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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Notice that the boy she envies is onstage, and there you'll find another answer to the question above. Growing up among six siblings only sounds like a loving romp to those who haven't done it; surely whoever dreamed up "The Brady Bunch" was, like Dobie's mother, an only child. Dobie doesn't regret her upbringing, but she remembers how kids in big families can feel undifferentiated, like part of "a pack of wild animals," close physically but "without really knowing each other." While Dobie's solidly middle-class family never went hungry, she remembers never getting quite enough of her mother's love. "To me," she writes, "The Family was an entity, a being with needs and desires, an appetite all its own. Often those needs and desires were quite different from mine."
It's not surprising, then, that Dobie found it so easy to be swept up in the desires of the "tribe," the "brotherhood" that she believed she had found among the boys of the teen center. As the only girl in the car, though, she was no longer a mere face in the crowd, but special, the one girl with the daring to act like a boy. The desire of the men and boys she had sex with must have felt like sweet compensation for the undivided attention she'd never had before.
The teenage Dobie was a breathtaking blend of tarty attitude and sheer ignorance. Riding in the back of her family's RV during a long road trip, she traded innuendo with male drivers. Any woman who's ever wondered why a trucker would hold up a sign reading "I Want to Eat Your Pussy" to a complete stranger in another vehicle should know that every so often there's a girl clueless enough to read this as a gesture of loneliness and flash back a sign reading "Meow!" When two men in a car teased her with a piece of paper reading "Jailbait," her response was "Want to Go Fishing?"
Yet even after Dobie's 14th year dissolved into a "storm of boys, fingers, tongues, dirty words whispered hotly in my ear," she didn't know that women could have orgasms, and she'd never had one herself. She didn't know what 69 was, though that didn't stop her from agreeing to try it. And she was impervious to many warnings about the social consequences of her recklessness. Boys she thought she was "going with" told her they had "real" girlfriends who wouldn't even kiss them.
And the girls who hung out at the teen center sent the usual harsh adolescent signals of disapproval, at first indirectly, but finally with a hostility as "thick as brambles": "They hated me for getting away with it, even though I was only 'getting away with it' in my own head. But that's what must have been so infuriating. To them I was trash -- it was obvious. Everyone knew it but me."
Not every boy she encountered was predatory. A friend's older brother deflected her advance when he found out her age. And, most touchingly, the four black boys who sometimes frequented the teen center invited her out for a drive in order to warn her that she had "to start being careful ... You're getting a rep ... You can't trust any of them."
"To this day, I marvel at it," Dobie writes. "Four boys in a car with me? They could've imagined a very different scenario -- but all they tried to do was protect me ... What did I have to offer them? A girl so foolish she didn't even know she was alone ... They saw danger approaching and took sides -- not with the pretty girls or the rowdy boys, but with the weakest link in the chain. A bravery wasted on me."
Bravery winds up being the shred of treasure Dobie takes away from her nightmarish experience with four much less decent boys a few months later. Even after her imagined "tribe" turned on her, it took several more cruelties before she realized how utterly she'd been forsaken and how grievously she'd miscalculated her "beautiful adventure." For nearly two years afterward she barely left the house for fear of running into her tormentors, and at the Catholic girls' school she attended, she stuck close to a funny and fearless black friend who shielded her from the mean girls who knew about her "rep." She's also lucky she didn't get pregnant.
Yet Dobie doesn't disown the impulse behind her brief foray into promiscuity, that headlong dash to freedom and exploration. The hankering to model yourself after "a boy who joins circuses or travels west with a pistol and a dog" is nothing to scoff at, even if the first time you take a stab at it you screw up badly. "The Only Girl in the Car" is a grownup's memoir, not a fetish of past miseries thinly wrapped in the pretense of having reached "closure." Dobie is not nursing grievances, but explaining that she continues to take chances (albeit different kinds of chances) even though she once paid a horrible price for doing so.
In fact, not all Dobie's memories from that time are muddled or scary or poisoned by later betrayals. She recalls one lover, a nameless "wanderer" from someplace else, "the most beautiful boy in the world," who by some miracle "didn't think that sex was his to experience alone." She let him in by the basement door late one night and never saw him again after he left, but he had, she writes, "stamped himself on my brain, and so he would resurface again and again through the years, in other boys and men. Once the mind knows something exists, there's no stopping it from finding that thing again, especially when that thing is a slow, practiced, shamelessly hot and tender boy. Occasionally he appears in my dreams -- he's always on a high wire, performing for a crowd. He wears a dusty bowler cap and will take no money for his show. He does it for the love of it; he's as light as air."
