Floozy

A parody of the Catholic school system's medieval approach to sex education; a huge overhaul from a previous piece that wasn't exactly a masterpiece.

Floozy

by

Seth Cason

 

 

 

 

Several conscientious disclaimers: some readers might lack the esophageal fortitude for what they are about to read. A removable, portable gag-reflex reinforcement device, though primarily marketed as an emergency tracheal respiratory rescue system available only through prescription for patients six months and older afflicted with a life-threatening strain of Spontaneous Regurgitation Syndrome, an allergic reaction triggered by the unexpected sight of the current Senate Minority Leader on television, in cloud-shapes, even fits of hallucinatory attack turtles all the way down, up, sideways, bursting out of mailboxes, etc. So, yeah, one of those thingies is strongly recommended. Your safety is our seventh, maybe eighth priority.

Granted, your GI tract might have more important issues to digest than this shlock, but your nervous and circulatory systems are whipping themselves into a cyclonic endorphin-high maelstrom, dragging with it your innocent but eager salivary glands, all bound for what I fear is a bum road to nowhere. Having read the title of this piece, this shouldn’t come as much of a shock as the disorienting adrenaline drop you’d best prepare to suffer right now:

Abstinence Only.

Two innocuous words that, when separated, are perfectly harmless, even agreeable when applied to a pair of unrelated sentences. But when combined side by side there’s no other range of contexts by which they can be interpreted. They glorify one of the most fraudulent and laughably abnormal concepts ever drummed up by some of the most shameless and disgraceful samplings that humankind would inevitably vomit forth. And now, we’re being subjected to the bullshit one last time, in my New Testament Studies classroom, supervised today by a leggy substitute failing to rock the 15-year outdated naughty librarian fantasy entertained by generations of men before the Obama administration, when doctors reported record-setting cases of intellectual erosion linked to Sarah Palin’s existence and refusal to cease and desist this existence.

And now, our platonic male/female team of guest speakers fidget in impatient wait, geared up for this year’s encore performance. I maintain that this spectacle might stand a chance had they included a rapping mascot.

A shame. My name, by the way, is Donovan McGregor. I’m a senior here at St. Catherine’s High where just recently, after almost four years of dragging myself through these halls, I learned that our Catherine (and the church has canonized several hundred Catherines) is a fourth century martyr from Alexandria, meaning she probably never existed, but who cares? “The Catherine Wheel,” one of my favorite old-school alternative bands, is named after her. So there’s that.

But here, today, this pair of clowns has decided to tone down and mainstream the surrealist stupidity, and that’s why I’m exposing their approach. It’s nothing fresh or controversial, but nothing apeshit-bananas like how condoms are only 1% effective, birth control triggers contagious autism, and intercourse with anyone besides one’s spouse results in cervical cancer, even if the husband is the cheater. No, this time the man-woman team is pre-empting class to demystify God’s opinion of the subject. Just like everybody who disagrees with them, their conclusions are the correct conclusions.

Introductions are brief and casually ignored, so basically we’re catapulted without warning into story-time, and it’s a story heard by every kid unfortunate enough to either spawn from a “family values” family or forced in a red state Catholic school. I’d like to document this lesson, this alarming phenomenon for the rest of the world, or at least anyone who’ll listen.

The tremendous heroes of epics like the Iliad and the Aeneid earned their glory though skill and training, divine favor, larger than life determination, maybe a touch of immortal ancestry, and the courage to press forward when all hope seemed lost. This year in Ms. Hogan’s New Testament Studies class, our glitter-eyed for God guest speakers, Ms. Ginger No-Last-Name and the other one, regaled us with the tale of a true hero, one whose merit and value as a child of God was contingent upon only one thing: virginity. If after reading “virginity,” you identified our hero as a girl, then at some point you’ve completed this course. Our girl’s name changes year to year but we’ll call her something that only a monster from the cigarette-and-casserole era of Cold War American History would consider tagging his daughter: Peggy.

 

 

 

 

Peggy isn’t popular like Gertie and Mildred and Tilly. She has a small group of friends, mostly children of local Baptist preachers, all of whom wear coke bottle glasses, pink sweaters buttoned neatly at the top and, in the cafeteria, they erupt into giggling fits while racing each other for seconds on Lima bean day, which is every day.

But Peggy’s not so unpopular that a hunk like Vinnie Vicarrino, quarterback for the Centerville Wildcats and the school’s most gorgeous/popular apex specimen of American teenage male, doesn’t hesitate to sit beside her one beautiful autumn day, not only to share his gelatin-weenie loaf, but to invite her to a flick at the drive-in this coming Saturday night.

“Oh, gee! Why… why yes Vinnie!” she gushes, “I’d be positively delighted!” She doesn’t tell him that this will be her first date (but he knows) and that there’s a stunning lavender dress she’s been hand-stitching since kindergarten.

“You are coming to the Big Game Friday, aren’t’cha Peggy? You’ll be there to cheer me on when we clobber those Mountain Valley ratfinks, right?”

“Heavens, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. And I’ll be cheering the loudest of them all, Vinnie.”

“Swell! Hey, ya hear that fellas?” Vinnie glances over his shoulder at his football buddies at the table behind him, all of whom are soaking their heads in small vats of Brylcrem.

