Eventually we saw each other less and less. He ended up joining the military. I went off and wondered for years, including many hours with a therapist, why it was okay with me to be so insignificant to someone. The bottom line was that to me he was a very important person; he was truly my first love.
When I went to my ten-year high school reunion, Joe was there, but he didn’t behave or look at me any differently than he did with anyone else in our class. By then I mostly didn’t care.
At our twenty-year reunion he wasn’t there and by then I really didn’t care.
By the twenty-fifth-year reunion, I had honestly not given him a thought. So, you can imagine how surprised I was to find Joe, making a beeline for me as soon as I entered the high school gymnasium. His eyes were misty and filled with love. In fact, the look on his face was more affectionate and passionate than any look I’d ever witnessed on him before. He took my hand and looked deeply in my face. He cleared his throat, emotionally. He began, “My mother died a few months ago . . .” He stepped closer to me, within kissing distance, then continued: “And I went through the house and I found this box with all these letters you’d written me in college and . . . and . . . and. . . .”
“Yes?” I said.
“Wow, we were so close, you and I. Us. What a great pair.”
I felt suspended in time. I wanted to transport myself back to age nineteen, and say, “See here, Julia. He did eventually care. The letters actually had the desired effect. Just twenty-five years too late!”
I looked into his face and said, “Yes.” I smiled back at him but I felt stiff and awkward. I realized my smile had frozen and I gracelessly rearranged my expression to seem more natural. I felt a deep distance from this man, this blank person I had showered so much affection and attention on in college. Who are you? I thought.
Then I met his wife and I think I looked at pictures of his darling children, but I’m not sure; everything was a blank to me after hearing him say, “We were such a great pair.” I think I looked like a deer blinking in the headlights.
A few months after this, I met another Joe. Let’s call this one Joe #13. He lived in San Francisco. He worked for a nonprofit that focused on lefty politics, one that I greatly admired. He was handsome and smart and he got along well with Mulan. My friends liked him. I liked him, too. But I wasn’t in love. I was about forty-three by then, and being infatuated with someone seemed like a brain state of the young and gullible. Not that I was cynical. I really wasn’t. I just felt past all that. I thought that this was good, too. Cold, clear, honest eyes, that’s what I felt I had. One weekend when I was in San Francisco he took me to a very romantic and expensive restaurant and proposed. I thought, Yes. This is good. I’m not in love with this guy, and that means I am making a good, logical choice in him of a mate. I’m so screwed up when it comes to falling for men that if I was falling for someone, that should indicate that I should run in the opposite direction! So this guy is perfect. He’s nice, he’s smart, I love his social and political views, I love his job, and he is so into me. I’m sure my love for him will grow over time.
I said, “Yes.” We smiled deeply into each other’s eyes. It was completely wonderful and everything I could have wished for. We were all dressed up. Looking at it from the outside, it was wildly romantic.
Then this thirst came upon me. It was so big and powerful. It felt like a wave and it had me right in its grip. The urge I had was to drink alcohol. I needed to drink some alcohol.
We ordered cocktails, and I asked that mine be a double. We toasted our union. I threw my drink back. I ordered another one. And then, as it turns out, many more. Everything got a bit hazy. I blacked out.
The next morning he told me that I’d vomited on him. I’d vomited on him. I was horrified; I’d never done anything like that before. He said he had to put me in the shower to clean me up. I felt so profoundly embarrassed and guilty that I doubled, no, I tripled (!) my commitment to him. I mean, after all, he’d seen me at my absolute worst. Blacking out? That was seriously crazy. I hadn’t done that since I was in college. In fact, I can’t remember doing something like that, ever. And yet, in spite of this humiliation, he still loved me. We would never speak of this night again, but I would devote the rest of my life to his happiness.
Soon after this I did a short run of a play in New York. My aunt Bonnie came and stayed with me, helping out babysitting Mulan at night when I did my shows. Bonnie spent her entire career as a counselor for low-income, troubled inner-city youth at a high school in Seattle. She’s also been a therapist. She’s the dream aunt for me because deep down, I too am a low-income, troubled inner-city youth.
I told her about my engagement. I told her I was so happy, but since Joe and I became engaged I felt an uncontrollable urge to drink hard liquor around him. She asked me if I thought anything was not exactly right between us. I told her I had only one complaint about him and that was that we didn’t really have similar senses of humor. Worse, it was very important to him, not that I was funny, but that I thought he was funny. Because I had been known as a comedian, and worked with many comedians, it was a loaded issue. I felt constantly on the spot.
I will have you know that I don’t need to be with a funny guy. Sure, I would like to be with a funny guy, but I don’t need to be with a funny guy. Joe #12, for example, was not funny. I didn’t care a bit. Joe #10 was not funny. And yet I was ready to walk to the ends of the earth for him.
What was hard was dating someone who wanted me to think he was funny, even though I frankly didn’t . . . didn’t . . . personally . . . exactly . . . find him all that funny. Everything else about our relationship was really good. This was just one teensy area. Was it a big deal? Was I petty to be thinking it was a big deal? “It wasn’t a big deal, right?” I asked my aunt Bonnie. “I probably just need to have a heart-to-heart conversation about it with him, right?”
