So I didn’t go to a school where there were boys, let alone fraternity pins. But I had relations with seven boys during my freshman year.
PEGGY: Eight.
KAY: No, it was seven, wasn’t it? Maybe it was eight. Why the hell should you remember if I don’t?
JERRY: Because she loves you, darling.
KAY: Sweet. The point is that once I started I didn’t know how to stop. I really was a slut. The classic tramp pattern. I felt very out of it socially. My group in high school was very snobby, the cream of the social order there, and all of a sudden I was with all of these private school people and I was snob enough to care about it at the time. I also decided I was pretty ignorant and mousy compared to all these polished preppie cunts. Typical low-estimate-of-self shit. Typical reaction formation. So of course I fucked around, and of course I didn’t enjoy it much, and this convinced me I was a lousy lay, which I very likely was.
JERRY: How you’ve changed!
KAY: And I got knocked up. Inevitably I got knocked up. And had an abortion, and at least I had the sense to do that right. No knitting needles routine. A real live doctor in a clean office, a quick scrape and no postoperative complications, thank God. Is it proper to thank God for a successful abortion? I don’t see why not.
The abortion put me off sex. I hit the old books just in time to save myself from flunking out. I spent the summer at home and dated the same crowd of boys I had dated during high school. Most of them had gone to schools like Michigan and Northwestern and pledged fraternities.
I laid a couple of them. Two of them. One of them decided he was in love with me and tried to give me his pin. I told him I wasn’t that kind of a girl.
When I went back to school and Peggy and I started rooming together, neither of us were particularly active socially. I had liked her well enough all along, but now we began to get really close. We talked quite a bit about men. Told each other what we had done sexually. Heterosexually, that is. She never said anything about fun and games at prep school.
Nor did it occur to me to ask, and I had nothing to report in that area myself. I was a complete innocent on the subject. If I ever had any subliminal urgings in that direction they were too subliminal ever to let me know about them. I suppose there were girls in my high school who had crushes on the gym teacher. That’s the usual pattern, isn’t it? And I suppose the gym teacher must have been a dyke. I suppose all lady gym teachers are dykes, whether they know it or not.
So here we were, the brainless tramp from the Midwest and the sexy two-way preppie, rooming together and spending more and more of our time with just each other for company, and discussing sex all the time, and telling each other how men were really a drag. And admiring each other’s bodies — I wished I were thin and long and lean and all like Miss Sophisticate here, and she had always wished she was like me, with a pair of tits that could qualify her as a stand-in for Elsie the Cow.
I think if Peggy had been as innocent in these matters as I was, we still would have wound up in bed together, because all the conditions were certainly right for it. All systems go, you know. But to make things easier she had been down this street before, and she did me the supreme favor of turning me out.
PEGGY: Actually I had a pretty hard time for a while that Kay didn’t know about. This big moral conflict thing. Like should I or should I not seduce my roomie? I wanted to a whole long time before I got around to doing anything about it. Kay was the first girl at college that I had felt this way about. The girl I had originally planned to room with that year, we were close, but in a completely sexless way. I would now and then see girls in a class or walking across campus and would say to myself that So-and-so would probably be fun to ball, but with no idea at all of doing anything about this. Pure window shopping and nothing but.
Kay and I became extremely close, and at this time neither of us was at all close with anyone else. And I knew what she was going through, what a screwed-up sex life she had had during the past year, all the conflicts that had been messing her up. We would talk about all of these things. In addition I found her enormously attractive physically, which is something you shouldn’t find terribly hard to understand.
JERRY: Hear, hear!
PEGGY: I wasn’t doing anything with boys at the time. No interest. So all my impulses were directed toward Kay. I wanted more than anything to make love to her, but I had to keep cool about the whole thing because the last thing I wanted to do was ruin the really beautiful relationship we had going.
KAY: I was just thinking. Suppose you never did make that pass.
PEGGY: Oh, it had to happen sooner or later.
KAY: Look what we might have missed.
PEGGY: I don’t even want to think about it.
The night it happened, Kay went out on a date with some yoyo from Williams. She had never met him but someone fixed her up and she wanted to turn the date down but decided the hell with it, she would go. I studied for a while and then just moped around the room wishing she hadn’t gone. I had a couple of drinks and put bluesy stuff on the record player and sat around feeling deliciously sorry for myself.
When Kay came back she was in tears. Literally. She was pretty much hysterical. Her clothes were a mess and her face was all runny with tears. She opened her coat and said, “Look at this, the son of a bitch came all over my dress!”
KAY: He really was a son of a bitch. He wrestled with me for half an hour trying to screw me, and I wouldn’t, and he slapped me and tried to stick it in my mouth, and I wouldn’t let him, and then he just pushed me down on the seat and got on top of me and jerked himself off all over the front of my dress, which I was wearing for, I think, the second time. “You can have it cleaned,” he said. “Listen, I’ll pay to have it cleaned. And it wouldn’t have gotten like that if you were just sensible in the first place. You’re not a virgin, for Christ’s sake, so why make a fuss about it? Why not just put out?”
He was a real charmer. I said something devastatingly witty like “Go fuck yourself” and went back to the room, crying every step of the way.
It was the way he treated me. It was just so disgusting, so cheap. I felt like a wastebasket.
PEGGY: I made her have a couple of drinks, and got her clothes off. We threw the dress out. She didn’t want to have it cleaned, didn’t want to look at it again. She went down the hall and showered until her skin was raw and then came back wrapped up in a terrycloth robe. A yellow robe. I can picture her in it so vividly even now, and I made us both fresh drinks, and we sat on her bed together and I knew tonight was the night. I just loved her so much at that moment and wanted to do something good for her.
KAY: She suddenly leaned over and kissed me. On the mouth. I just sat there feeling stupid. Not reacting at all. Then she put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me again. And I didn’t think. I just responded. I kissed back, and my mouth opened, and she put her tongue in my mouth—
JERRY: Oh, you sly devil, you.
KAY: —and something happened. I just felt totally warm and passionate, but passionate without being at all tense. I knew something weird was happening but I just locked out thoughts and concentrated completely on what was happening. I stayed with the present and didn’t get involved with the future at all. I wanted it to go on forever, the kissing. Her arms around me and our breasts pressing together and our tongues working. I just wanted it to go on forever.
We kissed for a very long time. It was such an unusual experience.
Then we came up for air, and I reached for my cigarettes and lit one, and Peggy took a drag on it and gave it back to me, and I took a drag and put it down on the edge of the dresser and looked at her, and our eyes locked. I couldn’t speak right away. Then I said, “Well, what happens now?”