Shrug by Lisa Braver Moss

Author:Lisa Braver Moss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2019-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

17

rebellious

“There’s nothing wrong with sex,” my mother said to Hildy one evening a few months later. The doors were all open, as usual, because children don’t need privacy! My mother was lecturing Hildy from the doorway, not even making an attempt to keep her voice down so that Drew and I wouldn’t hear. “You don’t want to be one of those uptight girls, playing games,” she went on. “Depriving their boyfriends of intercourse when it’s only natural that’s what the boyfriends want.” “Mom!” Hildy said.

“You can’t string him along indefinitely, you know, Hildy. That would be cruel.”

Afterwards, Hildy came into my room. Her voice wobbled as she tried not to cry. “Mom wants me to go to her gynecologist so I can get birth control,” she said, as if I hadn’t heard the whole conversation. “She wants me to have sex with Greg.”

Have sex: that was not what my mother had said. She’d said “intercourse,” and Hildy had automatically corrected it, just as I would’ve done, maybe without even noticing, putting as much distance as possible from my mother’s repulsive way of saying things. Intercourse. Only my mother could make something nice sound clinical and disgusting at the same time.

“Hildy, what do you want?” I knew she didn’t want to have sex with Greg Gold. Maybe if she said it aloud, she’d have more of a chance of listening to herself.

“You know, Greg thinks I’m exaggerating about how mean Mom is. He doesn’t believe me.”

“I hate when people are like that!”

“Plus, he acts like he owns me or something,” she went on. “I asked Dad what he thought. He said if I’m not having fun with Greg, or if he isn’t being nice to me, that’s a good enough reason to stop dating him.”

“Oh.” Was it?

“And I said, ‘But Dad, it’ll hurt Greg’s feelings if I break it off.’ I told him I thought I should just gradually spend less time with him. But Dad said that was a bad idea. He said breaking up with someone was kind of like an amputation. He goes, ‘Do you really think it’s better if you do it an inch at a time?’ And I can see Dad’s point.”

“So—you need to tell Greg. Right?”

“I know. I’m trying to get up the nerve.”

Hildy had been getting horrible stomachaches lately. I told her she should make my mother take her to a stomach doctor, not a gynecologist, but we both knew that if Hildy let on, there’d be some reason why the situation was Hildy’s fault. Or Jules’s fault, for being such a psychopath, it was no wonder Hildy had developed physical symptoms to mirror the psychological damage, blah blah blah. . . .

Not that Hildy could get help from my father, either. If she told him she wanted to go see a doctor, he’d open up the register and say, “What do you need?” as if the problem were cash. What Hildy really needed, of course, was help finding a doctor and making an appointment.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.