As a girl, I learned two things of supreme importance: that chastity was my best virtue and that when the time was right, offering it to a man would be my greatest accomplishment. This was the extent of sex education I received and as I reached puberty around the age of thirteen, I began to find it increasingly difficult to “hurry up and wait” at the same time.
I was vulnerable.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Fall of 1980
McKinley Junior High
Mr. Bittle thumbed his strawberry-blond mustache as he watched me walk toward him. Gray morning light through the paneled windows behind him cast his face in shadows as I approached. When I reached his large metal desk, he set both hands palms down and smiled. I smiled back, and then slid behind the wooden flip-top desk directly facing him. The blue of his eyes sparked and he twitched.
His twitch. Every twenty seconds or so, his head tilted abruptly to one side, his lips jerked in a smirk, and one eye squeezed shut in a harsh blink. Nobody cared about his twitch, though. We all made more fun of Mrs. Hoffstedler – AKA Heatmizer – and her bright orange hair than we did Mr. Bittle and his twitch.
He was a very popular teacher and I was thrilled to be his “favorite student.” I’d met him the year before when I’d joined a Peer Counseling program that he sponsored. Along with other interested students, we’d spent two afternoons each week in Group discussing home life, teachers, and friends. Before the year was out, Mr. Bittle and I had struck up a friendship of sorts, meeting after school in his classroom on the days we didn’t meet in Group. Over the summer, I’d thought about him often and that morning, the first day of eighth grade and well before the first-period bell would ring, I suppose I wasn’t surprised to see the metal door of room 41 propped open. But when I saw him behind his desk, as if waiting for me, my insides swirled.
Our eyes still intact, he lifted an envelope hidden beneath his hands. He set it at the edge of his desk, spun it around so the printing faced out, and nudged it toward me. “To Tammy,” it said. So strange to see my name like that, on a letter from a man. One hand returned to his face where he stroked his mustache with a thumb and forefinger. His eyes stayed on me.
I opened the envelope and removed a card. A cartoon bear held flowers with a caption that read, “Next time, don’t stay away so long. I’ve missed you.” Inside, it said:
My dear Tammy,
I am surprised by my feelings for you. I’ve thought of you all summer long. I’m so glad to see you again.
Love, Mr. Bittle
I smiled and put the card in my backpack, shrugged my narrow shoulders and shifted in the desk. I loved him, too, I thought. Love was not a word used in our family, ever really, and for that reason, I didn’t think much of it. I loved dancing. I loved church. I loved macaroni and cheese. And I loved Mr. Bittle.
Yet, I thought about that card often that day and whenever I had a moment alone, I took it out and ran the tips of my fingers over the printing as though I were reading Braille. No one had ever spoken to me that way. Nothing had ever made me feel so special. I was charged with an energy I didn’t recognize, feeding every inch of my being from a center I didn’t know I had right out to the new and fine hairs sprouting from odd places – arms, legs, armpits, and down there, too.
That night, I found an old vintage-looking suitcase in my father’s junk room tucked in a cupboard beneath an old black typewriter. I replaced the typewriter to the shelf and closed the cupboard door halfway, just as I found it, and then I brought it to my bedroom. Inside were three black and white photos of people I did not recognize and a Utah State University commencement brochure from 1959. I set these things aside to discard them in the backyard trash can, surely no one would miss them, and then I placed the bear card inside, closed the lid, snapped the buttons shut, and slid it under my bed as far as it would go. I crouched and peeked at it with one eye and decided it was still vulnerable to discovery, so I took the rattiest towel I could find from the hall closet and flung it under the bed and over the suitcase until it looked like a pile of nothing but something to clean.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Winter of 1980
LDS Menlo Park Stake Center
Over the holidays a special meeting for young women only was held at the Mormon Stake House. Church members were organized by geography, the smallest unit being a Ward, with three or more Wards occasionally joining together to form a Stake and meet in a larger designated meeting house. The Young Women’s conference included girls between twelve and eighteen from an even larger geographical area, hundreds of girls from as far as Monterey. Dresses and pantyhose, pumps, purses, delicate hands in laps, rows and rows of wooden pews filled with youthful beauty. And from the pulpit as would have been the view by the female church leaders giving the talks that evening, a field of soft blow-dried hairstyles with bright bows and clips like wild flowers.
The conference began with a hymn and a prayer delivered by one of the few men present, a bishop from another Ward, and then the women took over. Three talks were given that day, on subjects mostly having to do with setting and achieving clean, worthwhile goals using our Behold Thy Handmaiden workbooks. There was talk about recipes, learning new domestic crafts such as knitting or sewing, and volunteer work to help those in need.
