Sex Raises its Ugly Head in the 1950s

My mother, my own very mother, I am telling you, a pinky swear, gave me, when I was just past the age of bar mitzvah, a pack of dirty playing cards.  So we are talking 1953 or 1954.  French playing cards, they were called. With pictures in colour of naked ladies, you could see their bosoms entirely visible, but otherwise they were covered up so no one could stare.  A normal proper person has to ask: Why did she do this?  Is this a normal or a proper thing for a Yiddisha moma to do?  So obviously an explication is entirely in order.  But because we are here and now sixty years later on the other side of the world and just about everybody who was involved in this story are gone to the other world, what is here presented has to be a little bit not true. Only if they still alive and thus could read, and when that is so the narrator (who else but yours truly) would have a different kind of attitude and say things in a more serious kind of a way.  But you know all this already, do I have to tell you every time we meet here furtively between the lines?

Nu, so this is what happened:  She said, and I swear with another big wet pinky swear, Look.  It is natural.  They all have two.  You find me a girl with three, not only will I come look with you, but I will keep her in the house for you.  She actually said this.  Well, who knows what means “happened” in such a circumstance or in such a memory of such a circumstance?  Even more, when you come to think of it, and who wouldn’t? what does “actually”?  You see what problems any simple statements can be when you put them down with a pen, look at them again, and then again a month, a year or a decade later, and especially when your original memory has wandered off into other things or just maybe wandered off.

Or, if you are becoming a little picky or nervous, maybe not quite in those exact words, but my mother did give me such a pack of playing cards you can buy, if you are grown up and have money, in shops on the Boardwalk in Coney Island.  After the first little shock, when I looked at them day after day, or maybe better night after night, something about the faces of these naked girls changed.  They stopped being just strangers and models and became like girls I knew, and they didn’t stare out with blank eyes or try to imitate a come-hither look like in fancy expensive magazines started to show in a few years after that, like with playboy’s girl of the month or penthouse females or whatever they were called.  They looked embarrassed.  They seemed to appeal for me to help them out of their situation, like maybe it would be  possible for me to hand them from a chair nearby their brassiere or a sweater they had had to take off in front of some old man who was the photographer paying them a little money they needed to bring home.  I wanted to help, but you think I could take my eyes off what I saw, so it was embarrassing to me.  The relationship was shocking really because it also seemed to me that my mother was watching what I did and she wanted me to see only nice girls and for me to learn what they had so that when I started to go out on dates someday it would not be a big temptation to do something naughty.

At first, as said above, I was overwhelmed, but not as much as you might think, because this was, nu, my mother and she did such things all the time.  Who else in the world goes into crazy little tourist knickknack shops and comes out with furry toilet-seat covers or buys funny hats no one would be caught dead wearing in public?  My father had no control over her.  Moreover, she wanted me to learn about sex in an adult and comical way, not filthy and diseased on the street, so she told her best friend, while I was standing there next to her waiting for the money so I could run down to Thirteenth Avenue I should buy her more cigarettes.  If there were other reasons, how could I know?

Not then, at least, obviously, but it came more understanding as the years passed.  On the one hand, while those poor  girls in the pictures became not only more familiar, so that it was not such a big deal to see them without clothes over the top parts of their bodies, but rather felt sorry for them, as they were embarrassed and a little bit chilly too, they also became younger and gradually I was older than they were, and because a little bit mature, I could see that they didn’t want to be where they were, nor, finally I realized, did they want me to be looking at them.  Insofar as the girls—or let me say one or two, and the others one by one I threw away because I could start to see smirks and other bad looks in their faces, and thought they were not embarrassed at all to be there, and were staring at me and chastising me for not doing to myself what the nature of those dirty cards was supposed to make you do, and so why they were paid in the first place—were now my friends, I could discuss with them the problem of why my mother bought them for me to see. 

The little one with the long dark braids used to say to me, You know what? your mother wishes she could be young again and be with boys like you, and have a chance to grow up properly and happily, and she needs you to see and do things on her behalf.  The other one, somewhat plumpish and with blond bangs almost covering her eyes and always turning away a little, furtively—a word it would never come into my mind then—she said: Your mother wants you to be a man and go into life without fear of girls or sex, that’s what she wants.  She had two brothers and she saw what problems they had, one getting a girl into trouble and having to get married too early, and the other one, so shy he ran away to the navy and no one has heard of him since December 1941.  You should look at me and know what I have, not to be afraid.  I am only sorry that other boys look at my body in a different way.  They do bad things to themselves and later they will probably do rough things to the girls they know.  I wish you and I could be alone together.  Then you wouldn’t have to stare at night under the blankets with a flashlight. 

The next day, I tore up the photograph of the girl with braids and only kept the card of the plumpish one whose eyes turned away slightly.  Though I kept this second picture, the last one left of the pack, for a few more years, I hardly ever took it out of the drawer where it lived.  I knew what she looked like, so I didn’t want to risk any of my friends accidentally looking at her and having dirty thoughts in his head. 

