The Only Girl in the Car
A remembrance of promiscuity
by Kathy Dobie
First appeared in Harper’s Magazine, August 1996.
As a child, I courted simplicity and goodness. I’d fill a soup bowl with water, add leaves from the hedge, and eat it with a doll’s spoon, slowly, until I was calm. The world was gorgeous and terrible — lightning, God, my father in a suit, the mere thought of my mother asleep … My passions disheveled me. At dusk, I could be found hiding in the lilac bushes, watching my younger sisters whirl around the yard. Their blonde manes, their shrieks and laughter left silver tracings in the air. My mother would come to the kitchen window to watch, her shadow springing across the lawn. I could feel her thoughts: Where is she? Why isn’t she playing with her sisters? Crouched there, I felt unhealthy, crooked, a runt among golden lion cubs. Although my mother told us she wanted each of us to have our own personality, I had trouble finding a good one. I was the dreamer, the sloppy, forgetful girl. My solitude was seen as melancholy. Reluctantly, I would leave the lilacs and join my sisters in their loop-the-loops over the grass, wheeling through the window light and my mother’s dark gaze, heavy-footed and grim where my sisters were wild and light.
My mother was nineteen when she married. Before she turned thirty she had six children, and before I turned two I was a big sister. I was the third child, but as the oldest daughter I was responsible for my two younger sisters and my baby brother. My responsibility plucked me from the happy, bloody tribe of my siblings, stripped me of innocence. I fretted and worried, held them and bossed them around. “This one’s the oldest girl,” my parents would say, and something would click shut in the eyes regarding me.
I was achingly aware of my mother’s youth and big-boned beauty, the full lips painted red right before my father came home from his work as an administrator at Yale, the slender fingers playing “Try to Remember” on the piano, playing with such sadness I’d clutch myself and rock back and forth, wishing she would stop. My father came home with stories, comic and heroic adventures starring janitors and professors, politicians and cops. What a world lay outside our door! And my father was the man in the sharp suit gliding through cocktail parties and student riots, not a shadow of anxiety or doubt on him. On Sundays he took us to Yale. We wore our Sunday best, our prettiest smiles, and the rowdy, dangerous world my father knew would straighten itself up and smile politely back.
In a photo he took, my two sisters and I sit on the livingroom floor by the fire, wearing lacy dresses. We’ve been caught dreaming; our faces are milky, stunned-caught in that vague sadness children sometimes feel when they’ve been kept up too late, too long in the adult world. It’s a beautiful portrait, only I’m at the very edge and half my face is cut out. The camera was focused elsewhere. I didn’t exist in Daddy’s gaze; therefore, I was not a girl.
When my youngest brother, Stephen, was born, I carried him around for hours on my hip. I had a nanny’s secret tenderness, her bitter pride; a fear of the day when others would see his value and take him from me. Except with Stephen, a kind of coldness surrounded me, a moat that couldn’t be breached. When I was in my teens, my mother told me that I didn’t seem to like being held or touched as a child—I cringed, I grew stiff—so she and my father made a decision not to. They would wait until I came to them. And they waited and waited. For it seems the touch I wanted wasn’t familial, wasn’t even “loving.” That affection was for good little girls, and it made me feel like an impostor, made me lonelier.
In the attic bedroom I shared with three of my brothers and sisters, I caressed and kissed my pillow, calling it “Mark, honey, baby” after a crazy, vicious boy at St. Rita’s grammar school. Mark was the only kid in the entire history of fourth grade to have shaved his head, tattooed himself with Nazi insignia, and worn rubber boots and a trench coat to school. I licked Mark Honey Baby, kissed him like I was sucking oranges. All the kids hated him. He was powerful and lonely. His glasses were broken and heavily raped, but he wore them like they were something dangerous: a
car wreck, a baseball bat. I can see him now-little Nazi prince clumping home from the schoolyard alone, his trench coat swirling around him like a cape. He was my ally in a world that seemed increasingly cold.
Family barbecues, cars baking on the black tar of the mile-long shopping plaza, the endless stream of women and carts, exhortations to be happy, to join in the games . . . Life went cheerfully around and around while my visions grew monstrous. I wanted out. I wanted company.
