Don't Kill the Birthday Girl

by Sandra Beasley

  That relationship was not long for this world. But a guy doesn’t have to be callous to cause harm; even simple carelessness poses a danger.

  Before moving in together, Adam and I had spent a few years trying (and failing) to make a long-distance relationship work. He was still at the University of Virginia, attending law school, while I worked in D.C. as the assistant to a journalist. Both of us were strapped for cash and perpetually exhausted. On the weekends, we made long road trips to see each other, thinking it would keep the spark alive. Instead, we’d struggle to stay awake long enough to watch a rented movie on his laptop, which had a screen prone to reflective glare and a DVD drive that froze up every five minutes. Then we’d pass out on my too-small futon or the mattress he laid on the floor in lieu of a proper bed.

  One Friday, having fought my way out of town despite a particularly grueling evening rush hour on Interstate 66, I marched into his house determined to have a “romantic” reunion. I ignored the trash bags piled by the front door. I ignored the fact that the living room reeked of citrus (courtesy of a construction-worker roommate who appeared to eat nothing but oranges, strewing piles of peel and pith around the house). I ignored the fact that Adam had just gotten back from the gym and was still in basketball shorts and sweaty T-shirt.

  Ignoring it all, I hopped onto his lap, before he could get up from his hand-me-down plaid couch, and gave him a deep kiss.

  I had also ignored my knowledge of Adam’s habitual post-workout routine. After a second I tasted the chalky residue of milk on my tongue. I yanked back, pressing my palm to my lips, but it was too late. My mouth began to tingle.

  “What did you have?” I asked, only then noticing the water glass filmed in white.

  “Ovaltine,” he said sheepishly.

  “What are you, a grandmother?” I snapped.

  I got off his lap and went to take a long drink of lukewarm water from the tap. The reaction could not be stopped. A Benadryl pill later, I settled in on the couch, lips apart so I could take in air even as my nasal passages shut down. Nothing more attractive than a pissed-off mouth-breather, I know.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. But I was madder at myself. So much for Date Night.

  Every relationship revolves around issues of trust. We prioritize our individual expectations—in terms of religion, sex, family, money—and hope to find the person who can honor those needs. In every relationship there will be moments when that trust is broken. You can internalize your partner’s reactions to these moments, picking and choosing when to flip out and when to let it go; most of the time I can, too. But I can’t shrug off a lapse in judgment when it comes to handling my food allergies. Each violation is as undeniable as a hive on the cheek.

  Those with allergies are forced into becoming custodians to the lifestyles of those around us. It’s one thing to announce you’re going on a diet and then sneak a cheeseburger on the side. That’s your business. But when you then kiss me and I have to go to the hospital, even though you’ve allegedly been eating nothing but celery and hummus all week, your business becomes my problem.

  So with Adam, and boyfriends before and since, I have to question (“Did you wash up?”). I have to quiz. I have to be meticulous about the other person’s hygiene, at the risk of feeling less like a lover and more like a mom. And I can never get entirely swept up in the moment.

  Cosmopolitan and Glamour hype the importance of good “chemistry” in a relationship. Not just conscious traits and habits but that ephemeral mix of hormones, pheromones, and every other kind of moan. Do my food allergies alter my chemistry? Should I be holding out for a neat freak? Looking for a vegan? Could I have stayed with Adam if he’d woken up one morning knowing his true calling was as a shrimp fisherman?

  As if that wasn’t enough to worry about, judging “chemistry” with a partner has an additional critical (if slightly vulgar) dimension. There’s another kind of allergy people ask about. I’m going to demur on calling it a food allergy, but let me just say once and for all: Allergies are triggered by ingestion or exposure to proteins. Any proteins. Proteins found in food, pet dander, pollen.

  Proteins found in sperm.

  After you filter out all the misdiagnoses related to sexually transmitted diseases and chemical irritation, semen allergy is rare. But it exists. The first documented case was in 1958, when Dutch gynecologist J. L. H. Specken examined a sixty-five-year-old woman who experienced postcoital hives and bronchial spasms. The allergy is usually diagnosed among women in their twenties who have a known history of vaginitis unresponsive to other treatments. The marker for diagnosis is an absence of symptoms when condoms are used; a skin-prick test will confirm IgE-based response to seminal proteins.

