June 9, 2011
My Ode to Peggy Lee


It all started with Peggy Lee. She was my first crush-my first female crush. My first boycrush was my uncle Fred, whom I was convinced I would marry until around the age of ten when the concept of incest was clearly explained to me by my mother.

Peggy Lee. The voice smoky as the bacon she could fry up in the pan and never, ever let you forget you’re a man. The big blonde pouf of a hairstyle. The cleavage so deep you could dive in and roll around in it. The mole. As I child I was fairly addicted to variety programs, and while my heroines were definitely the female comics-Lily Tomlin, Goldie Hawn, Carol Burnett and Cher-my unadulterated adoration was reserved for the vocalists.

Peggy Lee. I didn’t want to be her-I wanted to be Raquel Welch-I wanted to do her, even if my tiny little muffin brain couldn’t quite parse those naughty-sweaty stirrings in my girlfolds. Peggy Lee would eventually be replaced in fantasy with the never-aging Bernadette Peters, but Peggy Lee was my first, unrequited girlcrush, because I met her in real life, or a girl who resembled her so closely that I transferred all my Peggylust to her blonde, be-moled substitute self.

When I was six, my mom uprooted our tiny family and moved from Illinois, where we’d lived for two short years, to Vermont. I was desperately lonely. In my six years, we’d moved four times, and while this time we had moved closer to my grandparents, the only source of security I’d ever known, they were, after all, adults. Everyone around me was an adult, something I was accustomed to being the oldest kid, the only kid, in my family.

Even if I was used to it, it still sucked.

One day, awash in my loneliness and my fantasies of friendly bees and other swarms of friends, I met a girl who lived around the corner from my grandmother. I no longer remember her name, but I remember her mole. It’s hard to say how much morphing my memory has done to this girl, this Peggy2, but in my mind she was my Peggy in a prepubescent and available package.

We circled each other warily, as children are often wont to do, sizing each other up. I saw in her everything I wanted for myself-she had two parents, a house with a lawn, a music box with a tiny ballerina, a mother who seemed to be around a lot and who made sure to serve her actual meals on a regular basis. I saw in her too the Peggy2 erotic promise, a nymphetic self that didn’t quite know what she’d turn into, but clearly whatever it was, it would be a woman.

And I’m sure she saw in me my wonderlust, for she definitely had the hand in that relationship. Whatever Peggy2 wanted to do, we did. Wherever she wanted to play, however she wanted, whenever: her tiny word was law. She lorded my many desires over me, even if she didn’t really recognize what they were or what she was doing. It was a deliciously painful relationship for me, and as much as I wanted to spend every moment with her, I also was pained by it. Peggy2 was a seven-year-old poison, but she was a pleasurable poison.

By the end of the summer, my mom had found an apartment for us a couple of miles away from my grandparents, and after we moved there, I didn’t see Peggy2 much. I was social and I made friends in my second grade with a couple of twins and Miriam, who would be my friend into adulthood, and a couple of other girls.

The twins and I were very close. We all got thrown out of the local Brownie troupe together. We spent a lot of time with each other and our dolls and we had that experimental erotic relationship that little girls often do. We’d play house and the house would include one of us on top of the other shaking and grunting, simulating what we thought sex was. Sometimes we would play “puppy” and cross the floor on our hands and knees, touch noses and kiss. We took baths together, we looked at each other’s hairfree pudendum. We discussed with great seriousness how babies were made and how they popped out of mommy’s tummies.

We experimented running our hands over one another’s flat nipples in the fat hours of the night, under blanket tents, illuminated by flashlights.

We were close and it was fun. And still it felt like fun I knew I shouldn’t be doing. I knew, despite being carefully raised not to have shame about sex, that this was sex to be shameful of. So did the twins. We didn’t play this way that often or that long, but we also didn’t talk about it to each other nor to our parents.

It was our little secret.

At the end of the summer, my mom and I had to move again, and once more I found I was in that interstitial location limbo, and once more, I found myself spending a fair amount of time at my grandmother’s-the twins being out of town. I ran into Peggy2, and once more we circled and hung out, though this time I wasn’t as reverential about her power. I didn’t kowtow, not quite as much anyway.

One sunny day, we secret ourselves away in my grandmother’s finished basement, playing together in one of the old hospital beds that she had put down there in case any of her progeny came home for an extended visit. We hid under the covers, and I found myself playing with Peggy2 as I had with the twins.

We played “house.” We kissed. We touched one another’s flat nipples. We looked at, with the help of flashlights, each other’s “down there.” I got close, closer to that mole and I felt it brush like a monarch’s wing against my own cheek. It all felt wondrous and suffused in pleasured shame, there being that knowledge that we shouldn’t be doing what we were doing and the fact that I felt pretty sure that Peggy2 both did and didn’t want to be kissing me-even closed lipped and chastely dry-in equal measures.

I don’t remember exactly how it ended, whether we got bored and tugged our clothes down and trundled off to find a cookie or whether we stopped abruptly and Peggy2 ran off mole-eyed into the blinding light of an August day. The latter makes a better narrative; the former is probably more accurate.

But I do know this: I never played with Peggy2 again, though I saw her repeatedly, if infrequently. And each time I did, her eyes would narrow with our shared secret, and we would give each other a terse hello.

I always wanted to tell Peggy2 how much she reminded me of Peggy Lee. I don’t think she would understand what it meant, or even that it was a compliment. Peggy, she was my first, and I’ll always remember her.


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