I imagined the landscape outside family in part by watching my father’s work life and in part by the books I read. I used to baby-sit for a family that had a huge library of porn. (In a Playboy cartoon, a doctor says it’s time for a shot and if she’s a good girl and doesn’t cry, heh, heh, he’ll give her something to suck on.) The idea of being an object of discussion, of lust, of trickery, of winks between men aroused. me. My favorite books were written by women. I read for those moments when the sex kitten, the queen bee, the happy hooker caught his glance at the party, and she and he threaded their way out of the polite company and met panting, fumbling, straining in the dark hallway. These were my Cinderella stories.
Imagine us rolling across the country that summer of my fourteenth year, my father at the wheel of the huge motor home, Mother and my oldest brother playing copilot, Henry Mancini blaring from the speakers. I sat on the couch at the very back of the motor home by the window. Truckers blasted their horns. Men followed in their cars. I carried on conversations with them, first mouthing words, then writing notes. They rode our bumper so that we could read each other’s words. In the middle of one such conversation with two men, they held up a sign that read: “JAILBAIT.” I wrote a reply: “WANT TO GO FISHING?” There was a brief astonishment on their faces, and then they broke into laughter. They followed us for miles and miles of sunlit highway until we turned into a campground. They turned in after us, paying the campground fee, and then I got nervous. They were drawing into the family zone, too close.
They parked in the campsite next to ours, and when my father went out to hook up the electricity and water, the men started chatting with him, their eyes roving over the trailer door. My father noticed nothing, not even the fact that they were trailerless, tentless, extraordinarily idle. It was painful, this dumbness of his. Before I stepped from the motor home, I grabbed my baby brother’s hand and dragged him with me like a prop. The men lit up like flares, but I bent down to Stephen and talked intently to him. I played with him, keeping close to the motor home, occasionally casting a look at the men, a look like a rope that said, “Hold on.” I stroked Stephen’s hair lingeringly. I hoped some courage or form of action would occur to me. Perhaps by nighttime, when my family had fallen asleep. But the two men left the campground in an angry scud of pebbles and exhaust smoke, and I’d gone from being the most desirable bit of jailbait in the world to a stupid tease.
Back home, in August, my father’s friend from work sat on our couch as my father showed him photos from our vacation. He came to one of me, posed on a rock in a black bathing suit. “Cheesecake,” the man said. And the word hung there, porous, crumbling, glittering over the coffee table, the blue-green shag carpet, the piano. My father cleared his throat. His laugh was startled, embarrassed. He didn’t send a glance my way. He pulled out the next photo.
“Cheesecake” was a door opening, but I walked through it alone.
“Cheesecake” was stamped on my flesh in an ink that glowed. My parents, my sisters and brothers, seemed to notice nothing. But men heard my message loud and clear; they understood it perfectly.
One morning I missed the bus and walked to school, late and happy about it. I was wearing my Catholic schoolgirl uniform, the plaid skirt and kneesocks, but I pushed the socks down around my ankles, rolled the skirt up short, and undid the top three buttons on my blouse. A man stopped his car-did I want a ride? He was in his forties and dressed for golf. His dress was corny to me, even creepy, but his confidence was laid on thick. His eyes were bold, blue, and amused.
He drove me to school and picked me up that afternoon, suggesting we get ice-cream cones. He wore a belt, drove a car, had a thick wallet-how can I capture what a grown man feels like to a girl? He was a man, and his flesh was pale and heavy, disgusting and exciting. He was incredibly casual about his maleness. Even when he wasn’t looking at me, even when he was busy ordering the cones and paying and driving the car, I felt his awareness of me, his plans for me on my skin. It was more exciting than being touched.
The next time we went out, I wore a black, backless sundress. I laced my wedged-heel shoes up my ankles. I wore the dress without jewelry so that I wouldn’t hide its true intent. After he picked me up (I no longer remember his name), he brought me directly to his condo. He didn’t work, he played golf; he lived on a trust fund. The rooms were pin neat-no dust, no music, no windows cracked open to the outside-and the things he talked about left me tongue-tied: golfing tournaments, tennis, money. Except for the huge mystery of what might happen next, an event completely in his hands, I would have been extraordinarily bored. But I was too nervous to be bored; my whole body was humming.
