iii.
Justine’s medical, and I’m dental.
Normally.
It’s usually her sitting in the waiting room with this bulky digital pad, entering our daughter’s information, details of our coverage plan. On occasion we come together, trading off, me holding Sadie while she fills out a portion of the form, then switching. That was in the beginning when I’d wanted to be involved in every aspect of childrearing, when I thought it possible, when I believed I could juggle the nine-to-five, childrearing, dreams of being a writer. Slowly this has changed. Sadie’s teeth poked through, and we needed to make dental appointments. So, Justine became medical—doing wellness visits, keeping track of vaccinations—and I took over brushing her teeth, making our daughter’s dental appointments. I didn’t mind, though it was difficult getting her used to the brush, getting her to stop squirming anytime she heard the clink of it being removed from the cup.
We started brushing at a year old. Before that, she’d had some teeth, but the doctor had recommended wiping them with a moistened towel before bed. There was some question as to whether or not to use toothpaste, when to transition to a little kid’s brush, so I’d called and made an appointment with a pediatric dentist and took a morning off, and Sadie sat in the chair, the bright lights from the overhead lamp blaring down. The hygienist had given her sunglasses to wear to shield her eyes from the light, and she took it all in, her small body dwarfed by the beige leather chair. She kept asking, “What’s that?,” pointing to the dentist’s tools, and I tried to tell her, “It’s a mirror. For looking in your mouth.” Or, “That one’s to scrape plaque off your teeth.”
I’d only become adamant about taking care of my teeth around twenty-five. Before then, I’d been inconsistent. I had dental insurance, but I hadn’t gone to the trouble of finding a dentist. The last one I’d had was in high school, and since my parents paid for it, I hadn’t realized how much it cost, how much they’d dropped on the fillings the dentist had drilled into my mouth over the years. But then, one morning, while lying in bed in my West Philly apartment, tonguing an odd spot in one of my bottom front teeth, a piece came off. It wasn’t an abrupt separation. For the previous few days, it had felt loose, as if a remnant of lettuce or apple had lodged there. I knew I shouldn’t keep poking it, yet my tongue kept roving back, the pointed pink tip testing a granular ridge at the back, prodding, trying to see what it was. It wasn’t painful. But it was distracting. I’d sit at my desk at work and touch it with my finger. Roll it around. I must have been loosening it, so that morning, in bed, prodding again, a segment detached. And I didn’t have a dentist, but I had insurance, so I called around, sent an email to friends who lived in the city, asking for recommendations I made an appointment and went, and it turned out the chip wasn’t severe. The dentist recommended leaving it alone.
“If we fill it,” she said, “it’s only going to be more likely to decay underneath, and we’ll have to take it out in a few years and fill it again.” Which, I learned in the course of that visit, was what happened to all fillings. The metal expanded and contracted, exposed to heat and cold. Then the filling crumbled, and the tooth beneath was open to decay, and they had to drill and fill it again. Eventually, the tooth would have to be crowned. And after they had x-rayed my teeth, I discovered I’d have to have two fillings replaced on the upper left and would likely need a root canal and crown on the other side. What this cost when the bill came due was around a thousand dollars, even with insurance. I never knew it cost so much. The fillings, of course, were cheaper. A fifty dollar deductible. Sixty dollars a tooth. But the root canal and crown required minor surgery. There wasn’t enough tooth left to hold the crown, so they had to peel back the gums and expose more tooth to make the crown fit.
“Like a banana,” the dentist said.
She was smiling, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a dental procedure, certainly far from pleasant, but I was a grown man. I could take it. I’d had Novocain before. The shots were momentary pangs, pinches; the strange itchy sensation that remained after it wore off was far more irritating, and of course, there was bruising. But I was worried about something else.
“There’s one thing,” I said. “During procedures, I’m kind of prone to anxiety.”
I could sit in the chair for a thirty-minute checkup. But they’d portioned off two hours for the crown. And I couldn’t endure two hours of sitting, and this was what I was getting at: my anxiety always lessened if the person who was going to witness it knew what to expect. The dentist was a beautiful dusty-blonde woman with a set of her own perfectly-formed, perfectly-white teeth. She looked as though she would have been at home sunning on a beach where the sands were white, the waters blue. She was beautiful but not the kind of beautiful I find alluring. This was more a passing observation, hard not to notice. Even my asexual uncle—the one who’d recommended her to me—had mentioned it. It didn’t matter for dentistry, had nothing to do with her talent, but looks don’t hurt when delivering bad news. My gums were being peeled back, and if my first dentist, the one I’d gone to as a child, an old man with a pack a day smoking habit, had delivered it, I’d have been terrified. But she gave the impression of complete knowledge, control over the tools of dentistry. She put me at ease, placed a hand on my arm, said: “Of course. We can prescribe diazepam. Ask my receptionist for the scrip on your way out.”
When the day arrived, I took the afternoon off, though the procedure wasn’t scheduled until four-thirty. I didn’t drink coffee and only minimal water so I wouldn’t have to use the bathroom, and before I left my apartment, I chased two diazepam with a shot of whisky.
When I arrived, they ushered me to a room in the office devoted to oral surgery, a quieter place where patients who were about to experience real pain could do so privately. I hadn’t understood. The explanation that they were peeling my gums back to expose more tooth hadn’t sunk in. I’d expected my dentist to perform the procedure. But it was surgery, a word I’d blotted out, and as surgery, there was a surgeon to perform it. He was a handsome Asian man—was everyone she hired attractive?— standing next to a dentist’s chair. He, too, seemed warm, his smile as bright and clean and full of perfect teeth as my dentist’s. It must have been a prerequisite, teeth like these. Had I ever seen a dentist with anything less than perfect teeth? Did they have them capped, whitened, worked on, or were they perfect throughout life? Was the flame of orthodontics there from the beginning? Most people I know—non-dentists—have blemishes.
