Very Early in the History of Sexuality

Very Early in the History of Sexuality: A Case Study

Age: 6 years
         Once upon a time there is a girl made to wear itchy tights.
         "But they're such cute tights," her mother says, tugging the fine gossamer torture into place. "Don't scratch and get them dirty before Sunday school."
         The girl doesn't like the yucky old tights. They yank at the hair on her legs, twist around her ankles and bunch around her knees, choke the life out of everything soft and free. She touches her fingers to a calf and move them around in circles wee enough to relieve exactly none of the tension.
         Her mother calls the tights' puking tomatoe color "red," but frankly the girl think they just look like the time she got her foot caught in a hole on the playground and she fell (ker-SPLUNK, she still remembered what it sounded like even though it was in kindergarten, a whole year ago) and she bled every which way until they gave her a Band-Aide. It had been shaped like Snoopy on top of his dog house. She likes Snoopy.
         "Marybeth!"
         The girl's fingers leap away from the tights.
         "Don't scratch!"
         "Okay, Mom." The girl never calls her mother anything other than Mom. She isn't a baby. Her fingers sneak back for another secret go.
         "Marybeth!"
         "Huh?"
         "WHAT did I just SAY?"
         The girl pauses to poise the words perfectly in her mouth. They taste like the pink stuff she has to swallow whenever she gets sick. "You said 'Don't scratch.'"
         "So why are you still scratching, young lady?"
         The girl looks down, startled. Sure enough, her fingers are pinching and rubbing and scratching, scratching, scratching. "They itch, Mom."
         "Well, don't—scratch." Her mother drag out the last two words like the girl's teacher sometimes does, pulling the letters apart so they can be examined thoroughly. "Ladies don't scratch."
         "Not even when their yucky old tights itch?" the girl asks, although she strongly suspects what her mother will say. The girl merely needs information; she has yet to decide if she would apply it or not.
         "Yes," says her mother. "Ladies don't scratch. Especially when their cute new tights itch. They want to look nice for Sunday school."
         Oh, right—Sunday school. The girl has forgotten about Sunday school. She wonders if God will tell on her if she goes into the room with the toilets and scratched, since technically that's in big church.
         "Do you hear me, Marybeth?" her mother says, frowning. "No scratching at your tights. Okay?"
         The girl nods, sighing and resigning herself inwardly for a long session of unbarably tingly legs. "Okay, Mom."
         The curve across her mother's forehead smoothes out. "Good girl."

Age: 10 Years
         The same girl is hot, sweating. Itching again, this time the top half. This time, it's not filmy red tights strangling her legs; it's heavy ribbed cotton patterned like the American flag, wrapped around her torso and buttoned up the front with two fabric tubes flapping around her elbows.
         "Look, Marybeth!" her mother says, pointing. She hums along with the patriotic music leaking out of the car's open windows.  Above, exploding clouds of sequins scream and puncture the velvet sky.
         The girl does not look. At this point in her fireworks observation career, repetition has blasted her cynical and jaded and slightly deaf in one ear. She's seen it all.
         And now more important, more maddeningly, insistanly urgent things demand her attention by skating over her flesh, light as the brush of mosquito legs and deep as the lap section of the community swimming pool.
         "Huh-RUMPHT." Her father hoists himself next to her, weighing down the tailgate until her feet can almost brush her toes along the concrete. In one hand he holds a beer, the kind in a bottle that always reminds the girl of a T.V. lady, all slender height and faint brown sheen. "Okay there, squirt?"
         "Yeah, Dad," the girl says. She notices how his shirt falls open like curtains, how the slight mound of his tummy pushes the buttery checks into asymmetry. She notices how peaceful his belly button looks. She notices a sudden rebellion—it resembles her fingers an awful lot—yanking at her American flag until the itchy cotton parts and her own belly button sighs in relief and all is peaceful in the world. "I'm cool." She even starts noticing the fireworks again, tracing them with her eyes.
         His grin fades drains into a flush when he sees her exposed torso. "Uh, squirt."
         "Yeah, Dad?"
         "Your shirt's unfastened."
         "I know, Dad!" She giggles in triumph at recognizing and deflecting his nose-snapping joke. It's only the eleventy billionth time he's played it on her.
         He looks puzzled. "If you know, why's it unfastened?"
         Her face squirms out of serenity again, anticipating the next move she will be forced to make. "But it's itchy."
         Setting down his beer and leaning over in one swoop, her father quickly pieces the flag back together. "Don't let your mother see you like this."
         "Why?" She is confused and growing grumpy with each itchier moment. So close.
         "Girls can't wear their shirts open." Her father shifts, rocking their seats up and down in a minute ripple, stares at the fireworks, shortens the fizzy hem on the lady's upside down dress an inch or two. "They have...things to...cover."
         "Oh." Things—the girl's mother has hinted at Things to Come, which the girl suspects are very close offspring of Things to Cover. That's what the pamphlets in the guidence office illustrates, anyway. "Okay." The girl blushes deeply and resigns herself to stealing scratches when nobody else is looking for the rest of her life. 
         