And then a young Relief Society President from another Ward who looked like she might have been in her twenties gave the closing talk, which started out rather curious. She began by speaking about men and the importance of missionary work. But, she said, as important as it was for our priesthood holders to reach those in other countries and share the One True Gospel with them, some young men would never make it on a mission. Men must be pure of heart and deed and this was not easy for men to do. This is where we young women came in. It was our “duty” and we would soon learn it would also be our “greatest challenge” to keep these young boys worthy.
“Girls, I want you to consider this rose.”
She held up a single long-stemmed red rose, its shape unmistakable even from a distance.
“What a beauty to behold,” she said into the microphone. “Now. What if I were to remove a petal from this rose. Just one petal won’t make a difference, right?”
She removed a petal. And darn it if the rose didn’t already look different.
“What if I remove another?” She removed another petal. “And another. And so on. And so forth.” She plucked away at each petal, slow and deliberate, until she reached the last.
“Oh dear,” she said, chuckling. “Look what’s left.”
The remaining petal slumped against the stem in spite of her exaggerated attempts to raise it. She set the mutilated rose on the podium and folded her hands.
“Girls, you are this rose,” she said. “This rose could be you.”
She read a poem about love and grace and the Kingdom of Heaven.
“Just as the rose is perfect in the Lord’s sight, so, too, are you. But when we allow ourselves to be spoiled and defaced, we sin in a manner that cannot be recovered. For once our flower is plucked, it is no more. It cannot re-grow its petals. It does not regain its beauty. Its lovely scent is but a memory. It is useless.”
The congregation sat silent, frozen. Perhaps some had already sinned and feared being singled out. Perhaps others were contemplating sin. And perhaps some were as confused by the message as I was. It’s not that I didn’t trust this woman with her Nancy Reagan hairdo and her baby blue ruffled collar. It’s just that I couldn’t imagine being her, having that much composure, confidence and grace. But most puzzling was that I couldn’t find the logic in her words and so although I understood their gravity, I could not glean their meaning. Each time I tried to follow a logical lead, such as keeping the boys worthy, things would take a contradictory turn, such as how important we as women were and how we must find our own personal calling. How could both be true?
She finished her talk with mushy words about love of Christ and God and our living prophet and One True Gospel and it went on, further clouding the message about that rose. My thoughts wandered to Mr. Bittle. By then, my secret suitcase was half full. He’d given me dozens more cards and personal letters as well. And books. Jonathan Livingston Seagull and a book of Shakespeare love sonnets that were as mind-numbing as sermons, but evocative, too. On some level I understood that our relationship must be our secret, but inside I felt ready to burst with the news that I’d secured such attention from a man. And I wondered what he would think of my church, if he would still consider me special when surrounded by all these other pretty young girls.
“And I’ll conclude today with a gift for each of you.”
Her amplified voice, sweet and high, echoed through the large chapel. About a dozen girls stood in the congregation and moved out to the aisles. Each wore white and each carried a flat basket piled with white, long-stemmed roses.
“You are receiving these roses as my gift to you to show my faith in your dedication to purity and chastity and to the young men we must keep wholesome.”
The girls in white divided and fanned out, giving handfuls of flowers to the girls seated at the ends of each row.
“Keep this rose to remember just how very special you are.”
And there was the contradiction again. Every single rose seemed exactly the same.
The girls in white worked fast, but the pews were long, perhaps forty or more girls seated on long wooden benches. By the time I received my rose, its silky soft petals had already begun to show the tattered signs of age, and its small white head drooped like an apology.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Spring of 1981
123 Madison Avenue
It was the first openly rebellious thing I’d ever done. I’d stolen things, exchanged dirty secrets with trusted girlfriends, and once I’d plagiarized a poem for a class assignment. And of course there was Mr. Bittle. But all of those things could be hidden, disguised, or dismissed – explained away and kept to myself. Pierced ears, however, by their very design were meant to draw attention. Every girl I knew had pierced ears, even Mormon girls, and Dad could never explain why he didn’t want me to have them as well. His mouth would turn down into an unmoving frown and his forehead would crinkle, as if the very request was shameful.
But I’d done it anyway, finally, after many pleas and just as many refusals and when news of my pierced ears reached Dad, there was a fight between my parents. I sat on my bed and listened while doors slammed, my father hollered, and my mother cried and apologized before turning bitter.
This was how it often went between them. Dad roared and threatened, even manhandled, and Mom cried like a child and begged to be left alone. The fight would come to end with cutting words from her, always from her. With each slice, he grew more silent and as he grew silent, the cuts went deeper.
