Chapter 1
1
Can’t a Girl Dress Like a Hooker, Dance Like a
Stripper, and Kiss Like a Porn Star and Still Be a
Nineteen-Year-Old Virgin?
Do you ever find yourself in your office daydreaming of an
old crush and wondering what your life would have been like
with him, especially on the days when your husband isn’t
treating you like the princess you still are? Suddenly the
crush comes to mind and you decide to Internet stalk him to
find out if he is still single or to see how ugly his wife
is or what your kids may have looked like with him. Well,
Kevin O’Sullivan is the guy I Google and search on Facebook,
MySpace, LinkedIn, Classmates, and so on. When my husband is
not being nice to me, he refuses to help me on the computer
in my attempt to track down this old flame of mine.
With a name like Kevin O’Sullivan, I knew he was Irish. In
fact, his parents were from Ireland: the land of potatoes;
four-leaf clovers; leprechauns and Lucky Charms cereal; and,
of course, famine and bloodshed. He went to Arizona State,
where I was visiting my friend Suzanne, but his family lived
in Pasadena, which is just outside of LA, but at least an
hour from my home in Woodland Hills. We went through the
usual college pre-hookup-meet-and-greet of “What’s your
major? Dorm? High school? What was your SAT? Is there a
history of cancer in your family? How about acne?”
With Kevin the conversation was really easy, and the alcohol
helped. I don’t think I ever saw the bottom of my red
plastic cup. Fraternity guys are trained to never allow a
sorority sister’s drink to run out. They’re such gentlemen
in that way.
At about one a.m., it was time for us to leave. Suzanne was
from Arizona and we were crashing at her parents’ house, so
we couldn’t be too late. Kevin asked for my number and I
asked for his. I loved having the guy’s number. At the time,
my Heather philosophy was that these guys always lose the
little pieces of paper with the numbers scribbled on them;
they must lose them, or what other explanation is there for
them not calling? I couldn’t risk the possibility that my
precious phone number might be held hostage in the crevice
of a futon for months and by the time it was rescued the guy
would have no recollection of who I was.
If you can believe it, in the nineties there were no
Black-Berrys or iPhones or Palm Pilots, so the potential
boyfriend could not program my digits in his
telecommunicative device. By getting his number I had
control if I chose to call him. He said he’d be back in
Pasadena over Thanksgiving and we should go out then. I was
going to hold him to it and that’s why I kept his number
safe in my Velcro Louis Vuitton knockoff wallet. I also
transcribed it into two different notebooks in two different
locations just in case I was approached by a mugger while
walking to my car and I couldn’t reach my mace or kick him
in the groin while yelling “fire” (I was told “fire” gets
more of a response than “rape”) and he successfully grabbed
my purse.
Like Oprah says, “Never go to the second crime location,”
even if it means a potential boyfriend’s phone number might
be lost forever. I also decided to always keep a bottled
water and granola bar in my car so that when the big
earthquake strikes and a freeway collapses on my car, I can
eventually tell Oprah, “And even though there was only a
small pocket of air, I managed to reach down and get that
water and granola bar until help arrived.” Oprah always
tears up at a good story about survival and rationing one
granola bar over a period of ten days.
Thanksgiving weekend rolled around and I left USC, where I
was in my sophomore year, for the long forty-six-minute
drive home to the Valley. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving
Day is always a great party night. People don’t have to work
the next day, and some are staying, like me, at their
parents’ house. I loved flopping into my double bed with its
pink ruffled canapé top, which, by the way, does not work
like a bunk bed. My sister and I learned this the hard way.
I would lie among my stuffed elephants and panda bears,
which were impossible to cuddle because they were all won by
my dad from various trips to Six Flags and therefore
synthetic, and watch my junior varsity cheer-leading ribbons
spinning around my room before I passed out. This memory
repeated itself every Thanksgiving. It just always screamed
“autumn” to me.