Guess where this is headed. After a brief courtship, or maybe until halftime, Vinnie manages to wheedle poor Peggy into the sin of pre-marital sex. Peggy, who’s kept her misgivings aut going all the way to herself, is afraid Vinnie will dump her if she refuses to give in.

So he tells her he loves her, and that pretty much cinches it.

He wakes up, leaves, and is out of the story forever.

When Peggy, her mother, and her little sister Kitten first behold the new garage door, time simply stops, and with it, all sound. The world goes mute. She sees her mother crash to her knees, screaming in slow motion, limbs flailing without a sound as if under water. Her father doubles over, laughing like the devil; she doesn’t recognize him. She swears that, beyond the silence, a voice is shouting, “What is that? What is it?!”

Good question. Peggy steps over her little sister who, after a two-second glimpse of this desecration, has exploded like a pipe bomb buried under a hundred pounds of steaming cheese and bean enchiladas. Peggy takes a gander one of the empty paint cans and her lower jaw goes slack. She turns the can around, double, triple-checking. Slowly, she stands, shaking, the lump in her throat close to bursting, and faces her father. “Dad, the garage door is supposed to be white, just like the rest of the house. Just like every house in this neighborhood. Just like God.”

Her mother, hysterical and bawling, flops about the driveway like a cat that’s been run over. “What is that?” she screams, loud enough to startle the birds off of every tree on the block.

“It’s…” Peggy closes her eyes, takes a few deep breaths. “it’s… Seashell!”

Her mother gasps, a high-pitched whistle that drives all the squirrels and chipmunks and woodchucks scampering from the branches of the surrounding trees and sends them fleeing in a bloody stampede.

“Strumpet!” Her mother screams, pointing her trembling finger at Peggy. “Strumpet! This is all your fault! Your father’s a heathen lunatic who clearly hates this country! Our house is ruined, and you turned your sister into Mexican food! And my gardens! Do you have any… idea… how long those brown ‘landscapers’ were here practically invading this godly premises?”

“Good Lord, Ms. Myrtle,” cries a young woman with six sleeping newborns in her arms, “You’re scaring the dadgum stuffing out of us!”

And from the crowd:

“I caught my daughter…”

One man, in the near-throes of hyperventilation, yells over the noise, “with one a’ them landscapers doing… in the middle of…” he wipes his eyes, “…clothespins!”

“This has to stop!” screams another neighbor, the corpulent Mr. O’Grady, his adamantine pot-belly a testament to the undefeated championing of every pie/ hot dog/ squirrel eating contest at every state fair for as long as anyone could remember. He weaponizes it as sort of a snowplow, barreling though the crowd to announce his grievances.. “My icebox is on the fritz, you strumpet!”

“Boy-howdy, I tells you what!” hollers Reverend Thompson, “I don’t need no Harvard Doctorate in Anthropological Forensics with an emphasis in Quantum Nuclear Physics to know that it’s that there girl’ fault, all of it! Can’t you see it’s starting? The government is coming for us! They’re going to take our guns and turn all of us into permanent homosexuals!”

“Oh, fiddlesticks!” Peggy cries. Her family, her friends, her entire future, all irrevocably destroyed thanks to three minutes of vertiginous copulation. “I don’t want to be a homosexual! What am I to do?”

 

 

 

“Use a f#@%ing condom,” mutters Nick Brewer.

“Nicholas,” Ms. Hogan sighs, turning a page in her latest issue of Cat Fancy, “we do not use the c-word in this classroom.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Kaitlin Kramer, future prom queen and Harvard alum, interjects from across the room. She’s pinching the bridge of her nose, is she laughing or crying?. “So, you’re saying that some ‘homosexuals’?”

“Whoa,” interrupts the female half of the anti-coitus commandos, “no dear. It’s vital to remember that there is no such thing,” she air-quotes, her voice dynamic and rising to engulf the whole room, “as ’some’ homosexuals. They are a tribe, an organized syndicate of terror, and they will not stop until all of you are converted. The only hope for these close-minded cultists is unquestioning reconciliation with and loyalty to Christ, who even still might obliterate the deviant before he causes any more trouble.”

“Let’s try again!” Kaitlin shouts, seizing everyone’s attention, “you’re saying that homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, all of these are choices and therefore sinful.”

“We haven’t said that at all.” The man smacks an open palm against his heart. “It’s ludicrous to believe that our Lord God would wire his children as such that they would explore those diabolical perversions, or, like all of us, they’re being tested. They are to remain celibate and of service, squashing and triumphing over every temptation the Enemy throws at them, such as the desire for acceptance. And of course, they must keep their distance from the children. It’s quite the illustrious and heroic calling.”

“Heroic?! What the ever-loving..."

“What about the lesbians?” asks somebody else; since I’ve burrowed my face in both hands, I have no idea who.

“Bi-curious temptation is a gateway into numerous, unspeakably dangerous offenses to our Lord: from abortion to witchcraft to voting. Girls, never forget your role as patriots and distinguished Christian women. You weren’t created to steal important jobs away from men by going to college.”

“True, true,” nods the dweeby jellyfish man.