He suggested a massage and told me to take my shoes off and lie down on the bed. I couldn’t see his face when he said sarcastically, “Aren’t you going to take your pantyhose off?” He said it like I was being a scared prude. To pull them off was to shed feminine cowardice, male disgust. So I did. Then he told me to loosen my dress. And that seemed to be enough for him, to massage me as I lay there in my girl’s white underwear.
At home, I opened the venetian blinds to let in the sun. Spring, summer, beaches, parks, barbecues, backslapping sunshine—my family thrived in bright light, warm days, togetherness. A desire for darkness, for aloneness, was sick. I was sick. So when the time came, none of the ugliness of sex astonished me: the hickey made with sour breath and brown teeth that became infected a few days later, the hands shoving my legs into the right position, the grunt of loveless coming. I cringed at none of it. “Jailbait,” the men named me, laughing together. And the thing they named tried out its new voice. “Want to go fishing?” Bait asked slyly. I became as oily and dirty as the moment called for. Rarely did a boy have to make it pretty for me.
I remember a moment of absolute clarity before the storm of boys, fingers, dirty words whispered hotly in my ear, then howled to my face. One Saturday morning I stepped out the door of my parents’ house in Hamden, Connecticut, wearing a candy-striped halter top, hiphugger jeans, and platform shoes, went out the front door, and sat down in the middle of the lawn. If my mother was watching, I was, finally, unaware of her. I was going to lose my virginity. The family dog sat at my side. I stroked and knotted his fur. Cars sped by, honking. Boys hissed, whistled, blew kisses, yelled. If they were caught at the red light, they became shy, though one boy wagged his tongue at me like a pendulum, and then ran it, slowly, up the window.
It was a full-grown man who finally stopped. He did a U-turn, parked in front of the house, and got out. He made his way over to me, long hair swinging, eyes pretending friendliness. Robert was thirty-three.* It didn’t matter that I wasn’t attracted to him. He was what others girls would have called “sleazy,” a loser: he still lived with his mother, he was picking up fourteen-year-olds. But to see that man’s tight-jeaned, T-shirted form gliding through the grass, intent on me and mine in ways that I didn’t yet understand …
He smiled cagily, nodded at the house. “You live here?” Then, “Your parents home?” He crouched down in the grass and picked at a blade. “So you’re just hanging out with your dog?” He circled me with questions, patronizing, nervous as a thief. “Do you want to go to the movies sometime?” he asked. And when I said sure, he said, “Uh, what are you doing tonight?” And he came and picked me up at my parents’ house.
I don’t know how I dressed for the occasion. I know that I had no idea what sex might be like, though I had the vocabulary. I thought sex was going to be something you’d like no matter who you did it with. We left the movie right after it started and drove to a small empty lot behind a brick building. He had trouble getting it in and kept asking, “Are you sure you aren’t a virgin?”
“I’ve had lots of boys,” I told him. I wasn’t just lying, I was bragging. He told me to stay still.
I could say my first sexual experience was disappointing, but that misses the point. I had posed and passed my own initiation rite into the world—losing my virginity. Now I was free. I walked down Treadwell Street the next day licking my lips. That was a signal, too. I wanted boys to know that I’d had sex, and that I was now open to them.
I walked the three blocks to the Teen Center, a small brick building that used to be a firehouse, owned and operated by the town of Hamden. I sat down on the curb across the street and waited until the kids drifted over. The boys came first. They had shaggy heads and wore dungaree jackets. They invited me across the street, and we hung out in front of the center. The girls eyed me more closely, but there was no trouble that night. I sat there smoking while the laughter and talk closed in around me. Just like that, I was taken in.
Even that night, it was the boys who made me feel at home—the way they goofed around and told tall tales of cops and drugs and cars and someone’s father chasing one of them with a baseball bat. Their scattered, coarse energy warmed me, entertained me, let me in but asked no questions, made no examination. There was something very democratic about the boys, and from then on I always hung out with a group of them, the only girl in the car.
