An Old Maid's Tale - How Racy Novels Stirred A Librarian To Sexual Delights

Melinda Potter had been an ordinary child, an ordinary student, and a quite ordinary looking little girl; and as such she was an ideal offspring.  She caused her parents little trouble and less grief. 

While other children were going through the terrible twos, Melinda sat quietly reading her picture books. When older girls threw tantrums, tortured the cat, and ran off, Melinda drew pictures - inspired, gentle pictures of sunshine, cornfields, and happy families. 

As she approached adolescence, her parents took a deep breath - the lull before the storm.  Her good behavior could just as easily turn into a tempest of sex and drugs, dangerous risk taking and misbehavior.  To say that Frank and Isa Potter were on their guard was putting it mildly, for they deployed a platoon of forward observers - teachers, priests, neighbors, and relatives - to let them know when their daughter began to slip off the rails. 

 

At thirteen, however Melinda was still the quiet, patient, untroubled child she had always been, helping her mother wash the dishes, making her bed, picking up her clothes, and always on time for school.  

At fourteen, the age when if a storm comes, it comes with a vengeance, Melinda was still a model of quiet patience, good manners, and propriety.  Although her parents considered themselves lucky - the secure, white, middleclass neighborhood of University Park seemed to have as much delinquency as the worst Hartford slum - they began to wonder if their daughter suffered from some sort of arrested development.  She had no interest in her personal appearance, always dressed properly but plainly, and at this rate she would end up a wallflower unpicked and unhappy. 

None of this concerned the girl, however, and she went about her business with a smile, always in the middle of the class, outstanding in nothing but never failing, agreeable on the sports field but never a star.  While her classmates clamored over Robbie Phipps, the football captain, or the Brad Pitt lookalike in homeroom, Melinda never made a fuss over boys.  Nor did she have a crush on Miss Purdy like many girls did or wonder what her parents were doing in the bedroom with all that moaning and thrashing around. 

The high school yearbook included her in the graduating class, but there was no other notice of her - no debating club, honor society, Oklahoma!, field hockey, or St. Anthony's Kitchen.  It was as though she did not exist, some insubstantial presence, a 'Present' checked at the beginning of class but then forgotten. 

 

Her grades were good enough for Montgomery College, a two year public school for those of lesser academic promise or financial means and, as could easily be predicted, she did modestly well without  notice but with enough successful courses to attend the state university for her last two years. 

Again as predicted, there was nothing remarkable to report about this phase of her life.  While college for many was the first flowering of adulthood, the shedding of dependency and the first step to maturity, for Melinda it was a passage from nowhere before to nowhere after - never unpleasant but far from those bright college years that adults often talk about. 

Having minored in library science - a career that fit her character, personality, and modest interests - she easily secured a position at her hometown library, and was quite happy filing, checking books in and out, helping patrons find the volumes they were looking for, and occasionally taking over Children's Hour, a short session where little children were read to. 

It was at the library one day when she happened upon a novel by P. Pritchard Stone, one of a hundred short paperback romances that housewives borrowed until they were dogeared and had to be retired. Unrequited Love had been the most sought after, often put on hold, and its racy cover - a busty brunette tearfully in the arms of her lover - was surprisingly tempting. 

 

She borrowed the book, read it through in one evening, and was delighted.  The woman on the cover eventually found true love but not before she had given herself to an unscrupulous cad whom she later poisoned.  Mr. Right, the police chief investigating the crime, falls in love with her, ignores the evidence, and takes her away to Europe where they lived quietly in a turf cottage on the Irish Sea. 

P. Pritchard Stone had written over fifty novels, and Melinda read all of them, each one racier than the next, more thrilling and more sexually passionate.  The heroines were always weak at first, tentative, and hungry for love; and they all fell for the strong, silent types who wooed and bedded them then left them alone and disconsolate. But they all recovered and became sexpots, women of loose morals and uninhibited passion.  Nothing could dampen their sexual desire or their willful satisfaction of it. 

By the time she had finished Volume 52, Stone's latest and last book of the series, Melinda wondered where she had been all her life.  Where were her suitors, her sexual adventures, her thrills, her motel rooms, her assignations, and her lust?  She was no longer a spring chicken and well past the age at which most of her classmates had been married and had children, but most of her life was still ahead of her, and there was no telling what or who she might become. 

At first there were the little changes - a bit of lipstick, a dash of perfume, pearl earrings, and a less severely cut dress - but as time went on and as she delved more deeply into the world of women's romance, she was more forthcoming and more attuned to her growing need for male attention. 

Along with the modest changes in her appearance, she felt something more fundamental as well.  In the verse of the romantic novels, 'something stirred within her'; and while she was at first unsure of what it was, she gradually came to a very surprising conclusion,  

Some men just want it, cannot do without it, look at every woman as an irresistible sexual object, and make clear, unmistakable overtures.  It was to these men that Melinda was attracted.  She had heard the feminist cant about 'sexual singularity', the 'internal value' of women, and their right to respect and admiration; but she rejected it.  She knew who she was and couldn’t care less if anyone else did. 

This is not to say that Melinda was without taste.  She was as bright and canny about her choice of men as any female animal who senses virility and fertility.  She might not be looking for a long term mate - she was far beyond her pull-date for that - but she still did not want to waste her time. 

'Why, look at Melinda Potter all tarted up like a regular Mata Hari' said a classmate who had spotted her at Sloane's on one of her trips home; and to be quite honest she had in the years since her epiphany, come out quite boldly from her own shadow.  'Tarted up' was unkind but not too far off the mark. Melinda had blossomed into a Belle de Nuit, a woman 'of lesser propriety', quick to please, and more than happy in her new guise, the persona of a sexually liberated woman. 

Just like the Catherine Deneuve character in the film, Melinda, a proper, well-brought, up, respectable woman had a strong sexual desire not for the right man but any man.  There was something  particularly satisfying about pure, unadulterated, uncomplicated sex that made her more of a woman, more of a unique woman.  Looking for the ideal mate was so ordinary and predictable, so pedestrian leading nowhere.  Accepting her womanhood - her defiant, demanding female sexuality - was the only validation she needed. 

Anyone hearing Melinda's story might wonder who the real Melinda was.  Could such an ordinary, plain, sexually indifferent girl really mature into a sexually prolific woman?  Or was this sexuality always there but tamped down and repressed? 

A moot point, of course.  Many who did listen and appreciate Melinda's particular and unique vitality are still so confined by their proper past that they can only wonder what will happen to a woman like that.  How will she end up?

But of course Melinda never gave this a second thought.  One cannot be fundamentally physical, sexual, and female without a disregard for the ordinary. Who cares? Melinda might have answered if asked. Whatever her end, she was one of the few who added and never subtracted. There are plenty of women in boardrooms and on medical faculties, but few who really get what makes women tick .

Tart, loose woman, a Belle de Nuit? Perhaps, but more power to her.