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

period and couldn’t meet him upstairs in the attic of the store for their affair. The attic of the City Drug was where Stinky Burkholder did it to Lauretta Riegsecker, too, and had to go to the army. Everybody in the store, everybody in town, knew what was going on and didn’t really blame Ray. Ray’s wife, Louella, was not the world’s greatest-looking woman. We did, of course, blame Rutheda; we were scandalized by her. No wonder she wasn’t married. The City Drug absolutely teemed with sex.
    Only a few short years later, in my father’s office, there I was in the examining room, Jeanine, now properly married and pregnant, on the table. I stood, my back against the wall, my eyes on the ceiling, while my father put his fingers into Jeanine. It lasted forever. I thought I would be sick. I don’t know if this was my father’s idea of sex education or if he was just grossly insensitive, probably both.
    And now, in my own real life as a young sexual person in need of a diaphragm, a doctor—of course, he would be male— would put his finger right up me. The picture in my mind of me lying on an examining table, legs spread, while some strange man peered into my very self terrified me. Sex was dark; it belonged to the night, to the back booth of the City Drug, to the backseat of a car, to a blanket on the ground after midnight. Sex was furtive, dangerous, secret, forbidden, and therefore very exciting. Besides all that, look what happens to Dottie in the book: she gets her diaphragm, calls her lover, aptly named Dick, who is not at home and is never at home to her ever again. That’s what you get when you go crazy outside of marriage.
    So no diaphragm for me, and I continued to feel guilty as the times Jack and I made love grew fewer and fewer. I continued also to repress any thinking about what we were doing. I just waited for Jack to come round and marry me. Marriage would keep me from being a nymphomaniac.
    When Jack betrayed me with another girl, when I found them in his bed, our bed, I forgave him. So he disappeared. He ran away. He fled. My sexual neediness, my desires, my requests, everything my mother had told me was improper—unless they belonged to men—had done this, had driven away forever the man who might have married me and made me respectable. So once again, I gave up on sex, tucked it way down deep, out of sight, out of mind. Until my biological clock, the phrase having yet to be born, began to chime.
    Jack had done something terribly important for me besides introducing me to the thrill of the orgasm. Wordless though he usually was, he said near what would be the end of our affair, “Why don’t you do something for yourself?” What was he talking about? Doing for myself meant getting married, having children, and making everybody happy the way all my friends were doing. What would doing something for myself be? What had I ever liked doing? The answer came quickly. I had liked going to school. I had liked getting taught by smart people, all men, of course. And so I went back to find them. To the University of California at Berkeley. I have Jack to thank for starting me off on what would be the happiest time of my life. Until now, of course.

SIX
    My Very Own Jew
    I grew up a Jew in a neighborhood peopled by Polish foundry workers
whose children, in packs, would surround me shouting, “Christ
killer!” Until I would go berserk and drive them away, large and
small, by the fearsomeness of my rage and fear.
    â€”JONAH
    I stood at the corner of College and Ashby, one of the busiest intersections of Berkeley, and listened intently to my friend Sandy. I love this corner. Almost always it is crowded with people walking and talking, young and old, homeless and not. It is a university corner and has a vitality I find in no other city, with the possible exceptions of Florence, Oxford, Ann Arbor, Cam-bridge, and I could go on. Be patient while I outgrow