Secret spaces: a memoir by Laurie
McTavish
I was born without a vagina. Dr. Miller was ecstatic. This condition only occurs in one of every five
thousand female births and now he had a patient of his own. My deformity had eluded both me and my mother
for seventeen years because it wasn’t so much what was there, as what wasn’t. I looked
normal—breasts, pubic hair-- but was born without the inside works. At the time, I had just been waiting
patiently to join my friends who complained about cramps, and crowed over a
successful tampon insertion, sharing the news with anyone who would
listen. They seemed so worldly.
Dr. Miller insisted on immediate
exploratory surgery and extensive testing.
When all the tests had come back, he cut right to the chase. “In cases like yours we usually take a skin
flap from your inner thigh or buttock, and wrap it around a sterilized balsa
wood dildo.” He went on to describe how
this would be implanted inside me.
I was confused
from the start because I heard the key word “dildo” as Bilbo, and wondered what The
Hobbit had to do with it. I
flashed on that flesh-colored thing my friend and I found babysitting and
snooping around one New Year’s Eve after the kids were in bed. She knew it was called a dildo, but I had forgotten
all about it.
I was pretty
ignorant. Not stupid, just
ignorant. I could happily use calculus to prove the
existence of a theoretical vessel with finite volume and infinite surface
area. (You can fill it up, but you can’t
paint it.) I could tell you about the foreshadowing significance of Desdemona’s
song in the first act of Othello, or why Camus felt that
I even knew pretty
much about balsa wood because I often wasted my allowance on those tricky
gliders. I knew the smell that comes
from sanding the wings baby skin smooth to make it fly like my brother showed
me. All I knew about a dildo, though,
was that it sounded like an odd thing to make out of balsa wood.
Dr. Miller
continued: “Provided your body doesn’t
reject the implant, we remove the dildo after a few weeks, leaving a skin
pouch.” He was drawing rough sketches of the process, the wiry black hairs on
his fingers springing up from his white flesh, looking like pubic hair which
seemed appropriate given his line of work. “You won’t have much feeling, but
with enough lubricant it should feel perfectly normal during intercourse.”
My mom just sat there. Maybe she didn’t know what a dildo was either. I had done my share of parking at the airport with various teenage boys, but I always kept my clothes on. I hadn’t seen or touched a boy’s penis. I certainly wasn’t qualified to imagine intercourse, especially not in front of my mom.
“Just be thankful
you weren’t born in the nineteenth century,” he said to our silence. “You’d have been married off at fifteen and
put aside or sent back to your family when they realized what was wrong. A farmer needed kids to work the fields, you
know.” I blinked.
But Dr. Miller was a salesman. After his hide-the-dildo presentation, he offered an alternative. Sort of like bait and switch only different. He wanted us to try something new, developed because of frequent septic reactions from the implants.
My mind tore off on another tangent. Septic.
When I tuned back
in he was promising that our success would land us in the medical journals,
though he assured my mother that I would remain anonymous. “This process takes longer than surgery,
but I promise you’ll be happier with the results.” I wasn’t sure what he meant. My mom pressed
her lips together and made a sound in the back of her throat usually reserved
for when I let slip a curse word.
Once I understood
the science, Dr. Miller’s novel alternative to the dildo wood implant surgery
was brilliant in its simplicity.
Here’s what happened. When my mother was seventeen weeks pregnant with me, something went wrong in my little fetus self. “Your uterus, cervix and vagina didn’t form,” said Dr. Miller. In place of a vagina I had two fused lengths of cartilage. (If you squeeze your first two fingers tightly together and imagine them both the same length, it will give you an idea of what the fused cartilage looks like.) “You’ll never have kids,” he said casually. “But we can make you a vagina that works like a dream.”