He was a slob around the house.
“Now that’s enough Sylvia. I’ve had just about enough. This is MY house. I own this house.”
Why couldn’t he get a real job, like the rest of the men at church?
“Sylvia… I… I… I am an educated Engineer…”
And what about his status at church? Any real man taking care of his family and home would have a Priesthood position of status and would be important to the Ward.
The front door closed shortly after that. He left. Her bedroom door closed and locked as well. And then the muttering began. This was also typical.
I touched the burning hot flesh of my ears with both hands and felt the tiny gold-plated studs, then fetched my suitcase from beneath my bed, pressed the rusty snaps and flipped the lid back flat. Just beneath the white rose from church, now dried to a keepsake, was the most recent card Mr. Bittle had given me. Dorothy and the Scarecrow stood opposite one another in a colorful photo, Dorothy in tears and the Scarecrow wearing a sideways smirk. The caption read, “I’m going to miss you most of all.” And on the left, he’d written that it was he who would be missing me most of all one day soon, and that Dorothy would always remember her first. I read his words over and over. It seemed he was beginning to say goodbye, as I would graduate from junior high in a matter of months and our opportunities to see each other would diminish. But I also couldn’t figure out what he meant by Dorothy remembering her first. Did he mean her first love, first friend, first teacher? First what?
Mom muttered away in her room, certain words emphasized more audibly almost like she were scolding someone. Herself? Me? Dad?
My eyes returned to the Scarecrow card. I felt a pull toward him I couldn’t resist and a pull toward my mother that I resented. I didn’t want to be in her room with her; I wanted to be free of her. Why did it feel like I should be with her? That I should go to her? That she needed me desperately?
I sighed and groaned with irritation and she grew silent for a beat or two. Our walls were thin.
And then her muttering started up again and I repacked my suitcase and tucked it away in its secret corner. I pulled my winter coat on and fastened each button as I headed through the laundry room to the back door. I checked the exterior doorknob, unlocked as always, then stepped out on the back stoop where week-old laundry fluttered on a T-shaped clothesline Dad had strung up to save money. Down the crumbling steps, through the broken back gate, I found myself on Madison Avenue, the sidewalk riddled with purple leaves fallen from the plum trees. I slipped my hands in my coat pockets and started off down the street.
I didn’t know where I’d go. I never did. Sometimes I went to the Plaza and stole food and snacks from the supermarket. Sometimes I went to neighborhood schoolyards – Taft, Roosevelt or McKinley. And sometimes, I just walked and walked until night fell and streetlamps flickered on. I saw scary things occasionally. A man flashed me from the bushes once. Older kids huddled in dark masses at street corners. But mostly, the streets at night were empty and quiet except for the sound of my own footsteps on the pavement.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Spring of 1981
Mr. Bittle’s Classroom
In first period English where I sat at the front of the class, Mr. Bittle noticed my earrings right away. I saw his eyes linger on the shiny globes on either side of my face, then a twitch, a wink and a smile.
He thought they made me look pretty, I could tell, and I took notice of being noticed. I began to style my hair more carefully, curling it back at the sides in two tidy rolls. Instead of snack food and candy, I stole cosmetics and packs of earrings, stuffing them deftly into my pockets and boldly purchasing only one or two things. I wore make up when Dad wasn’t home to see me leave the house: Baby Powder Blue eye shadow by Maybelline, super glossy Lip Smackers that smelled like bubble gum, Sweetie Pie pink blush, and Love’s Baby Soft cologne. With babysitting money, I bought a pair of Jordache jeans from Ross, snug as my ballet tights but more defined around the rear end.
Mr. Bittle noticed everything, I saw it in his eyes, which first acknowledged the new accessory and then approved by way of eye contact or a wink followed by a smile. He sometimes touched my arm or my hand when no one was looking. Once, he squeezed my knee when we sat at desks beside each other. And he started talking as much as listening, treating me like a peer, not a student.
We went to public places once in a while. Mings Restaurant for an early dinner one night, the high school football field where we sat high in the stands and watched scrimmages and track meets, Red Morton Park with its ambling rose garden.
He told me his family, his daughter. She was just a year or two younger than me. She went to a different school in another town and was angry at him often. I recall recognizing the similarity between his relationship with his daughter and my relationship with my dad, but as quick as the thought arrived, I rejected it. The daughter was the irrational one in his story. In my story, it was the dad who was the problem. No comparison.