Age: 13 years
         School dances are stupid, a fact as universally acknowledged as the whole in-with-oxygen-out-with-carbon-dioxide thing everybody learned in third grade science. Standing by the punch bowl, the girl stares into the red liquid and tries to will the name of the process to surface in her brain. It's there—she can feel it swimming around, but too far in the depths to yank it out of the water and study its scale pattern in sunlight.
         Re-something, she thinks. Res—resp—or maybe recession (a word she vaguely associates with her first successful crossing of the monkey bars). No, reciprocity—but that's not it, either; crap it all, what HAD Mrs. Barnes called breathing—the girl can see her former teacher's nostrils flaring, can smell pencil shavings and Lysol—
         "Uh, Marybeth?" A throat clears itself. "Dyouwannadancwime?"
         "Respiration!" she tells the boy sweating in front of her. Relief, as if from a sneeze, makes her speak louder than normal. "That's what it's called."
         "Huh?" His eyes wrinkle around the edges (she's been looking at them for the past two whole years and still marvels at their sheer pure blueness).
         "What?"
         He glances over his shoulder, then back at her. "I said—dance with me?"
         She blinks, smoothes her dress, presses her lips together, all behind a gauzy mental curtain that reality rips open a second later to reveal the exact same scene. She resists the urge to plunge an arm into the icy drink mix to feel if it's still cold.
         "Okay," she says, teeth and tongue molding the word and shoving it out in the open.
         They step into the coupled masses spaced around the gym floor. The girl steps into his arms (fully extended with no courage, or inclination, to fold into more) and out of herself—the better to take in this new experience.
         They step in circles, dress shoes tapping invisible patterns to an anonymous pop ballad, gazes catching anyone's but each other's. It's too embarrassing, such intamacy tried on for size where everyone else can see and judge the fit before it's been tailored.
         She feels herself blush the color of ripe tomatoes.
         Halfway through, as the synthetic strings swell, he takes his balled up fists off their perches of her hip bones, flexes a couple times, and replaces his palms on either side of her waist. Fingers trail up her ribcage and down pelvis, spreading fans of heat through her satin. She worries about staining handprints.
         When the music dies, they step apart.
         "Thanks," she says.
         "Welcome," he says, and life resumes as before.
         The girl carefully packs away her first slow dance for future reference, comfort, and—well, she's not quite sure, but she figures it'll be important.          

Age: 16 years 5 months
         The girl sits on the couch, legs sprawled in jeans and stagnating against the overstuffed khaki cloud of a cushion. Her face tilts left and her tongue pushed out between her lips, pointing.
         Lizard raises her eyebrows, wavy black arches flapping against an alabastor canvas. "Classy."
         "Well, yeah," the girl says. "Look who you're talking to."
         "Ah, shut the fuck up."
         The girl grins. Lizard makes her forget it's Friday night and they are watching Gigi for the thirty-seventh Friday night in a row.
         "Move." Lizard stands up and kicks at the girl's shins. "I gotta go take a piss."
         "Thanks," the girl says, and shifts slightly. "I really needed to know that."
         "Hate ya, kid." One corner of Lizard's red neatly prim mouth tugs upward.
         "I hate you too, Lizard." Their insults still shimmering and winking in the air, the girl watches her best friend pad down the hall. Lizard is tiny, wee all over in a way that makes the gangly girl feel like a puppy trying to be a hummingbird.
         "Scoot." Back from the toilet, Lizard plants her hands on her waist (they almost touch) and stares. Eyes, caramel brown and honey clear, take up most of her delicate face.
         "What if I don't wanna?"
         "Then I sit on you." Suiting action to words, Lizard plops down in the girl's lap; the girl inadvertantly plunges her nose into the black thick river of hair engulfing Lizar'ds skull. It smells like home.
         A whoosh of surprise escapes the girl.
         "Comfy?" At the girl's nod, Lizard settles into her as if it's merely the next logical move.
         The girl wonders. She wonders at Lizard's lightness—it's as if her very bones are hollow. She wonders at the sudden peace saturating through them both, how very right this all seems. She wonders if she's suppose to burn with a private unsteady fire of ecstacy, or if this is enough to mean anything.
         She wonders.