After my older cousin’s
very expensive abortion the year before, this was the place where I thought my
mother might stand up, grab my hand, and say, “No vagina, no sex, no
problems. Thank you, doctor. We’ll be back when she’s ready to get
married.” But he was Rasputin to our
Nicholas and Alexandra. A snake charmer
to our basket of helpless pythons. It
was essential to him that I have a vagina, and thus became essential to me.
Dr. Miller’s plan was
to use physical force to separate the cartilage, avoiding the need for major
surgery. He reached in a drawer and
pulled out four plastic syringe cases, each a bit bigger in diameter and length
than the next. They looked like a set of
the matrioshka dolls my sister and I received every Christmas from our aunt in
“We’ll use these, starting with the smallest
and expanding your vagina over time.” He
held up one that looked like an eight dollar Fourth of July rocket and said,
“Believe it or not, one day you’ll be able to sit on this bad boy right here—Number
Four.” We should expect the process to take twenty
minutes a night for about eighteen months, depending on my determination.
“I’ll be in college,” I said.
“Pick one close to home. I need to follow your progress.”
He
had me lean back then, feet in the stirrups, dabbed me with some sort of cream,
and without ceremony pushed the smallest of the syringe cases into the small
declivity he had created during the exploratory surgery. I tried scooching back from the pain but he
pressed hard on my belly and held me in place.
“Antibiotic cream, then twenty minutes of pressure every night,” he
said. “Now go ahead and get dressed.”
When I was dressed
we went to his office where they looked at me the way adults do sometimes when
they’ve already made up their minds about something. They insisted on one thing: I could not tell anyone about my condition. Dr. Miller imitated a man at a cocktail party
coming up to me winking and leering, “So, how’d everything turn out with your
vagina?” This made my mother laugh. It made me certain that if I didn’t kill
myself, I was leaving
The last news of that day was the best. He shuffled through a file on his desk, and told us that I wouldn’t need hormone therapy. In many cases like mine the ovaries are cancerous and need immediate removal, but the tests and surgery revealed ovaries as healthy as horses, pumping all the right juices to my body. This pleased me. My breasts were real. My pubic hair was real.
Maybe I wasn’t a
real girl, but at least I wasn’t a boy.
As I walked to the
car with the drug sample bag bulging strangely with assorted syringe cases, I
had a horrible thought about my boyfriend and our last make-out session on his
trampoline. Had he gone inside my underpants? He was a dangerously distracting kisser, but
surely I would have remembered that.
No. The mosquitoes were awful, so
we went inside and watched a baseball game instead. But what if he had? What if he was going around telling his
friends, “She finally let me get to third base but
third base wasn’t there.” Surely he
didn’t know. And if he did, who would
believe him?
“Well, treasure,” my mother said, glancing
quickly at me, her hands firmly in the ten and two position. “At least you’ll never have to worry about
your period.”
Of all the news I
had faced I met this news with the most ambivalence. I wanted to join my friends, my sister and my
mother with their mysterious times-of-the-month and the accoutrements involved,
but I didn’t really want to bleed. Also,
since childhood I was always frightened by those sanitary product disposal
boxes in public restrooms. The ones in
my high school girls’ locker room bathrooms were especially nasty—all those bloody
strings and stained cotton wads were in your face because the lids were all
rusted open.
Once, when I was
about ten, I tried to eat one of my sister’s tampons. These were white cylinders, wrapped in
clear blue cellophane, neatly lined up in a box labeled Pursettes. I naturally assumed she was hiding a stash
of peppermints from me. If my sister got
a ten-roll Lifesaver Book in her Christmas stocking she would still have three
or four rolls, including butterscotch, when Lent rolled around. She could make the center of a jelly doughnut
last an entire episode of Fury.
I remember sucking
on my prize, waiting for the peppermint to take hold, or maybe the sinus thrill
of menthol. My mouth finally got so dry
I spit it out, but it wasn’t until years later I realized what I had done.