“You are a comedian,” Bonnie said measuredly. “This is part of your profession. It’s not not a big deal. I think it’s a big deal. A really big deal.”
Instantaneously, I knew she was right. I went back home and tried to talk to him about it. He got defensive, said he didn’t know what I was talking about.
I won’t rehash the whole Sturm und Drang. In the end, I had to break up with him. It was so horrible. I’ve done my share of breaking things off, but this one was the worst. I was the asshole.
I was confused about myself and about how I chose men. I figured something really was wrong with me. But I didn’t know how wrong, and I didn’t know how worried I should be about it. I didn’t know how to be different, or in what way I should be different, and I wasn’t sure I could change myself even if I wanted to change myself.
On top of all this, there was something else. It was this: I just didn’t give a shit about guys anymore. They seemed to take a lot of energy and time.
So, I got out of the game.
That’s the phrase I used when I talked to myself. It was as if a referee had blown a whistle and run at me with his black-and-white-striped uniform and pointed and yelled, “You’re out!”
And my answer was, “Fine. That is perfectly fine with me.”
Yes, I realized that Mulan would most likely not have a father. But so what? A lot of people don’t have fathers. I figured I had a lot of really close and wonderful male friends, especially Gino and Jim, two men who were becoming an important part of Mulan’s life.
I know you must think I’m setting this up to dramatize how I met my husband. And yes, I will tell you in a couple of chapters how I met him. And yes, I am in a delightfully romantic, and agreeable, working marriage.
But that isn’t the surprise. There was a different big surprise. It was the best thing about “getting out of the game.” It launched me into a deeply, and up to that point, most enjoyable two and a half years of my life.
I would say that since I was sixteen, I’d been either trying to get out of a romance or desperately trying to get someone to notice me.
I had not spent any significant time as an adult not wanting any of it. And listen, people—it was great. I had no idea how much space men had taken up in my brain. I had no idea how much energy went into starting a romance, getting to know someone, and maintaining that relationship. I realized that I had all this emotional space back. I was surprised to find that I had so much energy all of a sudden, and so much more time. It was truly fantastic.
I wish I hadn’t been so eager to be in a relationship. I wish my fears about being alone hadn’t driven me to spend time with certain people. I wish I hadn’t completely lost my self-worth with Joe #10.
I wish I could have had the attitude toward all those guys that I have about them now, which is an appreciation of the transitory nature of romantic relationships. I’m lucky to live in a time of unprecedented liberty and power for a woman. And I’ve taken advantage of that opportunity to make choices that many women—hell, many people—across the planet haven’t been able to make. One of the results of this is that I got to know, intimately, a lot of really interesting and very different men. And when I use the word intimately I do not just mean sexually, although of course that is part of it, too. Now that I’m older, I wish I could take away all the anguish from my past relationships and have enjoyed them more, because they were very enjoyable.
Of course, that’s easy to say now.
But I think that would have required a psychological perspective that would have been quite unlikely given my biology (in the end men really are sperm and women really are eggs), Catholic upbringing (in my mind, all my romances are scored with Bach’s Magnificat in D Major, which does not allow for much lighthearted whimsy), my deep ambivalence (“Do not get married and have children!”), and desperation (let me knit you a sweater that takes up all my time while you decide if I’m right for you or not) mixed with independence (I can take care of myself).
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Birds and the Bees
Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.
—Steven Wright
I remember asking my mother how babies were made. We were in the kitchen and my mom was preparing dinner. I think I’m about nine years old. My mother doesn’t answer me but turns to my father and yells something. They both laugh. Then I have a memory of my father in a chair facing all four of us older children (I’m guessing ages six to nine) sitting thigh to thigh on the sofa in the living room. He says something about sperm in a man and eggs in a mother. I raise my hand and ask where the sperm is kept in the man. He says, “In . . . [long pause] his stomach.”
Another memory: me talking to my mother soon after, and her asking me what my father said when I asked him this question. “The stomach!” she replied incredulously when I told her. “It’s the [in a whisper] penis!”
I remember torn pages from a pornographic magazine passed around the playground at school, and pictures of men naked. So hairy. Ick. I remember a girl on the same playground telling us in graphic detail how sex happened. She added she knew about it firsthand because her brother and she had tried it. No one blinked an eye or thought that was weird, even though I also think no one got the idea that we should go home and do something like that with our brothers, or anyone else for that matter. We all agreed on the playground that the whole business seemed horrendous.
I do remember telling this sexually knowledgeable girl that there was another, less gross way to have a baby. The man and woman just slept in a bed together. The man’s sperm could crawl over and go into the woman’s vagina on its own. This was why there was that phrase “sleeping together.” Otherwise, why would people say you had to get married before you “slept together”? I mean, duh.
I also have a memory of seeing a Seventeen magazine cover at a store and reading the title “Is Virginity Outdated?” And asking my mother while we drove together in the car what the word virginity meant. She told me that virginity was something that, if you didn’t have it, no man would marry you.
That was it.
