I’d enjoyed soapy showers then sex with hubby but didn’t feel sexy while caring for babies. Sex was another domestic routine, a chore for his horny rush. I didn't care. It was duty booty. I accepted his need, was pleased he wanted me, was happy to give it but just didn’t feel sexy. If aroused I had to get mine on top first but usually was too tired and laid back and let him have it, pleased he wanted it.

As the kids grew out of diapers and choo-choo train baby talk ended, however, we began to emerge from our marriage shell and rejoin peers, at least on weekends. Most were still single, partying and sexually experimenting with the new Age of Aquarius. They avoided career, house and kid commitments and considered us bogged down.  We were bogged down but happy ever after-ing in our little Camelot.

In the summer of 1974, six years after our wedding bells pealed, just before the kids entered preschool and kindergarten, we made a second trip to Disneyland for the kids, not us. We flew, not drove, rented a car at the airport, stayed and ate in the Disney Hotel and took the monorail to and from the park. The trip reflected our economic rise upward.

With freedom from breastfeeding, diaper changing, midnight baby cry awakening via "the pill", my seminal sexual yearnings re-emerged. First, it was a new dress or lingerie, then a special dinner with wine, then dancing, and best, with all these ending on our marriage bed.

Our sex, while vanilla, was again satisfying and sketches in the book, Joy of Sex, told us how to experiment for different flavors.

The changing sexual culture swirling around us, however, also shook our marital bed with ideas of greener grass on the other side of the marriage fence, not just doing different positions together.

We didn't talk about it. It was in our marriage closet. By the latter half of the 1970s, the sexual revolution of the sixties was over. Sex had won. Now everyone was "doing it". An eighteen-year-old virgin was a source of ridicule. Couples like us who missed the free love boat were urged to get aboard.

By 1975 middle America Tupperware parties became "Fuckerwear Parties" with a middle-class married woman host selling lingerie, lovemaking oils, and sex toys. Pornography was on the big screen with, Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door. Woman’s magazines like Cosmopolitan and Redbook were full of articles titled, How to Experience Sex, Casual and Anonymous Sex, Your Orgasm and even, Should You Start Swinging?

The local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, delivered on the front porch, included classifieds filled with couples wanting to meet couples. The Berkeley Barb, a political protest paper, morphed into a thick, classified, sex ads messenger for every depravity, it’s yellow paper rack pervasive at commercial street corners and restaurant entries.

With the pill and before AIDS, there were few ramparts against the onslaught of sex on demand. The media pulled out the stops and advocated sex in the haze of marijuana smoke seeping across suburbia. Commitment meant doing something together, including swinging.

With two kids, we knew about sex. What we didn't know, we knew from magazines, books, newspapers and even television, all now vying to outdo one another in sex education. From them, we were informed we needed to expand our horizons despite what we knew.

I tested media tips for man-pleasing but like new food recipes, hubby wanted a basic fare of three meals a day and two to three sex romps a week. He did respond to, sexy nighties, lingerie and hula dancing.

The Mountain View city parks and recreation department offered hula dance lessons. I enrolled to firm up from childbearing. It required only a twenty-dollar fee, purchase of a grass skirt, weekly class attendance, a neighbor babysitter during attendance and practice at home when hubby was absent because all it took was a little swaying in the grass skirt and he was on me fast and furious. It appeared a nylon nightie or hula skirt was more exciting than me.

From hula dancing, I graduated to much more difficult belly dancing. I chose the Turkish bedlay style known for its energetic shimmies, hip vibrations and clicking cymbals over the more sedate Egyptian. I made my costume with beads, sequins, and a fringe-decorated bra, one stitch at a time.

The "V" shaped hip belt included four layers of coin chains for shimmy emphasis and a lavender chiffon skirt for a dreamlike allure.

Accessories included a chiffon hip/neck shawl, large hoop earrings, bracelets, and slave ankle coin charms.

Movements are accompanied by finger and thumb-held brass cymbals, called zils in Turkish, clicked by the dancer to the music tempo.

As with the other students, my costume was not traditional. It was based more on the TV series, I Dream Of Jeannie than an authentic but expensive outfit encouraged by our instructor. 

She was a plump, middle-aged, former professional belly dancer. The class of about a dozen women was her venue for teaching her art and educating Americans about Turkey, a hobby income supplement to her day job. I learned where Turkey is on the globe and that belly dancing is one of the few things which unite opposing Turkish, Arabic, Armenian and Greek cultures. Eventually, hubby and I visited the Middle East where we enjoyed different ethnic professional dances but of, course, appreciated it in different ways. He, arousal and me, aesthetics.

