleazy, to artsy, to upscale, my life would run the gamut. After the “moseltov” at the wedding I found myself at a huge banquet restaurant in Rockaway, mingling with Long Islanders in long dresses and their best coiffures at table after table of hor’d’oeuvres. These appetizers, which I thought to be the whole wedding spread, proved to be a prelude to a luxurious sit-down dinner followed by a dessert cart from nirvana. We danced the Hora, I saw all my old friends from college, and the beautiful bride who never married the Kentucky boyfriend at all, but ended up marrying a podiatrist from Chicago.
I did not crave her life, or think about hanging on in Long Island. Of course I had my teaching job to go back to, but you would think, given my big dreams in life, I would have tried to hitch my star to these winners. Never gave it a thought. Their background was too different from mine. This was their world. I was off back to mine. I couldn’t wait to begin. I was scared to death to begin. Summer was over. I had a new place to live. I was out from under the cloud of Lena (I thought) and could just enjoy the energy of Lena. I was ready to go. I still didn’t inhale.

Chapter 9 - Robert

Felicity was the first child, me, Zoe, the second, Tyler, the third, and Gertie the fourth. Robert was #5. Before puberty Robert was a victim to Tyler, and a baby doll to Felicity, Gertie and me. We felt bad when Tyler tortured him with the old “smotheration” routine. At first we told mom, who did the “wait until your father comes home” bit. Dad always did his duty in these situations, but his heart wasn’t in it. And afterwards Tyler might torture Robert even more with psychological insults against his courage or his gender. Tyler didn’t torture Robert everyday anyway. There were lots of days when they got along great, but because of the age difference Robert would always be the follower and Tyler the reluctant and twisted mentor.
Felicity and Gertie and I just loved Robert. He was our first baby. He came along when we were old enough to do some nurturing, holding a bottle, watching Mommie change his diaper, or finding “blankie” (Robert rubbed the satin on a certain blankie until he was about five and it consisted of only a few threads, crisscrossed and fuzzy). Next thing you know he was a toddler waddling along behind us with blankie, and so cute. He had a little tough face and a blond crew cut, and he smiled with his whole face. He would do anything we asked, even be the groom when we played wedding with the youngest of the three sisters from across the street. He was our pet. Tyler had Pete, the dog, but we had our cat Bootsy and we had Robert.
After puberty Robert was never a victim again. He discovered beer early and was addicted early. He had an informal posse of cohorts, all boys, who also pledged allegiance to beer and to feats of drunken courage. Most of Robert’s friends were nice boys from around Smithvale, who appreciated his creativity and Bobby was truly inspired, leading his merry band from one humorous and borderline illegal adventure to the next. Their deeds were legendary and sometimes noisy. Robert had a whole room to himself by his teenage years because the rest of us older siblings were no longer in the house. I was still in college and came home for weekends and school breaks and summers.
Robert’s room in our house was called the “Sin Den”. If you opened the door, which you did only after gaining clearance, clouds of cigarette smoke would greet you, along with crashing music, beery exhalations and an explosion dirty underwear. State your business and go. But Robert also had a roguish charm that allowed him to pass all this off as just testosterone, high spirits, and boyish humor.
Robert also had a corner of the basement for his drum set, which was the height of generosity and parental love on the part of my mother. She had never appreciated music of any kind, to her it was all noise, and the drums were parked right next to her escape hatch, her laundry area. The boys knew how to get around Augusta though. They flattered her and teased her, made her laugh, and flirted with her. It wasn’t even just a strategy to get away with things. Those boys truly loved her, sort of adopted her. They often stayed to dinner; they ran away to our house, slept off drunks at our house and hardly ever went home as far as I could see. Sometimes their moms were jealous but they certainly knew my mom wasn’t trying to steal their children.
Robert and his “posse” did things like sneak into the E. J. Strodel Warehouse, take cases of beer out into the woods behind the warehouse, and get someone to take them back later to load up the beer and take it to wherever they hid it. After I got my car, I did a couple of beer runs when I was home from school, but I had no guts for this kind of caper at all.
A few times I accompanied the boys to Scruples Bridge, a tall truss bridge over a local river. They would climb to the very top, bolstered by alcohol and jump into the river. After I heard that, historically, boys had died when they hit rocks hidden under the water, I didn’t take them anymore. I’m sure they just found another ride.
