CHAPTER 3
Abra’s four years at Jackson College were a time of daily change as she molded herself into the person she dreamed of becoming. Her college life was a hemisphere away from her precollege life. She never dreamed that it would be so easy to go from hell to heaven in a seven hour drive. Abra got up every morning thinking of just one thing – herself. She didn’t think of what she had to do for her parents or Rachel or Noah. She was the center of the universe. And that is the way she wanted her life to be forever. Maybe it was selfish, but she felt that she had paid her dues of selflessness for the last 18 years.
During her freshman year, she wondered about her family daily. Were they eating well? Were they getting their medicines? Were Rachel and Noah doing okay at school? By her sophomore year, she thought of them sporadically and by her junior year, they were almost entirely absent from her daily consciousness. She was amazed at how easy it had been to erase them from her life. She felt like she had been born at age 18 when she entered Jackson College. She harbored no guilt about banishing her family from her mental life as she had banished them from her physical life. This was what she had to do to survive. She visualized the Ginzberg family as passengers on a sinking ship with one life preserver. Abra slipped into it as she pried off the desperate grasping fingers of Noah, Rachel, Jacob, and Miriam. At the end of her reverie, she calmly watched her family disappear into the icy water.
Abra popped out of bed every morning, alert and ready to savor whatever the day would bring. The girls in the dorm made fun of her suggesting that her perpetually happy mood was attributable to chemical support. She insisted she was on a natural high and good-naturedly offered to take a drug test or have her room searched. Fortunately, Beth was like that too so they became known as the bubbly twins.
Some of the people who knew Abra wondered why she didn’t show any sadness about the death of her family, but they usually concluded that she was covering up her real feelings. A few even broached the subject to Beth. Sheila, a girl who lived in the next dorm room, once asked Beth: “Does Abra ever talk about her family?”
Beth responded much the way Abra would have if she had been asked the question. “No. She doesn’t like to share her feelings. She’s coped with her losses in the past and she’s reached a stage of acceptance. She’s moving on with her life.”
Sheila pursued the subject. “It just seems that sometimes she would show some sadness or negativity. She’s just not normal. She’s too positive. She’s too happy, especially when you consider that her parents are dead and she has no real family except for that fat lady.”
“Abra’s the most normal person I know. But she’s also the most private. She doesn’t want people to know about her past and I respect that. You should too.” That put an end to any conversations about Abra with Beth. But most people still wondered, only they didn’t verbalize their questions to Abra or Beth. Sometimes in late night gossip fests, they conjured up stories about Abra’s parents being murdered by a mad killer and Abra being the sole survivor, or Abra’s parents being killed in an automobile accident, or Abra’s father killing her mother and then committing suicide. A few went so far as to fantasize that Abra killed her parents and did not have to go to jail because she was going to Jackson and it was definitely a penal institution.
What Abra loved most about college was learning. She was the rare student who read all the assignments as well as supplementary readings. Whenever possible, she studied, especially during the late night hours when there was total quiet in the dorm study room. No sounds coming from outside, no sounds from girls talking, and no sounds from girls sleeping. There was never total quiet in Queens, especially on hot summer nights when people kept their windows open searching for a cool breeze. On 17th Street, Abra heard the summer night sounds of the city: whizzing window air conditioners, snoring of sleep apniacs, crying of colicky babies, grunts and moans of sexual coupling, and arguments over infidelity or money.
She loved late night studying when she communed with her books. She shut her eyes and concentrated on absorbing knowledge through osmosis. She thrived on words and ideas. She loved writing papers so she could use words that she couldn’t use in her everyday speaking vocabulary. She created metaphors like “jaundiced leaves” in a freshman essay on what she liked about Jackson’s campus. She would never say jaundiced leaves when dining with her friends over mac and cheese. She would link ideas, find causes, project effects, and identify relationships like an Olympic mental gymnast. She felt her brain cells multiplying as she studied. She loved herself when she studied because learning was what she did best. She wished she could go to college forever.