I was the youngest
behind a big brother headed for med school in the fall, and a wild sister,
still driving my parents crazy—this time by moving to a commune in
I made the Varsity
volleyball team. And now, added to my
regime, every night, my knees making a clumsy tent of my bed sheets, I smeared
some greasy lotion into the small slice Dr. Miller had made. Then I pressed as hard as I could stand with
a plastic syringe case. For twenty
minutes. Just like Dr. Miller said.
I kept the other syringe cases, the ones I would eventually “grow into” like a pair of hand-me-down saddle shoes, hidden in the back of my pajama drawer. The largest, the “Number Four” seemed ill-advised, if not impossible altogether.
That first night
my dad knocked on my door. I knew my
mother had probably forced him to come up and say something. He stood there awkwardly and said, “Honey,
when I married your mother I wasn’t thinking about you knuckle-headed
kids. All I wanted was Marie.” It was a long, sweet speech for my father and
when I hugged him I cried a little and took comfort from the familiar smell of
Winston cigarettes he always kept in his front pocket. At seventeen, though, I wasn’t too worried
about not having kids. I wanted to be
normal. And that meant sex.
When I went back
to school that fall of my senior year, I was amazed to learn about the abortion
I had over the summer. My girlfriends were
awkward; my boyfriend basked in the notoriety.
No one was surprised when he broke up with me. Over the summer I had changed from a fun,
athletic, enthusiastic girlfriend to an awkward Ice Princess.
So I lowered the bar. I turned to the nerd guys in my smart classes. We’d been together in hand-picked classes since kindergarten, tracked as an elite subset within our overcrowded baby-boomer schools. In junior high we formed a Computer Club and weaseled computer time from a small university near the high school where we wrote simple programs and were allowed to run them. By my senior year we were all taking Advanced Placement Calculus, English and Physics.
These were friends
who didn’t want anything in the world from me except to beat me at chess and
ping pong, which never happened. We went
to our calculus teacher’s farm on weekends, helped him with his beehives, rode
his tractor (which I almost crashed because the brake was controlled by a
number four sized knob, and not a pedal and I couldn’t get the hang of it.) We played
songs on the guitar, had bonfires and talked theorems. They tried to show me how calculus and
physics were one and the same, but I eschewed acceleration and interest
rates. I just liked the proofs, with all
of their elegant symbols, and perfect conclusions. My entire senior year I was just one of the
nerds, and I was happy.
During basketball
season I ripped a hamstring muscle doing the splits, and was treating it with
Ben Gay, mentholated, heat-producing grease that could have been bottled as Eau de Cheerleader. It was inevitable that one sleepy night, my
vaginal exercises almost forgotten, I accidentally grabbed the tube of Ben Gay
instead of the antibiotic cream, smeared it on my vagina and jammed in the
syringe case. This was a big
mistake. The initial sting was
astounding, but the pulsing burn that followed went on for three days.
By the middle of
my senior year in high school, I could only handle half of the length of
syringe case number two. Dr. Miller
wasn’t satisfied. “At this rate you’ll
be the oldest virgin in history,” he said.
My mother always
laughed when he said things like this.
During this visit he grunted and pushed and measured and came up with a
new idea. For the next two months, I was
to forget lying in my bed and pushing.
“Just sit on it,” he said. “The full twenty minutes. Sit on it until it hurts, but don’t let it
bleed.”
I was never more
thankful for all those hours spent swimming backstroke, cheerleading and
serving volleyballs. I was very strong,
and very flexible, and never once impaled myself on the final inch and a half
of that pesky number two. Impalement
meant blood and blood meant possible infection and the healing process could
close me right up. This was an
unacceptable option, and though my arms would sometimes shake in exertion, I
finally made acceptable progress.
Now that the
crisis was over, my mom let me go to my appointments alone. She would ask how things were, and I would
say they were fine. My father had never
said another word about any of it after the first night. Only Dr. Miller knew that the diameter leap
from number two to number three was causing me fits.