Robert was the first Taylor to attract the attention of the police. This is the only thing that he did that really devastated mom. The idea of having a police car parked in our driveway for the whole world to see was more than she could bear. I guess Bobby had been talked into being lookout for a new friend whose misdeeds went well beyond those of Robert and his friends. He got off with a warning, went back to his old friends, and was never in trouble with the police again.
Bobbie was elected president of ZEUS fraternity in high school and the rumors of their exploits made him the darling of the high school for at least his senior year. One exploit apparently involved no pants and a snow bank. These same exploits were probably to blame for the demise of sororities and fraternities at our high school. Robert was extremely shy about girls, but my younger sisters reported that girls were forever trying to catch his attention at school, waving coy “hi, Bobbie’s” in his directions.
The dark side of Robert, however, was the way he passed on the Taylor male tradition of torture to my younger sisters. He and his boys would often fill up the living room and my sisters, who arrived home later, had to run the gauntlet in order to enter the house. The guys had long derogatory nicknames for each of my sisters. Emily, Rebecca, and Morgan still remember these long chains of derision and can recite them to this day. For the boys, the entire object of the exercise was to entertain themselves and to force the girls from the living room so the guys could have it. Although my sisters tried to hang tough, eventually someone would run crying or in anger from the room and the rest would follow to give comfort. Emily was the one most frequently reduced to tears.
My younger sisters did many of the same fun things the rest of us had done in their early childhood years, and they got to go places with my parents more often, because there were no more babies, but their youthful pleasures were marred by the torment they had to endure to get through the living room each day, or anytime the guys wanted to evict them from any space, or anytime those bozos wanted to boost their egos with a little bullying. To realize that some of this was payback for the times Robert was tortured by Tyler would not exactly require the services of a psychotherapist.
I witnessed several examples of the dreaded “dinner table torture”. My dad was working nights at this time. He went off to work before dinner. My brother hoarded all the food and would not pass it until you either asked for the item in Spanish with an accent that perfectly matched his original pronunciation, as in '?Pase me le leche por favor', or sometimes he made up an arcane enunciation that had to be duplicated, like gra-VEE for gravy. My mother tried to control him, but he would turn on his charm (he could be very funny) until he made her laugh, or they would get into a mock slapping fight and mom would eventually crack up and retreat. Dad would hear about an incident, but it just sounded like horseplay to him. Robert never did any of this when dad was home.
Once Emily, Rebecca, and Megan hit high school age, the boys did not tease them as much and some of them started flirting with the girls, especially Becky, who was our family’s only long-legged blonde. But it was too late. My sisters despised Robert’s friends, although later, as adults, they forgave them.
I think you can guess that Robert smoked, a lot. He smoked until his late twenties or early thirties. When he started to cough up blood, he stopped. He had to choose between the beer and the cigarettes. His beer addiction won out over his cigarette addiction

Chapter 8 - Gertrude

Gertie, as I have said, was a different kind of Taylor altogether. She did not care about excelling in school. She was content to do OK in basic courses. She didn’t bother to join our sorority. She just wanted to have a good time. She would lower her lashes and smile until her dimples showed and make everyone around her feel, with happy certainty, that some flirty mischief was about to take place.
In childhood she played the same things we all did. She was best friends with the two younger sisters across the street and usually did not bother to tag along with Felicity and me. She liked “jump rope” and “hopscotch” and “Mother-May-I”. She liked roller-skating and dresses.
As soon as puberty hit she got a shape that was designed to make boys crazy, with large breasts and a tiny waist. She wasn’t perfect. She had the bad complexion we all had either from heredity or poor nutrition.
Gertie’s best friends after puberty were not the popular kids, they were the rebels, the James Deans, the hood types, the boys with leather jackets and duck tail haircuts, the girls with reputations for being fast. They didn’t do wild and anti-social acts, but they were into action. They loved to play records and dance and probably smooch, although I can’t be sure because I didn’t hang out with them very often. Smithvale had grown into the type of small town where teens took long evening walks and met friends or went to the little league ballpark to hang out near the Babe Ruth game. Gertie met her friends at street corners, enjoying herself so much that she didn’t want to come inside. Her gifts were social.
Gertie was also very earthy, didn’t mind coming home with a hickey now and then, or talking to anyone about every detail of her bodily functions. Probably Mom and Dad worried about Gertie the most. She was the most likely candidate in the family so far to end up in the dreaded “pregnant out of wedlock” state. They didn’t worry too much though because, for the most part, it looked like she just knew how to party, something the rest of us were not particularly good at.