Age: 17 years 3 months
         Her favorite teacher strolls into the break room, stops, cocks his head. "Embee," (he always pronounces her initials as one word, giving her name enough of a twist to keep it interesting), "this yours?"
         "Oh!" The girl struggles through a forest of frantically dancing pianos and violins back into the real world. She turns off the stereo. "Yeah. Sorry."
         "You're not in trouble or anything." Letting an arm drop, he fans a pile of papers onto the nearest table. His hands, small and square and neat, the third finger of which is banded in gold, absently shuffles. "I just didn't know you're into classical."
         "Yeah," she says. She likes him; she likes his ease of manner and his tendancy to write like he speaks—as if the listener is the only other person in the world. And she respects his taste in music. "It's...dramatic."
         "Yeah, exactly," he says, sparking a glow of satisfaction that smoulders in the base of her mind. "I like the layered stuff, the horny bits—"
         A second before the word registers, the girl notices her cheeks beginning to flood red, and she cannot quite figure out why.
         Her favorite teacher notices and grins under his own flush. "I didn't mean it that way—I mean—"
         But the damage has already clicked into place. The word's blunt implication drags her mind through the gutter and pulls it out reeking of thoughts stinking uncomfortable under the gaze of her favorite teacher and the glare of fluorecent. She laughs.
         "You perve," he says, still grinning but shaking his head, as if denying something to keep it away. It doesn't move, and she gets her first glimpse into adulthood: it never goes away.
         Somehow, she finds it extremely funny, and has to run to the girls' room (leaking snorts and giggles along the way like bread crumbs) to compose herself.
 
Age: 17 years 8 months
         The girl discovers masterbation almost on accident.
         She's heard enough crude jokes and biology lessons to form an abstract—touch this, stroke here, lie back and think of someone naked—but sometimes she wishes to be male, to keep things straightforward and out in the open; she imagines boys are much more adept at handling the vague aches that surge and sulk under her naval at random intervals. It bothers her.
         "I touched myself," says the novel the girl is reading. "I touched and rubbed myself until the whole world went away."
         That doesn't help, the girl thinks, and slams the paperback into her lap with frustration. A corner of the spine ticks her denim crotch, and she feels something stir.
         Further explorations (first touches, then rubs when she gets brave) wind her whole abdomen into itself like a rubber band. She notes with scientific detachment it climbing, climbing, and is yanked back down by its abrupt, shuddery spasm of release. Dots explode behind her eyelids and paint the sensation red.
         Now still and calm, her thighs and ass unclench, her heart slows, and she is left with a slight dent in her book's backbone.

Age: 18 years 3 months 6 days
         The girl lets a boy touch her breasts.
         They curl against each other in his bunk, obstenately to stay warm while watching a movie because the dorm's heat switched off earlier and hasn't coughed on again yet.
         (But everybody else seems fine, forcing their curves to drape over severely angled chairs, scattered in front of the TV as if around a campfire.)
         His hands rub and pinch against the grain of her reality, teasing it loose like the bra under her shirt. Heaps of blankets, darkness, and lofting metal erect a wall so thin she is sure she will set something on fire by one of the sparks he sends shooting across her flesh with a flick of a slightly overgrown fingernail. It makes her feel—it makes her /feel/, and for that she is insanely grateful.
         (But everybody else seems suspended in animation, staring foreward and blinking at a rather alarmingly slow rate. She doesn't notice because she's trying to pretend to do the same.)
         Tongue flickers out, teeth nip, and—
         "Shit," he says quietly into her nipple, which has turned a bright attentive red, when a phone beeps.
         She hooks her bra back together and pulls down her shirt while he props up his end of a conversation with his girlfriend.
         "I should go," she says. The movie's credits roll in agreement; nobody else moves excpet to wave a hand.
         "Let me walk you back."
         As he dips off the bed and wiggles into the nearest coat, she attempts to stand up and finds her head still swimming circles in hormones. Tiny slivers of guilt fish dart to and fro, hard to catch but even harder to avoid.
         (But she wants more.)
         Following the uneven brick road to her dorm, they stumble into a conversation that leads around the block three more times and two more hours. Happiness blossoms inside her, sprouting from the last place his skin touched her. At the door, they linger, eyes darting over one another and imagining while lips continue on their seperate march.
         "I'll see you later," she says, meaning sooner.
         "Yeah, see you," he says, and leaves.
         They never speak again.

