When I read Ruth’s observation to Stanley in The Harrad Experiment, “Anyway, darned few men want to marry a brainy woman. They want somebody to tell them they are wonderful, and be ready to cuddle with them or baby them,” I thought of that boy. Was it true that all boys were like him? Stanley does suggest to Ruth that perhaps a girl could be cuddly and intelligent, but Ruth responds, “Sure, intelligent. She can read the bestsellers and take on little civic problems in her women’s club . . . but let her really get her own interests . . . let her not be completely children and house oriented . . . then watch out, she’s in for trouble.” Later in the novel, Beth describes love like this: “Love is something else . . . Something more dynamic, all consuming. Something that makes you want to kneel down before somebody, humble yourself to him. Give yourself irrevocably.” These debates, which continue throughout the novel, articulated my own confusion about sex and love. What was the difference? How did I know if the feelings I had were sexual ones or real love? Was it really okay to have many sexual partners and someday think, as Valerie does, “Sometimes I wake up in the night and for a sleepy moment I may forget whether I am with Stanley, Jack or Harry, and then I feel warm and bubbly.”
Yes, The Harrad Experiment helped me, a sexually na?ve, even prudish fourteen-year-old girl, to put words to all I was wondering about in the shifting values of the 1970s. But arguably more important, it told me how sex worked, what actually went on between a man and a woman when they made love, what went where and how it felt. The pages that I read over and over—pages 160 to 167—were exactly what I needed to understand. Reading them made me blush and squirm uncomfortably, but they also empowered me. Finally I understood.
The scene involves two characters who are practicing a method of sexual intercourse called sexual communion, a concept based on Hindu Tantric literature. Before Sheila and Stanley try sexual communion, Rimmer introduces philosophical and historical information about it. The basic idea is for a couple to delay orgasm—a word whose meaning I had to run to the dictionary to find. “A climax of sexual excitement, characterized by feelings of pleasure centered in the genitals and (in men) experienced as an accompaniment to ejaculation.” What? I thought when I read that. Pleasure in the genitals? I remember slamming the fat dictionary shut, sitting on my bed, and trying to absorb what I’d just read.
But this scene between Sheila and Stanley made it all seem less scary, less confusing, and even exciting. Stanley enters her and they lie side by side reading to each other. At one point, Sheila tells him she’s about to explode, at which point I realized that women get to enjoy this too. For seven pages, they read out loud and touch each other and shift positions, until finally, on page 167, they can’t take it anymore. The book falls to the floor with a thud, and Stanley tells Sheila he’s past the point of no return. To my surprise and delight, it’s Sheila who kisses him wildly and shouts, “Oh, God! Darling . . . darling . . . so have I. So have I!”
Like so many of the 1950s values and ideas on which I’d been raised, sex had been challenged in this changing world I was living in, The Harrad Experiment brought me headfirst into understanding—and almost ready to join—the sexual revolution of the 1970s. A fear of pregnancy, the wrath of my mother, disappointing Jesus, and a general “good girl” hang-up kept me safely innocent and relatively pure through high school. It was years before I felt comfortable being naked, years before I had my first sexual relationship, years before I fell in love. Yet it was a book that taught me about sex and love and how to not confuse the two, a book that told me what even my sex ed teacher and my mother could not.
Lesson 9: How to See the World
? Doctor Zhivago BY BORIS PASTERNAK ?
I GREW UP LISTENING TO MY FATHER’S STORIES OF his days in the navy. He described Lombard Street in San Francisco—the crookedest street in the world!—and how in the tropics it would rain on only one side of the street. He told me again and again his stories about how in Morocco he once ate dog for dinner—they starved the dog for a week, then fed it rice, and then killed it and cooked it, and the rice was the stuffing, right inside the dog!—and in China he ate “hundred-year” eggs, which were buried and preserved and smelled and tasted rancid—they made me gag but I had to eat them. You can’t insult your hosts. He skied in Greece; he stood at the railing of a ship and threw pennies into the Caribbean off the coast of Haiti for children to dive for and collect; when he lived in Naples he drove a Fiat Topolino, which was the smallest car in the world; in China he saw people die in the street from starvation. And I, the little girl on his big lap, tracing the tattoo of an eagle in front of a setting sun on his forearm, wanted to do all of those things and more. California and Morocco and Greece and Italy and China . . . “Where else?” I used to ask him. He smelled of Old Spice and Vitalis and Ivory soap and cigarettes. “In Cuba I was bit by a mongoose,” he told me, “and I had to go into the hospital and get rabies shots right in my stomach.”
Where else? There was always, always somewhere else.
But mostly we stayed put.
My mother did not like to travel. She did not like to leave her own mother, who had a vague heart ailment and always seemed close to death, though she lived until she was eighty or eighty-two or eighty-three (no one really knew, because they’d changed her birth date so she could go to work in the mills sooner). Every other summer we four—Mom, Dad, my brother Skip, and me—got into our green Chevy station wagon and drove to Indiana to visit my father’s family. To make it exciting each time we stopped at a different attraction—Niagara Falls; Hershey, Pennsylvania; Amish country; Montreal. I thought it was exciting anyway, leaving Rhode Island and driving through six other states, sleeping in motels with pools that reeked of chlorine and beds that shook if you put a dime in them. My mother packed a cooler with fried chicken and sodas and kept Underwood deviled ham and potato chips in a bag at her feet. But the night we stopped at the motel we ate out, maybe at a Howard Johnson’s or Cracker Barrel, and we got to order anything we wanted. Once, in Montreal, we ate at a steakhouse and Skip, who had just started to learn French in school, ordered petits pois and bifteck, impressing us all; in Niagara Falls we ate in a restaurant at the top of a building that slowly rotated, a feat of engineering that dazzled me.