God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (12 page)
Revirgination
Those of you who have lived in the country or spent any time at all hiking in the woods will know that a road or a trail with regular traffic, be it vehicular or pedestrian, will remain clear and open. But let it fall into disuse, and very soon the weeds and vines will crowd in until, in scarcely any time at all, the pathway is completely obscured as if it never even existed. What we need is an intrepid new blazer of trails.
And so it is with us when our personal trails have gone unblazed for a time: We revert to our former state. And you know, of course, what an unexplored wood is called, don’t you? Yes, it is a virgin forest. If we spend too much time without a regular man, we may go into a state of revirgination. This is a positive occurrence, given the high premium placed by men on virginity in both woods and women. They just do purely love to be the first one in someplace.
For revirgination to occur in a woman, it requires some changes in demeanor and comportment. It is not enough to be a virgin—or revirgin, as it were—one must also act like one. A certain degree of shyness, timidity, and wide-eyed naïveté is required. Certain props, such as hair bows, may help facilitate your transformation process (see Chapter 14 for details). You can also get good tips from romance novels: Everybody’s a virgin in them.
The time it takes for revirgination to occur varies from woman to woman. Some might revirginate in a matter of weeks, while for others it might take months. Still others have honed their skills to such a level that they’re able to simply spontaneously revirginate within mere moments as often as the situation demands.
Revirgination works according to our previously discussed theory “Treat ’Em Like Shit and Never Give ’Em Any and They’ll Follow You Around Like Dogs,” and it’s easy to see why. If you’re not just a bitch but a virgin to boot, mercy! You better like this guy a heap, because you will have to pay to have him towed away.
A reconstituted virgin is so much better than a plain ole virgin that’s been sitting in storage for a hundred years. With a revirgin, all the benefits of training, experience, and the accompanying enthusiasm are retained; in addition, the equipment has been well maintained. It is not necessary or even desirable to pretend to your new trailblazer that you have never been down this road before, especially if you have one or more children who look exactly like you. No, it is enough to state, for the record, that you are a card-carrying reconstituted virgin and entitled to all manner of special considerations as such. It will then be up to him to woo and entice you to yield your most current virtue to his manly assaults upon its bastions. (He can also get some good tips from romance novels and fairy tales. I mean, who could resist a guy who rides up on a noble steed, rescues you from a dastardly villain, and gives you a kingdom or something comparable? Actually, if he could just demonstrate substantively that he is not himself a dastardly villain, he’d be pretty darned irresistible in my opinion; I’d be perfectly happy to provide my own steed and kingdom even—but that’s just me.)
This revirgination thing is only useful up to a point—holding out too long is just cutting off your nose to spite your face. So do try to keep in mind how much better your face looks and feels
with
a nose.
14
How to Be a Girl
I
t has come to our attention since the publication of
The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love
that not a few men are not a little intimidated by us and the whole Queen thing. We were stunned by this revelation, since we consider ourselves to be very sweet and eminently approachable, if not dainty flowers of girlish vulnerability. Imagine our surprise when Bill Hollingsworth, allegedly speaking on behalf of men in general, advised us that we are actually, in his words, “ball-busting bitches.” My, my. You just never can see yourself as others see you, can you?
This put us in quite a quandary because, as we explained to Bill, most of us are fending for ourselves out there in the big world, and although we might dearly love, above all things, to sit down in the middle of the road, heave a big sigh, and wait for the cavalry to come to our aid, experience has shown us that they just ain’t coming. And furthermore, if they do show up, they want us to fix them lunch or tell them what tie to wear. Whatever needs to get done is going to have to get done by us our ownselves. Bill contends that we would have a much better shot at getting guys to run errands, pay for stuff, buy jewelry, furs, and flowers, as well as slobber all over us endlessly, if we didn’t act so much like guys. He actually said that we
are
guys and that, as masculine as he himself is, he is a damn sight more feminine than we ever thought about being.
Well! we said, in somewhat of a huff. So naturally we demanded, not that he put his money where his mouth is (what could be more worthless than a man with a mouthful of money), but that he buy us dinner and give us details on how, in his opinion, we could be more girl-like. We wanted details on how to do it, examples of when we were not doing it, and alternative—more feminine—choices for future reference. He said he would do just that, but he insisted that we must, to use his own words, “leave our dicks at home.” He wanted to be the only one at dinner who had one. We had to agree to be total girls for the entire evening. We were a tad daunted at the prospect, since we were clueless about what he would require of us.
To put ourselves into the girlish spirit of the occasion, we decided we would try to dress the part. You know how we do love to dress up. Thinking ruffles, pink stuff, petticoats, white stockings, little flat black-patent shoes, we trotted off to our respective closets and returned crestfallen and empty-handed. Who’s got any of
that?
Obviously nobody we know, since we are all guys, to hear Bill talk. We did, however, fix our hair. I dredged up some old hair bows from my daughter BoPeep’s archives—great big, floppy ones. I piled my hair up on top of my head and plunked a giant bow smack in the middle of it. Tammy pulled her hair up on one side and secured her bow at a rakish angle. Let me tell you, putting a big bow in your hair has almost the same effect as putting on a crown! We walked different—sort of prancy, actually—and we found ourselves tilting our heads this way and that, even when speaking to each other. Instant Girl.
We had Bill pick us both up at Tammy’s house so we could make our bow-bedecked appearance together for maximum audience appeal. By the time he got there, we had completely metamorphosed into giant fifth graders. Giggles and sidelong glances abounded. We both met Bill at the door and inundated him with our girliness. We sat up very straight and pulled our skirts down primly, hands folded in our laps. He pronounced us “adorable.” We were off to a grand start and figured we had aced the girl thing with only a couple of simple props. We settled in for a little light predinner conversation, just the way girls would do.