Belly dancing changed my self-image from a long-necked ugly duckling to temptress. My costume included a lavender nylon panty except when dancing before hubby due to his rapid response time. Gyrations with cymbals clicking in front of hubby resulted in being picked up carried to bed and nailed before I could go through the next dance movement. 

There are seven core movements to master with many variations due to tribal ethnic and instructor nuances, mostly unnoticed by the untrained eye. We learned lifts and drops, slides, shimming, twists, circles, figure eights and finally undulations as we trained muscles to avoid contortion injuries. We also learned to practice when there was no male significant other to interrupt.

My flexible body made it easier for me than for other students to master a movement. My "long" neck was ideal for head slides, my bosom, and hips for shimming and my nimble sewing fingers for the cymbals.

My complexion and slanted eyes were assets. With the instructor’s guidance, I wore heavy eye makeup to emphasize “Cobra” eyes and used Liz Taylor in the movie Cleopatra for inspiration. In costume and makeup, I converted the stigma of youth associated with Cobra to an asset and adopted it as my stage name.

Tricks mastered are concentration on the movement of one body part, relaxation of other parts, breathing control, joint flexibility and music response. Once a month our instructor took the class out for a performance, typically before a sedate audience and often before women only. Beginners performed in a group but those advanced did a short solo exhibition of their most recent mastered movement.

As I advanced my dancing empowered me first with my husband and then with the audience as my movements captured attention. In belly dancing, one keeps a stoic face while performing but makes eye contact with the audience, especially a singled-out male. I began to enjoy selecting a man in the audience, mesmerizing him through movements while keeping indifferent eye contact.

After a year, the instructor took me and another advanced student to an upscale Middle East-style restaurant/nightclub with belly dancing in San Francisco. My costume by then had advanced to include a pearl jeweled headpiece and transparent silk veil which added to the allure of eye makeup and neck head slides. We were introduced as novices. No audience money offerings were permitted to keep us, innocents, among the professional dancers. Our instructor knew enough not to generate competition resentment.

The instructor had me perform second. Gyrating to the background music of the darbuka goblet-shaped drum and Turkish kanoun strings guitar, I swayed among the subdued lighted crowd, clicked my cymbals to shimmering hips from table to table until before one seating powerful-looking men. I first got their attention with neck head slides while peeking behind my shawl, made indifferent eye contact with a good-looking, well-dressed man, roped him around the neck with my shawl and led him back to the stage behind my undulating hips.

I sat him on a little stage chair for my performance and began with hip lifts and drops to the music, advanced to neck and head slides, switched to shimmering shoulders, then breasts, then hips. I went through each progressive body part movement following the music’s increasing tempo with body twists, circles, figure eights, to twisting undulations.

Finally, spread before him, arched back, my hair sweeping the floor behind me, my torso supported by my buttocks on my heels, my knees spread apart and with indifferent eye contact I went through the finishing crescendo. I shimmied my shoulders and breasts as my torso and arms swayed to and fro, my cymbals clicked in rapid music rhythm, my head slid from side to side while I kept my eyes fixed stoically at his mesmerized attention and pants-swelled erection. The tempo increased with the music until a spasm of sexual exhilaration swept me.

With the music stopped, my instructor led him back, limping, to his table. I slowly rose up from the floor, exhausted both physically and sexually. Standing, catching my breath, profusely perspiring, I gave my veiled bow to an ebullient ovation. His fixation and the applause from those at tables caused a sense of sexual empowerment never possessed until then.

At home, still in costume, sans headpiece, with a dried sweat-stained bra, belt, and panty, hubby picked me up before I could shower, stripped me in a frenzy and dropped me on our bed for his fast and furious without words. I climaxed thinking of the man's transfixed gaze before my gyrations and his pants-stressed erection.

Afterward, the cabaret stage patron attempted to contact me through the instructor but she was an experienced mother hen and ensured he never did. I didn’t want to meet him. I wanted him to remain a San Francisco fantasy but his seeking me boosted my self-esteem.

Belly dancing is time-consuming.  One needs to keep practicing to ensure flexibility and muscle conditioning to avoid injury. While sexually empowering, my class attendance tapered off after my nightclub cabaret performance until ceasing when I started work. Hubby was disappointed the costume moved to the back of the closet and eventually to a garage trunk.

Belly dancing, however, changed my self-image to someone sexually alluring, a fundamental change from being man shy to seeking their notice. I became a flirt, thrived for confirmation I was not a long-necked ugly duckling but a Liz Taylor Cleopatra. Flirting was a game of glances, smiles, banter, innuendos and crass suggestions seeking a man's overt move and then hiding behind the safety of marriage to decline. Each overt male move provided confidence while honing my flirting skill. I continued to wear dark eye makeup, kept the nickname Cobra and often darted my tongue out when flirting. 

