#52, spring
ATTACK OF THE VAGINA | Hayley Krischer
It’s Monday and though I should be in school, we’re going to an emergency visit at Aunt Marce’s gyno in Jersey City, who also happens to be a friend of hers, so she can check out my vag.
Can I be blunt about this whole vag thing? What kind of person gets a degree in staring at vaginas all day? And if she, this gyno, is going to be looking inside my vag, then does that make me a lesbian? I mean, she is essentially fingering me, right? Aunt Marce says no, that fingering (okay she didn’t say fingering, she said, heavy petting) is for pleasure, and that gynos deal with the female reproductive system. Plus, she says, they deliver babies. So they stare at the bigger, scarier, hairier vaginas with bloody babies pushing out of their crotch like jelly donut-covered basketballs.
A gyno’s daily work experience must be like an attack of the vagina. And my teenage vag doesn’t even have that much pubic hair. She’s probably relieved to see a teenager on the list.
Though I was young when my mother left, I wasn’t too young to forget her massive pubs. Her gorilla vagina popped up in the bathtub when she’d soak there for what seemed like hours. And then I’d sit on the floor filing my nails waiting for her to come out and her hairy vag with all of its dark curly pubs would hang down, dripping water all over the floor. Her vagina needed a separate towel. I wasn’t so sarcastic then, or I would have completely said that to her.
Anyway, Aunt Marce is bringing me to the gyno because my dad says its better to go with a woman. This is my father’s guilt trip of his life. He walks around with so much guilt about me not having a woman in the house to help raise me.
So Aunt Marce and I are driving along in her sporty little Prius. She doesn’t have any kids. She doesn’t have a husband either. She’s got plenty of time to spend with me, but sometimes I wish instead of spending so much time with me, she was obsessing over Ask Cupid or JDate instead. She’s a very in-your-face person, my aunt.
“Ali, I love you and I want you to listen to me.”
A lot of her statements start like that.
Even though I feel my phone buzzing on my ass, and I’m sure it’s Sammi, wondering where I am, I kick my feet up on the dash. Sometimes you just have to surrender to your elders.
“Your father told me about the drinking. He told me this was a very popular senior boy,” she swats my feet off her dash and I cross my legs underneath me. “That boy had no respect for you. He had no respect for Alistare Greenleaf. He took something from you. And I don’t just mean your virginity. He took your self worth.” I see tears sliding down her cheeks just underneath her glasses. “As a person. As a woman,” she says. “I know your father wants to respect you and your feelings. He doesn’t want to say something that is going to make you uncomfortable… especially considering—“
“That I was wasted?”
I don’t detail the airplane bottles of vodka that Sean Nessel lined up on the washing machine for me to drink, and how I drank them all. I just gloss over it.
“I want to know something,” she says. “And this is without judging you, okay?”
But anytime someone says they’re not judging you—they’re totally judging you. In fact, they’re not even in the process of judging you because they’vealready judged you.
“I want to know why you went up there to that bedroom to begin with.”
“Is this what this whole car ride is about. This whole, I want to talk to you Ali, woman to woman? Are you now going to blame me?”
“There’s no blame,” she says. “Ali, I love you. I want to figure out what is going on with you.”
“Then you would know why I went up there,” I say. I lower the car window because I’m going to throw up. I haven’t eaten in a day.
She pulls over to the side of the road. We’re at a stretch near the New Jersey Turnpike that runs along side of the plume-filled wetlands. The plumes are these giant feathery tusks—kind of like the feather earrings I just bought at the mall. In the distance, a steel bridge crosses over a railroad track. Trucks whiz over the bridge at full speed. The train cruises through. I don’t understand this part of New Jersey at all.
She’s removed her enormous shades to wipe away her tears. It’s a messy cry. Guffawing and hiccups.
“Sometimes when we have an emptiness that’s so great, and I’m talking about your mother leaving, that we try to stuff it up and fill it up with bad stuff. And I think that’s what you did by having sex with that boy Sean.”
I’m dying to say: Yeah, I filled it up—with Sean Nessel’s dick. God, that is so inappropriate. I groan and rub my eyes—I want to rub them until they bleed.
**
My mother left us because she fell in love with another man. The man was just the catalyst, actually. The real reason is because my mom is a drunk.
Excuse me. Alcoholic.
My father and I came home one day find my mother and Sam Pearlman, a curly-haired aspiring photographer, in bed together. They didn’t even hear Dad and I walk up the stairs. And we have creaky stairs.
I remember her standing at the door screaming with her sheet folded over her chest, “I’m not happy, Johnny! Don’t you understand I’m not happy!” My mother was the only person who called my father Johnny. I always loved that.
Then she chucked a lamp. It missed him by a few inches and shattered on the floor.
