436
ALAN
FRIEDMAN
"No.
It
has to stop. Millie, you're going to become a woman-It
"Will I?" I said wistfully. I was almost thirteen.
"Of course. We'll be man and woman, grown and separate. And
I suppose we'll be embarrassed when we look back, but let's not
regret
it.
After all, we made the choice. Now we've got to make
other choices-"
"Construct other choices," I corrected him ironically-the first
time it had evcr entered my head to correct him, or to be ironical.
1 was awed at myself.
Desperately, I began writing verse again-filled a whole year's
diary with girlish love poems, pleading with him for his affection.
Impatiently I kept waiting for his first summer vacation. But he
was as good as his word and when he did come back, he remained
irreproachable, unapproachable. After he left again for the second
year, I succumbed to endless nighttime imaginings of his presence
in my bed.
With a good deal less interest I kept waiting to become a
woman, as a kind of consolation, never forgetting that Sandy had
seemed to promise it to me. I was already rather pretty, blonde
and graceful, and as thin as a young girl should be. But I
was
worried because by that time I should also have been adolescent.
I began to think that nature was spitefully withholding my maturity
from me on account of my precocious adventures with my brother. I
was already fourteen and terribly conscious whenever I undressed
with the other girls during swimming periods at school that I
was
childishly hairless and flatchested. It seemed to me that for purely
physical and therefore unfair reasons, the other girls were auto–
matically relegating me to the position of social failure; I resented it.
When Sandy came home the second summer, I consulted him,
hoping also to tempt him by making him touch me where I was flat.
Mocking me goodnaturedly, he said, "Let's construct a choice for
you, Millie." So he carved a pair of sponges into the proper shape,
and when school came round again in the fall, on his advice I dropped
swimming classes and began wearing my womanhood inside a bras–
siere. The result was immediate and it shocked me: I had more
invitations than I could accept. Since except for Sandy, I wanted to
keep the boys at a distance but at the same time wanted the ap-
