Every woman has a story.

Or two.

I was thirteen when an adult cousin of my father’s tried to kiss me in a way reserved only for romantic movies. But I guess, according to Megyn Kelly, it was ok because I wasn’t eight.

It was at my Bat Mitzvah party at my parents’ home in the spring of 1968, when a bespectacled 40-something cousin I knew only by his nickname of “Eyes” cornered me in my darkened bedroom and tried to kiss me in a very un-cousin kind of way.

The May lilacs were in full bloom that Sunday, sweetly perfuming my Long Island backyard now smartly decked out in cocktail party mode with rented glass café tables and gilt-colored chairs. The standard suburban back yard barbecue and webbed lawn chairs had been upgraded overnight.

Young waiters in wash-and-wear tuxedos passed around silver-plated trays of pigs in blankets to adults in hip turtlenecks and Pucci printed sheath dresses. As the guests mingled, sipping their whiskey sours on the freshly mowed lawn, I could hear the laughter from the party drifting through my bedroom windows as cousin “Eyes” pressed himself against me as I cowered against a wall.

Painfully shy, I could barely say a word.  I hung my head down in terror, turning away from his large, imposing face so close to mine I could smell not only his Old Spice After Shave but remnants of the Ivory soap he had used to wash his face that morning.

“Oh come on,” he shamed me repeatedly, “don’t be a cold fish.”

I hadn’t even reached puberty yet.

A 13-year-old Sally (r)

I was a very young 13.

Always a late bloomer, I cleaved more towards childhood, rejecting the mad dash to embrace being a teenager. While most girls rushed to proudly wear training bras for their barely perceptible budding breasts, I embraced the familiarity of an undershirt.  Devotees of Seventeen Magazine, my peers would delight in wearing Yardley Slicker, applying the lipstick in the bathroom at school once they got off the bus, out of a watchful mother’s eye. I read Little Dot comic books and still slept with my stuffed animals

I eventually returned to the party outside, popped a cheese puff in my mouth, chugged a Shirley Temple, and said nothing.

Yet I absorbed that message uttered in my bedroom; it played in my head for decades, so I taught myself to be accommodating to men fearful of being perceived as a cold fish.

That would be my lasting Bat Mitzvah lesson.

Bat Mitzvah

Once Bat Mitzvahed, I was viewed as a Jewish adult.

While this religious ceremony is a public recognition of a girl’s coming of age,  was the scene in my bedroom played out in secrecy, the dark flip side of coming of age?

A foreshadowing of inappropriate sexual advances; of patriarchal entitlement, feeling trapped, and lack of agency.

Was this also what being female in society signified? To be assaulted, pressured, to be the recipient of unwanted sexual advances, and the inability to say no.

Every woman has a story. Or two.

Or three.

Or more.

I have too many stories to tell, yet this was one I never told.

I never told my parents. I never told friends.  Not at the time or ever.

But it’s a story many women know.

The stories women don’t tell are often ones all women know.

Ironically, I only found out yesterday in a conversation with my brother that this cousin named Irving garnered the nickname “Eyes” not because he wore thick eyeglasses, as I assumed.

It was, my brother said, “because he had eyes for the ladies.”

It hit me in the gut.

“Eyes” couldn’t see me. Because I was no lady.

I was a child.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream