The V-Word

by Amber J. Keyser

  At those summer house parties I got good at snagging an empty Olympia can and filling it with water in the bathroom so I could sit there and sip along with everyone else. I felt like I needed to be in control of myself. Being sober made me feel safe. Each night, when it got late, the canvassers would start slurrily telling me how they had a lot of respect for me and I’d know it was time to leave.

  I’d take the bus back downtown to my apartment. I was too proud to buy a map and I could never figure out where exactly my apartment was. I’d just wander around the streets, navigating by landmarks. With my headphones in, I followed the train tracks, took a left at the stadium, went up a hill. If I walked in a big enough circle, I’d eventually come across my own bendy road. My feet would hurt, and I’d flop on my dorm room bed, lights off, sheets off, alone.

  I was afraid to even kiss anyone.

  What else would they want?

  After about six weeks, I was invited to join a “camping canvass.” Many of the nonprofit’s exploitive endeavors were branded as “fun opportunities,” and I jumped at the chance to drive to Las Vegas, Nevada, with Jeff, David, and the usual crew. We pulled into Las Vegas just after dawn. I had accidentally left my wallet on my bed back in Portland so Jeff lent me $20, and I spent the next week eating two meals a day at the Golden Nugget casino, which had a $1.99 breakfast special.

  The canvassing was the worst anyone had ever seen. The subdivisions were vast and hostile. I scraped by, barely making quota every night until the last one, when a guy in another nondescript tract home pulled a gun on me and told me to get off his lawn. I spent the rest of my shift in an empty park, lying underneath the swings and trying not to cry as I looked up at the big Nevada sky.

  When we met up at the end of the night in a local brewery, people who were over quota peeled donations off their piles and handed them to me. Jeff, who was in charge, recorded them on my tally. The week ended with all of us keeping our jobs. To celebrate, everyone except for me got raging drunk

  Jeff proposed a toast. “To being young and stupid!”

  We all cheered.

  The tediousness of the drive home was hysterical. We laughed at road signs and played word games until we ran out of both road signs and word games. In the desert near Mount Shasta, we switched drivers, and I squeezed in back next to Jeff, our thighs and arms touching through layers of sweat and cotton. He offered to give me a neck massage. I turned sideways in my seat, and as he laid his hands on my shoulders, the car seemed to disappear. He leaned in and his breath raised the hair on my neck.

  There was no horrible job. There was no guy in Las Vegas with a gun. There was no eighty-six dollar quota. There was no week of casino pancakes. I closed my eyes and there were just his hands on my neck. He leaned his head against mine and I breathed in the smell of him.

  We stayed that way for what felt like three hundred miles.

  At a party a few nights later, I got cornered by a raw foodist and was enduring a lecture about dehydrators and numerology when I caught Jeff’s eye from across the room. He grabbed my hand and led me upstairs. I don’t know whose bedroom we locked ourselves in but we made out on the filthy mattress until my lips hurt. We’d gotten down to our underwear, and Jeff put his fingers up inside me. It was a surprise but it felt damn good. Drunk on lust, I got lost in sensations only to realize Jeff was whispering something to me.

  “What?” I whispered back, hoarsely.

  “Will you toss my cookies?” he murmured.

  My body froze. I had no idea what toss my cookies meant. Was that even what he’d said? I didn’t want to ask him to repeat himself or to let on that I had no idea what cookies were. Too proud for a map, I plunged onward, deciding the request must have something to do with touching his dick. I stuck my hand down his boxers and fumbled around. His penis felt like a bizarre, alien object, a fleshy Washington Monument. I was caught between horror and desperately trying to play it cool. I frantically fumbled around and managed to poke him hard in his swampy testicles. Then I rolled over and fell asleep. We woke up together, gross and groggy, and took the bus our separate ways.

  Despite my clear ineptitude, the next night Jeff invited me out for a proper date: just us, no one else from work. We met up in Pioneer Square and talked about where we grew up and walked a few blocks to see his favorite fountain in the city. He was sweet. I felt good with him. He opened up to me about his life after college, his favorite people, his interests, and I felt bad that I wasn’t being honest with him.

