How I Learned to Drive

In 1979, Li’l Bit is on a bus to upstate New York. She’s reading a book for a class she is teaching. A man, young enough for his voice to break, sits next to her. He says he’s a senior in high school, but Li’l Bit has doubts: she tells the audience that “perhaps he was—with a very high voice” (28). She tells the audience how he invited her to dinner and walked her home and how they had sex in her room: she says they engaged in “the faltering and slightly comical ‘first act’” (29) and “and extremely capable and forceful and sustained second act” (29). As she lay on her back “after the second act climax” (29), she thought of Uncle Peck. She realized that “this is the allure” (29)—“Being older. Being the first. Being the translator, the teacher, the epicure, the already jaded” (29). 

The scene shifts and now a 15-year-old Li’l Bit asks Teenage Greek Chorus, as Grandmother, if sex hurts the first time. Though Grandmother is appalled by the question, Female Greek Chorus, as Mother, explains that it hurts just a little and that there’s a little blood.