Were they going to put me under?
I think I asked this. But the surgeon shook his head. He launched into an explanation. As I listened, I kept thinking about bananas, the way you need to fold their skin back to eat them, and I transferred this imagery to my tooth. The yellow skin becoming pink gum. The pale flesh of the fruit becoming tooth. I didn’t like bananas, but I liked having teeth. I didn’t want to lose them. I should have taken care of them when I was younger. Why didn’t I?
I was zoning out. The surgeon’s tone was calm, measured. It set me at ease. I stopped hearing his words. I wondered if they taught this in dental school, since my dentist used the same tone. Was it bedside manner? Chairside? Maybe my dentist chose to work with people who had a similar touch, an elite team of pleasant-natured people.
“We’ll use a local,” he said, as he pulled on a pair of white latex gloves and picked up a syringe. I tried to focus on something besides myself, where I was, what was being done, but in spite of the meds and whisky, every muscle in me became taut. Whatever relaxation his soothing tone induced vanished in that instant. I felt the tip of the needle slide into the pink tissue of my cheek, beneath my bottom row of teeth. The surgeon used his other hand to flap my lips and ease the pain, but my ass still rose three or four inches off the seat as he pressed the plunger down and dulled the nerve. He did it twice more, and the entire right side of my face was numb.
The surgeon stepped out to let the Novocain take effect. I took a few deep breaths and did the thing I do every time a dentist steps away. I pulled on my lower lip and released it, letting the flesh that was now dissociated from me slap against my gums. I did this many times in quick succession, repeating the word, “Fwibbity, fwibbity, fwibbity.” But because he wasn’t leaving to check on other patients, as a regular dentist does, I mistimed his return, and he caught me. “Fwibbity! Look, Elvis lips!” I cried, and snarled like Elvis. I wasn’t able to do this without the numbness. My lips don’t work like that. I didn’t mind sharing it now. The meds had taken effect. The surgeon laughed.
“Shall we get started?” he said.
He sat, picked up a scalpel. I hadn’t expected a scalpel. I hadn’t expected stitches either, but when he finished, there was something in my mouth that needed sewing up.
“They’ll dissolve on their own,” he said, and passed me a prescription for painkillers. The wounds didn’t hurt at first, and it wasn’t a deep pain so much as continuous irritation. Then I had to go back for another appointment. They’d peeled the tooth, but hadn’t done the root canal or made the crown. I’d have to heal first. But this wasn’t the most painful part. The most painful part was the bill, the idea I had to drop a couple hundred dollars that could have gone elsewhere on my teeth. This was why I attended closely to Sadie’s teeth. I wanted to help her avoid my mistakes, instill a sense of what it took to care for teeth properly. Once a cavity got in, the tooth was done for. It died a slow death.
I brush Sadie’s teeth twice a day—before school and bed. I floss them, too, which is difficult to do for another person. It took a week of struggling with the string wrapped around my index fingers before I remembered stores sold floss picks, a short strand of waxed string between two plastic nodes that I could slide around her teeth. We bought a stool that allows her to stand at the sink and see herself in the mirror and spit into the porcelain bowl. We use bubblegum-flavored toothpaste that has Dora the Explorer on the tube, but the gel is gummy and sticks to the region right above the drain. I have to rub it off with my finger. Otherwise, a pink nugget clings to the side. Sometimes I forget to use the bubblegum toothpaste and load her brush with mint gel, and Sadie recoils as if I’d scoured her gums with napalm. I don’t have a lot of sympathy. This is the last part of her bedtime routine, and I want to get it over with. This is after we’ve done dinner and a bath, and as we approach the time I don’t have to be a dad, the time without anything scheduled, the time when there aren’t any pressing needs to attended to, the time when she’ll be asleep and the house will be quiet, I become increasingly irritable. The slightest interruption amplifies this. If she doesn’t do things quickly enough, I take it personal, speak in a gruff voice, tell her to spit.
The pediatric dentist revealed, during our first visit, that Sadie’s teeth are tightly-grouped. They’re straight but ridged. There are places for food to get stuck, and we have to watch them because such teeth are prone to cavities. There’s staining on the back right side, and I’ve developed an obsession with the stain—a tiny brown cloud on the last tooth on the bottom. The dentist showed me on a subsequent visit that I was brushing incorrectly. I’d been seated in front with Sadie facing me. I’m supposed to stand behind her, tilt her head back. From this vantage, I can view the cloud that obsesses me. It isn’t a cavity, they’ve assured me. But I have to work to make sure it doesn’t become one. So I begin there and concentrate the brush on that spot, as if I can wash it clean, remove it. Yet, I can’t. It’s a stain. And brushing merely keeps the rot at bay. Still, I continue to work at it. The stain’s a sign of my failure as a father: I’ve vowed to take care of her teeth, to avoid allowing what had happened to me—the cavities, crowns, root canals—to happen to her. Yet, here she is, on her way toward that, toward a cavity.
“Calm down,” Justine says whenever she sees me getting worked up. “You brush her teeth twice a day. You floss. She’s going to be all right.”
