Expensive People (30 page)

Nada said, “It's all right if Bebe doesn't drive you,” but when Mrs. Hofstadter drove up that evening with Gustave, Nada was not even home to notice. I climbed into the car and said a polite hello to mother and son; Gustave and I were both a little embarrassed. It was clear that he did not want to go to this talk any more than I did. Mrs. Hofstadter
chattered as she drove. She was a frail, stern-voiced partridge of a woman, always perfumed and attractive, but, unlike Nada, she looked as if she might come off in peelings with her clothes. I could not tell at once whether she was worse or the same as usual or slightly better. Gustave often reported her condition to me in a terse impersonal whisper, but tonight he was strangely silent and seemed to be paying no attention to his mother's chatter. She had a habit of driving in the middle of our narrow Cedar Grove lanes whether she was ascending a hill or not, and she had a habit of brushing rather close to parked cars, and she often glanced around into the backseat at me while she drove.

“There were these Egyptian sailors, you see, and they had been commissioned by one of the Pharaohs. I would date this at about 400 B.C. or maybe 400 A.D. They certainly had invented things in those days! You would be fascinated to learn about it, Richard! Well, the point of this was, that to disprove their findings the European navigators thought it was enough simply to measure their routes according to the existing maps, but—and this is the marvelous thing—the Egyptians were measuring according to
below the Equator,
and the Europeans were of course above … and so … it's a wonderful example of how we must not leap to conclusions.”

“Yes, it is,” I said shyly.

I felt my brain begin to click off, part by part. The low buzzing and ringing began. Mrs. Hofstadter chattered on, occasionally creasing her powdered neck to look back at me. We passed a drive-in restaurant in front of which sullen Negro women, of middle age, were walking with picket signs. “That is one thing you would never see me doing, never,” Mrs. Hofstadter declared. “I would never in my life carry a picket sign!”

“Mother, you're swerving to the left,” Gustave said.

By the time we got to the high-school auditorium and sat down near the back, the talk was well under way. A middle-aged woman stood on the stage, looking out into the lighted auditorium. I heard her say the word “sex,” and another part of my mind turned off, in a panic, but then it focused upon Nada and That Editor, and so I plugged myself in again to the good doctor and her talk.

“… And so, you see, there is this vast, marvelous area of human life called sex, and we know so very little about it, so very little! But I think that, after our discussion tonight, many of you will feel that the problems
you have are not so gigantic after all. Many times a young person is like a driver in a new car, inexperienced and giddy with excitement. He is more interested in the looks and the speed of the car than he is in safety and the laws of the road, drawn up for him by his somber, well-meaning parents. Yes, some of your parents are well meaning!”

This brought forth a ripple of appreciative laughter.

“Now, I hope there will be many, many, many questions. I think that you must have many problems of your own or many curiosities about sex which you have kept back or expressed only to your peers. Are there any questions? Did any of you feel shocked or worried about what I said earlier? Do you think that such things should not have been voiced?”

An awkward moment. There were muffled whispers and the creakings of seats, then a girl put up her hand. You could tell by her taut, un-worried throat and her confident voice that she was a Leader. “Dr. Muggeridge, may I ask a pretty far-out question?”

“My dear, nothing is far-out in the twentieth century,” Dr. Muggeridge said, beaming. She was a handsome, muscular woman.

“Well, Dr. Muggeridge, I got to thinking that some of us are going to go home, and maybe our parents are … I mean … they might be mad when they hear about this talk …”

“Yes?”

“They might get mad or something because … well, you know …”

Everyone except Gustave and myself chuckled sympathetically. Oh, it was a warm, harmonious group! I felt my mind begin to drift slowly away.

“You know how parents are!” The girl giggled.

“My dear, I know only too well. I have had enormously pitiful conversations with pregnant teen-aged girls who waited far too long to talk over their problems with a responsible adult. Yes, I know, I know! But what can we do, we, all of us, toward educating the parents of teenagers into discussing these things openly?”

A few seconds of excited silence, then another girl said, “Dr. Muggeridge, I think a talk like yours should be offered to our parents too.
They
need it even more than we do.”