  We meandered back from the cool downtown dusk to my dorm. The air in my little room was hot and stagnant. I didn’t have any way to put on music—I’d been living in my headphones all summer—so we made out in silence on the narrow, plastic-sheeted bed. It was way too small for both of us so after some awkward snuggling, I grabbed the cushions off the suite’s sofa, put them on the floor, and dragged my mattress down next to them. The lights were off, but we could still see each other in the light streaming through the small, locked window.

  Now that we were here, in this moment, about to do exactly what I’d wanted to do, I got nervous. I didn’t get self-conscious about my body, but I suddenly felt weird about his. I didn’t know this person, I realized, with rising anxiety. His body was so foreign, so fuzzy, so lean. His chest and legs and arms felt strange and tough under my hands. His strange sweat was all over me. When he opened the condom wrapper, the unfamiliar, chemical smell hit me and I tensed. In this most intimate moment, I felt very alone.

  But I was committed.

  This was the way to escape virginity, to destroy its power over me.

  I had to go it alone.

  I lay still underneath him as his penis pushed inside me. I both wanted him there and didn’t want him there at all. I tried to keep my hands on him while my brain floated away. I kept my eyes squeezed shut and thought about how soon it would be over. I wasn’t paying attention to his thrusting or the way that it felt both a little painful and a little good, I distracted myself by thinking in intense detail about what we’d do the next day. Would we get coffee after? How would we walk there? Should I try to make breakfast? What groceries did I have? Was the milk in the fridge expired? Maybe it was expired. Very quickly, it seemed like his body shivered and he stopped. I came back to reality. He slid out of me and leaned up to my face, kissing me. He felt cold with sweat and I still didn’t open my eyes. The whole thing felt absurd, like something animals did, not even a part of me or who I was.

  I was grateful to fall asleep and wake up a few hours later as myself, having gone through this undesirable ritual. We rose early and walked to the coffee shop like I’d seen in my head. We made pleasant small talk as I walked Jeff to his bus stop and kissed him good-bye. My flight back home was the next day and I never saw him again.

  That year at college, I did help out at the radio station. I did join the environmental club. I did make friends with the adventurous, eccentric girls on my hall. And I met a boy who became my best friend and then my boyfriend. Before we had sex, we talked about our histories. It felt good being honest with him. We confessed the things we were nervous to do and laughed about the things we liked.

  Slowly, I let my anxious boundaries dissolve and was surprised to find that trusting someone made me stronger not weaker. Just as I’d imagined for my future self, we had lots of sex. But he didn’t wield desire over my head like a weapon or abandon me when I revealed myself. Back in high school, I could never have imagined this sweet spot—a friend with whom I could safely shed my armor, someone I could learn from, and whom I would want to have stick around and know me for years. Being young and stupid is fun, but being young and honest is even better.

  Many women feel their relationship to their own bodies is a stumbling block to good sexual experiences. In the pursuit of some imaginary ideal, you might be pretty hard on yourself: Look at my bulging tummy, teeny breasts, bushy pubes, lumpy thighs, enormous cleavage, scrawny ass. I hate my zitty skin, sweaty armpits, bony knees. My period.

/>   It’s exhausting to worry so much about how you look and smell and feel.

  But maybe you don’t have to agonize. Maybe none of it matters. Maybe when you’re with someone who really loves you, every single inch of you will be good.

  So good.

  9

  Power in the Blood

  Molly Bloom

  It happened in that singular summer: those sultry months that separate high school from college. We swam in a pool of sex, or at least the idea of having sex, and the water was fine. DJs hired for our high school dances in this rural Midwestern town were known to introduce slow songs by saying, “Ladies, here’s your chance to polish your man’s belt buckle.”

  Yes, they did say that.