Some of the girls in the dorm kidded her about being a study machine and obsessed with grades. And indeed she was a study machine and obsessed with grades. Doing well in school had been the exit ramp from the life she despised. Doing well in school was her way of validating herself as a smart person who could achieve whatever she wanted. Being smart differentiated her from her family. She was the mutant in a family of retarded people.
Abra started out as an English major which was a natural for her because of the love of literature instilled in her by Miss Benjamin and her natural talent for writing. But through conversations with Beth about her classes, she became interested in psychology. So she added psych as a second major with the goal of becoming a child psychologist. She thought this would be a good career match for her because she could empathize with children going through painful childhoods. She knew this would entail many years of schooling but it would result in a job which Abra would always need, having no one to lean on for financial support. She figured that there would always be kids with problems so there would always be a need for child psychologists.
During the summer after her junior year, Abra won a grant to study in England for two weeks. She was to study the London locations featured in books by major English writers. Abra didn’t know that the money for the grant was donated by Miss Benjamin who established the grant with the understanding that Abra be the first recipient. She never suspected that the grant was funded by a specific donor, let alone Miss Benjamin. Thanks to her parents’ generosity, Beth accompanied Abra. After their two weeks in London, they spent another two weeks traveling through England. The life-changing experience that Beth had described that first day they met three years ago became a reality for Abra. In her four weeks in England, Abra had more memorable experiences than she had in her previous 21 years.
Getting her passport was a milestone in Abra’s life. Now she had an international identity. She could travel to the ends of the earth…ride a jeep on a safari in Africa, scale the endless steps of the Great Wall of China, or stand at the foot of Ayres Rock in Australia at sunset. Her passport picture showed her joyous anticipation of the places she could go. Her smile was so full, it monopolized most of her face. Who would have thought that she would go from 17th Street in Queens to the world? She would see places that the Ginzbergs never heard of, and even if they had, they wouldn’t want to travel to because there would be no bagels and TV soaps.
She had another first with this trip - her first airplane flight. She and Beth flew out of Dulles Airport in Washington on a British Air 747. Beth’s parents drove them to the airport and as they approached, Abra gasped at the beauty of Dulles. Its sloping roofs and its beautifully contoured control tower were works of art. Beth told Abra, “Shut your mouth before you catch a fly. What are you going to do when you see Trafalgar Square – swallow a pigeon?”
Abra sat next to the window with her nose glued to the glass. She delighted at the smallest things: the suitcases being loaded, the plane being fueled. As the plane started, her heart pounded, not with fear, but with anticipation. She loved the feel of taking off. The noise of the engines and the gathering speed filled her with elation. She sensed the battle between her body being pulled up by the plane while being pulled down by gravity. Flying was a way of really escaping, not just metaphorically, but actually.
Beth
despised flying. She easily got motion sickness so she had taken medication to help her with the ups and downs and shaking, rattling, and rolling. Beth slept much of the way and refused food. Abra kept waking her up to quote from the guidebook on England which she had already read three times. “Beth, wake up. Let’s make sure that we rent a boat on the Avon when we go to Stratford. Let’s also go to the Swan’s Nest. It’s over 300 years old. Hey, let’s go to Marlowe’s Restaurant. It’s even older.” Beth moaned and uncharacteristically told Abra to fuck off as she burrowed into her pillow and blanket.
The flight was smooth as was the landing, although not to Beth. Abra looked out the window and got her first glimpse of London. Everything was grey, the sky was grey, the buildings were grey, even the streets were grey. How could something so drab be beautiful? The first thing that struck here as she disembarked at Heathrow was the accents. These people really knew how to speak English. They didn’t devour the language like New Yorkers. She felt so important when the immigration agent asked what she was going to do in England. She crowed, “I’m going to tour your beautiful country and enjoy every second of it.” Conveying complete boredom through his body language, he stamped her passport without looking up. She didn’t let his disinterest dampen her enthusiasm. Nothing and no one was going to stop her from having the best time of her life.
