SUMMER SERIES: This is the first in a series of stories by New Zealand writers with the theme 'a summer that changed me'. In the first, Sarah Daniell remembers New Year's Eve at the age of 16.
It’s a summer of firsts. First holiday away from our parents. First New Year's Eve with my friends on our own. First roadie. First taste of freedom. First time “going all the way”. I’m avoiding the phrase “losing my virginity” because that implies something careless, accidental or misplaced, like car keys. “Losing” sounds archaic, like “she fell pregnant”. No one fell. No one lost anything.
I’m 16 and something in me has decided. A quiet voice. I don’t talk about it, specifically, with my friends. We mostly talk about finding a good party and getting drunk.
***
We are on our way. There’s a photo of us about to leave Whanganui for Taupō but we don’t say Toe-Paw because we are still ignorant. In the photo, Tina has parked her green Datsun Sunny ("Nat the Dat") outside my house, and for some reason the bonnet is up and we’re standing around cracking up. Why is the bonnet up and what’s so funny? Nothing and everything, probably. The car doors are all open. We're about to pile in. We’re 16 and we think we know it all but we look like we haven't got a clue. Tina is driving, and there’s Suzi, Margaret and me. We are tight. We call ourselves the brothers. In that photo, Tina and I are dressed identically in high waisted white shorts, dark blue T-shirts and jandals. My hair is long and a single fat braid falls over my face. The sun is bright and the grass on the verge is yellow. Later, my father will absolutely go outside and water the grass with the hose, while holding a gin martini. But we will have gone by then. Out of here. Out of there. Hoping to get out of it.
We chant incantations at Nat the Dat to make it up the steep inclines of the Paraparas. At some point, we overtake a truck driver and he hangs out the window whistling and winking at us. I would like to say we responded just like Thelma and Louise: pull over and call him out. But the reality is, we flirt like idiots and eventually – and inexplicably – he and we pull over to the roadside and we take a photo. He looks like Michael Landon from Little House on the Prairie. He’s wearing stubbies, a singlet and has early-onset Beer Gut. He must be 30, tops. He poses by his truck, arm resting on the door, leaning, and smiling. Like a wolf.
***
Mother Mary full of grace, blessed is the fruit of thy womb. I say these words robotically in the school chapel along with all the others. I am one of very few non-Catholics in a church full of devout girls clutching rosary beads, reciting the mantra, trying not to laugh. That would be a sin. A sin on top of just existing, which is already big enough. I never knew about the magnitude of sin until I went to the Catholic school. When I ask my parents why they are sending me there and not High School, where they teach Japanese and German And French, they say it’ll be a “good influence”. They are not even believers. I have no idea what they are talking about.
At school we say all the words. But Clare, who is really bright but a rebel, sticks a cigarette in the statue of Mary in the Grotto before the Easter weekend and the whole school is called to assembly (she's never found out. We might be sinners but we’re not narks). Another friend, who my mother says is “not a good influence”, teaches me how to smoke. Though in truth, all the adults have been doing this around me for as long as I can remember. She has menthols. She “falls pregnant” and leaves school. A single mother, cast out at 15. The incantations could not save her.
But you repeat incantations long and often enough and eventually they get in. Forgive me father for I have sinned. Another friend who, like me, isn’t Catholic, gets caught in the spell of it all and vows that as soon as she can, she’ll convert to Catholicism. She wants it.
***
I want it. Sex. Forgive me Father for I think I want to go "all the way”. I’m not sure why I choose to broach the topic with Dad and not Mum. Perhaps I want to shock him. “Once you have lost it,” my father says (repeating a puzzling mantra passed down through my sisters though not my brother) “you will never get it back". What he probably means, but cannot say because it’s awkward and we don’t discuss such things, is: “Be careful who you choose. Hold your power. Because you are a force and men, well, some men, can be dogs.” But back then, they speak in short phrases designed to deflect. They give answers that just provoke more questions. I hear his words and I see myself walking; walking to the border of myself and crossing over into unknown territory and waving goodbye, never to “get it back”.
Why aren’t we having sensible conversations around emotional intelligence? About consent. About not being defined by a single act?
Why are we not talking about the nature of love, the importance of friendship. I want to hear him say, “Look, it might be really underwhelming and it might make you even feel a bit empty. It could also be delightful. Go there, if it feels right and safe, but maybe temper your expectations. And know that you are wonderful and strong and made up of so much more than this single moment. And if he’s a dick, well, sorry but we’re barely out of the 70s and misogyny is rife, entrenched, and we still have much to learn, us men. But that is not on you.”
But a simple, natural thing is presented as holy, sacred, for reasons mysterious and fraught and never quite explained. So much tied up in a word: virginity. My father is, on many issues, a liberal. Highly intelligent. “I have an agreement with God, he says. “I ignore him and he ignores me.” My mother loves conversation and books. She says of all her four children, with resignation and an eye-roll: “None of you are going to die wondering.”
Statements, incantations, thrown up into the atmosphere and left hanging; suspended like a forlorn statue staring in terror at humanity in a chapel resounding to the incantations of young women clutching rosary beads, but wanting something that tastes like rebellion.
****
The bach belongs to a friend’s parents. He’s a friend of my friend’s older brother. We clock each other. Don’t ask me what his name is. I’m not even sure we talk. Later, in the dark, when everyone is sleeping, or pretending to, he comes into the room and I unzip my sleeping bag and he climbs in. There is little preamble. It reminds me a little of the sex in The Handmaid’s Tale – perfunctory, almost Biblical in nature. A deed done. Tick. It’s consensual. But not sensual. He is unskilled, selfish, and so am I, I guess, and I could forgive him that, but not for what happens after. The thing that stings and bruises isn’t physical. I don’t bleed. I don’t cry out in pleasure, either. There’s no epiphany. It’s as if I’ve stopped on the side of the road and I’m asking a stranger for directions, and, having a little more information, I go on my way.
He gets up early, before anyone wakes up and he leaves. I just lie there. I don’t know then that sex will not always be like this. That it will be at times fantastic, satisfying and even transcending. But right then I feel empty. Another friend also has a guy in her sleeping bag but they don’t go all the way. Later that day, when we’re walking along the beach, I see him. He’s in a dingy close to the shore. I look and go to wave and he looks away and starts paddling. And I want to laugh it off. But I keep walking, head high. Like it’s nothing. It’s everything.
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