The road to this first kiss was long and convoluted but I knew I was a girl when I was very young. Maybe five years old, and playing with my first Barbie, that tall skinny one in a one piece that came with a Ken and lots and lots of costumes and even her own dream house.
It was one of those kisses that you know you will have someday, the first time you fall in love. We fell in love more than once in my generation. All of us did.
I wasn’t one of those girls in High School who was going to go to a Prom, because we would have called them uncool in those years. Girls like me weren’t the cheerleader type and boys my own age were like little kids compared to grown men.
I think I must have fallen in love with him the first time I saw him at seventeen, across a crowded party my mother was throwing for my Uncle at the Chateau Marmont, and he came gliding across the room, in all that black Irish charm that actors have and said simply, “You’ve blossomed.”
I was shy.
It would be another two years, until I was 19, that I had the really real kiss.
We would begin in a story of crossed stars the year my Uncle died in 1976.
But I should go back to the dolls, first. I never had the kind that were meant to be pushed in strollers. By five I liked the costumes Barbie wore, and that was the sort of dress I had on that night at the party. It was palest grey and shimmering, a bias cut vintage number straight from the 1940’s, floor length, all bell sleeved and wide shoulders and I might have worn wedgies, or maybe platforms. They were popular those years.
We wore jeans and jean jackets.
They were like a kind of armor, I suppose.
We weren’t trying to be men, they were the fashion of the times. Dresses weren’t something I wore after I was thirteen. I wore Danskins.
Writing a memoir. I don’t expect it will be easy. He really hurt me.
In the years after 1973, they knew they could hurt us.
They hurt us like our fathers had. All the fatherless girls we became after our parents divorced, when there wasn’t ever going to be a corsage, and there weren’t going to be any dances, and romance the way we had always thought of that, or chivalry, the way we had always thought of that, was a thing torn from pages of ancient books we had glimpsed.
We, of the tribe that walked the stacks, searching through books and books and books for answers.
What was love?
I found it in Lady Chatterley at fourteen, reading all the secret sentences.
Adrienne Wilson 