“You up? Feeling frisky?”
When I was a kid — nine or maybe ten — my Sunday school class was taught by Ellen, an inordinately tall woman with fat elbows and a bowl haircut. She wore oblong glasses with rust-tinted lenses and highwater pleated pants.
Ellen was what my parents and their married peers called a Neat Single Lady. She was really nice, and knew the Bible, and cared a lot about the kids in her Sunday school class. I hated her.
I hated her for her rounded shoulders and the puffy belly that held up her high-waisted khakis. I hated the way she clearly didn’t know that you could see her geriatric bra right through her synthetic-fibre polo shirt. It was that, more than anything, that I hated — her unawareness that she was a pity case, that people liked her because she suited their needs. The rest of the world had everything to gain and nothing to fear from her. She had forgotten, it seemed, that she was a woman.
And that was why my parents and other parents called her “Neat” and “Single” — never the two adjectives separated — in voices pregnant with relief. She’d never be busy, or moody, or out of town when they needed her. The unpredictability of sexual nature had been vacuumed out of her, leaving her completely, benignly reliable.
Sometimes I wonder if, like Ellen, I’m walking through life in a state of benign androgyny, and that everyone knows it but me.
“What’s up? What you doin’?”
It’s 1:24 a.m., and I’m having a very hard time getting to sleep. But I won’t turn my phone off. The messages keep coming in, probably because I keep answering them. Never with explicit encouragement — I follow a careful, dignity-preserving protocol so I can look myself in the eye the morning after. Wait at least five minutes after each text before responding. Never say anything committal or inviting. The occasional challenge is permissible, for example: “You’d never say something like that in person.”
In situations like this, explicit encouragement is hardly necessary. I might not be initiating the exchange, but I know where it’s coming from. On this kind of sleepless night, all you need is to know someone’s there on the other end of the line, paying attention.
“Too bad you’re not here. I know what we could do.”
My deepest depressions aren’t because I don’t get presents on Valentine’s Day. It’s because I wonder if everyone likes me the way they liked Ellen. Because I babysit for people, and keep showing up at church, and nod humbly when people commend me for waiting on God’s timing. Because year after year, I do what they’d never have done, if they’d remained unmarried as long as I have. If they can commend me for doing it, they feel like we’re together on the right track.
They threaten to erupt when I hint at the truth. So I don’t tell them the truth anymore.
“Are you cold? I bet I could keep you warm.”
My parents always said they wouldn’t approve of a guy who initiated too much physical contact during the dating period. But when I questioned my mom on her feelings about my sister and her fiancé cuddling on her couch, their limbs interlaced like a braided lanyard, she shrugged and said, They’re getting older. They need it more.”
I went and got a pen and paper, and wrote her words down, with the date and time marked beside them. If permissibility is scaled on the basis of age, my parents’ living room is going to look like the set of Jersey Shore by the time I get engaged.
“It means whatever you want it to mean.”
I love the looks I get from guys when I’m dancing. I love the way they smile kind of sheepishly when their girlfriends are standing nearby, and I also love the sideways smirk that emerges when they don’t have a girlfriend. I love when their cocky desperation goes past the point of dignity. I love all this the most when it just happens, without me trying.
These are the things I remember when I’m lying alone at night.
Some might say that I should deplore these things, since they have nothing to do with me as a person. Sometimes I do feel a little guilty about it. The guilt doesn’t feel as bad as the fear that I might instead become Ellen.
“Hey. You still up?”
At 2:29 a.m., I think I did raise the ante, messaging back, “So what would you do?”
But it seems he doesn’t know how to respond; he must not reach this point very often. He says something that you’d expect to hear from a Victorian-era ancestor of Austin Powers. I tell him to go to sleep, and I turn off my phone.
Most of the happily married Christian couples I know did, in fact, have sex before they got married. They just never tell you that, until they think that you’ve done it already or that you’re strong enough never to do it.
Whether or not I do feel any guilt — for the dancing, the flirting, and the texts — I wonder if I should. Then I wonder if this is just what people do now, and everybody knows it but me.
Flickr photo (cc) by rachel a. k.