“Do you think that your parents are perhaps afraid?”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid of sex, themselves?”

Everyone hesitated at this. So Dr. Muggeridge went on in her gentle, kindly voice, “It may be that the parents of young people are simply afraid, and that they need help. I have often come to this conclusion in my talks with troubled teen-agers.
If
some understanding adult had only been available in time! But I can see so very few young people. Now that I am traveling on this lecture tour, and the tight demands of my television show, I'm afraid even these few teen-agers I could have helped personally will have to go without anyone to talk to. Incidentally, may I ask, how many of you here tonight
feel you can
talk openly to your parents about sex?”

Everyone looked stealthily around. One boy started to put his hand up, then thought better of it. Gustave and I sweated and did not look at each other.

“How pitiful!” Dr. Muggeridge cried. “How very tragic! Tragic! But surely some of you girls talk to your mothers, at least about mild problems?”

A few girls raised hands. “But not openly and freely, Dr. Muggeridge,” someone said. Other girls agreed.

“And you boys, with your fathers?”

A few boys laughed. One boy said, “I'm afraid I can't talk with my father about anything.”

“This is much more serious than I thought,” Dr. Muggeridge said, shaking her head. “How do you account for this strange secrecy?”

No one knew.

“Well, fathers are like that,” a boy said slowly.

“You mean they are difficult to approach? They are embarrassed?”

“They get all red and funny,” a boy said. “You know. They start coughing and can't stop.”

“And why is that, do you think?”

“Who knows? It's just easier to talk to a friend, or someone like you.”

Dr. Muggeridge smiled. “Thank you, but flattery is out of place here. I wonder, have you ever thought that perhaps your parents don't discuss these enormously important and complicated problems even with each other? That perhaps they are simply afraid? There are extraordinary cases of non-communication between married people.”

For some reason I thought of Nada a few years before, standing on
the stairs with her back to Father, who was yelling certain names at her. (I was peeking around the dining-room louver doors.) But I shook this image away and uncrossed my legs.

Dr. Muggeridge was now saying, “And don't you think, then, that you boys and girls should feel free to discuss these matters with one another? Particularly those of you who are already quite intimate, or who are even thinking toward marriages. Yes, I know there are some of you here,” she said, smiling, “and I know there are others of you who have had sex without marriage in mind, and I don't make any distinction between you. Wouldn't it be helpful for you to know as much as possible about each other, about your feelings and worries? Wouldn't this help communication later, when you're married? Then you could avoid the problems your parents have.”

A girl said, “Dr. Muggeridge, can I say something? It's funny, but… but this talk tonight has done me a lot of good. It really has. My mother would never talk to me like this. It's a real experience.”

“And this is the tragedy, boys and girls, the tragedy of noncommunication. Think of our culture—the advertisements, the intensely stimulating movies, your popular dances and the clothes you wear. You must come to grips with this environment and conquer it; otherwise it will conquer you. We must demand of the adults of America that they face up to the realities of the world they have created. There is no room for squeamish hypocrisy. Did you know, boys and girls, that in any given group of young people a certain percentage of the girls will have unwanted pregnancies, and a certain percentage of all will have a venereal disease? Everyone knows that, but no parents will face up to the fact that
their
children may go into these statistics. Were I a parent myself, I would insist that my children come to me with any and all questions they have. There would be no red faces, no coughing spells, nothing except rational, wholesome talk. Sex is not a tabooed subject, boys and girls. It is not unhealthy and dirty. Sex should be discussed openly anywhere, in Sunday school, in classrooms, as well as in school lavatories”—laughter of a spontaneous sort—”and even at the dinner table.”

“But, Dr. Muggeridge,” a girl said, “have you ever talked to adults on this subject?”

“My dear, I will tell you a secret,” Dr. Muggeridge said sadly.

“Whenever I offer a talk like this, it is precisely
those parents
who need it most who stay away. The open-minded parents who come are rarely in need of my advice—and, I must say, there are very, very few of these who do come. I think this points back to something we said earlier, the fear adults have toward sex.”

