ninanevermore

Being unemployed has allowed me to indulge in the pastime of reading, a joy that working full time and being a mother had caused be to forgo in recent years.

There is something decadent about falling into a novel and letting the laundry and the dishes pile up because I have to read one – just one – more chapter before I get started on something productive. But the chapters of a good novel are like potato chips or M&Ms: you can't stop at just one. After that one, you have to read another, and then another, until your eyes are so bleary that you are forced to stop because you just can't go any further. Before you know it, a whole day is wasted. If the book is long, several days in a row get wasted. Reading is a wonderful way to get nothing done and still feel a great sense of accomplishment when you are done.

They say that addictions run in families, and this is true. I got my addiction for words from my mother. She managed to live as a functioning book addict by limiting herself to trashy romance novels, which fed her craving but left her sober enough to be an effective wife and mother.

"I can't read a good book," I remember her saying, "Because I never get anything done. But with these," she held up a Harlequin Romance with a picture of a couple the moment before a passionate kiss, "I can stop anywhere and not worry about forgetting where I am, and pick it up again when I have the time, because they're all the same."

My mother used trashy romances the way a recovering alcoholic uses near-beer: she pretended to indulge in her addiction by going through the motions of reading, but she did not get a buzz from it the way she would have from an honest-to-goodness real book with real content in it.

Because of trashy romance novels, dinner got served on time and clothes got washed. Harlequin Romances helped shelves get dusted and carpets get vacuumed. They helped get us kids up in the morning and dressed for school. More important, when I was about the age of 11 they educated me in the ways of men and women and sex and romance, even if the information was filtered through strange euphemisms like "throbbing manhood," "soft petals of her femininity," and "pleasure that exploded through her senses like a thousand fireworks going off at once." On second thought, it's a wonder I ever figured any of that stuff out and managed to become a parent myself. For all the blow-by-blow details they gave, they were very vague about exactly what parts of the pair were throbbing or quivering, being written in the obscure secret code of romance novels.

My mother had hundreds of these books that took up an entire wall in our attic. She kept them organized by number, since the publishing house assigned them all numbers on the spine because so many of them came out each month and the titles were all so similar. Whenever I pleased, I could slip into the attic and select one I found interesting. I only liked the ones where the heroine was a virgin, since I was a virgin, too, and that way the heroine and I could figure everything out together. I became very good at finding the virginity-loosing section of the books, and could locate that scene in about 30 seconds of flipping through and skimming the pages. It was toward the end of each book, and there were always at least two "teaser" scenes where the girl almost gave in but stopped just before things got out of hand. I skipped those scenes if I could, and honed right in to scene where the deed was accomplished. If that scene turned out to be well written (at least to my 6th grade sensibilities), I would go ahead and read the rest of the book starting at the beginning.

I indulged in these books filled with their euphemistic sexcapades to my heart's content until the day my father happened to pick one up and thumb through it. The next time my mother saw me walking around with one of her books at that, she took it away from me.

"Your father doesn't want me to let you read these anymore," she said, "He says they're soft-core pornography."

He wasn't wrong, but that didn't keep me from pouting about it. I was annoyed at my mother for leaving her books where my father could get his hands on them, since he was obviously the sort to be shocked by the contents. I was told to find other books to read that were more "appropriate."

I have could read the books from my school library, but none of them talked about "piercing swords of masculinity" or "firm, high breasts that swelled beneath a mans rough yet gentle caresses". My Nancy Drew books had none of that stuff in them, for example. Since the romance books were forbidden, I was forced to sneak them from the attic one at a time and hide them beneath my mattress, the same way my older brothers were hiding certain magazines in their own rooms. Nobody has a greater curiosity about smut than the truly innocent, and I would not be denied my quest for it. Looking back, I don't know why I didn't just read the same one over and over, since romance novels of that genre are essentially the same story told again and again with different names and places in them. They all have the same plot and the same three characters: the sweet virginal ingénue, the seemingly cruel and hard man who actually turns out to be very tender when all is said and done, and the man's worldly ex girlfriend who tries to intervene in the budding affair but who is destined to fail.

I haven't read one of those books since my early teens, when I finally lost interest in my mother's stash of steamy romances and moved on to other types of books. After my father remarried, he and That Woman He is Married To tossed out my mother's collection of trashy novels to make way for That Woman's immense collection of Christmas decorations. They asked me if I wanted them, but I had to decline. What can a person do with several hundred cheap romances that aren't worth the pulpy paper they are printed on? I didn't have the space to store them. They barely qualified as books at all, to the point that often used book stores won't even buy them to resell. Still, I couldn't bring myself to help dispose of the things. I would have cried with each one that I took down from the shelves, and I didn't want to cry in front of my father and his wife and have them accuse me of being manipulative. I had taken comfort in having them lining the back wall of the attic, arranged by number and publication date. When I stepped into the attic and looked at them, for a moment my mother was downstairs reading the next batch to be added to the collection.

Having got trashy novels out of my system as a teenage, now I don't want to read anything that I can easily put down when the dryer buzzes or the phone rings. I want to tell myself I can return that call or hang up the clothes after one more chapter – just one more – because I have to know what will happen next. I like books that make supper late and cause my husband to run out of clean socks.

I wish my mother had allowed herself the same luxury, to enjoy the same high I get from reading a good book. Rock-hard chests and heaving breasts are a nice diversion, but I find that the books that keep me from getting any work done are the ones that satisfy me the most. Not to say I never enjoyed reading about those crushing embraces and unyielding kisses that led to rippling waves of pleasure that threatened to drown the characters as they moaned and sighed their way across the pages of my mother's books. I'd be lying if I said I didn't. When I was 12 years old that was some pretty good stuff, much more interesting and far more mysterious than anything Nancy Drew ever did in the pages of my own books.

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