The girls got their luggage and took the tube from Heathrow to central London. Abra knew the New York subways well, but the tube was different. It wasn’t the cars or the people, it was just the feel of being foreign. During their stay in London, they took the subway often and always chanted “Mind the gap” along with the recorded message as they jumped over the space between the platform and the train. Over the years, “mind the gap” become a signal between them to rekindle memories of their trip.
They got directions for walking to their hotel on Bloomsbury Square. The Virginia Woolf Hotel. They were staying at a hotel in the neighborhood where Virginia Woolf had lived. How perfect for an English major! Perhaps they would see real writers sitting in the square. How would they know who was a writer? They probably would look intellectual and wear berets and scarves jauntily wrapped around their necks. But, in their two weeks in London, they didn’t see anyone like that in the park or for that matter anywhere in the city. The park was filled with old people feeding the birds, students reading textbooks, homeless people in fetal positions sleeping on benches, and nannies wheeling babies in prams. No overt intellectuals.
Beth and Abra shared a tiny room on the top floor with a window overlooking the square. Abra spent every free minute looking out the window when she wasn’t sleeping or writing in her journal. They shared a bathroom with the other hotel guests on the top floor. They were used to sharing a bathroom with women at Jackson, but now they were sharing with men. How continental! Because of the secure lock on the door, they never saw men in any compromising positions. They were disappointed that they didn’t see any nude or semi-nude men walking back and forth to the bathroom.
Every morning they were served an English breakfast of eggs, tomatoes, and kippers. On the first day, Abra tried everything, but she couldn’t do it again. Abra hated fish, and kippers were the ultimate fish. Kippurs were worse than gefilte fish. Warm tomatoes also didn’t do anything for her taste buds. And slippery eggs fried in an unknown substance were too hard for Abra to swallow, literally. She missed her Cheerios and cold milk.
Abra hadn’t planned on sleeping for the two weeks they were in London, but as soon as she became horizontal she fell asleep. When she awoke six hours later, she was freezing. Although it was July, it was 50 degrees in London. Not only was it cold, it was damp. The type of dampness that makes your bones and internal organs shiver. They had brought rain jackets anticipating London’s usual rainy weather, but not sweaters because it had been 90 degrees at home. So their first purchases were heavy sweaters to keep warm. It was so cold for a few nights that they slept with their sweaters over their pajamas. Beth’s sweater became especially ratty as it had remnants of pigeon poop from Trafalgar Square that refused to be washed out. After four weeks in England wearing their sweaters, they deposited them in a garbage bin at Heathrow before boarding their plane for home. They had a ceremony as they buried their filthy sweaters with Beth officiating: “We officially put to rest our bulwark against the brutal cold of the British Isles. It kept these two colonists from developing icicles on their titties.”
Abra had an extensive list of places she needed to visit for her grant, but she also wanted to see the “big” tourist spots so they went to Buckingham Palace, Parliament, Tower of London, and the British Museum. Abra imagined herself as a character everyplace they visited. At Buckingham she was Princess Di. Obviously, she couldn’t imagine herself as stiff Queen Elizabeth, especially since she didn’t have a purse; only a backpack and that was hard to hold over her wrist. At the Tower of London, she was Anne Boleyn getting her head lopped off. At the British Museum, she was a shapely model for an Elgin marble Greek goddess with body parts shed over thousands of years.
They went to plays almost every night seeing Le Mis, Miss Saigon, and the Merchant of Venice. They treated themselves to high tea at the Waldorf, the ultimate in British classiness. At home, Abra only drank tea when she had a cold, but in England she daintily sipped tea. At home, it was Lipton’s tea bags. In London, it was Fortnum and Mason’s Earl Grey. And of course, scones with clotted cream. Years later when she started frequenting Starbucks where scones were sold, she never bought any. She found that she really didn’t like the taste of scones, or maybe the taste of American scones. And she certainly wouldn’t clot her arteries with appropriately named clotted cream.
