I shudder to think about it. So Would Ann Douglas
Somehow, without our consent, the people in the last years of the baby boom era have reached that age where we simply don't get "young people". That I could even use that phrase astounds me - when did I become elderly? When did I become that old person that people look at and wonder: Is he having a mid-life crisis? Does he understand how pathetic he sounds?
My husband and I are too old for living our entire lives online, and for preferring text our friends instead of talking with them on the phone. I don't want to subscribe to blogs to get my news, I want to hold a copy of the Sunday Washington Post, or the New York Times, and savor it. And yet my husband and I are still way too young for Social Security or thinking about the easy carefree lifestyle that a retirement community could afford us. And music today? Don't get me started.
That we are most likely younger than the people in the image above really sets my teeth on edge. Those are old people. We are not. So the idea that they would be "wife swappers" just kind of scares us. Shouldn't they be at home, watching Lawrence instead of trading partners? Does anyone even admit to swapping spouses?
A neighbor's 20Something-year-old son is into VCR movies, something that we experienced in the decades ago in its first iteration. But to him, its all-new, it's all hysterical. His mother Sue came over with her dog for a play date with our dogs yesterday and laughing that a box of used tapes that he found at a Salvation Army Store included "Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice."
Sue is about ten years younger than us and had our rapt attention as she tried to answer her teenage son's question about whether or not the movie was pornographic. And Sue said "I remember the term, and the movie, but did anyone actually that.
Yes. It really was real. Wife Swapping was a "THING" in the 70s, as I remember it. In the 1950s, when the people in this picture would have been "into it", it would have been a bit Avant-guard. But in the sixties and seventies, all sorts of stuff was happening in homes with shag carpet and lamps swagged by ceiling-mounted chains.
When I was in or about fourth grade, wife swapping, however, was all the rage. Or so the magazines would have you believe.
My neighborhood friends and I would go to Campus Drug and pick out our dime candy bars and our quarter (.25) cans of cold pop and stop off look at magazines to see what we weren't supposed to know about. The covers talked about all sorts of things that we were clueless about. "Weed". "Giving yourself permission to look at your vagina." "Premature ejaculation" and "How to make him feel like a potent man." If the headline was "Are you and you other compatible signs? What's a Cusp? We show you how to draw your own STAR CHARTS."
All of it, in the seventies, was on magazine covers.
But, according to Cosmopolitan, Wife Swapping Was Empowering - "It's a BLAST" the headline read while the subline read "We show you how! See page 69." Playboy's cover was all IN for girlfriend swapping. In fact, the magazine even suggested that a man could please three women at once, without his buddies even participating. There was even an article on one cover that asked "Why Swap? Orgy Instead!"
My friends and I spent our dollars on enough sugar to cause a diabetic coma in adults and took our hoard to the vacant lot across Fairmount Boulevard. There, amongst the ruin of a house that was never built, we stuffed our faces and just would just yabber away.
One of the boys in the neighborhood wondered aloud about the topics we were reading in the headlines. The Wife Swapping topic proved to be as puzzling to our uninformed minds as any other topic. Back then, at ten, you don't know about what don't know because you don't have that awareness to know that you didn't know. And if you wanted to learn anything, you either needed a much older brother to tell you - and good luck with that. OR you needed a girl who was going into sixth grade - because they knew everything.
But the boys knew from the word "Swapping" that this somehow involved trading.
"Why would you want to do that?"
What?
"Swap your wife?"
"Because you're tired of her. It's like trading your car with a friend because you want to drive his convertible, but he needs your station wagon," said Beth McClatchy. Beth was headed to junior high school in a couple weeks for seventh grade. We were in awe. Little did any of use understand the snake pit that every junior high school was.
"Hey," said Ann Douglas "You aren't going to mix pop rocks and Pepsi together are you?" Beth, her mouth full of pop rocks, wide-eyed, nodded
"Its certain death," admonished Ann Douglas. Ann had always been Ann Douglas as not to confuse her with Ann McCauley who lived further down the block. Ann McCauley was fourteen and had "developed", so she had better things to do with the prepuberty crowd.
But Ann Douglas was such a buzz kill; Beth looked really annoyed. Beth got annoyed so easily and the boys figured it was because she was getting boobs. We couldn't see anything, but she made it a point to remind us that she had a training bra "because my bosom is growing." And that to a ten-year-old made us giggle. "Don't laugh fart face, just wait until you see what you're going to through." But for now, she was still one of us.
"What if she's tired of him?" Colin, Beth's younger brother asked.