Around six p.m. on Thanksgiving, with some Blue Nun wine and
tryptophan in my bloodstream, I decided to call Kevin
O’Sullivan and see if he still wanted to take me out that
weekend. Needless to say, he hadn’t called me. I retrieved
the number from my wallet and dialed. It was his home number
and an Irish woman answered, which freaked me out because
any Irish woman sounds like a nun to me. My heart was
already beating because I was calling a boy, and now I was
having flashbacks of my fourth-grade math teacher, Sister
Therese.
“Yes, is Kevin there please?” I asked as politely as I
could, thinking she could ask me to solve a long division
problem at any moment.
“One moment dear,” she replied.
“Hello?” Kevin said.
“Oh, hi. This is Heather. I met you at the ATO party a while
back. I go to USC and ...” He cut me off.
“Of course. How are you, Heather?” he asked. The rest of the
conversation was easy, yet my heart still managed to beat at
an excessive rate. Whenever I was on the phone at my
parents’ house I never knew when my dad would start yelling
about something so loud that the person on the other end
would hear, “Don’t get your tit in a wringer about the
blood. Just get me the goddamn Band-Aids!” When that
happened, I would immediately hang up, and then when the
house was quiet again I’d call back and say, “What’s up with
your phone, we just got disconnected, that’s so weird, you
should have that checked out.” We made plans for Kevin to
pick me up on Friday night at my parents’ house and decided
we would go out in Woodland Hills.
The next day, my sister Shannon and I went shopping. I love
when you shop for a new outfit and then have plans to wear
it that very night, provided the idiotic salesgirl doesn’t
forget to remove the security tag. When that happened to me,
I called the store in a panic demanding that they send
someone from Forever 21 immediately to my home with the
security removal gun and take care of the situation or I
would file a lawsuit on the grounds of intentional
infliction of emotional distress. When the salesgirl made a
sarcastic remark about how they don’t make house calls for
purchases under twenty-nine dollars, I attempted to remove
the tag myself and went out that night looking like I’d been
shot by a blue paintball gun.
Being a virgin never conflicted with the way I dressed. My
philosophy at the time was: If I don’t show it, how will
people know I have it? So the shorter and tighter the outfit
the better. Shannon was not as risqué and didn’t always
agree with my clothing. I was so confident with my Forever
21 purchases that even as an aspiring attorney she wasn’t
able to convince me that cleavage and upper thigh should not
both be the focal points of a dress made out of 100 percent
hot pink spandex.
When Kevin met me at Arizona State University, I was wearing
a salmon-colored mesh tank-style minidress with white cowboy
boots and big white hoop earrings. Obviously, that look
worked for Kevin.
Driving home from the mall, I anticipated my first date with
Kevin and I imagined myself in my new purchase: a
rust-colored minidress paired with brown go-go boots, gold
hoop earrings, and bangles. Madonna’s Like a Prayer
provided the soundtrack. What a perfect fall-colored palette
to wear tonight, I thought. I looked at the clock and it was
already 5:17 p.m. I would be ready just in time for an eight
o’clock pickup, since I was starting from scratch—that meant
washing my hair and conditioning it with Vidal Sassoon hot
oil treatment, blow-drying it, setting it with hot rollers,
and putting enough Sebastian Shaper hair spray in it to do
significant damage to the ozone layer.
I feared the moment Kevin would meet my parents because of
my dad’s temper. More often than not, my dad flew off the
handle because of a simple miscommunication. My parents had
a few poorly matched ailments. My dad couldn’t hear and my
mom only had one vocal cord. Dad, a former Marine, lost his
hearing in one ear during combat. He refused to get a
hearing aid because of vanity and the related fear of
looking old. And once, when my mom was screaming at one of
her five kids for making a mess, “right after the goddamn
maid had just left,” one of her vocal chords suddenly became
paralyzed. So she can be heard, but she has trouble yelling
or really projecting her yell.