High school friends who visited envied me. Life was good. Yet with the kids away during the day I was bored and still carried some of the low self-esteem of my youth due to dependency on my husband's income. Only flirting assured my self-worth.

Despite having everything, something was missing, an inoculate yearning disrupting happily-ever-aftering.

During America’s 1970s sexual revolution, Santa Clara Valley flung off its agricultural past and became Silicon Valley, the epicenter of electronic culture shock. We were fortunate to buy our house when we did. Prices leaped up monthly soon after our purchase as swarms from around the world came to develop integrated circuits from silicon wafers which revolutionized the world, making it, like the song title, 'It's A Small, Small World.'

Escalating home prices shifted our economic position up to semi-elite as homeowners. Many of similar or higher income were regulated to renting. Economic status became associated with when you bought or if you owned your home more than how much you made.

Those moving into the area came from everywhere bringing new ideas and lifestyles, often with few traditional family restraints. In the 1970s, silicon wafer designs, superseded one another rapidly making what was new and exciting, obsolete the following year. It was here today, gone tomorrow. Silicon fabrication plants ran twenty-four/seven. They shut down only at Christmas for repairs and upgrades to make an even faster chip or die.

The plants sprung up as concrete, tilt-up mushrooms in former prune, pear, cherry and apricot orchards with the trees bulldozed in piles and set alight as historic trash to make the latest chip. Companies came and went and often shortly after they opened went, bankrupt or merged with another. Loyalty meant staying with a company for over a year.

Chipmakers were desperate to hire, even someone like me, only a high school graduate with no experience. There were over twenty pages of Help Wanted Ads in the San Jose Mercury News. Most screamed for workers in wafer fab electronics. In October 1974, with the kids at last in school, I applied to a Nortec Electronics ad.  The plant was in Sunnyvale, adjacent to the south of Mountain View. It advertised in bold print, “No Experience Necessary”.

I’d driven past electronic plants but had no idea what they did other than they made "chips" which went into digital watches, radios, computers, and games such as Atari. The interview was short. They looked at my application and asked me to start that day's swing shift as a wafer fab aligner, a position held only by women. I postponed staring until the next day to work out logistics with hubby.

Nervous on showing up to work, at my first real job, a woman supervisor told me to relax, put me in a “bunny suit”, an anti-dust smock worn in the plant and took me to the wafer alignment section. There she showed how to mimic her moves to align layers of integrated circuits on a silicon wafer by microscope. While hard on the eyes it was a sit-down job in a clean work environment, a huge step up from my prior experience of summer dishwasher in a bowling alley restaurant and fruit picker. Wages were good to attract workers from afar and to offset escalated home prices. I loved my new job.

Nortec, like others, ran twenty-four/seven, three shifts a day. My swing shift was 6 PM to 2 AM. I left for work at 5:30 PM as hubby arrived and got home at 2:30 AM. At home, I changed, showered and hit the sack by 3 AM. Hubby left for work at 7:30 AM and got home at 5:30 PM.

There was only time for a pass off of kids with a kiss for the afternoon switch. We all got up at 6:30 AM, I fixed breakfast, hubby and the kids showered, dressed and gulped breakfast down and left at 7:30 AM to their work and school at the morning switch off.

Sex during the week was either when I awoke him at 3 AM or he, me at 6 AM, with one or the other of us groggy.

At 8 AM I hopped back in bed then got up at noon to clean house and see the kids return home with a little “quality time” while I fixed dinner for my hand off rush to work.  During the workweek hubby and I were together five hours daily but time awake together was only an hour, unless there was an additional thirty-minute awakening.

Swing shift swings they said. It did. Almost everyone was under forty and most under thirty. Fifty was a geezer. Working hours jumbled to accommodate twenty-four/seven operations meant everyone was time stressed and lived alternate hours from the rest of their family. Swing shift became one’s family.

The males were mostly university-educated executives, scientists, and engineers who worked twelve-hour days, six days a week or more to be millionaires. Females were mostly high school diploma line production or secretary employees and outnumbered males four or more to one. Turnover was constant.

Security was tight to keep out spies from competitors, especially foreign ones. Once in the guarded parking lot, you were in a zone safe from spouses and boyfriends. It was a violate mix when the "pill" was a standard item in a woman's purse and before AIDS. It was work hard and party harder. At work, there were nonstop sex innuendos, banter, and pranks. Off work, there were nudie and hot tub parties and affairs. There were also parking lot quickie trysts.

The ongoing salacious banter, sexual gags, erotic presents, and pranks would today cause personnel office sexual harassment panic attacks but back then workplace sex wasn't taboo.  It was an employment perk.

