Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage Read Online Free Page A

another leisure activity—nothing to be embarrassed about, nothing to hide.
    The only sex talks I got from my parents came too late—like the one during Thanksgiving my freshman year of college. I brought my boyfriend home with me, and as we waited for the train that would take us back to school, my mother asked me to take a walk with her, a request that was generally not a good sign. I have never seen a volcano erupt, but the way the words gushed from my mother’s lips—with a ferocity I have never seen before or since—must have been akin to what the witnesses of Vesuvius experienced.
    “I don’t know if you’re having sex or if you’ve ever had sex or if you’re planning on having sex and I know I’m not the person you would talk to about it even though I wish I was and I don’t know if you’re being careful if you know what I mean by being careful of course you know what I mean by being careful you better know what I mean by being careful but people die from sex now and when I was

    young you could get pregnant or need a shot of penicillin but not die and now you die but not always but you can and you’re too young to have a baby and I want so much more for you and I know you want so much more for yourself and I don’t know if you’ve had sex or are planning to have sex but I want you to be careful. . . . ”
    “I lost my virginity to Kevin last spring, and I went on the pill immediately,” I finally interrupted. I was sure she would be very happy and proud.
    “What?” she screeched. “Under my roof?” Thankfully, the train came not two minutes later, and she never, ever brought it up again.
    The sex talk with my father happened that summer, when he picked me up from school to bring me back home. “You’re using condoms, right?” he said, apropos of
    absolutely nothing.
    “Uh-huh,” I answered.
    “Good. So, do you want to catch an Orioles game tomorrow night?”
    The only other conversation my mom and I had had was when I’d gotten my period, but she’d said little more than that it meant I was growing up, and that it was a happy thing that I shouldn’t be scared of or embarrassed about. I have pitiful memories of trying to teach myself how to use a tampon, waddling through my aunt’s house like a penguin because I didn’t quite understand how the damn things were supposed to work. As for sex, my friends talked about

    “doing it,” but none of my close friends seemed clear on just what “it” was until high school—where the mixed messages became even more baffling.
    I went to a Catholic high school. It was the best private school in the area, and my dad taught Judaism classes for the Jewish students. The nuns and priests preached abstinence before marriage, and advocated antihomosexuality. I remember Father Keith coming into the classroom one day to talk to us about the AIDS epidemic. It was 1986. “The good thing is, you kids have nothing to worry about because, of course, you are not involved in any sort of . . . ” (here he lowered his voice and looked at us sternly) “ . . . sexual behavior. It’s a gay disease, really; it’s God’s punishment for behavior that forsakes him and his great love for us.”
    I was sixteen years old, and one of my best friends, Theo, was gay. My parents had never had any problem with homosexuality. They raised us to believe that everyone is equal, regardless of age or race or sex, and certainly regardless of whom they love. I was both appalled and indifferent. Father Keith’s comment struck me as awful, yet I wasn’t affected by it, either, mostly because I chose to ignore what he was saying. I had enough brains and experience at that point to know that he was off base, and that I didn’t agree with him, but not enough to take him on in front of my whole class.
    Plenty of kids I knew were having sex in high school. And I wanted to. I didn’t know why; it just seemed—like

    a lot of things—to be the thing to do. I just never had the