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Out From Montclair High, Into Troubled Waters (“Country” 11)
This morning I looked up the words, and it turned out the boy at the front desk of the boys’ dormitory, strumming a guitar and eyeing me sideways, was singing someone else’s song, with a few words changed. “All the boys in the neighborhood, Would love you, If they could, ’Cause you’re easy, So easy.”
I took it as a compliment at the time. Happily involved with the young man I’d later marry (because isn’t that what you needed to do if you want to move off campus and live in an apartment?), secure as one of the “belonging” young women in a group of six or seven freshmen who sat in the grill together over lemon Cokes and french fries in the evenings, eagerly “making love” once or twice a night with D when his own roommate slept in a girlfriend’s room, and feeling competent in schoolwork, desirable as a love partner, “cute enough” for someone who knew she’d never be conventionally pretty.
Which doesn’t exactly explain why I took it as such a compliment. In fact, thirty years later, I’d rearrange my first date with the man who’d become my “third and last” husband — the man I was clearly meant to marry — for fear of being seen as “easy” enough to accept a meal together!
But in 1969, it seemed like the boy with the guitar was telling me I was the right kind of (17-year-old) woman: one who was…
