The Over-Educated Nympho

My dear sweet beloved cousin Dr Science is getting married this weekend in our hometown. I’m a bridesmaid. It makes me sad. I have no doubt that I’ll start crying (loudly and with lots of snot), but it won’t be because of what I’m supposed to be sad about. I’m not jealous that she’s getting married. I’m not worried that I’ll die an old maid. I’m not concerned that her fiance is wrong for her, I have great faith that they are perfectly nerdy for each other. It’ s just that I know things will never be the same again. No matter what she says and promises, things will change. That’s what happens when people grow up, get married, have kids, change jobs, get old. I’ve always known this, I just don’t want it to happen to Dr. Science.

For as long as I can remember, she’s been my partner in crime. When we were kids, I was shy, bookish, well-behaved, and introspective. But when I was around my cousin, one year older than me, we brought out the worst in each other in the best possible way. Boys, shopping, naughty cable channels, hours playing Nintendo and Monopoly (she always cheated), learning dirty jokes, doing all the bad things kids are supposed to do while they’re growing up.

When we were in high school we both had really serious boyfriends and we had a bet going on who would get married first… “I am!” “No, I am!” “Who would want to marry you?” “What weirdo wants to marry you?” Then in college it changed to “You’re going to get married first!” “No, YOU are!” “I don’t wanna get married! “What the fuck makes you think I do??”

She won, and it breaks my heart. Dr. Science has always been a step ahead of me, being a year older. I always saw Dr. Science as my older sister that I resented my parents for not providing me themselves. She taught me all sorts of things about boys, how to be cool, how to be more out-going, how to flirt–and with her endless supply of boyfriends, no one could have been better to teach me the things that comprise female adolescence. By the time I turned sixteen I had nearly caught up with her, now we were discussing sexy bras and hair and oral sex on the same level. She may have been doing these things longer, but I was a damn fast learner. By eighteen I had long ago lost my virginity, which I revealed to Dr. Science during a camping trip with all her college friends. She was shocked in a way I haven’t seen since. She’d lost her virginity years ago as well, but I knew about it. For some reason I had kept it to myself when it happened with my high school boyfriend. Was it because not only had I caught up with her, but passed her in the many rites of passage in becoming a woman? Already highly sexed, my sexuality was still forming at a scary rate. Although Dr. Science had had countless boyfriends, it seemed so normal, so un-intimidating, so nothing for her. With me it didn’t stop there. The potential was so much more than either of us wanted to admit.

At 21 I flew across the country to visit her at grad school where we did the standard grad student activities of dancing, drinking cheap beer, getting guys to buy us drinks, competing to see who got hit on more, stumbling drunk into convenience stores and demanding fresh pancakes–but it wasn’t so fun any more. The dynamic had changed. By this point I was the single one dating and sleeping around, she was the conservative one listening to my steamy stories with a sense of awe but I could hear in her slowly-conceived questions a new barely-there growing contempt for my behavior. Even now that I live with BF and we talk about marriage one day, it doesn’t matter. My cousin will still remember me as the awkward child who usually read while our cousins played in another room, just as she will remember me as someone who saw so much more in sex than a girl should.

So Friday morning I leave to drive the several hours home just in time to be at the rehearsel. It seems like a Tim Burton fantasmagical scene. Dr. Science wearing a beautiful elegant dress, the girl who normally wears purposely mismatched and clashing things bought at used clothing stores on the coolest strips in Austin, who thinks nothing of skipping and singing in public, who wears bright blue eyeshadow for the delight of watching old ladies whisper about her to each other. I’ll be beside her at the altar, her longest friend of the bridesmaids, knowing that things are about to change. But does it matter? One day she may be a bridesmaid at my wedding, crying just as I will, because we left each other behind long ago.

**Sorry for the sappy posts today. I woke up in a lousy mood, wrote one post this morning that put me in tears than even a Xanax couldn’t fight off, and I just haven’t climbed out of the hole today. Despite another Xanax this afternoon, fresh vanilla cake for dinner, I’m still feeling sulky and pensive. You know, one of those awful don’t-make-me-think-about-it-because-I’ll-cry days where all I’ve been thinking about how nice it will be to go back to bed where I belong.

As a child, I would often slip into bed to read with Mom before going back to my room to sleep. I remember sitting up in my parents’ bed with my book, looking around their room at all the items belonging to adulthood: Dad’s shiny shoes, Mom’s bras and lacy nightgowns, money and business magazines, luggage, scarves, red and maroon nail polish, thick hardback books, ceramic items I’d made in school, fancy purses saved for date night. I recall looking around the room, fascinated, waiting earnestly for the day I would own such adult things.

Of all the items surrounding me, none I wanted to possess more than the smell of my mother when I snuggled up to her, the book abandoned on my lap. Often she would smile down at me and maybe laugh at something I’d said, then turn back to her magazine and flip a page. She never realized that while my head was on her chest, I’d tilt my head up to breathe in the smell of her, something sweet and clean that I had not found anywhere else, what I later learned was the face cream shipped in from an overseas friend of hers. Once I asked her to use it on me but she said, as I commonly heard from grown-ups, I was too young for it–what six year-old needed face cream?

Now when I visit Mom and Dad very few of these adult things remain in their room. Most no longer hold importance for them, having grown well into middle age. Now I go into my parents’ room and it no longer smells wonderfully exotic, just old and settled. There’s no perfume or glorious travel books or beautiful clothes with foreign colors. All that remain of the original adult glamour are the stacks of magazines on money and business, many covered in dust. Books and clothes cover the bed, which Mom often sleeps on because she’s too tired to clear them off first. When I first noticed the disregarded energy of their room as a teenager I was saddened, even a little ashamed for them. Now that I’m older I understand, and I wonder how they maintained that level of energy for as long as they did.

While living in New York City, my parents booked a last-minute flight for me to visit home because I had called them crying or on the verge of crying so many times. That first night, weeping and broken and disappointed in myself for being a failure at my first attempt at adulthood, I climbed into their bed where Mom was reading one of her magazines. She looked up in surprise, but quickly made her small customary motherly smile. She had been in a similar place many years ago. Although she has never told me her story, I’ve heard enough pieces to know that it was her shaky first step toward being the strong woman I have breathed in all my life. Here she lay next to me, having long outlasted the exotic makeup and pretty nightgowns that I used to think were signs of being a woman. Her smile was no longer full or glowing, but it was there holding steady.

This time I didn’t use the pretense of a book to crawl into bed with Mom like when I was younger. I wrapped my arms around her and started crying quietly. Throughout my childhood I’d hide in my bedroom closet when I cried because I was too proud to be seen vulnerable, even in front of my parents. But for the first time, I was too empty to be embarassed. I let Mom pull me into her, her sweet soft neck smelling just like it always had.