We all had our little square cases with musical notes on the sides to organize and carry our 45’s- our “Teen Angel”, “Bye-Bye Love”, Wake Up Little Suzie”, Blue Suede Shoes”, and “Love Me Tender”. Felicity kept hers in alphabetical order. No two records could go in the same space and every title was written into the appropriate space on the index card inside the cover of the box. The front section held those little plastic adapters that had to be snapped into each record so it could be placed on the skinny record player spindle. I wasn’t quite so neat about my little record box, but I was neater than Gertie. She put her records in order from most favorite to least favorite, but since the order was always changing, she couldn’t write anything in the index or on the tabs at the top of the dividers. You could never find anything in her 45 box, but she knew all the new dance steps. She knew how to slop and jitter bug, and how to do the mashed potatoes, and the jerk, and the twist. And she knew how to do the dog, which Felicity and I considered too gross to even look at.
Gertie’s values were somewhat different from the rest of us also. Once amid a succession of older station wagons, Dad, in an attempt to find a car that would fit the whole family comfortably, fell heir to an antique extended-body Packard in black. It had about 3 feet of carpet between the front seat and the back seat. On the back of the front seat were two small, upholstered seats that folded down and held extra passengers. This car had obviously once graced a life of affluence and luxury. It still looked really good. Most of us appreciated the luxurious provenance of the car and enjoyed riding in it. Especially since we didn’t have to have two layers of kids in the back seat and for some reason throwing up was no longer an issue. This voluptuous old Packard, however, mortally embarrassed Gertie. To her it was just a monstrosity. The car did have one serious flaw. It had a cracked engine block, which soon made its presence known. If we went too far or climbed too many hills the car would overheat and we would have to pull over and wait until the engine cooled before we could complete our outing. Then we would all pile out of that car like clowns from a Volkswagen. Gertie knew what was cool, and this humiliating routine, on top of the unusual look of the thing was too much for her to accept. After my father had to order her into the car a few times, and after several episodes of impassioned, tearful refusal, Dad gave up on the Packard, which would never have made it through the winter anyway, and got a more conservative and more modern junker. A few of us were quite disappointed to see the old Packard go though.
Gertie married right out of high school. She “picked up” her husband-to-be at a downtown movie theater. He was stationed at the local air base, which still existed, but was much smaller than it had been just after World War II. He was with a friend and he started pestering my sister and her girlfriend. I made the two of them move to another seat. The young men followed. Finally I left the four of them giggling and chatting and sat in another part of the theater. After the movie we waited out on Main Street. Gertie was still at it, flirting and dancing the dog, right there on Main Street. I told Dad when he came to pick us up. I’m sure Gertie did not love me very much at that moment. Jason, the young air force guy, invited himself to dinner at our house and proceeded to charm Dad, who never did feel he had enough sons. They had a fairy tale marriage through fourteen years and two sons until Jason’s philandering ways became too obvious to ignore. He broke Gertie’s heart, big time. Actually he broke all of our hearts.
Gertie never smoked, (well she may have tried it once or twice). Jason did.

Chapter 7 - S-E-X

When puberty hit everything changed. Once the hormone switch turns on, there’s no turning it off again. My sister and I still played paper dolls, mostly we designed clothes for them, but instead of Betsy McCall paper dolls, we now went in for movie star/model types. We all still played football and baseball and shot baskets in the back yard, and we still played outdoor games. The difference is that we now preferred games where a boy had to touch you, or tackle you, or wrestle you. We much preferred to play after dark and we dropped “Hill Dill” for “Hide and Seek”. We were very aware that these were coed activities. All of a sudden I became very self-conscious around neighbor boys I had taken for granted for years.
This is when I began to realize that, although I got some great “birth gifts”, physical beauty was not one of them. I had to shop for my dresses in the Chubby department, a nomenclature that, thank goodness is now obsolete. By the time I was fourteen I wore a 36C bra.
I was the only one in my gym class who wore a bra, so I hid almost inside my locker when we changed our clothes so that my ugly bra would not stand out among all the pretty undershirts. Probably everyone saw me and my bra any way, but I didn’t know because I didn’t look. I felt sloppy and awkward and clumsy. I spent hours looking in mirrors and picking at pimples on my face. I didn’t have terrible acne, but I had the normal run of blemishes and blotches, some of which swelled to gargantuan proportions. Mostly I told myself over and over how ugly I was. Since that time I have learned that this is a teen-age rite of passage, but not every teenager suffers these symptoms to the same degree. I bet my sophisticated Long Island roommate never did. First of all, she was beautiful. Second of all she had a handsome, solicitous father who treated her like she was his princess.