Men had ushered me into my sexuality, but I wanted boys—boys with light in their eyes, hoarse voices, hard arms, silky chests, bodies that were my size. And the boys I wanted were the bad ones—the confident, aggressive, dirty-minded ones. They put me at ease, and the willfulness of their desire turned me on. Timidity, efforts to converse, dates for pizza, the nicely dressed boy at the door made me feel awkward and dirty. The bad boy was sneaky, clever, always thinking one step ahead. He was kissing me, whispering, “Baby, baby,” while he raised his hips to unzip his pants, and then fiddled with the snap on my jeans, all the time acting as if I might be so preoccupied with his tongue and his voice that I wouldn’t notice what was going on below. I didn’t even mind that they assumed they were tricking and pushing me into sex. I was dangerously careless about their opinion of me.
At the Teen Center there was a group of boys who were rougher, rowdier, cooler than the rest. Most of them were high school dropouts and had juvenile records—drunk and disorderly, vandalism, maybe a few B& Es. Usually they just shot their mouths off, got drunk, fought, ran their cars into things. Once they set one of the couches in the center on fire and pushed it down the stairs into the basement.
The girlfriends of these boys hung out together, all very pretty girls. It was their boyfriends I was messing around with. I was so new to the center, so swept away by the boys themselves, that I didn’t even know they had girlfriends. And although I must have heard these girls talk happily about “kicking ass,” I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. I spent very little time at the center, and I wasn’t there to make new girlfriends. I’d arrive, and a few minutes later I’d be taking off with a boy or a gang of them.
Tony was my first boy. He was Puerto Rican, but everything about him said white frat boy. He had black wiry hair and thick lips, a squat wrestler’s build. Tony never bothered with any preliminaries. He picked me up, went straight to the park, kissed me, got my clothes off, and got on top of me.
Every night for nine nights we were in the back seat of Tony’s car. One day I skipped school and we went into the woods across from my parents’ house, and he spread out a blanket. I thought Tony and I were girlfriend and boyfriend then. I must have mentioned that idea to him, because he sneered, “You’re not my girlfriend. I’ve got a real girlfriend and she won’t even let me kiss her.” I was shocked that he had a girlfriend and that not kissing made her real. It was exactly the opposite of what I fiercely believed to be true. There was the daytime world, the public world, in which we all had families, went to school, took directions from adults, and lied all the time without even thinking about it. We had faces, not thoughts or feelings. Sex blew this world open, and the blank-faced boy lit up, stuck out his tongue, and wagged it at me. I thought that boy was the real boy. When Tony told me I wasn’t his girlfriend I felt a hurt, a humiliation that I immediately tossed out, rode over. I went on to the next boy.
How many boys altogether? It doesn’t seem like all that many, not if you watch the talk shows. Maybe nine or ten in seven months’ time. Almost all of my early sexual experiences were with boys who wanted me and hated me for it, boys who thought their desires were dirty and were quick to put that dirtiness on me. That peculiar mix of lust and loathing, the light in their eyes, the brusqueness of their hands, the begging and then sneering, the whimpering and then boasting—that was sex as I knew it. Not what I had expected, but there was a striking kind of shamelessness to me, and I took all comers. I was looking for experience and that feeling of being in the middle of things. I liked the rush, the willfulness of boys’ desire. I admired them for it. I liked to feel them hard under their pants, the tender urgency, the focus on me that disregarded me. And if I wasn’t too concerned with what the others were thinking of me, it was because I wasn’t seeing myself from their point of view. It never would have occurred to me that sex was only a boy’s adventure. I just kept going, hungry and excited, despite the talk around me, the approaching trouble.
I must have driven the other girls mad. They heard what the boys said, the contempt in their voices; they shrieked at the dirty jokes. And then they’d see one of those boys come into the Teen Center to get me, and off I’d go with a grin and a wave. They hated me for getting away with it.
One night, the four black boys at the Teen Center told me they wanted to talk to me and asked me to take a ride with them. I only remember Craig and Fat Roscoe. Craig was tall, whiplike, genial. Fat Roscoe was indeed fat, wrinkled with it, like a bulldog. He had gold teeth and carried a walking stick. Roscoe made ugly cool, cooler than any white-boy prettiness. Behind his back, the other kids constantly referred to him as “the coon.” They were afraid of him, and they loved him. He was like some kind of mascot, he so perfectly fulfilled their idea of a nigger.