What usually happened was my dad misunderstood my mom and
thought she had said something other than what she actually
said. Whatever he thought she said would piss him off and
then he’d start to yell. We would try to correct the
situation by saying, “But Dad, wait, that’s not what she
said!” He would yell back, “Don’t interrupt! Let me finish
my goddamn sentence.” Afterward, we suffered through an
agonizing ten minutes of his ranting.
For example, my mom might say, “Please pass the bread.” And
my dad would respond, “Fred? You’re still dealing with that
asshole? I told you to dump him as a client. He’s never
going to buy a house and we don’t need his business. He’s a
patronizing little fuck with his goddamn Jaguar and the way
he pronounces it ‘Jag-u-r.’” My mom would try to interject,
“But Bob, wait...” That only made my dad more angry. “Don’t
tell me to wait. I’ve been in the corporate business for
twenty-five years. I thought we were partners in real
estate. If you don’t want my opinion, you can take my name
off the twenty-five bus benches now and it will just read
‘Pam McDonald welcomes you to Woodland Hills.’” At this
point, my mom and I would fight back laughter as she
struggled to get the words out. But in no way could she
reach his level of volume, causing him to be even more irate.
Before Kevin arrived, I remembered one time when my sister
Kathi was waiting for her date, a concrete salesman, to pick
her up. Some argument began to escalate to the point where
my dad raged about everything and anything. He was mad that
he was just hearing (if you can technically call it that)
that Kathi was going on a date that night. My mom, in
contrast, was happy that Kathi’s date sold concrete for a
living and was not a roadie for Poison or a Rick James
celebrity impersonator. She managed to screech, “But Bob,
this guy is into concrete.” My dad got even louder and said,
“I’m supposed to be impressed that he’s into Kathi’s feet.
What a sick fuck. Just because he’s the first guy whose eyes
won’t be glued to her boobs, we’re supposed to jump for joy
like a bunch of assholes? Well, unless he’s a podiatrist,
he’s a pervert and he’s not going out with my daughter.”
About five minutes later, my sister’s private line in her
bedroom rang and she picked it up. When she returned, she
told us it was the concrete salesman and that he was on the
walkway when he heard Dad screaming about him and his foot
fetish, so he decided it was best he didn’t ring the bell.
She told him everything was fine and to come back, which he
did. My dad felt terrible and actually was impressed that
the guy sold concrete. He made conversation and asked where
he was from and what college he went to. When the concrete
salesman said the University of Michigan, my dad immediately
brought up their mascot and said, “Oh you’re a Wolverine,
are ya?” He then talked sports for a few uncomfortable
minutes. Though my dad’s outburst didn’t help the date, he
couldn’t be entirely blamed. My sister did admit to yawning
several times at Red Lobster when he explained the
intricacies of a concrete convention, and they never went
out again.
But my dad wasn’t a bit embarrassed. He never altered his
mood, activity, or volume for anything. It didn’t occur to
him that I was having eight friends over for a slumber party
and that might be the day to forgo his usual routine of
swimming naked in our pool except for a pair of goggles and
flippers. His daily routine included twenty-five laps of
free style with flip turns and ten of the butterfly stroke.
No, he never worried that one if not all of my eight friends
from the fifth grade might at one point look out the living
room window and witness him.
Luckily for me, the night Kevin came, everyone was calm and
the meet-and-greet was quick and painless. My parents
trusted me and it was understood that I’d be back around one
a.m. or so. One good thing about being the youngest of five
kids is that by the time you’re a young adult, the parents
are too old and exhausted to bother to check up on you. With
my older brothers and sisters, I’d often wake up to the
sound of my parents having been up all night because someone
never made it home. They were calling hospitals only to have
one of their children walk in at eight a.m. claiming to have
fallen asleep at a friend’s house while listening to an
eight-track tape. When my turn came, they simply took two
Tylenol PMs, said an “Our Father,” and called it a night.
I decided to take Kevin to a happening bar in our
neighborhood called Patty’s. It was an English bar with
drink specials like Sex on the Beach and Long Island Iced
Tea. Kevin ordered a Guinness (he was obviously taking the
Irish thing pretty seriously) and I had a Kahlúa and cream.