But she doesn’t understand because she’s medical and I’m dental. And medical’s more dramatic, more difficult to control. You can’t prevent a cold the same way you prevent a cavity. We can tell her to wash her hands, cover her mouth when she coughs, but still, if the kids in daycare are sick, Sadie gets sick. It’s inevitable. If someone in the school gets strep, we cross our fingers and wait. If they have a stomach virus, we do the same. And maybe Justine sees cavities this way. Brushing and flossing are like handwashing, tactics to reduce likelihood, but it still might happen. And if it happens, it’s nobody’s fault. There are genetics involved, the quality of teeth inherited. If Sadie gets a cavity, we’ll deal with it. Or I’ll deal with it, since Justine is medical and I’m dental. The only time there’s overlap is during emergencies. And there are less dental emergencies than medical. In fact, there haven’t been any dental emergencies. Not that Sadie’s cold is an emergency, I’m just available, so I’ve become medical.
I sit in the waiting room and fill out forms on a digital pad—name, address, birthdate. Why isn’t this stored? Why do we have to fill it out every time we come? The list of potential conditions. Check if your child has had any of the following. Why not simply ask if there are any updates? The digital pad malfunctions frequently. I’ve seen this on earlier visits, parents approaching the receptionist, telling her it isn’t working. It’s crapped out on me as well, but it seems to be functioning now. Sadie’s rallied since we left my mom’s. There are two waiting rooms in the lobby—one sick, one well. But there isn’t a door between them, so kids pass from one to the next. We’re in the one for sick. There’s a TV on the other side, and some of the kids watch, but the sick room has a fish tank in the wall, and Sadie touches the glass.
“Please don’t tap. You’ll scare the fish.”
She lets her finger linger above the glass, tracing the path of a black and blue fish, charting a course between these and a bright yellow one, before moving back again. Her cheeks are red, but she hasn’t been coughing as much. She still feels warm, but less than at my parents’. Plus she’s standing now, not clinging to me.
“Did you see the witch?” I ask. I point to the wall.
They’ve decorated for Halloween. Above the tank, a cardboard cutout: black dress. Green and orange striped socks. Pointed hat. Wart. There are jack-o’-lanterns as well. A few black cats. Justine is making Sadie a costume for Halloween. She’s pulled instructions from the Internet. She’s knitting a hat, a replica of Olivia the pig. She’s bought fabric, a gauzy red skirt, a red Lycra shirt, red and white striped leggings. She’ll put this together as Oliva’s outfit. Oliva’s the excitable, curious heroine in a series of children’s books. The stories are among my favorite to read to Sadie. I like Oliva’s pluckiness, her imagination. The trajectory of the stories is typical. Olivia sets in motion a chain of events using her imagination. Those events go awry. She gets in trouble with her parents, and lesson imparted, the story resolves. Unlike Caillou, the books have charm, and so does the show. They have a wry sense of humor. In the first story, the original one, Olivia’s mother takes her to a museum. Standing before a Jackson Pollock painting, Olivia thinks she could do the same in five minutes, which makes me smile every time I read it. I like Jackson Pollock. I think the author does too, but Pollock’s work, to the untrained eye, can be perceived that way. And I like that he puts this in the mind of a child. A child who, once she gets home, tries it on her wall and gets in trouble. In the same book, there’s reference to Degas, Maria Callas. The author knows the arts and slides in references as a treat for parents, parents who need something to keep their interest, which is easy to lose reading inane children’s books.
I’ve zoned out again, my vision a blur. I rub my eyes. I’ve gotten no further than the first form on the screen. I hit the button to flip to the second and glance up.
“Are you looking forward to Halloween,” I ask. “To dressing up as Olivia?”
I’d rather talk to my daughter than fill out the form. What will they do if I don’t finish, not see her? As long as I pay, they’ll take her.
Sadie stares at the decorations. I’m trying to get her into the spirit. Some nights, I read her this book with a witch, Room on the Broom, but she made me stop when the dragon appeared. She doesn’t like the dragon. She likes pop-up books, things about pumpkins and trick-or-treating that allow us to shout Happy Halloween at the end. The fish are more interesting now, and she returns to looking at them. I return to the pad.
Do you wish to take a short survey?
No, I don’t.
It’s not that I can’t be bothered, but the last time my wife was here, she’d taken the survey, and they’d charged her a ten-dollar fee. That’s the medical establishment. They offer a necessary service, a service one can’t do without, but they don’t tell anyone up front what the service costs. Then, after they’ve performed it, they charge whatever they deem fit. But it isn’t the doctors’ fault, oh no. If you ask them, they’ll tell you it’s the insurance companies. A lot of them claim it would be cheaper to abandon their practice, with what it cost to keep up with malpractice coverage. And the amount of paperwork necessary to get paid for routine checkups almost makes it not worth it. A lot of them, I’ve been told, accept the copay and let it go at that. So, you turn your attention to the insurance companies who are really at fault, and they point to the pharmaceutical companies and to the exorbitant cost of prescription medications, and they start talking about the cost of research and development and how these drugs wouldn’t exist if they didn’t charge the high costs that reflect this, and you run in circles with no one to blame. And then, if you point to the executives of companies and ask if they deserve multibillion dollar salaries, they shrug and argue they’ve earned it, they’re worth it, they deserve it.
In fiction, critics would call this Kafkaesque, except we’re living in it. And if you want to live a life with any quality, if you find yourself ill and suffering and want treatment and maybe even a cure if it’s one of those diseases they can’t milk by keeping you alive but hooked on the drugs, you have to do what they say, and you don’t have any other choice, because all doctors are pretty much the same and all insurers are pretty much the same and all companies are pretty much looking for ways to reduce overhead and change the type of coverage they give employees each year to pass more of that cost onto workers—because they obviously haven’t earned it, aren’t worth it, don’t deserve it—and turn the savings into profit to pass to shareholders. And here, my blood is boiling again.
