A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska Page B

sheik—carried to his horse, put on the saddle right in front of the sheik, and transported far into the desert. All the way she can hear the pounding of his heart and feel his burnoose pressing into her neck and shoulders. And when they get there—to the sheik’s silken tent—he carries her not to his tent, but to her very own tent, from which there is no escape being that it is the desert and all. Then, one night he comes into the tent, her tent. “Why have you brought me here?” Lady Diana demands. And the sheik replies, “Are you not woman enough to know?” He kneels down and covers her mouth with kisses. She resists, her little fists flailing futilely against his brawny chest about to become nude. Finally, there is nothing for it but to succumb to his superior strength and good looks, so succumb she does. They do it, she likes it, and we’re not even halfway through the book!
    No wonder Miss Levi didn’t want me reading this stuff. She undoubtedly understood that Scarlett and Janice and Lady Diana were, in fact, raped, that these novels showed women who enjoyed going limp, having it done to them against their will; for, after all, what nice girl would do it willingly? That’s what I learned, and although Miss Levi tried her best to keep me in the dark, she probably knew, too, that sex education begins at home.
    In real life, my best friend’s father was fire chief and roughly handsome. Her mother was delicately beautiful and played the violin. Life imitates art, don’t you think?
    So I went about my mother’s business once I got to college, though I was dreadfully confused about what that business was. Still, the safe road is the high road. A few kisses, but more than that—no, no matter what Simon wanted. I subdued him, and me along with him. In fact, if I had been able to put two and two together, Simon, at six feet four inches and oh so fond of me, was the embodiment of all those fictional heroes. However, I was my mother’s daughter, I was pretty sure, and I chose not to put anything together.
    THESE WERE the fabulous fifties. In 1955 the pill was yet to be invented,
Roe
v.
Wade
was eighteen years away, but I was a twenty-two-year-old virgin living in San Francisco. (“I suppose you couldn’t find anywhere farther away,” my mother remarked acidly.) I fell in love.
    I did not own a diaphragm. I had never heard of Planned Parenthood. And Jack made me come for the first time in my life, and I wanted him to do it again and again. And I loved him inside of me and I made myself not think about wanting this and him. And I hated condoms, which he wore most of the time; they were yucky, especially with all that gunk in them afterward. I had failed miserably at subduing his animal passions and, worse, I had to admit to having some of my own. I was on my way to hell. There was only one answer: we would marry.
    Jack taught me oral sex. Not that he did it on me. Me going down on him was what he taught. It was our form of birth control. It was better for him than having to pull out of me before he came. I loved giving him pleasure. I got right to it when I felt his insistent hand on the top of my head and listened to him groan as I swallowed his sperm, which I began to do regularly, after I forgot the Kleenex one night. For the first time in my life, I was powerful. Of course, I also knew I was a slut. So I didn’t think about it. And I didn’t think about what it might feel like if Jack reciprocated on me. I knew the words
blow job.
I knew boys got them. I had never heard of girls getting them, so they didn’t because there was no such thing. I was Jack’s to command. But I was the Keeper of the Flame.
    In between times of lovemaking, and sometimes during, Jack got drunk. Sometimes he drank himself sick and threw up, more than once all over me, all over my sheets and pillow, and, as he leaned over the bed, into his shoes. This ought to