The whole college
choice process had been ugly. My parents
wanted me in town. I wanted the East
Coast. We settled on a school in the
next state, a six-hour bus ride from home, and I had to agree to make every
bi-monthly appointment.
That summer before
I left home, Dr. Miller sent me back to the hospital to remove a sebaceous cyst
he found on the wall of my vagina-in-progress.
A faceless crowd of medical students listened to his every word and
peered curiously into my vagina as he discussed my case. “We’re going to get some gorgeous pictures,”
he told them.
My vaginal
development suffered a major set-back when I ended up in a dormitory with an
unpopular roommate who was always around.
The only place I could count on privacy was found in the bathroom on our
wing (girls only, thank god) just after the dinner bell rang. So I’d dart in there, run the shower, and
squat for twenty minutes, water streaming over my back and head. I found that the step into the shower was of
great help leveraging myself over the syringe case but a patch cold tile could
be problematic. It caused my vagina to
clench shut, expelling the case with a splat onto the shower floor, and I would
have to start all over again.
Dr. Miller was not
pleased. He had opened his office on
Saturday just for me, and not only was my vagina not getting any larger, it was
shrinking.
“You’ve got to
care,” he said, slapping the desk. “This
has to be a priority.”
I knew I had let
him down. “You don’t understand your own
potential,” he said. “The process is
working perfectly. You can’t give up
now.” Then he stared into space and
started talking out loud about a short cut.
Back to the balsa wood concept, but for days, not weeks. Maybe even cotton packing if he could figure
out a way to keep the blood from binding…he could do it immediately. I’d only miss a week of school.
“Give me two months,” I said. He took a final measurement, none-too-gently, and told me he expected results by Christmas, dorm or no dorm, privacy or no privacy, or it meant surgery.
I was lucky not to
get athlete’s foot on my ass. I sat in
those showers every day, making it hurt, just shy of bloodshed, watching the
clock on the lavatory wall. Sometimes I
went for twenty five minutes. Next exam,
Dr.Miller was gleeful. He was confident I’d
be ready for Number Four by the summer.
As it turned out a
holiday romance resulted in a major strategy shift. While many of my high school friends were
reconnecting over the holidays, I spent my time with a new group I had met life-guarding
over the summer. None of them knew me. I was even thinking of dating one of them--something
to do on New Year’s Eve. Surely I could
escape if things got too hot and heavy.
One of this gang
had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. He
was a nice Midwestern boy dazzled by the most beautiful blue-eyed blonde
anywhere. Before running afoul of us,
her Mormon lifestyle was so proscribed that she had never had a Coke or watched
television. Such an exotic, with a
father richer than God. Now she was eighteen years old and pregnant,
plenty old enough for a Mormon girl, even if the husband-to-be was a
Gentile. (It turns out that all
non-Mormons are Gentile to the Mormons, even Jews.) That night was Mormon family night, so we
were all toasting his future, and commiserating.
This guy clearly didn’t know much about birth control, but he knew how to make a killer Tequila Sunrise. A couple of those, and I was flirting madly.
Alan was a fun,
gentle young man attending the University to
It was in that
bed, in that cool dark room closed off from the music and the laughter, that I
discovered the answer to all of my problems.
It felt so good to be kissed again, and touched again, that I lost my head, and God, was I wet. Before I knew it I was on my back, stark raving naked, and he was actually headed inside of me.
“You’re so tight,”
he murmured. I guess so, I thought. Number three was only the size of a cheap hotdog
and from what I could tell Alan was about a three and a quarter, maybe a three
and a third.
He was a
gentleman, and lifted himself up on his elbows asking if I was alright. I gave him a Jose Cuervo kiss and told him I
was a virgin. (If I discounted fifteen
months of jamming plastic syringe cases into my vagina, I figured I was still a virgin.) Then he asked if he should “use something”
and I said no, birth control was not an issue.
(That much was true.) There was
even the tiniest bit of blood which made him so solicitous he gave me a cool
wash rag.