When I was fourteen, I read Peyton Place, which I found at the library where I volunteered, and which I hid in a bottom desk drawer, under many papers, until I finished it. It was the first time I started to think about the sexual act itself, how it was done, how it felt, etc. I loved reading this book, but hated reading it too. While I was reading I would feel a certain heaviness, lassitude. My body would become hot and flushed and I would become extraordinarily aware of my body against the seat of the chair. If anyone entered the library, and very few people did, I would hide the book away in the desk drawer and pull myself back into the world of human interaction. At first I would resent them for interrupting my illicit biological moment, then I would gradually feel lighter and friendlier, the fourteen-year-old self I recognized.
After that I discovered my joy button and I spent a lot of private time at home pushing it. But I did not get any opportunities to have s-e-x with real boys. First of all, I was not ready for that. Although the idea of being kissed appealed to me, having sex with an actual man or boy did not occur to me. Second, no boys tried. I did not go out with any boys in high school at all. I was terribly shy at school. I did not even talk to boys except the ones in the neighborhood, and I spoke to them less and less frequently. I watched them; I developed a few long distance crushes, but none that were returned. I didn’t even miss it yet, having a boyfriend. Apparently I would be what is known as a late bloomer.
When I wanted a partner for my sexual activities (such as they were), I just closed my eyes and a faceless man would appear. He was really just a vague male figure, broad shoulders, nicely dressed. I could not really undress him except for his shirt because I had never seen a grown man naked. I was still determined not to get married and ruin my life. But I did want to fall in love and I did want to know all about s-e-x. I had a long crush on Marty Zeferelli, but my best friend at the time decided she did too. She would embarrass me by writing notes to him. She told me that she told him that I liked him and I got so angry with her. Or we would gaze at him and giggle in the lunchroom. How junior high is this? And that’s the age we were. We were only in eighth or ninth grade. Marty didn’t like either one of us. He let us know by his nonverbal reactions that we were just an embarrassment. We were lucky he didn’t decide to get revenge. And thus, without ever actually being in love I managed to have my first broken heart.
Books – now I love books and reading, don’t get me wrong. I could immerse myself so completely in a book that it truly was like a time machine or a “place” machine. My present world and its circumstances would disappear. And in some ways this is a good thing, especially for a poor child. It definitely broadens your horizons and very inexpensively too. But in other ways it can be unhealthy. For one thing, it can turn you into a sort of passive observer of life, one who stands back and watches, describes and analyses others, a person who is not a live-r of life. For another, it kind of makes you believe that things will happen to you with little or no effort on your part. Fictional characters can become more real then actual people. Everyone including one’s self can become an archetype. Instead of learning your actual self, you may imagine and re-imagine your self. Life can happen like a story plot. Each “story” or segment of life can seem self-contained, with a beginning, middle, and an end. It can seem as if the events from one “story line” cannot affect the events in the next episode. Wrong!
I imagined myself as a heroic character, struggling to be larger than life. I would be as independent and smart and self sufficient as Jo in Little Women, for example. Instead of working on me, I bemoaned my inability to be my heroine of the moment. Books and movies affected me so strongly. A book or a movie could move me to hysterical sobs and righteous anger about some injustice or personal pain experienced by a character. Or it might move me to tears of joy and brain waves of sunny optimism. I grew used to living other’s lives instead of my own.
People gave our family boxes and boxes of books. Some were classics; most were bestsellers or Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I read more than anyone in my family and we were a family of readers. I read everything I could get my hands on, good, bad, or indifferent. I also saw every movie I could get to, except horror movies. After Tarantula I didn’t bother with any more movies that I could only watch with my hands in front of my eyes. I don’t even remember most of what I read. I do remember the Bobbsey Twins, which I read about a million times when I was seven. I remember Nancy
Drew. I also remember Heidi, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and “Archie” and “Superman” and “Spiderman” and Treasure Island.