This was long before I knew the caloric dangers of sweet,
creamy alcohol. The bar also offered karaoke, and for a
brief moment I considered performing my tried and true
“Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About” by Bonnie Raitt. I
can do the raspy voice and had memorized it years before. I
never even have to glance at the screen with the highlighted
words but occasionally would, just so it wasn’t obvious that
I practice regularly at home—but instead I chose to lean in
for our first kiss. We started to make out at the bar before
our second round. I’ve always been a strong advocate of
PDAs. I feel it is only inappropriate when you’re sober and
witnessing it. When you are partaking in a PDA, it’s just
two people who are really enjoying each other’s tongues. We
even made out walking to the car. We made out on top of the
car. We made out in the car. We made out underneath the car.
… Because all I really did was kiss, I believe I was quite
good at it and very passionate, too. I was willing to kiss a
lot. I would have been a perfect contestant on Brett
Michaels’s Rock of Love.
While sitting in the passenger seat, I’d managed to puff out
my chest and arch my back, flipping my long hair from one
side to the other. Kevin was saying everything I loved to
hear including my particular faves: “You’re so hot. … You’re
so sexy. … You’re better looking than Cindy Crawford.” And
then he said something that shocked me: “Let’s go to your
room at USC.”
I was totally floored. What? Was my dad’s hearing problem in
fact hereditary? He didn’t just suggest we go back to my
room at college?
“Let’s go to your room at USC so we can really do this.”
Oh my God. This was our first date. Earlier in the evening,
I had mentioned that I lived in a defunct sorority house now
renamed the Honor House for any members of sororities and
fraternities who had a 3.0 grade-point average. I much
preferred to live there than in the dorms where my roommate
freshman year was a former member of the Israeli army,
six-two, roughly 220 pounds, and played the cello. Between
her body mass and that of her cello, I barely had room to
raise my arms to tease my hair. What had stuck in his mind
from the story was the fact that I could go to the Honor
House anytime, even when school was on break.
Living with guys and girls in such close proximity made for
a lot of fun. During Greek Week, I drank a lot during the
day and passed out on my bed with the door wide open. When I
awoke, one of the guys down the hall had put a squirt of
white lotion on my inner thigh in an attempt to make me
believe that a guy came on my leg while I was unconscious.
Having never seen cum, I didn’t get it, at first, but when I
did, oh the hilarity of frat humor. But did Kevin think I
was hinting at something when I told him about my college
boarding situation?
I immediately pushed his hands off my well-moisturized,
Calvin Klein Obsession-scented cleavage and said with an
annoyed tone, “Are you kidding me? Did you really think that
I was going to have sex with you tonight? Did you think I’d
be so desperate to have it that I’d let you drive me all the
way back to USC to go do it on my twin bed? How would that
even be feasible? You’d have to drive me all the way back to
Woodland Hills before the sun came up and my parents awoke.
Do you even have that much gasoline?”
Come to think of it, I may also have told him how my dad
snores and my mom wears earplugs and therefore they can
never hear me when I come home late at night. I guess he
interpreted that comment as a major hint that I wanted to
have sex all night until the Daily News hit our
driveway. Was Kevin one of these guys who takes everything
you say and do as a major indicator that you want to have
sex with them? You could say, “I’m tired.” And then that
certain type of guy interprets it as, “Oh yeah. She wants to
go to bed with me.” You could say, “I want a sucker.” And he
thinks: “She’d like to suck on my cock like a lollipop.” Or
you could say, “Look, I’m fucking someone else.” And that
certain guy interprets it as “Poor guy. She’s thinking about
me while she’s with him.”
I asked myself, “Can’t a girl dress like a hooker, dance
like a stripper, and kiss like a porn star and still be a
nineteen-year-old virgin? Why is this such an enigma?”
