Once in a Lifetime Opportunity
by Jessica Hardy as told to Lizzie Ashworth
Genre: Memoir
Publication Date: November 4, 2019
In the mid-20th century, an entire generation of women found themselves caught up in a revolution. Young women tossed aside society’s rules that had governed women with an iron hand for hundreds of years. Suddenly women had agency, the right to their own identity. And their own sexual adventures. The story of Jessica Hardy and her seven-year marriage to Parker Grant brings that enormous cultural shift down to the personal level. As she enters college in 1966, Jessica is desperate to break out of her strict upbringing. Parker is her salvation, a graduating senior who becomes the love of her life. Newly married, they immerse in Parker’s duties as an air force officer and a world of their own making—nights in Las Vegas, windy Pacific beaches, and long summer days in the Philippine Islands. Slowly, with Parker’s encouragement, Jessica gains self-confidence and a sense of herself. But Jessica has a problem. She wants more. More knowledge, more experience, autonomy. Leaving no stone unturned, Jess breaks one rule after another—illegal abortion, drugs, one man then another, even time in jail. It’s an unexpected spiritual awakening that opens the door to the rest of her life. Once in a Lifetime Opportunity reveals this tumultuous time in a gut-wrenching portrayal of a woman determined to find her own way and the man who loved her.
Chapter 2:
The “facts of life” seemed an inadequately euphemistic term for
the purpose of sex. “How people make babies” would have been a more honest
label for the breeding act with a thousand names. But even at age fifteen, I
remained abysmally ignorant of these truths.
That summer of 1962, as my
quest for knowledge led me forward, dust motes danced in beams of sunlight
streaming in the windows of my great aunt’s abandoned chicken house. Here and
there, cracks broke the long concrete floor but at the upper end where I sat, a
place had been set aside for a trunk, random chairs, a broken ottoman, an iron
bedstead and various other household outcasts. The trunk contained back issues
of Reader’s Digest, mostly 1940s and 1950s editions which
I’d mined for days as our summer vacation passed at a glacial pace.
Our family—dad, mom, me, younger sister, and two infant
brothers—were camped in my great aunt’s cabin, a relic perched a hundred feet
from the main house, a stone’s throw from the chicken house and another twenty
feet from the outhouse. The toilet hosted nests of angry red wasps and yellow
jackets, so as our days there crept past, bodily processes became fraught with terror.
The purpose of our stay was to save my father from cigarettes.
After reading the latest fad for cleansing the body from nicotine addiction, my
mother had hit upon the perfect plan in her continuing effort to expand our
health food diet: stay in her Aunt Golvia’s cabin, pick bushels of grapes from
the nearby vineyards, and eat nothing but grapes. That would cure him.
As it turned out, it didn’t cure him but it did exacerbate my
problem with the outhouse.
But that wasn’t the focus of my attention that sweltering July
afternoon. As I thumbed through various articles, sweat dripping down my sides,
my hands stopped on a page with fascinating drawings. These looked like – no,
they were!—line drawings of male and female bodies with genitalia in
anatomically correct detail. Even more fascinating was a third drawing showing
the male organ inside the female’s body. An even smaller detail showed the
release of sperm penetrating the cervix to fertilize the egg.
I read it and re-read it, trying to understand what it meant. My
face became hot. My hands trembled.
Could this be true? It was
in Readers Digest, so didn’t it have to be true?
So much suddenly made sense. All the years of my life until that
point, I’d been told that when a woman loved a man ‘enough,’ a baby grew in her
stomach. It was a miracle of God. I accepted that idea like I accepted that it
rained.
My fevered mind raced back to my previous efforts to understand
procreation. Just months prior, I stood in the cafeteria line as a group of
friends whispered about a freshman classmate getting pregnant.
“She
shouldn’t have done that,” JoEllen said. “She knew better.”
“They
expelled her,” Marti added.
“That’s
not fair. She can’t help it if she loves him that much,” I said piously.
Six sets of eyes settled on me. I squirmed uncomfortably. What?
None of them took mercy and told me the truth. Maybe they didn’t
grasp that I truly didn’t know how babies were made. But a few months later as
I crouched in that dusty barn staring at the page, here it was in black and white.
Humiliation flooded through me.
How could I have been so stupid?!
It was now obvious my mother had lied to me and more than once.
In seventh grade when my friend Joanie told a joke with the word ‘fuck’ in it,
I didn’t get it. The whole point of the joke hinged on that word. I rushed home
from school to ask what ‘fuck’ meant.
I ran down the alley as fast as my long lanky legs could carry
me, crossed the yard, and burst in through the back door. Mom was in the
kitchen, surrounded as usual by my two little brothers and a multitude of
unfinished tasks. I posed my question.
“What
does ‘fuck’ mean?”
Red splotches sprang onto her cheeks and her dark eyes flashed
in anger.
“Jessica
Hardy! Don’t you ever say that filthy word,” she said sharply. “Only filthy people
say that.”
I refused to back down. “But
what does it mean?”
“You
don’t need to know what it means,” she said, dismissing me with a turn of her
back.
Wow. Well, if she was that
upset about a word, I absolutely had to find out what it meant.
Next day, my friend Joanie was only too happy to explain that
‘fuck’ was when a man put his “necessary item” inside a girl “down there” and
went to the bathroom.
Oh god, the horror! Now, as I
studied the detailed drawings and re-read the Reader’s Digest article,
I finally got it.
MY PARENTS HAD FUCKED!
I staggered back to the cabin
where my mother was in the tiny kitchen washing grapes. I shoved the open Reader’s Digest in
front of her. “Is this true?”
She took the book, scanned the drawings, and angrily dropped the
little publication into the trash can without saying a single word. I could
tell by the red spots on her cheeks that it was true.
“Tell
me!”
“Yes,”
she said furiously. “Where did you get that? You’ve got no business reading
such filth.”
My jaw dropped. Filth? This was how she got pregnant. Why was it
filth? I couldn’t believe it. How could it be?
I wanted to scream at her. Make her admit her deliberate lies,
confess her intentional failure to educate me about the most important aspect
of human existence. Explain why making babies was filth. I couldn’t find words.
Instead, I raced through the cabin, climbed into the sleeping
loft, and threw myself into my pillow where I sobbed my eyes out. My parents!
Fucking? Each of us kids had come from fuck?
Oh, the horror. The shame. I thought I would throw up. I would
never do that. Now I knew with absolutely certainty that I would never have a
husband or a family because I would never let that filthy ‘fuck’ thing happen
to me. The missionary thing in Africa solidified in my mind.
Months later when Bob walked up beside me in the high school
band room and my knees sagged, I quickly amended my outlook. If I loved someone
enough, I might let him fuck me.
Early years of my life raced by with little time for writing as I pursued a technical career, raised children, and made questionable progress in learning to paint. Finally with time to write, I dedicate myself to stories of pleasure as well as the occasional editing project. I enjoy cooking, gardening, and time at the Pacific coast. Sunrise and sunset bring special moods, the twilight between two worlds--fully of creative energy. I love snuggling up with a good book most of all--and a cat or two.
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I like the cover
ReplyDeleteThanks Gwendolyn!
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