Beth had been in contact with the English family with whom she had lived three years earlier. Hugh and Judith Fox and their two children, Frederick now 10 and Vanessa 8, lived in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a neighborhood of old townhouses in North London that Old Forest Hills in Queens was modeled after. What an irony for Abra, she was visiting a neighborhood in London that looked like a neighborhood near where she had lived for 18 years. The Fox’s home looked like something out of a 1950 British black-and-white movie. They had a gas fireplace that they used for heat, not decoration, lamps with fringe on the shades, and a kitchen sink with a separate tap for hot and cold water. Abra thought the place was quaint, but not someplace she could live long-term. She was too American; she loved her conveniences.
They spent a Sunday with the Foxes walking through a park, reminiscing about Beth’s earlier stay. The weather had at last warmed up and the sun made an uncharacteristic appearance so they had tea at an outdoor café. Abra treasured the experience of actually getting to know Brits and being more than a tourist who just viewed Brits as specimens. They ended the day with a fish and chips meal at a local restaurant. Abra insisted that she loved the fried cod and French fries despite the grease that coated her hands and face.
Before leaving the states, the girls had bought a British Rail pass which enabled them to freely travel through England and Scotland. First, they went to Stratford on Avon and saw Macbeth at the Shakespeare Theatre. They respectfully visited Shakespeare’s church and Ann Hathaway’s house and, of course, the Swan’s Nest and the Marlowe’s. In the house where Shakespeare was born, they touched the walls in the hope that Shakespeare had also touched them. Despite the hundreds of years of paint and washing, they were sure that their skin could feel Shakespeare’s skin. Abra remembered her vow to rent a boat so they got a rowboat and rowed on the Avon as they sang “Row, row your boat.” Not exactly a British ditty, but the only boating song they knew.
They traveled through the Lake District visiting villages on scenic lakes. On a warm, cloudless day in Keswick, they hiked 10 miles around Lake Derwenwater. But one of their most memorable experiences of the trip was telling ghosts stories in a church cemetery at midnight. They were staying in a student hostel where they met four college kids from New Zealand. One night, one of the boys suggested going to th
e church graveyard on the path from their hostel to the lake. It was a clear, crisp night with a full moon, perfect for ghost searches. The kids read the information on the gravestones before picking the ones that they would grace with their backsides. Abra picked the eternal resting place for Abigail Bennett, a two year old child who died in 1826 while Beth picked her mother Sarah who lived for 86 years, a very long time in the 1800’s. Sarah had outlived her daughter by 84 years, how sad each of those years must have been for Sarah.
Each of the cemetery haunters took turns telling ghost stories. Abra told the story of the headless horseman. Beth chastised her for not thinking of something original, but she told the Stephen King story of Carrie causing Abra to punch her arm and return an insult about her lack of creativity. Abra could have stayed in the cemetery until daybreak, but the group was suffering from frostbitten toes so they went back to the hostel at about 2:00. As Abra lay in bed that night, she realized that she could never have imagined this night’s experience when she was back on 17th Street. Unimaginable – the word fit the experience and the word fit her life since she left Queens on August 22, 1990.
After Keswick, they went to Edinburgh where they visited castles and walked the hills. They strolled along Princess Street, first shopping on one side and then sitting on the benches below the castle on the other. On their first day on Princess Street, Abra saw a group of mentally retarded adults with their caregivers. They were looking in the store windows at Jenners Department Store and describing what they saw. “I would like that blue sweater,” said a woman with Down’s Syndrome speaking with a thick Scotch brogue, while an elderly man with a small, misshapen head, said, “I would like that yellow tie for Christmas.” They all smiled as they held hands with each other and the caregivers. They seemed so happy and “normal” for retarded people. Abra turned away because she didn’t want thoughts of her family intruding on her happiness. She didn’t want to compare Scottish and American retardation.
Just as Abra worked on developing her mind, she worked on developing her social skills. She developed a knack for making people feel comfortable and important. This combined with her warm and bubbly manner made her popular and well liked. Although she had many friends, she and Beth were inseparable. Beth was her true love, not a homosexual love because both girls had no desire for each other physically. They loved each other like sisters, but differently. You don’t get to pick your sister. They had picked each other. They were sharing experiences that were molding them into the women they would become and because of this they were intertwined like a latticed climbing vine.
