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Would her life have been better if she’d had sex with her supervising teacher when she was a troubled 23-year-old virgin? But if she’d done that, would she ever have attempted, a quarter of a decade later, to rescue teenaged girls kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery? In Various Men Who Knew Us As Girls, a woman reinvestigates the “bookmarks” of her life, the incidents and people who seemed to determine major conditions of her future course, simultaneously raising questions that disturb the faultline of commonly accepted standards of morality.
The border sex trade in Southern California works like a drug cartel, but the smuggled contraband is girls, mostly underage, who are forced to work as unpaid prostitutes, often in the most degraded conditions in thickets in the brush on the undeveloped terrain just outside “civilization.” These enterprises are known to exist by law enforcement agencies, by investigative journalists, by human rights organizations, and yet they continue to exist. Chased from one outdoor location to another, it costs little to move the business elsewhere, and the available locations in undeveloped canyons are almost limitless. How those in the population of Southern California respond to learning about this situation will vary. Most would express some brand of shock in the moment they hear about it; then they’ll go on with their daily lives, without reflecting on it long enough to feel the helplessness of realizing there’s nothing they alone can do to stop it.
But what does it take for an individual to become involved? Not necessarily a higher moral standard or a higher level of outrage or repugnance. Maybe just some quirk in their past that causes their outrage to be confused with fascination, to have a different tint, a different color, a different shade of grey. To not know why they’re seeing themselves in these girls, and to be repulsed at the suggestion that that’s what they’re doing.
Hester Smith works at a large wholesale nursery whose growing fields extend into the canyons and hillsides of Southern California. She begins to observe one of the so-called “Love Nests” operating just outside the nursery’s property. Meanwhile she has discovered that the man with whom she thinks she’d almost had an affair – her supervisor when she was a 23-year-old virgin student teacher – had been having a simultaneous affair with a 16-year-old high school student. While slowly pursuing a plan to rescue one of the sex slaves she continues to observe in the fields, Hester also mines her recollection of the months she spent as a student teacher, trying to discover why the man so abruptly left off his interest in her, and imagining a version of the story of his affair with the 16-year-old, who is now in her 40s and is suing him. In Hester’s determination to learn what really happened in her past, and how missed opportunities led to an adult life of frustrated sexual dysfunction and failed relationships, she also pursues knowledge about the former 16-year-old student, finds her, and arranges a meeting with her – a meeting which inadvertently coincides with the timing of her rescue of a hostage prostitute being forced to service laborers in a field. After the mayhem, Hester finally comes to understand why her interest in the girls in the field had bordered on fascination, even a horrifying envy. Through telling her story afterwards, it is only the shame of this realization that finally overcomes her lifelong bitterness and resentment toward the men in her past.
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