Sherry and Ray

She is just aching to get laid by Ray but he won’t do it.

When I was in college I knew a young woman named Sherry. She was voluptuous. Her face wasn’t as cute as some other women I knew, but it was pleasant enough. I had always thought of her as a moderately attractive young woman until the day I was out cutting the grass on a tractor and she happened to be sun-bathing behind the faculty apartments and when I came around from behind the apartment building, she was startled and had to jump up and reattach the top of her bathing suit. She was voluptuous. The sinuous curve of her hips. Her full, upright breasts. She looked pretty peeved as I drove by.  It was actually her stomach that appealed the most to me: flat, with languorous curves. 

She was a conservative little American girl. I was a Canadian and the Canadians tended to be socially liberal– we drank and smoked and swore and used pot– and the Americans tended to be rather conventional. Some of them had never been in a bar until they left home to go to college. But not Sherry. She didn’t go to bars at college either. Good girls didn’t do that.

The American guys like to wrestle each other and horse around with each other and pat each others’ behinds while playing touch football in the courtyard.  The Canadian guys like to wrestle Canadian girls. The American girls thought Canadian girls were rather rural in that regard. I’ll bet they secretly envied them. I remember wrestling for an extended time with an attractive blonde named Janet in the student lounge and a couple of my American friends, afterwards, expressed envy. They thought it meant she wanted to get laid.

I will note that my experience was that many of my American friends went to a bar to get drunk, while most of my Canadian friends went out to a bar for a drink or two and to socialize. To our American friends, there was no difference between drinking and getting drunk: they were both sins.  The Canadians were used to social drinking but thought it was not smart to get drunk.

Sherry was engaged to Ray, who worked in the administration. Ray was even more strait-laced than Terry. He was square, man. He wore suits. He had short hair. If Ray was coming down the hallway in the dorm, you hid the grass. But I had heard from a number of reliable sources that Ray had sewn his wild oats profligately in his first three years at college: girls were wild for him. He was tall and good-looking and rich. But when he met Sherry, the love of his life, he decided to reform. He would wait until they were married before they consummated their mutual passion.

He wanted to marry a virgin. He wanted her to be pure.

One day, I was chatting with Sherry’s roommate Lisa about something and the Sherry and Ray relationship came up. I made some off-hand remark about something and Lisa said this: “Sherry is going absolutely crazy. She is just aching to get laid but he wants her to be a virgin on their wedding day.”

She used a less kind word than “laid”.

I had two theories about this. Firstly, I thought that Ray was a raging hypocrite.

Secondly, I thought that maybe the stories about him being promiscuous his first years at college were untrue. Certainly, they were impossible to confirm. Maybe he really was pure.

Later, I talked to a young woman who had been a Resident Assistant at the time Ray was allegedly sewing his wild oats.  Oh yes, she said, everybody knew about Ray.  There were girls who had to leave college after he got them pregnant.  He was an asshole.

An American told me, if a girl put out, you took it, but you didn’t want to marry a slut.  He said it as if it was common sense, not that old double-standard we all know and love.