Cousin Jenny is Pregnant

by Beth Kelly

I didn’t think I was bearing my soul with this essay about sex until I slid my phone across the table and watched my husband read it while we waited for our waitress to bring breakfast. 

Let it Be provided the eternity of his reading a soundtrack — in which Paul McCartney sings the phrase “let it be” no less than 34 times. 

The world is full of tiny graces. 

The draft of the essay John read started like this:

Before Marty there was Ben. 

I didn’t murder Ben — but he is dead.

Which got me thinking. 

How is it I’ve never told the dreadful story of my virginity to my best friends. And come to think of it, why do I know so few of their stories?

It’s because I don’t talk about sex — like the actuals of sex. And I talk about everything. I almost never stop talking. It may be because I don’t actually know how I think about sex. If I’m to be honest, I don’t know how I feel about sex. 

The “Sex Talk” I was given was delivered in three memorable lines:

“Your cousin Jenny is pregnant. Don’t have sex. If you’re going to have sex, take a bus to Planned Parenthood.” 

This week I turned 40 years old — Cousin Jenny’s daughter is 27. I think I’m ready to start the real sex conversation with myself. 

And I intend to go down to the brass tacks: What sex has been? Where have my ideas about it come from? How have my experiences informed me? What does sex mean to me today? 

How will we talk to the kids about it?

I have to start somewhere, so I’ll start with Ben suddenly dead of a heart attack at age 34. 

It took years for that news to find me. When it did, I used the internet to find his obituary, and I also went so far as to lurk on his widow’s Facebook page — and stay there long enough to see (in the way FB allows you to believe you’re seeing anything) their story start, middle and abruptly end.

I didn't know that Ben. The Ben I know lives on in the spring of 1996 when he held the whole of my attention with the potency of a dark magic only 17-year-old boys can muster over 14 year-old girls. 

It didn’t take much really. 

A handful of very humpy makeout sessions; a few rides in his car; a critical and withholding demeanor — a particularly effective device when used on girls with medium self-esteem; a stupid fucking Hallmark card; an empty house. 

I undressed and pulled the twin sized comforter up to my chin. He put a condom on in another room.

At the very moment “Dj Benny Beats,” (a detail I picked up in his obituary) — successfully pushed his penis where no other boy-child had before, I was overtaken, briefly, by an intense rush of an altogether new sensation. 

It was the feeling of having something while also longing for it at the same time. 

All at once I was startled, delighted, devastated. 

But mostly I stayed quiet. 

Ben told me to wrap my legs around his waist, and since I didn’t know what else to do with my stupid legs and was unaccustomed to seeing my knees bobbing back towards my face, I was both relieved and mortified to arrange them to his liking. 

There was no intimacy, no tenderness, no connection, no violence. It was an impression of intimacy — the cheap variety only a naive and unsophisticated person could fall for. 

But there I laid in Ben’s thin — but not unclever — plot to extract my virginity from my narrative.  

He didn’t call me again. And he didn’t return the messages I found the courage to leave with his mother.

There were only a handful days left of school and I counted on seeing Ben there, in the hallways, despite my being in the 8th grade and him residing in the 11th. I imagined I would demand an explanation. There was courage still in the tank. 

Only it was Finals Week, and gone were the regularly scheduled bells that made the beautiful and mysterious older boys swim in predictable patterns through our school’s hallways. 

And just as the opportunities for cornering him dwindled, my friends took to the same hallways to tell anyone who would listen that I lost my virginity to Ben over the weekend. It was news. 

Beth lost her virginity to Ben this weekend.

Hey, did you hear? Beth had sex with Ben this weekend.
My friends had defected spectacularly. They walked the halls stopping people, indiscriminately, to share how I had lost my virginity to Ben, before moving on to the next person. 

School ended. I laid on my bedroom floor. 

Dead.

The first blow from Ben left me with an excruciating ache for what had been lost and the cruelty in which it was taken. 

The second wound was the publicity regarding my sexual status. 

The fatal and final strike was the grief of having no one to talk to about any of this. 

So I did what teenagers do. I rose from the dead and made new friends. 

And in my town, just outside Rock Bottom Pennsylvania — where there is little expectation that even 14 year olds do much outside of drinking — I set out to find myself at every party. I was looking for Ben that summer. 

And I couldn’t believe how hard it was proving to be. Days dragged. Night brought hope but invariably each evening slipped by without catharsis. 

Until finally:

My hands would have been trembling, while certainly also holding a solo cup and a Marlboro. 

The conversation was brief and unsatisfying, the specifics of which I cannot recall. 

But for the sake of the essay, here are the broad stokes: 

Me: Sad. Hurt. Recounting the facts. Wanting an explanation.

Him: Not sure not sure not sure. Defensive defensive defensive. I’m a cool jerk. I’m a cool jerk. Immacooljerk. 

But before we walked away, Ben did manage to say something so shocking, so beyond the pale, so creative, that it stands up to time and refuses to be lost.

Here he is again: Dumb unhelpful words yada yada more dumb words. 

Then…

...your legs spread like butter.

“...your legs spread like butter”

Not unlike a physical artifact, only this fragment of the larger part remains. 

My legs spread like butter. 

My pain catalyzed into anger. I stomped away with a newborn resolve. 

Nothing like this will happen to me again. 

This story picks up seven years later, in what I now believe is probably the same bar where Ben would come find his cringy alias — only on this night he’s not DJ Benny Beats, he’s checking IDs at the door.  

Ben appears genuinely shocked to see me in his line, at his bar, in his college town. He looks too like he’s trying to determine if this is a dream.

Once again our exchange is brief, but this time it’s his eyes that do the beseeching. 

Is he trying to say he’s sorry? It feels to me that he’s going further than that. He’s begging me to understand how sorry he is and there’s a sincerity to this plea. 

Or maybe he wants to know if the butter is still warm. 

In any case, I’m there to visit a friend and he asks for her number — he’d like to reach me after his shift. 

I feel the jolt of the power shift. He has no spell over me and for that, I was relieved. I went about my evening more-or-less indifferent to whether or not I ended up on the other end of his phone line. I walked away with everything I needed from his sorry looking face. 

And I never do see him again. 

That night, when we got back to my friend’s place, her roommate did mention the phone had been ringing. 

And I sleep just fine. 

But I don’t fuck right for years.

Beth Kelly is a writer, mother, wife and friend living in New Mexico. She learns everything the hard way.