“Now then. If there are no further questions for the moment? No? Splendid! Because it’s time you find out what happens to Peggy. Hint: this is almost as bad as it gets. That bad kind of bad comes later. And I want you to pay careful attention, all of you. If you yearn to please the Lord as well your future husband, full chastity,”

“What about us?” asks the guy in the front of my row. Letterman Lenny. That’s not his real name though it might as well be. To me, all the upper-crust jocks with their heavy green jackets designed to spin the optical illusion of added bulk all look identical.

“Pardon?”

“You said ‘future husband,’ yearning to please us. That’s so pathetically sexist I can’t even…”

The two speakers glance at each other with suppressed giggles. The male facsimile steps forward, his head bobbing as he stops just inches in front of the jock.. “Mr…?”

“Lenny.”

“Lenny,” he sighs. “If you feel that cooking can be a shared experience, or if you believe that a man can just as competently do the laundry, if you think that women should shoulder themselves into the work force as anything except a nurse or teacher… I’m sorry young man, but it appears that the only sexist in this room is you.”

“One day,” the woman addresses Lenny, her voice and posture gentle, loose. “you are going to meet the woman of your dreams, the woman God created just for you. Your destiny. And on your wedding day, well, come to think of it, I’ll bet Peggy’s final saga will help all of you to understand why your virginity is the most precious gift God has given you. More costly than your family and friends, more divine than your talents, your five senses, your very life.”

“So,” Kaitlin began, “Since Jesus can’t chill with prostitutes anymore, he calls televangelists and family-values Republicans to take up the torch, right? ”

“Well, uh…”

    The sidekick man clapped a few times to silence the giggling. “That’s an excellent question. Maybe this story will clear things up.”

 

 

When Peggy surveys the horrors unfolding around her home: fire hydrants exploding, screams ripping through the streets, bald eagles dropping dead in mid-air, she dares not imagine the fiery hell due to burst from the earth and claim her, body and soul,

With one last look at her father, the man she’d terminally disgraced after a lifetime of his generosity, warmth, and compassion, the man who provided her with everything she could possibly need or want, the man who is now flipping off the live broadcast from local CBS affiliate QQKQ while chugging his second liter of paint thinner, Peggy dashes inside, tracking her sister all over the shag carpet.

She’s breathing too fast, her heart pounds like an AI pogo stick as she circles and circles her bedroom, stuffing her floral pink suitcase with only the essentials: the teddy bear she’d cherished since birth, her most recent family photograph, a signed and illustrated copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

She’d never have imagined sneaking out of her own home like a common Polish alley cat just because her family was dead and it was all her fault. God works in mysterious ways. She plucks a pair of twenties from the emergency cookie jar fund and seconds later the screaming cavalcade of sirens and firetrucks and more news crews barrel down the street, dispersing the afflicted mob, most of whom are evaluating the optimum trajectories and maximum velocity-to-destruction probabilities of one another’s “W***e Stones,” available as part of a buy-one-get-one free offer at Stubby’s Bible, Fried Chicken and Semiautomatic Family Firing Range; gift wrapped at no extra charge.

With only seconds to spare, the mob catches up with her on foot at the train station. Peggy, revered by her classmates as swift, sharp, and plucky, succeeds in demonstrating all three at once, eluding the warriors of righteousness into storming the wrong train. Now Peggy crouches low in her seat inside her actual train, as still and silent as a cadaver, and as the train comes to life, huffing and chugging and grinding forward, she can’t help but peek through a corner of the window.

The platform is hosting its very first riot. Already the police, in full doomsday gear, lob tear gas with a side of billy-clubs at the brains of the torch-bearing men and women, members of the congregation who had known Peggy since birth, taken care of her and her family, destroyed everything.

Thanks a heap, pre-marital sex!

She has no idea where she’s going, where she’s been, or what will happen if this train never stops. How much longer until they zoom over the edge of the earth and billow into outer space? She’s overwhelmed with nausea and exhaustion and something with the consistency of a rotten enchilada on the bottom of her shoe. She’s heard about the slew of dreaded pre-marital sexually transmitted diseases: herpes, gonorrhea, pregnancy, HPV, chlamydia. If indeed she is sick, she’d settle for smallpox or scurvy over cirrhosis of the cervix any day.

She changes trains six random times. The moment she realizes she’s lost she nearly weeps with relief.

She’s never heard of the towns on the signpost, and the garbled names the conductor barks over the intercom. It’s all gibberish. Now, she’s sweaty, her palms as clammy as a dead bullfrog. She tries controlled breathing but remembers her father’s sermon last year about meditation being the new infant sacrifice atop the altar of Satan. Staring out the window, she suspects (and she prays she’s wrong) that she can’t pinpoint her own whereabouts because she’d never learned in geography those dangerous elitist swathes of the United States. In fact, they were forbidden to even speak of those mysterious worlds, much less set foot in them. Heck, by now she might even have crossed into the fabled land of Canada. She shakes her head, such a silly notion. Libs will believe anything except the common sense that God gave a chicken.

She’s too brokenhearted to sleep for any significant interval. Somewhere along the way she adopts a policy of never locking eyes with any of the surrounding strangers, even on a night train like this one. This is what life on the streets has done to her. She’s as hardened and filthy and dangerous as all of those colored men shot to death, usually in the back, by patriotic policemen. Still, eyes closed, entertaining choppy dreams of the elephant barbiturates Mr. White keeps stocked on the rotating rack in the front of his apothecary. They’re jitterbugging to Benny Goodman, and pretty soon they persuade the neighboring crack-cocaine gummies to join along. But suddenly she’s aware of movement, shadows towering in and out of the darkness. She swallows hard and, as furtively as possible, cracks open one eye.

