I lined a baking sheet with wax paper and joined Marie in dumping all the ingredients into a saucepan. We didn’t have to bake the cookies, just drop them by the tablespoonful onto the wax paper and put them in the refrigerator for thirty minutes. When they had cooled and hardened, we would place them onto a silver serving tray and bring them to the boys in shop class. It smelled good down there, musty and woodsy at the same time. When we walked in, the boys lifted their goggles onto their heads and devoured our cookies while we watched.
Later—not that day or even the next, but weeks later—I went home after school with Marie. We were on double sessions: the seventh and eighth graders went to school from seven to noon; we ninth graders went from twelve thirty to five thirty. Marie lived up the street from the school, in one half of a mill house. It was almost dark by the time school ended, and the autumn air smelled of leaves burning and the sharp scent of winter approaching. At her house, her brother lazed on the sofa. He wore blue jeans and a pocket T-shirt, and although he was barefoot he had drawn what looked like the straps of sandals across the arches of his feet, ending in a pointed V between his big toe and the one beside it. This, Marie explained, allowed him to enter restaurants and stores barefoot, as clerks and waitresses thought he had on sandals. The Mattiases had a dog named Frog, and Marie and her brother liked to give him a tablespoon of peanut butter and then watch him try to swallow it. We made fudgies, and while we waited for them to cool we gave Frog peanut butter and watched him smack it loudly on his tongue.
When the cookies were ready, Marie pulled out a Ouija board.
“Ask it anything,” she said.
I looked at her curly hair and black-lined eyes.
“What’s a French kiss?” I asked.
We placed our hands on the planchette and waited. Slowly, haltingly, it moved across the board, spelling out: KISSING WITH TONGUE. Grossed out, I lifted my hands suddenly from the planchette, just as Marie nudged it toward S. Our eyes met briefly. I stood and said I had to go home. Kissing with tongues?
MY SECOND SEX education lesson came, in a way, from my mother. As a Catholic, I was told that a girl saved herself for marriage long before I understood what exactly I was saving. “You don’t buy the cow if the milk is free,” my mother would tell me, another thing I did not understand. What were girls giving away? And why, if boys wanted it, did they not want the girl? If I prodded my mother for answers, she did not respond. The last thing my prudish mother wanted to do was talk about sex. “Let me just say,” she told me once, eyes averted, cheeks red, “you have to really love a man to do that with him.” What was that? I wondered. And why was it so mysterious, so valuable, yet so disgusting?
My mother and my aunts had a terrible term for promiscuous women, one that disturbed me then and disturbs me even more so now. “She’s a pig,” they’d say about the divorcée who dated lots of men or the teenager who got pregnant. Today, I ask my mother not to use that word to describe any woman. But as a girl I just cringed. One thing I knew for certain was that I never wanted to be called that. I had no concept of how girls got pregnant, or even of how sex worked. Once I heard Joan Rivers on The Merv Griffin Show say that she’d read The Joy of Sex and took its advice by wrapping her naked body in Saran Wrap and greeting her husband, Edgar, at the door like that. The audience laughed but I only felt confused. The next time I went to Waldenbooks at the mall, I found The Joy of Sex and flipped through it. The illustrations of naked men and women, pubic hair drawn in squiggly lines, arms and legs thrust in every direction, looked disgusting. “You really have to love a man to do that.”
I was twelve when I got my first period, an event I only anticipated or knew about because my cousin, a year older, got hers the year before. For months I hoped I’d find blood on my underwear, but when nothing happened I forgot about it. Then I went to a birthday party for a girl with the magical name of Staria (at some point it lost its magic when I learned her mother had plucked it from a book about a horse with that name). Staria lived in a new development and had many wonderfully exotic things to marvel at—her family ate at a kitchen table that had benches instead of chairs, for one thing. And her basement was not dirt-floored like mine, or a second kitchen like the ones so many people I knew had, but rather was bright and large with indoor/outdoor carpeting and a door that led outside into the yard. At the party there was a long table with all kinds of mayonnaise-y food—tuna salad and egg salad—something I’d never seen before. We didn’t even have a jar of mayonnaise at home.
“It’s time for lunch,” Staria’s mother announced.
I wore a hot-pink minidress with a scalloped hem and white go-go boots, an outfit bought just for the occasion. As soon as her mother told us it was time for lunch, I stood and went to the buffet table (though of course I didn’t know that’s what it was called, having never heard the word “buffet” before), peering at those finger sandwiches, taking the least offensive-looking one and piling chips onto my plate. There was a hot tray of tiny meatballs in red currant jelly. I took two on their cellophane-tipped toothpicks just to be polite. Where I came from, meatballs were large and covered in red sauce. When I looked up, I saw that I was the first one getting food. Everyone else had formed a line and was waiting. Everyone except a soft-spoken girl named Nancy, who still sat primly perched at the edge of her chair.
“Ann,” Staria said, “since you went first, you can’t be Miss Peanut.”
Miss Peanut? Clearly I had done something wrong, but I had no idea what it was. Hadn’t Staria’s mother told us it was time to eat? My stomach cramped. The smell of mayonnaise, unfamiliar and sweet (perhaps it was actually Miracle Whip?), wafted upward and I had to swallow a wave of nausea.
“Miss Peanut is polite,” Staria continued, “and lets others go first.”
Now my stomach was really hurting, and something strange began—I had my first headache, a pounding that was thunderous and painful. I thought I might have to go to the bathroom—there was one down there! In the basement! Staria’s mother had pointed it out to us when we arrived.
“Today,” Staria announced, “Miss Peanut is Nancy!”