Over the four years of college, Beth twice broached the subject of Abra’s family and both times Abra shut her out. One night when they were discussing “deep ideas,” Beth asked, “Do you think much about your parents?”
“I just can’t talk about that. Please, let’s not go there. You know how painful this is for me to talk about.”
“I’m sorry. I understand.” But she didn’t understand. She thought that best friends should share everything, but Abra believed that best friends should share everything except a troubled past.
Another time, the two girls were lying under the stars at Beth’s family’s beach house when Beth said “Do you think your parents are up there?”
“I try not to think about my parents.”
Beth was tempted to ask why not, but she knew that Abra had closed herself off. She was sure that someday Abra would share her secrets, but maybe not until they were old ladies in a nursing home.
Occasionally, Abra talked about her grandparents, especially when she received her monthly letter from them with two crisp ten dollar bills enclosed. She would respond with thank you notes containing a few comments about how school was going or the weather. Abra talked a lot about Miss Benjamin. She had been Abra’s family throughout her high school years. Abra had eaten at Miss Benjamin’s apartment a number of times and they had gone to the theatre and concerts together. During her four years at Jackson, Abra spent some of her school vacations at Miss Benjamin’s when she didn’t go to Beth’s house or stay in Linz.
Although Abra never talked about her family, Beth gradually disclosed more and more about her own family. Abra looked at the King family as clones of the Brady Bunch. But Beth gradually shared family secrets showing Abra that even the most “normal” family had skeletons in their closets. There were the usual family feuds between Beth’s mother and her aunt and the alcoholism of a grandfather, but the King’s main issue revolved around Beth’s brother Jeff’s homosexuality. Jeff, a year younger than Beth, was also at Jackson where he was captain of the baseball team and a track star. He was movie-star good looking and had the body of a gymnast. All the girls on campus lusted after Jeff, and Jeff lusted after all the boys. In his freshman year, Jeff told Beth that he was gay. Beth was not surprised; she had always suspected. It wasn’t anything he said or did, maybe it was gadar. He hadn’t told his parents because they were devout Christians who believed that homosexuality was sinful. His father who had been athletic all his life could not believe that a jock, like Jeff, could be gay. It would be many years before Jeff would finally tell his parents. When he finally did, his father was dying of cancer. He told Jeff that he had always known in his heart, but couldn’t openly acknowledge that his son was gay. The day before he died, he told Jeff that he would love him for eternity and so would God.
As part of developing the woman she was becoming, Abra worked on creating a unique look. She was slowly coming to the realization that she was striking, not cute or pretty, but attractive, someone people took a second look at. With her dark complexion, small upturned nose, large black eyes, tall, trim figure, she was almost beautiful. She wore plain, but expensive, clothes, tee shirts usually in preppy colors with a polo player on her chest. In Queens, she had shopped at stores where she could buy clothes for less than $10. There never was money for clothes or jewelry. She was always ashamed of the clothes she wore. Although she still didn’t have much money, now she shopped at the Gap and Banana Republic where she bought at huge reductions at the end of the season. Miss Benjamin knew her love of good clothes and gave her generous gift certificates for the Gap for Hannukah and her birthday so she could dress in a manner suited to the person she wanted to project to the world. She loved looking at herself in the mirror, not only for how she looked, but for who she was becoming. Her new outer look complemented her new inner self.
During the school years, Abra was a work study student in the English department and worked for Dr. Weaver. During the summer, she helped the Jackson groundskeepers tend the flower beds. The money that she made combined with her scholarships and loans made it possible for her to get by. As in high school, she worked on the newspaper eventually becoming news editor. Now the events she wrote about in the paper were events that she witnessed firsthand. Dances, lectures, sports. The stuff of college life. In high school, she wrote about these events, but experienced them vicariously. Now she reported them and lived them.