It’s nothing, just a woman getting situated. A harmless, older woman, wearing… what the? What in the name of.. oh, dear Lord.

Peggy braves a double-eyed squint. She’s dressed all in black! And that neckline! Don’t judge, she’s clearly too poor to afford an actual wig. Is she a pilgrim? How horrifying! What if she’s one of the fabled vampiric ambassadors from the Church of Hot Scientopics?

But the truth is infinitely worse, and it dawns on her like a space shuttle to the face. The old woman, oh, Lord! This cannot be happening. Peggy’s heard stories about them, seen photographs, even saw an actress portray one on a television program. That devil woman is a real life bonafide Catholic nun!

Shuddering, Peggy clasps her pink sweater to her heart and tries to stifle her sobs. Everything is crashing in all at once; she would never have the life of which she’d always dreamed, the life of cooking and cleaning and giving birth, the life for which her melted parents worked every day to provide her. She fights back the tears, but it’s useless. She should be cutting a rug at the school sock-hop right now, having fun, laughing, making memories. Imagine if that dreamy Skip Wilbur asked her to dance, or maybe when Cletus McShank tapped Skip’s shoulder to cut in, the two started to rumble, throwing punches, destroying the whole gym!

And once the police and ambulances shut down the dance, she and Alberta and Roberta and Norberta would pile into Alberta’s big brother’s DeSoto and head down to Quicky’s Malt Shop where they could really let loose, like pooling their spare change and taking turns choosing Patsy Cline songs from the jukebox. They’d gab about boys, giggle like maniacs, tell the craziest stories: (“I was at Sears last weekend, and I saw a half-colored person!”). And they’d quaff so much chocolate they’d lose track of time. How would they explain this to their parents, coming home in sugar-shock in the middle of the night?

“Young lady? Pardon me, young lady?”

    A voice as sweet as an apple pie wafting atop a windowsill above the honeysuckle bushes in the heart of spring. Peggy opens her eyes.

Oh Christ Almighty another goddamn nun!

“Well hi there!” Peggy beams, scooting as far back as possible. She feels like a squashed bug against the window.

Where did they suddenly come from? Were they robots? No, to her knowledge the devil is still busy coercing MIT students into playing a morning round or two of  “snort the mystery powder every time Pat Robertson lies. Peggy looks at the one who had woken her, searches her face for traces of treachery. “Dear,” the woman says, “ tell me your name.”

Across the aisle and seven rows ahead, another old nun, clearly in her early three hundreds, pops up and kneels upright atop her seat and turns to face them, her ruts and wrinkles like tough, fuzzy crop circles about her face, her neck-flaps as sinister as a Venus fly-trap. She aims one gnarled, yellowish finger at Peggy and, gently bouncing on her knees screams, “W***e! I smell a w***e!”

“Sister Ethelberga, that is lewd and uncalled for. Sister Lucretia, do try to at least maintain the illusion of honoring our buddy system policy.”

Sister Lucretia slumps over sideways, either defiant or dead.

“S**t!”

“Silence, woman!”

“No,” cries Peggy, choking back her sobs. “She’s right. I-I’ve engaged in sexual activity outside the sacred bonds of matrimony. I’ve lost everything-- my family, my friends, my poodle skirts, my home!” She dabs the tears from her face with her sweater. “I have nowhere to go, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Oh my,” the old nun sighs. She takes Peggy’s hand with a gentle squeeze. “Oh, you poor, pitiful s**t. Why don’t you come back to the convent with us as our guest? There’s plenty of room, and plenty of people eager to help you through this. I take it your school never instituted a sexual education course.”

“Oh, they did.. A very thorough and righteous one at that. We discussed the dangers of fraudulent prophylactics, black market back-alley brokers, 9-speed blenders, wire vs. expensive 20-pack plastic K-Mart coat hangers, and they even distributed limited edition 50th anniversary extended Blu-Rays of Rosemary’s Baby.”

“What on earth is a Blu-Ray?”

“I don’t know!!!” she bellows, weeping again.

The old nun shakes her head. “Good heavens! It’s no wonder public schools have a lower student pregnancy rate. Oh my, we have less than half an hour before our stop. Do consider coming with us. A young girl like you out there all alone? Oh goodness! We haven’t even been introduced. I’m Sister Britnee Amber.”

“Huh?. I mean, uh, yeah hi I’m Peggy.”

“Peggy…” The nun’s face lights up, her eyes wistful and distant. “What a lovely, groundbreaking name! So original, so modern.”

Peggy shifts in her seat. “Thank you. Oh! But I’m not Catholic. My father is a Baptist preacher.”

“No worries, you’re a child of God, and in desperate need no matter how misguided your barbaric upbringing.” Peggy nods, glances over Sister Britnee Amber’s shoulder to see old Ethelberga cramming handfuls of crab grass into her mouth from a Tupperware container. “Please, be our guest at our East Coast Motherhouse.”

“Who are you, anyway?”

“We are none other than the Order of the Sisters of Infernal Purity.”