"In our house, my parents just sit in different rooms, sleep in different rooms, and grumble about going places together." Brad Silverman said.
"Why don't they get a divorce?" asked Colin.
Sally Wilson rolled her eyes said "Because stupid, they are staying together for the sake of the children. So Brad and his sisters can come from a happy home. GAH! Don't you know anything?" Beth nodded in agreement. Secretly, in their heads, I just knew that they were annoyed beyond all words. Girls were like that, because boys all had cooties.
Not wanting to be left out, I chimed in reminding them that my parents were divorced.
"But my mother says your father is a 'hound' and a 'skirt chaser.' So your mom was smart to get a divorce." Sally had a point. My father loved women. He didn't love my Mom. But other women, yes. My father loved women in every shape and flavor. And he always picked the wrong one to marry.
"Wife Swapping," started Ann Douglas, a sixth-grader who "knew things" paused for us to pipe down and get the attention that an oracle deserved, then said: "I think they do it to spice up their marriages and love lives. Marriage has to be like an episode of the Waltons. Every week you tune in and expect something different at the end, but all you get is a "G'night John Boy."
Anne's brother Chuckie piped in with "Sometimes I wish someone will ask "who farted?"
"GROSS!"
"Ew!"
"Chuckie, Mother doesn't like you using that word." We started on the second candy bar, there was a lull as each of us took that first gulping bit.
I asked, "None of our parents would do that, would they?" And I immediately knew that I shouldn't have said it.
At that point all everyone else's parents became suspect. Every last lawyer, accountant, doctor, den mother, and housewife could be into "Wife Swapping" and we would have no way of knowing. The crinkle of candy bar wrappers stopped. All was silent as we look at each other, asking in our minds "would Lisa's parents have sex with Colin's parents, or would they peel off with Ann Douglas' parents? It was our first Mexican Standoff, and any of our parents could be doing things with other parents. Collectively, our stomachs sank for a brief moment.
Then, someone broke the tension. "NO!"
EW!
BARF!
Beth sighed and growled "Your parents are divorced; they can't swap. Your mother could become a Swinger, I guess. Then again, your father remarried so he could be a wife swapper." It was a backhanded comment, but I figured it was her "bosom" making her like this. I really want her to grow the pair and start hanging out with Ann McCauley.
Secretly I knew that my father's wife was promising men sex in bars because both of my parents had first names that began with the same letter (M) and my mother was in the phone book as "M Cookie, and my father was in the phone book as MA Cookie. So drunken men were calling the first "M. Cookie" house asking to speak to "Tonya" because "Tonya promised to mumblemumble me off."
The first time it happened, I went to my mother said "there is a man on the phone who wants to talk to Dad's wife."
My mother, watching a medical drama and playing solitaire replied, "Well, she's not here, give them your father's phone number. He ought to enjoy taking that call."
It seemed like the thing to do. So I did.
The second time it happened a few days later, I told my mom and she had the same response. But she didn't just drop it like she did the first time.
"What did this guy want?"
"He said that Tonya was going to 'mumblemumble' him off. I don't know the word or what it means."
My poor mother. She wasn't expecting that. "What did you say?" I started to repeat what I had said but she cut me off. She was angry, but not at me.
"I only said it because you asked what the guy on the phone said."
"Don't say that word again."
"What word?" Needless to say, Mom sat me down and she gave me the talk. I was appalled. I was appalled that I had spoken to the guy, I was appalled that my mother had to explain "masturbation" to me, and I was just appalled. The next thing I knew was that my parents were fighting over the phone and my mother was really angry.
But back to the idea that my mother could be a swinger. We all knew that was as unlikely as mankind exploring Pluto because my mother would never have sexual feelings. Or muss up her hair. She was a Daughter of the American Revolution! Moreover, she wore a sash that read CHAPTER REGISTRAR.
The truth as we knew it was, not one of our mothers would, well, because they were our mothers and that would be gross. In reality, all our mothers really want was ten minutes of peace and quiet.
"Do you think that anyone in our neighborhood would become a Swinger?" Colin asked.
Beth chimed in and said: "I think it could happen, but if the membership committee at their country club found out, then they could kick you out."
"Why would they do that?" I asked.
"Because you can't get in until they judge you. Country clubs aren't in the country, they aren't about golf. Getting into a country club means you have a good reputation, and someone is willing to sponsor you into the 'club'. When your father tells someone that he belongs to Acacia, or Beechmont or even The County Club, that means that he has money and that he and the family have been approved," reasoned Ann Douglas.
