Nancy blushed a deep red. Staria grinned at her, and as she went to bring Nancy a large prize of some kind, my stomachache got so bad that I ran to the bathroom. I’m sure that the other kids thought I’d left out of embarrassment for being the antithesis of Miss Peanut. Crammed into the tiny bathroom—her mother had called it a “half-bath”—I yanked down my underwear and there it was: two smears of dark red blood.
That afternoon, after I snuck upstairs and called my mother on Staria’s fake old-fashioned crank telephone that hung on the kitchen wall, trying not to cry; after my mother picked me up and I left the party without saying goodbye or thank you; after my mother silently handed me a strange belt and a box of sanitary napkins; after she showed me how to attach the napkins to the belt; she handed me a slender, mustard-colored paperback, almost more of a pamphlet, with a silhouette of a young woman’s face and some vague title about mothers and daughters. “Read this,” she told me, and I dutifully did, a hot water bottle on my aching stomach, a bulge of Kotex between my legs. The book told me this would happen every twenty-eight days, that I could get pregnant on day fourteen of my cycle, that boys had a penis that resembled a mushroom and a sack below it that contained two balls the size of plums.
Was it any surprise, then, that when someone showed up in ninth grade with a book called The Harrad Experiment, a novel about fictional Harrad College and its experiment to have men and women live together and feel free to have sex, argue about politics and philosophy, change partners, and think and act “freely,” I eagerly read it? And reread it, especially the dog-eared pages 160–167, which describe the act of sex and orgasms in graphic detail? So, I thought, this is what all the fuss is about.
The Harrad Experiment was published in hardcover in 1966, and in paperback a year later. The copy that was surreptitiously passed around my ninth-grade classroom was that original paperback, with a naked college-age boy draping a sheet around a naked girl’s shoulders. They are both tanned and blond, he looking down at her, she looking directly at the reader. It was racy and titillating, that cover. Reading the book as I did in 1970, when teenagers were moving in droves to Haight-Ashbury in search of free love and just a few years earlier Time magazine had featured the Pill on its cover, it seemed to me to be a poster for just that. Initially, Sherbourne Press printed 10,000 mail-order copies sold through an ad in Playboy magazine because the novel was too racy for bookstores. But Bantam promoted the paperback edition that I read with sexy billboards and advertisements. It sold 300,000 copies within a month. Eventually, more than 3 million copies were sold, with reviews posted on Amazon as recently as February 2016.
ONE OF THE rules at Harrad College is that all sports, exercise, and swimming in the pool had to be done in the nude, an idea that I found impossible to imagine. That year, in ninth grade, we had to change out of our clothes and into our gym uniform in tiny shared dressing rooms connected to smelly, moldy showers. My dressing room partner was a girl named Joanne, who, out of embarrassment or perhaps out of bravery, would hustle into our small space, whip off her clothes, and pull on the one-piece pale blue gym uniform, seemingly in one motion. I caught a flash of her flesh, pink and still baby chubby, and then she was snapping up the front snaps while I tried to strategically drape my towel in a way that would hide as much as possible. The thought of climbing the rope, or bouncing on the trampoline, or doing calisthenics naked as Danny Kaye sang “Go, you chicken fat, go!” from the record player, horrified me. What was this place called Harrad? Did people ever really feel comfortable enough to swim naked? In front of other people? Did people ever feel comfortable enough to be naked at all?
Yet the character Harry writes: “Every day when I go to Physical Education, there they are . . . girls . . . naked, swimming in the pool, playing volleyball . . . yelling, screaming, soprano-joyous.” One day, his classmate Sheila plops down beside him at the edge of the pool, water dripping from her breasts, and tells him: “You know just two weeks ago when I first came here and had to walk out in front of everyone naked, I thought I’d die of embarrassment. Now it seems the only way to be . . . naked.” Really? I thought when I read that. Someday I might feel comfortable walking around naked? The idea seemed both impossible and exciting. And very, very far away.
A COUPLE OF years before I read The Harrad Experiment, a boy approached me on the stretch of asphalt that served as our playground, and said, “You want to go out with me?” “Going out” meant that you wore his ID bracelet, stood by the fence with him every morning before school and again after lunch, and maybe met him at the mall on Saturdays. My parents would absolutely kill me if I went out with a boy, even in this benign fashion. Yet the idea that a boy liked me made me consider the offer. This boy was tall and broad-shouldered, dark-haired and strong-jawed. He was also several years older than anyone else in our grade, having stayed back a rumored three times. He wore a leather jacket, short black Beatles boots, tight jeans, and a scowl that was almost frightening. And he liked me? The girl who raised her hand too much in class, wore glasses, and carried around books the size of bricks?
Before I could answer “Okay!” he said, “If you go out with me, you gotta stop using so many big words. No one likes a girl who uses so many big words.”
My vocabulary, honed by taking the monthly Reader’s Digest “How to Improve Your Word Power” test and reading books far beyond my ken, was one of the things of which I was most proud. To not use it seemed almost a punishment. I guess I took too long to think about his offer because he looked at me in disgust and said, “Ah, forget it. You just like big words, not me.”