When Good Girls Go Bad - Vixens, Harridans, And Shrews, And The Men Lost Without Them

The Devil, Dostoevsky's vaudevillian creation in The Brothers Karamazov, tells Ivan that without him life would be one unremitting, catastrophic bore.  He was put on earth to add spice and variety to Jesus's treacly homilies and parables.  Face it, he continues, life without me would be one, long string of Sunday Masses, communion without sin and confession, a life intolerably unsustainable.  

 

Emily Roberts had never been a good girl, the one in pigtails and smiling in a Norman Rockwell painting of middle class ordinariness.  She had always been obstinate, cantankerous, and difficult. 

'What's a mother to do?', Ophelia Roberts asked as Emily frowned, grimaced, looked her right in the face, and let loose a long yellowish stream on her mother's newly cleaned and polished floor.  There was no give in Emily, no second thinking, no remove from an adamantine resolve which was, even for such a little girl, intimidating. 

What prompted the episode was a mystery to her mother.  Nothing she did or could have done could have provoked such infantile fury; but there she was, standing in a yellow puddle, panties wet, speckled  drops on her patent leather shoes, sternly looking at Ophelia as if the woman had committed an atrocity. 

'She reminds me of old Great Aunt Iphigenia', her husband chimed in, suggesting some genetic passage over which parents have no control and therefore suggested some leniency at least. Iphigenia was the family harridan, a vixenish old maid who had terrorized every last one of the Roberts clan, rapier wit, no-holds-barred dismissive flashes of ad hominem criticism, blatant discordance with every single balanced, appropriate consideration of her family.

 

'I certainly hope not', said Ophelia after she had cleaned up after Emily and sent her to her room; but a spade had been called, and no one could possibly have disagreed with Arthur Roberts about the striking similarity between Old Maid Iphigenia and little Emily.  The genetic cards had been played, and for better or worse, Emily's trumped the Great Aunt's hand.  She was indeed a clone of the old bitch. 

Such unpleasantness followed young Emily through grade school and middle school.  She was a pariah from kindergarten on, but found her footing at Miss Porter's School for Girls, a proper New England finishing school where, her parents hoped, the good breeding and good sense of the administration, teachers, and parents would prevail, and their daughter would lose at least some of her orneriness. 

'Impossible', reported Miss Porter herself, doyenne and principal of the school her great grandmother had founded for the well-to-do of Farmington and West Hartford.  'The girl simply cannot be reformed', a surprising statement from a woman who prided herself on her rectitude, impressiveness, and discipline.

Emily, however, had a marvelous old time at Miss Porter's from which she escaped regularly to meet up with boys from Plainville, near dropouts and offspring of tradesmen and workers in New Britain's ball bearing, hardware, and tool-and-die industries, nothing to write home about, but sufficient for Emily's chutzpah, need for outrage and a delight in épater les bourgeois, showing the petty burghers of her town what life could be like outside Kinder, Kuche, Kirche. 

She took the boys for a long, long ride, so smitten were they with her, patrician blonde, blue-eyed upper class girl that they had no idea that she had them tethered to her and harnessed, studs when she wanted, servants when she didn't. 

Half Miss Porter's senior class was in love with her, so irrepressible and irresistible was her sensuality and overt, unashamed sexuality.  The affairs were so frequent and so passionate that girls were summarily dismissed for 'behavior unbecoming', but the real culprit - Emily - remained Scot free innocent and guiltless of all charges.  There was something so demanding about her defiance and her innate, preternatural sexuality, that the administration left her quite alone. 

College was a sexual jamboree for Emily, a free-for-all of sexual hijinks, cocks and cunts in equal proportion, unsparing in insistence and pleasure.  Harvard was never the same after the likes of Emily Roberts, and both men and women mourned at her graduation. 

Nietzsche famously noted that the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will, the property and purview of Supermen, Übermensch who rode astride the herd, beyond good and evil, sybarites, emotional dictators, and kings.

Emily was Nietzschean to the core, a woman of such willful magnitude and complete amorality that the philosopher could have been writing about her when he penned Thus Spake Zarathustra.  Yet she was an Übermensch that dominated by persuasion and perfect seductive pitch.  Men and women both fell for her charms and let her do her bidding. 

 

She was a forbidding lover, an unforgiving, uncaring sexual partner who left surprised and nonplussed emotional men on the curb.  

When they came to their senses, they were angry at having been so used and abuse. Credulousness when it comes to sexual behavior is common but shameful.  Any man worth his salt should know when he is being taken, but the fields of dead bodies attested to profound male ignorance. 

Women were no different.  The toughest bull dyke from Bernal Heights was flustered and girly when it came to Emily, and she ran roughshod over them no differently from the men from Hollywood.  She was at the top of her game - a Dostoevsky Devil, a Nietzschean Superman, a Kierkegaard existentialist an Epictetus sybarite - her own woman, astride the Colossus, mistress of all she surveyed. 

Ivan's Devil was right - badness mitigates the boredom of goodness and validates the individual - and so it was that Emily was one of the happiest, most unconcerned, least worried, and most baggage free of anyone in her circle and well beyond. 

Such was her canniness and charm that she had few detractors.  Even those left in her wake valued the experience, better to have loved Emily than not, better a few hours of uninhibited passion than a lifetime of marital routine. 

There were a few of course - and there will always be in a diversely emotional world - that were jealous and hoped to see her fall, to get her comeuppance for her years of indifference and lack of moral principle, but that day never came.  Even in retirement she was Queen of the Shuffleboard, the older woman who could still raise a cloud of dust. Octogenarian men long past their sexual pull-by date watched her every move, toyed with the possibility that it's never too late.  

It was only women who never outgrew their bitchiness and catty jealousies, talked behind her back, and spread the most noxious and unbelievable rumors; but Emily was untouched and unbothered and dismissed these cunts just as she had in her salad years. 

There was no one like her, men said around the poker table or at the 19th hole, and never would be.  A woman of value, a woman to be noticed, a mensch, a diamond, a delight