Read Online A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska - Free Book Online

have bothered me. He did it far too often, and once should have been enough for me to figure out that something was wrong. I knew that the young man I loved was not happy. But gosh, I honestly believed that I would make him happy and all things right once I became his wife. I had not the slightest doubt that, once we were married, his behavior would change.
    What was going on here? What was going on here was that I wanted Jack to marry me so he could continue to fuck me. I loved Jack’s lovemaking. He was sexy in a sloppy sort of way. To keep him in my bed or his bed or any bed at all with me in it, too, I tolerated vomit, long silences, slurred speech when speech came at all, and driving under the influence. I cleaned up after him, mixed his highballs, baked pies, knitted sweaters (I actually did all that) in the belief that surely he would see the light and that it would be at the end of the center aisle of the church. Poor Jack. Poor me.
    After five years of this, one day the thought struck me that Jack was getting tired of pulling out, that, despite the eloquence of my mouth and tongue, he was getting tired. I ought to get a diaphragm, that is, if I wanted to keep him, if I wanted him to marry me, which of course I did—why else would I be committing sin all over the place?
    Mary McCarthy’s
The Group
became my sex guide, even though it arrived in my life after Jack had departed from it
.
Mary McCarthy’s novel, which informed me as no other book had, concerned a group of college girls and their sex lives. My god, every one of them had one. And they were nice girls, too, from well-to-do families. They had gone to one of those fancy girls’ schools in the East, which may have accounted for their being way, way ahead of Midwestern Me. But reading that novel I felt a rush of cool air. Sex was public. Mary McCarthy had made it so. Sex was not dirty. Unless nasty people had it. Happy and unhappy people had sex; sometimes the sex was wonderful, sometimes it wasn’t. But definitely it was something that normal girls and boys did. And not always inside marriage. Maybe I hadn’t been so bad after all.
    In the book one of the characters, Dottie, does what I ought to have done at the very beginning of my love affair with Jack. Dottie goes to a doctor to be fitted with a diaphragm. Surely, I thought, the doctor will castigate her—an unmarried woman— and very possibly refuse her request for contraception. No such worries plague Dottie, for she is here at the request of the young man she loves. “A female contraceptive, a plug,” he tells her. “Get it from a doctor.”
    Jack had never been this forthright with me. Jack didn’t talk much at all, actually, and never about making love to me. I suspect he felt guilty for turning me into a slut. In the novel, Dottie believes her lover must really like her, must love her, to want her to keep herself safe from his desire: he must want to make love to her terribly. Surely, this must have been true of Jack, too. If I had had a diaphragm, if I could have made it possible for Jack, free of messy condoms, to stay in me, not to have to pull out at the last minute, maybe he would have liked sex with me instead of groaning at the last minute and throwing himself toward the other side of the bed and the box of Kleenex.
    And, according to Mary McCarthy, getting fixed up was legal, pretty much. Doctors were allowed to prescribe contraceptives for the prevention or cure of disease. In my case, pregnancy would be a disease if I weren’t married, the worst disease possible. Abortion was out of the question. When I was still in high school, I asked my mother what would happen if I got pregnant before I was married. “Don’t any doctors [thinking of my doctor father] help?”
    â€œNo reputable physician would touch you,” my mother answered, “and those who would are filthy and you would die from the infection.”
    That is