The Family Interview

Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey

1/29/94

A middle-aged couple is being interviewed in their modest but well-kept living room. They had apparently married young. Neither had played the field much; they imply but don’t out-and-out state that the wife had been a virgin on her wedding night. While they have remained satisfied with their marriage, they both wondered ever since what it would have been like to have sowed their respective wild oats when they’d had the chance.

They decided early on they they would give their only child, a daughter, the upbringing they wished they’d had. They encouraged her to be frank and open about any questions she had regarding sexuality. The mother gave her more advice than she wanted to hear about looking pretty, poise, smiling, and the psychological importance of wearing pretty underwear at all times.

In the short run all this doting attention hurt the girl. Always dressed in the most attractive clothes her folks could afford, she went through grade school and junior high as as object of jealousy and scorn among the other girls. Her parents now admit they may have overstressed the importance of feeling beautiful at too early a stage, but insist their parentage has been nothing but sincere and well-wishing.

When she turned 15 they sent her to a co-ed church summer camp, with the unspoken understanding that she would contrive to lure a boy into the woods to cure her virginity. That scheme didn’t work out: she got her period the first day she had an unsupervised hour, on the next-to-last day of the camp. She came home disappointed and dejected. Her parents sat her down for a long talk. She told them she wanted this one boy so much, but couldn’t get alone with him to even ask him. Her mother smiled and reassured her that other opportunities would occur soon enough. Her father quietly announced that he needed to go on a business trip the next weekend and wanted to take her mother along.

That weekend the girl invited the boy from camp over. She did most everything that a girl with a boy and his dad’s car could do out on a Friday night in Burien. When that was over (about 45 mins.), she invited him into her house. Awkwardly and nervously, she brought him to the couch to watch videos, then at one point sat there looking at him for what seemed like several lifetimes waiting for him to kiss her. At several stages in the making-out process, she felt alternately like she was coming to life for the first time and like she was going to die. She abruptly got up to go to the bathroom. Five minutes later he got up to see what was keeping her. He found her waiting for him in her parents’ bed. When that was over (about 25 mins.), she fell asleep dreaming of his exquisite face and smooth chest, and devising how she could politely dump him.

He was still there in the morning, fixing breakfast and planning their day together. She went along with him to the Boat Show, then to Denny’s, then back to her house for a slightly more relaxed session of sex (about 40 mins.), before he said his mom would be waiting for him and he left. She curled up with a bad-movie night on cable, while pondering the significance to the course of the universe of her past 24 hours. At one point in history, an unmarried girl having sex was always potentially important, because it subverted the rules of society and could lead to a socially unacceptable pregnancy. But in her day and age, with her careful adherence to the physical and emotional precautions her mother had insisted upon, her brief ascendence into heaven (albeit a sloppy, sticky heaven) meant nothing to the world outside her house and the boy’s house. He didn’t even go to her school, so none of her classmates would know about it if she didn’t tell them.

She did tell it all to her mother, and knew her mother would tell it all to her father. The three had a long heart-to-heart about the responsibilities of womanhood and why the heart and the body can have different cravings at different times and how to tell them apart.

In the five years since then, her parents now report, she has had a succession of fascinating adventures with some of the nicest and/or prettiest guys in town. She’s learned how to request and receive full pleasure. She knows how to start and end an affair with minimal hurt or embarrassment. They hope she’ll settle down and marry, but they understand that the demands of college, to be followed by the demands of starting a career, might set that back a few years.

The grownup daughter now enters camera range and sits between her parents. She is just as pretty as they claimed. She’s got a vivacious face and a perfectly-shaped smile.

She sits up straight and peers into the camera with her perfectly made-up eyes. She says only that she has had a good life so far, that she’s not in love at the moment, but she believes, and her parents agree, that not being in love shouldn’t prevent a woman from having a good life, including a good sex life.