None of this was discussed with my mother, and, of course, she never spoke to me after the first day when she gave me the French cards.  She may have forgotten that she gave those pictures of topless young women to me or recalled it only as a birthday joke.  She was too busy being sick.

I never mentioned the cards to her also because I was not sure what she might ask me about my feelings or my search for confirmation of what they displayed on real girls I started to go out with—on dates that she arranged with their mothers.  Because these early social encounters with girls of my age were carefully negotiated between the two mothers and occasionally, as I soon learned, with the reluctant agreement of the girls themselves, I avoided ever doing with or saying to the dates that would be reported back to both the mothers.  This meant there was never a second date.  So far as I could tell, the young daughters of my mother’s friends agreed to go out with me as a way of staving off worse punishments from their family, my reputation for being “safe” assuring these sophisticated females that the evening out would provide no complications once they had performed their duty and thus displayed a degree of obedience to the family involved; much later too I discovered that most of these girls had been going out with more dangerous young men—like from college or in the army—and they therefore had to regain their parents’ trust before being allowed to meet other boys (or rather “young men”) who would be more suitable. 

My reputation for a virtually complete lack in social skills also ensured that none of these young women—for they seemed that way to me, being more poised and knowledgeable about the protocols of dating than I ever mastered—quite glad that I made no further attempt to see them, though my mother probably made some inquiries in this regard.  She thought a large number of dates with many different girls would give me some experience for later years. 

Frankly, though many of these girls were pleasant to look at, or even attractive to me, our time together was rather a bore.  I simply didn’t know what to do.  I would take a subway to the place the young woman lived, knocked on the door of her apartment, greeted her mother and occasionally shook hands with father, then walked out with my date.  We went to the movies and then left. Sometimes, if the address was really far away, more than an hour on the train, it would be arranged—by you know who!—for us to meet outside the movie theatre, we would enter, sit down, watch the film, and, that being over, the two of us would walk out as though we knew each other, and I would accompany the girl to her train station, after which I went home by myself too.  The very minimum of words was used the whole evening, all three or four hours that were involved. 

Movies always?  I could think of nowhere else to go.  Perhaps, to be honest again, some other thoughts entered my mind, and it was interesting to look at the person seated across from me or next to me in the subway car, and it was pleasant to sit really close to a girl in the darkened theatre for a few hours. It was clear to me all along that whoever she was she really had no interest in conversing or even hearing anything I had to say about my interests and activities, although from time to time one of these girls would almost inadvertently try to make small talk.  She was   relieved to revert to silence as soon as possible.  My gauche remarks were thus avoided, just as any awkward closeness was minimized. 

My mother always looked disappointed when she welcomed me home and began to quiz me on where we went, what we did, what we said to each other, and did I want to see the girl again; and I had nothing to say.  As soon as possible, I went to my room, preparing to erase the evening from my mind.  Sometimes, though, a few small images and memories of slight pressures of body on body lingered, and the only way to relieve the feelings of tension was either to close my eyes and reproduce the girl on the playing card’s face and also her body and describe to her what I had done, or rather not done, and to have her softly explain what should have been said and done.  Not that she could provide me with any practical advice.  But at least I could imagine a conversation of sorts with another person and satisfy some questions about what the female anatomy looked like and why it was so mysteriously and appealing.  On certain occasions, I would dig around and find the card and look at it for a while.  Then came sleep and oblivion.  Or not.  I then wished I had not thrown out all the other playing cards in the deck because it seemed necessary to try to reproduce the photographs on the remaining fifty-one and my memory was not of the best.

Not too many years later and in another country I heard a young university student make a public talk to apologize for his having appropriated the images of women he had seen in the street or in other places to use for his own private fantasies at night.  He spoke about the demeaning power of the male gaze, the lack of respect shown to females even if his fantasies were never acted out or his dominating power put into practice in day-to-day activities.  For a moment, what he said took me up short, and it made me feel ashamed to have kept the one playing card for so many years and the memory of other cards as a reserve stock of images. Such a sense did not last more than a second.

 By then, that time being more thirty years after the adolescent adventures discussed above, when I was already a husband and a father of daughters, I found this young man’s discourse pathetic and ridiculous.  He was saying he was sorry for being a boy growing up into sexual thoughts and so of being interested, fascinated and mystified by the opposite sex.  He never said insulting words, did inappropriate acts or condoned them in others.  When I looked around the room to see how the other students were reacting, there was neither a snigger, nor a snort, nor a guffaw.  Both males and females in the room sat there silently, nodding their heads in agreement, and after wards gave him a large applause, and rushed up to shake his hand when his speech was done.  All I could do was to pity the whole pack of them.  If only their mothers had thought of giving them a gift of French cards and making the bet that he would never find a girl with three breasts.