I must have had the word STUPID on my facial expression because Beth read it and added: "Country clubs aren't about the bad food and golf. It's a social code for being good people. And getting caught sleeping with someone else's husband or wife is not the kind of thing that looks good. That's how reputations are ruined."
Beth had a point, and Ann Douglas was irritated by her because "She thinks she knows everything" Ann once said
The Richman's (not to be confused by the Richmond's who lived in the house next to the lot we were seat in) went to Israel and came back raving about living the kibbutz lifestyle. They gave their house a name: "Kibbutz Rosenstein" and became vegetarians. They even had their oldest son Gary enlisted in the Israeli army.
Again, Ann Douglas took charge "Mom said that Beechmont Country Club kicked them out when they insisted that they help with the day to day operations of the club instead of annual dues, which they felt was a capitalist concept."
Capitalist what? Huh?
"If," Brad started to say "anyone in this neighborhood is going to 'swinger', it's going to be the Shipley's. Mr. Shipley is, according to my mother, 'handsome like a news anchor' and Mrs. Shipley can wear hip-huggers."
John Wise added in "And she has big boobs."
We all talked about Mrs. Shipley's boobs until Ann pointed out that damning bit of evidence: "They have that modern house."
They looked the part, and they lived it, so they had to be honest God real wife swappers. The nail in the coffin though to securing our decision that they were both on the road to living the lives of a Jacqueline Susann character lifestyle was the house. It was big, and bold and had an all-white interior with huge plate glass windows. And they had no children. Well then; That was the key to everything.
"So they can swap without worrying about finding babysitters."
"And they ski. There's a lot of drinking and sex at a ski resort. And they do IT on bearskin rugs."
How would you know, I asked - never having been skiing myself.
It was, of course, a foolish thing to ask. "Andy Turner's father reads Playboy." Well, that wasn't news. Every ten-year-old boy at Mercer knew that. It was the only reason to go over to Andy's play, and his dad kept the evidence under the mattress in his parent's room.
"Playboy is a magazine of nude women and cartoons showing escapades at ski lodges that took place on bearskin rugs, My father reads it for the articles," said David Wright. David was mostly silent, you almost forgot that he was there, so when he spoke up it was something.
After deciding that all wife swappers could be swingers, but not all swingers would be into wife swapping, I asked - having my silent yearnings even at that age and wondering what Mr. Shipley looked like without his shirt - "Why do they call it 'wife swapping'? Why not 'husband swapping?" Now I could see a couple of the male camp counselors at Hawkin day camp doing it. But I was smart enough not to say that.
And the answer my friends proclaimed was one of major importance:
"No!"
"Never!"
"Can't happen. Because men are men, duh!"
"GROSS!"
This is when the boys told me that it was OK for two women to do it together because that was hot, and men got off on that. But two men having sex was "totally a 'mo thing." And Beth rolled her eyes to emphasize how childish we were.
"So women never think about two guys together?"
Sally let out one of those pre-adolescent girl growls - "GAH!"
And with that bit of drama, Sally put an end to the salon on the rocks having finished her Pop Rock's and moved on to Hubba Bubba, the absinthe of under 13-year-old set. "Look, you guys are just gross," which is kid speak "Oh, fuck for fuck's sake." And thus our enchantment, our kiddie salon, ended.
"What are we going to do now?"
I announced that my father gave me a tape recorder. "We can go to my house and swear into it?"
Ann Douglas proclaimed that as something she wanted to do, and that meant we were all going to follow. "I love saying fuck. And now I'll be able to hear myself fucking say it. Fuck, I mean."
And that's what you did when I was a kid in the 70s. You made up life as you went along. From candy and cola to solving the question on Wife Swapping, and the answer was "gross" to swearing into tape recorders, that was a summer day in Shaker Heights.
I still have those old cassettes with us swearing on them.
But like those late August afternoons before school started, the cassette's are breaking down, as our minds and bodies. I am one half of a happily married old couple. Still, if my husband wanted to become a swinger, it's his option, not mine. He wouldn't, but once we hit the retirement community in the next decade, maybe he will. As for Cookie? I am in the Sons of the American Revolution.
One day, in 2060, a twenty-something will bring home a box of cassette taps that they bought at an estate sale. He'll load it in and hit the play button and out of the speakers, with pops and scratches will come the voices of ten to twelve ten to twelve-year-olds from the year 1972 saying the word Fuck. They will say it softly, yell it, they will sing it and shout it. He'll write about it on his social media platform, or play it on the nightly news. He'll muse, did people used to do this? Why would anyone do this?
And that will be his moment to ponder and make sense of a bunch of kids, one summer, on the rocks figuring life and all that other stuff out.