“I think you should just take me back to my parents’ house,”
I told Kevin firmly as I put on my seat belt and looked
straight ahead.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you, Heather. I’m just
really attracted to you and I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Well, of course, I forgave him in about three to four
minutes. I really liked him and I wasn’t going to blow him
off for wanting to sleep with me. But at that point I wasn’t
ready to tell him I was a virgin, either. It was only our
first date, and I was fine if he assumed I wasn’t one. At my
age, not many girls still were. We kissed again at my
parents’ front door. Kevin said he’d call me the next day,
and he did.
Over the next few months, we’d talk on the phone all the
time, especially late at night when we’d both come back to
our rooms after being out drinking at our respective
sorority/ fraternity parties. During one of these
intoxicated phone calls, I insinuated that he should invite
me to his fraternity’s spring formal. I was surprised that
he hadn’t brought it up yet. That’s when he told me that he
really wasn’t an ATO. He had pledged, but then something
happened and he depledged. He said he was still friends with
the guys and that’s why he was at the party, but he was not
an active member. I was in utter shock. Everything I had
imagined for us was gone. It was like finding out that Santa
is just a creepy fat guy at the mall who gets paid by the
hour. No ATO formals were in my imminent future. And this
wasn’t even the first time something like this happened to me.
In high school, Doug Malcolm was my only kind-of boyfriend.
I kept waiting for him to ask me to the homecoming dance, so
finally I brought it up with only a week left for me to
purchase the iridescent lavender strapless dress with
matching silk pumps I’d been eyeing at Macy’s. That’s when
he told me that he had been grounded for driving his dad’s
car without a license. Sure, the parents wanted to teach
their child a lesson, but what about the crime of leaving a
desperate fifteen-year-old dateless on homecoming?
I’m sorry, but this Greek thing was my life. It was in my
bloodline. To have him tell me he was a GDI (goddamn
Independent) was not a turn-on. This was my identity. I was
a Gamma Phi Beta and I thought that my long-distance
boyfriend was an ATO, but now he was just a junior at
Arizona State University—a place where kids went when they
couldn’t get into USC or any of the University of California
schools. If Kevin wasn’t in a fraternity, I had no hope of
ever getting pinned.
In case you don’t come from this world, being pinned is when
your fraternity boyfriend gives you his pin in a ceremony on
a Monday night in front of all your sorority sisters and all
his fraternity brothers. Then everyone gets drunk and hooks
up with one another. If the sorority sister getting pinned
was dating a guy in a top house, every girl would be dressed
to the nines and willing to drop a class if she had a test
the next day. If the sister getting pinned was dating a guy
in an average to below average house, then suddenly many
girls would have to get a two-month jump on finals. Yes,
shallow and horrible, but it was my reality at the time. If
I was to stay with Kevin, I would never have that fraternity
pin, and that was something I had dreamed would happen at
college.
Sometimes the calls with Kevin turned sexual but only on his
part. He talked about how when he went down on a girl his
rather prominent nose was worth its weight in gold. I really
was too embarrassed to say anything back or do anything to
myself, but I did enjoy listening to how turned on he was.
I’d kind of cringe under the covers as we whispered to each
other for hours. One night he even told me that he had had
an affair with a twenty-six-year-old Playboy Playmate. I
immediately questioned how he knew she was in fact a Playmate.
“Did you ever see her spread in the magazine?” I probed.
“No, but her license plate read BUNNY87.” Guys will believe
anything that will make them feel better about themselves.
Something tells me a real Playmate wouldn’t want everyone on
the 405 freeway and in the grocery store parking lot to know
she posed naked in a magazine. “Excuse me, Miss. Sorry to
follow you to your car, but didn’t I see you on page
thirty-eight of the June ’87 issue lying on a gravel
driveway in nothing but a chauffeur’s hat and white gloves?”
That’s around the time that Kevin told me our sex life was,
in fact, a carcinogen. I can’t help but wonder if Lance
Armstrong was severely blue balled at some point in his
young life.
