Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [11]
On another occasion, at a party Gail took her to, Mary got sick after mixing beer and whiskey drinks. She went into a bedroom to lie down. Suddenly the door opened and a man entered, leering at Mary. Gail came to the rescue. “She doesn’t do that,” she told the man. Someone volunteered to drive Mary home. The next day the Oakland Tribune ran a front-page story about a raid on a party in which the proprietress was arrested for prostitution. To Mary’s horror, it was the same house, and the raid had occurred fifteen minutes after she left.
Matters deteriorated further when Mary got invited to a “tea” party, the kind that featured heroin and marijuana. Naively, Mary thought the objects people were smoking were regular cigarettes, and accepted a couple as a gift from a young man who was kind enough to drive her home. When she told her mother about it the next day, the horrified Ophelia phoned the Oakland drug squad. A day later, Mary was downtown talking to the FBI. It turned out, again to her horror, that the man who threw the party had a long police record. The authorities asked Mary to serve as a police plant at another dope party, but then failed to follow up.
She had stumbled into these situations ingenuously and out of loneliness and a desire to be anyplace but home. Ironically, while at the parties she wished she had been home, safe from the crowd she found herself among. Such events were not her style.
Things would have been far worse had Ophelia known that Mary had been intimate with a boy she’d met through a coworker while working after school at a grocery store. For Mary it was a nerve-racking and unpleasurable first experience.
Mary’s view of sex and intimacy was influenced by her mother. During Mary’s early adolescent years, Ophelia became obsessed with the idea that Alvin was cheating on her. With Alvin at sea or lather, at she would grouse about her suspicions within earshot of the children. Mary could not tell whether her mother had evidence, or even whether the issue was ever discussed between her parents. She only knew that Ophelia was deeply embittered about it.
In later years Mary would speculate that this had been the source of Ophelia’s dissatisfaction and sour attitude. Perhaps there had been an early affair, or an imagined one. There was never talk of divorce. The couple lived together for sixty-two years, until Alvin’s death in 1986.
But Ophelia’s suspiciousness had a profound impact on her impressionable daughter. Her mother communicated that it was in the nature of men to stray and the fate of women to suffer it. In fact, the message Mary got was that if a man strayed it was somehow the woman’s fault. All this dug into Mary’s psyche, and would later reverberate in her own life and marriage.
Mary’s adolescence seemed to her like an uncharted voyage with no one at the helm. Things happened to her, it seemed, rather than the other way around. She didn’t know where she fit in. Timid, sexually repressed, feeling unattractive, she blamed her sinful nature for leading her into trouble: not getting along at home, the occasional excessive drinking, the sex. She believed that everything that went wrong came from not being right with God. She desperately needed an anchor.
Mary’s first meeting with