THE BURNING QUESTION
It was London in the 1970s, times were wild and some of us were quite terrifyingly ignorant. The sexual revolution was in full swing, which, for those sentenced to live through it, was a great deal less enjoyable than you might suppose it to have been.
Up until then, as far as boys had been concerned – and believe me, in those dark days, it was boys who called the shots – the sole imaginable reason that any girl could have had for not yearning to leap into torrid and immediate sex with any single one of them on any single occasion had been the fear of getting pregnant; now that the contraceptive pill had greatly reduced that fear, so, to their thinking, must have gone any other female reservations, and a girl who dared to hesitate before casting her underwear joyously to any wind that blowed incurred both thunderstruck astonishment at her lack of “normal” female impulses and stern denunciation for her callous cruelty towards the much put-upon male sex.
“That,” said one boy at a party somberly to my horrified self after I had woven my siren spell with ten full minutes of joking about Doctor Who beside the cheese table before heartlessly declining his next suggestion, “is the most unkind thing you could do.”
Maybe some people were having endless fun in the era of free love. But Gabrielle Mary Teresa Donnelly, late of St. Angela’s Providence Convent Grammar School, of the Daughters of Providence of Saint-Brieuc, was not among them.
I had learned the facts of life at school, although it had been in spite of any organized instruction rather than because of it. The Fourth Form had been given a special lesson exclusively dedicated to what was described as Female Biology, which had given rise to much whispering and giggling, but which I had missed because, in a stroke of irony on which nobody thought to comment, I had been laid up with period pains; I was summoned afterwards to a private audience with the biology teacher, one Sister Jude, who loathed me and with excellent reason, who showed me a diagram of an organism called an amoeba that looked like a fried egg, and informed me, icily – and as it happened, in my case dead-on accurately – that the form of birth control that she and I both used was “abstinence.”
I endured the lecture with the expression of stone-eyed torpor that I had perfected for Sister Jude alone, and as soon as it was finished rushed full pelt back to my book about Bonnie Prince Charlie (don’t judge), thoughts of whom made me feel all sorts of tingling deliciousnesses inside, and it occurs to me now that it was fortunate for me that the Bonnie Prince was confined within the pages of the history books, because I shudder to think what might otherwise have happened for all the information that meeting in the Biology Lab had imparted to me.
When my classmates and I were about sixteen, we started, as teenaged girls will, to exchange smutty jokes, at which I sniggered along with the rest, eager to join the fun, but all the while privately thinking, “But … the only way this joke could be funny would be if … no, surely not …” until at last it penetrated even my wool-gathering skull that “surely not” was not only the case, but indeed how the species was regularly propagated; if I had not spent my first decade besieged by baby brothers, it’s anyone’s guess just when or how the mysteries of the male anatomy would have caught my attention. Maybe Mr. Los Angeles would have said something.
One rainy evening, when I was home on vacation from university, wrestling grimly with Beowulf and feeling more than a passing twinge of sympathy for Grendel, my bedroom door cracked open and in slunk my 15-year-old cousin Dominic, whose parents were visiting mine. Dominic’s face was afire, and he was looking up at the ceiling, down at the floor, and anywhere but at me.
“I need to ask you a question,” he muttered.
I was touched. I was emphatically the sort of young woman to whom people felt more impelled to offer advice than from whom to seek it; but despite what the boy at the party would have had you believe, I was really quite kind-hearted nevertheless, and, besides, had always been fond of Dominic.
“Of course,” I said. “What’s up?”
Dominic sat down on my bed. He wrinkled his nose. He pulled at his sweater. He frowned.
“It’s an embarrassing question,” he informed my bedside lamp.
An Angelus bell of alarm began to ring in my mind. Our family was Catholic, for heaven’s sake, any exchange of information of a physical nature was roundly repudiated as “disgusting,” and although I had by now figured out the mechanics behind the schoolroom jokes, and even begun, tentatively, to forge a personal acquaintance with some of them, I knew, on reflection, quite alarmingly little about the topic in general.
“I don’t know who else to ask,” Dominic continued, still addressing the lamp. “I can’t ask Vincent or Philip because I don’t want them to know I don’t know. And I can’t ask Kathleen because, well, you know.”
Yes. Knowing my cousin Kathleen, I did indeed know.
“And I’m not going to ask anyone at school!” he added firmly. “Urrrggh!”
He shook his head, eyes widening with horror at the thought.
“But I can ask you,” he concluded with that adorable frankness of 15-year-old boys everywhere. “Because it doesn’t matter what you think about me.”
He paused.
“Besides,” he expanded. “You’re a woman of the world, aren’t you? You’ll know this sort of stuff.”
This was growing serious. What little information I had gleaned since Sister Jude was about being a girl, not a boy; and Dominic was growing into a handsome boy, and who knew what challenges he might be encountering now in his sixteenth year, or from where – or, oh, lord, from whom – they might be coming?
“I mean,” he explained to the lamp, his complexion graduating from crimson to garnet, “you’re a … a student, aren’t you?”
I looked at the pile of books on my desk, where Beowulf’s battle with the monster Grendel, wrapped in the comfort of such delicious tedium, recounted in a language that remained, blessedly, all but incomprehensible to me, and a taking place a glorious fifteen hundred years into the fictional past, had never seemed so attractive as it did right now.
Dominic twitched his buttocks on my bed. He rocked backward and forward, then shifted from side to side.
“So I need to ask you,” he told the lamp. “I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to, but I really need to know, and you’re the only one I can talk to.”
Inwardly, I emitted a howl of anguish worthy of the dying Grendel himself. What if Dominic asked me something I didn’t know? What if he asked me something that I thought I knew but didn’t really and told him something that scarred him for life? What if he told me something that I thought was OK but really was the quite disastrous reverse of OK and because of my lack of sounding the warning, he died in agony and so tragically young? How would I explain that to his parents? How would I explain it to my parents?
Could we two go downstairs now to seek the counsel of those same parents, four mature and experienced adults, sitting together in all their combined wisdom and enjoying a relaxed glass of wine over Bing Crosby on Parkinson?
Could Beowulf dance the foxtrot?
“It’s OK, Dominic,” I said, lying through my teeth as my stomach plummeted to the very depths of hell and lay there writhing in agony. “Ask me anything you like, and we’ll figure it out together.”
Dominic stiffened his spine. He took an almighty gulp. He finally looked up and at me and his eyes were filled to the brim with confusion.
“What happens,” he blurted desperately, “at a disco?”
Some names and identifying details in this story have been changed to protect the privacy of the formerly innocent. But Sister Jude was a real person, and that really was her name; and if there is a Heaven and she is there now, it is largely because I am still walking the face of this earth today.