We spent the rest
of that holiday season playing on his gigantic mattress, emerging periodically
to party with his friends. It hurt
sometimes, especially in the beginning, but I learned quickly, and soon was
having orgasms which made every centimeter of pain worth while. Alan felt a deep sense of responsibility to
me, and genuinely enjoyed my company. That
combination convinced him he was deeply in love. But he was going to a school
eight hundred miles away from me, and after discovering orgasmic therapy, I
knew I couldn’t afford romance. Not if
romance meant fidelity. Not if it meant
syringe cases.
As Alan drove me home our last night I agreed to write him, counting on him for summer maintenance, but I was already flipping through faces, trying to guess the size, availability and amenability of the boys I knew back at school.
What I needed was
someone near my dorm, available every day, or at least every other day. And he had to be three and a half, minimum.
First
on the list was a scholarship tennis player from
Unfortunately I
learned that a great backhand does not translate into a size three and a half,
or even three and a quarter, so I knew I would have to break it off soon. I was
going to shrink if I spent much more time with him.
Fate handled that
break up dramatically. One day his
ex-girlfriend collapsed in the shower. The dorm buzz was that she had had too much
to drink in the hot sun, but the doctors found a brain tumor. She was packed off to a serious medical
center in
Small as he was, his departure left me desperate. I had left every single syringe case at home in my pajama drawer. I needed penetration.
My grandmother
once told me something I’ve never forgotten. “You may not be a beauty like your
sister, but you have a heart of gold, and that’s what matters.” She was right, I was no beauty. In fact, I was utterly average looking, with
straight brown hair, average height, average-to-small breasts. Sure, I was nice. Thanks Grandma. But who needs nice? I had a vagina now, custom made and curious
as hell, and it needed to be penetrated and stretched every single night. Since when did nice ever help in a situation
like that?
I zeroed in on my
badminton partner. I was taking
badminton to satisfy the physical education requirements at my college. My partner was a very tall basketball player
and we were undefeated. He hit every
shuttlecock without ever moving from the center of the court. My only jobs were to serve when it was
absolutely required by the rules and to pick up the birdie the few times it
fell on our side. “You’re a lot closer
to the floor than me,” he would say, clearly amused.
The
day after the tennis player left for
This
left my lab partner in Chemistry who owed me a thousand favors since I did all
of our experiments. He was a fun farm
boy with an ugly rash on his hands but my next appointment with Dr. Miller was
four weeks away and I would die of mortification if he found that I was
shrinking again, before his article was
published.
I
poured on the charm. He laughed when I
said I wanted to learn to drive his old “three-on-the-tree” farm truck. “After all, who knows when I may have to
drive one home from a party or something.”
“Honey,” said the farm boy. “You can drive me home any time.”
I learned a lot from him. How to drive his truck, how to use a bong, and how much fun it was to have sex outside on an old mattress in the back of a pick-up truck in the middle of a corn field or a wheat field or an abandoned barn. And—what luck! He was perfect three and a half.
His rash cleared up and in no time I was back in shape, too, He told me he might be falling in love—I’m sure it was the whole virgin thing again. That and the fact that I loved sex every single day.
We were funny and
smart together, but what I liked most about him was that he was a bit deformed,
too. It didn’t interfere with his
performance, but his testicles hung down lower than most men’s do---suspended
like those of a Great Dane. I liked
the feel of them slap slap slapping against me.
He told me that I had accepted his distended balls in a way no one else
ever had. Well, who was I to throw
rocks?
There was a close
call one night at a barn dance given by his fraternity. We had climbed into the hay loft for some
fooling around. “Let me show you
something new,” he said. “You’re gonna
love it.” With that he left my breasts
to the cold night air and moved down my body, headed right to my vagina, where
I suspected he planned the thrill of my life:
oral sex.