Mr. Bittle also told me about his wife. She had a brain tumor and wasn’t expected to survive much longer, months maybe. She rested in a hospital room, no hair, only tubes and tears. He visited her every evening and said he was tired of saying goodbye. He also said he didn’t want to talk about her or his daughter when he was with me. He said I was sanctuary, a big word for a young girl but I think I understood. I was exciting and safe at the same time, an alluring retreat.
I did not feel sad about his wife. Instead, I fantasized becoming the next Mrs. Bittle. The daughter would be a problem. I couldn’t be a stepmother to a girl my own age. Perhaps she would get a brain tumor, too. I included this in my fantasies.
One afternoon while sitting next to one another at student desks in his empty classroom, he asked, “Do you ever think about me?”
“What do you mean? I think about you all the time,” I said, feeling slightly panicked.
“But I mean, really think about me?”
His eyes stayed on mine. He inhaled deeply through his nose. His eyebrows raised a bit with angst as he confessed, “In my mind, I’ve made love to you thousands of times.”
I looked away instantly. I was on fire, hot flames licking my skin from the inside out.
“Do you know what that means?” he asked.
“Yes, of course I do,” I lied, still looking at the classroom wall to my right, covered with thumb-tacked poems and essays by students that fluttered from the breeze through the cracked windows. Maybe it meant he loved me a lot in his mind. I didn’t know what “made” love meant and I also didn’t understand love as something that could be quantified with numbers. If he’d loved me a thousand times, was that a lot or a little? I was confused and yet something about that phrase and the way he said it stirred something deep within, something that felt new but that I had known all along.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Spring of 1981
Across Town
One day, Mr. Bittle took me with him to help a friend move from one apartment to another. We moved boxes down steps and into the back of Mr. Bittle’s blue van. His friend was older than Mr. Bittle and wore a black leather vest and a gray ponytail. He drove a motorcycle, Mr. Bittle had explained, which was why we were there to help him move.
Once the van was packed, Mr. Bittle and his friend sat at the kitchen counter in the empty apartment and opened bottles of beer from the otherwise empty refrigerator. Looking at him next to his friend, I noticed that he wasn’t as tall as other men and that his figure was slight, his manner more reserved. Men like his friend either leered at or completely ignored young girls like me and sometimes I couldn’t quite tell the difference. But Mr. Bittle showed a regard somewhere in between, attention at arm’s length. This might also have been the first time I noticed that Mr. Bittle did not have much hair. I didn’t really know whether he was good-looking by social standards nor did I care. I hadn’t yet learned to discriminate appearances of the opposite sex.
“Do you want one?” Mr. Bittle asked, a brown-tinted bottle extended toward me, his eyebrows raised. A twitch.
“Sure,” I lied. I didn’t want one actually, but I wasn’t about to refuse. It tasted awful, how I imagined urine might taste. It smelled not exactly like urine but a lot like a boy’s bathroom. I left most of it untouched. But I liked pretending, my small hand wrapped around the slick bottle.
It was after dark before we left. In the passenger seat of Mr. Bittle’s blue van, I began to fret about getting home so late and having to explain myself to Dad. As we approached my neighborhood I also began to worry about Mr. Bittle seeing our very messy house. These were two worlds that should not collide. I didn’t see any way to avoid that, however. My Dad would meet an outsider and that outsider would see inside.
Mr. Bittle pulled up to the house and suggested he walk me to the door to meet my father, and my mind froze with fear. I couldn’t think of one single thing to dissuade him and I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking either. Did he speculate I had a drunk for a dad or some other unacceptable childcare scenario? Was he planning to intervene in some way?
He knocked on the door and smiled down at me, confident. Twitched.
A split second later the door opened with force. Dad stepped out, grabbed my elbow, and yanked me inside.
“Go to your room now, Tamara. NOW.”
I squatted in the hallway, out of sight but within earshot, my arms wrapped around my knees. I heard Mr. Bittle apologize, he was sorry it was so late, but Dad cut him short.
“Now you listen to me, Sir,” he said, his voice monotone, controlled except for a slight quiver. “I’ve got a rifle.”
There was a great pause. I heard nothing. Then Dad again.
“If I ever… catch you near my daughter again…” another great pause, “I’ll use it.”
Silence. Then I heard the strike of the deadbolt slipping into position and I scrambled to my bed where I held my breath, heart pounding.
