Because really, there is no dignity in it. These days, I am the sort of tough-skinned old battle-ax who would rather stand dry-eyed and undefended in the most hostile underbrush of truth than degrade herself and everyone else by collapsing into a swamp of manipulative tears.
But in the autumn of 1941, I had not yet become that woman.
So I wept and wept, in the backseat of Jim Larsen’s Buick—the prettiest and most copious tears you ever saw.
“What is it, Vee?” Jim’s voice betrayed an undertow of desperation. He had never before seen me cry. Instantly, his attention turned from his own shock to my care. “Why are you crying, dear?”
His solicitousness only made me sob harder.
He was so good, and I was such trash!
He gathered me in his arms, begging me to stop. And because I could not speak in that moment, and because I could not stop crying, he just went right ahead and made up a story for himself about why I was not a virgin.
He said, “Somebody did something horrible to you, didn’t they, Vee? Somebody in New York City?”
Well, Jim, lots of people did lots of things to me in New York City—but I can’t say that any of it was particularly horrible.
That would have been the correct and honest answer. But I couldn’t very well give that answer, so I said nothing, and just sobbed away in his competent arms—my heaving voicelessness giving him plenty of time to embellish his own details.
“That’s why you came home from the city, isn’t it?” he said, as though it were all dawning on him now. “Because somebody violated you, didn’t they? That’s why you’re always so meek. Oh, Vee. You poor, poor girl.”
I heaved some more.
“Just nod if it’s true,” he said.
Oh, Jesus. How do you get out of this one?
You don’t. You can’t get out of this one. Unless you’re able to be honest, which of course I could not do. By admitting that I wasn’t a virgin, I had already played my one card of truthfulness for the year; I didn’t have another one in the deck. His story was preferable, anyway.
God forgive me, I nodded.
(I know. It was awful of me. And it feels just as awful for me to write that sentence as it did for you to read it. But I didn’t come here to lie to you, Angela. I want you to know exactly who I was back then—and that’s what happened.)
“I won’t make you talk about it,” he said, petting my head and staring off into the middle distance.
I nodded through my tears: Yes, please don’t make me talk about it.
If anything, he seemed relieved not to hear the details.
He held me for a long time, until my crying had subsided. Then he smiled at me valiantly (if a little shakily) and said, “It’s all going to be all right, Vee. You’re safe now. I want you to know that I will never treat you like you are tainted. And you needn’t worry—I’ll never tell anyone. I love you, Vee. I will marry you despite this.”
His words were noble, but his face said: Somehow I will learn to bear this repugnant hunk of awfulness.
“I love you, too, Jim,” I lied, and I kissed him with something that might have been interpreted as gratitude and relief.
But if you would like to know when—in all my years of life—I felt the most sordid and vile, it was right then.
Winter came.
The days got shorter and colder. My commute to work with my father was executed both morning and night in pitch darkness.
I was working on knitting Jim a sweater for Christmas. I had not unpacked my sewing machine since returning home nine months earlier—even looking at its case made me feel sad and grim—but I had recently taken up knitting. I was good with my hands, and handling the thick wool came easily. I’d ordered a pattern through the mail for a classic Norwegian sweater—blue and white, with a snowflake pattern—and I worked on it whenever I was alone. Jim was proud of his Norwegian heritage, and I thought he might like a gift that reminded him of his father’s country. In making this sweater, I pushed myself to the same level of excellence my grandmother would have demanded of me, ripping back whole rows of stitches when they were not perfect, and trying them again and again. It would be my first sweater, yes, but its excellence would be beyond reproach.