  This is one allergy I have never experienced firsthand. But that doesn’t mean I think of it as the punch line to some dirty joke. Having struggled to be honest with a partner midkiss, I can’t even fathom the stress of having to pull away in bed to say, “Um, I think we have a problem.” The physical impact is as agonizing as any reaction. Not just burning and redness in any area of contact—which can last from hours to days—but wheezing and other systemic symptoms.

  The long-term consequences are also intimidating. Once diagnosed with a semen allergy, a woman trying to conceive may have to begin taking prednisone in the seven to ten days prior to each predicted ovulation, to prime her body to handle the stress of unprotected sex. Anyone who has taken prednisone knows it is quite the mood killer, associated with rapid weight gain and extreme irritability. If that doesn’t work, the couple may have to resort to the expense and complications of in vitro fertilization, even if they have otherwise healthy sperm and eggs.

  There are a couple of desensitization treatments, preferably using materials taken from the likely sexual partner. One option is receiving shots containing small doses of the, er, allergen. The other method would be a “graded challenge,” in which various dilutions of semen are placed in the vagina every twenty minutes, building up a tolerance to the whole and undiluted form.

  Once tolerance is established, the allergy sufferer needs to maintain a certain minimum level of exposure to the allergen. The recommendation: sexual intercourse no less than every forty-eight hours.

  You could look at this as the silver lining. Unless you or your partner travels frequently, in which case medical necessity dictates the creation of some very unholy variations on the freezer pop, to be used in his absence.

  • • •

  My first date with Adam was in my second year of college. Not a date, really. More like a “Hey, Sandra, I’m grabbing a bite. Wanna come along?” Not exactly rose petals showered at my feet. But if you’re a girl deep in the clutches of a crush, such an invitation trumps Prince Charming pulling up in his gilded carriage.

  We had gone to Café Europa, a popular hangout on the Corner known for cheap Mediterranean sandwiches served deli-style from behind a glass counter. Souvlaki, falafel, feta, and eggplant: the messy, greasy comfort foods that help a nineteen-year-old power through a ten-page sociology paper or a raging hangover. The café’s logo, a woman with a strong nose and wiggly lines for hair—presumably Europa—looked like it had been doodled with a Bic pen on someone’s napkin. The plates were paper, the forks plastic.

  “Can you find something here?” Adam had asked.

  “Sure!” I’d said brightly. “I love this place.”

  Actually, I’d never eaten there. Its student staff, while friendly, didn’t seem overly diligent about avoiding cross-contamination or contamination, period. I waited for Adam to get his order and then sent him off to grab a table while I asked question after question of the guy behind the counter.

  I settled on hummus, carrot and celery sticks, and wedges of pita, setting my plate down on a table that wobbled to the touch. The hummus was a bad move—grainy, garlicky, an eminently unfit premise to a kiss. But I soon had much bigger problems.

  Bubbles. I tried to ignore the sensation of pockets of air rising from behind my sternu
m, working their way painfully up my windpipe, popping, rising again. Focusing on eye contact with Adam, I took a long sip of a Coke that had been mixed with too much sweet cola syrup. Pop. Pop. Pop.

  This had to be a minor reaction, a contamination issue as predicted. Carrots and chickpeas were harmless. The manager had sworn up and down that the pita contained no dairy. (Later, I’d find out the staff did not consider goat’s milk a form of “dairy.”)

  Adam was making small talk about movies. It was all I could do to stay upright, nod, smile, swallow, smile again. Occasionally I would trace my fingertips over my cheeks, hoping it looked like a flirtatious gesture as I felt for radiant heat or hives. At least, I thought, my skin isn’t getting all blotchy. Yet.

  Forty minutes passed in a blur. We walked back together to Alderman Library, where he was meeting a study group. Only after I saw the doors close behind him did I walk to the building next door, find a pay phone, and call the University Hospital. I was in an ambulance soon after.