I tap a few more buttons, answer a few more questions, swipe again. I come to the payment page. At least, they’ve updated that. It used to be we’d go through all of this, then have to go to the counter and pay. But here, they’ve made it so I can swipe our card. Forty-five bucks. When I started at my company the copay was ten dollars. A near five-hundred percent increase in ten years. My salary hasn’t increased five hundred percent, but what are you going to do? My wife had given them hell about the survey fee. I wasn’t there, but I imagine her rushing the desk, pad in hand, as she reaches the last page and see they plan to charge her.
“I’m not paying that,” she’d have said. She wouldn’t have lost her cool. She’s not like me that way. She’d have been polite. But she’d have been firm. I can imagine, too. The receptionist would have acted confused. There must have been incidents like this already, people complaining about the fee. She would have looked up, feigned confusion, since this makes some people back down. Not my wife. The dumb act doesn’t work on her. I know this well.
“Ten dollars,” she’d have said. “For the privilege of taking your survey? I’m not paying this.”
Poetry in motion, my wife getting angry but keeping calm. As long as it isn’t directed at me.
My mind flashes to the car, to Sadie’s lunch bag, to the bag inside that bag, which carries the last of my mother’s twice-baked potatoes. I’m not sure this will resolve our disagreement, but it might. I wonder if it’ll keep in the car while we’re here. The bag’s insulated. It isn’t warm out, so it should be fine. We won’t be here long. Her appointment’s for five. It’s ten-of, now. Usually, I’d be getting off the train, heading home, hopping into the car and driving to daycare. Maybe I’d have a snack before I left. I don’t each much at work. Sometimes I keep a loaf of bread in the bin under my desk. A jar of peanut butter. So, I’m hungry when I get home. I raid the fridge, throwing back a handful of cashews, pulling the peel on an individually wrapped packet of string cheese, slapping two slices of bread on the counter and having another sandwich—peanut butter again, maybe cheese. Something quick. Something I can consume while walking, dropping my bag, getting the keys, driving the car. The house is quiet at these times, which I appreciate now, but I didn’t always.
Before Sadie was born, I’d come home and have nothing to do for the hour between my arrival and Justine’s, so I’d sit and read or write and drink. The house, especially in the winter, was dark when I arrived. The windows shut, lights out. And the darkness, the stillness and silence, invoked a dour mood. There was an emptiness to the house that I don’t mind once in a while, but back then, it was day-in, day-out. If I had nothing planned, or if only planned to read and write, I’d stop at the liquor store and buy a bottle of wine and consume it before Justine got home, then try to hold myself together so she wouldn’t know how much I’d had. A glass, I’d admit. Maybe two. But I’d never cop to a whole bottle.
This started to change this when we discovered Justine was pregnant. It was a gradual lessening, from three or four times a week to one. As Justine’s due date approached, I became even more careful, knowing I’d have to drive, be present, involved. When Sadie arrived, Justine stayed home for six months, and my arrival routine changed. As I walked up the street from the train station, I could see the lights in the house from a distance. Through the front windows, as I passed the post office, I spotted the TV on, the top of Justine’s head above the sofa. I knew she was sitting with Sadie in her lap. And I wasn’t interested in drinking, but in being with my family, in playing with my daughter, in watching her grow, trying to etch each memory into my brain so they would never fade.
When those six months were up, the house went dark again, but I hardly had time to notice. I went in, flicked the lights, left. I had somewhere to be, someone to get, and when I brought Sadie home, it wasn’t dark. I would make dinner, and that’s what I’ll do tonight, even after the doctor. Justine’s due at six/six-fifteen. Sadie and I can get there before her. I want to place her potato on a shelf, a prominent shelf, one that Justine can’t help but see. I don’t want to say anything. I want to be nonchalant. Let her notice in her own time.
The door to the hallway with examination rooms opens, and a nurse pops her head out.
“Sadie?”
The examination room is painted an egg-yolk yellow with a strip of wallpaper running around it at the center depicting a Western motif of cowboys riding horses, rugged terrain, cacti. The nurse takes Sadie’s weight and blood pressure and asks a few questions.
“What brings you in today?”
She types what I tell her into a computer.
“The doctor will be in shortly,” she says and leaves the room.
I’m sitting on one of two plastic chairs, below a window that faces Old Gloucester Road. Sadie’s on the examination bed. The cowboys have caught her attention. She traces the path their horses run with a finger. She has to touch everything. It’s compulsive in her, part of being two. The thin sheet of translucent paper they roll out and change with each patient crinkles beneath her. She reaches up and tries to play with the cord of the blinds, and I stop her. The cord has a strand of metal beads that causes the blinds to flip this way and that, and she can’t ignore this, keeps trying to touch it. I have to reach out and grasp her arm and move it away. She squirms, and it gets so I have to pull her off the table and hold her in my lap. I reach up to flip the strand of beads myself to show her how they work, how each time I pull the sting, the slat on the blinds opens and closes and lets in the last sunlight of the day. Sadie stands on the second chair to gaze outside. Cars zoom past. She watches for a bit and then turns and sits next to me. She seems happier now, pleased with herself for sitting on her own chair. Her legs extend out toward the edge of the seat without dangling over, and she reaches and touches her toes through her shoes, as if stretching before a run.
“Knock, knock,” the doctor says as he enters. He doesn’t knock on the door, just says it: “Knock, knock.” Which defeats the purpose of knocking. It doesn’t matter, just funny. “And how are we today?” he asks.
