2.
the sin under the covers
My work has given me enough stories to fill this and any number of other books. Some, like Mark, center on people with extraordinary lives and challenges. But most are of those who grapple with more straightforward concerns, like erectile dysfunction or premature ejaculation. When I chip away the particularities and personal eccentricities, I almost always find that much of what they struggle with on the deepest levels are issues few of us would find alien. Loneliness, anxiety, fear, guilt, or shame about sexual feelings, low self-esteem, poor body image, and body ignorance are just a few in the constellation of all-too-common issues that I see every day.
My career as a surrogate now spans close to four decades and includes hundreds of clients. I consider myself blessed to have found this profession when I did and to be able to know that what I do changes people’s lives for the better. It has been a long and rich career. When people ask where and when I started, I answer 1973, in the San Francisco Bay Area, but that’s only partly true. Really, it started at least two decades before and three thousand miles east of California.
The city of Salem, Massachusetts, lies sixteen miles north of Boston on the coast. Salem Neck and Winter Island extend out from it like two fingers stretching into Salem Sound. By the time I was born in 1944, Salem had been cleaved into ethnic neighborhoods. The Polish, Italian, Irish, and French Canadian communities were largely composed of the descendants of immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century to work in the city’s textile mills.
My family members on both sides made their way from France to Canada and then down to Massachusetts, bringing their French language and customs with them. Luckily, they also brought their recipes. My great-grandmother on my father’s side was a wonderful cook. When we went to her house, mouth-watering aromas of French food greeted us as soon as we crossed her door—including her specialties: cipate, a casserole layered with vegetables, meat, and pastry dough; creton, a pork pâté; and bouef bourguignon.
Salem is a place with deep ties to and constant reminders of its past, especially the Salem Witch Trials. The Witch House, home of Judge Jonathan Corwin, one of the judges appointed to hear some of the first charges of witchcraft in the late seventeenth century, still looms eerily at the corner of North and Essex Streets. Gallows Hill, where around twenty innocent women were hanged after being caught in the crosshairs of hysteria and religious fundamentalism, isn’t far from my childhood home. These days the city capitalizes on its history for tourism dollars and witchcraft kitsch abounds, but when I was growing up witches were no Halloween marketing ploy. To my child mind, they were very real. They served as warnings to stay on the right side of God—or at least the Church.
I was the first child born to Virginia and Robert Theriault. Almost two years later, my brother David came along; eight years after that my brother Peter arrived. With his job at the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, my father earned enough money for my mother to be a full-time homemaker. He started out as a salesman selling advertising for the yellow pages and later became a manger. Unlike most of his counterparts in management, my father didn’t have a college degree. He did, however, have a gift for art and for gab. Both of which helped him in his selling days. As he talked up particular ad opportunities for clients he would draw out what they would look like, bringing them to life on the sketch pad he took on all of his sales calls.
For the most part, my family was made up of hardworking, decent people. Many of them were inclined toward generosity and, for the most part, they were a lively and fun bunch who delighted in big family dinners, music, dancing, storytelling, and laughter.
Growing up, the person I was closest to was Nanna Fournier, my grandmother on my father’s side. She was funny, intelligent, and kind, and she was crazy about me. One of my earliest memories is bolting out of my stroller so I could run into her open arms. She also had a sharp fashion sense, and as I got older I was the only girl I knew whose grandmother gave reliable advice for looking hip.
For all of their merits, my family members were also people of their times. They were steeped in a rigid Catholicism and a pre-women’s movement mentality about the proper role of women. A woman’s job was to look pretty, win a stalwart husband, and then be a doting wife and mother and make a comfortable home.
My mother took this job seriously. Impeccably neat, slim, well-coiffed, and—frankly—obsessed with appearance, she never cut anything less than an attractive figure. She also kept an immaculate home and was often frustrated by what she considered to be a lack of appreciation on everyone’s part. As good as she was at it, I don’t think my mother ever enjoyed being a homemaker. She was often angry, and, in retrospect it’s easy to see why. The Valedictorian of her high school class, this bright and capable woman must have secretly yearned for more and felt unfulfilled with the endless cycle of cooking and cleaning and childcare that made up her days. At the time, though, all I knew was that no matter how perfect she or the house looked, my mother always seemed dissatisfied. “Didn’t anyone notice . . . ” she would say in exasperation after polishing the floor or washing the drapes or performing some other thankless domestic task.
When it came to sex, the religious, cultural, and social forces of the time converged to create a code of silence that could only be breached to issue harsh judgments and condemnations, usually aimed at women who had in some way transgressed. On one occasion my mother made it a point to note a woman in town, a former classmate of hers, who was “loose.” From the tone her voice I could tell that being loose was something very bad. Before I was even sure what it meant, I knew that I never wanted to find myself in this category of women.
My mother couldn’t even say the word “vagina,” much less talk about anything that might go into it. To her, it was a “hoosie,” and that was only when she absolutely had to refer to it. As for sex education, or at least what passed for it at the time, they left that to the nuns and teachers at St. Mary’s Immaculate Conception Elementary School, which I entered when I was five.