Everyone at Jackson was into some sport so Abra chose running. She had been a great walker on the streets of Queens so now she just went faster. A lot of kids ran to relax, but Abra was never tense. She had no anxiety about her classes or the future. She liked running because of the feeling of freedom. She ran all over campus and then expanded to the streets of the small town and then to the country roads. She was still amazed at seeing cows and chickens on the farms she passed. These were the real animals that she had read about with Rachel. When she saw them, she would make the sounds – moo, quack, oink. She would think of Rachel when she did this and how she would respond to seeing actual animals, not pictures. She would probably cry and cringe with fear. Rachel was afraid of everything new and different, unlike her sister who treasured everything new and different.
Another of Abra’s achievements in college was learning to drive. Lots of people in Queens did not drive. They took subways or buses and for special occasions, cabs or private cars. Beth ha
d her own car in their junior year and taught Abra to drive in one easy lesson. Abra pored over the drivers’ manual, took the written test and, of course, passed with 100%. When she passed the behind-the-wheel test, she was deliriously happy. She hugged the bored tester who reacted as if he had been sexually attacked. Abra’s picture on her driver’s license was like her passport picture showing a widely smiling girl ready to see the world in a vehicle driven by her.
Over their four years together, Abra and Beth planned how they would have all the experiences necessary to become worldly women. Now they were seniors and still virgins. They couldn’t call themselves worldly women without having experienced sex. They both had dated but hadn’t found anyone that they really liked or that they wanted to remember as their first. They were determined to lose their virginity before graduating. Like everything else in their lives, they made careful plans. They investigated going on the pill or getting a diaphragm or using a condom or using all three. They were careful about their lives and wanted to be sure that they were protected from pregnancy and disease. They were eager for sex, but cautious sex.
Fate looked kindly on Beth’s quest for her first sexual experience. She met Tom Newland who would become the love of her life as well as her first and only sex partner. Tom had graduated from a college in Pennsylvania the year before and was now a graduate student at UVA where he was getting a master’s degree and state licensure to teach history. He was teaching a freshman history class at Jackson and working as a waiter in a newly opened pizza parlor. Beth and Abra went to try out the pizza and they found Tom. He was built like the wrestler he had been in high school and college. He looked a bit like Beth because he, too, had thick dark blond hair and lots of freckles. They could have passed for siblings, maybe that’s why they were immediately attracted to each other. As he served them their pizza and drinks, he flirted with Beth and before they left, Beth agreed to see Tom the following night. After a movie, he took Beth back to his apartment and she had her first sexual experience. In the past she had worried about whether to kiss a guy on the first date, and now she had sex on her first date. Within a week, Beth was madly in love with Tom. She unreservedly extolled the virtues of sex, vividly describing every aspect from Tom removing her clothes to her climaxes. Abra was surprised at her reaction. She was envious. She wanted a fairy tale experience like Beth’s. For the first time in her college life she wanted something she couldn’t get by planning.
Abra looked at each guy with a different motive. Would he be right as her first? A guy in her psych of personality class was interesting, but she liked his mind, not his body. He was a scarecrow and even though his penis might be the right size, the rest of him was too skeletal. Another guy she ran with had a great body, but was as dumb as a post. He didn’t have to make intelligent conversation, but she still she wanted her first to be someone with an IQ over 100. She was worried that she was being too choosy and with the end of the school year fast approaching, she would miss this one major life experience. She didn’t want to graduate as a 22 year old virgin.
Tom told the girls about a guy in his grad program who Abra might like. He also knew of Beth and Abra’s plan to lose their virginity before graduation. Although Abra didn’t like blind dates, she was eager to meet this guy because he might be someone as good as Tom. Rick Carbona from New Jersey turned out to be quite unlike Tom. He was working on a doctorate in history at UVA and was teaching two history classes at Jackson. Abra thought he was okay looking – dark haired, dark skinned, nice features, and muscular build. Two problems – he was short, probably two or three inches shorter than she and from what she could see of his arms and chest where his shirt collar opened, he was covered with thick black body hair. Even his fingers were hairy. She found all that hairiness ape-like.
The four of them went to a beer joint to hear a rock band. Abra didn’t pay attention to the band. They could have been playing Beethoven for all she knew. Abra was totally focused on Rick even when she wasn’t talking to him or looking at him. At the end of the evening, Rick asked Abra out for the following Saturday night. All week, she and Beth talked about whether he would be the one.