  I was eighteen, and by that time I had brought a few of those large, elaborately decorated cowboy belt buckles to a high shine. Of course, I brought a high shine to my own damn self during those slow dances—and after, in the back seats of cars and in the hayloft and once, sticky with the juice of a stolen watermelon spiked with vodka, in the middle of an abandoned blacktop road.

  I was raised in a conservative Baptist home where there was no discussion about safe sex or any kind of sex for that matter. No sex before marriage was a given. I considered myself a virgin, although I suspected that I possessed that title only on a technicality. I’d done everything up to actual penetration, and until Sam came along I was okay with that. It allowed me to think of myself as a “good girl.”

  Things were different that summer. I’d been dating Sam for nine months. He was a year behind me in school and, while we both cared deeply for each other, we knew that our relationship might very well end when I went to college in the fall. So it took on a fierce intimacy, as if we could somehow forestall the changes to come.

  We always stopped just short of making love, frustrating as it was. We may have been young but we weren’t foolish. We weren’t taking any chances on an unintended pregnancy—not an unusual occurrence in our small town—but getting birth control was a dicey prospect. We knew the owner of the drugstore and he knew our parents. You couldn’t just waltz in and buy a package of condoms.

  One night, we were doing a lot of enthusiastic fooling around behind the barn. We were both highly aroused and one of us said, for probably the millionth time, “I wish we could do it.”

  And then it occurred to me—maybe we could. I was on the second day of my period, and I thought this was probably the one totally safe time of the month to have sex. (I was wrong, of course. It’s rare, but women can in fact become pregnant during menstruation.)

  I was game, but what if Sam was totally turned off by the idea? My body told my brain to stop worrying and go for it.

  “Um, I’m having my period now,” I whispered.

  “That’s okay,” he said, his mouth on my nipple. “I don’t mind.”

  “I mean, it’s a safe time for us to do it. If it doesn’t gross you out.” I waited for any sign of disgust.

  Sam didn’t hesitate. “Gross me out? Hell no!”

  “It might be kind of messy,” I said. “You’ll get all bloody.”

  He grinned. “I don’t mind. I’ve been bloody before.”

  “Not there, I bet,” I teased.

  We took off the rest of our clothes in about five seconds. The sight of Sam’s slim, athletic nakedness made me gasp. I removed my tampon and threw it into the bushes. I wondered briefly if some wild animal would bring that deliciously bloody thing back to its den. Better than Sam’s father finding it the next day.

  Between my arousal and the blood, I was plenty wet, and he entered me easily. The sex was great—amazing—blood and all. Afterward, we cleaned up with some tissues I found in my purse, giggling in sudden self-conscious embarrassment at what we’d just done. We’d lost our virginities in a sea of menstrual blood.

  I drove home that night thinking about what a great guy Sam was. I was pretty sure that most guys would have recoiled at the very thought of having sex with a girl who was having her period. It probably helped that both of us lived on farms. We saw and experienced life in all of its beautiful and ugly messiness, from birth to death. Hell, what’s a little blood? And who am I kidding? It probably helped that we were two horny teenagers.

  Even so, menstruation was seen as dirty and shameful. We lived in monthly dread that a tampon would fall out of our lockers, or that we’d bleed through onto our stonewashed blue jeans. Remember that scene in Stephen King’s Carrie, in which the main character gets her first period in the locker room? Her crazy mother hasn’t given her a heads-up and Carrie naturally thinks she is dying. And how do the other girls react? They throw tampons and sanitary napkins at her. It’s the ultimate public humiliation, reinforced by the pig’s blood at the prom.

  Menstrual etiquette dictated that, while you might complain about that time of the month to your girlfriends, it was otherwise a closely held secret. Ridiculous tampon commercials assured us that if we used their products we’d spend our periods in delirious happiness, frolicking on the beach in white bikinis and going horseback riding. No one would know about our “little secret.”

  This idea that menstrual blood is somehow dirty isn’t new, of course; it’s part of our cultural DNA. Menstruating women were, and often still are, considered unclean in many religious traditions. Contact with a menstruating woman—not to mention sex!—was bad juju.