I launch into the spiel again, same thing I told the nurse. Cough, fever, don’t think it’s life-threatening, but better safe than sorry, right?
He smiles at Sadie, takes a seat on the leather swivel chair, and looks at his computer. He wears a white lab coat, a penlight in his pocket, his stethoscope hangs from around his neck. The desk where his computer stands is stocked with the doctor’s standard toolkit—cotton balls, tongue depressors, thermometers swimming in a vat of pink sanitizer. Over the years, these things haven’t changed. It’s funny that doctors still use these flat wooden sticks to guide your tongue and see inside your mouth. Its texture makes you gag, cold friction against your soft gums. But here they are, still using it, so I guess it must work. He asks Sadie to open her mouth. He takes his penlight, a black triangular gizmo attached to the end of a long white handle, and shines it into her mouth.
I didn’t give the doctor a good look when he came in, but he sits close to us now, leaning toward Sadie. His face is familiar, but older than when I’d last seen it. His hair is close-cropped, curly. It used to be dark brown, but now it’s threaded with gray. He has the same small eyes, a squint. When he speaks to my daughter, he smiles, and the stenciled name on his coat reads “Barnes.” It takes a moment to place him, but I realize that he’d been my doctor when I was kid some twenty years ago. This is the same practice my parents brought me to. Yet, it seems odd that the same doctor who examined me is now examining my daughter. Kind of like an old-time country doctor, the type of GP you read about in small town novels, treating generation after generation. He must have been a young man back then, straight out of med school, because he looks to be in his fifties now.
I smile, thinking of the way he entered the room. “Knock, knock.” He must have been entering rooms this way for thirty years. Why have we never seen him? We’ve been taking Sadie here for two years, but mostly for well visits, visits with the nurses. We don’t always see a doctor. There are pictures on the wall of the wellness waiting room, the doctors who work here, but I’d somehow missed his, which is funny because I stare at them sometimes, stare without seeing. For a moment, I consider telling him he used to be my doctor, but I don’t. It feels like harassing a celebrity you’ve spotted in an airport terminal: boorish, wrong-headed. It’s more about you than them, what they mean to you. And while he might take it in stride, it also might make him feel old. I could thank him, I suppose, for the care he provided all those years ago, but this would be disingenuous. I haven’t thought of him until this moment. Certainly I remember him fondly, but he didn’t have a profound impact. He was doctor to a healthy kid. I saw him for strep throat, physicals. That’s what I recall most, my dread of physicals.
“They have to check for hernia,” my friend Lex told me.
“What’s that?” I’d asked.
“They make you undress and pull down your pants and grab your nuts and tell you to turn you head and cough.”
His dad had told him this. They used to do it in gym class when he was a kid. They’d make the kids line up and drop their pants, and I couldn’t believe it. They didn’t do it in gym anymore, but if you wanted to play organized sports for school—and I did; baseball—you had to get a physical. The season was coming, and school had sent us home with paperwork for the doctor. I was in seventh grade, and Lex was two years older than me, so I believed him. I had no reason not to. His dad told him. I never once considered that he might have distorted his father’s words, provided me a half-truth. To my mind, that’s all a physical was: a doctor grabbing my nuts, making me cough. There was no Internet to look it up, find out what hernia was, and I wasn’t going to ask my parents about something involving my testicles, so I internalized the fear. My mother made an appointment, and that whole week, I suffered the sense of impending violation.
In hindsight, this is how childhood works: a half-truth reinterpreted can lead to misunderstanding, to terror in otherwise habitual situations, because you have no adult to talk to, no one to explain that something another kid told you was inaccurate. No one had seen me naked; not since I’d sprouted pubic hair. Nor had I seen any friends without their clothes. There were no points of comparison. What if the doctor saw me and my penis was smaller than others and he laughed? No, he wouldn’t laugh, a doctor wouldn’t do that, but he’d think, what a small penis, this poor guy’s never getting a girl. But that wasn’t the worst possible outcome.
What terrified me, what kept me up into the late hours of night, turning it over in my mind, was the possibility that if he touched it, I’d get an erection without any power to stop it. The description of the physical Lex provided had included the doctor tugging on my nuts, but it didn’t take much to produce an erection. A light breeze, the slightest grazing of a hand against my crotch, the mere thought of a girl I liked, even fully-clothed. I’d discovered how to give myself an orgasm at eleven. Until then, I’d experienced stirrings, arousal, but I’d never been able to concentrate that arousal and provide myself the kind of pleasure I now knew existed.
This was something adults didn’t discuss either. There’d been no awkward heart-to-heart with my dad, no inappropriate uncle making lewd jokes. Even my friends wouldn’t admit they did it. The act was shrouded in secrecy. I knew what sex was. My mother had explained it in hopes of preventing me from getting a girl pregnant. But she didn’t delve into detail. I suppose she knew I’d pick up details along the way, that I’d learn the practicalities. I wanted to do something with a girl, I just didn’t know what, and for me, the specific girl I wanted to do something with changed every few years, but I’d never had the courage to ask if they wanted me. Most of my friends were a year or two older, and they’d brag about kissing or touching breasts, a feat of daring I couldn’t imagine. But not a single one would go near a conversation about touching themselves. It was taboo. Did they do it? Or was I the only one?