 

 

 

James, my best friend since pre-school, giggle-snorts and says, “I once did weed like that.” He isn’t joking. “Most of it fell out of the taco.”

“Have you ever tried it with Betty Crocker’s Blueberry Muffin Mix?”

“Whoa.” James nods his head, astonished. “No. That never occurred to me. I am all over that. Thanks, Ms. Hogan.”

Milo Atkinson, slumped as always over his desk, raises a lazy hand “May I interject something here?”

Expert lady replies with a plastic smile: “No, not yet. We’ll conclude with a Question and Answer segment just before the end of class.”

“It is the end of class.” says Milo.

“Heck! Why don’t you wrap this up, Ginger, while I distribute the Abstinence Arsenal.”

 

 

Dusk has already fallen once they reach the rambling old Motherhouse. The instant Peggy’s feet touch the earth she’s overwhelmed by a dizziness from which she almost faints. What is she doing? She’d lost everything to Vinnie Viccarrino; she wishes that a rabid herd of porcupines would mutilate his muscles into table scraps. But for some reason it’s a sin to revel in another’s misfortune. Goddammit.

Although possessed by an unyielding sleepiness she charges forward with the rest of them, luggage and all, barely able to distinguish the sisters’ black habits beneath the meager lights of the entrance gallery until someone flips a switch, drawing mass sighs of relief from the nuns who, in silence, disperse like cockroaches in every direction out of the light.

“I’ve never imagined anything like this. It’s as big as a castle!”

“It is a castle, dear,” Sister Britnee Amber smiles. “Of sorts. No moats, no torture towers, no laboratories and hunchbacked staff. Are you ready to get settled in?”

“My, yes.” They trudge across the sleek green and white checkerboard linoleum toward the grand staircase.

“You’ll be on the third floor,” the nun explains as they ascend. ”West wing. It will be your room for the time being.”

And on the second floor, after two right turns down hallways that ran past the half-open doors of the nuns’ private quarters, all of them on their knees praying the Rosary along with the they stop at a door as nondescript as an unmarked broom closet.

While Peggy adores her accommodations and the kindness of the Order of Perpetual Purity, particularly the Friday Night Quilting Smackdown and the Saturday afternoon on-location forced birth reenactments, she dreads the upcoming to-be-announced one-on-one interview with the enigmatic and cloistered Mother Superior.

She remembers the pamphlets arranged in vertical slots alongside the door to the guidance counselor’s office at school, pamphlets that collected dust throughout her four, well, three and a half years at Centerville High: Have I Been Kidnapped? 8 Warning Signs. Well, not technically. Am I being lured into a cult? Uh, definitely. Peggy is the Madame Curie of S***s! She’d love to rip the face off whatever hooligan wrote that on the wall. It was probably Vinnie Viccarrino himself, in which case it was a super-sweet compliment.

Finally one morning, in the spacious TV room where she and the sisters hurl answers at an all new episode of “Name That Gregorian Chant,” another nun, or possibly the Grim Reaper guided by the light of a Liberace candelabra, summons her with a pointed finger that goes unnoticed by the others.

This entity leads her through the dank and freezing tunnels beneath the Motherhouse. “It’s like a labyrinth!” whispers Peggy. “Where are you taking me? Do you ever get lost here? How far below ground are we? Any ghosts in these parts?? Oh, it’s frightfully cold! What I wouldn’t give to have my Snuggie back.”

The longsuffering attendant, who cannot wait to go home and write smack about Peggy on Facebook, leads the girl down a majestic marble staircase into a simple though extraordinarily furnished round antechamber. Exquisite tapestries, each twice as heavy as she, encircle the walls, Beyond a ring of plush burgundy sectionals and recliners, all organized atop a Persian rug no smaller than a lake, she sees a thunderous pair of doors boasting designs and inscriptions that must have taken years to complete.

“Peggy Sue?”

She gasps, her eyes darting all over the room. It was a woman’s voice, though deep and gravelly and as resonating as a bullhorn. She turned to the shrouded figure; nothing was there.

“Peggy Sue Cunningham?”

She gently cleared her throat. “Yes ma’am?”

“In a Now she detects movement, someone rises from one of the shadowed chairs, someone with the frame of a linebacker, and steps forward into the light. Another nun, though this one seems more lucid than the others. Despite her peaceful demeanor, smooth and non-confrontational, Peggy’s mind goes blank. She can barely nod her head at the old woman.

“I’m the Mother Superior of this convent, but you may call me Mother Bubbles. Unusual, I know,” she smiled. “But ever since childhood I’ve harbored a powerful devotion to the Patron Saint of Barb-e-cue. Come child, come down, have a seat.”

The chairs, soft enough to nearly swallow them, are not only rocking chairs but swivel chairs. She and Mother Bubbles rotated to face each other. She knows what will happen next.

“Peggy,” the old nun says, “let’s talk about sex.”

 

 

 

You notice the most curious things on sex-ed day. It’s like your conscious brain decides to swap the most important, useful, and dangerous details tracked by your senses in exchange for rumination over the most irrelevant sensory bullshit: the chalkboard drawing of a fat mitochondria with its creepy flagella, Shannon Bennett’s overstuffed purse set to burst like a cannon with prescription pill bottles, and I s**t you not, the hands on the clock above the door have not so much as twitched in half an hour.