  I’ve always been quick to hide a reaction if I can get away with it. Sometimes it’s because I’m embarrassed by the cause. One evening, at the age of ten, I was feeding my kitten bits of dried cat food—flicking it across the laundry room floor so he would chase after it—and without even thinking, put a piece on my tongue. Dried milk, beef extract, shrimp protein, who knows what else: gulp. Gone. I squonked my way through dinner that night, while insisting to my mother that everything was fine.

  Even under more dignified circumstances, there is an element of pride. I want to be with someone who cares about me, not someone who considers himself a caretaker. As far as dates go, allergy attacks aren’t pretty. A reaction is no dainty “spell” that leaves me dabbing at my mouth with a handkerchief. There will be gasping and sweating and retching. Getting ready to go out for a dinner date, I always line and shadow my eyelids knowing that by the end of the night they could be swollen and heavy with fluid. I coat my lips in Chapstick, not knowing if I’ll end up with a kiss or mouth-to-mouth from a fifty-three-year-old paramedic with halitosis.

  Eight years and several breakups after that ill-fated Café Europa meal, Adam and I would once again be sitting down to eat together—this time in D.C., in a diner called Open City, across the street from an apartment he’d rented in my neighborhood. By then, I’d gone on enough dates to know to steer clear of bread entirely. Still, a few bites into my salad, I felt that familiar tickle.

  I got up to use the restroom, taking a long look back into the kitchen as I passed. I could see that while the men were wearing gloves as they mixed the greens, they were not changing gloves between salads. Which meant that the residual oil from someone’s handful of cheddar was now all over the roasted red peppers on my plate.

  Returning to the table, I nibbled on another leaf or two, then pretended I was full. As Adam walked me back to my place, my mask of composure slipped. I slowed, then staggered. I leaned against a metal railing, sure I would throw up on the street.

  “Let’s get home,” I said. “I need to get home.”

  Once in the door, I ran to the bathroom, hunching down as my guts roiled. Adam waited outside. Every few minutes he would call in, “Are you okay?”

  I was determined to be okay. I couldn’t let Adam see this, but I couldn’t let him leave me alone, either. The second Benadryl was failing to take hold. I felt dizzy.

  “Are you okay?”

  I heard the question, but couldn’t shape a response. As sometimes happens with bad reactions, a surreal image was rising up in my head. This time it was my breath as the bow on a violin, being drawn back and forth. Back … forth … back …

  Keep playing, I thought hazily. Play.

  That was when the bathroom door nearly jumped off its hinges as he busted in.

  “GET OUT,” I hollered, trying to yank up my underwear.

  Relieved that I was conscious, Adam quickly stepped back into the hallway and closed the door.

  Later, after the EMT team had come and gone, he sat down next to me on the spindly futon I was still calling my bed. He wrapped his arms around me.

  “Do me a favor,” he said. “Don’t die.”

  My posture stayed stiff, resisting his hug. I was mortified at the view he’d gotten in the bathroom.

  “Sandra,” he said. “You have to understand. I couldn’t picture explaining to your mom that I let you die alone—and on a toilet.”

  That was when I knew he intended to stick around for a while. Yet even after we’d known each other so long that we were ready to try sharing a household, I don’t think he was prepared for the thousand minor hassles of living with my food allergies. Not just the allergies themselves but a personality shaped by a lifetime of managing those allergies.

  I am a compulsive double-checker and to-do lister, a scrutinizer of labels and a labeler of file folders. In contrast, Adam followed the philosophy of open-air filing, in which anything is easier to find if you leave it in plain view. This goes for bills, socks, used water glasses, and month-old crossword puzzles. He moved through the apartment like a poltergeist, leaving every conceivable cabinet and drawer hanging ajar in his wake.

  It’s not as if I didn’t have some warning. Throughout college, he would snack on a jar of peanut butter that he kept in his room, open, with a knife stuck into it for handy serving. Each time I visited, the jar had roamed to a different spot—the bedside stand, the dresser, the seat of a chair. I called it his free-range peanut butter.