“I’m Catholic,” I said, pulling him back up to kiss me on the mouth. “We think it’s a sin.” After that I told him I wanted to get high and go eat onion rings and that is exactly what we did. I could handle penises inside me. But oral sex was not an option. Too close to my secrets maybe, but for whatever reason, my vagina clamped up tight at the very thought of it. Not even a wet watermelon seed could have slipped inside, much less his tongue--certainly not his penis. Therapy was over for the night.
We broke up at the end of our senior year. He was off to medical school, I was off to write advertising.
In the working world, things were a little rougher. So many married men, for starters. And a lot less free time. Luckily there was a tormented widowed account executive who lost his wife to cancer a few years prior to my arrival on the scene. While she was dying, he had cheated on her with her own best friend, a waif-like nutcase who alternately embraced but then spurned his attentions. I was a welcome distraction, and after he slid his hand down my shirt in the middle of a sunny patio crowded with happy hour executives, I decided he might be worth a try. There is something morbidly and tragically attractive about a widowed man. Besides, he paid for everything.
It didn’t work out. He had a penis with impressive length undermined by mediocre width. I was getting longer but tighter. Not good. Even more fatal to our future was the night he couldn’t get it up. I was crushed, convinced that my vagina had finally failed, its perfect record blemished. A little fellatio might have helped the man, but I had never bothered learned to learn much about it. What was the use? Oral sex would not stave off a shrinking vagina.
What I needed was old-fashioned sex and lots of it. I had learned that whoever I fell for had to be, above all things, dependable.
Christmas came. As usual I jestered my family through our collective holiday depression. I also received a cautionary lecture from Dr. Miller. “I had a patient who went nuts once her vagina became functional,” he told me, with a look of distaste. “Screwed everything, including the doorknobs. A gorgeous cunt like that and she just wasted it on anything that moved.”
I found I could relate to her. By the time I left for graduate school, I had won five local advertising awards. And I had slept with at least twelve different men.
One of the charmers, a disc jockey for the alternative rock station, lied about his marital status and as a bonus gave me a case of vaginal warts which sent me into a tailspin. The laser that cured them did not burn deep enough to rid me of the shame. Even worse, the hospital had sent me home with instructions to replace the tampon every three hours, but when the first one slithered out, followed by leech-like blood clots, I closed up tight, and wore bulky pads for two days, moping around my apartment drinking too much.
Christmas came and I jestered my family through our collective holiday depression, mine augmented by my shame and embarrassment. I cancelled the appointment my mother had made with Dr. Miller. “I’m seeing someone else, now,” I told her. “Don’t worry, he’s good.”
Even after the warts, I didn’t use condoms. At the time they were still sold in vending machines in the men’s bathrooms at truck stops, and over by the girlie magazines wrapped in brown paper in the local drug stores. Women on the pill, in committed relationships, kept their men satisfied with an unfettered, natural experience which I was desperate to imitate.
Two of my ex-lovers, one the impotent ad executive, and the other a client, wrote recommendations for me as part of my application to graduate schools. I applied nationwide and got accepted at a prestigious university out East. Marriage was clearly not in the cards for me and it was time to forget my childhood assumptions of freshly pressed gingham curtains, bridge clubs, matching china, and children to sing to. I had to move up and on. After all, I was earning for two now, wasn’t I, myself and that husband I would never have?
Graduate school actually got my head out of my ass, or my vagina, as it were. For the first time in my life I faced an academic environment that threatened me with mediocrity. Yes, I would tell myself, only ten percent of the people who apply get in, but I had never dreamed I would find myself coming up short. School was something I did, and did to perfection. Not anymore.
In place of a
plebian A-F grading scale, this place gave Excellents, Fairs, Satisfactorys,
and
Peter kept me
deleriously happy and perfectly dilated throughout the rest of business
school. Peter knew the truth about me
and it didn’t matter to him. We were getting married. We were adopting starving black babies from
We broke up at the
end of school. I told myself it was his
parents. He was an only son, after
all. Surely they wanted him to have his
own kids. They must have pressured
him. But it was probably never that
sinister. He was going off to make
millions in the motion picture industry.
