Sugar in My Bowl Read Free Page B

pretending, and no real understanding to be had after the fact. It is a dream, another world, and then it’s over.
    With new-mom friends I whisper and giggle about sex, the possibility of sex, like nervous adolescent virgins: Have you done it yet? How was it? How did it feel? What’s it like ? Can I do it? Will it be okay? For me? For him??
    Sex is new, and scary, and different, and interesting, and strange. My body has been . . . reorganized. As the amazing Ina May Gaskin, godmother of the modern American midwifery movement, observes: “Men take it for granted that their sexual organs can greatly increase in size and then become small again without being ruined. . . . But obstetricians of earlier generations planted the idea (which is still widely held) that nature cheated women when it came to the tissues of the vagina and perineum (give it one good stretch and it’s done for, like a cheap girdle), and a lot of women have bought into the idea that their crotches are made of shoddy goods.”
    Still, the cliché about how clichés are clichés for good reason is true! This beautiful baby boy is bouncing in his bouncy chair and he fills my mind and heart and arms. Soon he’ll be hungry and this brief window for contemplating his conception and birth will be over for now. All I can think is: Love. Love, love, love.
    We literally made love, a term that until recently I did not like. We made, from pieces of our bodies, from the love we share, a new human being—a love—whose gummy crooked smile and clutching hands and soft skin and shining intent gaze and drunk old man chuckle daily redefine for us the very concept.
    I’m glad we’re connected in this way: flesh and blood, down to the bone. It’s more than married. It’s permanent: We were here, this new person is here. There was, is, and will always be a lot of love between us.
    My bounty doubled that night in Toledo. (Or Sevilla. Or Madrid. Or Teruel.)

Worst Sex
    Gail Collins
    W hen I was a sophomore in high school, a girl in my class got pregnant and had to get married. There were two things about this that puzzled me. One was that her boyfriend, a student at the Catholic boys high school next door to our Catholic girls high school, was the head of a club called “The Beadniks,” which was dedicated to finding hip ways to encourage young people to say the daily rosary. Saying the rosary involved fifty-six separate prayers, and even in 1962 we knew there was no hip way to do it.
    I decided that the whole make-the-rosary-cool idea had been hatched by a teacher without any student input whatsoever, and that the father-to-be had simply been dragooned into posing as president for the yearbook photo. That sort of thing happened all the time. A nun at my school once decided we needed a club called Students for Decent Styles, whose members would go into department stores, try on dresses with spaghetti straps, and then flounce out of the dressing room while announcing loudly that no decent girl would wear such immodest clothing. I never heard that anybody actually undertook such an expedition; in fact it seemed unlikely that Students for Decent Styles had ever had a meeting. Yet there it was in the yearbook, with a picture of a couple of alleged officers admiring a dress with a very high neckline.
    But the really inconceivable part of the Beadniks story was that a girl in my class had been having sex. I was possibly one of the least sophisticated teenagers in the United States outside of Amish country, and although I knew the mechanics of how babies were made, I had not yet really come around to imagining that people actually did that kind of thing voluntarily. (This was at about the same time that the entire universe was talking about the fact that Elizabeth Taylor had ditched her husband to run off with Richard Burton. I told myself that it must all have been a terrible misunderstanding.)
    I don’t think I was all that untypical, given the time (the prudish early