Craig drove that night, Roscoe sat in front, and I got in the back with the other two boys. As soon as we hit Hamden’s main drag, they began. “Kath, everybody’s talking about you,” Roscoe said. Craig added, “You’ve got to be careful, you’re getting a rep.” They told me not to trust the others, but I was sticking my face out the window, letting the wind push my smile away. A rep. A shadow, a ripple. Something’s there before you enter a room and after you’re gone. I couldn’t have been happier. My name would have the force, the thunder of Roscoe’s walking stick, thumped down every time he took a step.
He and Craig advised me to slow down, watch out. There was nothing judgmental in their words, nothing that said I was wrong and dirty, or that having sex was. It was all about the treacherous company I was keeping. To this day, I marvel at their goodness; I still don’t understand it. Four boys in a car with me? They could have done anything they wanted—that’s the kind of girl I was and yet all they tried to do was protect me.
Joey was the last Teen Center boy with whom I had sex willingly. Joey with his crazy, movie-star grin, his stubbly jaw, and his many fuckups. There wasn’t a mean bone in Joey’s body. He was just a hapless bad boy.
Joey and I drove around in his beat-up Chevy for hours, usually with a gang of boys. I sat next to him under the curve of his arm, being pulled into his body every time he took a corner. I had the usual schoolgirl crushes-on his brown, scarred leather jacket, his blue-green eyes and dark lashes, the Marlboro hanging from his lips. With one hand on the wheel and the other around me, he couldn’t very well hold his cigarette, and he didn’t have to. He squinted his eyes and smoked. I took it from him once in a while, tapped out the ashes, and, taking a drag, put it back in his mouth, holding my fingers against his lips as he puckered for it.
He worked in his father’s gas station, and we spent every night together. On Sundays, we used to go visit a woman named Patty, who worked at the Teen Center. She was big and fleshy with hair down to her hips, and had a black boyfriend from New Haven. They were always in bed when we arrived, me and Joey and a few of the boys. We’d raid their refrigerator and then, Cokes in hand, pull chairs up around their bed.
Patty and her lover spoke in the laziest tones, and you could feel their pleasure, naked under the white sheets and our gaze. She’d lean back against him and he’d reach over her to grab the menthols from her night table, pausing, it seemed, to let us see his black arm against her marshmallow skin. He was all ripples, lean and long, and she was a mountain of whipped cream. That was our Sunday service, Joey and me, worshiping at their bed. (She got fired shortly after the boys burned the couch and threw it down the stairs. An earnest and tousled-looking man named Steve took her place.)
Then we just tooled around town, Gladys Knight on the tape deck, Joey singing the words to me. He called me “babe,” and I tried out all the names I’d been keeping on the tip of my tongue: “sugar,” “honey,” “baby,” “lover.” He had a girlfriend, too, but she was like his mother, something we both disregarded.
At the end of the night, the boys would be dropped off somewhere, and Joey and I would head to East Rock Park. I can still remember his hard jaw, the stubble underneath my hand, and his lips, kind of hard, a man’s lips, his tongue smoky and muscular inside my mouth. After we had sex, he’d drive me home and be there again the next afternoon. If he ran into my parents, he’d be as charming and clumsy as a shaggy dog, but to me he was the epitome of masculinity.
That last night with Joey began as all our nights began, a car full of boys and me. Joey at the wheel, me by his side. Pete and Bob and another boy in the back with a bottle of gin, a case of beer in the trunk. For many years I couldn’t remember the fourth boy, though I think it was Ronny. And I’ll never be sure of the order. I know we drove into the park and it was filled with snow and Joey’s car was a boat rocking over drifts, plowing through the woods, churning up clouds. We drank, we told war stories, we laughed. Then Joey began to kiss me in front of the boys, his hand sliding up my shirt, his breathing coming harder. He wanted us to have sex. He said the boys could leave the car, and the boys said they would.
