Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

to go away to school; I’m happy where I am”)—had, on her own, entered me at the Madeira School, located in Greenway, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Madeira was reputed to be very strict and academically tough; it also satisfied certain social and geographical requisites. (“Lucky you to be in Virginia, my home state!”)

Greenwich had come to fit me comfortably. I’d broken it in, maybe outgrown it. Crucial events had taken place under its sheltering sky. My first evening dress, properly virginal—white organdy, ruffled, off-the-shoulder—followed by many other evening dresses, graduating to a strapless tulle, nipped in above by a painful waist cincher that left its hook marks on my flesh and a bone-stiffened bra that jabbed into the tender spot between my breasts, with its skirt belled out below by a set of crinolines modishly collected like silver bracelets. It was a time when countless orchid corsages were left to shrivel in the icebox.

Then there were my first stockings, sheer and seamed, and black suède heels—now, that had been some fight! Mother forbade them both until everyone else in the eighth grade had been sporting them for a year. She violently disapproved of all those emblems of budding eroticism. “You won’t have anything to look forward to when you grow up,” she’d remonstrate. “You’ll become hardened and blasé. I didn’t wear high heels till I was seventeen. And as for bras, it’s pointless for me to waste money on a bra if you have nothing to fill it with.” Consequently, my first bra was also the last bra to make an appearance in my class. I also had my first menstrual period, for which the fashionable euphemism at school was “falling off the roof.” In those days we had euphemisms for anything remotely sexual.

My first kiss prompted another skirmish with Mother, when, after a Saturday-night party at Jackie Hekma’s that started innocently with Ping-Pong and ended in the dark with a lot of rubbery, fumbling, spin-the-bottle-group embraces, I charged into the living room where Mother and Kenneth were playing bridge with friends to give them the good news of it. “I guess the time has come to explain promiscuity to you,” said Mother ominously, squelching my enthusiasm.

Another problem was leaving all my romances behind. I fell in love every other week with someone new. And, of course, I liked to keep the discards hanging around. Ken Towe was my first older man. He drove a blue Ford convertible, and after I caught his eye, he used to speed up and down Clapboard Ridge Road, buzzing our house. One afternoon, I repaid his attentions by lining up Bridget, Bill, Susan Terbell, and myself on the side of the road with glasses of water snatched from the swimming pool. As he turned the car around and came toward us for the third time at fifty miles an hour, I gave a signal and we all threw our water at him. Mine hit his windshield and the blue Ford crashed into the traffic island at the bottom of our hill. Ken was furious; he had a broken nose and the steering wheel looked like an accordion. He yanked it off and threw it in the back seat. Mother came storming down the hill and, to my great mortification, Johnny Gladstone strolled toward the wreckage with a pipe between his teeth. Just out of college, and recently returned from a six-month research project in the Brazilian jungles (on a more fortunate occasion, he’d shown me his brace of pistols), Johnny was truly an older man, and this incident seemed to place him unequivocally beyond my reach. He calmly wiped the blood off Ken’s face while Mother raced back for our car; then we hustled Ken off to the hospital emergency room. For some reason, Ken’s ardor was in no way diminished, and he appeared at our house a few hours later, nose heavily bandaged, to escort me to a party. He was as smitten with Mother as with me—as were all my beaus, not surprisingly, since Mother could charm anyone, male or female, when she chose to—and long after he and I went our separate ways, he would come by to pay her a visit (and to sample Elizabeth’s cooking).

Bridget regarded my romantic adventures with disdain. She claimed that my flirtatiousness was a bad habit and that it lacked finesse. Mother’s, she admitted, at least had finesse. Bridget stayed away from boys, yet it was Bridget who had the courage to buck Mother’s ban on leg-shaving. I found her in the bathroom scraping off blond fuzz with soap and a razor. “It’s my body,” she said airily, dotting her blood-specked shins with pieces of toilet paper. “I’ll bet she doesn’t even notice.” But she did. Mother was outraged.

“Bridget Hayward,” she began, building to hurricane force, “come here. Let me see your legs. My God, you’ve done it, you’ve disobeyed me and ruined your legs! How many times have I told you—from now on until you die, you will have coarse black hair sprouting all over your shins! I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it!” But Bridget never blanched. It was a landmark victory.

The fear of pregnancy was enough to effectively back up the code of sexual behavior our mothers prescribed for us. Heavy petting at the local drive-in theatre, or “passion pit” (another of Mother’s bans), was considered racy. A far greater peril to our health and welfare was alcohol. I was beginning to run around with an older crowd, and Mother was justifiably concerned. More than once she reprimanded one or another of my suitors for carrying a bottle in his car. Once, spotting from her upstairs bathroom window young Scot Pierson transferring a case of gin from his car to another, she notified him at the top of her voice that he was never again to set foot on her property. Her dictums were not only stricter but more purposefully enforced than those of other parents, which was always a