Meh, so what, the clock’s broken. Hmm, so is my wristwatch. I doubt I’m the only one afflicted. But a-ha! My android phone has outwitted this odd phenomenon and is running defiantly. Up front, the teacher’s desk is unattended, and Ginger is now puppeteering her story using Barbies, assorted action figures, and a trio of Go-Bots, one of whom is an esteemed gynecologist.

Meanwhile, Brandon Alvarez, seated behind Christine Lloyd, has shot at least three dozen spitballs into the back of her giant, wiry shock of blonde hair. Nathan Deitz cuts his toenails. Bill Corso is dead, and I had no idea that Ashanti de Raven is black! I’m hoping for Kaitlin Kramer to blurt, “B***h, just finish the story!” But her seat is empty, her things are nowhere to be seen. Maybe she slinked out of the room unnoticed like a vampire cat. Maybe she simply willed herself to stop existing. Like anybody needed another reason to be jealous of her.

“Christ Almighty!” cries one of the Lennys. “Finish the goddamn story so I can get to football practice.”

“And blitzkrieg your boyfriend behind the fieldhouse,” murmurs Nick Brewer.

“Why yes, quite frankly. Jealous?”

“Yes, actually, who isn’t?”

The lady-woman hurls an incredulous open-mouth look of horror at Mrs. Hogan who’d long since grabbed her purse and scurried away.

“Fine,” Ginger sighs, “down we go…”

 

 

To Peggy’s disappointment, yet ultimately to her relief, Mother Bubble’s advice proves somewhat informative, insomuch as a plummeting elevator could double as a cogent though brief wake-up call, leaving Peggy to wring her hands and hide her tears as she imagines the wreckage of her destiny.

“Our sexuality, Peggy, is a delicate and dangerous gift, and it’s more than obvious from scripture that it’s a one size-fits all facet of human nature.”

Peggy could challenge that medieval logic, citing that no matter how much two people are alike in every way, their differences are just as prominent. So why would God, who knows everyone’s extenuating circumstances, crush the whole of humankind into the same box by the same standard?

“You’re damaged goods,” the wobbling crone continues, aiming an unsteady, unmanicured finger at Peggy’s face. “And there’s no going back. You’ve willfully and permanently desecrated the holy temple of the body that God gave you. Think of the shame you’ve inflicted on your own family, on the church that no longer welcomes them, how the countless hosts of angels stayed home from heavenly choir practice all week just to projectile vomit all over heaven, all thanks to you, and of course there’s a deadly curse that shall--”

“Mother Ursula!” The robed messenger, positioned like a stone column behind Peggy, steps forward, having withdrawn from his/her sheathe a Vaudevillian cane and, clasping the curved end like a rapier, firmly and almost humanely pops the nun square in the forehead.

The old woman staggers backward a few steps, mouth ajar, staring with wonder into the darkness of the ceiling.

“Give her a second,” says the robed figure.

“Mother Ursula? What happened to Bubbles? What kind of sick joke… ”

“She’s the sick one, no joke.”

“Lurch, what do you expect after beating the damn woman senseless?”

“When small defective appliances go on the fritz, they often respond to a reasonable measure of harmless violence. I have to smack this b***h back into reality at least six times a day. It’s called being humane?” With that, the robed figure, definitely a man, retreats into the shadows.

Peggy turns to see the old nun shudder back into reality, face-palming and muttering under her breath. Eventually she steadies her stance, smooths the phantom wrinkles from the front of her dress and blesses Peggy with the warmest smile she’s received in days, weeks, possibly forever.

“Hey there, Peggy!”

“Um…”

“Come sit. Alright, where was I? Oh yes, yes. Sit down, sweetheart, and I’ll explain all the ways that your decision to engage in premarital sex has cursed you to a lifetime of unequivocal misery here on earth and later, when you’re doggie-paddling throughout eternity in the lake of fire.”

Peggy maintains her stance before the old lady. “You have absolutely--”

“It’s the same story, dear. The names and locations change, but it’s always the same story. You failed to subvert your feminine wiles, and just like our ancestor Eve trashed Adam’s, and thus humankind’s, very existence by seducing him with magical produce, you dismissed your responsibility to honor the most precious gift your Creator had given you! ”

“What? My virginity? What about him, what about his virginity?”

“Do you honestly believe that a high school football star never succumbed to the temptation of a fresh apple pie? I mean, if you were his first, odds are the poor thing is a homosexual.”                                              “I wouldn’t know and I don’t care. And I suppose staying here,” she asks, “is out of the question?”

“Jesus wasn’t a socialist,” says Mother Bubbles, “and neither are we.”

Now Peggy, being a righteous non-Catholic, eventually and with considerable heartbreak bids farewell to the brides of Satan and, bootstraps and all, carves a quiet and reputable life for herself in the godly hinterlands of Arklatuckytexakota where, at the age of thirty, while working full time at Polecat Corners’ only lending library (an eight rung bookshelf, four of which being empty, permanently purged of the pornographic possum-puckey of Maxim and Cat Fancy) in the back corner of the local family general store, toward the restrooms, just past the cigarette pyramid display.

