Ramona Jean Tompkins was a pipsqueak, and frequently mistaken for a younger girl. The simplicity of her outfits, and her lack of nail polish and cosmetics didn't dissuade the misperception. Sporting a faded plaid shirt and worn jeans, and her usual battered boots or saddle shoes, the flat-chested, five foot tall woman was frequently offered a reduced bus fare or movie admission in Gordonsville.
The theater operators didn't know the 'underprivileged', dark-featured girl, always a solitary patron, was near her twentieth birthday as she walked past the concessions - she always brought her own piece of fruit - and through the aroma of popcorn. She was there for a Saturday matinee of Hitchcock's
Vertigo
, the latest spring 1958 release. Besides, they rationalized, she was only getting half the movie - the images on the screen, but not the soundtrack, since she was a 'deaf mute'.
"Deaf as a post," was the quote from the doctor that examined her as a four year-old. While on the trip home, those on the bus buried their noses in newspapers describing the recent Allied invasion of North Africa, and her adoptive mother, Madelyn, sobbed all the way back, holding the sleeping youngster. Born in Appalachia, Ramona was the premature, unplanned child of a teenaged mother. The toddler was represented as completely healthy by the agency, which vanished soon after.
"We shoulda got us a dog instead," Calvin Tompkins had said. He was generally a good man and father, but was prone to insulting verbal tirades. The adoption of the little girl was his idea, to distract his wife from the losses of their own children. Polio took their teenaged daughter Daisy during the depths of the depression, and their son Cal Jr., who had been enjoying his exotic, Hawaiian assignment on the USS Oklahoma, was killed on a Sunday morning the previous December.
So, they raised the little girl as best they could. Public school was out of the question, so Ramona's world consisted of the family's white-framed combined home, general store and filling station - which served a highway in the Blue Ridge foothills - and the dolls, coloring books and magazines within. A happy, inquisitive child regardless, she communicated largely by grunting, pointing or pounding on a table or wall to get someone's attention, and helped keep the store stocked and swept up. Nights she slept soundly upstairs in her room, or, in the heat of Virginia summers, on the second floor's screened-in side porch. Sunday was her least favorite day, as she couldn't grasp why she had to wear an uncomfortable dress and shoes to a hot building where everyone sat on hard benches and then stood for random intervals and looked at books with no pictures and moved their mouths in unison.
Madelyn, busy with running the store, kept the girl's jet black - they surmised she had Cherokee blood - hair short, so as not to have to 'fuss with it', and 'Mona' was often mistaken for a boy by customers of the general store and those purchasing gasoline from Esso pumps out front. As yet another war raged, this time in Korea, nature intervened, if only subtly. Ramona's summer tomboy days of denim overalls without a shirt beneath had come to an end. Almost immediately, Calvin insisted on the addition of a disguising training bra beneath her clothes, since he and 'people didn't want those things staring at them'.
It was at about this time that Calvin's drinking escalated, as he lamented his perceived lack of success and prestige. Luckily a flat tire soon changed their lives.
One overcast morning, a shiny blue Lincoln limped into their gravel driveway on the rim. As Calvin fixed the innertube, silent Mona improved the driver's mood with a small bouquet of picked wildflowers and her big smile.
The driver was an Alexandria socialite on her way to the University of Virginia, but more importantly, was on the Governor's educational advisory committee. That fall Mona was attending a State school for the deaf an hour away in Staunton, at no cost to the family. It was a boarding school, but she would be home holidays and to work at the store during the busier summer season.
Despite a rocky start and some insensitive juvenile remarks labeling her a 'half breed', Ramona flourished at the institution, meeting other deaf children enduring similar struggles. She learned math, to read and write - her mother framed the first post card she received from Mona - and mastered sign language. She found the dormitory luxurious, as it was her first time living with central heat and indoor plumbing. She would forego most social activities to stay in her room and read, and completed all twelve grades over five winters, earning nearly straight A's and proudly receiving her diploma by the time she was nineteen. She returned to the store and relieved her parents of much of the burden, handling the books and written orders from suppliers. They even planned an early summer vacation.
