The Scream

I was a nerd, bullied and shunned by many of my peers. A Mormon. I developed a fetish for good grades and chastity. I fervently prayed away unclean thoughts Satan whispered in my ear. I never touched myself. I was effectively neutered through adolescence. 

In 1966, I was a sophomore at Louisiana State University. It was the age of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. I knew something was deeply wrong with me. Why was I different? Why had I never dated or had a boyfriend? That same year I blossomed into a Daisy Mae. (Kids today call this a glow up.) A French-speaking sugar engineering student from Mauritius spotted me in the breakfast line at the LSU Union. I was conspicuously different from other coeds with their beehives and Villager dresses. He was my first boyfriend. I quickly learned to make out. I was eager to rid myself of my bothersome cherry, but he said, “Lady, I want for you to be a virgin when you get married.”  Gérard was a senior, handsome, rich, patrician, a viscount. 

My art professor picked up the scent. I babysat his kids, and he used the drives between my dorm and his house to feel me up and describe the wonderful affair we were going to have. Yes. I was flattered. Suddenly I was a desirable woman. A woman with power. 

I couldn’t take the pressure. I had a panic attack in my dorm late one night and got hauled off to the infirmary in a fetal position. The infirmary sent me to a shrink working for the State of Louisiana. He displayed me before student nurses as a novel example of late adolescent neurosis. 

He wanted details. “Did you have an orgasm with your boyfriend?” he asked. 

“I don’t know...” I said, “maybe.”

“There’s nothing more comical than two virgins,” he chuckled. I got the message.

Soon thereafter, Gérard ghosted me. I’ve never held it against him. I know now he wasn’t about to get a chick from Cajun Dogpatch knocked up.

On summer break, I went to a beauty shop to have my hair done for a job hunt. The hairdresser had the appeal of a jaded jazz piano player. He asked me out that very night. He offered me scotch, something new. Feeling bulletproof, I suggested we play strip poker. Five minutes later I was on my back, holding on with my legs wrapped around his waist. After, as he drove me home, I asked him to stop for birth control. At my direction, he procured a spermicidal foam.

I had a couple of virginal girlfriends. Lydia was a diva, the alpha female. Barbara was bold and overtly competitive with me. I was meek and covertly competitive with her. Lydia had no competition. “Birth control is the greatest invention of the twentieth century,” Lydia declaimed as she once described the wonders of Emko foam. None of us had ever used it or read product directions to inject the spermicide before. I felt heroic as I regaled them with the hilarious mechanical details of coitus. We were all atwitter and oblivious. They left in Lydia's Thunderbird for a road trip to California while I stayed home for the summer.

I’m the oldest of six, first to go to college, penultimate valedictorian of GHS, recipient of the LSU Alumni Scholarship, the pride of my LDS (Mormon) community. The nausea set in within weeks. I’d seen it in my mother many times. She was president of the LDS Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association. I was moping around contemplating the hermaneutics of suicide when she ordered me to get ready for YWMIA softball practice.

“If you make me do this,” I said, “I’ll kill myself.”

“Kill yourself? Don’t be ridiculous!” she laughed scornfully. “Get dressed!” 

She stomped around grousing about adolescent recalcitrance. The look on my rubbery face during these harangues infuriated her and always earned me a slap. To keep her from seeing my face, I picked up a paper grocery bag from the floor and put it over my head. Uncharacteristically, she went silent. I went to the bathroom and filled my palm with all the pills my state shrink had prescribed. I clutched those pills until my hand stained purple. I gave up. I couldn’t do that to Mama. She was a slapper, but she was above all a ferociously committed, passionately loving mother.

I have often thought since, Mama knew something. After all, she’d given birth to six live children and miscarried twins. Plus, on one of those softball practice trips she had to pull to the side of the road so I could vomit. If she did know, she took it to her grave.

Without access to either maternal or girlfriend advice, I went to the LSU library to do my own research. I found pieces in women’s magazines suggesting abortion was almost certain death. If it was a choice between coming clean to my fierce mother or suicide by D&C, it was an easy one. But how to access this taboo medical procedure? There was no information.

I kept at the research until I discovered there was a discrete franchise of sorts for pregnant girls. I perused the directory and settled on a Florence Crittenden Home in Missoula, Montana. As I left the library, a hippy friend hailed me.