I’d made the discovery in my room, alone at night. My brother was sleeping over a friend’s house, so I had the room to myself. HBO was running a documentary series called Real Sex, and they were up to the fourth installment. I’d seen it advertised in brief tantalizing clips after a movie I’d watched earlier, so I stayed up. I didn’t know what to expect, but it had sex in the title, and the second segment featured the Miss Nude World pageant. The women were gorgeous, and as they walked the stage, they stripped from bikinis to nothing at all. They weren’t just bearing breasts but fully nude. And while I’d seen a woman’s pubic hair in Revenge of the Nerds, this was different, the camera lingered on them, on their bodies, on the area I wanted to touch so badly. I was terrified that any moment my parents were going to walk through the door and catch me, so I sat on the edge of my bed with my left hand on the power button. I listened for steps on the stairs. I knew the sounds the house made. My parents were both downstairs, and I couldn’t resist. My blood was racing. So, for the first time, I violated that taboo, watching these women.
My family isn’t religious, there was no formal edict against it, but no one I knew admitted to doing it, and I worried that I would become an outcast, a pariah if someone found out that I masturbated, not just that night, but frequently. It was the greatest bliss of all. Greater than the rush I felt playing sports or listening to music or watching my favorite movies. So, even at eleven going on twelve, I saw no need to deprive myself of it. I just needed to keep quiet, to not reveal what I was doing. But then came the physical, the appointment with Barnes. And I started to worry. What if I became aroused when he started to check for hernia? Should I masturbate beforehand and try to get it all out to reduce the likelihood of this happening? There was no getting it all out. If I was aroused, I would stay aroused regardless of whether or not I’d had an orgasm. And there might be signs I’d done it. Abrasions maybe. If not abrasions, trace evidence. Slight leaking after the fact, small wet spots on the inside of my underwear.
Traces were unavoidable. I’d learned this the first time, that night when I hadn’t known what to expect and abruptly came in my pants. It happened so fast, my legs clenched and turned inward, my hips convulsed. All the muscles in the lower half of my body locked. The pleasure had grown as I continued doing it, but I was surprised how quickly it transformed from mildly pleasant to ecstasy. I hadn’t anticipated the way my mind dimmed, my body took over, wave after wave, forcing it out me. I’ve had many orgasms over the years, but never one quite so thrilling. I hadn’t pulled my underwear down but had tucked my hand beneath the elastic. I knew, from hearsay, what coming was, what semen was, but I hadn’t expected so much liquid. It felt like a dam giving way, like the high tide of ocean reaching shore, hoping to grip and pull it back to sea. The substance threaded about the top of my hand, seeped between the cracks in my fingers, and soaked into the fabric.
I removed my hand and looked at it, then put it to my nose to smell it, to examine what had come out of me. I spread my fingers, and in the light of the TV, the semen hung between them like webbing. If one of my parents had walked in, there would have been nothing I could do to hide it. But I’d forgotten them. And then, the shame hit. There was no way avoiding this. There was evidence of what I’d done on my hands, my clothes. It was like I’d committed murder without a thought as to how I planned to cover it up.
I was eleven. I didn’t do my laundry. I threw clothes in the family hamper after I bathed, and they were back in my dresser at the end of the week. I knew how that happened—that my mother washed them, sorted them into colors and whites, examined them for stains. So, I certainly couldn’t throw this pair in the hamper. She’d see it right away, single it out. When it dried, would the stain disappear, blend into the background? No, I didn’t think it would. I had no evidence to base this on, but I was certain. I wiped that hand on the side of my pants and turned on the light with my other. I checked the bed where I’d been sitting, and I hadn’t gotten any on my sheets. I walked to my dresser, and with my clean hand, removed another pair, and then walked to the door and opened it a crack.
The TV was on downstairs. I heard my parents in the living room, watching. One of them cleared their throat. One of them moved, and the couch creaked. I had to be quick, and so I slipped out, and on my tiptoes, took the hall in three or four steps and turned into the bathroom and shut the door. The first order of business was to wash my hands, which I did, foaming a lather up to my elbows like a physician prepping for surgery. Next I slipped the soiled underwear off and folded them in such a way that the stain was covered by the unstained fabric. This way when I put them down in the basin of the tub, the stain wouldn’t touch the porcelain and leave further evidence. I took a washcloth and dampened it and rubbed it around my pelvic region—the words, pelvic region, from health class, echoing in my ears—and rinsed the washcloth.
It hadn’t removed everything. There were matted clumps of semen gummed in my pubic hair, but it would take a bath to get them out, and a bath at this hour would require explanation. It would have to wait until morning. I pulled on the fresh pair, hoping the clumped regions wouldn’t bleed through. The question remained as to what I should do with the soiled pair. I decided to take a risk. I pulled them out of the tub and brought them to the sink. I opened the fold to view the stain. It was discolored, off-white. I turned on the warm water and once against soaped my hands and scrubbed it. When I finished, I wrung them out and used more soap and washed them again, and when I finished, I still wasn’t certain I’d gotten it out. Plus I didn’t know what to do with them. I needed them to dry, but I couldn’t hang them out like a towel. I couldn’t put them anywhere obvious in my room. The only place I could think of was under my bed, and even then, I knew they’d never dry in the dark recesses there.
I left the bathroom, snuck back down the hall and hid them, thinking, Tomorrow, I’ll take them out, I’ll put them in the trashcan at the field. One pair less, my mom won’t notice. And I hoped this was true. I’m never going to do this again, as long as I live. Just let me get out of this. And I fell asleep, certain I had the willpower to stop. But the next afternoon, I broke my promise, and I did it again the day after, and the day after that, and the day after that one, too. Knowing the pleasure now, I was willing to sacrifice sanity for a moment’s bliss.
