Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #17: Sex Education (Part Deux)

Reader discretion advised. Contains beach bunnies, Anais Nin, and a filthy excerpt from James Salter. I, however, remained unaffected and untouched.

A few years after my sexual instruction from my dad, we visited Cape Cod National Seashore, where I employed binoculars to gain a closer look at the bikini beauties frisking about us. My mom became visibly cross as I did this, so my dad pulled me aside to explain that this wasn’t the kind of bird watching I should do at the beach.

Or, at least admit to, at the beach. 

And there you have the push-pull of my sexuality at that time, with my prim mother expressing abhorrence for public displays of sexuality at the same time that Love, American Style on TV, and Playboy magazine on the newsstand, were luring my sidelong glances. We attended a showing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as a family, and I can remember my mom tut-tutting during the early scene where Robert Redford points a gun at Katharine Ross and says “Strip, teacher lady.” 

And she does! Happily!

Also around that time, I experienced an indelible, overheard moment in the hallway upstairs at our small house in Connecticut, whe…