From Slut to Saint

“I’m comin’ at ya, Baby.

“And I’m comin’ in ya, Baby.”

This is the wanton response “Will” has just given me after telling him my plans to see the new 3-D movie called Comin’ at Ya.

It is summer 1981, and the return of three-dimensional theater is the talk of the country.

But it’s obviously not what Will wants to chat me up about, because he keeps turning our brief and shallow conversations back to the sex I’ve promised him.

And not just any sex, but my precious first time, virginal sex.

I am 12 years old and a virgin.

Chaste.

And I don’t even know what the word means yet.

“You’re too young, girl…”

“Paula, you’re too young,” my best friend “Denise” tells me over the mustard-toned phone receiver end.

I’ve stretched the curled cord taut from its attached station base on the kitchen wall to the farthest point up the staircase I can muster, away from prying parental ears.

“You’re only 12 years old…” says the voice of Reason and Truth and Wisdom, and a small percentage of her pleading breaks through my stubborn will for a split moment.

The fervency of the wise words being spoken through a 14-year-old girl via tiny holes into my left ear almost makes me want to heed them.

But it’s too late, the voice of Illogic and Unreason and Lies overrides immediately, for I’ve already promised Will myself.

Even though I barely know Will, I’m afraid to renege on a promise.

I’m scared he’ll be angry and never talk to me again.

After all, having looked up to Will for years during our tenure at Saint Edmund’s Parochial School, I am reveling in the fact that he has turned his popular prettiness my way.

Alter, Boys

When I stood as a round-faced girl with “Grade 2″ in the 1975-1976 black and white yearbook — with four pressing-comb straightened and rounded puffy-tails accented by the girly spiral bangs my mother spent untold hours creating — Will appeared with his “Grade 5″ on the flip-side.

I would’ve been 7.

Him, possibly 11.

Perhaps he was one on those high-fro wearing acolytes who performed cool rituals like extinguishing candles way above their heads with lengthy brass snuffers — or simultaneously kneeling while ringing bells each time Father “Matthias” said “Holy, Holy, Holy” — then setting them down silently on the beige-carpeted altar stair ledge in the front of the parish attached to the small school.

Either way, I only recall one interaction where Will noticed me — around the time I’d accelerated to the 6^th grade and he was part of the 8^th grade reigning class.

“She’s a big one,” Will said about me to another older boy one day as our class filed by them, standing in the opened doorway like judging guards.

Will was the older, taller and better-looking brother of a schoolmate in my grade – and as such was looked at as some sort of upper echelon royalty in my sight, a dangerous delight to the eyes.

Being the youngest in my own class — having skipped both the 1^st and 3^rd grades (due more so to my age-misleading stature than to the fact that I whipped through lessons with mind-hungry ease) — I was sometimes teased for being two full years younger than my same-grade peers.

“What did he mean by that?” I asked my sister over and over when we got home, and in turn she tortured me with coy answers until my queries became wearying.

“He probably just meant you’re tall,” she relented.

And now, years after Will-the-Upperclassman and I have both graduated from grammar school — with me standing on the precipice of the big transition to high school that he has already leapt over, he has in all likelihood visited his alma mater, posturing himself as the all-knowing false sheik who has come back to enlighten the village locals.

During his sojourn home, he has gotten my phone number and name to add to his own burning list — but for now he targets me with single-minded black-book-building focus, in sad misguided attempts to prove himself a man.

I am more than flattered that this high school boy has taken an interest in little ol’ young me.

Unfortunately his laser-like ruining has found me at a precarious time in my life.

Prophylactics or Proverbs?

For during a preceding summer I’d already eliminated the one thing standing in my way of having sex.

Sitting in my mother’s Parkway Secretarial Service office wiling away the time, I’ve come to an interesting article in Reader’s Digest.

(By then my sister and I had graduated from the silly folly of propping a book under one of the wheels of my mother’s swivel chairs and spinning each other so dizzyingly fast that I literally saw the space and stars on a black sky unfold behind my closed eyes within my unsteady equilibrium.)

The Reader’s Digest piece contained a chart about the effectiveness of birth control.

My eyes landed on the highly-effective pregnancy prevention rate of condoms – up to 95% or so.

Those particular prophylactics seemed so obtainable – unlike the Pill or IUDs or other foreign-sounding stuff that would require parental notification or doctor’s office visits.

That day, soaking up info from a magazine as a 10- or 11-year-old, I decided that the only reason I’d been holding out from having sex was no good reason at all.

Learning about the so-slanged “rubbers” boasting an approximated 95% success rate, I was willing to hedge my bet and open a door I’d told my sister years prior was closed, because, as I motioned with my hands over an invisible round belly, “You could get pregnant.”

For she practiced not what she preached

Certainly nothing much that my mother or father said or did till that point had convinced me my virginity was valuable, and not in the eBay-it-off-to-the-highest-creep way that hopefully fades from fashion these days.

Back in the 1970s, however, at least my mom was kind and aware and conscientious enough to buy us the “How Babies Are Made” Time-Life book with its cutout renderings of mommy dogs pregnant with puppies, and human women with growing children in utero.

Her honesty opened my eyes to the whole wonderful and warped world of sex after my sister and I began asking her the tough questions around age 7.

But even after the perfunctory, basic lesson about coupling occurred, my adolescent mind continued to grow with questions that were left up to Lord-knows-who to answer, like:

So what exactly does the man have to do to the woman for the pregnancy process to begin?

Does he pee in her?

(Obviously the trail of sperm soldiers depicted in the three-dimensional paper collage renderings of dogs doing it left me wondering what substance served as their carrier.)

Eventually enough scientific study taught me more about the flow of semen, yet a lack of biblical undergirding taught me barely nil about God’s thoughts on when it’s okay to have sex, and under what conditions.

The Song of Sexuality

Yes, Mommy did sit me down one memorable time to discuss saving myself, but her unspoken deeds and actions screamed louder.

“Sex can be beautiful thing,” she’d said, sitting far away from me on the living room couch near the front door, adding humbly, not believably, “within marriage.”

Her uncomfortable smirk and glance askance and hypocrisy was evident; for she practiced not what she preached.

Even as a young girl, I knew this.

So as my mom paid literal lip service to the Scriptural rules of sex, a steady, memorizing diet of Prince’s lyrics ill-advising me that…

“Ow! Sexuality is all I’ll ever need…sexuality, I’m gonna let my body be free…”

…were winning my allegiance — momentarily.

Continue reading Page 2 of “Unchaste”…