  I’m no longer a Baptist or very religious in any way but I can’t help but think of the old Baptist hymn There Is Power in the Blood. It begins, “Would you be free from the burden of sin? There’s pow’r in the blood, pow’r in the blood.” Although the hymn refers to the blood that the crucified Jesus shed for our sins, it makes me think of the power of my own blood. It gave me the power to make my own choice about sex that night. My blood made me free from the burden, not of sin, but of worry. Sam and I managed to score some condoms that summer, and it was a good thing too. Having made love once, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have had the self-control to stop doing it.

  I went off to college that fall and, predictably, we broke up soon after the homecoming dance. We were going different places: Sam wanted to be a farmer and I dreamed of the big city. But I still give him a lot of credit for his enthusiastic embrace of me and my body—especially at that time of the month.

  Thank you, Sam.

  Pink, blue. Girl, boy. Gay, straight. Virgin, not.

  It’s tempting to line up the little boxes and get everyone to jump into one. But forget the tidy categories. Reality can be much more complicated, especially when it comes to sexual attraction. Why does that woman with the dreadlocks make my heart race? Why do I flush every time I see that guy with the fish tattoo?

  Arousal is unpredictable. Sometimes it grows slowly out of a deep emotional connection. Sometimes it bursts out of nowhere, a powerful physical reaction that surprises us with its ferocity.

  Just as we go through phases where we feel more or less sexual, we can also experience fluid patterns of attraction that change throughout our lives. In the next story, Sara shares how a growing understanding of her sexual identity influences how she views the world and her place in it.

  10

  “Openly Bisexual”

  Sara Ryan

  The last time I had to explain about my sexual identity,I I was in a speeding car along I-35 on an unseasonably cold day in Texas.

  Okay, I didn’t have to, per se. But the friend who was driving was curious. We’d met through the young adult author community, so he knew my work and he knew that I identified as queer. But I’d, in quick succession, mentioned a workshop for emerging LGBTQ voices I was excited to be teaching and then said something about my husband. And although he didn’t come right out (as it were) and ask, I had the impression that the juxtaposition of these two pieces of information was somehow surprising.

  So I told him the latest version of what I say when people want to know how it works for me. Yes, I’ve had significant relationships with people of different genders (and by tha
t I mean both with cisII men and cis women, and with people whose sense of gender is more fluid and shifting). No, it doesn’t mean I’m automatically looking to hook up with everybody all the time. No, it’s not a phase. No, I’m not experimenting.

  “I think of it as a lens that informs how I understand and navigate the world,” I said finally.

  “Maybe this is off base, but it kind of reminds me of being biracial,” he said. “Like, you don’t feel like you really fit in on either side.”

  I’d have been hesitant to make that analogy myself because I can’t know how being biracial feels. But I appreciated his willingness to use an aspect of his own identity as a way to better understand mine.

  Let me assure you that I did not always have the ability to explain my sexual identity to others, or even to myself. I had to analyze, interrogate, worry,III discuss, research—and write about it in journals.

  I called the journal I kept when I was fifteen L.B.B., short for Little Black Book. I think I knew that the phrase little black book was typically used to describe a collection of women’s phone numbers kept by a man, but since the journal literally was a little black book, it seemed appropriate.

  1.

  My second summer in the theater group, the summer I was fifteen, Ursula knew I was going to have sex with Robert before I did. Ursula was older, in her twenties: funny, mechanically adept, a martial artist into puns, comics, gaming, science fiction, and fantasy. She knew a lot of things I didn’t but she was never condescending and always treated me as a friend and a peer. She’d observed Robert and me as we were getting together. The joke was that we were “the lame leading the blind,” since I was on crutches that summer and he was, in fact, blind. Before him, I’d barely even been on any dates. Though I’d had multiple crushes, not all of which I initially recognized as such, despite my tendency to analyze everything in my life in minute detail (usually, as stated above, in my journal).