It’s here that she meets the man who, in the not-so-distant following month, will take her hand in marriage before God and a bunch of other white people fashioned from leather and cardboard by the Reverend’s resourceful wife, who for forty-five years taught K-12 in the one-room schoolhouse on Main Street, the gated pink place between the pawn shop and the automatic rifle emporium/ daycare center, hemmed tight by steel bars.

But I’m skipping ahead.

“Howdy,” he says, stepping out of what was once the dim and empty alcove of the restroom entrances but now boasted the town’s first state-of-the-art video arcade. “Name’s Clem.”

Peggy, quite startled by the stranger in grease-smeared overalls and a Banana Splits! t-shirt, blushes but tries to concentrate on restacking the shelves, a task she performs up to thirty times a day, not including the rearranging of the decorative bunny rabbit tchotchkes positioned atop the shelf for Easter. Her mother would have burst into flames at the mere sight of such greedy paganism fraternizing at the Last Supper with Christ and his sleepy-drunk apostles, but Verlinda, the postmaster’s wife, broke the news years ago that Peggy’s mother had already self-incinerated upon learning that the new box-boy at Piggy-Wiggly was rumored to be the son of wealthy Democrats who’d moved into the charming ivory-toned Victorian just fifteen blocks away.

“Peggy,” she says, braving a split-second glance. “Peggy Cunningham.”

“Pleasure to meet you.” She senses he’s moved closer, possibly even offering his hand to shake. “That’s a heckuva rack you got there!”

“Oh, my goodness, thank you,” she beams. “See anything you like?”

“Sorry ma’am,” Clem chuckles. “I ain’t no fan of Nora Roberts. I’m just here to install that there contraption for the comp’ny.” He gestures toward the Pac-Man game now glowing gently across from the door to the men’s room.

“Goodness,” Peggy. “Isn’t that Satanic?”

“Well, it’s no Donkey Kong, but it’s all about cannibalism, just like them Catholics, so yeah.”

“Jeepers! Will working in such close proximity to that contraption turn me into a cannibal?”

“Only if you already wasn’t one, I reckon.”

“A Democrat?”

“No ma’am. Democrats is born like they is. You ain’t got’n worry about that.”

“As much as that’s a relief, I remember the pastor’s sermon last month on technology. Oh, I still get the goosebumps! He said these games trigger violence in boys and nymphomaniacal bi-curiosity in girls!”

“I have a quarter here in my pocket.”

And so, they get married.

Astonished, she’d never expected fate to allow her such happiness. She thinks back to the harrowing “talk,” how she refused to condemn herself as unworthy while Mother Bubbles explained where in the convent’s gift shop Peggy could find the best bargains on dishwasher-safe cat-o-nine-tails for Lenten self-flagellation. And now, after lowering her standards several notches year by year, her new husband is still the same hungry devil-shark swimming dreamboat she’d hoped for. Clem was a regular Greek Assyrian Hee-Haw cornfield gopher-god at 5’6-and-a-half, sporting a healthy farmer’s glow and a not too prominent paunch, jaw, or knack for grammar, and Sweet Matilda! The way the sandy wisps of what remains of his hair match the tigerish patterns of his glasses with such sumptuous perfection makes Peggy’s leg stubble jolt heaven-wards, her soul radiating brighter than an endless burst of gamma-ray photons streaking at light speed across the electromagnetic spectrum, or, in more godly heliocentric terms, she was rather smitten.

But after the ceremony, once she’d plucked the last of the rice grains from the underside of her eyeball, Peggy suddenly remembers Mother Bubbles’ foreboding final words.

And she knew what she had to do.

 

 

 

“So you see, girls, it’s better she live miserably and alone throughout this short life than to a forever unyielding misery in hell. Girls?”

“Um,” I raise my hand, “it’s just me, Ms. Ginger.”

“You’re not a girl!”

“Some people just aren’t.”

“Well then, we have a problem.”

“I wouldn’t call it that, I’d say we both have an opportunity. I imagined that once I forward this video and its transcript to my connection at MSNBC, my petty problems will clear up faster than my face on Proactiv®. “I’ve never gotten any complaints. Now what is this problem you speak of?”

“Excuse me, what is that in your hand?”

“A very contagious sex fungus. If only you’d joined us in class two weeks ago, I would have been responsible and this never would have happened.

“Who are you? Where did everyone go?”

“Name’s Donovan McGregor, reporter for the St. Catherine Times Gazette. Ginger, could I trouble you to grant me a quick interview before we’re locked in here for the night?” (And come morning I’ll have crammed five chalkboard erasers down your throat.)

“Is that a… Have you been recording me?”

“Not with this. Hang on. This is a harmonica.” I lift my treasured little gizmo, passed down by hand from my grandfather, then jab my thumb in the direction of my backpack, lying in front of me atop my desk. From a discrete incision between the zippers of its largest compartment, my smartphone delivers its stealthiest mission to date. “ You’re being recorded for context, fraud, and incompetence by those tiny baby cameras (lie) fastened to each corner just below the ceiling, see? It’s being livestreamed (true!) and recording on my phone.”

“You wicked little hell-spawn! I am doing my job!” Her face burned several shades of red brighter than her hair. “Where’d that useless jellyfish of a co-speaker go?”

“The fieldhouse. Just before he distributed the ‘Abstinence Arsenal.’ By the way, on record, could you please clarify why all of the boys in this class got a hundred thousand pamphlets and brochures on everything from STDs to ‘How to Control Your Primitive Patriarchal Rape Compulsions’ while the girls-- even Lisa Chang who is clinically blind-- were given handguns and castration-sheers?”