“I’m going to Montana,” I told him.

“Big sky country,” he said. 

That appealed to me.

Early next morning, I told Mama I wanted to quit school and move to Montana. To my surprise, she took it evenly and suggested I hitch a ride with a cousin leaving shortly for Salt Lake City to start a Mormon mission.

Lydia called from her road trip. I told her I was pregnant and going to Montana. “Sharon, you are not going to Montana,” she said sternly. “You are going to have an abortion. Stay put until I get back.” 

I was dirt poor, but Lydia was the only grandchild of the only banker in Ascension Parish. We hopped into her Thunderbird and high-tailed it to Tiger Town looking for hippies. We found one who offered a name in exchange for...as I recall...speed. The procedure would cost $350. That was an unattainable sum for me, but Lydia made the deal. 

An hour away from LSU, deep in strawberry country, Dr. R**** examined me. While my feet were in stirrups, he manipulated my genitals. This will stimulate contractions, he explained. As he labored, he ruefully showed me his erect penis and said it would be most thoughtful if I let him insert it to ease his discomfort. I meekly declined. He gave me a pill and instructed me to come back the next day after the clinic closed. While driving back, Lydia asked what went on in there. When I described the doctor’s manful efforts, Lydia harrumphed, “I don’t know about that manipulation part.” I may have been first to lose my virginity, but I was far behind Lydia and Barbara in every other way.

Since Lydia had both morning and afternoon classes, she dropped me off at dawn. As prearranged, I curled up in the back seat of the doctor’s car to wait for opening time. I was wearing a maroon dress with little white flowers that I made myself. I sat up when I heard kindly Black nurse Betsy unlock the clinic door.

“Oh, I saw that dress” she said with a start. “I thought it was Doc’s laundry.”

The doctor’s wife had compassion and scoliosis and hovered over me like a misshapen angel. She gave me a Dashiell Hammett novel to keep me busy for the next eight or ten hours. I spent the time reading the same sentence over and over. I could make no sense of it. My brain would not work. 

Finally, I lay on a table with knees spread and feet in the air. This is sodium pentothal, Dr. R**** explained, count backwards from one hundred.

● ● ●,

“I love you, Betsy,” I cried, overwhelmed with gratitude to be alive. 

“I love you too,” she said and laughed. 

The pain between my legs was excruciating. 

In recovery, I asked the doctor’s wife, “Why does it hurt so much?”

“Well,” she said, “you haven’t exactly gone unmolested down there.”

I left with pads and some pills to control bleeding. Lydia and I spent the night with another GHS chum who lived in Tiger Town. He had no idea what we were up to. Suddenly I was seized with paranoia and flushed the pills. They were evidence. Except for a sore crotch, I was sure it was over and I was alive and free at last. 

Back home next day, contractions started. They got worse through that day and the next. It was agony, but I thought it was constipation. I asked Mama to give me an enema even though I feared what she might spot down there. 

That night, a small, unidentifiable, bloody mass dropped into my pad. I hid it in the backyard. The pain stopped. (I looked for it later, but never found it.)

A tsunami of relief and gratitude swept over me. I had not slept in days. Intermittently, I was blind and deaf. I left my body and talked to God. Mama called the missionaries who prayed and poured oil over my head as I prophesied and spoke in tongues.

Mama took me to the parish coroner, and he committed me to a state insane asylum on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. 

“Should I take my hair dryer?” I asked myself. “Yes. I’ll pack a notebook. Now that I’ve experienced everything a woman can experience, I shall write a great novel that will amaze everyone.” 

I chirped to Lydia about my blissful, peaceful life to come. 

“Snap out of it!” she commanded. “Do you know the first thing they will do when you get to that hospital? A...complete...physical...examination!”

I listened like a first grader as she schooled me. “This is what you’re going to do,” she said. “Tell your mother you went to a party in Tiger Town and someone slipped LSD into your drink.” 

● ● ●,

Mama took me back to the coroner.

“Are you on a trip?” he asked. 

“I’m going to Montana,” I said.

He canceled the commitment, gave me a shot, and sent me home with a bottle of Thorazine.

Next morning, I pulled off my pajama top and milk squirted from my nipples.

My little sister shrieked, “Sharon, what is that?” 

“Don’t tell Mama,” I begged. “I don’t want her to worry.”