Abra was obsessed with what she would wear Saturday night and how she would react to what he might do. Should she cooperate if he took off her clothes? Should she initiate sex if he didn’t? At Victoria’s Secret, she bought a sexy red lace bra and matching bikini pants, very different from her usual white cotton underwear. As she looked at her textbooks, she fantasized scenarios of passionate love making on a sumptuous bed covered with satin sheets with Rick gently removing her beautiful new underwear and commenting, “This bra and panties are gorgeous, just like you.” In her fantasies, Rick was hairless.
At last, Saturday night arrived. Abra met Rick in the lobby of her dorm. Her hands were dripping with sweat. She was glad he didn’t touch her. He had a VW Beetle that looked like it was new in 1960. He was polite and opened the car door for her. What a great start. They went to Charlottesville where he lived because there was a new restaurant he wanted to try. He said he was a maven on Italian cooking and he wanted to evaluate it. She knew that the real reason they were going to Charlottesville was to be near his apartment. Their dinner at the restaurant was enjoyable. The food was good and Rick was an excellent conversationalist with a biting sense of humor. As they left the restaurant, he said, “Now to my place for dessert.” He leered at her and she knew what dessert he was planning. She felt as if she were about to bungee jump off a bridge. There was no turning back.
His apartment was squalid, like that of most grad students. He lived in two rooms in a divided house with multiple apartments. No sumptuous bed with satin sheets – just an unmade single bed pushed against a wall and dirty clothes piled on the floor. As soon as they entered the apartment, he pulled Abra to the sofa and said, “Let’s get down to business. Your first time and I’ll make it great for you. You’ll always remember it.”
“How did you know it’s my first time?”
“You announced it to Tom and he told me.”
He kissed her deeply with his tongue touching her tonsils. Then he pulled her purple polo up and massaged her breasts. Before she could stop him, he had her bra pulled up above her breasts. He hadn’t even looked at her lacy new purchase. He was moving so fast. It was as if he had six hands. She was sexually aroused and didn’t want him to stop, but she didn’t want this to go too fast. She wanted it to be leisurely and romantic and memorable. Before she knew it, he had pulled down her khakis and her lacy bikinis. He spread her legs wide and forced himself into her. With a few deep lunges into her unexplored vagina, he came. Abra looked down and saw that she had bled on his couch. “Geez, I’m sorry. Look what I did to your couch.”
Laughing, he said “This old piece of shit. It’s been screwed on hundreds of times and has the proof permanently embedded in the material.”
She put her clothes back in order and went to the bathroom to wash herself using tissues since there was no washcloth that she could see. It took half a box before the blood was gone. There was only one dirty towel to dry herself. She cringed at the thought of what else had been dried with this rag. She used more tissues to dry herself.
When she got back out, she saw that Rick was asleep in bed. She sat on the couch, far from the bloody remains of her virginity. She was sweaty and disoriented. This was not what she expected. This was a horrible experience. She didn’t know what to make of the feelings in her vagina. She felt throbbing pain, but also a tingling that wouldn’t stop. She cried silently and dozed off. Sometime later, Rick was pulling her off the couch. “Come on to bed. It’s more comfortable.” He guided her to the bed and said, “Take off your clothes.” She obeyed hoping that this time would be better. He got in bed and immediately got on top of her. With minimal foreplay, he entered her and pumped up and down for what seemed like hours while he grunted. He never looked at her or talked to her. As he was doing this, she looked at him and thought she was coupling with
an ape. Finally he came. Then he asked, “Wanna sleep over or go back to Linz?”
Without hesitation, Abra answered, “Let’s go back.” She needed to get away from him. On the way back he chatted about school and movies while Abra stared out into the darkness wondering what she had done. She didn’t feel shame. She felt raging anger at herself for essentially advertising that she was ready for sex with anyone willing and able. Her first sexual encounter was nothing like she dreamed of. It was impersonal, grungy, and mechanical.
