Knitting Needles

 

From Chapter 1 Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles

My grandmother was the perfect Victorian lady. Even in the early 1960s she would never leave the house without her hat, gloves and corset.

I couldn't imagine her having sex. She bragged how her late husband had never seen her naked, but since she had three children, they must have had sex at least three times.

Anxious to preserve my purity, my grandmother cautioned me on keeping the proper distance from my dance partner. After I dated my future husband for several months as a sophomore in high school, she asked if her ever kissed me. When I nodded, she added "On the mouth?"

I did not go into French kissing or our petty sessions in his 1950 green Chrvolet.

My mind was boggled a couple of years later when we were discussing the small number of children her friends, all proper ladies like my grandmother living a middle class life in Massachusetts.  They were the embodied of the cliché "prim and proper." Most would never dream of even taking a sip of alcohol.

Had my grandparents and her friends practiced abstinence? It was something I'd never ask. I didn't have to. She volunteered the information that her friends' families were small because they used the "knitting needle trick?"

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