I was headed to
One Fourth of July
I was in LA shooting a television commercial and I called Peter. We had sex before dinner, like we used to
do. After dinner we watched fireworks at
I was twenty-nine
when I married a man attracted to my self-sufficiency, my intelligence, my
inability to have children, and the fact that I loved to have sex, morning and
night. James didn’t want children. There were enough children in the world. I told him he didn’t have to marry me, and he
told me he needed to stand up in front of all of our friends and family and
tell the world that he would love me forever.
Poor guy. He was planning a life
filled with exotic vacations, racing his J-24 sailboat on
Having a husband was the best thing that ever happened to me or my vagina. Suddenly my energy was shifted from the daily addict’s scramble for a fix (or a penis, in my case) to a future beyond daily sex and a non-shrinking vagina. It was over. No more garbled explanations over what a strange lover could expect. No more concerns about liking someone too big for me, or loving someone too small.
At my last visit to Dr. Miller he asked how sex life was in my marriage and I told him it was fine. “You’re not as big as I would like,” he said. “Don’t let him come at you from behind unless he’s very very careful.” I gingerly asked Dr, Miller if he ever had patients who gave up their children for adoption. He told me that I would never want the children that were available. That they were all either addicts at birth, or bi-racial. “There are no healthy white children born in this country available for adoption. Just forget about it.”
My husband and I briefly flirted with the idea of a surrogate pregnancy using my eggs and my husband’s sperm. This poor man who had married me expecting a lifetime of child-free Sundays reserved for the New York Times, was now joined in holy matrimony to a woman with a new mission in her quest for normalcy. I wanted us to raise a child like everyone else. He was scratching his head, wondering what had happened to all of his plans. But he was game for adoption.
When I told my
sister-in-law about what Dr. Miller’s attitude toward adoptions, she said,
“Forget him. You need a new
doctor.” So I did. I forgot him, and I found a new doctor who knew
a lawyer in
Our son was about two weeks old when I was taking him for a stroller ride through the park near our house. A woman peered in the carriage and then looked at me. “Girl, you look good!” she said. “How’d you get your figure back so fast?”
“I never gained much weight to begin with,” I said with a smile. Then I wished her a good day and we headed home.
So am I normal now? My teenagers (we adopted a baby girl eighteen months after my son) drive me crazy and that makes me normal. My husband of twenty-one years bores me sometimes and that makes me normal. I will someday experience menopause (even if it’s invisible) and I guess that makes me normal.
Am I the same adult I was headed toward becoming in those halcyon days before my life became driven by hard plastic syringe cases or findng the right sized penis? I hardly think so. Those years of secret sessions left invisible scars in my pretty pink vaginal pocket. Those ugly years filled with random sex, drugs, and alcohol still have power to haunt me, though I go there less and less frequently. No, I am not the same person I was headed toward being.
Would I even like
that woman if I could meet her? Would
she have stayed in the
With glowing recommendations written by two of those men, I
was accepted to a prestigious business school where I met Peter. He kept me deliriously happy and perfectly
dilated for two years of a very rigorous learning experience.
We went backpacking after we graduated and one night by our campfire he told me that
he had fallen for my self-sufficiency, my warmth, my sense of humor, my
intelligence, and, oh yeah, the fact that I loved to have sex, morning, noon
and night. He wanted to marry me, he
said. But he had tell me something
first. It turns out Peter had a bad
fever as a child, a high fever that left him sterile. He looked miserable, I saw tears in his eyes.
“Don’t worry,” I said, pulling him to me. “We can always adopt.”
During my final visit Dr. Miller asked how our sex life
was. I told him it was just fine. “You’re not as big as I would like,” he said. And
then he winked at me. “Just don’t let
him come at you from behind unless he’s very, very careful.”