She had also learned to carefully speak aloud, but knew her fabricated words sounded unusual, and was wary of the reactions of strangers. So, Mona kept her pencil and spiral notebook handy to write down most of her conversations.
Back home for good, she missed her interesting and more worldly school friends, put away her nice clothes and returned to her baggy jeans, shirts, bobby socks and loafers.
Two
What remained unseen beneath the oversized clothes was the body of a young woman - the nude, light brown-skinned torso Mona saw in the full length mirror clearly for the first time in her dorm room. By senior year, she had what could be called a 'boyish' build. Her hips were only marginally wider than her waist, but her feminine bottom had expanded, at least when viewed from the side. She had a few wisps of black hair between her thighs, which did little to camouflage the conspicuous trident of flesh - ample, finger-sized outer labia, and the protruding hood of her clitoris that graced the adult-sized genitalia which her diminutive pelvis could not quite fully withhold.
What had stalled on her journey to womanhood, she believed, were her breasts. They were small and steeply sloped, seemingly the minimum flesh needed to support her nipples, which were dark brown, hemispherical, and, Mona believed, disproportionately large and swollen looking. Their outward projection was more evident without one of the restrictive Maidenform AA cup brassieres she usually wore around her ribcage. It angered her father if he happened to see her without restraint, even in a nightgown when she crossed her arms across her chest when they passed each other at sunrise on the path to the outhouses behind their building. The girls at school were mostly consoling, assuring her there were practical athletic, as well as backless and strapless fashion advantages to being a 'Flatty Patty', and after all, it was ultimately the silken slit between her legs the boys were pursuing.
With the help of her friends, Mona had learned to walk in borrowed high heels, albeit with newspaper stuffed in the toes to compensate for her smaller feet. Dresses loaned by other petite girls, hairstyling, and a little makeup 'shined her up' for school mixers - the music free equivalent of a prom - and she had a pleasant time with the awkward boys, but was glad when the events had ended, and she could return to her introverted ways.
Bookworm Mona had not eschewed all social gatherings at school. Her favorites were the scandalous but silent - punctuated with an occasional unheard squeal or giggle - sign language discussions, usually late at night and led by the older girls, about boys, kissing, romance and the biggest mystery of all - S-E-X.
Sometimes embellished with crude illustrations, the various elements were explained and debated, some in fact and others in conjecture. Mona couldn't believe that a man's pee-pee could grow large and rigid enough to fill and even hurt her insides. Surprising her peers with her boldness, she readily admitted to having seen several 'dicks' - one of the words the girls called them - by coincidentally being in their backyard shed on an errand and spying through the gaps in the siding. Some impatient male customers simply urinated into the underbrush behind the store instead of waiting for the occupied outhouses to be vacated. The fleshy spigots seemed too small and limp when shaken - like wet washrags - to transform into the formidable predators the girls described.
The unofficial education at school filled in a lot of the blanks her mother's discussion omitted. Madelyn, more frank than many mothers had been, had said that a naked wife lying in bed underneath her naked husband - obviously permitted
only
after marriage - would produce a baby. Any attempt at such activities before nuptials would ensure eternal damnation for both participants. Mona, having read most of the Old Testament and all of the New, wasn't worried too much about the damnation, as the boys weren't exactly knocking down the door.
As of her last year in school, Mona, with large dark eyes and high cheekbones, had let her straight, raven hair grow to her shoulders. She was not without admirers - local young men who knew, despite her appearance, she was no longer jail bait - flirted with her a little, but the scribbled conversations fell short of asking for an actual date. To the local boys, some of them barely literate, the problem of how to converse smoothly for an entire evening - or long enough to determine if the stigma of her handicap, some of them hoped, left her self-esteem lacking to the point she was an 'easy lay' - just seemed insurmountable. No matter, the resolute young woman dove into her work, since the store and land, she was told, would eventually be hers.
Three
Mona panicked as she awoke. The alarm clock - which she had set and left next to her head, so the vibrations would at least awaken her, had rolled away and had already exhausted its winding. Six twenty -
Oh no!
She had overslept by forty minutes. The petite young woman bolted upright, slipped her nightgown off over her head ran a brush through her hair, then grabbed her denim shorts - jeans cut off and hemmed just above the knee.
