Irma Kurtz - My Life in Agony: Confessions of a Professional Agony Aunt

ALMA BOOKS LTD

London House

243253 Lower Mortlake Road

Richmond

Surrey TW9 2LL

United Kingdom

www.almabooks.com

First published by Alma Books Limited in 2014

Irma Kurtz, 2014

Irma Kurtz asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

ISBN : 978-1-84688-311-8

eBook ISBN : 978-1-84688-323-1

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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

I was fourteen going on fifteen. I still pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America with my classmates, hands on hearts, at the start of every school assembly. It was a summer day in 1950, and my parents were doing a weekly stocking-up in the small town near our holiday home in the foothills of New Yorks Catskill Mountains. My little brother was indulging his incipient bibliophilia in the childrens section of the local library under the eagle eye of the librarian, a woman never seen to smile, not even when she pointed to the sign Bea Still on her desk and warned new arrivals that it really was her name, so they had better not laugh aloud. I was sitting alone at the counter of the luncheonette in the main street. It was unusual to see a young person alone in a public eating place back then. It still is. Solitude in public looked like failure to us then it felt like failure too. It still does. Unless as in my case and that of others like me to be alone came as a relief from wondering who we were and how we fit within our families and the crowd.

When another girl on her embarrassing lonesome walked into the luncheonette and stood for a moment in the doorway looking around, anxious and frowning, something told me she was going to make for the stool next to mine at the counter never mind that plenty others were unoccupied, or even that she was at least three years my senior, which is time enough to put teenagers a world apart. She was dressed in fashionable ballerina style; I wore a shapeless skirt and a baggy blouse; her hair was permanent-waved to her shoulders, mine was in two thick braids nearly to my waist. In the mirror behind the counter I watched her wrinkle her nose when she saw the towering strawberry ice-cream sundae in front of me and then, after an approving glance at her own reflection, she settled on the neighbouring stool: her skirt, over a starched petticoat, opened into an umbrella under her. Sometimes, when I recreate conversations and correspondence from the past, I invent the words, but I no more invent their themes and timing than I would of recollected music.

I dont know what to do, she said in an accent like my own from the big city fifty miles to the west.

The strawberry ice cream is yummy I replied, wistfully.

Gimme a Coke, she said to the cute guy behind the counter.

He had been ogling her with a sparkle she did not return or appear to notice. I put my spoon down. I sighed. Only a beast would tuck into an ice-cream sundae while sitting next to a soul in confessional mode.

Its my boyfriend. He says hes gonna stop going out with me if I wont do it

Her pauses underlined the significance of it, and also made it clear that she had no more done it yet than I had. Virginity was not unusual among girls and young women of that time on the contrary: it must have been common among our brothers too. The parents and teachers of my generation quite a few of them born in the previous century instructed us girls that to do it was all every boy wanted from any girl, and once she had done it with him he would have no more to do with her; nor would any other boy want damaged goods like her not if he was a nice boy. Doing it was reserved for after marriage, and marriage was what nice girls were made for. The maidenhead was a gift and a burden we damn well better hang on to until we sacrificed it virtuously at the altar. All faiths, no matter how antagonistic they may be in politics and on the fields of war, are in accord to this day when it comes to rating virginity as a major component of every good girls dowry.

Do you want to do it with him? I dared ask the stranger, for I myself had recently begun to feel stirrings of physical desire, albeit no stronger than the tickling that precedes a sneeze.

Her grimace of horror wrinkled into disgust: No! Of course I dont want to do it! My folks would kill me if I got pregnant!

Nowadays teenaged girls are warned to beware of promiscuous intercourse because sexually transmitted diseases are reported to be on the increase in their generation; however, not only are such afflictions invisible on the dance floor, they are unimaginable to young people in throes of infatuation, and so STDs are a less effective deterrent to underage sex now than getting knocked up used to be. Procreation was the one and only reason adults gave us girls for doing it; later we would learn that it was also our duty to provide pleasure to the man with whom we were legally contracted, lest he stray away to find it elsewhere. Accidental pregnancy and a resultant baby labelled illegitimate were the hazard and punishment of unauthorized doing it. Contraception was not to be had out of machines in the Ladies or over drugstore counters in those days: a diaphragm was the only defence available to girls, and to be fitted with one was a fiddly business involving lies and possibly the attempted forgery of parental approval.

I dont know what to do, the stranger said yet again.

She stirred the straw around the glass in front of her; her fingernails were painted crimson. Had she and I been in the same year at the same school she would be one of the girls who jeered at my braids and lace-up shoes whenever we passed each other in the halls. But when she turned to me and I looked into blue eyes welling with tears, I could see it was not one like herself she needed now, it was not a friend she wanted: it was a listening stranger who had to be a female, one she was unlikely to meet again, who posed no risk of tattling to her classmates or her family. Should the stranger be able to offer her a spell or potion, so much the better; however, the most important thing for a troubled girl was to hear herself speak without interruption. And the moment this girl saw me plain and alone at the counter, she knew I would fill the bill.

Im crazy about him. Hes crazy about me too. Were crazy about each other

Crazy! I thought. I only said: If he cares about you so much, then why does he let himself make you unhappy this way?

She frowned and, after a moment: He gave me flowers for my birthday

Flowers wilt and die, I thought, but red marks on exam papers had finally taught me that metaphor is often mistaken for obfuscation, so I said nothing.

And he gave me gorgeous chocolates at Christmas

Did he eat any of them himself?

I anticipated her reply, and had asked the question only so she could hear herself answer it.

He ate all the soft-centres, she said. Her scowl delivered a glimpse of the bossy, defensive old woman she would become some day, and the puzzlement of her tone flared into outrage: He ate every last one of the soft-centres