I got better at hiding it, planning ahead, choosing moments when no one was in the house, and I started to use tissues or toilet paper to stem the flow, something I could dispose of, flush. Still, I noticed the stains remained, a dot on the seat of my drawers that seeped out, even after I believed I was finished, a blemish that appeared as residue after I walked away. So, I couldn’t do it before the appointment. I had to make sure I kept my hands off myself, or the doctor would discover what a pervert I was.
The day of the physical arrived, and I woke that morning with the fear sitting on my chest. I considered giving up baseball, all team sports, if it meant I wouldn’t have to have a stranger examining me. I slunk around the house, watching the clock. Canceling wasn’t an option. If I said I didn’t want to go, I’d have to explain why. I couldn’t opt out by saying I was sick. This was you went when you were sick. And I wasn’t going to reveal to my mom—the one who was going to take me—what my reservations were. There would be no other procedures performed that day, nothing but the hernia check, not to my mind. There was no weigh in, no taking of the heart rate and blood pressure, no eye examination, no peeking into the ears and throat. These things all happened, of course, but I went floating through them, disembodied by my fear. It was mostly the nurse who did these things. She scribbled the results onto a page in a folder and left the room, and as she went, she said, “Undress down to your underwear.”
There was a practiced tone to it I didn’t recognize. They’d have to have a standard line to use in such situations, something generic, antiseptic, nonsuggestive. It was such an awkward thing to instruct strangers to do. I was sitting on the exam table, atop the white translucent paper that crinkled every time I moved, and I trembled as I unbuttoned my shirt and sat bare-chested, unable to go further. I was wearing jeans, and I tried to undo my belt, but my hands were shaking. I didn’t want to the doctor to see, so I stopped trying, left my jeans on, and focused on holding my hands still instead.
“Knock, knock,” the doctor said as he entered. Barnes came in and shook my hand, which is how men try to put boys at ease, hoping to make them feel on the level. But I wasn’t on the level. I was trembling, rigid, tense. My nerves clenched with every movement, though Barnes’s tone was light-hearted.
“So what are you gonna play?” he asked.
“Baseball,” I replied.
“I mean, what position?”
“Pitcher, shortstop maybe.”
“Do you like the Phillies?”
I nodded.
He talked about the Phillies’ upcoming season, pressed the cold metal stethoscope to my chest.
“Take a breath. Deep…”
He dropped the stethoscope, made a note, then placed a hand on my back and another on my chest. He guided me into a reclined position. “Can you undo your belt?” I lay on the table and slid my jeans down to my knees but left my underwear on. I couldn’t pull them off. I knew what we were getting at, I knew what he had to do, but I pretended I didn’t. He kneaded my stomach and the region around my pelvis, all the while talking, all the while asking questions that I somehow answered. This was it, his hand was creeping nearer and nearer, checking the nodes, looking for signs of inflammation, swelling. And somehow I couldn’t see that my terror was preventing the exact thing I feared from coming to pass. My whole body was dead, limpid, lifeless. And Barnes was professional. I guess you’d have to be, doing this all the time. He used one hand to lift the elastic waistband, and with the other, he found the region around my testicles. I’d been so distracted that I hadn’t seen him don the latex gloves, and he paused in his monologue about baseball or whatever he’d been talking about to say, “Turn you head,” and I did, and “Cough,” he said, and I did. And it was over. My penis, the entire time, had remained soft, coiled like a piece of cooked spaghetti. It hadn’t moved or grown. It hadn’t registered the alien presence at all.
It never occurred to me, since he was touching a region I associated with sex, that this might be the least sexual situation of all, and that, because of this, I was never in danger of doing what I feared, of getting hard, of revealing myself as what? Gay? I suppose that was part of it. I’d spent weeks anticipating shame, embarrassment. Now it was over, and I’d experienced neither. When he finished, he told me to sit up. A wave of relief swept through me. It was so great that my body, tense and rigid until then, released itself in a fit of unbounded happiness. I thanked him, and after he pulled off his gloves and washed his hands, we shook. From then on, I had a preference for Barnes. He’d walked me through the fire. He was a good doctor. It took someone who understood a child’s fear to deal with them so delicately. Other adults might dismiss it. They’ve gone through it and put it behind them, forgotten how harrowing it can be. They minimize it. You think it’s bad, but it’s not so bad, they say. But dismissing a child’s concern rarely works. One has to engage it, treat it as real. An adult can acknowledge they’ve been through it, but then, they have to shut up and listen, act with sensitivity. If a child wants to talk, they will. If they don’t, they won’t. But they need to know you’re willing to listen. And from the way Barnes conducted himself, I knew he understood. Perhaps I’m assigning a motive in retrospect that wasn’t there, but Barnes, coming into that room, seemed to sense my fear and to act in such a way that he put it to rest. Still, I hadn’t thought of him in years.
Sitting with my daughter, I almost laugh, though there’s nothing funny in it. To think this man, a stranger, had such a profound impact at that moment, a moment of confusion and fear. To know in hindsight that I couldn’t have been the only one, that he’d likely walked countless boys through the same experience. I can only hope I do as well when the time comes for my children, for Sadie and the next. One thing experience has taught me is that just because no one talks about something doesn’t mean you’re the only one going through it, but will I remember this when they come of age?
It’s already starting, the distance, the awkwardness between us, and she’s only two. My daughter examines herself in the tub and refers to her vagina as her butt. I try to correct her, but the words come out stilted. “That’s not your butt,” I say. “Only the back part is called your butt. The front is your vagina.” But she fails to recognize the difference, and I have to tell her this repeatedly. Justine and I have discussed not using slang terms for genitalia, only the scientific names, but I blushed as I said this. The words were forced, hurried. Why? Why does accuracy across gender lines feel so strange? Would I have the same problems if she were a boy? Is it that the word “vagina” isn’t a part of my regular vocabulary? It’s only going to get more difficult as she gets older. The whole point in not using slang terms is to establish in her that these are parts of anatomy with nothing strange about them, to express that all women have them and dealing with them is a regular part of female existence.