In second grade, my class started receiving training to make our first Holy Communion and preparing to make our first confession. The Baltimore Catechism served as our manual to all that was good and holy. Sometimes I was afraid to even look at this hallowed book, with its diffuse picture of Jesus and his sad, benevolent eyes staring out at the fallen world from the cover.
We learned the difference between mortal and venial sins and I had my first introduction to the sins of impurity. We were taught that touching “down there” was one of the gravest of mortal sins. It was a particular affront to God and anyone who did it was corrupting body and soul and risking eternal damnation. This conjured up all sorts of terrible hypotheticals. What if you touched down there and then died before you could confess? Of course, you would be hell-bound. I vowed never to touch myself in an impure way. I would keep my soul pure, even as I flailed in the temporal world.
Soon after starting school it became clear that something was different about how I learned. Much later, when I was an adult with two children, I would be diagnosed with dyslexia, but at the time my difficulty in learning how to read, write, and do math was taken as defiance, laziness, or just plain stupidity.
My classmates learned how to put sounds together and decode words and then sentences with what seemed like barely any effort. I was stumped by one-syllable words like “dog” and “cat.”
My mother enlisted herself in the effort to help me learn how to read. She promptly went out and purchased a series of “Dick and Jane” books and we had regular tutoring sessions after school. Each day we sat at the kitchen table and I would try to read the adventures of Dick and Jane and their dog Spot. My mother was no more enlightened about dyslexia than my teachers and less patient than some of them. I don’t know if she thought it would prompt me to learn faster, or if she was frustrated, or if she thought I was willfully misunderstanding basic concepts, but she resorted to physical punishment.
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sp; The afternoons with her devolved into a predictable and frightening cycle: She would tell me to read a word, I would read it incorrectly. “Sound it out,” she would demand, and when I still misread it she would grab my arm and squeeze it so hard that I sometimes cried out in pain. Once, she became so enraged after I misread “can” three times that she lifted me off my chair by my arm and then slammed me back into it. I started having so much anxiety that the words on the page blurred when I tried to read them, which made my performance and my mother’s anger worse.
What I couldn’t understand and what I would resent for years was that my mother was an otherwise compassionate woman. We had a neighbor Greta who was mentally handicapped. I had seen my mother be so gentle and kind with her. I had seen her insist that Greta be treated with dignity and respect. And it wasn’t just with Greta that my mother showed tenderness. She was a good neighbor who readily helped anyone who needed a hand. Why couldn’t she show any sensitivity to me? Did she know that there was something bad about me? I figured I must have been fundamentally unlovable and in need of drastic improvement. Trouble was, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to better myself.
I was probably in third grade when I concluded that something about myself had to be kept secret. I had come to believe that I was what was then called “retarded.” I just didn’t show it like Greta did. I had to keep it quiet or I would never be allowed in the same classroom as my friends—that is, if any of them still wanted to be my friend after they found out. I would become a social outcast and an embarrassment to my family. Nanna Fournier was the only one who would probably stand by me, but I wouldn’t tell her. She might still love me, but imagine her disappointment if she found out. Certainly no one would want to ever marry me if this got around. On one hand, I thought I was lucky not to be obviously retarded. On the other, I suspected I might be better off if I were. Then, at least, people would lower their expectations and I wouldn’t disappoint them.
At the end of each school year, I dreaded the terrible news that I would have to repeat a grade. To my relief, it never came. I managed to squeak by from year to year. Maybe it was to compensate for my academic deficiencies, but I soon became a real cutup, and at times a devilish one. I could chat with anyone and loved to talk. I was, by nature, an optimist and even a leader, at least on the playground. I learned that I was funny and had a knack for socializing and storytelling. I could reenact movie scenes, reeling off the dialogue in the voice of Natalie Wood or Tony Curtis or any of the other popular movie stars of the time. I could make my classmates laugh and they liked me for it.
By the time I reached junior high, I couldn’t always hide my poor performance in school, and my friends started to help me keep pace with the rest of my class. Often before heading off to school we met at Martha’s Sweet Shop around the corner from St. Mary’s. Martha’s had a soda fountain and played the latest and hippest rock and roll. Elvis, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley and the Comets, the Big Bopper—my friends and I swooned over them while we enjoyed Lime Rickeys and English muffins smothered in butter and jam. My compatriot Lisa and I would sit next to each other on the stools that swiveled all the way around and she would carefully go over my homework, replacing my mistakes with the right answers.
Unfortunately for me, our morning cheat sessions didn’t last beyond the first few months of the eighth grade. One chilly morning as “Chantilly Lace” blared from the jukebox and Lisa and I huddled over my math homework, I spun around and saw two dark figures approaching the door, their habits swirling around them like smoke. As they got closer there was no mistaking them: Sister Agnes Genevieve, my eighth-grade teacher, and Sister Alice, the Mother Superior. Somehow they had found out about the pre-class homework swapping at Martha’s, and they put an end to it that day. Even though I worried about how I would now eke out passing grades, I was partly relieved that the sisters had intervened. Cheating was, after all, a sin—one that I could now ill afford since I had begun committing the queen mother of sins: masturbation.