I wondered how I could get “virginity” because I definitely wanted to get married. But I didn’t ask. The way my mother had said “no man would marry you” was emphatic and signaled the end of the discussion.
Then the time came where I, myself, was in a position of dispensing information about sex to a child who had no idea. Mulan was nine and in third grade. We were eating at one of our regular haunts, a fantastic Thai restaurant (not the one with the Thai Elvis) called Jitlada, on Sunset Boulevard. I am being specific for a reason. If you can, you must go and eat there. Seriously, stop reading this book, get yourself to Los Angeles. Don’t miss the coconut mango salad or the soft-shelled crab in curry sauce.
But I digress. The point is that Mulan and I ate out a lot. My life seemed at that time to be a never-ending journey between her gymnastics classes and home. I think, when you’re a single mother who primarily takes her nine-year-old daughter to dinner at restaurants, it’s easy to think of yourselves as a couple. You eat, you talk, and sometimes you just stare at each other in a stupor of familiarity.
At Jitlada, we know the owner and chef, Jazz, who this night recommended the frog legs with green pepper and curry sauce. We politely declined. Perking up, Mulan told me that her class had begun studying frogs. In fact, she revealed she had a report to do and began to explain the basics of what she’d learned: “So, Mom. First, the frogs lay eggs, in a pond, and then the eggs turn into tadpoles and the tadpoles turn into more frogs.”
I squinted my eyes. Biology—and science, in general—was not my academic strong suit. Only recently had I discovered my own deep, neglected interest in science, and had been scrambling to catch up with the twenty-first century. Whenever Mulan told me of anything she was learning in science, I’m sure I wore an expression of astonished bewilderment and surprise. My twelve years of Catholic schooling did not dwell long on biology (God didn’t want us thinking about that) and avoided the subject of reproduction almost entirely.
Eventually I mumbled a response: “Uh . . . yeah. I think so. I think, though, that it’s probably just the females that lay the eggs, and then the males fertilize them—although I don’t know for sure—and there are probably all kinds of species of frogs with different ways of doing things. But yeah, in general, I’m willing to bet, the females are the ones with the eggs. Or something like that.”
“Huh . . . ,” Mulan said, listening carefully. “But, what does fertilize mean?”
I said, “Oh, the males have this substance inside them, and it’s like a co-ingredient, called sperm. They sprinkle, or squirt it on the eggs. That’s how they get fertilized. It takes both the female’s eggs and the male’s sperm, and together they make the new tadpoles.” I was really proud of myself for the word co-ingredient. That was good.
“Soooooo, only the females have the eggs,” Mulan said, her eyes wandering to the ceiling, taking this all in.
“Yes,” I said.
“Humans, too?” she asked.
Let me freeze this scene for a moment and say that I considered myself an enlightened, open-minded, sex-is-no-big-deal parent, yet I hadn’t truly prepared myself for this conversation. I had read a few parenting books and they all seemed to advise the same thing, which was, when your child starts to ask you about sex, or really anything that is complicated and multifaceted, just answer the exact question they ask. Nothing more. Don’t elaborate. Don’t overshare.
In that sense, I suppose I was prepared for this crucial rite of passage. I wasn’t going to stop and take her hand, get all watery-eyed and explain the beautiful way that we create more children in the world. That wasn’t what she was asking. She just wanted to know if human women had the eggs. The answer was clear and unambiguous.
“Yes,” I said. I deliberately forced a pause. I tried to think of some other subject to move on to. I took a big bite of the mango salad we’d just been served.
Mulan asked, “Where do women keep their eggs?”
“Well,” I said, “we women have evolved to have
our own pond, right inside our own bodies. We lay our eggs in this pond, which is so convenient when you think about it compared to frogs, because we don’t have to worry about any competing eggs. It’s a pond of our own.”
A pond of one’s own. I imagined Virginia Woolf contentedly sitting in a pond of her own. And then drowning.
“Where is it?” Mulan asked, her eyes bigger than ever.
“It’s in our lower abdomen, inside us, below our belly button, above our vagina.” I had managed to be specific and totally vague all at once. Perfect.
“But . . . how do the eggs get fertilized?”
“By the man,” I said, thinking why did I use the phrase “the man”? Aside from its conformist big-business connotations, I had possibly implied that there was only one man, some special Man who was used only for this purpose. Creepy and weird. And of course, incorrect.
Thankfully, at this moment the rest of our food was delivered. I scooped up some green beans with chili and hoped the subject would change. I realized my eyes were darting around, which reminded me of my own mother. I hated how awkward, embarrassed, and off-putting my mother became when faced with the subject of sex. Now my own body was displaying the same indications of unease. I took a deep breath and smiled in a deliberately relaxed way at Mulan.
“But how does the sperm get in to fertilize the eggs?” she asked. I said, “Oh, yes. That. Well, the sperm comes out of the man’s penis and it goes into the woman’s vagina. This happens when the two do what’s called, ‘have sex.’ And that’s where the egg—there’s usually only one in the woman’s pond at a time—gets fertilized.” Only after the fact did I realize that I had said the words penis and vagina and sex in a strained, sotto voce tone. Just as my own mother would have done.
If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother Page 9