Kerry Cohen: Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity

On Saturday, the three of us get ready at my house.

“Your hair looks good like that,” Ashley says after I use the curling iron.

“Those boys aren’t going to know what hit them.” Liz leans into the mirror, her mouth open as she applies eyeliner. My mother is out with friends, so we are in her bathroom cabinet with her mascara and lipstick and eye shadow.

“We’re smokin’,” I say, laughing, following Liz’s lead. Ashley laughs too.

“Move over, Christie Brinkley,” she says.

“Here.” Liz bends past me to wipe Ashley’s eye. “Your eye shadow’s a little smudgy.”

My mother owns tons of makeup: Chanel mascara and eye pencils, Yves Saint Laurent and Estée Lauder lipstick, the tubes lined up in rows like little soldiers. No Bonne Bell or Maybelline here. Liz and Ashley are excited that they get to try such expensive brands. There are other things too—tools for tweezing and bleaching and cleansing. So much I don’t know about yet when it comes to being a woman. Plenty of mornings I sat on the closed toilet seat and watched my mother stand at this mirror, cleaning, removing, and applying. It struck me as a lot of work to become presentable, but I liked the busyness of it. I liked the idea that I could use these items and become something better than I was. Now it is me at the mirror, applying blush, sucking in my cheeks like I saw her do so many times. We are giggly as we curl our hair and spray it so it feathers. All three of us wear miniskirts and jean jackets. My skirt is denim, and Liz’s and Ashley’s are black jersey. Liz ties her shirt into a knot so it shows off her stomach. She shows me how to make mine do the same. She does Ashley’s, too, but Ashley undoes hers, uncomfortable showing so much skin.

We catch the 7:25 bus, which takes us onto Route 9. At the George Washington Bridge we take another bus to the Port Authority at 175th. From there we walk down the long, graffiti-filled corridor to the C train, which we take to West 86th Street. By the time we get to Milo’s, it is ten o’clock. The streets are busy with Manhattan nightlife. Girls like us, but much older, walk along Columbus Avenue with lit cigarettes and duck into bars. Men laugh loudly. A couple kisses passionately against a building wall, the man’s hand tucked up under the woman’s shirt. My friends and I are excited. We are a part of this night, this passion, this potential for deep feeling.

Anything can happen, anything at all. We ride the elevator to Milo’s floor, our hearts fluttering in our chests. Milo answers the door, and my heart sinks. I imagined him as much cuter, a boy from the movies. Instead he is short and freckled, like me. In the living room, the boys are watching Eraserhead, that bizarre David Lynch film about a man who discovers he has fathered a mutant infant. We sit awkwardly on the couch, clutching our purses on our laps. I can’t follow the storyline at all. Instead, the strange images horrify me: the grotesque baby, the woman with swollen cheeks. Eventually, we begin to couple up. Ashley goes off with Geoff, Liz with Dylan, and Milo is left with me. I am used to this, being the one not chosen. It’s not that I’m not pretty in my own way. I’m just not notable. A year earlier the boys in my classroom divided us girls into three categories: love, like, and hate. They spent their free reading time huddled around a table and decided which category each of us belonged to. We girls sat at our desks, trying our hardest to read, but really we were all listening hard for our names to come up. Liz, who has blond hair and unfreckled, pale skin was put in the “love” column. When the boys agreed she should be listed there, we all nodded to ourselves. It was no surprise. One sad, awkward girl, a girl who was so tall all the crotches of her tights peeked out below jumpers that were too short, was sequestered to “hate,” which again was no surprise. Silently, I hoped they would shock everyone and put me under “love,” like Liz. But they didn’t. I was clumped with everyone else under “like.” Unexceptional and invisible. Not meant to be loved. Milo takes my hand and we climb the stairs to his small, cluttered bedroom. He presses Play on his tape player, and the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden” fills the room. We sit on his bed and, though I have no attraction for him at all, I allow him to kiss me. His tongue is clumsy and unpleasant in my mouth. It is my first kiss, and it isn’t at all what I expected. But I stay with it, eager for the experience. He pushes up my shirt and touches my tiny, sensitive nipple with two fingers. Just as he pushes me down on the bed, just as I feel the strange pressure against my leg of his erection through his jeans, there’s a knock at the door. I feel a vague relief at being stopped. Milo, though, frustrated at the interruption, opens the door in a huff.

Liz and Ashley stand there, jean jackets on.

“What the fuck?” Milo says.

“We’re going.” Liz looks at me, ignoring him. Then, to him,

“Your friend’s an asshole.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“Ashley told Geoff no, but he kept pushing.”

I look at Ashley who stands beside Liz, her jaw tight. She is clearly upset.

“He wanted to do more than kiss,” she says. I frown, hoping Milo won’t say anything about the fact that I just allowed him to put his hands on my breasts. Instead he says, “Why don’t you stay and they can go?”

I smile at him appreciatively, but when I look back at my friends, Liz is scowling. “I can’t,” I say. “But thanks.”

“Fine,” Milo says. I find my jacket and we go to the door. I wait for him to say something as we leave, like he wants to see me again or wants my number. But he just slams the door after us.

“Fuck you,” Liz says as we make our way down the hall. “He was always an asshole. I don’t know what I was thinking.” Ashley and I look at each other and laugh, relieved that it’s just the three of us again.

By the time we are outside, it is one thirty a.m. The streets are still lively, but the subway is deserted. Back at the Port Authority, we are conspicuously out of place at this time of night. The buses that travel across the bridge back into New Jersey only come every two hours, so we hang out in the dirty, fluorescent-lit terminal, waiting amid the drug-hungry beggars and the homeless who had found shelter for the night.

Eventually the bus does come, and we ride over the bridge and back toward my house, trying to stay awake. At the top of Closter Dock Road, though, when there is nobody left on the bus but us, the bus stops and the doors exhale open. “Everyone out,” the driver says. We sit up, confused. We’re going to Harrington Park. But when I ask, the driver informs us that after midnight this is as far as he goes. We try pleading with him to take us anyway, just this once, but he refuses, probably thinking we shouldn’t be out there in the first place, three young girls all alone.

So we step down off the bus, and the doors sigh closed. We stand by the side of the road. The air is cool, the night silent. No laughing, no made-up women, no couples and passionate kisses. Just the soft rustling of the leaves as a breeze lifts them. We’re ten miles from my house. Ashley starts crying. Liz and I look at each other, trying to determine what to do. Liz sees it first: a few hundred feet down the way is a gas station with the sign open 24 hours. We whoop and run toward it, purses banging against our hips. We walk into the office where there are two young men smoking and playing cards. Their eyes light up as we walk in—one, two, three girls, all dressed up in miniskirts. The desk where they sit is metal with a fake wood top. A small, grainy, black-and-white television murmurs on the desk. They clearly weren’t expecting anything like this tonight.