I.
A woman sat in a rocking chair in front of my house and cheerfully enumerated to me and the other mothers in attendance the ways in which her church taught members’ pre-adolescent daughters that if they had sex outside of/before marriage they would be permanently damaged.
“You give each girl a balloon and they fill it up with water and tie it up and you put pieces of clear tape on it. Then you have the girls take a pin and poke holes in it and each hole represents any sexual behavior before marriage and eventually all the water sprays out and all they are left with is a stretched out, deflated balloon and you tell them, ‘This is what you will be giving your husband on your wedding day if you engage in sexual behavior before marriage. Is this God’s plan for you and your body?'”
She made no mention of whether or not the pin gets dull or loses its shine in the process.
II.
On a scale of “unstretched balloon, fresh from the bag” to “the carpet after Twinkie the Jack Russell Terrier pops 100 balloons in 39.08 seconds,” where are you on the scale of disappointment to God and your future husband?
III.
Or are you the pin?
IV.
When I was 20, I got in a car wreck just up the road from my office while on my lunch break. My mom came and picked me up, since my car got towed off. At the time, I was going back and forth between living at home with my parents and staying at the apartment my then boyfriend shared with his roommates.
My boyfriend’s divorce from his wife, who had up and moved 4,500 miles away two years prior and had not been heard from since, wasn’t yet final.
For 21 miles of the trip from my office toward my parents’ home, I was a captive audience to my mom berating me for sleeping with a married man.
I threatened to jump out of the car and walk rather than listen to another word of it, but couldn’t find the right spot in traffic to make my escape. Finally, at the stoplight at the corner of Main Street and Highway 92 in Woodstock, GA, I had my chance. I hopped out and walked 5.6 miles from that corner to the Rose Creek Library, in my office attire (high heels, not-quite knee length skirt, etc.), until the pain from the growing blisters on my feet finally outweighed my stubbornness and I called her to pick me back up.
V.
VI.
Postscript.
When I think of that story, quite often the first thing I think of is not why I wanted to jump out of the car or even the golf-ball-sized blisters on my feet. It’s having not gotten cat-called. That is the part that feels the most remarkable to me. I walked past plenty of men that day—groups of men, cars of men—and not a peep.
At the time my theory was that I just looked too angry to mess with, like I might drive a high heel through a man’s skull like Jael wielding a tent peg.
Now I’m not so sure.
kfw 2021
Undusted Corners 