“Pray you never have to find out why.”

“I’ll behave. Now, fill me in on this horrible thing that Peggy has to do?” To be honest, I’m not the least bit curious. I already know  If I or anyone else here at Queen of Peace High have any serious questions about sex, it’s a common sense time-honored tradition to turn to the real experts, specifically, for now, the six girls in my grade alone that will be delivering this year. But since illusive yet combative sexism is still the Stubborn Strategy of the Locked Legs Lobby, it’s my job as a reporter to chronicle the stupid truth, even if it means converting my dignity, my sanity, and my citizenship into collateral damage. “I want to know why virginity is more important than life itself. So what happens?”

“What happens…” he exhales harder than a blimp after a head-on collision with a witch on a broomstick. “What happens is the deserving burden faced by every woman who walks down the aisle, resplendent in the dress that in her heart of hearts both she and the Lord know ought to be not white, but the putrid color of festering death!”

“Let me guess. Seashell.”

Ginger turns away and throws up a little.

“Allow me to pose a question to you. Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Mmm… off and on.”

“Do you two engage in premarital sex?”

“That would be the ‘on’ part.”

“Now you listen carefully, and think about this before you decide to bed your next stupid drunk girl in the fieldhouse or something.

 

 

 

The story ends in tragedy, and it ends as quickly as the romance began.

Clem whisks Peggy away to a dream honeymoon, the kind of enchanted, magical honeymoon that every girl prays for but few ever experience: A weekend at the Brown Sulfur Springs Donkey Park and Day Spa, with an all-you-can-eat Mutton-Butt-Meat Buffet/ chapel and a luxurious honeymoon suite complete with two separate twin beds (naturally), a private bathroom with an authentic Formica counter and, being on the hotel’s first floor, which is its only floor, a stunning view of the hedges.

But as heavenly as the day had been, with each passing hour Peggy finds it harder and harder to stifle her nerves.

Finally, back in their suite, Clem embraces her as gently as any man would embrace an angel. “Peggy,” he whispers, “I couldn’t help but notice… you didn’t go back for seconds on the jellied pork shoulder and rump roast loaf. Is everything alright?”

The lump in her throat expands faster than the Big Bang (which scientists have debunked as another lie straight from the depths of hell). “There’s something I have to tell you…” Her voice quivers, her teary gaze fastens to the floor and refused to move.

He squeezes her shoulders. “I’m your husband now. You can tell me anything, Peggy-Pie, you know that.”

“Oh Clem!” she cries and whirls around, biting her knuckle.

“Honey,” he says, the tenderness in his tone so much sweeter than honey, “it’s perfectly natural to be nervous. I’ve never done this either, and I’ve never been this close to a panic attack. But the Lord brought us together, forever, and gave us this gift that is now ours to give to each other, just like it was meant to be.”

 

 

 

“And this is the brutal truth of pre-marital sex. That you, like Peggy, will have to look your wife or, Lord forbid, husband in the eye and explain that you’ve already squandered the precious gift that was meant to be theirs.”

A few moments of silence pass. Miss Ginger stands.

Another few moments pass.

I grab my backpack, gobble a couple of chewable Flintstone valiums, and as I finally get up from my desk every joint in my body sounds like a bowl of Rice Krispies. “When I was twelve my dad dragged me to a Pauly Shore triple feature at the Cannes Film Festival. Until now, that was the stupidest day of my life.”

“How dare you?”

“Easy. You’re not a Peggy. You’re an imposter. An opportunist.”

“Am I? Am I wrong to want to girls to honor their purity, and--”

“You went to one of those creepy proms with your dad, didn’t you? Also, you left out the part where Peggy’s husband forces her to register as a sex offender.”

“You little�"!”

“But what’s worse is that even though you never said it out loud, all of us could hear what you were really saying. Sort of like moving the gravestones and then building the house on top of the cemetery.”

“I told the truth!”

“That virginity is an obsolete and immature vestige of the ignorant past? That poor Peggy all along was nothing but a piece of chewed gum? That every aspect of her humanity disintegrated and all that was left was a rancid helping of sloppy seconds? So that’s the truth.” I stood up, stretched, and gathered my things. “You know, I’ve never eaten lobster. I’ve never been to Portugal. Hell, I’ve never played ‘Never Have I Ever. And what difference does it make? You really believe that as soon as the priest says, ‘You may now kiss the bride’ that Jesus sprinkles magic glitter-dust over the couple and BOOM! Their virtuous chastity belts disintegrate, and now with God’s blessing they’re permitted to do unspeakable things to one another. ”

“Wait! Where are you going?”

“Home, to write smack about you in the school newspaper.”

 

 

Reviews

[barleygirl]

I got about one third of the way thru & couldn't finish. The italicized mind-masturbation intro is numbingly dull. The story itself is tough to plow thru as an overly-lengthy ramble, but at least there are sparkling moments of brilliance thru-out. Here's what I was observing before I gave up reading. You are inventive in an outlandish way (which I adore & try to do often myself), coming up with incredibly funny or graphic lines here & there. But it's the continuity of storyline that I just could not keep a grasp on (((HUGS)))