  Even as a grown-up, he was still a grown-up guy. He harbored half-empty soda cans, scooped with the same spoon from the Nutella to the ice cream and back again, and kept three tubs of cottage cheese in simultaneous rotation. When it was his kitchen, at his place, I could ignore a sticky counter or a dirty dish. But once his kitchen became mine, it wasn’t just a matter of habits that made my skin crawl. These were habits that could make my skin break out into hives, or worse.

  “Did you get all the eggs off that plate?” I’d say. “You kind of have to scrub before you load it in the dishwasher, or else they get baked on.”

  “Um, can you throw that milk away? That’s still in the fridge? I’m pretty sure it has gone over,” I’d point out. “You know I can’t touch it.”

  For the one being nagged, it had to have been awful. My allergies leverage every concern—both legitimate grievances and, I confess, occasional mere PMS bitchery—into a litmus test. Do you love me? Then rinse out that glass.

  Sometimes I wonder if I’m destined to live alone. Otherwise, I’ll have to accept this reality in which once or twice every week I break out in hives in my own house. It might happen when I swipe away a drop of orange juice, only to realize the counter is also coated in a fine drift of whey powder from my significant other’s protein shakes. It might be when I surprise him with a kiss, only to hear too late, “I had cream in my coffee.”

  Then again, I’m not the only one making a compromise in such a household. Any partner has to accept a reality in which there will be many nights when I am curled up, gasping and heaving, on the other side of a door. Nights in which it flashes through his head, What will I say to her mother if she dies?

  Just a few months after Adam and I had moved in together, I went out by myself for a friend’s “salon” dinner—a gathering of people from D.C.’s literary world, all friends of hers, all strangers to one another. When I came to the door, she handed me a cheat sheet that had every guest’s name typed out in curly pink script. At first the guests tried to match faces to names and names to jobs as we stood around in her cute Georgetown living room. We soon abandoned the obligatory networking and moved on to admiring her poodle, a regal descendant of a Westminster prizewinner.

  Our hostess set down a plate of warm pastry puffs. The dog sniffed them delicately before turning away. I reached out to try a puff, thinking I recognized the type as one I bought regularly at Trader Joe’s. Then realized these were filled with shrimp. Close call. My stomach growled.

  When dinner was served, I walked
over and grabbed a plate. I got the rundown on how the pork loin had been prepared. Olive oil, herbs, heat; it seemed perfect. But seconds after swallowing the first bite of mango-topped pork, my throat began to itch.

  Oh no. This was back when I still thought mango was safe. I’d had juice blended with mango and had tested out mango salsa without a hitch. But after those first two exposures, apparently my system had changed its mind. My gut cramped. I unzipped my purse, slivered the foil of a Benadryl with my thumbnail, and palmed the pill into my mouth. Looking around, I realized no one had noticed. Perhaps I could keep it that way.

  I took another sip of wine, testing my ability to swallow. The hostess’s poodle seemed to sense something was wrong. She settled in at my side and nosed my hand. I’d fallen silent for too long.

  Taking a deep breath and turning to the playwright on my left, I asked, “So, when did you leave England?”

  He answered with a long story, but it was hard to focus. The throat itch wasn’t going away. Maybe I could coat my stomach with something bland, but there was no helpful bowl of pretzels handy. This was too fancy a party for that. The French bread, handmade, was also of indeterminate ingredients. Broiled salmon?

  I got up and served myself two filets, then part of a third, eating it with my fingers from a plate still full of mango and pork. I looked like a total glutton, but it worked. The itch eased.

  “So you live with your boyfriend?” the hostess asked.

  “Yes,” I told them, “Adam. He’s a lawyer.” I talked about meeting him in college, leaving out that our first date ended with me alone in the ER. I was determined to make it through the night without being labeled the Allergy Girl.

  When it was time for dessert, I oohed and aahed with everyone else at the dozen assorted cupcakes, though I couldn’t actually imagine how they would taste. The thin bakery box began making its way around the table, and I noticed the cardboard bottom was seeped through with butter frosting. I faked digging something out of my purse as it passed, to avoid touching it.