SEX, BUSES and OTHER AWKWARD CONVERSATIONS

My dad never talked to me about sex or what it meant to be a woman, although he did ask me if I needed anything from the store once.

“Do you need anything from the store?”

A highly unusual question indeed. “Um, no.” Immediately wishing I’d
said ice cream.

There are plenty of great treats to be found when you live above a
bar: an endless variety of individual sized bags of potato chips, a
half a dozen choices of soda from the gun, deep fried anything,
barrels of ranch dressing, un-inventoried Zimas.

But never ice cream.

He asked again. “Are you sure you don’t need anything?”

What was the strange emphasis on “anything” for?

“Are you sure you don’t need something?” Third time’s the charm. I got it. He was asking his 13-year-old daughter if she needed “something” he wasn’t comfortable saying from the store. Gross! One of his bartenders must have told him it was time to start asking me what I needed from the store.

I’d rather eat raw onion than ask him for “something,” from the store.

I missed out on the New Kids On The Block phenomenon because I didn’t have the guts to let dad think I liked little-girl stuff. Instead I endured wearing Motley Crew t-shirts to slumber parties, when the other girls all donned full length JOEY nightgowns. Mothers whispered about my “street smarts,” and politely suggested to their daughters that I be left off the next birthday party invite list.

It’s true; I went to great lengths not to be mistaken for a kid. But I never said I wanted to be a woman.

I was across town visiting my mother for a weekend when she sat me down for what would be the only Sex Talk of my life.

She started into the conversation with the same subtlety I’d come to expect from her. “Your cousin Jenny is pregnant.”

Jenny is five years older than I. Only a few years earlier she was my favorite babysitter. Once, when I asked for cheese on my hotdog, she tossed a slice of American right into the pot with the boiling hotdogs. We still talk about it.

Mom continued, getting straight to her thoughtful advice, “Don’t have sex. But if you are going to have sex, get one of your friends”—she said “friends” kind of snidely, she resented my having friends—“and get on a bus and go to Planned Parenthood in Scranton.”

That was it. Everything I needed to know about sex in under a minute.

She stood up and left for another room. I slipped a single Marlboro cigarette from her soft pack—I’d been eying it the whole time—and walked out.

Who does she think I am? My friends and I haven’t even started to think about...Public Transportation. I’d only ever been on yellow buses, the kind you don’t have to tell the driver where you’re going, the kind of buses that haul kids around like cattle on the way to the slaughter house, or school, whatever.

Scranton was 16 miles north. Who knew how far away Sex was?