Everybody got out, and Joey and I slipped into the back seat. They took the bottle, and while Joey was on top of me I could hear them talking and laughing. After a while, they started stamping their feet in the snow and shouting for us to hurry up. I can only imagine their excitement, only imagine what it felt like to stand outside that car, its windows steamed over, the music pumping, picturing what was going on inside. They must have thought of themselves in Joey’s place and why couldn’t they be there?
Joey was shining when we finished, and after he let the boys back in he kept calling me his baby with that happy, grateful look on his face. Then the negotiations began to let his friends have a taste. What exactly was said, how long it went on, I don’t know. I only remember his saying, “I want them to see how good you are, babe” and, “Do it for me, babe. Don’t you love me?” It doesn’t matter what was said, only that it came out of Joey’s mouth and that no other world existed for me that night-just those boys, that car in the snowy woods. That was the moment when everything that had been said about me became real, when I gave up.
I think Pete must have gone first. He was in his thirties, and bolder than Ronny or Bob. I got into the back seat again, Ronny and Bob crowded in front with Joey, and Pete climbed in after me. When Pete was on top of me, Joey held my hand and told me he loved me. I cried. After Pete came inside me, he sat next to me and pushed my head down. I threw up. Pete jumped out of the car, cursing me, and the boys broke into laughter. The next boy wasn’t hard and had to take his fingers and push himself inside of me. When the fourth one was on top of me, huffing in my hair, I began to scream that I couldn’t breathe, and then they stopped.
More beers were cracked open. I dressed. Bent down in the back seat, into the darkness near the floor, I pulled my pantyhose up over each foot. Above me, the boys laughed and talked loudly, exhilarated-and, perhaps, nervous. I stayed hidden in the dark well of the floor, stretching the hose up over my legs, feeling that it was incredibly ugly, the pale pasty color of it, called “nude,” the white pad at the crotch so sanitary, so modest.
The boys drove me home, swearing no one would know about that night, and I stepped out of the car, out of the back seat this time, headed up the driveway toward the dim kitchen light, tripped and fell over a snowbank.
The next day, I put on my fake leather jacket with its fake fur collar, walked the three blocks to the Teen Center, and when I entered the place broke apart. The girls sitting on the floor began to open and shut their legs in some grotesque imitation of sex. Kids crowded in from the pool room in back. “Look who’s fucking here!” “Look at the bitch, coming in here after …” “Gang bang!” Their astonishment and delight couldn’t have been keener. My vision refracted (a problem I’d have from then on), and as bizarre as the scene was it became more so, with faces split in two and revolving in front of me, wagging tongues, eyes, legs bouncing and snapping back and forth. Steve, the new director of the center, came hurrying in, pulled me into his office in back, and told me I’d have to leave—the kids had spent the day planning to beat me up.
He said he’d drive me home but we had to go now. He didn’t understand why I’d come back there after last night, but he told me to stick close, and he rushed us through the throng of bodies, out the front door to where his car was parked. The kids massed outside, screaming “douche bag!” and “cunt!” A snowball hit my back, and some old movie, a western perhaps, came to me, and I turned around and faced them, looked them straight in the eye—whap! a snowball hit my chest and splattered on to my face. Then there was a torrent of them, and I ducked into the car and Steve drove me to my house, dropping me oft with the advice that I no longer needed: not to return.
I went through the kitchen—”hi, honey!”—and straight upstairs, and began to count the years, the months, then the weeks before I could leave Hamden.
I spent a lot of time over the next two years perched on my bed, looking out the attic window at the intersection and its blinking traffic light. My youngest sister says I carried a switchblade when I went out, and told her I had enemies, but I don’t remember that. I still had to go to school and do errands; everything had changed but the family routine. I’d hop on my bicycle and pedal to the grocery store as fast as I could, telling myself that if I could run the wheel straight over a leaf in the road it meant I could win a fight with half a dozen girls.
They found me on street corners. They came piling out of cars, howling, “We’re gonna kick your ass!” I never got used to it, though that particular look on their faces—the lively disgust, the sheer joy of hating—became very familiar. Strange boys sprouted from the sidewalk (always with a gang of friends) and announced, “I fucked you.” What good was it saying, “I don’t even know who you are”? I tried that once and got machine-gun laughter, and the reply, “Well, then how the fuck do I know you?” I became the route by which timid boys lost their virginity without losing their timidity.