I hid behind my bed and covered my ears thinking of my mother’s fingers running through Sam Pearlman’s chest hair. I was 10. Light years away from understanding what a breakup really meant. My mother was always somewhat volatile, so I thought this was just another fight and that in 30 minutes, she’d be sweeping up the yellow chards from the porcelain lamp into a paper bag.
About a week later, my father sat me down. He held me in his arms which was a sign of something weird to come because as cuddly and warm as my dad is, I was already too old and too string bean-like to be cuddled by my dad.
“Baby, I have some sad news for you.”
“Is she gone?”
My father buried his head in my shoulder. And I was just a kid. My father was depleted. I rested my hand on his head and could feel his hair, greasy from not showering. Depression will do that to you. Make you dirty.
“She’ll be back, Dad,” I said. Without being able to verbalize it, I knew my mother wasn’t coming back.
I don’t know what this does to you when you see your wife in your bed with another man, but I’m sure turns you into a raving lunatic. My father would never admit this to me because he’s all about peace, love, Ganesh and Buddha, but I think I remember him telling her not to come around until she got she got straight.
This is why I’m supposed to respectfully refer to my mother as an alcoholic because she has a disease just like many other people in this world. And as my “feelings doctor,”—a.k.a., a therapist, someone I saw a few times after my mother left—told me, my mother has an “allergy” to alcohol. Some people can have a glass of wine. My mother can’t have a glass of anything.
***
Dr. Connolly tells Aunt Marce that she doesn’t have to come in to the actual exam room and that there’s a medical assistant. Is that okay with me? I nod. I don’t really want Aunt Marce seeing me so exposed.
I sit on the table trying to cover myself with the paper towel gown. My ass crackles over the waxy paper they use to protect the table from my love juices. That’s what Sammi calls the flowery fluids that leak from your vagina when you’re all turned on. Like she would even know. Sammi swears that she had an orgasm while riding her bike. I’m like, someone has to be inside you, obviously. The farthest she’s gone is Stevie Goldman going up her shirt.
Dr. Connolly knocks on the door and comes back inside with her little puppy dog medical assistant who smiles at me with this weepy smile. I wonder how many vaginas she’s seen today.
“Have you had a talk with anyone about condom use, Alistare?” Dr. Connolly asks.
“Yes, I know I’m supposed to use them.”
“But what happened this time? Heat of the moment?”
“You could say that.”
So Dr. Connolly then tells me that she’s going to show me the speculum. Even the name sounds like a machine. Or an electronica band.
The speculum is this metal drum.
“That’s going in there?” I say and point to my crotch.
“Yes, but if it makes you uncomfortable, we can do this exam over a number of visits.”
This is code for it’s going to hurt. I don’t care how she says it’s going to feel. How she’ll use lube to make sure it just slides right in there. How she uses a heat lamp. Whatever. I call bullshit on Dr. Connolly.
It’s just like when I was little and my parents were all—oh, that shot is going to hurt us more than it hurts you.
Shots always hurt, you asshats. At least with those doctors you got a sticker, and if you really, really cried, like a serious freakout, my pediatrician had lollypops.
I cross my legs and wrap the gown around my knees. The panic in my stomach churns more and I look over at the door.
“It’s going to hurt.” I’m convinced now.
But she says it’ll feel like light pressure. Not hurt. There’s no hurt. Some people don’t even feel it, she swears.
I think of the women who don’t “feel it.” Otherwise known as middle-aged stretched out vaginas.
“If at any point you don’t feel comfortable, we can stop.”
“What do you mean stop?”
“I mean we can just stop right in the middle of the exam. I’ll take out the speculum immediately and we can either start again or reschedule.”
This is hard to believe.
“And you’ll just stop?”
“I’ll stop right away,” she says. “That’s my promise to you. One that I will never break.”
I wish all people would keep that promise. “Do other girls freak out like this?”
“Well, it depends on the girl.”
Oh, great. I think. So I’m totally freaking out and making a spectacle. I think of other girls and wonder if they sat perfectly still for their first gyno visit. If their visits were all easy with their moms right next to them. Oh, shove the speculum in my vag—no problem. High fives with the doctor.
Then I think of me. I want to leave, but I’m stuck here forever in the prison of lube, heat lamps, speculums and vaginas.
I cross my arms over the gown. I wish I was wearing my t-shirt.
I wish I was wearing my pajama bottoms with the kittens on them.
I wish I had an adult pair of zip up pj’s like I saw at the store last week. The kind with the footies. The kind that snaps at the top so that no one can get in them.
I immediately begin a massive assault on my fingernails. They’ve taken a beating in the past few days. All that’s left are cuticles.
Dr. Connolly takes a long stare at me and then rolls her little stool over to the table. It whirs in the moist air of the office.