Tammy had the first question for our mentor. She wanted to know how to get men to buy jewelry—for us, not for themselves, for although we love the look of jewelry on ourselves, it is too icky for words on them. Bill is the perfect one to ask the jewelry question of since he personally started my own rather extensive jewelry collection for me when I was only nineteen, a mere Cute Girl. Tammy lamented that last year a man gave her a monogrammed brass cigar case—a very nice, completely lovely monogrammed brass cigar case, but there is just no way to make a pendant out of a monogrammed brass cigar case. Bill didn’t even have to think a second about that one. “Well, Tammy,” he said, “you shouldn’t be smoking cigars, now should you? That is a guy thing, and if you want to be the girl, you shouldn’t be doing it!” But he offered me one, she whined. Now, this problem is clear: She thought she was being polite by accepting the cigar; as a former president of the Junior League, Tammy can be a tad manners-obsessed. Manners are wonderful things and they serve us well, but, as with all things, there is just a time and place. According to Bill, the offer of a cigar is just the situation where we, as girls, should venture to decline a man’s hospitality. He swears we can do this without giving offense, and come off looking girlier than ever. Nothing if not quick studies, we grasped his concept right away. We were just intuitively able to put that Southern spin on the whole thing, which is just about the girliest stuff on the planet. We did the little gasp thing that said to him what a big bad man he was for even
thinking
we would accept a cigar. We were positively
scandalized
at the prospect of even being offered a large, cylindrical—we can’t even think it—phallic-looking—oh my!—tobacco product. The very idea! (Southern women love to say “the very idea” to emphasize how shocked they are by things.)
We put both hands on his big manly chest and shoved ever-so-slightly and said that he should just quit it! We don’t even smoke, but if we did, we certainly could never smoke anything that big! Whatever was he thinking! We didn’t see how
anybody
could smoke anything
that
big! We were still talking cigars, but the subliminal message was getting through, and he was positively strutting around the room; crowing should commence momentarily.
The predinner chat continued for a bit and somehow, as it so often does, the conversation turned to sex—oops! pardon my lapse—s-e-x. Anything girls want to say that is the least bit racy, they will spell out, most often in a loud whisper, which is just about the most audible tone a woman can make. Anyway, in the course of this little s-e-x discussion, we were still sitting primly on the edge of our chairs, when the subject of pleasuring oneself popped up. Tammy and I referred to it in the vernacular—“beating off.” Bill was undone. According to him, we cannot say “beating off” because, as girls, we have nothing, in his definition of it all, to beat. We insisted it was just a term and could apply just as easily to us. He further insisted that yes, it was just a term, a guy term, and we could not use it, it was not feminine at all for us to use it.
What can we say then?
Masturbate
was what he came up with for us. We objected strenuously that “masturbate” sounds pretty formal for friendly discussion between friends about something you do to your own personal self; it is like talking about yourself in the third person. Besides, we tend to like earthier, folksier terms for things for private conversations. If we are speaking to a health professional, for example, we might say “breasts,” whereas if we are talking to each other, we prefer the less-stilted “tits” or “boobs” (although the word
boobs
is personally offensive to me in reference to female breasts—as a product of the Sixties’ South,
boob
will forever and always be a word used by Barney Fife to describe a stupid person). At any rate, Bill said we could use those words, but “beating off” was definitely off-limits. We thought only a moment before coming up with a satisfactory response. Once again, we drew upon our vast reservoir of Southern girl stuff. We looked at him, from way underneath our eyelashes, and we said, shyly, with an air of including him in a little conspiracy, “I like to touch myself . . .” (here comes the very best part: we shifted to a loud whisper and lowered our heads) “
down there!
” He fell off the couch.
After a bit, he recovered himself and seemed willing to proceed with our lesson. He said that certain references we made to men in the
Book of Love
were ill-advised when delivered in person to a guy. Specifically, Bill said that when we say that “we love men, they taste just like chicken” or when we refer to them as “cat-toys,” well, it doesn’t exactly, in
his
terms, make their dicks hard. We were shocked, not only at his harsh language, but at learning how thin-skinned the little SOB’s are! Oops! Not a girly thing to say.
Nobody can be in Bill’s presence for longer than five minutes without hearing of his undying love and devotion to me. This has been going on for, well, let’s see, it started in 1971 and continues today, unabated. He nags me ceaselessly to marry him, which of course I should do, and probably would do if I wasn’t so afraid of ruining the best relationship of my entire life. I would not take odds on how long the adoration would continue if I ever stupidly gave him what he thinks he wants so desperately. I’d be out a perfectly good boyfriend is all—and I do mean perfectly good. He loves me beyond reason and he lives two hundred miles away—show me the flaw in this deal. At any rate, Bill was yammering about how much he loves me and how he just had no idea if I would ever consent to even have dinner with him again and how he just had never even dared to breathe such a hope. Whereupon Tammy looked at him, tilted her little bow-laden head, twinkled for a moment, and said to him in the sweetest possible tones, “Are you just dumb as a door?” She and I both then went into convulsions of wild laughter at her blatant ball-busting, cleverly disguised with a bow and a smile. We could not stop laughing, nearly shook our bows loose. Bill looked very stern, indeed. We surmised from his look that this was a definite for the no list and so we pass along this advice to you as well: If you want to capture his heart, don’t ask him, even very sweetly, if he is as dumb as a door. You probably already know the answer anyway.
My sister, Judy, said she guessed arm wrestling with them is probably out as well. Bill confirmed that. But I tell you what we did discover: You can say or do just about anything to them if you smile sweetly, look at them even more sweetly, and wear a bigass bow in your hair! We admit the bow part was news to us. We can’t wait to go fully bowed to deliver our next Promise. Putty, putty, putty in our hot little hands.