When I finally got to drive, I drove fast, dressed down, and hung out at old men’s bars where no one would find me. I began to listen to classical music, though only Rachmaninoff was sweeping and sentimental enough for my teenage heart.
Without sex I felt deaf, dumb, and blind. So in spite of the heavy shame I now felt, the attacks of panic and guilt that often overtook me, I kept on, though now my lovers were older; they were men, white, black, and Puerto Rican men, men from New Haven. At sixteen and seventeen, I worked in the kitchens at Yale, trying to make enough money to move to New York as soon as I finished high school. I was a potwasher, a prep cook, a stockroom girl, and a general service assistant, unloading 100-pound bags of rice and potatoes from trucks and sweeping up storerooms. Although they bordered each other, New Haven seemed worlds away from Hamden. The physical labor was a relief from my dark thoughts, and I was the only girl in a crew of men.
I went out with a work-study student from Brooklyn. He would hop on his battered bicycle and pedal out of Yale’s lit courtyards, down Whitney Avenue, past the reservoir, the darkened pharmacy and beauty parlor, the graveyard at the end of Treadwell Street, and in twenty minutes arrive at the kitchen door when my family was asleep. I loved him, but I wouldn’t let him go all the way. In his medieval dorm room, we took off our T-shirts and traded them with each other. We compared our bodies; we clutched and rolled around his bed for hours, limbs aching, blood thudding.
A grizzled, gray-haired biker guessed something about me, and when we pulled out of my parents’ driveway, he stopped the bike, turned to me, and said, “Kath, you’ve got to hold on to me or you’ll fall off the bike. I don’t know what the boys did to you, but I’m not going to do anything, okay?” And he would sweep me far away from Hamden and into farm fields. After all our rides, we went to his rented room and drank tea.
But the white boys of Hamden had one last message for me. The summer was steaming to a close, and I was going to New York in a week. Because I was leaving town, because of my job and the men of New Haven, I took a chance. I had the audacity to believe that I was finally free of Hamden, that my sexuality belonged to me, that people forget.
I finished up my work and went to the basement lockers to change out of my uniform. I put on the black backless sundress, the wedge-heeled shoes that laced up my ankles-no jewelry, but a bag to carry my other clothes in. On the New Haven green, Stan Kenton was playing and families were picnicking on the grass. I sat on a bench at the border of the green, a sidewalk running between the families and me. I saw the boys coming from far away. “Don’t be stupid. It can’t be,” I told myself. “It was so long ago. Nobody cares anymore.”
There were eight of them, and they headed straight across the green, stepping around blankets, children, never looking down, until they stood in front of me. Their leader had a rubbery, clam-shaped face that I recognized but couldn’t place. (Years later, I’d remember he was my oldest brother’s friend, someone who went on family picnics with us when we were kids and had once almost drowned me in a lake; a Catholic schoolboy.) He had an ugly grin on his face. He named my brother and asked if I was his sister. I shook my head rapidly. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” He laughed and asked again, and again I denied it.
They were all laughing now, their faces filled with disgust, and the ringleader said, “Come on, we know who you are!” And he dug into his pocket, fished up some change, and held it out to me. “There’s only eight of us,” he said. “This should be enough for you to do each of us.” I got up and walked away fast. “Fucking dirtbag!” “Go back to Howe Street where you belong, you cunt,” they shouted, naming the street in New Haven where the prostitutes worked. The coins came flying at me, some of them hitting my bare back. On the green, people stared, and I thought they clutched their children to them. Even then, I knew these boys were still virgins and that they hated me for going, again and again, to the place they feared to tread. I knew how much pleasure it gave them to hurt a girl, to poke her and see her twitch, more pleasure than making love to her. I told myself to walk, just keep walking out of that town, that present, and into the future. I told myself the world was out there, just a little farther out than I’d thought at fourteen—New York, not Hamden—and that I still had a chance to enter it.
*For obvious reasons, some names have been changed.