At times, I look to Justine to reinforce what I’m saying, but it’s just as awkward for her. So, maybe gender isn’t the barrier. Maybe it’s always difficult to discuss these things. As Sadie grows, she isn’t going to want to hear it from her father or her mother either. I have to remember, too, that the isolation of that age isn’t created entirely by the adult world. I could have asked about having a physical, what it entailed. I didn’t have to go in blind. I didn’t even have to specify what my concerns were. I could have approached my dad and said, “What do they do at a physical?” He might have disavowed what Lex had told me, lessened my anxieties. But I never did.
I’m not sure the exact point at which this breach comes, but at some point, you separate yourself from your parents. And even as I hope to be there for Sadie, to help her avoid these same confusions, I’m not blind the possibility she won’t want me there. I presume with my knowledge and breadth of experience she’ll want me around. But Justine and I are authority figures, which means we get angry, punish transgressions. We might react to a slipup or mistake with severity, which is part of the reason children don’t bring concerns to their parents. Even kids who have a good relationship with their parents hold something back, live a secret life. But though they might resent this authority and avoid it, they also crave it. At least, I did. The omniscient god-like quality of my parents helped to hold my world together, made me secure. Their authority, as much as I might have resented it, kept the world at bay, and they were effective to the extent that I wasn’t aware they were protecting me. Bills were paid—mortgage, electricity, heat and water; food was bought, lunches packed, dinners made. We sat around the table every night as a family. They asked questions about my day, questions I evaded or ignored because I didn’t know how to answer or wished to maintain my privacy or thought they wouldn’t understand. They were successful without my being aware how successful they were, and it’s only in retrospect I recognize this.
There’s such a great divide in perception between the ages. The child, I realize now in having my own, has an identity to you from the start. They’re your child. But the child doesn’t have an identity to themselves until later. And this creates most of the disconnect. They’re trying on new masks, new ideas and styles and modes of being all the time, sorting out who they want to be, while to you they’re always and forever your child. And they resent you seeing them as such, especially when they wish to be seen as something else, so they pull away. I love my daughter with an ache in my heart, and I fear this pulling away, even though it’s the natural mode. I want us to establish a relationship where she can come to me and I’ll understand, but it’s difficult, if not impossible, to reach across those years and understand, to say I know what you’re feeling, you’re not alone, because even if I know, knowing is different from feeling, and all the intensity of youth for me is gone. I’ll never feel what she feels.
Obsession is different as an adult. Whenever I obsess now, I usually know the potential outcomes. My dreams are limited by the recognized possibilities. If I’m up for promotion at work, I’ll either get it or I won’t. If I get it, I’ll have more responsibility but make more money. If I don’t, I can go back to doing whatever I was doing for the same money or send my resume out for a new job. If I send out a story for publication, the magazine might accept it, but more likely, they won’t, and I’ll send it out again until it’s published or I decide it’s not worth the effort. If it’s accepted, I’ll be happy for an afternoon, and then the happiness will dissipate as I realize it’s only going to get circulated in a print run of five hundred copies and of those five hundred maybe fifty subscribers will read my work. In the course of daily life, there are few surprises or unknowns. The accumulated decisions I’ve made have placed me in a box, and without a full-on disaster to disrupt this, my life will continue on its present course.
For Sadie, this isn’t the case, not yet. Her world is full of possibility. At two, she can become anything. At thirteen or fourteen, life is still open to choice, though the options are closing. At that age, I’d wanted to be a baseball player, a musician, and both seemed equally likely to happen. The fact that few people ever become successful at these things didn’t cloud my ability to dream them. And if my parents tried to talk sense into me, I wasn’t listening. My reality changed with every year of development, every six months, as my daughter’s will. I was endlessly intrigued by the act of dreaming. The one thing that didn’t happen then that happens now is I grow tired of it, of dreaming. I grow tired of myself, of hearing my own thoughts. I want nothing so much as I edge toward the end of a day as to shut down, turn off, perhaps because of this—because my thoughts so consistently repeat themselves and there are so few surprises. Unless I’m writing. The act of trying to describe an event or observation is the only time I surprise myself. With the pen moving free form, I often come away revealing something I didn’t know I thought or felt, it’s the only time I make connections I’m otherwise unaware of. This is how I gauge the success of a session, and right now, in the doctor’s office, I want to get home and get dinner done with and give Sadie her bath and put her down for the night, so I can get some ideas down. And maybe, if I resolve this thing with Justine—if I put the potato in the fridge and let her know I’m sorry—I can give myself over to writing without distraction.
Sadie isn’t sick, not bad, not with pneumonia. I can tell from Barnes’s demeanor. He confirms my suspicions—a common cold, regular fever. The hummingbirds I’d felt this morning in her chest, that rapid heartbeat, was her immune system kicking into gear. I hold her on my lap as he examines her, lifts her shirt to hear her heart, listens to her lungs. “I don’t hear any fluid,” he says. “So we’re good there.” He looks into her throat. I tickle her to get her to open up. She smiles, tilts her neck, and catches my fingers in a fold. “There’s a little redness,” Barnes says, “nothing alarming.” I nod. “I can give her an antibiotic, but I don’t think she needs it. And if she doesn’t need it, I’d prefer not to give it.” Again, I nod. On this, we’re in accord.