Kevin was home in Pasadena for the summer, so we saw each
other as much as we could. Still, we were a good hour and a
half apart depending on traffic. Sometimes he’d come to the
Valley; sometimes I went there. My friends at USC who were
from Pasadena performed a clothing style intervention, so I
had started wearing things with sleeves and collars. I
traded my cowboy boots for flats in an attempt to fit in
better with Kevin’s town and family. I was becoming a preppy
just like James Spader in Pretty in Pink.
One thing that bugged me about Kevin was that he was such a
snob about the Valley. The night before his sister’s
wedding, where I was to be his date, my sister Shannon and I
went to an all-you-can-eat sushi place. I don’t know if it’s
a cross between inherent frugalness or gluttony or a
combination of both, but I now know I can’t handle any
restaurant with “All You Can Eat” in its headline. I just
kept ordering and ordering ahi, eel, yellowtail, octopus,
scallops, crab, and imitation crab. It never occurred to me
that the fish they were so willing to offer for a fixed
price of $19.95 may not have been the freshest catch. That
night I puked until the morning. I still felt ill when I
called Kevin. I said, “Kevin, I’ve been sick all night. I
think I might be OK by five o’clock for the ceremony, but I
just wanted to let you know in case I’m not up to it.”
He said, “Do you think your stomach is upset because you’re
nervous about the wedding and meeting everyone at our
country club?”
After ten and a half hours of using the porcelain toilet
bowl as my pillow and barely any sleep, I lost it. “No, I
ate twelve pounds of bad sushi. I have food poisoning. Look,
Kevin, let’s get something clear here. You’re not a
Rockefeller and I’m not Betty from the Bronx. My parents are
college graduates who run a successful real estate business.
We have a beautiful home which is not in a track area, might
I add. Yes, it gets hot here, but last I checked, Pasadena
is only ten degrees cooler than Woodland Hills, and we have
central air and a huge in-ground recently remodeled pool.
Your parents live on two acres and have five kids, too, but
still refused to ever build a pool. That’s practically child
abuse!” I yelled. Kevin apologized, and I felt empowered.
I managed to get myself together and we went to the wedding,
where many of the older guests made comments like, “Are you
two next?” I knew I wasn’t into Kevin anymore when that
question made me feel sicker than the sushi from the night
before. Later during the reception, Kevin took me into some
empty alley and said something about wanting to do me like
Andrew McCarthy did Jami Gertz during the family Christmas
party in the movie Less Than Zero. Now, I loved that
movie. But instead of getting me hot, it made me wonder, Do
people actually wear thigh-high nylons? In the sex scene,
Jami Gertz is still wearing her black nylons, skirt, and
pumps. In real life, if you had to wear nylons for an
important event, would you forgo the slimming bonus of
control-top pantyhose for the bulkiness of that contraption
with the clips to hold up the thigh highs just so you could
have sex in an alley while fully clothed? It didn’t seem
worth it.
About a week later, Kevin called me and said he talked to a
tarot card reader at a party he went to with his parents. He
said, “I asked her about you and she said you were really
nervous about losing your virginity and that I just had to
be patient and soon it would happen.”
This is why I don’t believe in psychics now or then. I had
no intention of ever losing it to him, and poor Kevin
thought it was just around the corner. At that point, I
didn’t have a physical desire to have sex with him and I
didn’t want the relationship to get more intense than it
already was. I liked having a long-distance boyfriend who I
just made out with.
For my twentieth birthday, he presented me with a framed
poster of a famous black-and-white photograph of a man and
woman embracing at a train station with a handwritten poem
that said something about, “How we are far apart, I can sing
like a lark.” I was flattered that he brought up my singing,
because besides my parents and me, no one thinks my voice is
that great. I thanked him for it. But the truth was it gave
me a stomachache and I never hung it up for display.
Then an explosion happened. Kevin said to me, “I think I’m
going to transfer to USC for my final year.” Oh God, no. I’m
not solely the reason, I thought. USC is a better school for
an undergraduate degree, but he made it clear he wanted to
continue our relationship once he arrived.