She asks if something happened to me.
This question stumps me so that I can’t even breathe. Did something happen to me? Why would she even ask me that question? Did something happen to me? Is that a question or a statement?
Yes, something happened to me. I lost my virginity to the boy that I love.
Excuse me. Loved.
Okay, obsessed over.
Okay, stalked.
A boy whose face I decorated with flowers and hearts. The kind of boy I would have jumped off a rusty bridge with. Even if he left me in a pond floating with tires. Which he sort of did in a metaphorical way, didn’t he?
I shake my head. If I talk, I’ll cry. I’ll cry so hard I might not be able to end it.
“Is there something you maybe want to talk about? Something that has to do with your sexual experience?”
“I just want to get this over with,” I say. And my eyes water. I wind my elbow around my face. I suck in my cries and my throat burns from it. I can’t hold it in the tears, though. It’s physically impossible. When tears are ready to explode, you just have to get out of the way. So I heave into my elbow, and it comes out like hiccups.
“Okay, Alistare, what’s going on?” Her voice is low now. I can’t even see her because I’m hiding in the crook of my arm.
“I don’t know why I’m crying.” And that’s the truth. I don’t know. This shouldn’t be such a big deal. Maybe a weird deal. But not a traumatic deal.
She tells me we’re going to do this another day. Dr. Connolly snaps off her rubber gloves. She wants me to feel in control.
Control is not a word that I can associate with right now. Saturday night. Sean Nessel. Control. Her words and my words bounce around like a weird language. Control. Stop. Promise. Speculum. Speculum? It really does sound like an electronica dance song. All of a sudden, my hiccup-tears turn to a crazed giggle and I imagine a dance party and people fist pumping to spec-u-lum. Spec-u-lum!
Dr. Connolly folds her hands into her lap. She’s not laughing.
I convince her that I just have a serious case of the nerves.
Once the tears and the giggles disappear, she asks me to lie back on the table. I do, but I tighten my knees together and pull the paper gown over my thighs. She puts little glasses on and glides her chair over to my feet. She places my feet in the stirrups and tells me she’s going to open my legs. I feel the silliest and weirdest I’ve felt in a long time, but trapped.
Dr. Connolly’s hands separate my legs. She tells me she’s going to insert the speculum.
Spec-u-lum.
I peer at her through my legs and then up at the turquoise parrot mobile that spins in a perfect circle above my head.
I close my eyes and get dizzy with all these weird images like Indians with saris bending over and lifting legs like they do in the Kama Sutra and Sean Nessel unzipping his jeans, then laughing and telling me how glad he was that I “wasn’t a virgin” all mash together in this madness.
I feel like such a fake. Like I duped Sean Nessel into thinking I was experienced. I go back to that night. My body is too lazy from the alcohol. The crazy lightening bolt-like pain as he grinds into me. Sean Nessel muzzles my mouth with his hand.
I cannot move.
The bloodied tissues. My puke in the metal basket. My saliva that I spit on the tissues to clean my face off with. The dirty sock that I poured beer over to wipe the blood off my inner thighs. Whirling.
“I don’t think I can do this,” I say to the doctor.
“Okay…you’re doing fine.”
“No, I mean, I want to stop.”
She looks up at me, her face serious and I feel her remove the speculum. She shuts my legs.
I hear her talking to me, but it’s one of those weird echoey sounds like the absent adults in Charlie Brown. Mwa-mwa-mwa.
I jump off the table and kick one of the stirrups aside in the process. The stirrups clang against each other as it ricochets back and forth. I grasp for my jeans on the chair. I hear her again. Mwa-mwa-mwa. I don’t even put on underwear. I just shimmy my jeans on, hiking one foot into each leg and jump up a few times.
Zip up.
Button up.
Closed shut.
My jeans are on. I’m safe again. I try to catch my breath.
She hands me a brochure. It’s purple and glossy. My tender finger tips run over the edges. I think it’s about this pill that she’s given me. But I scan it and notice pictures of women with their hands in their faces, and that it reads “crisis” and “hotline number” and “sexual assault.”
“I give it to all my young clients,” she says. “It’s precautionary.”
“This isn’t for me.”
“Well, pass it to a friend then.”
“What would I say to that friend?”
She pauses and takes a deep breath, looking over at her medical assistant who has done nothing the entire time but take notes. Dr. Connolly tells me that my friend needs help. She uses air quotes to get her point across.
“You should give your friend my number,” she says.
I fold up the brochure and stuff it in the back pocket of my jeans.
I look back at the table where I was just sprawled out. I wonder who cleans up the paper with the love juice?
BIO: Hayley Krischer is a freelance writer. You can find her on Twitter or at her blog Femamom.