When they got to the dorm, he said, “Can I see you next Saturday? I think we could really be good together. It gets better with practice. You’ll learn to like it.”
Abra told him to call her later in the week, knowing that she never wanted to see him again. When she got to her room, Beth was asleep, but got up as soon as she heard Abra enter. “Tell me all about it. I can’t wait to hear what happened.”
“I need to take a long bath first. Just let me say that I did not have an evening with satin sheets.”
After a long soak in the tub with repeated washings of her vagina, followed by a shower where she washed her hair twice, she put on clean white, cotton underpants and pajamas. She climbed into bed and said, “He acted like an ape and I felt like an animal just screwing and being screwed. Beth, I’m hoping that someday sex will be great, but it has to be with someone I like and not just for the sake of sex. That’s not me. Maybe, I shouldn’t have been so eager to have every experience before graduating. But now I am a well educated woman who has traveled abroad and who has had sex, albeit not good sex, but sex. I’ll tell you the sordid details tomorrow.” With that, Abra fell into a deep sleep with no romantic dreams.
Her senior year brought plans for grad school. She was ranked third in the senior class and had high GRE scores so she had no difficulty getting money for grad school. Originally, Beth and Abra were going to go to grad school together. Now Beth was tied to Tom who got a job teaching high school history outside of Richmond. Beth decided to go to VCU in Richmond so she and Tom could live together until they saved enough money to marry.
Abra decided to go to grad school at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She had been offered a graduate assistantship that would pay her tuition plus living expenses. She also liked the idea of USC because it was farther from Queens than Virginia. When she went down to meet the faculty and her advisor, she also met Judy Hurley, another new grad student, who asked to room with her. She knew that she would never find another Beth, but Judy seemed friendly and easy going. The fact that she was black was going to give Abra some experiences in cultural diversity which she sorely needed. Her experience with various cultures was limited to New York Jews and Christian Virginians.
During her senior year, Abra legally changed her last name from Ginzberg to Berg. This was her way of officially becoming another person. She changed her school records to Berg and all of her paperwork for grad school was in the name of Berg. She got a new passport with the name Berg even though she wasn’t planning on traveling abroad. When she got to South Carolina, she got a driver’s license with the name Abra Berg. Now she was completely Abra Berg.
Graduation was a bittersweet day for Abra. She didn’t want her life at Jackson with Beth to end, but at the same time she was ready to move on to the next phase of her life. Miss Benjamin came for the weekend festivities. She attended the honors banquet and the graduation ceremony as Abra’s family.
After the graduation ceremony, Beth, Tom, Beth’s family, Abra, Dr. Weaver, and Miss Benjamin went for lunch at the same steak house where they had eaten on August 22nd four years earlier. Miss Benjamin took endless pictures of Abra in her cap and gown and Abra with her arms around everyone else. Years later, Abra would look at these pictures and compare them to the pictures of herself on her first day at Jackson. To her, they were before- and after-pictures. The before-pictures showed her hopeful anticipation at what awaited her at Jackson, and the after-pictures showed her happiness at the person she had created. Others would look at the pictures and only see that Abra wore more makeup and more stylish clothes, but they wouldn’t see the real changes inside. The before-pictures showed a girl with four people hovering over her shoulder trying to grab her. The after-pictures showed nothing behind the girl. She was free. She wanted to always remember this day that capped the happiest four years of her life. She wanted to remember the look of complete fulfillment on her face. She had achieved everything she had dreamed of and even things she couldn’t have imagined. Unimaginable to Abra Ginzberg of Queens.
Arm in arm, Abra and Beth walked along the quad for the last time. They talked about how their lives would be forever intertwined. Abra told Beth that she would love her for the rest of her life and would even die for her. Beth laughed and knew that she would because she, too, would die for Abra. Beth said “We were soooo lucky to have such happiness. Nothing went wrong in our lives these last four years, well except for your first sexual experience which was a fiasco. Now we have to expect things to change. As you know better than anybody, life isn’t only good things. It’s also ugly and sad things. We’ll have sickness or death or things go wrong. But I hope we’ll always be there for each other whatever happens.” And they were.