I became aware of the world’s injustices. When I read The Diary of Anne Frank and Exodus, I was aghast at the Holocaust. From Inherit the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird I learned about narrow mindedness and prejudice. West Side Story, the sound track, which I learned by heart (and which everyone else in the family also learned whether they wanted to or not) brought Romeo and Juliet, ill-fated love, and gangs to life. My uncle had a book The Last Days of Pompeii, a chilling account of what it was probably like when the volcano buried Pompeii. Here was the awesome and malevolent power of nature. Life was deep. Everyday life, even s-e-x with real boys, could not hold a candle to this.
Not everyone in the family was so standoffish about S-E-X. I think by the time Felicity had graduated from high school and started in the community college, she was “doing it”. And right upstairs in her new little bed-sitting room too. Tyler, I’m sure was doing it, and Gertie, well; we’ll talk about that late. She was a whole other type of Taylor. But I wasn’t anywhere near to doing the deed. Although I was privately titillated by it, I didn’t even like to talk about it.
Then there was the whole issue of getting your “friend.” I guess someone thought up that euphemism to put a positive spin on a sometimes-yucky fact of life. I got my “friend” when I was eleven, Felicity must have too because she already had hers when I got mine. And Gertie followed a couple of years later. There were no mini-celebrations in the Taylor household when you became a woman. Instead you inherited the “Welcome to Maturity” booklet (or whatever it was called) from the Kotex box to read, and Mom took you aside to communicate the hygiene essentials.
My father did all the shopping and he would bring home the giant economy sized box of Kotex. He must have been embarrassed, but he never mentioned it. We used paper lunch bags for disposal, so when you saw someone sneaking into the bathroom with their little lunch bag in hand you knew exactly what time of the month it was for them. Gertie loved to talk about her “friend” in excruciating detail, but I felt that it was not an appropriate topic for casual conversation. The less said about it the better.
I thought a lot about how nice it would be if women didn’t have to have a period every month just so they could get pregnant if they wanted to. It seemed like overkill, biological redundancy, and a sad state of affairs for the female of the species. Not to mention that you could get pregnant when you didn’t want to and that this could be very, very bad. It would be nice if there was an on-off switch that you could make event specific, not the switch that turned on at puberty and off at menopause, but a switch that could be turned off and on at will. Maybe the switch could have a food trigger, off with chocolate, on with a jalapeno pepper, something like that. Of course you’d have to avoid chocolate when you wanted to get pregnant. That would be hard. But I assume that once the baby was planted you could go back to eating chocolate. I never did work out the fine points. Maybe someone has a better idea.
Anyway, with all these raging female hormones around the house, Tyler’s injection of testosterone kind of got lost in the shuffle, except for some talk about facial hair and shaving and his rigid, zealous drive for privacy he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
In college, my sophisticated Long Island roommate had a boyfriend who went to school in Kentucky or Tennessee or somewhere south of the Mason/Dixon line. She ran up huge phone bills talking to him with her blankets pulled over her head. The college was crowded; we were three to a room. But I never heard a word of her romantic conversations. With 500+ girls in one dorm and the Beatles playing top force up and down the hallways, girls dancing, talking, setting or ironing each other’s hair, or arguing, it was impossible to hear much. I didn’t mind it, I was used to chaos, but when I had to study I usually had to leave the dorm. Did you remember that Audrey Hepburn smoked? So did most of the girls in my dorm. We didn’t know from second-hand smoke.
I went out on my first dates in college. I was thinner, I had fashion consultants now, and I had my hair colored blonde and cut in a new mod style. One of my memorable dates was with a very cute guy with a suction kiss. He was a great kisser; he connected right from the mouth to the joy spot. I only went out with him once. He never asked again. Probably he had expected more from his hard work. But it taught me what I could expect from a good kiss. It raised my standards. By senior year I had met my Irish folk singer and my best friend had hooked up with his actor friend, and the four of us hung out. We went to the coffee house a lot so Ian could play and sing with the other folk singers. Ian’s uncle was our Irish Lit. professor and Ian took us to his uncle’s house sometimes, where we could sit in front of the fire and drink Irish coffee. I loved the idea of Ian.
The World’s Fair was in Montreal that year so we went. Ian flirted throughout the trip with my best friend. We had arranged it so I would spend the night at Ian’s apartment instead of at the dorm, but I was so angry (?scared) from all the flirting that I wouldn’t. Thus ended my first real relationship. I fled home where I was treated to a mini-makeover and antidepressants and arrived back at college in time to graduate. Still a virgin.
I’m sure you’re wondering what all this has to do with my cigarette addiction. Well I will tell you that my initiation into the mysteries of inhaling and sexual intercourse happened at almost the same instant.