I felt panicked. I didn’t want Kevin as a full-time
boyfriend. I couldn’t date him and still go to other
fraternity parties like I had been doing this whole time. I
loved dancing at fraternity parties, especially to MC
Hammer’s “Too Legit to Quit.” Those three minutes and
twenty-three seconds were sheer hip-hop delight. I’d do the
hand move that went along with the song, two fingers up,
then make the shape of an L (symbolizing legit), then two
fingers up again, then the quit sign across the neck. Then I
do my MC Hammer legs going to the left then to the right,
next the sprinkler, the chainsaw, and finally the all-sacred
running man. A boyfriend would totally suffocate my
expressive dance floor moves and I wasn’t about to give it
all up. Yes, I was shallow—most sorority girls are.
For example, a couple of girls on campus had claimed that
they were date raped, each by a different guy but all
members of the same fraternity, Kappa Delta. We discussed it
at our chapter meeting along with the fact that it was
likely that their fraternity would be suspended and thrown
off the row.
One of the girls, Marci, piped up, “How do we know they
really date raped them?” Another sister argued, “Because
it’s three different girls all from different sororities all
with similar stories.”
“Yes, but the Kappa Delts have the best parties and I’ve
already bought my flapper dress for the Great Gatsby Ball,”
she whined.
I felt my inner Gloria Steinem come out, and I stood up and
said, “Look, I know this is not Cal-Berkeley and we choose
to shave our armpits regularly. But don’t we have enough
feminism in our bones to back other women’s claims over
attending a 1920s party, a theme, which by the way, has been
done to death!” I stated this as the majority of the girls
cheered in agreement. Besides, the party was a week away and
the one Kappa Delt in my medieval civilization class who I
thought was going to ask me was already going with a Pi Phi,
so screw those rapists.
I tried to talk Kevin out of transferring to USC. “Really,
won’t it take you longer than one year to finish and
graduate if you transfer?” I asked.
“Yes, but you still have two years left, so it will be fun,”
he said with a smile.
It was pretty much after that conversation that I started
being brief with him on the phone and not calling him back.
Clearly, I was afraid of intimacy—both physically and
emotionally. What was wrong with me? This guy actually liked
my singing voice! He shouldn’t be so easily dismissed. But
timing is everything, and this was not the time. It was
still party time.
I was a junior living in our sorority house. When I wouldn’t
return his calls on my private line in my room, he’d call on
the house main line and ask whoever answered for me. They
would come find me, but it got to the point where I’d say,
“Tell him that I just left.” Then one night at around eight,
I was in my room with my roommate and I heard on the
loudspeaker, “Heather McDonald, you have a guest downstairs,
Heather McDonald you have a guest downstairs!” Oh shit. I
literally hid under the covers. I wouldn’t go down. I asked
my friend Suzanne to go down and tell him that I was asleep.
She went and didn’t come back for twenty minutes. When she
returned, she said, “Oh my God, Heather. Just be honest with
him. He was relentless. I told him you were asleep and he
begged me to go wake you up, saying that if you knew it was
him, you’d want to talk to him. He kept on saying I was a
convincing-type person and I could get you to come down.
Finally, I said, ‘Look, Heather is a total bitch, especially
if you wake her up, and I’m not doing it.’” I apologized to
Suzanne for making her do my dirty work.
Although I didn’t see him that night, I called him and stuck
to my story of falling asleep extremely early the night
before. We made plans to meet. He was already enrolled at
USC, and that night I told him the very original line,
“Kevin, I just want to be friends.” He said OK, but later
that night when he was driving me back to my sorority house,
he pulled the car over and walked around to my side, opened
my car door, and knelt down and pleaded with me. I didn’t
know what to say. He started to cry. I remember seeing his
giant tear fall onto my light blue jean miniskirt and
thinking, God, this guy really likes me. Imagine if he had
gotten some actual pussy. What would he be like then? Then I
realized he probably did put me on such a pedestal because I
hadn’t slept with him or anyone else.