Since the concept of self-esteem had a long way to go before it would become part of the popular culture and something that good teachers would be careful not to undermine, most nights I was racked with anxiety about the humiliation the next day might bring, and unable to sleep. Unfortunately, the antidote was a mortal sin.
Starting when I was around ten, I masturbated and brought myself to orgasm nearly every night. It was the only thing that helped me relax and fall off. If my nights began with anxiety, my days began with guilt. I became convinced that every earache, every toothache, every injury was God punishing me. Later, I had painful periods that often kept me in bed. These, too, I thought were God’s judgment. I couldn’t escape his gaze or his wrath. Sometimes I imagined my guardian angel looking away in disgust as I touched myself and rocked back and forth in my bed.
I had displeased God and my Guardian Angel. Not to mention, my mother. One evening she caught me masturbating and bellowed, “Get your hands out from under the blanket now!” as she stood in my bedroom doorway.
The priests to whom I confessed were equally appalled. Every Saturday afternoon as I reeled off the “Our Fathers” and “Hail Marys” that were supposed to absolve me of the sin I committed under the covers, I pledged, again, to resist temptation. My confessors let me know that I was guilty of a particularly vile sin and that I was doing nothing less than letting down Jesus Christ himself with my unwillingness to resist it. They were disgusted and disappointed with me. Soon, they would have even more reason to feel this way.
3.
irreconcilable differences: brian
Father Dennis had a baritone voice that made him sound like he spoke for God himself. In the confessional his full-throated announcement of penance carried with it as much condemnation as salvation and I dreaded it so much that my voice shook as I listed my sins, which invariably included masturbation. But that was a long time ago. It was part of a childhood policed by a God who was as vindictive as he was omniscient. A God, who, by 1976, I no longer believed in. Still, it was Father Dennis’s bottomless voice that I flashed on as I listened to Brian, a client who came to me in the fall.
I was three years into my career as a surrogate partner at that time and one of around one hundred in the profession. Today there are few trained surrogates in the United States. The International Professional Surrogates Association (IPSA) puts the number at fifty. Even in the late 1970s, when the numbers were at an all-time high, I would estimate that there were no more than two hundred of us, most living and practicing on the coasts.
Brian met me in the one-bedroom apartment I had converted into an office. I used the living room as a consultation room and the bedroom for the physical part of my work with clients. When I decorated the apartment I did my best to make it a place that clients would feel comfortable and at ease in. I had overstuffed chairs in the living room, and the walls were painted a soft peach. Fresh cut flowers often adorned the end tables and I usually made snacks available. The last thing I wanted was for a client to feel like he was in an austere, clinical environment.
At thirty-two, Brian suffered from difficulty achieving and maintaining an erection. His penis would only partially stiffen for a few short minutes before turning flaccid again. He had struggled with this since his marriage broke up two years ago, and it was easy to see why. Cecile, Brian’s now ex-wife, was a devout Catholic and she divorced him because she had caught him masturbating in their bedroom one afternoon. I found it interesting that she was willing to overlook the Catholic ban on divorce, but not its prohibition on masturbation. I never met Cecile, but I wondered about the agony she must have felt at having to weigh the sin of divorce against the sin of masturbation and make a choice that would leave her religious conviction, not to mention her immortal soul, intact. In this difficult reconciliation, it was clear which evil was judged the lesser.
Brian was short and stocky. He owned an auto mechanics shop that he had worked hard to build into a thriving business. He sat in the
easy chair across from me and bounced his leg up and down nervously. He recounted the day Cecile stumbled upon him in the act. “She only wanted it once a week, so I used to do it a lot. I usually did it in the shower or at the shop after everyone went home,” he said. “But that day, I was in the bedroom. It was a Saturday and she was out in the garden, so I thought she’d be outside for a while and that I was safe.”
He had almost climaxed when Cecile opened the door and screamed, “What are you doing?” Brain scrambled to get on his pants, covering his penis with his hand. “It was like I was ashamed not just because of what I was doing, but of being naked, of my body.”
Cecile made Brian sleep on the couch that night. The next morning she told him that what he was doing was a sin and it was perverted. He was a married man. He should have outgrown his need to masturbate. If he loved her, he wouldn’t do this.
Not only had Cecile imbibed the Catholic dogma about masturbation, she also harbored one of the more persistent myths about it. She believed that once you got married, you “matured” sexually and that meant leaving masturbation behind and transferring your sexual energy to your spouse. Sure, it was 1976, the sexual revolution still had some steam left, and it was the progressive Bay Area, but old myths die hard.
A few awkward weeks passed before Cecile announced she wanted a divorce. Brian pleaded with her not to leave. He promised he would never touch himself again. He offered to go to counseling. All of this left Cecile apparently unmoved, and before the end of the year the divorce was finalized.
An Intimate Life Page 4