A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska

to wearing the same pleated skirt, the same very big cardigan sweater, day after day. In the privacy of the sorority house, I wore khaki pants and—you guessed it—a sweatshirt. What was wrong with this tall, good-looking, Jewish, funny, nice boy that he liked me? I hated me, and gradually Simon grew discouraged and we became friends.
    I had a lot of friends once word got around that I could hold my liquor. Peggy and I had pledged the same sorority—her grades got her in, my mother got me in—where she had pretty much given up dating in favor of studying. I had figured out how to get B’s with very little work. In my free time, I saw every movie shown in Ann Arbor between 1951 and the year of my graduation, 1955. Now recall: my hometown had one movie theater and not even that until I was in eighth grade. Ann Arbor had three, plus the tiny one in the basement of Angell Hall where some cineast showed weird movies like Kafka’s
The Meta
morphosis, one of the most powerful pieces of my education. So I didn’t go to Angell Hall often. I stayed commercial and fell passionately in love with Marlon Brando in that motorcycle movie,
The Wild One.
I was the small-town girl in that movie, the one Marlon Brando saves from the bad motorcycle guys who are closing in on her to do unspeakable acts. He saved me eight times, the number of times I saw the movie. I also never missed a hockey game in four years—the team gave me an autographed stick, I caught a puck—and in between, I squeezed in a few baseball and basketball games. My fall was devoted, of course, to football games. Swim meets were always fun. If I couldn’t sleep with boys, even kiss them, I could look at them. And catch their pucks. Ah, youth, ah, wilderness.
    Weekend nights Peggy and I and others unaccompanied by boys to boring parties went to the movies with each other and wondered what Ginny and Judy did on the nights they climbed through the window after curfew. I, a beacon of rectitude, was elected to Standards Board. Standards Board determined the fates of wrongdoers. I must have been at my ugliest and not only physically when I voted to put Judy on probation for Staying Out All Night at a fraternity party. I watched, no doubt with a smug smile on my face, when Judy did as ordered and unpinned herself. No Delta Gamma for girls who flaunted their sexuality. Judy’s breasts might be perky, but they didn’t wear the DG anchor. Mine did.
    My mother was a help here, too. We had never had a sex talk, really, like how one did it and why, if procreation wasn’t on one’s agenda. What advice she passed on to me had come while she and I changed the sheets on the beds once she determined I had learned to miter the corners properly. I was a senior in high school and the scandal in town was that Sally was pregnant. Sally was a senior, too, definitely a girl and a pretty one; she had a boyfriend named Alvin. They necked all over town. My mother decided to use Sally’s unfortunate behavior to direct me in my life at the big university, where the freshman class was five times bigger than the entire town in which I grew up.
    Pulling the bottom sheet tight, my mother said, “I hear Sally got herself in trouble.”
    I nodded. Sally was my friend.
    â€œWhenever a girl gets pregnant outside of marriage, it’s her fault.” She straightened up to her full height of five feet nine inches and looked across the bed at me.
    â€œIt is?”
    â€œIt is.” She continued, “Men have animal passions. It is the woman’s duty to subdue them. If she fails, she may very well become pregnant. And she has only herself to blame.”
    I believed her. I believed everything my mother told me. She would never lie. She would never be mistaken. She would never be wrong. She was my mother.
    On the other hand, I read books all the time. Not in English class, of course. In high school English class we had an anthology, so we