Months later, my mom confessed that shortly after our
official breakup, Kevin had showed up at our house. My mom
was expecting a refrigerator repairman, so when the doorbell
rang, she opened it and said, “Oh hi, come in, it’s right
here. I love my Sub-Zero, but for some reason it’s not
making ice cubes.”
Kevin said, “I’m sorry to hear that about your refrigerator,
Mrs. McDonald, but I’m just so sad about Heather.”
As my mom told me the story, she laughed. “Heather, I felt
so embarrassed that I didn’t recognize him right away. But
these Sub-Zero guys are so hard to get to come over because
a Sub-Zero is like no other refrigerator and you have to
have a Sub-Zero specialist fix it; otherwise, they could
really fuck it up and …”
“Mom,” I yelled. “Tell me about Kevin—and how could you have
not told me sooner?”
“Well, he made Bob and I swear we wouldn’t say anything.”
“Dad, you were here and didn’t tell me, either?” I questioned.
“Well, I walked in and I thought, Why is the Sub-Zero guy
crying and pouring his heart out to Pam? How much is it
going to cost to fix this refrigerator?”
“How could both of you not recognize him? You met him like
on five different occasions, two of which were full meals.”
They obviously didn’t think he was the one; otherwise, I
think they would have paid more attention.
“Well, Heather, you don’t know what we had been through with
this Sub-Zero. It was five thousand dollars and we hadn’t
had ice cubes for three days,” my mom said.
“Mom, enough with the fridge. What did he say?”
“Well, he was just heartbroken, and I said to him, ‘You’re a
nice, tall guy. You’ll find someone else.’ And he said, ‘Why
bother when I already found the greatest girl and she was a
virgin,’ ” my mother explained.
I thought, Ugh, gross, why is he telling that to my parents?
Well, of course, the virgin statement made both my parents’
afternoon even though the actual Sub-Zero guy failed to show
up that day.
One afternoon I went into my dad’s Trans Am looking for a
book I thought I had left in there and as I searched under
the seat I found something I had never seen before. It was
wrapped like a candy. I brought it into the house and opened
it. It was round and slimy and looked like a balloon. I said
to my mom, “What is this?” And just as I asked the question
I realized it was a condom. “Ew, disgusting,” I screamed. We
soon put two and two together that it was my brother
Jim’s—he had borrowed my dad’s muscle car the night
before—and everyone had a good laugh about it, especially my
parents, which I felt was so hypocritical.
From the time I started stripping off my diaper and wearing
my mom’s high heels around the house, she told my two
sisters and me that we “must” remain virgins until we were
married. She herself was such a virgin that two weeks after
her wedding night, she had to have her hymen surgically
removed by a doctor. She and my dad had honeymooned in the
Bermuda Triangle, but my mom’s hymen didn’t disappear. Yet
when it’s her son who is having the premarital sex, it’s
funny and cool and completely OK? What a double standard.
Yes, she should be happy that he was smart enough to be
using condoms, but if only for the sake of her daughters,
she should have pretended to be just a little mortified at
my brother’s behavior. Wasn’t it a sin for him, or is it
only a sin for the woman?
“Look, Heather, you did the right thing, and Kevin did have
rather narrow shoulders for his stature,” my mom added for
good measure.
“He never looked me in the eye the whole time he was crying
to your mother. What am I, a potted plant, just sitting
there like an asshole sprouting leaves?” My dad has always
been quite sensitive and requires a lot of attention.
“Well, I’m glad you finally told me,” I said. How weird if
my ex-boyfriend would have had a pinky-swear-secret with my
parents, who still associate him with the Sub-Zero man who
never showed up.
It made me feel bad, but at the same time the whole Kevin
experience gave me a lot of confidence. He was really my
first boyfriend, and I knew I was capable of being loved by
a man without having to have sex with him. So now I could
just continue on with my life until I found a guy who I
wanted to be my boyfriend and could still enjoy being the
blue ballee as much as I enjoyed being the blue baller.