Buildings had to be ultra-clean with everyone required to wear a “bunny suit” smock to avoid dust contamination. Girls often dressed risqué under their smocks and revealed to other girls during a break what they wore and at times not wore under it. A game good for a laugh was to “smock shock”, flash a selected male, especially if suspected of being gay, while others watched.

The employee parking lot was a secure trysting area for quickies before and after shifts and even during the thirty-minute lunch break. Walking through the lot one would on occasion spot a used condom and more common wadded tissue paper with a yellow smear spot.

Working swing shift meant the day time soap operas I once watched for titillation while ironing and washing were out. The girls at work provide real-life replacements. They unabashedly bragged about sexual exploits and openly displayed hickey marks. They definitely, had not attended parochial school.

They didn’t accept me as one of them and soon nicknamed me, "Fucking Do Goody" shortened to "FDG" because I didn’t attend their wild parties, swear, smoke and often missed the meaning of their sexual banter and innuendos, a working girl’s inverse hierarchy. Worse, I worked hard to meet and exceed alignment quotas which made me an "FDG" nerd.

A Filipino woman, Penny, was the only one to initially befriend me. She was married to an old Filipino man with a bald head and big, jolly belly who could pass as a Filipino Buddha. I learned US navy ships used men from the Philippines as, onboard ship cooks. While they were not in US military service, they earned a pension and got US citizenship at retirement. 

Old and retired they often married a young woman like Penny from the Philippines. She was his “mail order bride” and bore him two boys, her passage fare to America. While she worked, he retired, took care of the house, spoiled the boys, cooked, and fed Penny and the boys until all were plump. For him, the sugar was at the bottom of his life's cup. He taught me how to expand Mom’s Filipino dishes when I visited their always-open home.

Penny loved to laugh, was affectionate to her old husband, who she teased by rubbing his bald head, was a loving mother and was kind to me at work when no one else was. Their ramshackle house on a big lot, in an older section of Mountain View, was always open for parties with extended family, neighbors, and friends. The husband cooked banquet meals in the backyard as if still aboard ship in the navy. As her husband was too old for sex, she had a white boyfriend for stud service who her husband often unknowingly fed. She couldn’t believe her good luck as a mail-order bride. To her, America was truly the promised land which made her always as cheerful as her husband.

She told the others.

“FDG’s o’key-dokey.  She’s just a good Catholic girl, raised by nuns. Don’t be mean to her. She don’t know no better.”

She always invited me to sit with her group during lunch, where I was grudgingly accepted. I tried to adjust to the others but was still known as "FDG" until one swing shift when, Cindy, a regular at our lunch table, failed to show for lunch.

Shy, I usually sat quietly but this was interpreted as being stuck up, part of my FDG character. I was determined to be friendlier. I’d seen Cindy at the start of our shift and wondered why she was a no-show. Quietly munching a sandwich, I got the courage to say.

"Where's Cindy?"                                   

Penny turned, smiled and replied.

"She went to her car for F and F."

I didn't know what F and F meant. My mind raced what F and F Cindy was doing. Find Food, maybe fast food? It didn't make sense with food in the cafeteria and the nearest fast food outlet fifteen minutes away and our lunch break only thirty minutes. Thinking the girls knew about cars I finally said.

"She's fixing a flat?"

Penny looked at me as if I was crazy.

"Fixing a flat?"

"Yeah, F and F, she’s fixing a flat?"

The girls at the table turned to me stunned. Then they began laughing. Soon they were choking laughing. Mascara started to run. One was hysterical choking on her last sandwich bite. Just as they calmed themselves, one would whisper hoarsely

"She's fixing a flat!"

Off they would laugh again. Finally, Penny, struggling with words between choking said.

"Honey, F and F is Fast Fuck, you, fucken twit."

While made the butt of a joke, my "F and F" got rid of the animosity toward me. I was not a "FDG" just a "Fucking Twit" or "FT".

The sexual 70s and swing shift girls' escapades and gossip made me restless. Groggy domestic sex and even weekend sex wearing a sexy nightie with children asleep in the other rooms didn't fit the 70s excitement. It took more than large bars of soap, big shampoo bottles, fluffy towels, new clothes, even belly dancing for fulfillment. Something was missing in Camelot.

While time-stressed, for the first time we had leisure money. Our double income and relatively low housing cost kicked us up to a higher income bracket. I started buying nice clothes. Married to a good husband, healthy kids, a nice house, poor origin left behind, why the ennui feeling? What could be missing? Didn’t I have it all?

Driving to and from work, the only times I had to myself, I began thinking.

 This, is it? What's missing? Am I satisfied?

Well, it wasn't exactly like that. It was a feeling of emptiness. Others had it, I didn't.