I didn’t think about it at the time, but we never locked the doors. Our house was so lacking in proper security that the fact we’d never been robbed was the ultimate proof of its shabbiness. Not even a thief was interested in whatever was in that house. I don’t know why he locked the door that night. Maybe he finally felt threatened by something. Maybe he thought locking the door would keep that world out, or me in. He never spoke to me about that night either. Not one word. Not that night, not the next morning, or anytime in the future.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
June 1981
McKinley Junior High Eighth Grade Graduation
The dress I wore was too small in the bust, though I didn’t notice until years later while looking at a photo. My dress was cream with red roses and in the 1970s Gunne Sax style: old-time pioneer with a touch of vintage undergarment, though no pioneer would have been seen in public in a dress with a bodice that looked like a corset. My bust had just started to blossom. I didn’t even own a bra yet, couldn’t wear one with the dress anyway. It was laced up the front and pulled tightly, but not completely, closed.
Dad didn’t approve at all. At our attire negotiations that morning, he grimly gave up dissent when I promised to wear a burgundy shawl the whole day. The shawl was nowhere to be seen in the photo.
After the ceremony, balloons and cheers crept skyward. Parents and their young adult children shared hugs. Mom had not come, but Dad found me and we stood opposite one another, feet apart, his hands behind his back, mine on my hips. He frowned and told me to put on my shawl. I’m sure I said something snotty. Then he left to walk home, as if he didn’t even remember the incident with Mr. Bittle, who sat nonchalantly in a nearby chair with several students around him, legs outstretched, one over the other, his hands resting casually in the pockets of his Dockers.
“Congratulations, my favorite student,” he said as I approached him. “You know, I’m your Scarecrow. I’m going to miss you most of all.”
I looked around and bit my lower lip. My father was already out of sight.
“Would it be all right to give you a ride to the skating rink for the graduation party?”
He uncrossed his legs, bent his knees to rest his elbows on them, leaning his face into mine. “No one will see us,” he assured me in almost a whisper, a very deep-voiced whisper that made my cheeks flush red and the hair on my arms rise. “No one will know. One last ride?”
“OK,” I said.
As his car came to a stop in front of the low-brow building with the neon sign that commanded all who entered to SKATE, he turned off the engine and clutched the steering wheel, then breathed a slow whistle. The sun had set, the sky twilight and cool.
“Tammy, my sweet, sweet, Tammy.” His hand was on my thigh, his grip hot, large, tender but purposeful, too.
“Can I have a kiss? Just one kiss before you go?” he asked.
I set my smooth, tiny girl hand on his rough, knotty, man hand and leaned over the seat divide. He leaned toward me, face forward. I pressed my lips against his cheek lightly. He tilted his head, twitched, looked at me really strange-like, and then sat straight back up and removed his hand from my thigh and placed it back on the steering wheel.
“Okay,” he said, nodding his head. “Okay.”
I could see something was different, but I didn’t completely understand what. He expected a different kind of kiss. He was disappointed. I didn’t know how to give a different kind of kiss. If I did know how, I would have given it.
“I guess this is goodbye,” he said.
“Yes, for now. I’ll come back and visit you, though. All the time.”
He smiled, his eyes flashed, another twitch.
“Goodbye, my Dorothy,” he said.
I stepped out of his car onto the curb by the Redwood Skate entrance and stood beside the open passenger-side door. Another opportunity perhaps. If I got back in the car, what would happen? Where would we go? What would we do? I could see by his eyes that he would let me stay or let me go, whichever I chose. It would be my choice.
So much time passed. We stayed just like that, the engine running, our hearts locked in our gaze for the longest time. Was he waiting or was I?
A choice began to form, soupy at first, murky. I saw myself getting back in his car, heading toward a destination unknown, eclipsing beyond a point of no return. My breath was caught as my mind whirled to process the shadowy fantasy: knotty hands, the soapy-musty aroma of his cheek, the smell of the boy’s room, his blue eyes, my rose-patterned dress with the laced-up bodice and thin shoulder straps, the burgundy shawl I held in my hand.
But just then, he looked away toward the road ahead and I looked over my shoulder toward the skating rink. A few kids I knew milled around the entrance. When I turned back to Mr. Bittle, both hands were on his steering wheel and the trance, it seemed, was broken.
So I shut the car door and glanced at the buttery yellow moon rising between the dark buildings that formed an alley across the street. Night had come. The red roses in the pattern of my dress appeared black and I noticed that my attire had lost its softness and appeal. In the light of the moon, my graduation day gown looked stark and certain, black and white.
Mr. Bittle bent his head to see me and pressed his hand to the passenger door window. I slipped the shawl over my shoulders and pressed my hand against his through the glass. And then he drove away. I clutched my shawl to my chest and watched as his red tail lights grew smaller and smaller until they were gone.
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