“Oh, Dr. Muggeridge,” a boy said, “they did show a movie at our school a while back. About reproduction and stuff like that.”

“Shown to which grades?”

“Freshmen.”

“A bit late, wasn't it?” Dr. Muggeridge snapped. “By that time many of you had no doubt conducted your own experiments—absolutely unknown to your parents and teachers, however.”

A few faces reddened. I was leaning forward, my elbows on my knees and my hands encircling part of my face. Someone put his hand up, and I closed my eyes, forcing my mind off. At first there was nothing. Then I made out the image of Nada, a few years back. She and Father had given a party but it was one of their unwise parties, a mingling of Brookfield people and a few stragglers from somewhere else, an awkward group of people who were Nada's friends.

It had been a poolside party, and I followed Nada and a man (a “composer”) around the side of the house and hid in some evergreens while I eavesdropped. And this talk stayed in my mind for many months: Nada told him that if he didn't like her guests he could go to hell, and he told Nada she had become a ridiculous person, and Nada told him in a furious whisper that he was a bastard, that his suit was cheap and ready-made and that everyone, everyone, had seen that his shoes were brown, in the first instant everyone had seen that, goddam them! She began to cry in ugly, jagged gasps. “What do you want from me?” she said. “I'm trying to survive. Should I sink down in the dump heap and suffocate, like my people, my ancestors, everybody's ancestors? Most of the world is swimming in a cesspool, trying to keep their heads up, and I'm sick of it, I'm sick of knowing it, God, how I'm sick of living and thinking and being what I am! But I won't live any other way. This is heaven.
This
is heaven, I've found it, they don't torture you or back you in ovens here, in 1960—what more can we ask? Our ancestors tortured other people or were tortured themselves, or both. Well, I am Natashya Everett and I am out of history, I'm clean of its stink and
crap, and there is no one to thank for it, no one but myself and good luck. You son-of-a-bitch, to criticize me for being out of the crap pile! To criticize me for not suffocating in it!”

They were silent. Then the man (his face is a complete blank to me) slid his arm around Nada's shoulders, and she did a strange thing, she let her head fall back against him as if they were old, old friends, when I'd never even seen him before! And he seemed about to kiss her on the mouth, but she turned aside a little and somehow, perhaps with an indolent gesture of her hand, indicated that he should kiss her throat instead, which he did, while I stared from out of the evergreens and my eyeballs pounded. I was eight.

Gustave prodded me. “You all right?” he said. I blushed and nodded and sat back in my seat.

The discussion had ranged onto something else. A boy with purplish acne was saying loudly, “Yes, some kids at my school had pictures like that. When the teacher caught them she was afraid to do anything, she just hushed it up.”

“Well, now, she was afraid, poor thing, to admit such things existed,” Dr. Muggeridge said brightly. “Anyway, it's my personal feeling that anyone who resorts to pornography is a wee bit pathetic. What do you think? After all, normal people exercise their desires in normal ways. I think we should all be tremendously
sorry
for people who use pornography, just as we are for homosexuals and other perverts who are just plain sick people. Let's all help them, boys and girls, instead of pretending they don't exist! And you all know boys and girls your own age who are inclined toward abnormality. I don't mean just boys with dirty pictures but also the opposite, boys who show no interest at all in sex, and girls who show a morbid disinterest in boys. We have to admit our impulses and curiosities about this, or we are being hypocritical like most of the adult population of America. What do you think? You all, I suppose, know unfortunate boys and girls who have reached sixth grade already without admitting the slightest interest in sex, don't you?”

I shifted guiltily in my seat.

A girl raised her hand. “What about younger brothers and sisters?” she said. “What if you can see how your kid sister, for instance, is really out of it—I mean, she just doesn't know
anything
—should you maybe talk with her and bring things kind of out in the open?”

“But how can you, if your
parents
are against it?” Dr. Muggeridge said.

This was true. There was silence for a few seconds, but not a dull silence. I could feel everyone thinking excitedly. Another hand went up and a girl said, “I guess the question most of us girls want to ask you, Dr. Muggeridge, is this—and I'm really serious—how do you tell a boy to stop being fresh?”