Age: 18 years 6 months 0.9 days
         Plaid fills the girl's vision, threads of yellow and blue marching straight perpendicular lines across a field of red, dipping and rising with the creased terrain of her boyfriend's legs.
         Her boyfriend (boyfriend! She cannot get use to the word; it sounds patronizing, childish, dot-the-i-with-a-heart-esque. She doesn't have a boyfriend—she simply has him, and he her. The end.) squats in front of the television and frowns. "What's up with this thing?"
         She shrugs and hands him a shoe. "Sometimes it works if you hit it."
         He starts to take it, but his arm stops halfway in its extension. "Wait—why?"
         "I don't know." She's never bothered to ask why. "It's just the way it works."
         Shaking his head, he smacks dirty canvas and rubber against plastic, top side side in a cross as if giving it holy rites, but the screen refuses to confess. "Didn't work."          Of course not, she wants to say. Of course it didn't, because he didn't believe. It doesn't matter, though. "Guess we'll just have to find something else to do, then."
         "Oh dear. Whatever shall we do?"
         His proper schoolgirl mock always draws a giggle out of her, a bubble of mirth that expands to bursting with squeals as she is taken up in a clumsy spiral downward. Around them spins her life, tacked and taped and stacked in her half of the inflated shoebox of a dorm room, everything buttery along the edges from her desklamp's solitary point of illumination.          
         When the walls settle, she is lying next to her boyfriend, noses touching, eyes in solemn and goggling close-up, foreheads leaning. She breathes in his scent of soap and thinks of pine needles.
         His lips reach across the centimeter of space between them, tap her as if asking to come out and play. She kisses him back—tongues dart, dodge and embrace, teeth click lightly, soft sighs flutter from nostrils—and as always she is surprised that it tastes like nothing but itself.
         Hands—she can't see them, but his hands trace warmth around the curves she's never learned to like on herself. His hands skate over her shirt, settle in the small of her back for a second, squeeze her closer, mash them together.
         Every step of the dance is carefully ritualized, so that she gets impatient in the same spot. His hands will slip over her ass (lightly enough to be considered an accident) and then under her shirt. His hands will rub circles of contentment up her spine. His hands will inch closer and closer to her bra strap and skirt it like naughty children tiptoeing around a sleeping parent, until finally—not quite there—shit—come ON—FINALLY—
         "Oh," she sighs into the labywrinth of his ear.
         He peers at her; from this angle he resembles a sleepy owl. "You okay?"
         She nods. "You?"
         "I'm wonderful." He continues.
         Fingers—oh, she loves his dear sweet fingers, warm punctuation marks kneeding the plain of her back. She loves his bare back, too, loves the uninterrupted merging of waist and hips blending into torso branching out to shoulders. She loves smoothing her palms over the surface of this engineering marvel.
         "Ah—" The first tweak takes her by surprise. She isn't ready for the deep electric shocks twiddle out of the tip of her breats with his thumb.
         "Too much?" he says, detaching as best as possible.
         "No." She means most of it, all of it and then some when he lowers his head and rests his soft riot of curls under her chin and licks his warm wet tongue across her cool dry skin.
         Nipples—she hates that word but she loves the quarter-sized dots edged in a thin ring of chest hair escaped from the main patch. She loves the gasps she teases out of him with her own tongue, curled around the little raised pebble in the middle. She wants to capture those gasps, to marvel at them, to inhale those gasps into herself and keep them for a lonely day. She craves those gasps.
         "Marybeth," he says, like a prayer, over and over in reverent tones. "Marybeth, oh Marybeth—"
         Between them, her thighs have been aware of something stiff. They decide to announce their evidence to her brain, which finds the situation worthy of both awe and amusement.
         She takes an extra second to make sure she has not overlooked shame, but shame has clocked in early tonight and allows her to slide into place with just enough dignity to seem coincidental.
         It feels maddeningly, unhelpfully good, pressing buttons halfway down and hovering over an itchy spot but not offering to scatch, not daring to. Not yet.
         Her hips swing counterclockwise, slowly, asking. He hisses in breath and lands clumsy kisses on her neck and chin, moves in his own way—she can't tell what he's doing because everything has become a whirl of nerve endings singing and blood vessels pounding and moans ripping themselves out of her throat—
         Nothing is said; nothing is aknowledged. But after, as she lay spread on his chest listening to his heart, Marybeth feels like...
         "I feel like myself," she murmurs into his side. "For the first time."
                She smiles.

THE END