and how he never met her needs. If you’re still on the phone, I’d like to add at this point in the interview that for some reason people tell me things I’d rather not hear. Or, well, I do like to hear them, but I’m not asking for such information. This woman tells me she was a real beauty, stunningly gorgeous, but her husband had no interest. She said, ‘Some days I’d get so burning up hot I’d have to go off by myself and make things right.’ I was shocked because she held up her third middle finger for me to see exactly what she was talking about and kept waving that finger at me. I wanted to run away. I was like, ‘Way too much information, lady.’”
I heard the phone click. “Mrs. Reinhardt? Are you still there? Sorry, I was on another call, were you saying something?”
“No. Not really. Just eating my lunch, trying to keep my stomach calm.”
“What’s wrong with it? Do you have the stomach flu?”
“No, I’m eight months pregnant and doctors have me confined to bed.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, exhaustion in her voice. “Why can’t you get up?”
“They call it an irritable uterus. Irritable uterus syndrome. It just won’t behave.”
We said our good-byes and one month later, on my way to the pediatrician’s office for my brand-new daughter’s first checkup, I picked up a copy of the magazine with our interview. There was the picture, an innocent motherly photo of me and my oldest, underneath which blazed a sentence I will never forget: FAVORITE COLUMNIST SUSAN REINHARDT MANAGES TO SPIN YARNS DESPITE BEING CONFINED TO BED WITH A GRUMPY VAGINA.
Oh my Lord. I have never in my life laughed and cried so hard at the same time as I stared at that headline and wondered what my boss at the paper was going to think.
That afternoon the phone rang while I was tending my new baby. “How ya doing, honey?” my husband, who never calls me “honey,” asked. “You want some loving tonight, or is it true you’re suffering from a grumpy vagina?”
For years it’s been hard to live that one down. But it does come in handy when looking for an excuse to avoid sex on the nights I’m too tired.
“Oh, not tonight, honey,” I’ll say. “I have a grumpy vagina.”
Looking for Some Hot Stuff
Mama caught my sister and me dancing one Sunday afternoon on the carport and rushed out spewing Bible verses about the sins of our ways. This was the early ’70s and thank God she’s not like that anymore.
“Sabbath dancing will lead to nothing but a bad reputation,” she said, cutting off the stereo and Partridge Family album, David Cassidy’s voice extinguished and replaced with an echo of silent scorn. “First this. Then blue eye shadow. Next comes French kissing and ear blowing.”
Sometimes children have to break their mothers in like saddles. After a couple of years of junior high and the screeching emotions of our puberty, my own Southern Baptist mama had whipped a 180 and was wearing half-tops, hitting the Moose Lodge and Country Club and dancing with my daddy after imbibing in a couple of bourbon and waters.
“It’s OK as long as you don’t slow-dance,” she said, amending the rules of How Not to Sully Your Good Name and Ruin Chances for a Rich Husband. “But if you do slow-dance, make sure the boy does more than stand there and press into you. Make sure his feet are moving and his hands aren’t sliding to your fanny. That looks hussified. Remember, slow-dancing leads to other things.”
Yes, Lord, it does.
And I’m here to tell you about them.
In fact, the dance floor has led to the downfall of many a woman—and a man or two along the way.
Back when I was a bit of a boozer and young enough to have Farrah hair and Locklear thighs, the dance floor was where love sparked, lust ignited, and the hearts of many a young man or woman fell to the wood floors and bled to death under a disco ball.
Mama told us to be agreeable if a boy asked us to dance. It takes a lot for them to get up their courage and it’s rude to say no or even no, thank you. My sister and I knew the pain of being uglyish in junior high and standing in a clump of girls, watching the popular sultresses being asked to dance as we leaned against walls and pretended not to care.
But my mama had no idea of the weirdo magnet implanted in our bodies, a microchip that drew hordes of duds, creeps, latent pedophiles, personality-maimed fellows, and future serial killers toward us—guys who would spot our Farrah hair from across the pulsating room and slide over to our table.
“Wanna dance?” a yuckster would ask, and a picture of my mother shaking her finger in warning flashed. “Better dance with him. If you don’t, it will come back and haunt you. Remember, they’re humans with hearts, too. Just God’s Unclaimed Blessings.”
So my sister Sandy and I danced with the eyesores of the world, the prisoners on work release and weekend furloughs, and the deranged or homeless who’d collected enough in their cups to dance in a bar and have a draft or two. Most of them were nice enough to share a single dance with. No harm done. But if one of them kept asking us over and over to repeat the mercy move, we had to take care of matters best we knew how.
And that is where the Howdy Doody dance comes into the picture.
“Watch this,” I said to Sandy as I rose from my chair to cut the rug and pull the Howdy Doody on a guy who’d tucked his plaid button-down shirt into pants yanked up to his sternum, the crotch of which split his scrotum into something resembling a pig’s hooves. I tried not to look at his cloven crotch because that always gives a guy the wrong idea and notions of future fornications.
Like a naughty twenty-two-year-old with skinny upper arms and no stomach goiter—a woman without the foresight to see that one day she would be forty-two and out of options unless one counts the advances and free swordfish from the seafood manager at Bi-Lo—I thought I was hot stuff. On the dance floor, I stuck out my teeth and all but brayed, extending one hand in a “Howdy” move, while doing a bit of the Hokey-Pokey combined with a John Travolta Saturday Night Fever pose thrown in here and there, that Statue of Liberty thing he does. I combined it all with a shock-eyed, crazed-woman grin and if I felt limber or tipsy enough, I’d arch and do a back bend and crab walk in a full circle around the guy.
At this point the men, even those with pig foot crotches and plenty of larceny convictions, would barely make it to the song’s end before hightailing it back to Nerd or Penitentiary Land. Sandy and I invariably employed the Howdy Doody dance on many occasions when plagued by the outcasts of the dance club world who weren’t satisfied with a single mercy dance.
The only bad part of that routine is that no cute men would ever ask us to dance once we’d pulled one of our best One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest performances. This was not nice, what we did. I knew it was mean. I knew one day I would be paid back for all this naughtiness. Mama told us countless times growing up we would reap what we’d sown. What comes around goes around. Make fun of someone and whatever they have, you’ll get it. Call the lady with the huge fanny a “fat butt” and you’d wake up one day with an ass that could cart bags of charcoal and russet potatoes.
But I wasn’t quite ready for the punitive end to this fun just yet. I had another round coming before I was willing to pay the price for my evil dance floor ways.
That time dawned when my dear friend
